What 'choo talking about, Willis?

Cutting the cord, continued, and why USI Wireless is awesome for us

2011-12-22T12:47:00.000-08:00

I gave up on #resound11 about half way through. Just got behind from the 8 ball and couldn't keep up.

But I am still working on reducing my Internet and Cable bills. When we last discussed this topic, I was getting ready to order USI Wireless on a trial basis to see if it could serve as a reasonable substitute for the Comcast service I've used for the last 8 years or so at multiple addresses.

I've always been something of a sucker for speed with these connections and since I've been able to afford it have typically purchased mid/high tiers of service. I most recently had 20Mbps service which I was paying 54 bucks a month for. I enjoyed fast podcast downloads and other media files purchased from a variety of sources, and no challenges from a streaming perspective but was also aware that this kind of speed is probably borderline overkill considering the data cap on Comcast is 250GB so if you stream constantly in HD you'd probably get in trouble with them anyway. .

USI Wireless in the city of Minneapolis comes in 3 flavors, 1, 3 or 6Mbps. They allow you to pre-pay for a year, which amounts to a substantial savings of $144 on the most expensive tier, or about 33%. It works out to 23.95 per month. Even Comcast's cheapest tier, which is 1/3rd the speed at 2Mbps is 26.95 per month (and probably rising) and in order to get at least 6 you have to spend 44 a month with Comcast. So clearly, if you can make it work, the price is very attractive for USI wireless.

I had two concerns besides going to a much slower speed (and I wasn't that worried, because for most things I do, 6Mbps is adequate) - latency, and reliability.

I got the service set up about 6 weeks ago on a Sunday Night. I was very impressed with the available USI install appointment windows - they offered a variety of night and weekend options - very convenient if nobody can easily be home during the day. Everything went smoothly. The tech checked my preferred locations for their wireless device to be mounted either to a window or the side of the house. We ended up having to put their equipment on the top floor of my house in the back. This was line of site to the pole with their transmit/receive equipment on it and allowed me to get fully advertised speeds.

This placement likely would have been a problem for the less technically minded. I was working off a cable connection coming in at my TV in the basement where I had several wired applications that needed to remain so. Luckily, I already had a second router set up as a wireless bridge and repeater so I swapped it in and it worked perfectly for both wired and wireless connections. The main router went upstairs to serve as the main wireless broadcast for my house directly off of the USI equipment. I have nothing directly wired to that box.

At some point, I will probably upgrade the router upstairs to an N router for better range (and to reduce reliance on the g repeater in my basement, an aging Linksys router than may go at any time).

Performance wise, it works as advertised. I'm able to get 4-6Mbps down, slightly less during peak times and I haven't had any noticeable service interruptions. Quite manageable speed even for downloading Podcasts, music from Rdio, etc. Video files and larger files take a bit longer but queuing them up still results in getting them in a semi-timely fashion. 1Mbps up is a bit on the slow side, particularly when uploading photos, but nothing that you can't queue and forget about either (and still much faster than what I had with Comcast a few years ago-and Comcast wasn't that much faster on the up-side today either)

On the TV side, we had mixed results from my trial run, and I haven't cancelled cable yet as a result. I did end up ordering a RCA ANT1650R Flat Digital Amplified Indoor TV Antenna from Amazon. It picks up all the major stations, but not without some adjustments on occasion. I had a couple of Vikings games that didn't record because the antenna needed adjustment and several other times where the signal has been borderline. Also, the NBA resolved their differences, the Timberwolves have a product worth watching, and the Bulls are on national cable TV approximately 20 times (which are games that are blacked out on the NBA Season Pass). There's also the college game which I go in and out of being interested in but come tourney time it would be nice to have cable.

So I haven't cut the cord with Comcast all the way , but we're half way there. I'm impressed with USI Wireless's customer service as well. In addition to sending me an email highlighting the different avenues of customer service, they also gave me a call to make sure everything was OK and it was working well for us. They also handled my request to switch the modem rental to a purchase without any hiccups. Compared to my Comcast fiasco a few years ago, it was smooth sailing.

The TV thing we'll reevaluate after basketball season. It's always the sports that keep me connected. I didn't watch much baseball last year and could probably get by with an antenna for the summer months. It's possible I'll pursue a dish connection too, but over there, there's contracts, a new DVR box and other shit I don't really want to contend with.

Resound11 Prompt 5: Theme Song

2011-12-05T10:00:00.000-08:00

If your life was a television show, what would its theme song be? What music would be cued at the start of the show or when you entered a scene?

Think about this past year. Is there a song that you've heard that has really struck a chord, one that has spoken to you? Maybe there's a song that goes along with your one word for 2011. Maybe there is a song that you've heard that instantly cheers you up or makes you think of a special moment that happened this year?

Foster the People - Color on the Walls - Don't Stop. Because nothing stops, life just keeps moving along. Plus my daughter likes to jam along to this song. This album got a lot of play in our house earlier in the year, and the lyrics to this one are a lot less serious than Pumped Up Kicks, for sure. This song also symbolizes the demands my daughter places on my life.

Resound11 Prompt 4: Superpower

2011-12-04T10:00:00.000-08:00

Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound ... we know you've got one. What's your 2011 superpower?
For those of you going what the what ... stop. Think about it for a moment: what have you learned that you can do better than anyone you know this year? What can you do that no one else can? Don't be shy!

It's juggling all of the aspects of life and doing generally a better job at it then in years prior. Work was constantly changing this year - new boss, reorganization that significantly impacted my job. On the homefront, adjusting to life with a mobile child and having a pregnant wife again. A pregnant wife that while still quite capable, needs more help with things. Keeping a much larger house running - cleaning it up, and after our extremely affordable cleaning lady left the state, deciding to go back to cleaning it ourselves. We don't do as good of a job.

I don't really remember what much of life was like before Abby was born, but I wonder what the hell I did all the time.

Resound 11 Prompt 3:Virtues

2011-12-03T10:00:00.001-08:00

Yesterday we got down and dirty and revealed our 2011 vices; today we'll wipe the slate clean and talk about what personal virtues we discovered in 2011.

What good have you done in 2011? Where do you really shine? What have you done that makes you proud of yourself?

This is an area where I feel like I could be better. I'm not particularly good about giving money and time is something that is hard to give. Right before Thanksgiving though, I did two activities that I meant to blog about anyway, so this is probably as good of a time as any.

The first was a volunteer session at Second Harvest Heartland with about 10 members of my team at work. Second Harvest is a food bank in the Twin Cities area that provides food to various shelters, food shelves, and the like. We went to their warehouse in Northeast Minneapolis and packaged rice into individual packages for 3 hours. It was very similar work to the work I've done at Feed My Starving Children as an activity with another work team. There were other opportunities to do work with food donated from grocery stores. This is a great charity, doing an important job. They gather a lot of perfectly good food from stores around the metro area that otherwise would have to toss because of expiration dates. We ended up going through most of a huge thing of rice in our three hour shift. I was a sealer, which I feel like I was pro at by the time the shift was over.

The second volunteer activity I did was to take a day off of work (paid, thanks to my employer's generous gift of two paid days to go do volunteer work) and work at Bridging, Inc. in their warehouse. Bridging is an organization that collects furniture donations to supply to people getting back on their feet, getting their own place again, typically coming out of shelters or from living with someone else. Katie took the day off too and she worked in the front doing client visits, sorting of linens and office work. I moved furniture around. It was very rewarding. I met a lot of great volunteers and you can directly see the impact of what you do. A great organization and I hope to volunteer there again soon.

Resound11 Prompt 2: Vices

2011-12-03T10:00:00.000-08:00

Did you slip back into any old habits that you wish you hadn't? Did you gain any new habits that you wish you would have walked away from? Did you discover the evils of Nutella? 'Fess up ... we won't tell.

My addiction to checking Twitter, Google+, Facebook, etc got a little crazy at times. I blame my iPhone and iPad. They're always with me at home. I did try to get better at putting them away while Abby is awake. I also recently dialed back on the number of people I follow/friend on several of the sites which reduces the flow. I'm something of a completist as well, and I need to give up on that. Don't have to read every last tweet! Trying to do that by having a list on Twitter that I go to if I just don't have time for it, to at least see what my closest friends/acquaintances are up to and doing similar things on the other services.

To note: I've been smoke free for nearly 3 years now and it feels great. Still get the urge every once in a while, but that's usually after too much alcohol and the fact that virtually all of my friends have also quit the habit makes it easy to not fall back into bad patterns.

Resound11 Prompt 1: One Word

2011-12-01T19:00:00.000-08:00

I posted for 31 days last December using the Reverb10 prompts. While the original creators of those prompts are not doing them this year, another person has stepped up and I'm going to follow along. I really enjoyed reflecting on my year last year and hope to have a similar fun experience this year. Without further ado the first prompt:

What is one word to describe your 2011? Why does that word sum up your year?

A lot like last year, I'd be willing to bet a lot of these posts are going to be focused on being a dad because it's probably still the biggest thing going on in my life right now. My wife is due with our second child at the end of January so 2012 is going to be similar as well.

One word to describe 2011 for me is discovery. It was a year of discovery for my entire family, as well as a year of personal discovery for myself. While this is true every year, it felt especially true this year.

My daughter Abigail entered 2011 as a 8 month old infant, and is emerging from 2011 as a 20 month old toddler. The difference between those two points, as I'm sure those of you with children know, is HUGE. She is in full-on discovery mode right now and that has been fun to watch and experience.

Watching her discover what makes the world tick, the common language that we employ, and proper behaviors in the right context has been really interesting. Her brain is just absorbing and picking up all these new things, and doing a pretty good job of it. It's amazing how quickly they go from drooling baby to curious toddler that picks up on more things, understands conversations, and starts formulating words to express her feelings.

My personal discovery has revolved mostly around my career and job, and my wife and I have continued to explorer where we want to go with our lives. There's been a number of events that have occurred with my job and career that have caused me to pause and re-evaluate what I really want to do in the long term and that's been filled with discovery on several different fronts, a process that is ongoing and will continue into 2012.

Thoughts on cutting the cord and getting Comcast out of my life

2011-11-30T11:32:00.001-08:00

A casual survey of my friends and acquaintances shows that more people have cut the cord on cable or thinking about it, lately, despite the complete ignorance of industry executives. My wife and I are thinking about doing it for economic reasons, but also just for time. And I think we're actually going to do it.

I'm building a strategy around doing so before I actually do it, as I'd like to completely cut ties with Comcast. Their internet is probably without a doubt the fastest and most reliable (you get what you pay for as it's also the most expensive) available where I live. But, I just abhor them as a company-I don't think they do many things that are particularly customer friendly, and they constantly jack the rates and give you more shit that we don't need or want to watch for it. (and if any Comcast reps are reading this, don't bother to comment here, I will delete it as we're through!) We do watch shows on multiple cable networks, but a lot of it is disposable crap that I don't think I would really miss too much, or couldn't find elsewhere if I really wanted to.

What I think I'd miss
In theory, sports have been the main driver for me to not already have done this. In analyzing my actual viewing habits, I have not consumed enough sports to justify the exorbitant expense of having cable. I watched a handful of Twins games last season, and almost none in the second half of the season. That would probably increase if they were doing better, but there's also no shortage of watering holes where I could take in a game from time to time. I've been watching Gopher hockey this year, but I could live without. I'd probably miss being able to watch college hoops and the NBA as I tend to watch a lot of random games, but I'll just have to catch more on the networks. The Timberwolves might be better this year, but maybe I'll just go to more games. The Vikings are on network TV if I even care to bother watching them anymore. I'm also fortunate in that I'm still a fan of multiple out of market teams including the Bulls and the Cubs, for which there are several viewing options through their streaming packages if I'm so inclined. The NCAA tournament is totally streamed for free as well, reducing the need to have the cable portion and all the big games are on CBS anyway.

Other TV shows aired on cable would be missed, but I believe there are alternate legal means to get most of them should I decide I miss them and want to continue watching. I can think of a couple of shows that fall into this category. With the money we are saving on cable, I can justify splurging on a few season passes via Amazon.

Television
Obviously, cutting ties completely with Comcast and not wanting to get involved with the even more deceiving Satellite industry leaves us with over the air as our alternative. I'm looking at various antenna options and TVFool.com tells me that we should be able to receive everything broadcast in the area with an indoor digital antenna. I just bought this antenna from Amazon and I'm going to test it out before committing to cancelling cable.

I'm also looking at getting some kind of additional streaming option - such as an Apple TV or a Roku box. But that is something I'm probably going to research later. I already have a TiVo which can download some items and I've bought a few TV show season passes through it for items aired on AMC (a channel for which I could not justify the extra expenses in having the expanded tier by itself, with no interest in other channels on that tier). We're going to keep the TiVo around and hook it up to the antenna to record network items that we still watch, but we may even get rid of that eventually depending on how much we end up using it. My TV can also handle certain types of streaming as well, an option which I have not spent much time exploring.

Internet
This is probably the trickier one for me. As I said earlier, Comcast is probably the most reliable and fastest but it is also the most expensive. I think I am paying $55 a month for the second to top tier of service. I could dial back to the cheapest tier of service, and that may be something I consider, but if I cut cable completely, then they will charge me more for that. (I've also considered going down to the bare bones basic tier on Comcast if the antenna doesn't work, and then cutting down to the cheapest Comcast option may be better).

Alternatives where I live are DSL from CenturyLink and USI Wireless internet. I've not looked at the first option too much as I've heard the speeds are suboptimal in our neighborhood and I also don't want to deal with pairing it with POTS to get the best price. I have little interest in a traditional landline. I've seen mixed reviews of USI Wireless and have several friends that have ditched them after bad experiences, but I've seen more good than bad lately. I've heard the service has somewhat improved.

In the interest of not pigeonholing myself, I'm going to get USI Wireless internet set up and see how it works at my house. I've heard this is a huge YMMV thing, with some people having more success then others, based largely upon your home's orientation to the antennas in your neighborhood. It seems to be favorable as there is one at the end of the block and one block over, and I am the second house in with a clear view of the antenna from the back windows of my home. So I'm going to give it a go and not cancel Comcast until I'm sure it will work for us. It'll probably require me to reconfigure my router setup and have a bridge in the basement to get hard wired ethernet ports but I can figure that out.

So...
We're going to give it a go. We can always go back later. I have a feeling I won't miss it enough to bother. I've generally been watching less TV lately and this frees up time to do other things instead of watching mindless crap.

I'll update here as we go along for those who are interested.

Book Update October 2011

2011-10-25T08:28:00.000-07:00

I really need to make a point to update here more often. I keep saying that but then life gets in the way. I like writing here when I do. I think I just need to come up with some regular topics I can talk about.

I've shifted into hard-core book reading mode lately. I've always been a pretty big reader but I went through a bunch of my 20s where I just wasn't reading that much. I finally discovered the Hennepin County Library reserve system and it's a winner!

I was buying a lot of books used off Amazon but they are starting to pile up again and really there are only a few books that I've read that are worth keeping in the long term. Resale value is basically zero after a while so a lot of them get donated to Goodwill, etc. I'm still not on the e-book train, I suspect I'll get more there eventually but as long as the library is available, I do prefer reading paper books. I'm old fashioned like that.

I'm trying to watch less TV and reading is a way to accomplish that. I'm kicking around cancelling cable after Daughter #2 is born, we could do without the expense, and the library is free. I'm not sure Katie is on-board but we can probably figure something out where she can get her fix.

I'm going to try and write an update every month about what I'm reading.

Without further ado:
Everybody Loves Our Town: An Oral History of Grunge by Mark Yarm
About the Seattle Grunge scene of the early 90s - goes pre-historic with talking about bands like the U-Men, Green River, etc that were the precursors to the bands that everybody knows from that era. Really interesting Oral History, though I did have the problem I have with most Oral Histories - it takes me about 100 pages to get into it. But once I am, it's a page turner, I downed it in a few days after I started. He does a good job covering up the fact that he wasn't able to get much of Pearl Jam or surviving Nirvana members to participate and didn't have much material from a couple of other key players. Quite a bit on Alice in Chains though and the parts about Layne Staley at the end of his life are just heartbreaking. Nice job by Yarm. I was so young when this started and of course I caught the Nirvana bug like every 13/14 year old out there. I remember, I bought that album along with Metallica's black album.

Lucas Davenport "Prey" Series by John Sandford.
My dad tipped me off to these a long time ago, and I started reading them when I was looking for something a little lighter. I'm on Book 11 in this series after about 6 months of reading them on and off. There's 20 some odd total. They are good filler in between more serious reading and all take place in the Twin Cities. I can crank one out in a weekend if I don't have a lot going on. The last one I read was Certain Prey and that one was good - a female killer for hire was the main antagonist and she was a pretty strong character. Lucas Davenport is a great character too and the length of the series lets Sandford really develop him over the breadth. I've heard that some of the mid-teen books are the best in the series and I look forward to working my way through them. He has 2 other series I also intend to read eventually.

Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground by Kevin Poulsen
I was tipped off to this book by a Podcast I heard on Planet Money. I usually enjoy these types of books but this one was skippable. The subject matter just wasn't terrible interesting and the author didn't do a very good job of trying to make it compelling.

Freedom: A Novel by Jonathan Franzen
Finally got around to reading this one. I've not read anything else by Franzen, I need to circle back and read The Corrections and some of his older stuff. This book was fantastic though. The narrative development was top notch and the characters just kind of popped off the page. (one of the leads was named Walter and I had a hard time not picturing Bryan Cranston for some reason - too much Breaking Bad!). Helps that it was set in Minneapolis and a couple of the characters went to my alma mater, Macalester College. A bit of length but another page turner for me once I got about 100 pages in or so. Read most of this on my week long vacation in early October and it's an excellent vacation book.

Zero Day: A Novel by Mark Russinovich.
I wanted to like this book, but I just couldn't get into it. Too hokey - a computer virus is taking over the world. Just seemed really unrealistic given what I know about modern day technology and the author's attempts at relationships in the book just fail miserably.

I'm currently reading Dauntless, the first book in the Lost Fleet Series by Jack Campbell, a millitary sci-fi series. Haven't read this type of stuff in a long time but it's usually page turners and this one's no exception. I've got Two Kisses for Maddy: A Memoir of Loss and Love ready for pick up at the library but I'm considering returning it without reading it since it's about a father raising his daughter after his wife dies post-labor. Might be too much for me right now. Also have Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live by Jeff Jarvis and The Pale King, David Foster Wallace's last unfinished novel on their way to the reserve shelf. Should be a good couple of weeks of reading.

Netflix move takes guts

2011-09-19T12:20:00.000-07:00

I'm fascinated by what's going on with Netflix. I come at this as a former long-time customer. I first had an account near the beginning when we still had to mail DVD's back to California. I wasn't dissatisfied with Netflix as a service, we cancelled simply because of lifestyle - having a young baby is not conducive to watching many movies and we were much more attached to our Tivo than our DVD player for entertainment anyway.

I've watched from afar as Netflix has grown its streaming business while keeping the DVD business by its side. It's a nice compliment. I never found the streaming options to be that great when I last subscribed almost two years ago. Some told me they had improved, but then I keep reading stories in the news about deals gone bad.

I'm sure a number of my friends who are more into movies will have some decisions to make, or maybe they've already made them. But as a casual movie watcher who is more into current TV programming, they've probably lost me for good.

It takes a bit of guts to do what they are doing though, and take a perfectly good business, splitting it up into parts - aligning strategically with the future of content delivery. Don't get me wrong, I don't think anybody knows exactly where this whole thing is going to land between the distributors (the networks, cable companies, and streamers, etc), creators (studios) and the consumers, but it does seem likely that physical media will fade out at some point in the next 10 years. If not completely go away, it will have a lesser role, and could eventually be limited to those that streaming is not an option (those without access to high speed internet). Unwinding/morphing that business into something completely different is totally different from what the company has been for the first 10 years of its life, and certainly a much different thing than streaming video content, the future of the business.

Netflix is doing what it can to separate these businesses before they are publicly forced into doing it by investors. They may even have a suitor already. This is one step in a much larger plan.

