Well, it is five week since I wrote “Tell everyone you know that you’ve quit,” in which I promised that by this time I would be ready to run a 5K race, having completed the Couch to 5K running program from CoolRunnings.com. I didn’t specify any sort of speed, just that I would have the endurance to run 5K (3.1 miles) without stopping. And with that caveat in place, I am reporting back on my progress.

I’m pleased to say that I accomplished that goal in week 7, and at that point I stopped the training. Granted, I’m not “pleased” that I stopped training, in fact I don’t have a good excuse for my lack of enthusiasm, except that I got sloppy and started going to bed late and waking up late and not having the time or energy for the runs. Last week while in California I ran twice on the treadmill and it felt good, and I need to do more of it, and I hope to, if I can just get back on Eastern time and start waking up early again. I need to continue to work on both endurance and speed, so that I can run a 5K consistently, thrice a week, and not just once in a while.

But that said, the program has helped me a lot. I can run for a good 15 or 20 minutes without really feeling tired, provided I keep it at a nice consistent pace. And that is a real improvement from where I was two and a half months ago. I think what I need to get to the next level is a new motivation, some sort of goal or a challenger or a running partner. Kelli suggests a 5K race at the end of October, which might be enough, provided a few other people choose to join in, but I dunno.

It is difficult to estimate the full impact of _High School Musical_ on the Walt Disney Company, but analysts say that the $4 million television movie produced for the Disney Channel in early 2006 has netted the conglomerate at least $500 million, and as much as $1 billion. It has been shown in over 100 countries, been seen by 170 million people, and has spawned a triple platinum album. There are concerts, a touring stage show, and, coming soon, High School Musical on Ice. There is a HSM parade at Disney California Adventure. Merchandise in every shape and size. And the rights have been licensed to 2,000 schools and local theater groups.

What did this simply plotted, pop song-studded, family-friendly movie get so right? It has been called the Grease for the modern pre-teen generation. And its enormous success caught even Disney by complete surprise, at first. But since HSM’s premiere, shares in the Walt Disney Company have risen by 50%. This week the sequel, _High School Musical 2_ broke records for basic cable with 17.2 million viewers for its first showing. And HSM 3 is already in pre-production, destined to hit the big screen (instead of the small) sometime in 2008 or 2009.

Continue reading “Long Games and Quick Gains: High School Musical and the Evolution of the Disney Channel”

Apparently everyone knows Ryan Seacrest now, thanks to _American Idol_ and other big things, but I still think of him as that DJ on Star back in the 90s. Which I only thought of because I’ve been listening to an old CD, It’s Star Music, with a song I love, “Insensitive” by Jann Arden. I like Star better than KROQ, which apparently employed Jimmy Kimmel for several years in the 90s as a sports guy. I imagine a lot of interesting and well-known personalities got their start in the LA radio scene. Maybe I just don’t know anything about Boston radio, but it doesn’t seem like there is the sort of huge music scene here that there is in LA, its more small venues and fewer big concerts and gatherings. Which seems odd. Or I could be completely out of touch, which is a better possibility. There is good music to be had here, I guess I just don’t see it being advertised. And of course I spend far less time in the car here, and when I am in the car I listen almost exclusively to NPR, and only hear music from my iPod. Which might explain why I don’t have any new music to enjoy. Hmm. Anyone know any good music?

I read (or had read to me, or listened to the tapes of) the first four Harry Potter books, and then I went to college, and that was that. Since then I’ve managed to thoroughly forget most of the important plot details and a lot more from the series.

Much like with cancelled television shows, I found myself with renewed interest in the Potter franchise once the series was “finished.” I picked up an inexpensive paperback box set of the first six books a few months ago and last month finally got down to business. Tonight I finished the second book, and was surprised and amazed at how much I had forgotten, including the major plot twists. Which made it a lot of fun, actually, to experience it all over again.

That someone has decided to pick up Harry Potter doesn’t make for much of a story, but my friends and colleagues with whom I have shared my adventure suggest that my secondary pursuit is a bit more unorthodox and even interesting to the general public. Which strikes me as a little odd, but okay.

The twist is that I’m watching the Harry Potter movies, as well. *Simultaneously*. Well, not exactly, as that would be tough, but for both books one and two I’ve found that by the time I’m about a quarter of the way through the book, I’ve gotten the itch to see how certain things are portrayed on screen. So I’ve watched the movies up until the point when they catch up to where I am in the book, at which point I pause and continue to read. As I expected but which others find amazing, where I stop ends up being almost precisely a quarter of the way through the film.

Continue reading “The Harry Potter Experience”

I did a *lot* of driving this weekend, and one thing that kept me awake on the long drive home tonight was a _This American Life_ episode from 1997 called “Dreamhouse.” The opening vignette was about city living in a packed high-rise. I still can’t imagine living like that, so little private space, streets that smell of sewage and garbage, the constant light and sound and bustle and sirens.

The main story was long and fascinating, narrated by documentary filmmaker Meema Spadola, whose defining childhood experience was her parents’ decision in 1976 to move the family from New York City to rural Maine, where they would build their own house — from scratch — while living in a tent. The great adventure was in many ways an unmitigated disaster, but it had a profound and lasting effect on Meema. As I often do in such situations, I began to wish again that I could have grown up in a more wild, natural place. It’s a very, very mild obsession of mine, these days, but an obsession none the less.

