archive for the 'random' category

What Makes a Great Playspace?

I’ve recently been having a dialog with the national non-profit KaBOOM! about how Parentography can work with them to help spread the word about the good work they do around the country helping communities build and refurbish playspaces.  One of the questions they asked in one of our email exchanges was “What makes a great playspace?”.  I’m not an expert, but I’ve given it some thought as a parent and as someone who regularly seeks out parks and playgrounds to write about on Parentography and here are my answers (feel free to leave a comment with your own ideas or thoughts about my list):

Infants/Babies:

• Ample and free parking 
• Shade
• A Place to sit down
• Restrooms (with changing stations)
• Infanct swings (the kind that look like a bucket with holes cut out where the legs go)
• Sand and grass play areas
• Vending machines with water, healthy snacks
• Other friendly parents

Toddlers:

• Same as above, but also:
• play structures that include a slide
• Seasonal water elements (fountains, etc.)
• Soft surfaces (mulch, rubberized mats or surfacing) underneath play equipment
• Some low elements — like plastic and metal animals to climb on, tables, etc.
• Bright colors wherever possible

Elementary Age:

• Same as above, but also:
• Climbing structures, ladder elements, firefighter-style poles, all separated from the younger children’s play areas
• Sport courts (basketball, tetherball, four square boxes, tennis, etc.)

The Arrow of Time

This link has been sent to me a few times recently and it really gives a powerful sense of how quickly time passes!  I’m not going to give away what I’m talking about because it really is something you just have to see.

Memes, memes, everywhere memes

Before launching Parentography, I wasn’t very familiar with the subculture of blogs.  I’ve learned a lot since then and one thing I’ve learned is that there are a lot of new words you have to learn if you want to be a savvy blogger - words like trackback, plug-ins, moblogs, and, my favorite, memes.  This last one took me a while to figure out; the first few times I read it, I ignored it.  But, it just kept appearing, so I figured it must be important.  I consulted Wikipedia and learned that a meme is:

a neologism that first appeared in the 1976 book by Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene. Though Dawkins defined the meme as “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation,” memeticists vary in their definitions of meme. The lack of a consistent, rigorous and precise definition of a meme remains one of the principal criticisms leveled at memetics, the study of memes.

That helped a little, but digging deeper, I found this definition provided by Fredscapes 0.1 that relates specifically to blogs:

[a meme is] an idea, project, statement or even a question that is posted by one blog and responded to by other blogs. Although the term encompasses much of the natural flow of communication in the Blogosphere, there are active bloggers and blog sites that are dedicated to the creation of memes on a regular basis.

I’m not sure how one blog responds to another — I thought it was bloggers who controlled the software, not the other way around, but I now finally understand the concept.  I’ll be curious to see if ‘meme’ makes its way into more common usage.

Isn’t there a service out there that lets you track the emergence and growth of word usage?

Server Maintenance

These posts should usually come out before we do routine maintenance on our servers, but in this case I just didn’t get to it in time!  Last night, for anyone who was awake in the wee hours of the day and tried to visit our site, we took our servers down for a bit to do some upgrading to our servers.  They’re all better now and should be running faster than ever!  Our apologies if you couldn’t get access last night.

Sundance Film Festival: Family Friendly?

I came across an article in the Salt Lake Tribune today that includes this quote from Patrick Hubley, the spokesman for the Sundance Film Festival: “We want people to know there are films that are appropriate for all ages.”  The article then goes on to list a selection of movies that they deem okay for “all audiences”.  These include a film called “Enemies of Happiness” (I’m sure the kids would love that one!), a movie called “Hot House” that gives an “unprecedented look at how Israeli prisons have become…the birth place of future terrorist threats”, and another story about how three U.S. towns forced their entire African American populations to leave in the early part of the last century.  I’m sure they are all fine films and I’d probably enjoy many of them myself, but if Sundance is really trying to position itself as “family friendly”, I think they need to work a little harder as the majority of the films mentioned in this article would, in my opinion, only be suitable for families with high school students.

We’ll stick with “Little Mermaid” and ”Finding Nemo” for a while longer, I think, and save the snow, celebrity sightings and films in Park City for another year.