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Our friends are having a birthday party for their two year old daughter Olive, and our friends in Virginia will be having one soon for their son Joseph, so we made a run to toy stores in New Jersey. It’s been a while since I’ve been to a toy store and really looked around. Really looked around. I’ve run in to whatever toy store happens to be at the mall to see what used Playstation/Playstation2 games they have while Maria shops but this time we really looked at what they are selling.

What an eye-opener! But it’s probably not news to parents. I couldn’t believe how cheaply made the toys are- worse than I remember- and that even toys like Tonka trucks are mostly plastic not metal. The thing that really set us off was that more than half of the toys are linked to a non-toy, non-child product. Forget the tie-in between entertainment like music, cartoons and movies with figurines and play sets, that’s ancient history (pick an era: Red Ryder BB guns, Radio Flyer wagons, Star Wars action figures, Mighty Morphing Power Rangers, etc., etc.) and seems pretty benign. We looked at the cute plush animals and noticed the signature shapely light-green Coca-Cola bottle in their paws or hanging from around their collars. I tried to ignore gender-role stereotyped toys- many or even most of the toys are color coded pink for girls, blue for boys- and looked at how in with the play ovens and hand bags are toy shopping bags filled with toy brand name consumer goods and toy fashion cosmetics. We took at hard look at toy lunch boxes and toy bags and saw them filled with toy McDonald’s hamburgers and fries, toy Pepsi cans and toy pizzas. Toy cell phones. Toy laptops. Toy stereos. This consumerism stuff makes the gender-coded toys look good. We found ourselves asking each other if we’re somehow snobs for not wanting to give to a child a toy cynically marketed to tie them for life to a brand name.

There were some bright spots: there were many more educational toys than I would expect, the Fisher-Price preschool toys haven’t changed much except that they now make more electronic noises (just what every parent wants), the variety of board games was great, there were lots of activity-type toys and the construction toys (all kinds of blocks plus Tinker Toys, Erector, Lego, Knex, Capsella and others) were more common than I remember.

We did settle on toys, by the way: a Raggedy Ann doll for Olive and a Tonka truck for Joey. I’ll worry about the implict sexism some other time. Right now I’m still worrying about how we’re cultivating good little consumers of fast food and brand names with everything in the toy box.

Last week the company offered a four-day course on information security from @stake condensed into two days. The material was good and the pace, given the usual for courses, great. The majority of the attendees were current security people, so the subject was old hat for most of them (or should be!) and would be for anyone else who follows bugtraq, but for the target audience of application programmers it should be great or at least very enlightening. Now, the amusing thing. While experimenting with one of the commercial @stake tools we found a bug to which the instructor remarked that you sometimes find these in early releases. He noted that the guys who develop the tools are expert in multiple areas and very good a breaking things but not so hot at QA testing. Funny, isn’t that the problem?

Met my in-laws last night for dinner at Hakata Grill and to see Eddie Izzard’s performance at City Center. I was a little sacked out but we had a great time. As expected, Sexie isn’t so much a scripted show as it is a chance to experience Izzard’s wildly funny meandering aloud through his own mind. He rifled through and circled back over a few dozen things including transvestitism (surprise! and he wears nicely nipped-waisted jackets…), super heroes, air travel, television, Greek and Roman mythology, Neanderthals, balsamic vinaigrette and dentistry. It’s as if the funniest person you’ve ever met in graduate school is with you in a bar dissembling on the state of the world. Only funnier and in high heels.

I was tinkering the other afternoon with my blog software to implement new features and after a few attempts I realized that while blosxom is simple and good it wasn’t quite what I wanted and integrating other people’s plugins was not going to do it. Enter Movable Type, which leans less toward basic blog and more toward content management system. Very nice and easy to set up. I wrote a quick hack to convert blosxom to MT for import and away I went.

Except when I tried to deploy it on my webserver I had all kinds of weird errors that pointed to a corrupted database. After two days of reading documentation, rebuilding modules, running tests, reinstalling and reviewing the help forums I finally wondered if there wasn’t some problem with the particulars of Sparc64, Berkeley DB and Perl. Compiled and configured mySQL. Started from a clean install. Tada! It works.

I got spam to the blog account. Looks like the webcrawlers have picked it up and it has made its way into the hands of the spammers. It’s interesting that it took over a year to happen. Also interesting is the introduction of Spanish spam in addition to the English, Korean and German spam. Might be time to put the RBL checks in effect for qmail.