The final story in the show is an excerpt from David Beers’s memoir _Blue Sky Dream_. In his talk about moving out to a fresh Northern California suburban development in the 1950s and watching the land go from scrubland chaos to concrete order I found comfort and familiarity. I wasn’t there of course — I wasn’t alive — but it all feels true to me. Exploring the empty, cleared land with its yellow flags demarcating property boundaries and the future sites of trees and sewers and buried electrical lines. Wide paved roads, ever-present cul-de-sacs and sidewalks and green grass and pools. I know it all, I’ve seen it and felt it and wandered it, I love the order and the cleanliness and the tameness of it. I was born in a master-planned community that emerged from eradicated orange groves, and even in the 80s as I was growing up I could still see the march of human development as strawberry fields become shopping malls and parking lots, airports and baseball diamonds and roads. By my old house there is a remnant of what used to be, and it is amazing in its alienness, the dark ground and light brush and flies and lizards.

In my suburban safety I never had to worry about freezing through a snow storm in a house missing windows and walls, and for that, of course, I am grateful. I also never had to worry about getting lost in the woods, or stumbling across deer drinking from a pond, or waking up early to milk the cows, or getting splinters tapping the maple trees to collect their sap. But for missing those things I am not grateful.

I live in a world of order, and on weekends I venture forth, occasionally, into the chaos: I go hiking or kayaking or climbing. Its odd that exploring and enjoying the natural world, in this modern age, has become but an occasional weekend leisure activity for many, and a completely alien experience for many more.

And one final rambling thought: in California today perhaps the best way to experience the sight and smell of the orange groves of yore is, sadly, hilariously, ridiculously, through a Disney theme park ride.

Flickr long ago promised an easy option to get all of your photos out, no fuss. They never delivered. Since I use pretty much none of the Flickr community features and only use it for photo storage, and since I’m doing a fairly crappy job of taking new photos and uploading them, I’m not really sure I should be staying on Flickr. Maybe I should go back to a self-hosted solution, like Gallery or whatever the new version of iPhoto pops out.

On the other hand, I’m thinking of moving my blog over to blogs.law.harvard.edu because the server is snappy and well-maintained (by me, actually) whereas agblog is neither of those things. And of course WordPress makes it really easy to export your data and import it into another WordPress blog. I’d just lose my custom theme, which I’m not sure how much I care about anymore.

On the third front, I’m trying to get my spam under control and wondering what is the best thing to do with my email, knowing that IMAP is probably still it and Gmail is most decidedly not.

It’s my information, dammit! I want to outsource the management of it on a temporary basis, to make my life easier, but I want to maintain complete control over it. Mark Pilgrim is so right when he says:

Praising companies for providing APIs to get your own data out is like praising auto companies for not filling your airbags with gravel. I’m not saying data export isn’t important, it’s just aiming kinda low. You mean when I give you data, you’ll… give it back to me? People who think this is the pinnacle of freedom aren’t really worth listening to.

So what’s a guy to do? For goodness sake, I just replaced my Linux box with a dedicated NAS appliance, not because I don’t know how to maintain Linux boxes (give me a break), but because I do it all day and I just don’t want to have to do it at home as well. So what’s the best, easiest, most flexible, way to handle a blog, my email, and my photos in a way that I completely control but that I have to manage as little as possible?

I’m finding the first Harry Potter book utterly confusing, and not in the way one might expect. Harry has a “mum,” not a “mom,” which is properly British, but then he eats a bag of “chips,” which means french fries, which don’t normally come in bags — those are “crisps,” which means potato chips. Later he had a “pasty,” which is not something any American child would be allowed to eat (in Britain a turnover, in America stripper apparel), followed by an English muffin! A what? But in the next chapter, they’re saying “Merry” Christmas, which no Brit would say. And of course the most obvious change, taking the “philosopher’s stone” of the title, a legend that dates back to the 13th century, and swapping it for “sorcerer’s stone,” which means nothing, is just insulting.

It turns out that I’m late to this particular party: these very “translation problems” that so gall me were apparently discussed in a 2000 _New York Times_ op-ed, and in the later books Scholastic, the American publisher, made far fewer modifications. Very good indeed.

I’ve only found a few chances to play with my new camera flash (or “Speed Light,” in Nikon parlance) prior to the wedding this weekend, so I’m still getting the hang of it. I briefly scoped out the venue for last night’s dinner and it looked fine — low ceilings, which is really all I was looking for. I forgot to ask Igor to bring me my diffuser, which it turns out was a critical error. You see, to get good, soft light and avoid red eye, you want to bounce the flash off the ceiling. Which works well if the ceiling is low. The problem comes when your ceiling is chock full of chandelier crystal, and every time you flash it causes a thousand little light reflections on everything, like a disco ball. But if you do a non-bounce flash, the light is harsh and overpowering, and of course there is the red eye problem. And did I mention that all the walls were covered in big mirrors?

Bad venue for the inexperienced photographer! Having the diffuser, which softens and spreads the light, would probably have helped a lot. Today is outdoors, though, so perhaps I’ll do better. And of course there is the “official” wedding photog, so its not like I have to worry too much about missing the important moments.

I took 103 images last night. I’m happy with about a dozen of them. One of which is pictured here.