There is also a great playspace for kids under 5 which was well attended. KidWonder had a terrific time, testing the limits of his voice in the echo-rich halls, tapping the glass to wake up the wildlife, and interacting with the other families who were also visiting. If MomWonder wasn’t watching so closely, he would have walked off with a girlfriend to boot!

Without further ado, a short slideshow of the morning:

Anyhow, KidWonder had a blast, and we got the chance to snap some photos. I’ve embedded a Flickr slideshow here, I hope it works.

And just in case you missed it in the slideshow, or couldn’t open the slideshow, my favorite pic of The Dancing Machine:

The new groups feature on Propeller.com is starting to get fun. The team is still adding functionality to it, such as RSS, but its already interesting. The power to join a group of like minded people in your favorite niche topic, and then being able to share your thoughts on it… its the best of Usenet and Forums IMO.

On Propeller you can only create one group, so make it a good one. I believe I have: Battlestar Galactica.

Wil Wheaton is running the Geeks group. The conversation “I am a geek because…” spilled out into its own story.

My favorite response so far, FTC, is from Shoei-Mike:

I’m a geek becasuse:
(0) I’m not starting this list at 1.
(1) My wife wrote this about me.
(10) When I tried really hard to force past my bias against sport, I came up with this.
(11) I converted the message base from my old BBS to HTML pages and put it online.
(100) I found my way here by reading WWdN.

‘Nuff said.

Here I thought, naively, that I could really get most of this done over e-mail. I responded with my selections, and a few questions about financing. I got a call back and was told to come into the dealership on Saturday afternoon. I arrive Saturday afternoon to find out that the women I was e-mailing was not, as she said, going to meet me there. Instead I was corralled at the door by a salesman who turned out to be brand new to the dealership.

Not a huge problem, I thought, since I knew exactly what I wanted. A 2008 Kia Rondo, with V6 and 3rd row seating. I had no trade-in, and financing was easy. Now, like anyone else going in for a purchase as large as a new car, I naturally wanted a discount.

I started off with an opener: “How about giving me a good price for the car, since I’m a good guy, I’m putting a huge chunk down, I’m no credit risk, etc”.

“Sure” I was told. Then I waited as Mr. New Guy hemmed and hawed with his finance manager. He comes back and shows me his new math, where not only did I not get a discount, but I ended up paying $100 MORE for the car than I would have originally!

Hrm.

After more gnashing of teeth and considering walking out, I ended up going for it. “Great!” he says, his senior sales manager says, the finance guy says. Now they’ve got me. And they had no intention of letting me go anytime soon.

3 1/2 hours later, after numerous delays for little to no reason, after filling out several forms, and really just ready to go, I’m told by the senior sales manager, “so are you ready to fill out the forms now?” Hrm… what have I been filling out for the last 2 hours? Practice forms?

So I go into the back room, which is ostensibly where the “real” deals are done, and go through the paperwork. Extended warranties are talked about, financing, etc. I finally, gasping for air, get out of the dealership 4 1/2 hours after arriving. I did get to drive home in my new Kia, though.

I arranged an appointment to come back to the dealership Tuesday to have my car alarm installed. I tell everyone at the dealership that I am coming at 11, and must leave at 12:30 at the latest. More antics ensue on Tuesday… I show up early (10:45), but don’t end up getting my car until 1:15. I’m just glad I didn’t have a meeting I couldn’t reschedule.

It was explained to me, after I got my car almost an hour after I needed to be leaving, that the car was held up so much because it was getting inspected. Never mind that it was inspected on Saturday, I’m told. That was “just a temporary inspection”.

I now have a great Kia at home, which I really love. I just had to rant a bit about buying a new car from a dealership. While I was enduring the Saturday marathon, a guy who was decidedly more experienced in buying and selling cars came in, and haggled with a salesman for 3 full hours over a trade-in. He ended up dissatisfied and left without doing a deal.

