As Dyson gets older, he exhibits more independence. I find that it’s a balancing act between letting him grow into his own person and watching out for him.

If he’s being mean or behaving badly, I’m not really sure what to do. Ignore him if it’s towards me? Lecture him on the importance of being nice? Either way, it seems like something that warrants a response.

But for the most part, I try to let him do his own thing. He’s a pretty good kid and he’s a lot more cautious than I was (or still am, probably). So when he wanted to go down the big slide by himself, I let him. Well, that’s not quite true: he just leapt out in front of me before I got on. But the point is, I felt that the potential harm was outweighed by the potential benefits.

Bodies heal and character grows. That’s the hope, anyways.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJOn22Kq-Ws

I used to dye my hair occasionally but I hadn’t done it in … over a decade? It’s not exactly easy to do that sort of stuff with a kid underfoot.

But I had an occasion that called for “creative formal wear” and since my hair was pretty short anyways, I decided to go for it. Here are the results!

Also, the suit I’m wearing in the picture belonged to my uncle in Japan. When he passed on, I was the only one of the relatives that was close to his size. Come to think of it, most of the clothes that fit me best come from Japan. Maybe it’s genetic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrrQ0Lb89d8

For Mother’s Day, Dyson “read” a book to his mom. I thought it was cute, so I uploaded the video, mostly for his grandmothers. Happy Mother’s Day!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znMXc8CVT1Q

I saw Upstream Color with a friend the other day. We had both really enjoyed Primer, by the same director, so we were both very interested in his latest movie. I loved the movie but my friend got a little lost by the end so I thought it’d be fun to make a video explaining what I thought happened. With stick puppets.

I talk a bit about it in the video but one of the reasons that I loved the movie so much was that it’s about flawed and broken people that somehow manage to find and make each other whole. We’re all flawed in some way and usually those flaws hinder and hurt us. But I love the idea that maybe sometimes, just maybe, it’s those flaws that enable us to do great things.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4-rbYQXDbs

The video isn’t terribly informative, but it does show how much fun it is to play around with one of these things.

A few of my co-workers got together and funded the Oculus Rift Kickstarter and a bunch of us tried it out. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a virtual reality device that combines head tracking and stereo images to create a very compelling experience. It was a little blurry and there’s still some lag but wow, it felt completely immersive.

It’s not like you’re ever fooled into thinking that it’s real life, but it really does feel like you’re walking around inside a video game. I’ve heard that one of the first motion picture demos was of a train coming towards the screen and that audiences would run away because it felt so real to them. I think this might be somewhat akin to that. I mean, it wasn’t like I ever forgot that it wasn’t real … but I did feel vertigo looking over the virtual cliffs.

Also, I didn’t get motion sick in the few minutes that I tried it out but I got really dizzy as soon as I took it off. It was almost as if the real world took some adjusting to get used to again.

Every year, I have to go through the hassle of redoing all the provisioning profile and certificate stuff. And every year, I forget exactly what I did and have to go scouring the web to figure out what to do. So this year, I’m writing a blog post in the hopes that I’ll remember to look at this in future years.

• If you go to Xcode -> Organizer -> Devices -> Refresh and it crashes, remove “~/Library/Developer/Xcode/connect1.apple.com*”.
• Go to Apple’s developer portal -> Certificates, Identifiers & Profiles -> Certificates -> All and hit the “+” sign to generate new certificates.
• If “iOS App Development” is grayed out, then revoke all your expired certificates.
• Ideally, you should be able to go to Xcode -> Organizer -> Devices -> Provisioning Profiles and just hit “Renew” on all the expired profiles. If not, then you may just have to do it manually through the developer portal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDFP2bQ4P7g

I have always been fascinated by humor. As a kid, I didn’t really understand it but I remember pouring over Sunday comics and pressing my dad to explain what was funny about each one.

Then one day, I got a hold of some comedy cassette tapes and really learned about comedy: Bill Cosby’s Wonderfulness, Eddie Murphy’s Delirious, Weird Al Yankovich on Dr. Demento, Robin Williams … the list went on and on.

I struggled with some things in life but no matter how tough things got, listening to the tapes made me feel better. And I thought that making people laugh was one of the most wonderful things in the world. That’s one of the reasons why I make silly videos and what not. But I’ve always wanted to try stand up comedy because that’s what inspired me. Unfortunately, that’s a little hard to do that when you’ve got a full-time job and a family that needs you around at nights and on weekends.

But the wife and kid were out for a couple weeks last month and I thought, I’m gonna do it! So that’s how I ended up on stage at Club OMG during LOL Mondays on March 25, 2013. And it was terrifying. But it was also an incredibly exhilarating experience to make people laugh and see them smile.

The best compliment I got was from my wife. I showed her the video and she said, “I knew you could be funny, I didn’t know you could be stand up funny.” Well, I think I’m a ways from being actually good at it, but it’s a start.

This is one of the hardest things for me to deal with as a parent. Dyson is 3 years old and spends almost all of his time with Tracy. And they just got back from a 2 week trip to visit her parents. So naturally, he’s much more attached to her than he is to me. It also doesn’t help that things at work have been pretty rough lately and I’ve been spending some late nights there.

It’s natural and I completely understand, but it hurts. He’s just a kid, he doesn’t mean anything by it. And maybe at some point, it’ll switch. But for now, he pushes me away when I try to comfort him if he’s upset or just asks for Mama if I try to help.

Still, I know that I should keep trying and keep on being there for him even if he doesn’t want me to be. I take him on trips out of the house on the weekends even though it’d be easier to disengage and just let him stay home with his mom. Because it’s the right thing to do. But sometimes it’s hard.

So, this is the second video that I’ve been planning on making for a while but was particularly challenging to execute. if you’ve seen the video, hopefully it’s clear why that would be (mostly because of what I had to do in between takes). That said, it was a lot of fun, although a little terrifying to actually start the “right” part.

The other motivation for this is that I really do like doing dialogue, but it’s hard to find other people to work with. So I do the split screen stuff. I have contemplated just doing it with cuts instead of split screen as it would make it so much easier with the timing. (I find it very hard to act in response to something pre-recorded or imagined in my head.) But I thought this idea worked better if you could see “both” people at the same time.

Tracy and Dyson are out of town visiting the in-laws, which means I have seemingly inordinate amounts of free time. So naturally, I had to make this silly video.

I had the idea for this one a while ago, but it’s hard to make videos like this when there’s a kid around the house because it takes me so long to do. Even though the video is only a minute and a half, it took about three hours to put together what with the writing, setting up, rehearsing, filming, and editing.

With the wife and kid out of town, I feel like it’s a rare opportunity to get a bunch of stuff done that would be hard to do otherwise. So I’ve got a bunch of projects planned. On the other hand, I think maybe I ought to just relax and enjoy the rest. So I’m not sure how much I’ll actually get done. After all, that new season of Archer on Netflix isn’t going to watch itself.