This move is not unlike what Kraft Foods is doing with their business, or Tyco International, or countless others have done over time. Concentrate on what they do best or what to do best and where the growth opportunities are and unload the rest. The trick is to do it without alienating your existing customer base which is no small feat, and one that Netflix is clearly struggling with.

This will make a really interesting b-school case study someday, but perhaps for not the reasons people think.

St Paul Summer Beerfest Wrap up

2011-06-27T12:24:00.000-07:00

I really need to make an effort to write more in this space, and part of that is writing about the things I'm doing. I could write ad-naseum about my daughter and all the wonderful things she's doing these days, and I do that elsewhere anyway, also not as often as I should.

One of the things I did was to attend the St Paul Summer Beer festival last weekend. It was my first time attending this festival. It's been around for several years, and used to be held in the parking lot of Midway Stadium. This year, however, it moved to the newly-rennovated International Baazar at the State Fairgrounds.

The fest's new home was perfect. A stage for bands. Adequate space for vendors in an arrangement tailor made for this sort of thing. A grassy area in the back for more vendors and other stuff (VIP, entertainment, education tent). Adequate coverage from rain, which was sporadic during the first hour.

On the advice of Jumi, I bought a couple of VIP tickets. VIP's get access to the grounds an hour before the general admission, and have access to a tent area with its own porto-potties. Having access an hour early is crucial for an event like this because you can try whatever you want without crowds. Many brewers bring small batches to sample and they're gone quickly once the full-bore event gets going.

Highlights for me included Engine 20 by Great Lakes Brewing, a smoked Ale. It won the people's choice as well, though probably because they were campaigning harder than anybody else I saw and had ballots right there at the booth. It was still an interesting and good beer, it's a shame it's a limited deal and wont' be available here anywhere. I've liked what little Great Lakes I've had and I'll have to make a point to buy some more of it.

Other highlights - I really enjoyed Harriet Brewing's Saison Nourrice, a Belgian Style Farmhouse Ale. Perfect Summer beer. I think Harriet really hit it out of the park with this one. I've been a fan of theirs and have frequently stopped in to buy some growlers. Their West Side belgian-style IPA is probably the best of that style that I've ever had. Some of their seasonal beers have been hit or miss for me, but Saison Nourrice is a keeper. Growlers go on sale July 7th and I'll be over there to pick one up for sure.

I also enjoyed finally trying Ovalde's Auroch's Horn. I had heard about this beer from a few people, and I'll have to pick up a bottle next time I'm over at South Lyndale Liquors. It's a sipper for sure, and the sample glass size was perfect, but I wonder how a bigger "sample" would treat me.

Couple of other local things - Theodore Fyten's Fytenberg Grand Cru was good, apparently these guys are brewing out of the horse stables of the old Schmidt's brewery in St Paul. Very little online about them, but I was intrigued enough to try and find some more. Town Hall had a Macaroon beer that was fun, similar to Coconaut last winter. And Lift Bridge had a Strawberry-Rhubarb infused Farmgirl Saison that was fantastic. They really ought to get some of the infused Saisons into stores, they had a lemongrass one at Winterfest that was equally as delicious. I like this beer straight up too, though.

I didn't get to Fulton before they ran out of the Randall of Worthy Adversary with vanilla beans, coffee and cherry bark - it looked interesting from a tweet I saw during the event but I forgot to go there and all they had left was Lonely Blonde by the time I got over there.

There weren't many disappointments about the day overall. The beer selection from many vendors was very boring, nothing new, original or unique. I did try some things I've never had before though. I guess I wonder why they even bother, but they probably get some of the less-into-it people to try things they've never had.

Summit's a good example, they brought nothing but bottles of the same shit you can find at any liquor store in the metro area. As one of the first area craft breweries in the modern movement, and at a beer festival mere miles from their brewery in their hometown, you think they'd try to not mail it in if they are going to show up.

Surly also was a disappointment. I was hoping they'd have Schadenfrude as it was listed in the program, but they seem to have substituted Smoke, and didn't have anything else that wasn't readily available. I know that they are a different case than Summit in that they're probably still less drank, but at this point, they are the godfathers of the current resurgence, and don't most people that go to these things know them by now? I also realize that these guys probably prefer to pour everything they've got into the Minnesota Craft Guild events, but still, throw us a bone, will ya? Something not available elsewhere would have been nice. Just feels like it got mailed in.

Ultimately, it's an event I'd go to again, though I would probably be satisfied with just hitting up Winterfest if we can get tickets, and the Autumn Brew review, and maybe throw in a Beer Dabbler event as well.

Thoughts on Physical versus Digtal media

2011-04-21T09:59:00.000-07:00

A blog post by Louis Gray on physical media extinction in his life made me think briefly about my own media consumption habits of late. While I'm not as far along the physical media path, I am getting there. I'm still holding out on some things though, particuarly books. A summary:

Music - I can't remember the last time I bought a physical CD. It was a while ago. I do download from iTunes from time to time but I'm really not as big of a music consumer as I used to be. I have some CDs sitting in a closet somewhere that I really need to get rid of. But this seems like more trouble than it's worth. What do I do with it? Try to sell it to a used CD store? They'll probably take very little of it. Do I just throw it out? Donate it to Goodwill? This is why it sits in my closet. I think most of my physical collection is digitized, and the stuff that's not can probably stay that way. We listen to Pandora a lot in our household, and I've given Rdio and similar services some consideration but I don't think I'd use them enough to justify.

Movies - We have a young child and it's hard to find a block of time to watch a movie. We have enough TV content on the Tivo to keep us satiated most of the time. When we do rent movies, it's typically from redbox. We'll occasionally splurge on an Amazon rental downloaded to the Tivo if we're too lazy to go out and get a movie. But still very planted in the physical world here, and that's mostly because of price. I wound up buying a blue-ray player because our DVD player was on its last legs. I could see these going away in the next few years, but not until a few more things happen in the industry. We had Netflix but were not using it enough to justify the monthly subscription, especially once Abby was born.

Books - I don't have a dedicated e-reader yet. I do have an iPad now and have a couple of free books saved on the Kindle app and iBooks, but I've been reluctant to buy anything else. I have a backlog of probably 30 printed books going, one that I continue to feed with used book purchases from Amazon, which with Amazon Prime is cheap and painless. I'm not in a huge hurry to get a kindle or other device, and as I commented elsewhere, I suspect I won't do so until stuff is only digital that I want to read (and is longer than 40-50 pages, otherwise, I'll hit it up on my iPad) or the price of the Kindle drops to be virtually nothing. I believe the latter will probably happen before the former does - and more likely is that the latter will drive the former to occur. If I were to buy one today, it'd be the Kindle and one more reason has fallen for me to consider not doing so. I've heard a compelling case for the Nook as well, and either seem like they would be a viable solution. However, I'm already ensconced in the Amazon world, so I tend towards that.

Magazines - I'm down to two subscriptions from a high of probably a dozen 10 years ago. The Atlantic and Fast Company. I think I'm letting them both expire. I get most of my magazine-type content via the web. I'm using Instapaper quite a bit now. I'm a huge fan of long-form pieces and follow several sources of longform journalism on Twitter. I've found that it's broadened my horizons into a number of things that I probably wouldn't have otherwise read. For other things I used to read magazines for, I have a variety of Twitter lists and sources fed into Google reader and use tools like flipboard and Reeder on my iPad to browse.

Newspapers - I actually subscribed to the paper edition of the Star Tribune for 6 months with a groupon deal back in November. It was something like $25.00 for 6 months of 7 day delivery, which is basically giving the thing away. Definitely a come-on to get new subs that will eventually pay the full rate after the trial period is up. Problem is, I don't consistently read the thing every day. The new publisher may doing good things (some of which have translated to a better product) but it's still not something that's compelling enough for me to read daily anymore, and certainly not at full price. The papers tend to pile up during the week where I browse through them on the weekends, but I've even lost interest in that lately.

I've given the Star Tribune e-edition demo a test drive on my iPad and it's something I'd consider subscribing to at $1.99 a week (there's a come-on for existing subscribers that I might try to latch on to which is $14 for a whole year). I'm going to cancel the paper version when my sub is up and see how it goes after that. There's a plethora of paper machines around my hood when I feel like buying an individual copy, usually of the Sunday paper.

I've toyed around with getting a digital subscription to the Wall Street Journal, but I feel like that's another thing I wouldn't consistently read and it would be a waste of money. I do like that they sell individual issues digitally and have bought the Saturday version a few times, but I'm just as likely to take a walk and buy the paper copy, which is $.50 cheaper.

Economic Incentives for consumers are still lacking in the digital world - Sometimes I find it hard to believe that the media titans of yesterday and today (but probably not tomorrow for some of them) are still fighting digital content so hard well after a lot of these technologies have been introduced. The pricing economics of it still aren't in a good place, and they should be better. There's trade offs - I can go rent a top 100 movie title blue ray disc at Redbox for $1.50 but the same rental on Amazon or I-tunes costs me $3-$5.00, double or nearly triple. I can get access to Netflix's catalog of streaming titles for $7.99 a month, but it's missing a lot of movies that I have to pay double that to get access to their much broader disc collection. Pricing versus physical varies greatly on books but for back-titles, you're better off buying used.

I realize that I am probably more frugal and price sensitive than some, so take everything you read here with that in mind. But it seems as though a lot of people are price minded on this stuff, and if they don't perceive value in what they are buying, they will skip it altogether.

I'm sure this will evolve over the next few years even more than it already has, and it should be interesting to see what happens. I'm of the mind that eventually the big media titans will figure this out.

iEverything.

2011-03-15T07:39:00.000-07:00

I got sucked back into the Steve Jobs reality distortion field (aka Apple) a number of years ago, and it's bad now. I was a full blow Mac guy until college was over in 2000. At that point it was in my best financial interest to go PC (as well as sanity - Apple was on the brink at the time, this was pre-Jobs coming back, pre-OSX and the constant stream of iGadgets was a glimmer in somebody's eye).

Over the last decade, I've followed along from a distance - noting that the price gap on PCs and laptops, while still quite large, was coming down. I dipped back into Apple products with an iPod circa 2004 (white one with the monochrome screen and the click wheel - seems so quaint now). Loved it, it was finally a way to keep a big chunk of my music library in one place. I've followed the evolution of the iPhone closely and finally dropped for one mid-last year when the timing of my Sprint contract expiration and the release of the iPhone 4 lined up quite nicely.

So low-and-behold, the iPad. A device that has turned from a "who would want a giant iPhone" to a gadget that I desire in the span of a year. I think part of that is that I'm already entrenched in the iOS sphere, so it's easier to go for. I have a personal laptop at home that's having screen issues - it still works fine as a computer if I plug it in to a monitor, but its days of being a surf on the couch device are probably over. Rather than buy a new laptop, I'm going to get an iPad 2 to be my surf and sit on the couch machine, and we'll see how that goes. My iPhone is already serving quite nicely in that capacity.

I kept an eye on news of the new model and considered waiting in line for one last Friday, but decided against it, since my vacation time at work is better spent on other things. I thought that perhaps I could wander into a store that weekend and get one, but I grossly underestimated demand. On a whim, I went to the Best Buy on my way home from work around 4:30pm, an hour before the units were to go on sale. There were not as many people waiting there as i thought there'd be and I was told that I might be able to get one, so I stuck around. Right around 5, they finally got to me with the tickets for the units they had left. Sadly, they had no AT&T 3G units left and that's what I wanted. Not wanting to get something else, I took off, still thinking there was an outside chance of Apple having them still. Thanks to the power of Twitter searches, I was able to determine that local Apple stores sold out quickly out of the model I wanted, and most were completely out by 8pm.

I ended up ordering online around 6pm the night of release, and I'm 2-3 weeks out, with a tenative delivery date of April 6th. Ok by me - would rather do that then try to track one down in stores for the next few months.

Pretty excited about this device as I think it will fit in nicely to my flow. I have an endless supply of articles to read in Instapaper, use Twitter a lot, and Google Reader via the excellent Reeder app for iOS.

If you want to be entertained by how obsessive people are about this thing, check this thread on Mac Rumors out. It's crazy. Some of them need a lot of perspective.

A relatively new dad's perspecitve on baby gear

2011-03-10T09:20:00.000-08:00

I started jotting out a gigantic Google Buzz response to an article by the fantastic Mint blog but figured that a long-form blog post was probably more appropriate.

The article was specific to baby gear buying for new parents and it had some really good advice about what to buy, borrow and skip. Since I'm the father of a 10 month old daughter, I have some opinions.

For my childfree friends with no interest in kids, you can probably skip this post. But if you're gonna have them some day, you should book-mark this article for later (and maybe my blog post too).

Buy:
It was spot on in its assessment of bottles, crib mattresses, and convenience feature sheets (The Ultimate Crib Sheet is great, we have two).

As far as infant car seats and bases go - these are great in the early days, but if the baby's not going to be in a second car that much then I would advise to skip the second base and just buy a full sized convertible car seat for the second car - you're going to have to buy one or more eventually anyway, and the infant will fit just fine. The Graco MyRide 65 is an excellent option (we have 2). We bought a second base and I wish we hadn't. The base in my car got very little use because my wife was home with Abby for 12 weeks and then our daycare is very close to our house - but I realize this depends entirely on your situation. Certainly if you're splitting daycare duties and have to drive anywhere for any length of time in more than one car, 2 bases is worthwhile. (Update: Alison points out in comments that there are safety issues putting a wee infant in the convertible seats and you're best off using an infant carrier - good point, and one I overlooked). Our daughter outgrew her particular model (23 pound limit) at about 7 months - she wasn't too heavy, but too tall. Although there are models that you can use up to 30 pounds that detach, they are hard enough to swing around when she's 20 lbs, much less more than that. At that point, you're better off carrying her into the car.

We bought a digital ear thermometer, though our doctor told us they don't work that well with infants and you're better off taking her temp under the arm. I like to use the ear thermometer on myself though.YMMV.

Baby Monitors are great inventions and if you can afford it, get one with video. Unfortunately there's a lot of crappy, overpriced ones - we're on our 2nd model, 3rd unit since Abby was born - the first two died on us, and now we have a Motorola one which I'm pretty happy with so far. It's a little more expensive than the previous model we had, but hopefully it will not die on us. (the other one's being returned again for future use with another child and I would not recommend it at all). You may want to buy a second cheap audio unit as a backup and for traveling, etc. as well.

Borrow
I agree with only two things in the borrow section - exersaucers and pack and plays. We barely use our pack and play and unless you travel a lot, you probably won't either. We may end up using it as a holding area as Abby continues to get more mobile, but so far it hasn't really been needed. And when we did travel where there wasn't a crib available, we rented equipment and that was money well spent, because we didn't have to drag a ton of stuff with us.

However, if you're a breastfeeding working mom, or supporting one, the Boppy and pump are must haves. I would even suggest buying more than one pump if you can afford it. It helps so that potentially one doesn't have to be lugged back and forth to work, and there's spare parts in a second one if anything goes wrong (try finding a power adapter for a Medela in-style at a local store, they don't sell the damn things except on the internet - which is how we ended up with a second pump). If you're on your first kid and planning to have more, chances are you'll end up needing to buy more than one anyway.

The Bumpo I could go either way on, perhaps why it's in the borrow section. It's one of those things that's great when your kid is starting to be able to try to sit up on their own, but it has a limited shelf life. We used it as a feeding chair for a few weeks too, but the dedicated booster seats are much better for that once your child doesn't have issues sitting on their own.

Skip
I don't have most of the stuff in the Skip section, we didn't buy a Diaper Genie, but we did get the Diaper Champ which uses regular trash bags. It's worth it when they are wee little, but my daughter's room still smells shitty after a couple of diapers end up in there, so I don't think it works very well once they transition to solids. We skipped the warmers and the other stuff. We did buy a nice la-z-boy recliner which has worked great rather than one of those uncomfortable gliders, and as a bonus, you can use it for general relaxation long after a glider has outlived it's purpose.

Reverb 10's over, now what?

2011-01-03T11:40:00.000-08:00

I need to write more than I do now. I've written various things on the internet over the past 15 years, but I really start to feel like Twitter causes this odd decay in the long-form. It goes a little something like "rather than bang out a blog post, half of which is nonsense, why not just cut out the good stuff and post the nonsense straight to Twitter." Not that it's actually a pre-conceived notion, but you get the idea. And that's exactly what it turns into. Nonsense on Twitter.

Don't get me wrong, Twitter's been a valuable asset, and I probably spend more time using it than anything else in my digital life. I check it in the morning as I'm getting up, during the day and at night before I go to bed. It's where I most often learn of breaking news, and also interact with a core group of friends.

But Reverb 10 really helped me to focus on some things to write, drove a fair amount of traffic here via the hashtag and got a lot of complements. And really made me feel good about long form writing.

So what's next? I don't really think I could keep up the pace of a daily prompt (a quick Google search turns up several of them), but I do want to write more here. Perhaps I will come up with my own writing schedule and map out some things I want to write about. I don't just want this to be a "what I did blog", because frankly, I doubt many of you want to read about changing poopy diapers and I already have a blog that I should be writing in for my daughter.

Anybody have any other ideas for what keeps you motivated to keep writing?

Reverb 10 - Day 31 - Core Story

2010-12-31T15:08:00.000-08:00

Core story. What central story is at the core of you, and how do you share it with the world?

I am a father, a husband, and a friend. I try to balance all of these things, but the father/husband part took precedence this year. These things give me purpose in my life. I haven't always had a lot of purpose in my post-college adult life, I've gone through periods where I didn't feel it as much. But I've never felt it more strongly than this year.

I noticed a couple of days ago on Twitter that many people were complaining about 2010 being a bad year for them. I can say nothing but the opposite, it was a great year, one of my best. I'm very happy with my life right now and having a purpose and living towards achieving that purpose is one of the big reasons why that is the case.

Of the three things, being a father is the newest adventure for me, and it's one that I look forward to continuing in the years to come. My daughter is a great joy. She is a wonderful young lady, already so full of happiness and smiles from an early age. I love seeing her grow and develop and being there for her when she's having a bad day (and she does).

I love my beautiful wife dearly and being married to her has been a great thing in my life. She is my best-friend, my life partner, my closest companion, and the person I spend the most time with. She knows me very well - we've been together 10 years, married for 5. Not all of that time has been flowers and sunshine between us, but the last year has been really magical in our marriage. Being able to share the joy of parenting with her has only strengthened us as a couple. My wife knows my strong suits and quirks very well, and she also knows what I don't like. We complement each other amazing well.

I've had a lot of friends over the years and people have come and gone, but the core group of people in my life at this time are great. All of them are very understanding about the demands my family places on me at the present time and I really appreciate that (some of them have their own family demands too!). I want to be better about reaching out to people to see how they are doing - it is admittedly something I'm terrible at lately, but may things continue to be great in the coming years with my friends.

2010 was a great year and I look forward to a 2011 filled with just as much fun, awesomeness, love and understanding.

Reverb 10 - Day 30 - Gift

2010-12-30T10:15:00.000-08:00

Gift. This month, gifts and gift-giving can seem inescapable. What's the most memorable gift, tangible or emotional, you received this year?

It's a cliche at this point in this month long exercise, but being a dad is the best gift I could have ever hoped for. It was somewhat of a long time coming, Katie and I tried for a while to get pregnant. We finally did. I'll never forget that day, and I'll never forget the day she was born.

Being responsible for the growth, development and safety of a little human being is so much more wonderful than I could have ever imagined. I enjoy her so much. It's really melted away a lot of the concerns in my life and gives things better focus. It's hard to describe to someone who's never had kids of their own, but other newly minted parents completely understand it. I really think that thinking what parenthood will be like before you have kids, and what it's actually like afterward are such different things.

Abby got an ornament from my Aunt Sue with a letter saying that she'd get one every year until she is 18. It was very heart-felt and I really appreciated it. The ornament was very pretty too.

We chose not to give gifts in my family this year, other than stocking stuffers. We still got a little carried away, but Abigail got the mass of gifts, and that was perfect. Gift giving tends to be such a pain in the ass sometimes, but when it pays off, it pays off. We got everyone in our family a book of pictures of Abigail via Shutterfly and this was one of the funnest gifts I've ever given to anybody. Very emotional and I think people appreciated it.

