Three-Year-Old Fashion
What’s wrong with this picture? Two good-looking kids; politically correct races and genders; well-dressed — but obviously dressed by adults. In this case, adults trying to sell the clothes they’re wearing.
Sure, it’s OK for kids to look good, and have clothes that match. But there’s a certain self-expression evident only when they don (and sometimes doff) their own attire.
And young kids are the antithesis of teenagers in this respect. Whereas teenagers have their entire wardrobe dictated by their peers (What? You don’t wear Abercrombie & Fitch shoelaces? What kind of loser are you?), young kids just wear whatever they want. Or whatever is lying on the floor. Or just whatever.
Not only do they wear whatever, they don’t mind being seen that way, or even photographed, either. So, modeling here his own unique configurations, is Mr. Ethan Smith, age 3.
(Editor’s note: for the full effect, play this while you read on.)
Ready for whatever comes, the rugged bike-helmet, safety-goggles look, topping mid-morning pajamas.
The multi-collar preppies have nothing on this guy: he’s got hat-hood-hat to showcase the design elements of repetition and contrast. Snow boots make the ensemble bold. The fuzzy brown is a nostalgia piece — the bear costume from his first Halloween when only two weeks old.
Sans-trousers is popular in the potty-training stages. A brown sock on only one foot forgoes balance for asymmetry. The stocking cap, with ear-muffs and a chin-tie, sits rotated 45 degrees, with the front muff up.
Fashion meets fantasy in the toy box turned race car. Safety goggles again, with a hard-hat’s suspension strap for headgear. Ethan is joined here by cousin Emily, modeling the ice cream bucket crash helmet.
Hoping It’s All Worth It
I woke groggily this morning — I’m not even sure at what time — to a small muffin being pushed into my mouth by Ethan. I felt sort of like someone being nursed back to strength, being woken just long enough to get some food, and then I was back to sleep again.
I had finally gotten to bed at about 4:00 AM, after a nineteen hour day at work, but I was up again by 9:00 AM, because I had to go back. Fortunately, though, the worst was behind.
A little over a week ago, I discovered that I had been volunteered to work on a special project for our CEO’s press tour this Monday (May 1st). NextPage is making its first big marketing push, and has appointments with major business and technology magazines this coming week, and we need a demo of our “Content Network” strategy.
The product we’re working on takes information from various sources, and homogenizes it. So with our software, you can have a web site (usually an intranet site, or corporate portal) that gives you a unified view into disparate pieces of information. You get a single table of contents and searching across relational databases, internet web sites, professionally published content, internal documents, etc. so that the search results seem like they come from a single source.
But the analysts have been having a little trouble getting their heads around the idea, so our CEO decided to make it more personal. In addition to having this vast content network, he wanted to let every person create their own profiles of the content. So if I’m a lawyer, I might pick and choose areas of content that are relevant to a case I’m working on. I can then trim down the table of contents and the search results to only the relevant information.
The only problem was that our product didn’t support any such thing. But now a week later, it does. Well, in prototype form anyway.
I built the personalization system, while the rest of the development team helped get the product into good enough shape to be usable, even though we haven’t quite hit our “code complete” milestone yet (we haven’t finished writing all the code yet — let alone thoroughly test it).
So those efforts culminated in last night’s sleep deprivation, and we delivered the final system to the CEO this morning at about 11:00. Of course he had a few minor tweaks he wanted done, but that was easy.
So now I can relax a little. At least until Monday, when I have to confront the fact that I am somehow a week behind on my real work.
