Ben’s preschool put on a Christmas performance on Friday.  It was adorable.  His class had worked up an elaborate routine that involved randomly shaking bells while Jingle Bell Rock played.  There was also some screaming, crying, and wandering away.  3 year olds are great.  Check out all the pics here.

Ben got some sweet Buzz Lightyear pj’s.

Guess who thinks he’s Superman.

Madi is getting really cute.  She’s got smiling down and is working on giggling.  Right now, it still mostly sounds like she has indigestion.

Ben is not a good hider.  He grasped the concept of hide and go seek yesterday, but he doesn’t seem to get what constitutes a good hiding spot.  His best hiding spots included: under a pillow, covering his face in the shower, and putting a towel over his head.  Check out the full series of pics.

Kim is a ninja.

Ben helped decorate the Christmas tree.  He had a great time and the tree is nicely decorated up to about two and a half feet.  Good job, buddy.

We took Ben to Disneyland again the other day (I love having passes).  He got into the characters for the first time.  It was really cute.  Madi was really digging the Baby Bjorn.

Ben has been really into helping Kim bake lately.  Here’s muffin day.

Ok, I think that’s about it.  At this rate, there will be another post in about a month.

I know I’ve been off of the radar since I left MySpace, and I’m happy to finally be able to talk about my newest project: gravity.com. We’re officially out of stealth now, and it is a great feeling to be able to now talk about something I have been pouring my heart and soul into over the past six months. We’ve assembled an amazing team here, and today we’re unveiling the site and the problem we are tackling.

The online conversation space has been historically undeserved, with outdated tools that create fragmented and unwieldy discussions. Our mission is to help people engage in meaningful conversations about their passions. Be it gadgets, cooking, Voltron, or whatever you may fancy, Gravity will provide users with a place to have discourse with other people who share their interests. Traditional tools like forums, group email lists, and collaborative blogs haven’t offered users with simple, functional, and fun way to interact and share. When we talk about what we’ve built, we like to describe it as a turn-based conversation site. This isn’t about allowing for chatter, but instead about creating a destination where we provide a framework for people to better share and communicate. We’re focused on building out the Interest Graph for the web to help people connect with their passions and discover people and topics that are personally relevant. Additionally, we’re embracing the distributed nature of the web, current movements in open API’s and technology, and are looking at how we open up our technology while inter-operating with others.

Please check out this TechCrunch post that delves into more detail on the company and our mission, and be sure to follow us on Twitter at: @gravity. This is an exciting moment for me personally and professionally, and I can’t wait to share more about the project, and more importantly, give everyone a chance to play with the product and tell me what you think.

The duck tale

One of my college roomates is getting married next month in Phuket, Thailand. As a gift to him and his wife, I’ve designed, fabricated, and painted a pair of stylized Korean wedding ducks. Before I jump into the details, I have to give a big thanks to Steve for providing the idea, guidance and resources that were necessary to achieve a tangible outcome.

So why Korean wedding ducks? Apparently it is a Korean tradition to give a pair of ducks as a wedding gift. Aside from being cute decorations, the ducks are a way to visualize the current state of a relationship: a happy couple points their ducks face to face while a not-so-happycouple points their ducks away. There are some pretty intense ducks out there.

The process got started two weeks ago when Steve and I picked up a band saw from Westwood. Look how happy he is:

Three days later, I met up at Steve’s place to learn the fine art of band sawing and earn my woodworking badge. Here is a shot of Steve showing me the ropes:

Band saw, meet wood. Wood, meet band saw.

Steve’s ducks are on the left and mine are on the right. We proceeded to smooth the corners and faces with a Dremel and fine sand paper. Here is what the ducks looked like post-sanding:

We proceeded to stain the ducks and let them sit overnight in Steve’s garage:

Four days later, I met back up at Steve’s place and saw the dried ducks in all their glory:

Fast forward to this morning when I decided to paint the ducks with acrylics:

I ended up mixing white, orange, and light pink and went to town on the ducks:

I then went ahead and mixed orange and pink together to create some highlights and stripes:

Here is a top down shot:

Here is another shot showing the patterns from the other side:

Making these ducks made me realize how out of touch I am when it comes to working with wood and fabrication in general. Overall, this was an amazing experience to attempt a radically different project. I hope the couple keeps their ducks endlessly pointed at each other.