2010 Wrapup

2010-12-29T12:12:00.000-08:00

A brief interlude from the rest of ~~repeat nation 2010~~ Reverb 2010 to bring you this, my 2010 wrapup. I used to post these on my Livejournal but figured more people would catch it here nowadays.

Hat tip to Chele and Jenni for bringing this up, as they usually do.

1. What did you do in 2010 that you'd never done before?

Had a baby (and everything centered around it)
Cooked Thanksgiving dinner from scratch
Saw an outdoor MLB game in Minnesota (Target Field - Twins)

2. Did you keep your new years' resolutions and will you make more for next year?
I didn't do any last year, but some are floating around for next year. Not enough to commit to it, but loosely, I need to lose some weight and reign in the spending.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Well, besides us, we had many friends that gave birth - Mandy and Tom, Jim and Colleen, Rebecca and Julian, Katie's cousin Kirsten, Bridget and Tom, and I'm sure there's others I'm forgetting. Most of these babies made it to our house for our housewarming party too. Great fun.

4. Did anyone close to you die?
No. But lots of my friends and co-workers seem to have had this in their families.

5. What countries did you visit?
Nowhere else. I traveled once by plane this year, a just completed trip to North Carolina. Babies, you know.

6. What would you like to have in 2011 that you lacked in 2010?
Can't think of too much, but more of a social life would be nice. Using opportunities to get out of the house.

7. What dates from 2010 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
April 29-birth of my daughter
July 4th - my birthday and fun baseball game at Target field with awesome seats.
December 11 - Crazy Blizzard!

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? Becoming a father, and making good strides in my career.

9. What was your biggest failure?
I don't like this question. The word failuresucks. Besides, it's all relative.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Nothing too serious, I did have a bad cold in October/November that lead to some additional medical investigation, which showed nothing serious.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
iPhone 4. Hands down. Doesn't really ever leave my side for too long. Best gadget I've ever owned. I think Katie would agree with this for herself. I want to get the next gen iPad really bad. Damn Apple!

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?
My wife for being an amazing mother while holding down a full time job (and then some). My friends for being awesome and understanding.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
Without being too specific, certain members of my family. Not so much appalled as depressed though.

14. Where did most of your money go?
Our house, stuff for Abigail and savings/investments. We did pretty good on the last one despite all the additional expense.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Starting to see the potential in what our house could be and realizing that it's good enough for us to live in for a while even as is. Living in Minneapolis is very exciting for numerous reasons and I'm still really excited about moving there more than a year later.

16. What song will always remind you of 2010?
Serious answer: The Cave by Mumford and Sons. Pretty much that entire album, in fact.
Funny Answer: Whip My Hair by Willow Smith (I had to look up who that was by)

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
i. happier or sadder? Happier
ii. thinner or fatter? about the same
iii. richer or poorer? richer in more ways than just monetary

18. What do you wish you'd done more of?
Staying organized, donating more time and money

19. What do you wish you'd done less of?
Being anxious and worrying about things I have little to no control over.

20. How did you be spending Christmas?
At my parents house in North Carolina. It was Abby's first out of state airplane trip and she did really well. We had a great time. And there was snow there. More than I cared to see.

21. Did you fall in love in 2010?
I fell more in love with my wife if that's possible and I fell in love with a beautiful baby girl named Abigail.

22. What was your favorite TV program?
Survivor: Heros vs Villians. Great stuff. Unfortunately, the followup, Nicaragua, was one of the worst ever.

23. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year
I don't remember this question from previous years, but I'd say no. I don't really hate, I just forget about people. Easier that way.

24. What was the best book you read?
I didn't read that many this year, but I really liked In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan. Really got me thinking about how I could eat better, cut processed crap out of my diet and inspired me to join a CSA.

25. What was your greatest musical discovery of 2010?
Mumford and Sons, hands down. Oh, and that I could actually tolerate MGMT when I was in certain moods and (gasp!) even enjoy it - had dismissed them earlier in their careers.

26. What did you want and get?
Iphone.

27. What did you want and not get?
Lots of stuff, mostly gadgets and computer related

28. What was your favorite film of this year?
Inception

29. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I turned 32. We went to a Twins Game while my in-laws watched Abby. It was one of Katie's first times away from her for more than an hour or two.

30. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Less snow. We got dumped on hard.

31. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2010?
About the same as it's been. Probably out-dated.

32. What kept you sane?
My daughter and my wife

33. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
I don't really know. The Situation from Jersey Shore?

Kidding. I can't really think of anybody serious.

34. What political issue stirred you the most?
Healthcare and the tax situation. And the fucking clown Republicans acting the fool. (and even sometimes the Dems doing the same, honestly).

35. Who did you miss?
Granddad Wyker. I always miss him.

36. Who was the best new person you met?
A couple of my co-workers that have been cool to work with.

37. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2010?'
It's not all about you, in fact, very little of it is about you.

38. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.

Baby beluga in the deep blue sea,
Swim so wild and you swim so free.
Heaven above and the sea below,
And a little white whale on the go.

Reverb 10 - Day 29 - Defining moment

2010-12-29T08:03:00.000-08:00

Defining moment. Describe a defining moment or series of events that has affected your life this year.

OK, so a few of these this week have been somewhat repetitive, but this is nearly a clone of this one and I think it stands just as well. So I'm letting that link stand as today's posting.

See also: this

Nothing else new today that hasn't already been said!

Reverb 10 - Day 28 - Acheive

2010-12-28T07:10:00.000-08:00

Achieve. What’s the thing you most want to achieve next year? How do you imagine you’ll feel when you get it? Free? Happy? Complete? Blissful? Write that feeling down. Then, brainstorm 10 things you can do, or 10 new thoughts you can think, in order to experience that feeling today.

Man, this one feels a lot like Action on one of the early days. One which I had a hard time figuring out.

But I'll go in a more general direction here and say that I want to be the best dad I can be next year, and I'd imagine I'll be very happy when I accomplish that. Joyful and happy.

10 things I can do to experience that today? Let's take a stab at it:
1) Comfort her when she's crying
2) Relieve her mother when it's clear that she's exasperated/exhausted
3) Keep the house picked up
4) sing songs and read stories to her
5) love her unconditionally
6) watch her grow and develop into a beautiful little girl
7) have fun in interesting and new ways with her
8) teach her things
9) be there for her
10) be her dad

Oh boy, a bit of a stretch, but the gist of it is there.

Reverb 10 - Day 27 - Ordinary Joy

2010-12-28T07:05:00.000-08:00

Ordinary joy. Our most profound joy is often experienced during ordinary moments. What was one of your most joyful ordinary moments this year?

These are kind of starting to get repetitive, it feels like. I guess it's hard to do 30 days of these without that happening. I'm a day behind too, and the one for today is also seemingly repetitive.

For this one, I really think it's watching my daughter play and interact socially. I sound like a broken record, I know, but having a child is such a central thing in a person's life, especially when they are a young infant. Watching Abby look around the room, taking it all in, is a lot of fun.

We took Abby to a restaurant last night where we put her in a high chair sitting up for the first time. She was very interested in what was going on in that restaurant, looking all around and taking it all in, smiling at everybody and looking quizzically at the young kid behind us that was having a temper tantrum. I love my daughter, and I love that she's so curious about the world, and not phased by a lot of people and things going on in whatever space she's in.

Reverb 10 - Day 26 - Soul Food

2010-12-26T08:09:00.000-08:00

Soul food. What did you eat this year that you will never forget? What went into your mouth & touched your soul?

It's fresh in my mind, so it might be causing some bias, but my mom's Christmas dinner last night was probably the highlight. It was pretty great. Standard Christmas fare - Beef Tenderloin, carrots with chive and red pepper, Rosemary Parmesan Potatoes (which are the bomb, and I'm not a big potato guy normally. A cranberry-orange jello salad with a delicious topping and pies for desert.

I helped mom find several of the recipes online using a couple of sites that I know well. We used her new iMac in the kitchen, which I hope she continues to use for such purposes (and even had an Apple touch mouse lesson).

The food was good, clean, American Christmas food.

Since I'm biased about this, the runner up is some of the dishes I cooked using CSA materials. We cooked a lot of new things this year, including pea shoot pesto, which was probably my favorite, and Katie liked it a great deal as well. Our food processor got a good workout this year.

Reverb 10 - Day 25 - Photo

2010-12-25T06:14:00.000-08:00

Photo - a present to yourself. Sift through all the photos of you from the past year. Choose one that best captures you; either who you are, or who you strive to be. Find the shot of you that is worth a thousand words. Share the image, who shot it, where, and what it best reveals about you.

We were dancing around the room. I feel like this picture shows my easygoing nature of being a father. Katie took it in our living room. Abby was two months old.

Reverb 10 - Day 24 - Everything's OK

2010-12-25T06:11:00.000-08:00

Everything's OK. What was the best moment that could serve as proof that everything is going to be alright? And how will you incorporate that discovery into the year ahead?

This one's easy. Any one of the moments I spent with my daughter. But the best are the early morning weekend moments where we hang out while her mom sleeps. The wonder and joy that are having children is really hard to put into words. It is more incredible then everybody could have told me before we had them.

Everything's going to be alright when you have a child. It put everything into focus, into perspective. She is the center of my world, of my universe. Most everything I do now is geared towards her and her mother. It puts everything else into proper perspective. Those things I worried about in my twenties? A lot of them have melted away.

Reverb 10 - Day 23 - New Name

2010-12-23T08:44:00.000-08:00

New name. Let's meet again, for the first time. If you could introduce yourself to strangers by another name for just one day, what would it be and why?

Jack.

It was my grandfather's name and a name that I cherish. My mother's father. It will be my first-born son's name if we ever have a boy. (and his middle name will be William). And it's a name I'd be proud to have. My grandfather was a very special man. He passed away 7 years ago. I can't believe it's been so long. I often wonder what he'd think about the state of the world today. I think about him a lot this time of year because I spend Christmas with my mom's family.

Reverb 10 - Day 22 - Travels

2010-12-23T06:46:00.000-08:00

Travel. How did you travel in 2010? How and/or where would you like to travel next year?

This one's easy. We didn't. Katie was too pregnant to fly anywhere in the first part of 2010, and once Abby was born, we didn't really go anywhere. The furthest we made it in her first couple of months was to visit our friends that were camping about an hour from our house.

Not exactly true, because to close out 2010 we decided to travel to my parents house in North Carolina, which involved flying. Abby's first plane ride was yesterday, fitting on the day I was supposed to write this. It went very well all things considered. We were warned by many that the pressure might be an issue for her, particularly on take-off and landing, but she was sleeping on take off and nursing on landing, so she barely noticed. A real trooper, I was proud of her.

Flying with kids is challenging. Not only do you have more stuff to bring with you, but you also have to deal with strollers and things of that nature. We bought a more portable umbrella stroller and a bag to go with it that is red with a gigantic "GATE CHECK" on the side of it. These things help ease the struggle. Going through security takes more time as well.

I hope to travel more in 2011, but with the little one, I'm not sure how much we'll actually go anywhere. She can still travel on Katie's lap, which seemed to work pretty well. We've talked about Mexico a couple of times, and it'd be fun to go somewhere like that with my parents. (built in babysitting!)

Reverb 10 - Day 21 - Future Self

2010-12-23T06:39:00.000-08:00

Future self. Imagine yourself five years from now. What advice would you give your current self for the year ahead? (Bonus: Write a note to yourself 10 years ago. What would you tell your younger self?)

This is a good one. I'm just through the transition to fatherhood, so I don't see 5 years from now being terribly different than now, except that my kids will be older and there will be more than one of them. But I can give it a shot.

First off, be patient - remember how you learned patience in 2010 and keep applying that. Your kids will try you but don't let them get to you. You have a great depth of patience and understanding that you didn't even know you had and just started to discover in 2010.

2nd, Drive - keep up your drive, don't settle too far into a routine, don't let yourself get complacent about your career or your life. It's easy to get stuck in the routine and not push and challenge yourself, but don't let yourself get to that point. You don't want to be in a situation where you have career issues.

Those are the two main things I can think of. This is a tough one, because it's hard to envision what I'll be like in 5 years.

If I wrote a letter to myself of 10 years ago, here's what it would sound like:

Dear 2000 Bill,

The next 10 years will bring you great adventures in your life. That woman you just met and started dating? She'll end up being your wife and the mother of her child. Treat her right. Do all the little things for her - she'll appreciate it.

The things you find important now, you won't in 10 years, and your friends will come and go. Don't get too caught up in the dramas of the day, a lot of that will seem silly later on. Only dedicate time to those in your life that show an interest in reciprocating. Don't spend too much time on friendships where it doesn't seem like there is a strong mutual interest, you'll only get burned by that.

You will grow in ways you didn't even expect over the next 10 years. Enjoy the Ride.

Sincerly, 2010 Bill

Reverb 10 - Day 20 - Beyond Avoidance

2010-12-20T07:04:00.000-08:00

Beyond avoidance. What should you have done this year but didn't because you were too scared, worried, unsure, busy or otherwise deterred from doing? (Bonus: Will you do it?)

Well, there's probably lots of little things I could talk about here, having a child deters things no matter what you do, that's for sure.

Probably the biggest thing is broadening my social horizons. I have a small set of friends that I hang out with on a regular basis and I appreciate that, but I'd also like to spend more time with a couple of sets of people, old and new friends, that I missed out on in 2010. Part of that was just having a baby and the demands on that. But Katie and I need to get better at seeking out babysitters and getting some semblance of balance back in our lives, I think it will benefit both of us.
Increasingly, we are socializing with other parents, and I'm sure that will grow stronger as Abby gets older.

I think we will do a better job of this next year, and I look forward to it. But at the end of the day, I don't mind chillin' at home with the kiddo either. At all. I love it, in fact.

Reverb 10 - Day 19 - Healing

2010-12-20T06:56:00.000-08:00

Healing. What healed you this year? Was it sudden, or a drip-by-drip evolution? How would you like to be healed in 2011?

Oh no. Another topic that I really can't think of anything at first glance. What healed me this year? Pretty presumptuous to assume that I need to be healed in the first place. Or maybe that's just me as a dude putting up that front that dudes always put up when it comes to things related to healing (specifically thinking of doctors here, even though I know this is a more meta concept in this context).

So yeah, really nothing else to say here. Lame, I know.

Reverb 10 - Day 18 - Try

2010-12-20T06:43:00.000-08:00

Try. What do you want to try next year? Is there something you wanted to try in 2010? What happened when you did / didn't go for it?

When I think of try, I tend to think of foods for whatever reason. And really, a lot of the things I want to try probably revolve around cooking lately.

I'm seriously amateur when it comes to cooking. More food then I'd like to admit comes out of a package in our house. Though one of the things we tried in 2010 was joining a CSA. This allowed us to get fresh produce in our house from June until November. We're going to do it again next year because it was largely a success. Katie and I ate better, and while we threw out a fair amount of rotten produce, we did manage to eat quite a bit of it.

The CSA culminates with a delivery right before thanksgiving which became a big chunk of our thanksgiving meal. I had a goal to scratch cook everything for Thanksgiving dinner that we hosted at our house - no stove top or gravy packets or canned cranberries. It was a success. I made sausage stuffing, cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes with celery root (good, but I'm going to look for a different recipe next year.)

One of the things I want to try next year is to cook at least one dish with each of the produce we get from the CSA. I was probably on 80-90% this year, but I'm going to make it formal, and I also think it would be worthwhile to write about it here. That's a great idea, in fact.

Reveb 10 - Day 17 - Lesson Learned

2010-12-17T08:39:00.000-08:00

Lesson learned. What was the best thing you learned about yourself this past year? And how will you apply that lesson going forward?

This is another tough one - at first thought, I can't really think of anything in particular that I haven't already talked about. It'd be nice to talk about something other than becoming a new dad, but that dominated my life this year, so it's hard not to have everything center around that.

I think what I really learned this year more than anything is that I can persevere through a lot of things and keep going. Every year of my adult life, I've seemingly had more responsibility, more things going on, more financial things to track, just more of everything. With children comes more financial responsibility, life insurance, wills, health-care directives, all of these kinds of things. Better money management because there's now expenses related to having a child to deal with. I could go on and on.

I think dealing with all of this has taught me that I'm quite adept at it, and that I shouldn't fear the future, but embrace it. It has made me a more confident person that will power through whatever life throws at me.

Reverb 10 - Day 16 - Friendship

2010-12-17T08:20:00.000-08:00

Prompt: Friendship. How has a friend changed you or your perspective on the world this year? Was this change gradual, or a sudden burst?

My best friend is my wife and she's also the person I've spent the most time with this year. Having a kid changes how you interact with your friends - it reduces the time you can spend with a lot of them.

My wife has shown me that it's possible to juggle 30 different things and live to tell about it. I've always been bad at multi-tasking - my wife is a pro. To see her be able to juggle a full time job with being a mom and doing all kinds of things around the house.

This has made me realize that I can do a better job of doing a lot of different things at once and juggling all of the demands of life.

Reverb 10 - Day 15 - 5 minutes

2010-12-17T08:10:00.000-08:00

5 minutes. Imagine you will completely lose your memory of 2010 in five minutes. Set an alarm for five minutes and capture the things you most want to remember about 2010.

OK, there's a lot of stuff that happened this year. The birth of my daughter is clearly number one. All the things that happened that day and in the subsequent days. The multiple visits from my parents and family, and how much joy they got out of being with my daughter.

Opening day at Target Field - being a part of something great and new and outdoors. So much fun to be there for the beginning of it all. Going hand in hand with that, 4th of July at Target Field with Katie for her first visit.

The multiple early snowstorms including Blizzard '10, the craziest snow event in a while around these parts.

The collapse of the Vikings and Favregate. It was bad, but it was also memorable. I will remember this team for how much promise they squandered. The dome collapsing was an incredibly metaphor for the season too.

Memorial Weekend and being able to briefly visit friends out camping with Abby.

Katie's shower weekend where I got to spend time with my dad and brother doing stuff at my house.

Those are just some of the many things that happened this year.

Reverb 10 - Day 14 - Appreciate

2010-12-17T08:04:00.000-08:00

Appreciate. What's the one thing you have come to appreciate most in the past year? How do you express gratitude for it?

I'm appreciating fatherhood and what it brings. I appreciate the chance to mold and shape a young lady's life into something great. I enjoy taking care of her and seeing her grown and develop into a little person. I express gratitude through it each and every day to my wife and my daughter by showing my affection for them.

Reverb 10 - Day 13 - Action

2010-12-17T08:01:00.000-08:00

Action. When it comes to aspirations, its not about ideas. It's about making ideas happen. What's your next step?

We have a lot of ideas with what we can do with our house to modernize it and make it more our home. What we really need to do is meet with an architect and contractor and get a master plan, then get to work on it.

We made an appointment with someone but that's since been delayed till sometime next year.

That's probably the major thing I need to make happen in my life in the next year.

Reverb 10 - Day 12 - Body Integration.

2010-12-13T07:10:00.000-08:00

Prompt: Body integration. This year, when did you feel the most integrated with your body? Did you have a moment where there wasn't mind and body, but simply a cohesive YOU, alive and present?

Look, I'm a big guy. I'm overweight for my size. I've got a nice beer gut. I'm most integrated with my body when I'm eating. No kidding. I like food. But I've been able to wear the same clothes for a number of years, so I'm not sweating it too much.

But I did try to run this year. It was a moderate success - I proved that I could do it. I did the couch to 5k program. Really good deal if you haven't run in a while or on a regular basis before.

A couple of those runs felt really good, especially the first long run. There were definitely some runner-high moments there.

I hope to run more next spring - it's hard to do in the winter without a gym membership or a treadmill. We may eventually get a treadmill, we've been talking about it for a while.

Reverb - Day 11 - 11 Things.

2010-12-13T07:04:00.000-08:00

Prompt: 11 Things. What are 11 things your life doesn't need in 2011? How will you go about eliminating them? How will getting rid of these 11 things change your life?