I guess that is the real lesson here, that you really have to be willing to walk away whenever you feel uncomfortable. Had I used that measuring stick, I would have left as soon as I showed up. The guys at the dealership weren’t completely crooked, but they weren’t up to anything good. I used to play pool quite a bit, and these guys reminded me of the gamblers at the pool hall. Every person who walks in the door is just a mark, just a game. Not a person.

I tweeted while in the dealership that this is a decidedly old-world experience. Watching guys fill out forms photocopied many times over, writing in barely legible cursive, makes me sick. These are the guys handling your car insurance and registration, who need to write 20+ digit numbers without transposing any of them. The whole experience needed an upgrade.

I have been programming for over a decade now, but mainly focused on back end technologies. Thus, I have never really taken the time to learn Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). CSS, as it turns out, was the last core web technology in widespread use that I still had not yet learned. A project came up for work that demanded me to jump into CSS, so I purchased this O’Reilly title. I am a huge fan of O’Reilly work… my bookshelves are sagging with O’Reilly titles. I didn’t really have the time to sit back and savor this read, as my work demanded I just gulp it down.

I have to say, I sincerely enjoyed this gulp. Eric Meyer is a web standards guru, and really, really understands CSS to its core. I fully admit my geekness and say that anyone who can break down a technology the way Eric did for CSS can hold my attention for 450 pages, no problem.

I did come away with a healthy appreciation for how complex good CSS can be for a sophisticated web site that is expected to work across all mainstream web browsers. With the guide, though, I came away with the tools to manage it.

I highly recommend this book to any programmer looking to create good looking websites.

Small world.

A project I’ve been working on for some time has finally launched: an upgrade to the social news site called Propeller.com (Official blog post). I don’t normally write about work on my personal blog just because I’m already writing about it on corporate blogs and the like, and also because I like my blog to be a relaxing place to visit, with family pictures and all.

I’m proud of the effort my team put in and the final achievement. The site didn’t get very positive reviews from the tech blogs, and the existing community is still feeling it out. Social news is still a growing concept - I like its potential, where someone brings to light a story/meme/viral video and the community can share it. The mainstream news we get is OK, you can get that anywhere. The spam I hate. Really.

Social news sites are also victim to the fire hose effect, where the filtering mechanisms are too young/naive to really just show me what I want to see. Some community sites are starting to experiment with personalized news, but I don’t think that’s the whole solution. I want stuff you know I’ll like, but I also want good stuff I didn’t know I like - a tough task, but a noble one. BTW - lifestreaming services, news aggregators, RSS clients - you don’t do it right either. Trust me, I use all of you.

Time will tell whether or not we can make the right tweaks to the site to gain more mass traction. For now, though, I’m happy we got the upgrade out there. Trey, Blaine, George, Mike, Travis, Richard, James, Ryan, Alexia, Dakota, Helene - thanks. You guys rock.

Links: Act I | Act II | Act III

I thoroughly enjoyed all 3 Acts. Act II was my favorite. By buying the iTunes “Season Pass” for the series, I was e-mailed when each part came available, and the episode downloaded automatically into iTunes when I started the app.

This demonstrates that you’ve done it before. For engineers, I hire for talent. You need to demonstrate that you’re smart, and can get things done. But you don’t need 2 years of C# or SQL Server under your belt. For a manager it’s different. Management is something that you learn. It takes time. Sure, aptitude is still important, but you must show that your aptitude has crystallised into ability. Management is also about good judgement. Mulla Rasrudin once said that good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement. I’d like you to get that experience elsewhere.

Read more.

Go buy Act II of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog from the iTunes Store now.

For all of you cheapskates out there who aren’t real fans of internet video, you can watch it via stream. Act II is hilarious, and I’ll spare you all the best joke, about the Hammer.

For all those who don’t know about Dr. Horrible, it is a Joss Whedon (of Buffy fame) creation, starring Neal Patrick Harris. You can read the master plan if you want more info.

Really guys, support these innovators by buying the episodes. The production is great, the video quality is great, and it is hilarious. Well worth $1.99 an episode (or $3.99 for all 3 episodes). Also, if you want to catch these, you need to tune in now. I hear that these episodes are going to be taken down on July 20th.