“When you first meet Steve Mann, it seems as if you’ve inter­rupted him apprais­ing dia­monds or doing some sort of spe­cial­ized weld­ing. Because the first thing you notice is the plas­tic frame that comes around his right ear and holds a lens over his right eye.

But quickly you see that there’s more to his con­trap­tion: A tiny video cam­era is affixed to the plas­tic eye­piece. Mul­ti­col­ored wires wrap around the back of Mann’s head. Red and white lights blink under his sweater.“
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In the same era as Speak and Spell, The Lit­tle Pro­fes­sor, Shrinky Dinks and Trans­form­ers, there was Lite Brite — the qui­nessen­tial toy for any child wish­ing to shed their creativity.

Lite Brite was a sim­ple con­cept. It was essen­tially a peg board with a back­light in addi­tion to hun­dreds of multi-colored pegs — which resem­ble a cross between a Christ­mas light and those plas­tic pieces that remain affixed to model kit sheets.

When I first plugged a Lite Brite in I wasn’t sure what to do next. It wasn’t until I fig­ured out that included in the box were a hand­ful of pat­terns to inspire you. These included sail boats, clowns and the occas­sional island scene (one island smack dab in the mid­dle of the ocean with a sin­gle palm tree pro­truded to one side).

Over time a child would lose sev­eral of the pegs and more often than not you would be left with more than one color over another. For me, I had close to 50 or so pur­ple, 10 red and what seemed like a 300 pieces of green.

Today, the Lite Brite has evolved into the Lite Brite Cube — a vari­ant on the orig­i­nal design. Instead of one flat panel, you now have four pan­els com­bined to cre­ate a cube — which to me sig­nals the intel­li­gence or techno-savvy of today’s youth.

Chil­dren of yes­ter­year were enter­tained and con­tent with unpre­ten­cious tech­nol­ogy; things like Slip and Slides, Speak and Spell and remote-controlled robots. Those were the days. 

Our two week old daugh­ter, Zoe Eliz­a­beth and her new friend Roger Rabbit. 

If you’re like me, there are times when surf­ing the web becomes a cum­ber­some activ­ity. I’m refer­ring to those occas­sions when for some rea­son (pos­si­bly due to con­sump­tion of a Sub­way sand­wich) your key­board is inac­ces­si­ble. There are also those times when you might be jug­gling peanuts with your other hand and try­ing to surf the web becomes a “jug­gling act” in itself.

The Man in Blue, Cameron Adams, has stum­bled upon (or cre­ated for that mat­ter) a solu­tion of sorts. Uti­liz­ing a com­bi­na­tion of XHTML/CSS, Cameron came up with The Mouse­board, a key­board con­trolled entirely with your mouse. It’s func­tion is so that you, while jug­gling peanuts with your left or right hand can still surf the web with­out the per­ils of inaccessibility.

Another neat fea­ture is not only does it per­form straight surf­ing but it fea­tures a Google but­ton for those times when you’re not entirely sure where to find chocolate-covered roaches.

I thank you, The Man in Blue, for your cre­ative ingenuity. 

As you may know, Con­gress recently passed the ‘CAN SPAM’ law which accord­ing to it’s best inten­tions pur­port­edly meant putting a stop to the vicious onslaught of SPAM email messages.

Yet, could this have been passed at the result of sim­ply look­ing good? Sort of like the Big Brother who could really care less of the sit­u­a­tion, but to make him­self look good he’ll intervene.

Techdirt writes, “It’s also becom­ing clear that the entire point of the bill was never to stop spam, but to make a few folks in Con­gress look good.”

Accord­ing to the arti­cle, it is also noted that “the NY Times reports that the spon­sors of the bill asked the FTC to sue a spam­mer the very first week the bill was in effect in order to make a big “splash” so they could pat them­selves on the back.”

For the moment, I couldn’t agree more. SPAM is an issue that sim­ply can­not be thwarted overnight. In order to get rid of SPAM we must cre­ate an action plan that would metic­u­lously destroy spam­mers world­wide. Devis­ing such a plan would not be easy and would result in many hours of research to com­bat the situation.

Could it be done? Yes, I believe so. There was a time when SPAM did not exist, when email was used as an effec­tive form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, which granted, it still is used today. It’s just mud­dling through the murky waters to get to your legit­i­mate mes­sages that takes time.

You know what we need? Raid for Spammers. 

It’s inter­est­ing the thoughts you have when you reflect upon the pre­vi­ous years of your life. What­ever time period, reflec­tions are like mem­o­ries in a tide pool. When we come to the point of rem­i­nisc­ing, it’s as if we are look­ing into the water at our own reflec­tion notic­ing the minute details that pos­si­bly we never glanced upon before.

From the let­ters I’ve received from my brother in boot camp, it seems he has done a lot of rem­i­nisc­ing. He has men­tioned to me a few times that he can remem­ber play­ing Megazeux and putting on “shows” which where a child’s ver­sion of Broad­way plays. Sure, we had our times to grovel over stu­pid things like pass­ing the remote or petty argu­ments which now are for­got­ten. These kinds of con­flicts in our lives, whether they be with sib­lings or par­ents smooth them­selves over, much like peb­bles in a pond. Over time from sit­ting there they are smoothed over and their tex­ture — what once was rough is now smooth. Most impor­tantly when one takes the time to remem­ber their past — inad­vert­edly they remem­ber themselves. 

Hav­ing worked as Graph­ics Edi­tor for a local com­mu­nity col­lege a few years back I learned the impor­tance of effec­tive col­lab­o­ra­tion. Often, with best inten­tions, edi­tors of var­i­ous pub­li­ca­tions can get side­tracked by cut-throat com­pet­i­tive­ness which is the result of cre­at­ing some­thing unique with­out infring­ing on one’s own creativity.

Despite this, the staff that I was for­tu­nate to work with remained open-minded and col­lab­o­ra­tive. I worked as Graph­ics Edi­tor for 3 years and saw my share of tal­ented indi­vid­u­als — among them flu­ent writ­ers, bril­liant artists and tech-savvy lay­out edi­tors. Their tal­ents shined from story to copy edit­ing to print, wherein the staff of lay­out tech­ni­cians (or artists as I referred to them) would uti­lize Quark XPress to lay­out the View­points paper.

On occas­sion we would meet with the Editor-in-Chief, who admit­tedly seemed some­what adverse towards chang­ing the for­mat. His ideals instead remained focused on cre­at­ing an award-winning news­pa­per know­ing that the design and con­tent both led to its success.

Much remains the same for the Inter­net. Infor­ma­tive and intrigu­ing con­tent with a pleas­ant and equally intrigu­ing design cre­ates a suc­cess­ful mar­riage of a well-developed and thought out web site.