1) Procrastination - It's probably one of my worst traits, and having all these modern day digital distractions just exacerbates it. I will be a more productive person if I can reduce this.

2) Short Attention Span - going hand in hand with my number one, my lack of focus kills me sometimes. I have moments at home where I'm just a space case, half finishing things here and there until there are little messes all over the house. My leisure time is the worst, I find myself not able to read more than 10-20 pages of a book before I'm checking Twitter or looking for something else to do. I think I'll be more productive if I fix this.

3) Social Anxiety - I still have problems in large groups of people that I don't know that well - I stress about these events before I go to them and I tend to use alcohol as a crutch to get through them. I also don't place myself in these situations very often because of it, which is to the detriment of my social life sometimes.

4) Electronic Gadgets/Junk in my house - self explanatory. I have a closet full of it. Most of it needs to go.

5) Less Clothing - My wardrobe is absurdly large and I probably wear half of it on a regular basis. Need to prune things out pretty badly. I've also been saying this for several months, going hand in hand with 1.

6) Messiness - Pick up the messes. This is exacerbated with kids, all the more reason to be more diligent. At least we have a cleaning person now. Well worth the money.

7) Negativity - I've been doing better with this one, but I still tend to be a negative person sometimes, and wear it on my sleeve. My co-workers and friends usually call me on it when I am. I am generally really optimistic though.

8) Bad Friends - there's a few people I just need to jettison out of my life because they no longer contribute to my happiness. Struggling with this.

9) Arguments with my wife - most of them serve no purpose and are the result of:

10) Bad Temper - It's way better than it used to be, but still has its moments. Need to keep working on the things that I know can help me successfully manage it.

11) Sports Obsessions - I took the Vikings a little too seriously this year and was let down (see also: Twins). Need to remember sometimes that it's just a game and it's not the end of the world if they lose the big game.

Reverb 10 - Day 10 - Wisdom

2010-12-13T06:53:00.000-08:00

Prompt: Wisdom. What was the wisest decision you made this year, and how did it play out?

I really had a hard time with this one, so difficult that it's now 4 days later and I'm finally getting around to it. I always start out strong on these 30 day things, and I always end up doing them in 3 or 4 day chunks for whatever reason. It's not like I didn't have plenty of time during the weekend when we were snowed in.

Anyway, the wisest decision we made this year was probably to put Abigail in a daycare close to our house instead of a center. Even though there are benefits to a center, at her age, it makes little difference. We looked at some centers and at some in-homes and ultimately decided to go with one near our house. Sometimes people are a little leary of in-home daycare centers, but ours has worked out great so far. We may put her in a center later on, but for now it's excellent - and less than a block from our house. (so close that we can see it from the back windows). Our provider goes the extra mile and does little things like calls to make sure everything's ok if Abby goes home sick. Those are nice touches.

Reverb 10 - Day 9 - Party

2010-12-09T06:48:00.000-08:00

Party. What social gathering rocked your socks off in 2010? Describe the people, music, food, drink, clothes, shenanigans.

Well, by now, it's no secret that we had a kid this year and the partying was somewhat limited.

There are two parties that stand out. (by the way, "rocked your socks off"? this is a colloquialism that makes the author sound old. And it looks like she's around my age. Nerdy.) One is our housewarming party and the other is my neighbor's first "Adult Beverage Club" party.

Our housewarming was long overdue, due mostly to that we had a lot of work to do on our house, and Katie was pregnant with Abby when we moved in. We invited a lot of people, mostly through Facebook (which I wouldn't necessarily use again as an invite tool). We had a good turnout of family and friends, including many babies of couples that had them around Abby's birth - we had multiple friends who had babies within a few months.

The party was fun - it started in the afternoon and went until the early evening. I got a keg of Summit, which was popular and bought entirely too much beer which we spent the rest of the summer getting rid of. We had the deck set up with rental tables and we had some in the back yard as well.

Our neighbor's party was the first meeting of what will hopefully be more. We all brought a six pack of beer to share - and it was clear that people wanted to show that they were connoisseurs of craft beer - some nice selections and appreciation from a few of the Rogue Dead Guy Ale that I brought. (not a common beer around here yet).

Good conversations were had, I met a lot of people that I hadn't previously and lots of beer was drank and appetizers consumed. My neighbor Chris, one of the hosts, is a home-brewer and he showed off his setup, which, to my untrained eye was a nice one.

It wasn't really a year for crazy ragers, and I think I missed most of the ones that were but I'm sure they'll be more down the road.

Reverb 10 - Day 8 - Beautifully Different

2010-12-09T06:35:00.000-08:00

Beautifully different. Think about what makes you different and what you do that lights people up. Reflect on all the things that make you different - you'll find they're what make you beautiful.

OK, so the other day after I posted one of my Reverb 10 posts, I saw a comment on Twitter from someone that linked to me that people should support the men doing this because there aren't many of them. It didn't occur to me when I signed up for this that it might be the case, but in retrospect, this makes sense.

So here's the first topic where I had an adverse reaction upon reading - what the heck am I going to write here. No offense ladies, but this is kind of a chicky topic. I'm perfectly capable of writing about my feelings in public, but there's a line, and this comes close to it. Almost a little too kumbaya for me.

So after two paragraphs of protest, I'll tell you what I think. I think what makes me a unique person is my sense of humor, my analytical skills, and my easy going nature which gives me the ability to empathize and forgive easily.

I am kind of a joker - but I often have a very dry wit and can be really sarcastic. Sometimes I'm sarcastic to the point where people don't understand that I am being sarcastic. (usually on Twitter when there's often no context or tone). I like to make people laugh. A big thing with my daughter right now is getting her to laugh. She'll squeal, but ongoing laughter has mostly alluded me thus far, and this is one of my goals.

Analytically, I'm a good problem solver, and I'm geared well towards careers that involve a lot of analytical capability. In my personal life, I build complex budgets and debt snowball models which I'm constantly updated in Excel. I'm hoping to parlay this ability into building some things for my home - I keep watching This Old House and thinking - "I could do this" when they show various re-modeling tasks that I haven't previously conquered.

As far as my easy going nature goes, I think this really helps me from going to the loony bin and it's really how I stay leveled. My wife and I balance each other out - while her mind races, I'm able to put things out of mind and relax, and show her how to do this. I am really good at empathizing and seeing things from other people's point of views, sometimes almost to a fault.

So I don't know that these things are different from a lot of people, but they are my traits that I think set me apart. My competitive advantage, so-to-speak.

Reverb 10 - Day 7 - Community.

2010-12-09T06:23:00.000-08:00

Prompt: Community. Where have you discovered community, online or otherwise, in 2010? What community would you like to join, create or more deeply connect with in 2011?

We became a more integral part of our neighborhood this year, going to national night out, and a party thrown by one of our neighbors. We also had some friends move into our neighborhood. I have a stronger sense of physical community than I've had in a long time.

I hope to continue to build on that community. My neighborhood is a mix of old and young, and definitely starting to skew towards the younger end of things. I see a willingness of a lot of my neighbors to make an effort to build on what we've already started. It often feels like this gets neglected in the modern age - a sense of neighborhood community. A lot of people just get home from work, go into their houses, not to emerge till the next day. Winter in Minneapolis does not help this, unfortunately.

Reverb 10 - Day 6 - Make

2010-12-09T06:17:00.000-08:00

Make. What was the last thing you made? What materials did you use? Is there something you want to make, but you need to clear some time for it?

I'm getting a little behind on these because of work/home requirements.

I made Thanksgiving dinner for my family this year. We made turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes and gravy. We made everything from scratch. I'm trying to do more scratch cooking lately because it's better for you and really not that hard. For example, while being a buyer of cranberry in the past, I found it amazingly easy to make the sauce with fresh cranberries. So easy that I wonder why the canned stuff even exists.

We had a 11 pound turkey for 6 people. We used a citrus brine which we started the night before. It was our second attempt at doing a brine and it worked quite well, the only thing I would have done differently is thawed the frozen turkey a little bit more before we put it in the brine (it was straight out of the freezer). We stuffed it with vegetables in lieu of traditional stuffing.

I made a traditional cranberry sauce and stuffing, which both turned out very well (I halved the stuffing recipe but forgot to halve the salt so it was a tidge salty, though nobody complained to my face).

As far as what I aspire to make, I aspire to be a better cook/chef in the kitchen. I've got a lot of the basics down, but I'd like to improve my knife skills and maybe learn a few more basic things. I also want to hang out with my food inclined friends while they cook more in 2011, if I'm able to.

Reverb 10 - Day 5 - Let Go

2010-12-05T17:04:00.000-08:00

December 5 – Let Go.

What (or whom) did you let go of this year? Why?

(Author: Alice Bradley)

Sleep.

I told you a lot of these were going to be baby related. I used to be a sound sleeper who needed a lot of sleep. I always pushed getting up in the morning during the week and was not typically an early riser on the weekend either (10-11am was typical).

My sleep habits started to change while Katie was pregnant. There were many nights where I'd fall asleep on the couch early in the evening, go to bed, and a few hours later be wide awake. (usually around midnight or 1, sometimes later). I think this was my body preparing me for a baby, somehow. Usually a quick dose of something off the TiVo would take care of it and I'd go back to bed. (I just did this last night for the first time in a while - it drives Katie nuts - she doesn't sleep as well when I'm not in bed with her.

Since Abby was born I can count on two hands the number of times I've slept in on the weekend past about 8am. Probably about 6 or 7. I'm often on wake up early duty on the weekends, because I can survive on less sleep than my wife generally needs. Plus, I enjoy mornings with Abby in the living room, drinking coffee, reading the newspaper, and listening to podcasts.

Sleep is over-rated anyway. Though I do enjoy a nice 10 hour jaunt every once in a while.

Reverb 10 - Day 4 - Wonder

2010-12-04T10:04:00.000-08:00

December 4 – Wonder.

How did you cultivate a sense of wonder in your life this year?

(Author: Jeffrey Davis)

The first prompt I haven't really liked that much.

I'm beginning to sound like a broken record, but most of the sense of wonder (when I had it, I feel like I could improve on this, in all honesty) was looking at the world through the eyes of my daughter. To see her, from a very early age, explorer the world around her and try to figure out how things work is really an amazing thing.

That's all I really have to say about this topic.

Reverb 10 - Day 3 - Moment

2010-12-03T11:55:00.000-08:00

December 3 – Moment. Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors). (Author: Ali Edwards)

I have a feeling a number of these entries are going to be about my daughter, the first one was, and this one will be too. I am going to talk about the moment during and right after my daughter was born.

Abigail was born inside of an operating room in the maternity ward at Park Nicollet Methodist Hospital in St Louis Park. My wife Katie was prepped and ready to go for a c-section due to Abby being breech. I came in when they were ready to go. I'm squeamish in hospital settings, especially when blood is involved. There was a large white sheet covering so all I could see was Katie's head. Anesthesiology assistant told me not to look above the sheets. Later learned that Katie told her to say that, and I could have looked. Probably good that I didn't. It didn't take long once I was in the room. Doctor went in and baby came out. Katie had a look of sheer terror on her face when they were going in and I was doing my best to be supportive. The doctor held Abby up above the sheet, a little bit of blood dripped onto the sheet below Katie's head. The sterile smell of the room surrounds us as we smiled at each other. Abby was immediately whisked away to be cleaned off and checked up and I went with her while they sewed Katie back up.

Into the next room. I'm staring at my beautiful baby girl under the heat lamps while two nurses attend to her, getting the stuff out of her nose and airways, cleaning up her skin, and having her do a bit of light but still piercing cry. The vocals work and we can breathe! Crying! A very joyous sound on a baby just exiting the womb. Her eyes still haven't opened yet. One of the nurses asks me if I want to trim the cord, and if I want a picture. It's then that I realize that no pictures have been taken yet. Abby's first picture is taken of me trimming the cord. The nurses measure her and weigh her, and I put my first diaper on her (literally never having done so before, I needed a little primer from the nurse). This has happened, this is real, and its just me and her right now. Been waiting months and months for this (By the way, I'm getting teary just writing this now, 7 months later).

The camera comes out again and I shoot a video while the nurses are cleaning up, and her eyes open while I'm doing that, for the first time. I'm probably the first (fuzzy) thing my daughter ever saw. I'll always have that, I suppose (wish it would've been my wife). That video was shown multiple times to my wife afterward, and I'm proud that I captured her first "eyes open" moment.

We're whisked away to the baby nursery after a few more minutes - I'm under strict wife orders to stay with Abigail until she can be re-united with her mother. More tests. First sign that there might be troubles pop up - her pulse-ox is slightly low and her blood sugar levels are low as well. Katie and I were very gung ho about breastfeeding, but the nurses are already suggesting bottle feeding with formula to get her sugar levels back up. I don't know how to handle that and everything gets a little crazy inside my head while I try to figure this out. People are coming and going all around me in the typical zoo that a mid-day baby nursery at a major hospital tends to be. One of the nurses can sense that I'm struggling with this and suggests that I go consult Katie, who's now back in a recovery room. I do that, but she's still too out of it to really have much to say about it but gives the ok to supplement.

We try cup feeding since I didn't want to use the bottle - I had heard so many things about nipple confusion and staying away from the bottle. That seems to work, though this little baby in my arms barely knows what to do with it. Nurses check the pulse-ox again and find it's still low and decide to take her to the intensive care nursery. They are careful to tell me it's just a pre-caution and that she'll get better care there. It's right down the hall. I go back to tell Katie this and by that time, her dad has arrived, very anxious to see his new granddaughter. We went back to intensive care. It's now been some length of time since she was born, and Katie still hasn't held her yet.

Finally, all-clear happens and Katie is reunited with Abby. Things settle in and we get used to life as parents.

I'll never, ever forget this day.

Reverb 10 - Day 2 - Writing

2010-12-02T14:01:00.000-08:00

December 2 Writing.
What do you do each day that doesn’t contribute to your writing — and can you eliminate it?
(Author: Leo Babauta)

The question for me should probably be "What don't I do?" I have many habits that contribute to not writing as often as I'd like to. I used to be a more prolific writer in various forums around the internet, mostly in my personal blog. I've never been much of a public blogger. Now, it's often an afterthought, or really only utilized when I feel particularly strongly about something. This is due to a number of factors, which I explain below.

What can I do to eliminate?

Avoid distractions - television, Twitter, Facebook, other mindless activities. While I do enjoy all of these things, they get in the way of writing, sometimes to the detriment of my sanity (I subscribe to the theory that writing as therapy). Twitter is very addictive, but it can really be at the detriment of the longer form. 140 characters is good for a lot of things, but it's also not good for a lot of things.

Stop procrastinating - I am a gigantic procrastinator in a lot of things I do, both at work and at home. This causes way more time to be taken on certain activities then really should be.

Stay focused - environmental degradation (ED) is what I call what has happened to us to just about all of us on a daily basis. Beeping mobile devices, blaring televisions, blinking computer screens, ringing telephones. These are all detractors. I want to take several hours a week with as little ED as possible to read, write, and reflect. It's very important. It's hard to do when you're trying to blog, because all of that stuff is right there on the computer as you are writing.

Reverb 10 - Day 1 - One Word

2010-12-02T13:51:00.000-08:00

Wendy linked to this Reverb10 thing and I decided that in an effort to blog more often, I was going to do it. I'm a day behind, so I'll do 2 today. Here we go:

December 1 One Word.
Encapsulate the year 2010 in one word. Explain why you’re choosing that word. Now, imagine it’s one year from today, what would you like the word to be that captures 2011 for you?
(Author: Gwen Bell)

Life.

The birth of my daughter Abigail in April dominated my year. There were a lot of other things that happened, but bringing a new life into this world and the growth that accompanies it was the highlight of my 2010. It changed a lot of things about my perspective on the world, including putting the relative importance of many things into perspective. I thought she'd be the center of my world before she was born, and she was even stronger than I could have possibly imagined. Nary a bad day at work doesn't also come with the joy of returning home to see Abby's smiling face, and that makes everything better.

For 2011, I'd like the word to be "Growth". I'd like to grow more as a person, as a father, as a husband and as a friend. I'd like to put myself out there more often, take more risks in my life, and try to maintain a positive attitude, avoiding the pitfalls of negativity that so often grasp at me. I'd like to achieve more solid growth in my career and not feel like I'm spinning my tires half the time.

My Google Voice Strategy

2010-11-10T07:47:00.000-08:00

I signed up for Google Voice forever ago when it was still known as "Grand Central", before Google bought it. I had a phone number for it but I never really utilized it until Google turned it into Google Voice and created more options for voice-mail management.

At the time, I was with Sprint and they had just implemented conditional forwarding where they did not charge an additional fee to forward calls. Conditional forwarding is the ability to forward calls to a different number based on certain conditions. In the case of Google Voice, you set up a conditional forward to your Google Voice number based on a call going to voicemail.

Once you forward to Google, you can do several things - you can just answer the call with it's voice-mail service and you can also tell it to forward to another phone number for a certain number of rings before rolling back to voice-mail.

Google's voice-mail is nice - it transcribes if it's able, it's accessible via phone as traditional voice-mail is, you can have it send you text messages of the transcripts, and there's various smartphone apps for iPhone, etc and native support in Android. There's also a mobile web interface if all else fails.

Checking voicemail is a task that I abhor, so being able to see transcripts of messages is a great thing. They are generally accurate enough to get the gist of it - I'd say I have to listen to about 10-20% of the messages I get anyway.

Recently, Google opened up voice to all of its account holders. I have multiple Google accounts for various things, so I recently added some numbers.

My main number is still mostly unused - I have given it out to some things, but it forwards to my cell phone number. Since number portability is so common, I expect to have the same cell phone number forever and so the ability to have another number that you own and can forward anywhere isn't of much use to me at the moment.

What is useful is a second phone number that I can give out to individuals and organizations for which I believe it might be used in an attempt to solicit without my consent. This phone number goes nowhere but a voice-mail box for which I recorded a greeting - and an email is sent to my main gmail account. Like most people, I don't want to receive cold calls on my phone, particularly my cell phone. I recently subscribed to the Star Tribune and gave them this number - they can leave voice-mails to their hearts content about being a subscriber on my dead end voice-mail box, and I can still get any relevant messages from them. I plan to employ this number for most everything I have to give out to organizations from now on, and is a convenient number to use for the alumni associations of my Alma Maters too.

I'm very happy with the Google Voice service so far. Like most things Google does, they do it well and they constantly iterate.

My festival/tennis summer vacation idea

2010-08-31T08:50:00.000-07:00

I've not been to many festivals even in the United States - I had an opportunity to go to Bonaroo back in the first couple of years, but didn't do it for whatever reason. There haven't been a whole lot of other opportunities since then - most of the US festivals are on the coasts or elsewhere. Lollapalooza has really not been that interesting to me, and that, along with the much smaller (snooze) Pitchfork festival are probably my closest options.

I discovered this high-def only channel when we bought our new TV called Palladia, which seems to be an outlet for Viacom to repurpose HD content, but good HD content. It's actually about the (mostly live) music, as opposed to their mainstays which have very little to do with music anymore and are more lifestyle oriented (and surprisingly, we don't get in HD yet, but we do get this other, awesome channel)

Watching Palladia has helped fuel my wish to someday go to the Glastonbury music festival to fuel my love of multiple different kids of music (specifically rock and dance), and while I'm at it, take in some other things that go on at that time of year. It would involve going over to the UK and Ireland for 2 to 3 weeks to take in Glastonbury in the UK in the last weekend of June and the Oxegen festival in Ireland which is usually the second weekend of July. In between, I'd want to take in some tennis at Wimbledon (my favorite Tennis tournament for whatever reason) and the sights of Ireland and the UK. I haven't spent any time anywhere other than London and I was 15 when I was last there, so it'd be totally different.

I feel like I'm skewing on the older end of the audience for these festivals given the crowds I've seen in various films of the past festivals. And I could potentially skip the Oxegen festival if the lineup was close enough (the same bands tend to do the festival circuit in Europe, which lasts all summer). Going to Glastonbury would probably be enough.

