Dyson is now 2 years old, which is a tricky age for costumes. But at the last minute, I happened to find a teddy bear costume for only $20 that was super cute. Even better, he was totally willing to try it on when we got home. Unfortunately, he wouldn’t wear it on the actual day of Halloween.

So costume idea #2 was to put a hat on him, give him a broom, and say he was the kid from La Luna. Unfortunately, he wouldn’t keep the hat on.

So costume idea #3 was to put his jacket on, tie on an ascot, and say he was Charlton Heston. You don’t go take your kid trick or treating with the costume you want them to wear, you go with the costume they’re willing to keep on.

I recently saw a disheartening article about sexism in the skeptic community. It’s especially disheartening that it happened even in a community of intelligent and progressive thinking people. It shouldn’t be surprising, though, because sexism isn’t rooted in lack of intelligence so much as a lack of empathy. And empathy is directly related to representation.

In this case, it’s also related to the perception of criticism. Hearing criticism is hard. Trust me, I know. My job is primarily to produce work that is criticized over and over, on a daily basis, until someone says it’s good enough to go into a film. But that’s the nature of my industry. Sometimes it’s hard to keep going, but I do it because I want the work to be the best that it can be.

And I think that’s what a lot of these men are missing. They only hear the criticism as an attack on what’s wrong with them and they don’t have the motivation or desire to become better. And I can understand that, too. As much as I try, I haven’t always reacted well to criticism. Sometimes I just need a break. In fact, that’s why I rarely read the iTunes reviews on my apps. It’s just a little too discouraging to get slammed in a review on something that I spend what little free time I have to create. But I digress.

The point is that where women are absent, sexism often fosters. And then it’s a vicious cycle. This is why diversity and representation, especially in media, is so important.

Speaking of representation, I quite enjoyed seeing the movie, Cloud Atlas. But a friend pointed out that even though it boasts an incredibly diverse cast, there were no Asian male actors. But, hey, at least there were Asian-ish male characters. So that’s progress. =)

We have a family tradition of carving pumpkins, which my dad started. Dyson is only a couple years old, so I figured it’d be a while before he made his own pumpkins but he did seem to take some interest in the pumpkin I carved this year.

Well, it turned out that the play group he attends had an art activity where they decorated paper pumpkins and I’m not sure, but it does bear a bit of a resemblance to the one I carved. It was also a little overwhelming to realize that the things I do with him now are going to be his childhood memories. I hope they’re good ones.

In addition to looking cute in my last video, Dyson has started doing some interesting stuff. He recently made some sort of Space Invader looking thing out of a wooden block puzzle. I don’t think he’s ever seen Space Invaders, but he does like making symmetrical things (as evidenced by the symmetrically placed circular tokens, which he stole from a board game that I was playing with a friend).

He also knows how to arrange letters to spell his name, although he still doesn’t try to write the letters. But the biggest accomplishment is that he’s started to play with other kids! Well, “play with” might be a bit generous. It’d be more accurate to say “play next to” or “tolerates”. But it’s progress.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_j5N1Bl0aA

Motivational quotes are okay. But motivational quotes read by Bane from The Dark Knight Rises?! Awesome.

The man is the embodiment of power! He’s 200 lbs of pure muscle! The dude clawed his way from the ashes of a hell pit to become the most powerful man in Gotham! It’s a truly inspirational story. Well, except for the part where he tries to destroy an entire city out of love for a woman. But hey, we all do crazy things for love, right?

Tracy recently got a telescope. She’s always been interested in astronomy and since she sometimes has trouble sleeping at night, she thought she might as well do something interesting while she’s awake.

The first night, she saw the moon. Tracy was pretty excited and called me over to check it out. I know you’ve probably seen better, clearer pictures of the moon elsewhere. But there’s just something cool about seeing it that detailed with your own eyes, as it were. So I took the picture to commemorate it.

Another night, Tracy found Jupiter and what appeared to be three of its moons! She was really excited by that and went and got me again. And I went, “Bluearhghh?” Because it was 3 in the freaking morning. And I was asleep … as all sane people should be. Still, I did manage to attain consciousness long enough to see a bright dot and three smaller dots around it. And it just hit me that I was looking at moons orbiting another planet. And that was pretty amazing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWEW2eRytgo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65CX0gNfKmg

Between work and being a dad, it’s hard to find the time to work on apps. But I hit on a super simple idea that I thought I might be able to do in a weekend (it actually ended up taking a few months) — make an app that just chooses someone. I wanted it for our boardgames group (in order to pick who goes first) but it could have other uses as well. Most importantly, I came up with what I considered an elegant way to do it:

• have everyone hold their finger on the iPhone
• start spinning and then select one of the touches

The nice thing is that you don’t need any instructions, or any options. It knows how many people to choose from based on how many people are touching it. And it knows when to start spinning as soon as someone touches it. So I coded it up and after some back and forth with Apple (which you can learn about in the video), it got accepted. Check it out on the iTunes Store!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jtc8BeWupXY

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’ve been on hiatus from my blog for several weeks. I’ve been on a particularly grueling project at work so I haven’t had a chance to do much beyond work, sleep, and take care of the kid in the mornings.

But we just had a three-day weekend and I’m nearly done on this project so I finally had some time to catch up on some rest and do some fun stuff like make this silly video, which is pretty self-explanatory. I also worked on another video for a very simple iPhone app that I mostly completed a couple months ago. But I’ll put that one out when / if Apple approves the app.

A couple weeks ago, I received a request from Photo Dice customer, Teresa Besson, to increase the number of dice listed in the dice tray from 26 to 99. This was surprising because I didn’t think anyone would even need 26 dice.

It turns out that she was a Speech Language Pathologist at an elementary school and she wanted to create dice for each of the 75 phonemes in English to engage her students in speech practice. She got the idea from a speech pathology blog that featured Photo Dice as an app that could help with speech therapy.

I was more than happy to oblige so I submitted an update and it just went live on the iTunes Store. I’ve also made Photo Dice backwards compatible with the original iPhone. So go check it out!