LunaLog

Where to eat in Chattanooga

While searching for a map to Mushroom Rock on Signal Mountain and found this blog that my friend Herbert created.  It’s a great overview of some of the best places to eat in the Noog.

http://activechattanooga.blogspot.com/

You got to call him...

Baile del niño

Here’s our boy dancing with wild Caucasian abandon to the Ranchera music outside a Mexican restaurant in a nearby strip mall.  It was as if he had no control over his urge to dance.  Probably the funniest thing I’ve seen in weeks…

The Living Room of 2018

Since the late 50’s, living room furniture has been arranged around a television set.  That’s when the tv was the only screen in the house. People used to waste time watching the same television screen.  Now there are umpteen screens in every house and the wealth of available content continues to increase.  So now we find households where the 4-year old watches a Dora DVD, the 14-year old is playing guitar hero, Mom watches HGTV, and Step-Dad #2 watches The Golf Channel.

But as Clay Shirky points out, more and more people are deciding to salvage their time from television, and actually contribute some content to the internet (i.e., Wikipedia, Flickr, etc.) instead of simply consuming television.  I encourage you to read his thought-provoking blog post.

But unlike Clay, I don’t think the internet has to compete with television.  Just last night, I worked on a laptop on the kitchen table while listening to the television on the countertop.  I’ve also known people who have multiple monitor setups that watch video on one monitor while web-surfing on another.

So here’s what I think a living room experience will be like for the family of 2018:

I imagine some kind of wall-sized Minority Report-like display where everyone’s content is displayed simultaneously like posters on the wall (in the movie, Tom Cruise’s character is standing at the display, but I imagine a family would be sitting).  Everyone will probably interface with the device through gestures.  I suppose each family member would need headphones in order to listen to the content of their choice.  Just as the 14-year old is about to get a new high score on Guitar Hero, other family members could choose to minimize their various screens (the video game screen would maximize) giving the teenager everyone’s full attention.  The beauty of such a device is that it gives everyone the ability to see generalized and individualized content simulteaneously.  I’m sure Apple is working on it right now… ;-)

Touching Story, Powerful Photographs

Take some time and visit this site (requires flash):

http://www.dayswithmyfather.com/#/0

Not bad for a 3-year old...

Our three-year old took this photo with one of those cheap disposable cameras.  Heck, I may just give him our digital and let him take all the photos from now on.