I have no idea how hard or easy it is to get tickets to any of these things either - Glastonbury sells out in less than 24 hours and many people get shut out. I have no idea if there's a secondary market for it. Wimbledon also seems like it'd be an expensive endeavor. I'd also have to figure out how to work the family into the mix, a tougher proposition when you have a wife that's not a huge live music fan and small children, not compatible with anything.

It's still just a crazy idea in my head, but maybe it'll happen someday.

The summer of buying stuff - iPhone 4

2010-08-20T07:38:00.001-07:00

I have not been good about updating here. At any rate, it's been a good summer. My wife is back at work and the little one is doing quite well.

I talk quite a bit about things I buy on here, and it has been quite the summer for that. I talked about my TV in a previous post and I've talked about phones.

We did end up getting iPhones a few weeks ago. I liked what I saw with the iPhone 4, and I planted the seed with Katie that she could get one too (I figured that she'd use it more than some other smartphone/device). My Sprint contract expired and that happened to coincide with Katie getting water on the contact of her Palm Centro that she was using and rendering it useless (not before I managed to rescue her contacts in one last sync!).

We have various old Sprint phones lying around from 10+ years of being a customer, the problem is that most of the chargers got thrown out when we moved for whatever reason. So switching Katie to another phone was not really a viable option. I was oh-so-tempted to just re-up with Sprint and get an Evo and get her a Palm Pixi or something similar (she liked the QWERTY on her Centro). But I resisted the urge to do that, and we finally ended up deciding to switch to AT&T and get iPhones.

This was a few weeks ago, and at the time, there was still a shortage of iPhone 4's. If I had a lot of time, I would have ordered through the corporate discount site and waited, but since Katie was sans phone, I decided to try and track some down locally and deal with converting the account to the corporate discount later on. I printed out a list of stores and Katie started calling. Low and behold, the first Apple store she called on a Sunday morning had a "few" 16GB's (what Katie wanted) and "a lot" of 32's (what I wanted) in stock. So I went over there shortly after they opened. They must not have had that many 16's, because they were out when I got there, but they did have 32's and I picked up two of them.

Say what you will about the Apple store. It does have a weird cult-like feel to it, I do admit. But their service is stellar. I was in and out in 20 minutes flat with the new phones. I had left my old phone with Katie and attempted to call her on my blackberry and tell her it was switching over, but the iPhone in my pocket was already ringing. It happens that quick to port a number (never done it before, as I've been with Sprint the whole time). The Apple store employees are top notch.

I got home and got everything set up. I had rescued Katie's contacts from her old phone via Outlook, and I exported those to her Google Account. I had our Google accounts linked via exchange and push in no time flat (done that config several times on my old ipod touch). Boom, all of our contacts are just there, calendars are updated, and my mail is streaming to the device. It just works. I've heard people complain about being a Google platform junkie with iPhones, but hey, it works fine for me. You can use the HTML 5 web apps in Safari and those work very well as well (I use Reader a lot on it, and like it quite a bit). I mean, clearly, android would have been a good fit for my Google loving self too, but Apple plays fine with that world (ironically - thanks to a Microsoft technology!).

I've been a fervent iPod touch user for several years, and this experience is not that different. There's a camera and a phone, and you can access data anywhere but that's really the only difference.

AT&T still leaves a lot to be desired from a pricing perspective - Sprint definitely had them beat there. But my net is going to be a savings of about 10-15 bucks a month. I was actually paying Sprint for things I wasn't really using, which I can get around on AT&T. We went aggressive on the minutes, but have roll-over and won't have to worry about that after a couple of months. I also went really aggressive on text messages, since I don't use that many any longer. I turned off all the services I had texting me, because the iPhone has an app with alerts for most of those things as well (and frankly, I'm trying to funnel everything through email since it's much cheaper to use that on an iPhone than text messaging).

So far so good. Katie likes her phone quite a bit. It does seem to drop calls more than the average phone, but maybe that's just a fluke. I don't know. Verizon and Sprint did not work particularly well within the confines of our house, and AT&T seems to have much better signal strength (I can maintain a call in our basement on my iPhone, I couldn't do that with my old phone consistently).

I guess they all have their flaws, and I'm willing to put up with AT&T for the iPhone. Sucked in by Steve Jobs. I'm still pretty sure I'll end up on Android at some point, but for now, I'm liking what I've got.

How we bought a TV

2010-06-29T18:17:00.001-07:00

A 46" flat panel LED LCD HDTV (how many acronyms can we use in a row?) is now gracing the wall in my basement man cave. Up until last night the man cave was the hobby cave and sitting room. A TV transforms it over night into "the room Bill will spend the most time in".

This was probably my wife's motive when she suggested we buy this beautiful piece of electronic goodness. In fact, there's no probably about it, it was her motive. She wanted to reclaim her living room from my clutches. There's been far too much World Cup, Golf, Wimbledon, and baseball game viewing the last few weeks, and I honestly think she'd had enough of it. Not that she'd admit that, necessarily.

It was all triggered by a Best Buy Coupon that Katie got at the pride parade that promised a $100 gift card with the purchase of $1000 or more. She brought up the idea on Sunday afternoon and it had me quickly looking at the available deals. I'm all about playing the zero financing game, particularly if you can buy a product for close to what you'd get if you didn't have the deal. That's becoming tougher. Increasingly, stores like Best Buy are offering "zero down" deals but what you might not notice if you don't shop around is that you're not getting a particularly good deal. I see no real downside, other than the cost of these deals is often shoveled back into the cost of the item.

I've worked this deal with a number of items recently - our Tivo, the deck furniture, and the dishwasher. We buy it with zero interest for x amount of time, and then I set up a monthly payment in my bank's bill pay system to pay it off a month shy of when that deal expires. Of course, if you don't pay it in full, you get robbed - we're talking 25%+ interest rate. I'm assuming that's what ends up happening to a certain percentage of people, but I've never let it happen to me.

So we ended up buying a TV at Best Buy utilizing 3 years, no interest (which we'll probably pay off in a couple of months, but it helps the cash flow for now). We borrowed a friend's truck to take it home, because delivery was another 100 bucks. Another thing - Best Buy's prices are often higher on their web site than those in store, but they still charge sales tax. They offer free delivery online, but on TV's at least, that appeared to be a wash - if you chose to have the TV delivered. Do it yourself, and you save a bit.

Modern flat panel displays are quite light, and other than the size, are not difficult to move around. There's a wide array of options to choose from. We ended up deciding on a size and type, and then looking at what reviewed well on consumer reports. Type is less of a factor now - plasma is the older, established technology, but most of the shortcomings of LCD screens in the past are gone. The price differential is very small now and several companies have gotten out of the Plasma game altogether. So we decided to focus on LCD displays, although the differences between the two at the end of the day are pretty small. Sony Bravia and Samsung LCD panels topped the reviews, with Toshiba and LG also ranking well. I know Sony had some issues over the past few years from talking to some of my AV oriented friends, but they've come back strong this year. I looked at the Sony

Once we had a size, it was up to how much we were going to spend on features. Pretty much all the TV's sold now support 1080P (was not the case just a few years ago). The key differentiators on LCD displays right now are the types of lighting the TV's use, the engine that drives the picture and the speed refresh of the screen.

As far as lighting goes, there are LED or conventional back-lit displays. LED TV's are new and use less energy than traditional back lit. The price difference on these has gotten to be quite small. LED lit displays command a few hundred more dollars, but the difference in energy use seems like it might be worth it over the life of the TV.

The engine that drives the TV can make a big difference in the picture. Sony has the Bravia engine, which works very well, and the Samsung models we looked at achieved similar results via their own engine (the engine is the differentiator since the actual display hardware in a Samsung or Sony TV is virtually identical since the panels are made via a joint-venture between the two companies).

The last item, which I failed to consider before landing in the store for the final purchase, is the refresh rate. Many of the LCD TVs are 60hz refresh, but increasingly being offered at 120hz. The advantage is you get less blur when watching sports. The sales person at Best Buy convinced us to buy the higher refresh rate TV. It was only 80 more than the model without.

So we ended up with a Sony Bravia EX700 series 46" panel. I'm very pleased with it so far. We already had a Tivo capable of HD which we moved to the new TV. I bought an expander for the Tivo as well, since the HD capacity of it was suspect without. I plugged it in via the HDMI cable and it just worked. TV's have gotten so much easier to use with HDMI.

The only issue I've had so far is that the audio was lagging on some of the high def channels. This was being caused by the optical audio out on my Tivo having a delay. I hooked up the optical output to the TV instead and the delay went away. Probably good anyway, since I'm going to have to use the TV to do switching until I buy a different amp, an effort that also gets much easier with HDMI cables that carry both picture and digital audio.

Haven't bought a blue-ray player yet. I'm tempted to get a PS3 to provide that functionality and also have a video game system, but I won't pull the trigger on that for a while. We just canceled Netflix and our movie watching has gone down for the summer. I can rent high-def movies from amazon on demand and will probably use that to fill the gap.

Ironically, this will probably get me watching less TV because we put the TV in our basement, which separates it somewhat from the day-to-day activities of the house. And this is a good thing, because in the end, I want to read more anyway. Funny how that works.

My impending mobile phone decision

2010-05-26T08:55:00.000-07:00

I have a year and a half old Palm Treo 800w. It's been a good, fully functional phone. It has a few shortcomings, like the battery life has never been that stellar, but you buy a few more charging accessories and that's really not a problem very often, particularly because I sit at a desk all day, and have a car charger.

The chief issue is that it's a Windows Mobile phone. Probably the least developed for of the major smartphone platforms (And it's running an old version, to boot). Increasingly, there's been a shift to Android.

I've been a Sprint customer since 1998 and had the same phone number with them through too many phones to count, starting with that brick-ish Qualcomm phone back in the day (when Qualcomm still made phones as opposed to just milking their CDMA patents for all they are worth).

Sprint gets a really hard knock lately as a wireless provider. Their phones have tended to be substandard compared to Verizon and AT&T, and their customer service issues are well known. I've not experienced any significant customer service issues and have even been lumped into "Sprint Premiere" which is an MVC type program which, as far as I can tell, has relatively few benefits that are of use to me. A discount on your already hugely marked up phone accessories? No thanks! They do have one benefit there - which is that you can get upgrade price on a phone after 1 year instead of two, but I haven't taken advantage of that thus far.

I have a dilemma coming up. My contract is up with Sprint in July. The HTC Evo on Sprint looks to be the best fit of the Smartphones available in the next 60-90 days. Perfect, right? Because I'm already on Sprint. But they are going to charge a phantom 10 bucks a month more for the service, and I'm already having issues with how much I'm paying Sprint for my family plan.

At the same time, I've been pricing out AT&T with the new corporate discount that I can get through work. And I can get an iPhone, Katie can get something and we can save 20 or 30 a month over our current plan if it all works out. And I just got a Blackberry from work on AT&T to try it out. And the performance of their network is better than Sprint has been for me in the places I regularly am. So this is not boding well for Sprint.

My current plan is to wait to see what is announced for the next gen iPhone, and then evaluate at that time. My current Sprint contract is up in July, so if I do decide to go iPhone, I'll probably do it then and make the AT&T switch. I can't even believe I'm saying that.

If I decide to go to an Evo I'll probably buy one in June sometime. And I'm going to try and work the Sprint retentions people for all it's worth. I'd like to stay off contract and still get a good price on that phone if possible as well.

Decisions, Decisions.

Earthtainers galore!

2010-05-18T07:54:00.000-07:00

Bless me blog readers, for I have sinned and not posted for a long while. Well, we've been really busy with a new baby and all, so I guess I have a good excuse.

I've also spent a good chunk of my free time the last week constructing 7 EarthTainers for various people and inspired building of at least 4 additional EarthTainers that I know of (with consultation to the builder).

For those of you that are like, "huh, what's he talking about?", an EarthTainer is a container growing system that ensures vegetable plants, usually tomatoes, are properly watered. I built one last year after reading about it on LifeHacker a year ago (Lifehacker is a must read, if you don't already read it, particularly for the tinkering types among us). It took me several hours and lots of new tools and parts to build one last year. The results? They were pretty great - my tomato yield was fantastic.

Several of my friends caught on to my little project and were interested in building containers of their own, so I told a few people that I'd help them build these this year.

Last Thursday I went over to Jenni and Matt's place, and built 3 containers for her. It went really smoothly and it's a lot easier of a project when you have people to help. Jenni's planting tomatoes and peppers in her containers. I can't wait to go over and see how they are growing.

This past weekend, I built 4 more containers, 1 more for myself, 1 for my father-in-law and 2 for my friend and co-worker. My friend's family was so impressed with them that they were building 4 more total for 2 different people.

I'm pretty excited about the 11 earthtainers I've built or inspired, and I'm sure there will be many more. I bet the Lowes in West St Paul and Plymouth are wondering why there's a run on 31 gallon tan RuggedTotes.

If you do decide to build, there's a frequently updated PDF here, and if you're local to the Twin Cities and need assistance, feel free to get in touch with me.

As for my bins, I'm growing 4 tomato plants this year. I have to still buy those and plant them, but that will happen sometime this week.

Personal Finance - Keeping Track of Bills on Google Calendar

2010-04-19T10:17:00.001-07:00

I used to be an fervent user of Quicken. I'd load all the detail in there and even maintained a cash account to track every single last dime.

I did this up until a couple of years ago when it started getting more complicated, and also around the same time that Mint came on the scene and I started loading everything into that. I've never really had any issues using Mint to store info that's available everywhere else anyway.

Mint has slowly evolved to be an online competitor to Quicken. It's still not as full featured, but it's got basically everything I need - namely budgeting and trending tools with the ability to categorize transactions.

Mint works more seamlessly than anything in quicken ever did. I do have to review transactions periodically to ensure they are in the proper categories - it has a tendency to mis-categorize certain things, though you can give it rules to fix that stuff. For example, I bank with USAA and also use them as an insurance company. I tend to get emails that I exceeded my spending on Auto Insurance for the month when really I just made a big transfer to my USAA savings account that it classified as Auto Insurance when really it was just a Transfer. The only other issue currently an issue with my 401k provider not able to be accessed by mint after it was available for a while due to a provider change. Hopefully they'll fix that. In the meantime, there's not really a good way to track that info short of entering it as an asset and manually updating it. It's not ideal, but at least it allows me to still track all my assets in one place.

But other than those small things, mint's served my needs quite well. One of the things I used to use Quicken for was the ability to schedule transactions ahead of time. Like a lot of people these days, I don't "balance a checkbook" in the traditional sense since we hardly write any checks. But I still have a need to ensure that there's the appropriate amount of money in my account to pay scheduled bills. I have most of our bills on ACH withdraw with the respective companies, and have our mortgage on a bi-weekly schedule to coincide with both me and my wife's pay schedule (we work for the same company).

About 2 months ago, my wife was complaining about how she didn't know when bills were due and how much money was left in our joint account, so I decided to create a new Google Calendar called "Bill Calendar" that I'd share with her. I've used Google Calendar for several years, and stepped up my use about 2 years ago when I got a smart-phone that could sync to it via exchange. My wife has also become a regular user of it and we use it to coordinate schedules quite regularly, so it was a good option for me to share this information.

The calendar I created for Bills also helps me to better track our upcoming expenses at a quick glance. It's really simple - I simply put the bill name and amount as an "all day event". It looks like this when it's done:
I do this for all of my bills as well as any regular post-paycheck investments, of which we have several. For the investments and some of the recurring bills that are always the same amount, same due date, I make it a recurring event.

It's working very well for me and is a simple way at a glance to plan expenditures. It also helps me to not forget one time things that I pay for and do a better job of managing our balances.

On Target Field

2010-04-16T09:03:00.001-07:00

I managed to snag some tickets to the Twins Home opener a few weeks ago, that small chance that I talked about here panned out for me - as I had the opportunity to purchase tickets from a guy that always gets us tickets for the opener. His allotment was way down so I couldn't get as many tickets, but I was still able to get some.

I got down to Target Field early, about 1pm, after doing some work in the morning on my couch while watching the countdown coverage. I parked in the NorthStar ramp and walked down 6th street, being told it was the best and most dramatic way to come into the park. I hadn't really been downtown near the Target Plaza in a while (though I had seen lots of pictures), but I was still impressed by how it melds right into downtown so seamlessly. (the bridge that starts close to the Target Center seems like it's always been there). And it really is a dramatic entrance - the park is quite visible from a few blocks away - and walking there in my Twins garb among the people working downtown was pretty fun.

I got into the park and found my seat. There were not many people there yet, but for almost 2 hours before game time, there were quite a few. I decided to walk around the concourse once. It reminds me a lot of the newer ballparks I've been in - Miller Park and Minute Made Park come to mind - the open concourses are pretty similar. Target Field seems like it's the most open of all - pretty much all the way around on the first concourse it's open to the field. Even at those other parks there are stretches where it's not. The attention to detail is really striking at Target Field too - the art, the granite, the perfectly sculpted canopy (which looks awesome at night when they are not playing, all lit up), the way the lights are integrated into the canopy. I could go on and on. And the fan friendly features - such as the area where you can look right down into the bullpen, the number of seats they put into the first level bowl, the rail in left center where you can have a drink and watch the game from basically fieldside, the area in right field right off of Target Plaza where you can congregate.

We sat in the right field bleachers - one of the only places where the seats are benches instead of plastic seats. I didn't mind it one bit, as people were coming and going the whole game and there was plenty of room by the end. The view was great - you could see everything but a very small part of right-center field and the scoreboard behind the wall there.

The ceremonies before the game were great fun as well, and it was fun to be a part of a historical moment in Minnesota sports history. In recent years at the dome, I only went to a couple of games every year because of how stale of an experience it was. I only have tickets to one other game at the moment for this season, but I'm sure I'll end up going to at least a half dozen games - you almost have to if you're any kind of baseball fan and live in this town. I can go outside and watch a game, like I did for the vast majority of my childhood. And there's really no other sports experience like that for me.

Survivor

2010-04-16T08:37:00.001-07:00

Katie and I did not become fans of this show until a couple of years ago. We've managed to find a way to watch most of the past seasons, the only ones I haven't seen are the 2 or 3 seasons prior to China (which was the first season I watched as it aired).

It's really interesting that we never watched it until 3 years ago, because it's in our reality show wheelhouse. I'm mildly embarrassed to admit that I've probably seen close to every episode of the MTV Challenges featuring former Real World and Road Rules cast members. And we've watched shows like the Amazing Race for a long time (even if I'm utterly bored with it) and I was a fan of other Mark Burnet productions such as The Apprentice (back in the day, not now).

This season of Survivor has been great. They hand-picked a fabulous cast. Boston Rob! Coach! Tyson! Parvarti! Amanda! Rupert! and on... Some of the best people to play this game over 19 seasons. And of course, Russell Hantz, the most egotistical SOB to ever play the game.

Like a lot of people, I started off hating Russell during his season last year. And slowly, I started to build admiration for him, only to be blown away in the finale when I realized he'd gotten a really good edit from the producers and had ultimately failed to play the social game - alienating just about every single jury member. I was let down by this.

So in this season, Russell is at it again. He took down Boston Rob a few episodes ago, in a rather epic turn of events which started when Tyson stupidly created his own downfall while Russell made a gigantic bet by giving Parvarti the hidden immunity idol.

What some people may not know on the surface is that the Samoa season and Heroes vs Villains were taped only a few weeks apart in the same relative locations on Samoa. Russell went home for less than a week and then returned. This was well before his season aired, so the people on his team did not have the benefit of seeing his gameplay. Boston Rob thinks that he would have been voted out first "without a doubt". At the same time, Probst points out in his blog this week that they were well aware that Russell was one of the most evil of all time. But it's clear there's a benefit there - if the players had seen Russell's season, there's probably no way he gets to the point last night, and there's absolutely no way JT gives him the idol. No way.

Still, here we are, with Russell holding an idol about to go into a merge with a seemingly strong alliance. Sure, there are cracks showing - Parvarti is clearly supportive of him but at the same time doesn't fully trust him - that was clear from her holding back the information about the idol she holds.

I gotta confess though, I'm tired of Russell. He makes bold moves but he doesn't play the social game very well. I don't want him to get all the way to end, because the same thing would result. Andy Denhart nails it at Reality Blurred a few weeks ago. The same thing is happening this season - he's getting a favorable edit because they love him, but there's no way he'll win it all.

