The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes

A few weeks ago, the movie Touchback was released to U.S. theatres. I haven’t seen it yet, but I did note its importance in one particular aspect: with the release of that film, Kurt Russell joins the fairly small club of actors who have had roles in films spanning six different decades. What’s particularly interesting is that this isn’t even a case of “oh, he had a minor cameo in a few films each decade.” He’s actually had starring roles in at least one film for every decade from the 1960s onward.

If you’ve stopped to realize that Kurt Russell is only 61, it should become obvious that some of those early roles were as a child star, or rather, a teenage star. In particular, Kurt Russell had several roles in Disney live-action family comedies. In 1969, he starred in the first of a trilogy of films about college student Dexter Riley (spelled Reilly in the first film, but later films changed this). The first film of the three was The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, directed by Robert Butler.

Comment Emails

If you’ve posted any comments to my blog (or other WordPress-hosted blogs) recently, you may have started receiving emails about other peoples’ comments unexpectedly. This is because the checkbox under the reply box which reads “Notify me of follow-up comments via email.” is now checked by default. It was previously unchecked by default, and that’s the way it should be under proper site design. WordPress staff have been alerted to this — there’s a thread about it in the support forum — but have stated it’s not a bug. Well, I disagree, at least with the spirit of the term if not the letter. It may not be an unintentional move on their part, but it’s very much a bad design decision. This is a behavior that should be opt-in, not opt-out, and that’s how people have had it and how people expect it to be. Changing that is just going to lead to people getting email they don’t want.

Hopefully after enough bloggers have thrown their 2 cents in, WordPress will realize this is a screw-up and revert it. In the meantime, I apologize if you’re getting any email from here you didn’t want; it’s not my doing, and I’d change it if I could. (Unfortunately, WordPress.com hosted sites cannot alter their own code, at least without a hefty fee for the privilege, or I’d just change it. It’s a one-word fix unless they’re practicing spectacularly bad code writing.)

When you leave a comment, be sure to take a look at the checkbox and make sure to uncheck it if you don’t want to be emailed about follow-up comments. Hopefully this won’t last long.

Click here for the update on May 15