I don’t drive much and I like palindromes.  After 5 years my car just hit 22,222 miles. Hurray!

Cirque du Soleil is in town with their show Kooza.  It’s just amazing. Here’s a picture of their giant circus tent.  As the show was starting I realized that Harrison Ford was sitting about 50 feet in front of us.  He narrowly avoided a serious accosting.  He should consider himself lucky that his seat was in the middle of the row, denying me easy access to harass him and run away.

Madi has started smiling.  It’s a good thing as it helps to counterbalance her almost superhuman ability to vomit.

Disneyland is a pretty accurate reflection of the American population at large.  They appear to have a poor handle on the effectiveness of camouflage.

“Don’t worry, I’m a ninja.” You bet you are, buddy.

Ben got invited to ride in the cockpit of the Disneyland monorail.  Having kids gets you into all sorts of exciting places.

This is basically the universal view as a parent.

I sure hope this guy is a podiatrist.

It’s exhausting being 2.

Here’s a merekat.

You are now caught up.

Anyway, the show was awesome, but you’re probably asking yourself, “Hey, did they mess with some of the super dorky costume crowd?” You bet we did.  Here are the pics from last night.

We ran into some Jedi. Kunal felt the need to rock out with them. I felt like the little one needed a hug.

We ran into a couple of Han Solos.  Larry Solo was pretty amazing.  He had the steady calm of a Jerry Lewis, and the rogueish charm of Ben Afleck in Daredevil.  I assumed that he’s probably pretty lonely in his personal life (just a random guess), so he got a hug too.

Here’s our other Han Solo.  Let’s call him Enrique Solo.  Enrique brought his whole family.  The kid was an awesome Jango Fett (expect for his Go, Diego! backback).  The wife, on the other hand, should probably retire the gold bikini.

We ran into some rebel pilots.  Got the group shot and the obligatory MySpace self-shot.  I wonder which one of them was supposed to be Porkins.

Now I can hear some of you saying, “Hey Steve, it’s not cool to tease the costume crowd. They need something to fill the hole that not dating leaves.”  Allow me to rebut. We had three extra tickets from folks who couldn’t make it.  Rather than find three hot chicks that had less good seats (sorry Kunal), we gave them to a dad and his two kids outside who couldn’t buy tickets to the sold out show.  So I’m a lovely person and can poke fun at whoever I like.  Hurray for karma being a zero sum game!!

What shall the redeemed wear?  This handy tome from CVS Pharmacy shows the way.  Let’s consult Leviticus 47:92, “And lo the Lord spake unto them, ‘Thou shalt dress as thou did in the 80′s. And bedazzeling shall also be ok. Go forth, and be uncool in My name.’ ”

Yup, that’s Obama with an ice cream head

Kunal made a new friend on the Promenade.  They wandered off together.  I hope he’s ok.

Earlier, we helped Kunal buy a wetsuit. It seemed to turn him immediately into a ninja.

I’m glad Verizon finally has a marketing program that speaks to me.

Midgley was an inventor.  Celebrated in his lifetime, he died with over a hundred patents and accolades from his peers.  He also singlehandedly jacked the environment six ways to Sunday. Midgely became a household name for solving engine knock by adding lead to gasoline. His tireless efforts to show how safe high lead levels could be, despite the numerous deaths from lead poisoning in refineries, legitimized the process and landed him only briefly incapacitated for lead poisoning (he publicly demonstrated the safety of lead by running his hands through a lead solution and nearly died after the press had gone home).

Now, the wide dispersal of lead throughout the environment for the next several decades is quite a legacy, but Midgely would not simply fade into obscurity. Remember that hole in the ozone from all of the Freon and CFC’s? Well Midgely is up in heaven right now looking down at you through it. He invented those too. Yup, the lead in the gasoline guy is also the CFC guy.

On an interesting note, in his later life he contracted polio. In designing an elaborate system of pulleys to help get himself out of bed, he became tangled and was strangled (the whereabouts of Captain Planet cannot be accounted for that day).

So the next time you run into someone going insane because their well was a little too close to leaky gas tanks, or you see a polar bear who misses the snow, remember one man really can make a difference.