I've never been a huge fan of Parvarti. She's like that popular girl in high school that you couldn't stand because she was so evil to everybody behind their back. But I'm even finding myself hoping that she would win over Russell.

Ultimately, I hope Amanda finally wins one. She deserves it. And was the only one that they showed questioning giving the idol to the other side. She plays a much better social game than a lot of the people and is strong in challenges. Rupert, JT and Colby need to go.

But I've been extremely entertained and that's an accomplishment for a show on its 20th season.

My relationship with Apple

2010-04-07T10:06:00.001-07:00

I can take or leave a lot of the over the top bloviating over the latest iWhatever device that Apple cranks out. The latest was on display as the iPad was released. I had several friends and family members get caught up in this and be among the first to buy it. That's nice for them and the people that have the money to spend like that.

I have a love/hate relationship with the "i-product". I am the owner of a 2nd gen iPod Touch that I've had for a year and a few months. It is a great device. It's more or less an iPhone without the phone or constant network connectivity. There are very few apps that don't work on it (mostly ones with microphone applications, since it doesn't have one) - so it's probably a pretty good representation of the iPhone, when you can get a network signal. It was a Christmas present from my wife and at the time, I was debating between the iPod Classic, with it's much larger hard drive and the Touch, which was smaller and more expensive, but more fully featured. That the choice between the two was even a dilemma is funny to me now. Because now, there's no dilemma - I'm locked into a product I use every day.

I think having a Touch has kept the iPhone jonesin' somewhat at bay. Well, that, and also that it's only available on AT&T. Which, no thank you. Verizon is probably the only carrier I'm willing to switch to right now.

There is downside to the iPod Touch. The main thing for me is having to use iTunes on a Windows PC. It's a fucking bloatware piece of shit. It takes forever to respond/do anything, it constantly needs to do things like check the library, and locks up on a regular basis. It takes forever to sync my iPod. Which I wouldn't have to do so often if the damn thing could sync podcasts on the device. But I'm willing to put up with this part of the experience for the device because I like it that much.

All that said, I'm sold on getting an android phone for my next phone. I currently have a Windows Mobile device that sucks the life out of me. (it's not really that bad, we just miss out on a lot of stuff). I like what I've seen out of android and the open nature of their platform is more appealing to me.

The next generation iPhone/Pod interface is being unveiled tomorrow. It'd have to be a crazy leap to get me to change my mind. And the iPhone needs to come to more carriers, because I'd rather not deal with AT&T.

The first Interval Run on Couch to 5k

2010-03-17T08:40:00.001-07:00

So about a week ago, I talked about starting Couch-to-5K. And yesterday I did. I appreciate everyone's support and suggestions, it's been great. I've been reading the LJ Community and various other support message boards.

I did buy a watch with a chrono stopwatch, but on the suggestion of Kassie, I also downloaded an Ipod App. I researched a few apps and decided on the C25K app which several on the Livejournal community had recommended. It was 2.99, but money well spent. It lets you load a playlist into the app, then plays a voice over it telling you when to run and walk. A lot easier than trying to time it yourself, and you can listen to the music you want to.

I still used my watch to time the overall time but did not time the intervals. This was a good compromise (I also bought the watch to time my wife's contractions should it come to that, although I'm sure there's an Ipod app for that too somewhere!).

I started out from my driveway in my alley, did a few stretches, then went into the program. The first jog was pretty easy, but they got progressively harder. It got to the point where you really appreciated the walk. But there's something amazing about the human body, because I got this second wind and the last couple runs were easier than the middle ones. I mapped the route when I got home and I went almost 2 miles. Not too shabby for my first time out.

I was a little sore in my legs last night, and after popping a couple of ibuprofen this morning, I'm doing really well today.

I really think this is a way I can get into running. I live in an ideal neighborhood to run in and it should be interesting to see how things change for me over the next couple of weeks.

I appreciate all the supportive comments from my friends, and let me tell you, if I can do this, then you can too! I'm doing this coming off virtually no physical activity other than the occasional walk.

Couch to 5k

2010-03-11T09:07:00.000-08:00

I'm finally going to get off my ass and do something about the weight. There've been various wakeup calls for me over the last several months - the fact that my pants barely fit anymore (and I refuse to buy a bigger size!), that I've started having more problems with my back again, the life insurance price increase from the original quote that was a gigantic eye opener. Not to mention, I'm about to have a child and I want to be around for that.

I'm going to try running. I've never been a regular runner - I used to jog on a treadmill as a change of pace thing when I got tired of the elliptical. But I now live near one of the greatest urban trail systems in the country, about 2 blocks from the Minnehaha portion of the Grand Rounds Trail system. I'd be foolish not to consider some kind of fitness program involving that.

This represents a massive shift from my largely sedentary lifestyle, so I'm going to employ the Couch to 5K program. I've known others who've had success with it. I should set a goal for what I want to do, like a 5k by such and such a date, but I don't want to do that yet. I would like to fit comfortably into my pants by my birthday though, which is in early July. I think that's achievable.

I'm going to start running soon, as the snow has made a hasty exit. I bought a digital watch with a timer to time the intervals. I'm probably going to go buy some better running shoes soon too.

I'm hovering between 300 and 310 right now, and I'd like to drop a big chunk of that.

Hah

2010-02-28T10:34:00.001-08:00

Twinsanity

2010-02-22T10:13:00.000-08:00

So, we're about to be launched into not-seen-around-here territory for a while - a new stadium for the Twins is going to push demand to places previously unseen except for postseason play (and frankly, demand was pretty soft for that the last few years).

My personal feeling on this is pretty simple. I'm a fairly serious baseball fan - it's neck and neck with football for my attention. That said, over the last 14 years I've lived here, I haven't gone to that many Twins games. I can't totally explain why but there are some partial explainers- I never particularly liked going to the dome for baseball for one. Growing up in Chicago and Connecticut spoils me on that front.

I'm quite excited about outdoor Twins baseball, but I see the tizzy people are already getting into over getting tickets to the first games at Target field, and my immediate reaction is "Don't want to deal with that shit."

Granted, I've got other priorities, like a baby due sometime in the first month of the season, a house that still needs a lot of TLC and a fair amount of money thrown at it and an utter lack of discretionary income to boot.

But unless you can afford it and are willing to pay exorbitant prices to scalpers or already have some other way in, good luck getting tickets to the first week or two. Demand is going to greatly exceed supply. I already see it where guys are sending around emails to my fantasy leagues offering up their tickets for double face to any home game and 4 to 6x face for the first couple of games. That's fucking nuts, and that's somebody I know. Either he's grossly overestimating demand, or a lot of people are going to have sticker shock.

I still have a small chance of getting tickets to the season opener for near face, but even that's looking like a longer shot. My wife doesn't want to go because she's 8 months pregnant, and frankly, I think I'd rather watch it on TV in the comfort of my own home.

The first week of games features several daytime matchups which will cause work interruptions anyway.

I guess my point is that there's 81 regular season home games and not all of them will sell out. Plus, I'd much rather be sitting outside on a balmy July night than a cold April afternoon anyway. I'm sure the Twins will sell out a lot of their games, but their will be some tickets available for face, no doubt.

But it will be nice to go see baseball outside. Really nice. An entire generation of fans here grew up watching indoor baseball. What a treat to be going back outside.

Snow, Snow and more Snow.

2010-02-09T09:11:00.001-08:00

I've had a generally good demeanor about the weather this winter here in Minnesota. It's no secret, I'm not a native and while I've always lived in temperate climates, this area offers the most sustained cold of any other I've lived (Philly, Chicago and New York City metro areas being the other 3) - and usually the most snow as well. Not this winter though, I'm pretty sure Chicago and the east coast has gotten more snow than Minnesota, but we have a lot on the ground because it doesn't melt and we keep getting 3-6" just about every other week.

It's funny that I've had a good demeanor about it, because for the first time, I'm responsible for snow removal around my property. Living in a townhouse with a condo association for the last 7 years spoiled me a little bit. But I've enjoyed the exercise that comes with snow removal (even if it's mostly pushing around a heavy snow-thrower).

That said, my commute is relatively painless - I reverse commute out to the St Paul suburbs and my drive is normally not that bad and the snow doesn't really add much to it. I hear my co-workers horror stories and I'm glad I don't live where they do.

Still, I find myself starting to long for warmer temperatures and not having to go out and remove snow at butt o'clock in the morning a few times a week. Soon enough. But the snows lately have been really pretty when you pause for a second to look around. People should remember this when they get cranky.

Sports Heartbreak

2010-01-25T07:12:00.000-08:00

So here we are again. The day after another conference champion loss. This is the third one in my 20 years of being a Vikings fan. They do get easier. This one was easier, anyway. Or maybe the shock of being so close to the Super Bowl hasn't worn off yet. I don't know. I still remember the heartache 1998 like it was yesterday. I watched the game by myself in my parents basement in Illinois. I could hardly believe what I watched. That was a home game that they should have won. This, while in some ways similar, was not that. Not at all.

A few people tweeted last night that the Vikings did not deserve to even get to the overtime. I don't disagree because of how sloppy they played, but New Orleans kept the Vikings in the game. Way too long. The Saints extreme failure to convert on third downs, coupled with an inability to capitalize on the Vikings turnovers.

I'll tell you the truth, when they got inside field goal range with less than 2 minutes to play, I started getting a little teary. I thought I was going to finally get to see this team go to a superbowl. Should've known better. It's not over till it's over.

Could've. Would've. Should've. I saw the Favre "I told you so's" right away on Twitter last night after the game was over. We don't really need to collectively go there as Vikings fans, and we're being really disingenuous if we do. Just about everybody in Vikings nation bought into the notion of Favre as the guy who could get us there, and if you say you didn't now that it's over, and you're any kind of Vikings fan, you're a fucking liar. We can armchair QB this thing all day, it's not going to change that we got beat.

The thing is, Favre didn't lose that game by himself. Turnovers lost that game, a couple of fumbles by the guy we used to call Purple Jesus, but maybe some fumble oriented name would be a better fit now. He's got a rep worse than Tiki Barber at his worst now and he'll need to work on that. Elite backs don't fumble the ball at pivotal times like that. The D stoppped New Orleans, but seemingly couldn't when they needed to. Brees did not look like the top caliber QB that he was for most of the season.

I'm thankful that it was a heck of a game and that the Vikings were in the game the whole time. 41-0 was a fucking nightmare for me, nearly 10 years ago, and this was a LOT better than that. I saw Dan Barreiro of KFAN rank this second after 98, but I don't agree. It's at least third for me, at least in my lifetime, and for all time Vikings big game losses, it's probably lower than that. (the 70s are a whole other ballgame of disappointment).

And as for Favre, I really hope the guy commits to retirement and the Vikings move on. Bringing him back for another season isn't going to do anybody any good. He was visibly tired and the Saints abused him last night. I'd hate to see the guy end his career with a bad injury. Maybe the INT was just the way he was meant to end his career. I will be upset if he yanks us around for another off-season. But I'm also prepared for that to happen. It is Brett Favre after all.

And hey, at least we don't have to suffer a manhandling from the Colts in the Superbowl now. Not much of a bright side, but the Vikings would have been seriously mismatched against them if they had made it. That would have been a tough game to not get blown out of.

And to all of you in the national scene, you're welcome. You don't have to hear about Brett Favre anymore. At least for a couple of weeks, anyway.

Sports Allegiances in my life

2010-01-22T13:34:00.000-08:00

Brett Favre on the Vikings. What a crazy season. I was not surprised by the sheer number of bandwagon jumpers this year onto the Brett Favre/Minnesota Vikings bandwagon. It's a completely normal phenomenon in these parts for all sports. The Twins suffer from the same thing, and the Timberwolves bandwagon is about as low as it's ever been. Even I jumped off that ride after KG bailed (I wasn't really on it too hard to begin with). Truth be told, I'm still a Bulls fan. Hockey actually seems to have the strongest consistent support of any sport in this state, and it's probably stronger at the collegiate level. But I've even heard some Gopher fans questioning that this year.

I was talking to my brother about the history of our sports fandom - the first 18 years of mine were largely shared with him and we still have a lot of the same allegiances and dislikes of sports teams. My sports loyalties are largely shaped by geography. My dad was a corporate executive when we were kids and we moved a lot because he was re-positioning his career with a series of acquisitions dictating where he worked. I spent my most formative years living on the east coast. I was actually born in Philly and lived there till I was almost 5 years old. Really not old enough to ever be a fan of anything there. Even though, I remember having an odd assortment of Phillies and Flyers gear and a Philly Fanatic Doll, I did not live there in any state that I'd remember sports.

My earliest memories of sports are really with baseball and the Mets. I played little league when I was a kid and had an early infatuation with the sport. I grew up in Trumbull, Connecticut - a working class town that was in the sports fandom very close to the border of New York and Boston sports. My brother and I always veered towards New York sports - we were geographically closer, after all - but I also remember having childhood friends that were also fans of Boston sports. It tended to go like this: if you liked the Yankees and Jets, then forget about anything from Boston. If you were a Mets fan, then you might also be a Sox fan. This was also in the days before inter-league (although - 1986 probably did a good job of setting up those lines more distinctly). If you were a New York football Giants fan, then maybe you also took pity on the Patriots. This was in the mid-80s, long before the Belichick era Patriots. This is the Patriots you took pity on in Superbowl XX. They were not a great team for a big bunch of the decade though.

1986 was a magical sports year if you were a New York fan of a certain persuasion. I don't remember exactly how I became a Mets fan that year - most of my family was either sports agnostic or firmly entrenched in the Yankees camp. Several of the neighborhood kids that I hung out with came from huge Yankees familes (The woman in this video was my neighbor from across the street!) But the Yankees sucked in the 80s. In my romanticized remembered of this era, I'd like to think I was a Mets fan because it was the opposite of what everybody else liked, but really, I think it was just that they were damn good in 1986.

I think what's helped me through as a sports fan over the years is that I got a taste of the good life early on because of that 1986 Mets team. They won the world series and the hearts of millions of fans that year. I remember my first week in college in Minnesota in 1996 when I met a dude from Connecticut while possibly slightly inebriated at a party. And we proceeded to reminisce about the '86 Mets and the series for no less than an hour. It was beautiful. They were that kind of team, one that you could reminisce about 10 years later as if it had happened yesterday.

Another funny thing happened in 1986 - the New York Giants had a kick-ass season. And I was also starting to get into football. Unlike baseball however, I don't remember any doubt about this team in my family- I came from a NY Giants family. None of this Jets stuff. And they had a great year, Sims had a career year, the great defense with LT, Harry Carson. They beat the Broncos in Super Bowl XXI. And my brother was on his way to lifetime of NY Giants fandom.

Those of you that know me today probably would pause here and wonder what happened. My fan tastes, as you'll start to see, are decidedly less loyal than that of my brother's, at least when it comes to football. What happened was that a few years after the Giants won the Superbowl we were on the way out of the east coast for good. I haven't lived anywhere but the Midwest since. And that definitely shaped my sports fandom forever. I have no doubt if I had remained in the New York area that I would to this day be a Giants and Mets fan. Either that, or better technology as we have today. It's so much easier to move today and still follow your teams of choice with the internet, blogs, dish/cable packages, ESPN ad nasuem and DVRs. I will probably be a dedicated fan of the teams I am now forever. It's just so much easier.

Back in the early 90s, it wasn't that easy. We didn't even have cable for the one year we lived in Orono, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. Only an antenna. New York Giants? Maybe I could see one or two games a year, usually a Monday night game or the odd national game on one of the Networks that wasn't an NFC Central battle when the Vikings were not playing. My brother held fast, but I bailed - sort of. I actually remember it being more of an agnostic thing towards the NFL. If I could not watch the Giants, I was certainly not going to watch this team in Purple that wasn't all that good.

But I did end up watching it, and that was the foundation for my fandom. 20 years ago this year was when that occurred. So I tell people I've been a Vikings fan for 20 years, though it really started with a more solid passion in 1996. I remained somewhat disinterested in football during high school.

The Twins were a team I could get behind, though. There wasn't any conflict with being a fan of theirs and the Mets. I remember going to a lot of games in 1990 and 1991 before we moved to Chicago. The North Stars had a good run in the Stanley Cup playoffs that year too, which was really my first Ice Hockey fan experiences. And lo and behold, the Giants won the Superbowl again. My brother and I got to watch them a lot in the playoffs and the Superbowl of course, so I was, at least temporarily, back in that arena.

I couldn't complain too much about moving to Chicago from a sports perspective. Chicago had a lot to offer for the sports fan. We moved in the middle of the Twins run towards the world series, and I remember watching the end of game 7 of the '91 series on the 13 inch hand me down TV in my bedroom in our house in the Chicago suburbs. That was a team I wholeheartedly embraced and probably why I'm still a Twins fan today.

So, by the age of 12, I had tasted 4 championships in 2 different sports of teams that I cared for. That's not a bad track record. But it was about to get even better. Living in Chicago in the 90s was a treat as a sports fan. I didn't have any prior NBA alliances - I wasn't really a wolves fan when we lived in the Twin Cities in 1991. We did manage to go to their first game ever at Target Center (at the time, I remember it seeming like an awesome stadium, but almost 20 years later, it's a dump!), but otherwise, they were an expansion team with a long way to go towards relevance.

The Bulls. We moved to Chicago in June of 1991, just as the Bulls were winning their first NBA championship. I remember going to Chicago to look at houses with my parents in the spring of 1991 and it was Bulls fever EVERYWHERE. Madness. Jordan. Pippen. This was not a bandwagon it would take much persuasion at all to hop onto, particularly if you had no prior NBA allegiances. The whole city, heck, a big chunk of the country was hopping onto this thing. And it was a great run. They were unstoppable. They were a team you never lost confidence in, you knew they'd get it done, that push come to shove, Jordan would come through in the clutch. It was a beautiful thing. And I was right there for a front seat to it.

Bulls games became a regular event for my family. We watched every game, every night they were on. To this day, I cannot say that about any sport with a regular season schedule longer than 16 games. Except for the 94-95 Jordan Baseball years, it was a dominant stretch for a great team anchored by one of the greatest ever. I recall watching nearly every game in 1995-1996, the 72-10 season. That was nearly as perfect of a season and team as any ever in any sport. Or so it remains in my mind, at least.

I left for college in the latter half of 1996, and it was back to the Twin Cities, where I live to this day. Solidly in the Bulls camp, I'd also picked up an appreciation for the Cubs. I loved going to games when I was in high school - this was before the resurgence of Wrigley as the "it" destination and it was easy to get tickets to many day games in the summer. I remember going with friends to a number of games where we walked right up to the ticket window and sat in the first row of the upper deck. Those days are LONG gone. That Cubs fandom has only intensified as I grow further and further from 1986 and the Mets.

My football allegiances were decided less figured out at this stage in my life. The Giants were still lingering but the Vikings picked up a new attractiveness now that I was again a resident of the Twin Cities. I don't recall watching all of their games during the 96 and 97 campaigns, but by 1998, I had my own apartment, and my own TV. And I squarely remember watching ever game that season. And I've watched pretty much every game since that season. I consider myself something of a diehard. I've stuck with them through 8 years of the Mike Tice and early Chilly era. I was even a season ticket holder for the 2006 season. That was something of a failed experiment as my friend I went in with on a pair of tickets decided to buy a house, and I decided that I liked watching the games better on TV. But it was still a fun season, to go to every game. And sit there till the end through some really bad games. I'm as loyal as ever today. I struggled with Favre last summer, more because of how he yanked everybody around for a couple of months. But it didn't take me long to let him into the fold. I'm a Vikings fan first.

The Twins creeped into my consciousness as they had a great run in the first part of the decade. They've been fun to watch and I'm happy that I'm a fan of their ballclub. 2003 was an interesting season as the Cubs made it pretty far in the playoffs, ultimately losing after the Steve Bartman debacle, but it was a season that helped renew my devotion towards them as my National League team of choice. The twins also made it into the playoffs that year and several others but it's always ended in heartache.

It's been a pretty good run for championships and I'm ready for some more. I've been in the Twin Cites for 10 years. We're due for something. This could be the year. I'm a believer.

My New Year's goals

2010-01-04T07:37:00.000-08:00

I don't really call them resolutions, but I suppose that's what they are. I just think there's a certain stigma attached when you call them that.

At any rate, here's what I'm thinking:
1) Take a walk every day - even if it's just a few blocks. The intent is to ease back into an ongoing fitness regiment slowly. I've been quite sedentary, more than I'd like to be, and as a result have gained more weight than I care to admit. It also serves to get out of the house for a little while and enjoy the outdoors. Since it's really cold right now, indoor substitution will probably occur. Katie and I walked around the Mall of America a couple of times the other night, and we'll probably do the same a few nights this week, given how cold it is. But we also walked outside on New Year's Day and yesterday, so it's possible. Just have to bundle up!

I'm not committing to it yet, but I'd like to eventually give running another shot. I've had brief flings with it over the years, but I've never fully committed. My dad runs marathons, why can't I?

2)Read a book at least 30 minutes a day - The funny thing about these modern times, is that I probably read more than I ever have. Between things at work, and then a constant source of stuff to read in Google Reader, it's a constant thing. But what I have slowed down on is books. I have a growing stack of stuff I have bought but not read, and I want to rectify that. So I'm committing to reading a book at least 30 minutes a day.

3) Do at least 3 hours of non-routine work on the house every weekend - This one might be a little tougher to accomplish, particularly in the winter when I can't work outside, but I'm going to try. My house is old and it needs a lot of work to get it up to speed cosmetically with what Katie and I would like. It's certainly very livable as is, but there's a lot of things I can be doing to improve it. Once it gets warmer, this should be a lot easier - the outside of the house, particularly the landscaping and yard, needs a LOT of work.

That's it for this point in time. I'm using the New Year as a jumping off point, but will revisit throughout the year to add and remove goals.

Year in Review

2009-12-30T07:34:00.000-08:00

Stolen from Jenni (and Dan):

1. What did you do in 2009 that you’d never done before?
-conceived a child
-owned a non-condo detached single family home
-live in Minneapolis proper
-Visited somewhere in Georgia other than the Atlanta Airport in February
-Watched the NFL draft with my 11 year old newphew
-followed U2 to 3 different cities and saw them in a city other than Minneapolis or Chicago
-Met distant Norwegian relatives
-Watched Brett Favre play football in a Vikings jersey (and still somewhat in disbelief about it)

2. Did you keep your new years’ resolutions and will you make more for next year?
-I don't do them really, but I suppose I was resolved to have a kid, and we accomplished that.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
-Two of my cousins had baby boys
-Ask me again in a year, I'll have a lot here, including my own! No less than 6 couples we know are pregnant and due around the same time that we are.

4. Did anyone close to you die?
No, thankfully.

5. What countries did you visit?
Didn't leave the US this year.

6. What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?
-Be able to focus better and tune out distractions.
-More discipline at work.

7. What date from 2009 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

The day we found out we were pregnant - 8/18/09

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Knocking up my wife. (do you detect a theme yet?)

9. What was your biggest failure?
eating too much food and blimping out.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

Nothing major!

11. What was the best thing you bought?

A Tivo, to finally rid myself of shitty cable company DVRs.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?

Sully Sullenberger. I'm still amazed at how he landed that plane in the Hudson and nobody was seriously hurt. Stand up dude.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?

Tea Baggers (Republi"cant's") and the mainstream press. I really try to avoid it for the most part now. I don't give a shit that Tiger Woods fucked 27 women.

I wasn't appalled or depressed by Obama and his administration, but I was disappointed. Change, my ass. More of the same political bullshit, IMO. So much for being optimistic last year. Really does prove that Democrat or Republican, it doesn't make that much of a difference in my life.

14. Where did most of your money go?

Our house and Savings

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

The Norwegian visit over my birthday in July
When we found out that we were pregnant.

16. What song will always remind you of 2009?
"Breathe" - by U2

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:

i. happier or sadder? happier
ii. thinner or fatter? fatter
iii. richer or poorer? Richer

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?

work on the house, acting instead of just thinking, reading books

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?

Watching TV, being a lazy jackass, lacking motivation, checking twitter so incessently

20. How will you be spending (spent) Christmas?
Spent it at my parents house in North Carolina, as we often do. I told my mom last night that it just feels like Christmas there. I wish we could go every year, but it's tough with my wife's family here in Minny.

21. Did you fall in love in 2009?

Yeah, with the idea of having a beautiful baby daughter. And my wife and I are doing better than ever. You really hit your stride in marriage after 3 or 4 years, I really realized that this year. There's a rhythm, an ebb and flow to it that's hard to describe, but it works really well.

22. What was your favorite TV program?

There's so many. Survivor. How I Met Your Mother (discovered and watched all 6 seasons this year). Those are the two that stick out the most this year. We watch a lot of TV. Too much.

23. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?

I don't really hate on anybody. We've reconnected with some that we fell out of touch with though, and that feels good.

24. What was the best book you read?

Infinite Jest, hands down. It was actually one of the only books I completed reading this year. I started a lot of books.

25. What was your greatest musical discovery of 2009?

You know all those "Best Albums of 2009" lists that come out this time of year? I've realized over the past several days that on most of them, I don't know a single Album, and in a lot of cases not even a single band. To say that 2009 was not a year of new music discovery for me is not an understatement.

26. What did you want and get?

To sell my house and buy a new one

27. What did you want and not get?

Can't think of anything really. I get anything I want to, and set realistic wants to begin with...

28. What was your favorite film of this year?

Avatar, hands down.

29. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

Hung out with a bunch of awesome Norwegians and most of the Kinney family at my aunt's house, then watched the fireworks from the roof of a building downtown. I turned 31, and it was the greatest birthday ever. I'm not exaggerating.

30. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

Not having to deal with negativity. I'm trying to shut it out of my life, because life's way too short.

31. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2009?

Same shit, different day. Not at all an innovator here.

32. What kept you sane?
My wife, 150%.

33. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
Hate to say it, but Brett Favre. I am fascinated by the man.

34. What political issue stirred you the most?

How, in the end, Healthcare will continue to be ruled by the fat-cat insurance companies who will continue to ensure that many Americans will not get the care they need, and the government doesn't have the balls to do something more drastic about it. A tie with that and the lack of financial reform to make sure the greedy motherfuckers on Wall Street don't keep pulling their garbage. It's already happening again and Obama/Congress are not gonna stop it...

35. Who did you miss?
My grandfather. I miss him every year. He died 6 years ago. That's crazy to me that it was already that long ago.

36. Who was the best new person you met?

I didn't technically meet him in '09, but I got to know my new manager a lot better this year - and he's someone that can serve as a good mentor to me. For that, I am grateful.

37. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2009:

Preparing to have a child puts everything in perspective. Everything.

38. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.

"I love it when they call me big Poppa" - Notorious B.I.G.

both because I'm fatter and I'm gonna be a dad.

The Tivo so far, Consensus:Totally worth it

2009-12-14T08:10:00.000-08:00

We got a Tivo just before Thanksgiving after my frustration with the crappy Comcast DVR we'd been provided in our new place reached a boiling point. The last time I had checked prices on Tivos was several years ago, when the only option that would pick up digital cable was the original Series III tivo. At the time, that box was in the $750 range, which was pretty cost prohibitive compared to the cable company offerings.

Fast forward, and now it's possible to get a Tivo HD box for less than $250, and a monthly fee that's less than I'm paying for the cable box. For us, worth it, particularly when pressed with the inferior Comcast offering. The drive is small, but we don't actually have HDTV yet, and upgrading the box is as easy as buying a 1TB drive for around 100 bucks that plugs right in to the unit and gives you a LOT more storage.

The Tivo showed up in about 4 or 5 days, which was really nice considering I ordered it with supersaver shipping which was free. Sometimes that can take a while - but an item as big as a Tivo is still shipped via UPS ground, which usually has a 3 day cycle. I got it for 229.99 with free shipping and a $30.00 credit at the Amazon On-Demand video store. I could have gotten it a bit cheaper from a few other places, but wanted the guarantee to be able to return it to Amazon if we had issues or didn't like it.

Suffice it to say, that didn't happen. Once we got the Tivo, I hooked it up to the cable by splitting the line between the cableco box and the Tivo. The rest of the setup was easy - the tivo comes with a digital audio out which I've used for years with other sources and plugged in easily to my stereo, same as video out. Since my router was already by the TV in our house, I was also able to easily plug the Tivo into that.

I fired up the Tivo once I had everything connected. It takes a while to turn on the first time. I went into the setup and did everything to set it up (it's a bit slow to set up because it has to download the guide data, etc). Once I set it up, I took it for a spin. One of the things I realized rather quickly is that it had an old version of the software on it which did not support features like Netflix on-demand (something I wanted to try sooner rather than later). No worry, this guide and Tivo's site pointed out that I could force the Tivo to run updates and restart so that the updates would take. It took about an hour additional to do that. This is the one thing I'm not sure about Tivo, why wouldn't you have the latest software on the box out of the box, especially an update that came out a while ago.

This was really my only frustration with setting up the Tivo. Programming recordings, all that was easy to set up. And almost immediately the Tivo started recording suggestions, an interesting feature which I check out a few times a week.

We had the Tivo going on the analog channels which more or less provided what we already had in the digital starter package from Comcast. Katie and I don't watch much on the channels over 100 and a while back had scaled back to just the digital starter. Most of which is provided by Comcast on the Analog channels, particularly when you don't need HD.

However, this package includes a free cable card and the digital channels are a better quality, so I went over to the Comcast store in Richfield to get a cable card. Despite their website saying this location stocked them, the counter person informed me that I'd have to call and have a truck rolled. I knew I should have called! Waste of a trip.

I set up an appointment for the following week, which got postponed another 5 days because of a "national outage" of their activation system. Comcast guy was able to set it up without issue. The box did make me rerun the setup which took a while, but now the box is working great.

I've tried out some of the add-ons - Netflix works pretty well for the most part, a few films lacked sound or had weird aspect ratio issues, but most have worked great. Tivo's PC software, however, is a waste of time. Once I did get it to connect to the box (challenging because of my network setup, apparently), it errored out on my music library, which I found out was far too big for the Tivo to be able to handle. Lame. Transferring videos requires a 25.o0 upgrade which I was originally going to buy, but I found a free program called PyTivo which allows you to download videos of pretty much any stripe to the Tivo - WIN. It works great once set up to watch divx encoded and other video files. It's a bit tricky and technical to set up as it runs a mini-server on your pc. You have to be able to work with configuration files and the like, but once it's running, it's set and forget.

Overall, I'm very pleased with my Tivo experience, and I highly recommend it to anyone who isn't satisfied with the cable company DVR options. The CableCard makes it a no-brainer, really. You do lose on-demand and PPV from Comcast, but frankly, the Tivo box more than makes up for that.

There's a few places I reccomend checking out if you are interested in a Tivo:
The AVS Forum FAQ - an excellent and very inclusive guide to the TivoHD Product.
The Tivo Community - good site not affiliated with Tivo. Lots of good info here as well, particularly around CableCards and Comcast.

I've had it with this POS DVR from Comcast

2009-11-17T21:45:00.000-08:00

I've lived in a Comcast market ever since I moved to Eagan in 2002. Since 2005, I had a Motorola DVR box. It wasn't the greatest, but it did what I needed it to do and it was passable. It had its quirks, like it would inepxplicably freeze on a screen for a bit and queue up remote commands and then unleash them all at once. But once you got used to that, it was a minor annoyance more than anything.

I transferred this box to our apartment in Eagan for the few months that we lived there, but when we bought a place in Minneapolis, I was told I'd have to get a new box since the Motorola boxes were not compatible with the Minneapolis market (it's an old Time-Warner market that had flip flopped with comcast, and they use Cisco (Scientific Atlanta) equipment).

Well, the Cisco box that I have now is an utter piece of crap compared to even the Motorola box. It can't do series priority at all, and my wife likes to record a lot of shit on HGTV and stuff like that which is on multiple times per day. What ends up happening is that the box stops recording other things I want to record randomly, and I don't figure it out till I realize it hasn't recorded. It's maddening. The Motorola DVR also had the (undocumented) ability to program a skip button. No such luck on this thing. There's a lot of other things about this Cisco box that just plain suck but those are the two most glaring weaknesses.

On the suggestion of more than one person on the various AV forums, I started checking out the Tivo HD DVR. When I last checked out Tivo a few years ago, the Series III was just coming out. It was really what I would have wanted, but the pricetag, north of 750 if I recall, was out of the question, especially compared to the serviceable motorola dvr I already had.

Flash forward to now, and Comcast is charging me 15.99/month for this piece of shit box that's far inferior to the Moto box I had before (for the same price). Tivo's 12.99 per month (and can get even cheaper if I pre-pay) and the box is only 250. Seems like a no brainer. Comcast will even provide the cable card the box uses for free.

The Tivo box can also do a lot of other stuff, like watch netflix on demand movies and access Amazon's movie library as well. My wife will dig that.

Gonna make the leap. Comcast can take this DVR and shove it...

Stuff you can do if you run out of stuff to do on the internet

2009-11-17T08:52:00.000-08:00

I'm sure I'm like a lot of you when I say that I've got content coming out the wazoo most of the time. Far too much stuff. My normal routine is to first hit up Twitter to see what's new. I'm something of a completeist, so I usually read most of what I've read back to the last time I read Twitter. Brizzly is a great Twitter client for that because of the J/K shortcut keys and the continuous scrolling. Can scroll through a great deal in a short amount of time. When I've just gotten too far behind, the new Twitter lists are great for checking up on certain people or things. They now work in Brizzly too, so the same scrolling principles apply. Once that's done, I usually float into Google Reader. While some notables in the Tech community have all but abandoned it, I still find it to be the most useful tool for accumulating what you want to read for later consumption. Sure, I end up seeing a good chunk in my Twitter feed (I do still try to avoid Twitter feeds that are simply mirror's of a site's RSS feed, because Google Reader does that better), but I can aggregate a lot of things.

Very rarely do I run out of things on Reader. If, by chance I happen to, there's a few things I will do if I have some time to kill and my laptop in front of me.

The Popular Feed on Google Reader - The popular feed is great to find new stuff to read and peruse what people like. I like to page through it periodically. Lots of good visual stuff on this feed. I've found multiple new blogs to follow this way.

Comment feed on friend's shared items in Google Reader - Google's implemented a bunch of features related to the social aspects of sharing items. They're implemented rather haphazardly in my opinion. However, conversations do start up on some items, and it's always worth a gander to see what people are saying.

Drop in on your Twitter Lists - Lists are a great new feature in Twitter. I've used them to find and increase the number of accounts I follow. Increasingly, I'm following people on my lists that I don't follow on my main Twitter account. Mostly because they are entities or people that I don't always need to see updates from, but are good to check in on every once in a while.

Drop in on other people's Twitter Lists - one of the other great features about lists on Twitter is that you can follow other people's lists. This allows you to sample tweets from other people without actually following them or taking the time to cultivate the list yourself. I like to go in and do this periodically to see what's going on. The Breaking News list compiled by a New York Times editor I follow is interesting when a story is breaking. The New York Times staff list is also another one I'm liking a lot. And the list of TC Journalists is also interesting for a local new perspective. There's lists for all manner of things, the sky is the limit, really. There's a list for that, so-to-speak.

Check out Friendfeed - this is something I'm doing less than a few months ago, but I follow a base of people on that site that I don't follow other places, and they're interesting people. There's always something to look at content wise there because FF aggregates an individual's content, and it does a pretty good job of filtering the best of the day for various lists you can set up. Unfortunatly, the once-thriving native-to-friendfeed community here is less of one - since facebook bought the company a few months back a lot of people have all but abandoned native participation in favor of it simply being a stream. I'm guilty of that myself.

I very rarely peruse individual sites for content anymore - I can't remember the last time I went to look at startribune.com without being linked there, for example. I very rarely look at individual blogs where I'm not either linked there or read it in Google Reader. It's an interesting shift from the way things used to be, but it's one that I find gives me more information that I want/need, versus having to go through a bunch of stuff that I don't care about.

Delta's got some work to do to keep me as a regular customer

2009-11-11T10:50:00.000-08:00

MSP (Northwest, now Delta)has been my home airport for the last 14 years. Prior to that O'Hare (United/American mini hub) and Midway (Southwest, various low-far lines over the years), when I lived in Chicago, and when I was very young, NYC (numerous). So, I've lived in a hub of one sort or another for most of my life. And I've often had access to direct flights.

Like a lot of my fellow MSP travelers, I was not really thrilled with the Delta acquisition of Northwest last year. I've been a regular Northwest customer for most of my adult life. They've been a good option for travel, and we get direct flights on them to almost anywhere. Sure, directs were often 50-100 more than connecting through Chicago on United/American or Atlanta on Delta But after you get stuck at ORD or ATL once or twice waiting out standby lists, the directs become the way - particularly when you can afford them.

I'm going to be close to getting medallion status with Delta this year due to some bonus miles and late year traveling. I probably won't make it, but I don't know that I care that much. Delta kind of sucks compared to NWA for a variety of reasons. There's lots of little differences that are annoying, but their general service level just seems to be lacking in comparison as well. Maybe it's just because I'm primarily dealing with disgruntled legacy NWA employees right now.

I'm a little concerned that we're going to start losing directs out of MSP, but I don't know that it bothers me that much. I may end up flying Southwest more often down the road (though I haven't found their fares out of MSP to be very competitive with DL so far on the ones I've checked, in fact, they're often more expensive), even if it means connecting through Midway, Denver or St Louis. Southwest is adding new destinations from MSP pretty fast, and if Delta decides to reduce service further at MSP, I bet they'll come in with even more.

Simple math and geography dictates that Delta has too many hubs post-NWA merger. All signs point to Cincinnati (actually located in northern Kentucky), a legacy Delta hub, being the first casualty - and with Memphis and Detroit in the fold, that makes perfect sense. Delta was already hinting at downsizing there before the merger even took place. Memphis still seems awfully close to ATL, though there's no sign of downsizing there yet, and there's some overlap between MSP and DTW which leads me to believe that Delta may choose to focus more on one or the other.

Regardless of what happens, I really hope the discounters like SWA look more heavily at MSP. We've got a lot of business travel originating out of here because of all the Fortune 500 companies that are HQ'ed or have large presences here, and it seems like it will continue to be the case.

I'm hoping I can get medallion sooner or later on some airline. I don't travel tons for work, but do a fair amount of leisure travel. Fully half the flight I was on yesterday was medallion, and that left me in the predicament of being able to get in the 3rd row of coach because of my business fare, but not being able to get on the plan in time to avoid the dreaded gate check (all too common these days with people avoiding the bag check fees).

I've never really worked the system as far as credit cards and other special offers go, I think I need to start doing that as well.

Livin' in the Citaaaaay

2009-11-06T14:33:00.000-08:00

I've been a Minneapolis resident for a few weeks now. I dig it. My commute's a little longer, and totally reverse - I head out to my office in the burbs every day. It's only slightly longer than when I lived in Eagan. My wife has a commute generally less than 10 minutes in which she does not need to take any freeways. It's great for her, and I'm happy - she's had the longer commute for a long time. It's nice to have her in bed longer in the mornings and be home by the time I am usually. She tends to work more hours than me anyway.

I like a lot of things about the city. My Walk Score went from a 39 to a 73, a dramatic improvement. Interestingly, 73 is still in the bottom half of all walk scores in Minneapolis. But it's still way ahead of most anything in the burbs.

I haven't done tons of walking yet. It is getting colder out. But even having 4 or 5 different non-chain restaurants within a few blocks of my place, and hundreds more if you go to a 20 block radius is great. Options were always so limited in Eagan - it was basically a handful of chains or some local chain joints that I could usually get my wife to eat at. For that, I am happy. Fits better with my lifestyle. We ate out a few times this week at different places. Mostly because we could!

Finding things in your new neighborhood is always interesting. I had to figure out where my new polling place was. I voted in the first Minneapolis city elections to feature Ranked Choice (instant runoff) voting. It was not a very interesting mayoral race, with RT Ryback having no serious challenges going in. The park board race was the most interesting thing on the ballot, and only because I live in the 5th district, which was one of the few contested races. Indeed, it's going to the IRV for the official result since three candidates were within a few points of each other.

I also had to figure out where mailboxes were. The USPS web site has a nice tool for that. The nearest redbox. Grocery stores. And on... Lots of stuff is very close.

Since we have a bigger house with more storage, we decided to join Costco and made our first trip there last week. Good decision, will help save us some money in the long run.

I feel good about the long run benefits of living in the city. Someday I'll probably work in DT Minneapolis or the vicinity again. That will come in handy. Even if I don't, we are centrally located to a lot of things now.

Copy of my letter to Comcast Customer Service

2009-10-29T12:07:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: A customer service agent with the authority/ability to take care of this from their Twin Cities office called me a few hours after I sent this. They re-pulled my credit report and told me I wouldn't have to pay a deposit. I have cable and internet (finally) at the new house. Nice of Comcast to save the relationship - though they should empower their front line reps a little more so that I don't have to go to these lengths. I also feel bad for people who don't use Twitter/etc and don't know about these channels.

I've had Comcast for Cable and Internet for the past 7 years. They've been pretty good to work with overall, despite the horror stories that I've heard and read at various places around the Internet. I finally have a story of my own. I downplayed the "setting up the new account at an address with former service still installed" aspect in this letter, because that was finally resolved (and partially the fault of the incompetent non-profit that I bought the home from). But that saga was pretty terrible with 2 reps never calling me back and finally a third that was helpful. Clearly their reps need more training on what to do in these scenarios.

I'm proceeding with Comcast for now, but I'm hoping that this letter gets somebody's attention. I sent it via email to their executive customer service which seems to be pretty reponsive on Twitter, etc.

Hello, I am hoping you can help me understand and rectify the current situation I am in with your company.

To preface, I’ve been a satisfied customer of Comcast for 7 years, since May of 2002 when I moved into my home in Eagan, Minnesota. For the most part, I have been a satisfied customer of Internet and Cable services – a few glitches here and there, but Comcast has always been helpful in resolving in a timely manner when we've had issues. I now have a situation that needs attention, because I am being asked to pay a deposit on my new account in order to receive service. I believe this may be a systemic/administrative error that was simply overlooked.

My wife and I sold our townhome in August of this year where we had Comcast Service for 7 years and moved into a temporary apartment while we searched for a new house. I transferred service to this apartment successfully. We did have an issue with bill payment – the debit service for bill payment was not set up in time to capture my first bill at the new address and as a result was not debited from my account in a timely manner, even though I was told by an online rep (transcript available) and a phone rep that it wouldn’t be a problem and would be debited on time when I inquired. I rectified this situation after I started receiving shut off notices, and realized that Comcast wasn’t going to debit my account unless I told them to, even though they already had my debit info, it was setup on my account, and my account had been debited for the last 7 years.

I called Comcast’s local center in the Twin Cities on Saturday October 10^th in preparation for the move to my new home in Minneapolis Minnesota. I did not think I would have issues with this transfer since I had just done one with relatively few problems. I was wrong.

I purchased the property at (personal info omitted) a few weeks prior from (personal info omitted). They had used the house for institutional purposes and apparently had never shut off service to the property as a part of their bulk commercial account. I was originally informed of this by a representative around noon on Saturday the 10^thof October. I never heard back from that original rep or a subsequent rep that I talked to later that day.

By Tuesday afternoon when I hadn’t heard from anybody, I called the main Comcast Twin Cities number again and began talking to a third sales representative (Michele) in your Twin Cities office. At this point, I admit that I was a little perturbed because it had been 4 days since I had originally inquired about setting up new service, and it didn’t seem like anybody really wanted to help me get that set up.

Michele was very helpful and understanding, and was actually the first person at Comcast that seemed to actually care about the customer. She placed a call to the commercial group who told her to set up a new account instead of transferring my service and they’d take care of the shutdown of the old.

I was also asked to fax in proof that I owned the property. I understand why, and provided the Hennepin County Tax assessors record from their website, which already showed that I was the property owner (and is publicly searchable). Once I faxed that in, Michele called me back and we set up new service with an appointment for the following week (today, almost a week after I originally wanted service set up, due to the delays in shutting off the old account).

Imagine my surprise when a letter appears in my mailbox a few days ago, telling me that I would need to make a deposit to Comcast in order to acquire service, due to something found on my credit report from Equifax. It noted that it had been mentioned in my call to set up service, which it never was. I was also never informed of a credit check being re-done with my information. In response to this, I pulled a copy of my credit report from Equifax and have no accounts with negative standing or in collections. I also see no inquiries by Comcast in the recent past. I believe whatever credit check was done on me may have been done incorrectly.

Michele gave me her number to call her back if I had any issues. I left her a voicemail on this issue and never received a call back. It was disappointing to me since her service was otherwise excellent. I can only hope she's on vacation or otherwise out of the office.

I finally called the general Comcast number today to find out more information about this deposit levied against me, since the letter made no mention of the amount and it hadn’t been mentioned in my initial call. I was told it was going to be $200.00 and would be returned to me once I established a clean payment history. Since I’m technically trying to transfer my service from my account that I’ve had for 7 years and have never had a late payment other than the one that was the result of the billing error I described at the beginning of this letter, I’m a little stunned that I’m now being subjected to this treatment. I just purchased the property at which this service is being installed and at that time, had a very good credit history and received a prime loan from a well known national lender.

I’m hoping this is some kind of administrative mistake. I believe that my credit information may have been improperly pulled by Comcast which is what is causing this error. I have a copy of my credit report and I'm willing to fax it to Comcast to help rectify this error. I’m going to go ahead and pay the $200.00 deposit today to set up my service, but I’m also looking at other options for service. I have two other options (DSL and city WIFI) for internet, and other television options involving sat dish. I think it’s pretty obvious that I’m a fan of Comcast’s quality of their internet and cable service and a lot of people would have completely given up on Comcast by now. I would like to continue my service, but I'd also like this deposit refunded as soon as possible.

My account is under phone number (personal details omitted)

Thank you for your time,

Bill Kinney

BOOM BITCH

2009-10-06T11:48:00.000-07:00

That's the phrase that my friends and I honed in on from this Fanhouse Dugout column of spring training 2008. For those of you not familiar, Dugout is a mock IM session (AOL Style)between baseball notables. The guys that write it started off by constantly mocking Jim Thome (late of the Dodgers, but it started when he was with the Indians). It made fun of Thome's midwestern-golly gee ness (whether Thome actually acts that ridiculous is a point of contention, for sure) and general dopey nature.

At any rate, the column tends to have a pretty acidic sense of humor. The Twins spring training preview of '08 featured the arrival of Delmon Young with some classic lines as "Boom Bitch", and Delmon saying "ya gat dam right i play in at huh-huh-huh metradomez, in they outfield they got got trash bags son, trash bags ".

So it's been fun to watch his surge of power over the last week, considering he's played way under his potential virtually the whole time he's been here.

I'm a lot higher on the Twins now than I was a few weeks ago. I'd hasten to say that I've been a bit fairweather this year. But there have been plenty of teams with the momentum come October that won it all and didn't necessarily play the best 162-game ball. And the Twins definitely have that momentum. Gleeman covers it here in great detail. It's pretty amazing when you read that, what they've done without Morneau and Crede in the lineup.

Excited to watch the last few innings of the game today. Go Twins!

Moving to the 612 area code.

2009-09-28T20:03:00.000-07:00

So, my wife and I are moving to Minneapolis proper in the next few weeks. We are still slumming it in an Eagan apartment which is a shithole of a place to live. It seems like the property managment company's trying to weed out the dead weight, but there's still some winners here- like the couple that got into a domestic verbal assault at 2:30 in the morning last week. And got the cops called on them. Or the losers that smoke pot and cigarettes on the stoop right outside my bedroom window 3 or 4 nights a week. Or the assholes that leave trash in the parking lot and on the stoop, like this lovely 40oz beer I encountered the other day. (I left it there for a day, until there was also a 95% full Steel Reserve can sitting next to it the following day. There's little kids running around here and you leave a mostly full beer can sitting out? Have some fucking pride in the place that you live, for fuck's sake.)

Oh sure, the new neighborhood has its issues as well, already. (sorry Minneapolis). Some jerk decided that they were going to leave 2 grocery bags full of paints/varnishes/stains at the end of my driveway. Does the sign on the house say "Recycling Center"? No, that's what I thought. The house and yard still do scream "NOBODY LIVES HERE" but we're already rectifying that quickly. Cleaning the place up will help. We did some major garden bed demolition already and it looks 10 times better in the alley already. In a few more weeks, it'll be obvious and you won't dump your paint in my driveway.

That nice little "WELCOME TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD" was tempered with meeting a couple of nice neighbors who had nothing but raves about the neighborhood. It's also tempered by the fact that I will no longer live in John Kline's congressional district, but instead in Keith Ellison's. While I don't always agree with Congressman Ellison, his politics are of a general persuasion more amicable to my early 30's self. Besides being infinitely more affable and accessible to his constituents, he demonstrates that he understands his constituency's needs better than old guard guys like Kline (although calling Kline old line is a bit of a misnomer in some ways, because he's only been in congress a few years more than Ellison).

So I thought it'd be interesting to compare their Twitter accounts. Twitter's been quite evident as a tool used by politicians, and the ones that get it (like a lot of celebrities as well) actually send tweets to the account themselves instead of some lackey assistant or PR person. And the ones that get it share personal info to connect with their constituents. Ellison wins on both counts. Unfortunatly, I can't compare because John Kline appears to have an account, but as of this writing has not sent anything to it.

Is John Kline on Facebook or something? Maybe, but I don't really care anymore. Me? I'm outta here. See ya later Suburbs, been nice knowin'ya!

Things I like about moving to the city in bullet point format

2009-08-21T09:57:00.001-07:00

We are about to come to agreement on a house in Minneapolis. My wife and I have been suburbanite dwellers for the last 7 years in Eagan. We're not terribly far from anything, about a 20-30 minute drive with no traffic to both downtowns. But we've been looking at doing something different.

So here goes:

no sprawl
Walking distance to coffee shops, bars, restaurants, other shopping establishments
City Wifi
Less driving to the places I go normally
Public Transit within a few blocks that runs til late at night
Closer to my friends that live in the city (most of them)
being able to potentially own one car
diversity
city has better web site, with more public access
save money on gas, still viable at higher gas prices
don't feel as isolated
houses/neighborhoods have way more charm/character
near one of the best urban bike trail systems in the country
a short bus ride to downtown or light rail

I'm sure I could go on and on.

Infinite What?

2009-08-07T07:47:00.001-07:00

So I'm going to try and play catchup with Infinite Jest this weekend. I'm about 200-300 pages behind but I've got a weekend relatively free of obligation.

It's mostly been moving, looking at houses and activities supporting those things which have occupied my time the last few weeks. But I also have another time waster.

I've been a fan of Big Brother for a number of years, I watched bits and pieces of it the first few years it was on, but really got into it starting in Season 8. I've been an avid watcher of the TV show and followed along with various blogs about the goings on of the show. I decided to take the plunge a week and half in and get the live feeds for the season. It was only 40 bucks for the whole season, about 2 months, and honestly, not that expensive comparatively speaking.

So, I'm coming clean about the fact that there's some nights I'd rather watch a bunch of strangers locked up in a mock house on a studio lot in Los Angeles then read. And that has also contributed to my lackluster showing in #infsum.

I'd been reading accounts of the live feeds and people kept saying that it was a completely different experience to watch them in conjunction with the TV show, and that is an accurate assertion. This year they also have added the flashback functionality which allows you to go back into the archives and watch old footage. This is useful particularly when there's not a whole lot going on live. There's also a whole host of web sites that provide minute by minute blows and summaries of what's been going on, so you can go back and watch.

It sounds really crazy, but it's strangely addictive, and you get to know the people. There's this theory of them being edited in certain ways for the TV show and it's totally true - there are sides to these people that they don't show too much on TV. It's hard to compress 100+ hours of house time per week into 3 hours.

All in all, it's a highly enjoyable activity and one that I'm not regretting. There's a constant source of entertainment that rarely gets boring, and can be done while doing other activities on the computer, etc.

The little things in life

2009-07-27T07:33:00.001-07:00

I am in serious denial about Infinite Summer. I've been an average of 100 pages off the pace for some time. My first writeup is probably also going to be my last. See, this is why blogging is bad for me sometimes, I lack consistency. Maybe that's why Twitter is so much more popular in my mind.

Anyway instead I will bring you commentary about the little things in life that I'm enjoying, in bullet point format:

My fixed coffee maker. I own a Cuisinart Grind and Brew coffee maker. It costs an absurd amount of money for such a device, but I owned a series of sub-par coffee makers prior including a couple of hand-me-downs. My requirements were a coffee maker where I could reliable set a timer, and one that was industrial enough to not start breaking or leaking water all over the place (I've owned a lot of cheap coffee makers). At any rate, the Cusinart Grind and Brew fit the bill and then some. It has a bean hopper that fits a half pound of beans and it grinds them to an exact quantity every time. This is the greatest coffee maker I've ever owned, and a few months ago it started breaking down on me. It would shut off about half way through brewing and require me to keep resetting it. It took a call to the Cusinart customer service people to realize that I hadn't ever de-scaled it with vinegar. Why it didn't occur to me sooner is beyond me (I've de-scaled plenty of coffee makers). So, I did this for the better part of a Saturday afternoon, watching limey junk shoot out of the thing for a good hour and about 6 cycles. But it's working great again. My wallet and my stomach thank me.

Horse Racing - I've been out to the track 3 times this season and I've had a great time every time. Last Saturday was especially fun - it was the claiming crown at Canterbury Downs - lots of good horses and great jockeys. Russel Baze was there, he's the jockey with the most wins in the history of the sport (I don't think Kevin Gorg went 20 minutes without mentioning it the entire day). He was also riding a bunch of middle of the pack horses that were not favorites. Still, he managed to win two races in which we had Win/Place/Show bets and we also hit the Exacta on one of the races. (totally on a whim, I decided to bet on his horse and the exacta at the last minute). Total winnings of 140 bucks from these 2 races. Not too shabby - we basically ate and drank for free and had a good time while doing so.

Lazy Sundays - Katie and I drank coffee, played bejeweled blitz and watched the Big Brother feeds yesterday morning and it was pretty perfect. After the storm of work on the house to get it market ready, it's nice to have some lazy weekends where we do whatever we want.

Big Brother Feeds - as mentioned in the prior item, I got the live feeds for Big Brother this year. Totally worth it. They have a flashback option which is killer, and it's totally fun to see the whole picture. I'd been reading bloggers who were talking about all the stuff you were missing if you didn't watch the live feeds and they are totally right. They edit the show in ways they want to edit it and it's not always totally accurate as to what is really going on. My habit is to go home and watch the salient points from the prior night for an hour or two based on the various guides out there, then flip on the live feeds and watch them while doing other things.

Podcasting: I've always been a fan, but now more than ever, I'm hooked. My favorites in no particular order are The Bill Simmons Report (ESPN), This Week in Tech, and various Public Radio shows (This American Life, Car Talk, Fresh Air, Marketplace). My only grip is that I wish my Ipod touch had an option to synch all new episodes over wifi versus always having to sync with Itunes. You can download individual shows directly on the touch, but you have to manually go in and find them.

It's been a great summer so far and these are just a few of the things that are contributing to that.

Infinite Summer Week 1 (and a half)

2009-07-01T07:06:00.001-07:00

I decided that I'm going to do these updates every week. This one is a little late because I got engrossed in another Wallace novel, The Broom in the System, which I've now completed.

Status: Page 66 (slightly behind the pace)

Most interesting thing I read this week:the scene where Erdedy is waiting for his drug dealer to show up (chapter 2- pages 17-27). DFW really captures the frantic essence of the character and situation.

To be explored in more detail: Scene with Wardine. I'm told it comes together later.

Laugh Out Loud Moment: Filmography of James Incandenza:

"Various Small Flames. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Cosgrove, Watt, Pam Heath, Ken N. Johnson; 16 mm.; 25 minutes w/ recursive loop for automatic replay; color; silent w/ sounds of human coitus appropriated from and credited to Caballero Control Corp. adult videos. Parody of neconceptual structuralist films of Godbout and Vodriard, n-frame images of myriad varieties of small household flames, from lighters and birthday candles to stovetop gas rings and grass clippings ingnited by sunlight through a magnifying glass, alternated with anti-narritive sequences of a man (Watt) sitting in a dark bedroom drinking bourbon while his wife (Heath) and an Amway representative (Johnson) have acrobatic coitus in the background's lit hallway. UNRELEASED DUE TO LITIGATION BY 1960S US CONCEPTUAL DIRECTOR OF VARIOUS SMALL FIRES ED RUSCHA - INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE RELEASE #330-54-94 (Y.T.-S.D.B)"

So, how did I get here? Count me in among those that had barely ever heard of David Foster Wallace until his passing. I don't roll in those literary circles usually (though I have several friends that do). I'm mostly a non-fiction reader these days, I read a lot of business books and biographies. I've (somewhat ridiculously) limited my fiction reading to brain candy type stuff, like Vince Flynn and John Grisham - mass market stuff that's entertaining, but lacking any kind of interesting depth and meaning. Things that I can plow through in a few days without really thinking much. The reading equivalent of reality television (versus watching something of more substance, if it exisits these days, which one could argue).

Up till now, my experience with DFW has been a random essay in a magazine - I also read some of the Harper's stuff that they neatly collected after his death. He's right up my alley though, and I found Broom utterly enjoyable with many poignant and funny moments, yet mixed with a serious tone at points. He really does a fabulous job at character creation and conveyance of the character's thoughts and emotions.

I first heard about Infinite Summer nearly simultaneously on my Twitter account from my hombres Lauren Jumi and Jenni. Lauren's co-running the Infinite Summer Community on livejournal, and between that, the discussion boards on goodreads, and infinite summer site's discussion board, there's plenty of online outlets to discuss the book. I've picked up some clues from these areas. I also purchased a copy of Elegant Complexity to supplement, and it's already come in handy a few times to examine the overall narrative structure and some of the particular scenes of interest.

I'd been meaning to pick up more books of substance and read, and this gets me well on my way.

More to come...

Musings on Social Interaction on the Web

2009-06-25T13:35:00.000-07:00

Man, like other blog endeavors that I've had over the last bunch of years, this one's not going much better in terms of timeliness of posting. It's been almost 2 months since I last joined ye, loyal readers (all four of you, judging from my stats, if my shit doesn't get buried in your google readers anyway).

At any rate, I'll leave this up as my long form forum for all things Willis/Billhelm/W/whatever you wanna call me. No harm, no foul, right?

I think Twitter consumes most of my daily posting mojo. Sadly, it's in a somewhat restrictive format.

I follow a lot of technology crazy internet celebrities on there like Robert Scoble and Dave Winer over on Twitter. These guys are constantly talking about things like Twitter and new technologies. I've been follwing both of them (and some others) for a while, both always had good blogs, and Winer was heavily involved in podcasting in the early days, which I followed closely at the time.

Scoble's always going on and on about friendfeed. He loves the service and is probably their biggest evangelist. I joined it a long time ago but found it to be not terribly useful. You can follow your friends from other services, but you only see their posts on it. If you mostly follow people that only have twitter, then there's almost no point - particuarly when you check Twitter several times a day.

Last week, I decided to make my feed public, and start following some other people. It's working. I like the stuff that comes up, and unlike Twitter, where I have this strange, insatiable need to view just about every tweet, I can just sample friendfeed when I have some time. I follow enough of a critical mass that there's always new things, and it shows friend of a friend entries.

Another thing came along this week, also courtesy of Scoble, that of feedly. It's a plugin for firefox that combined with the site, provides another way to view google reader feeds. And man, it's pretty sweet. It also integrates with friendfeed so you can see conversations that might already be going on. It has a twitter sidebar, and lots of goodies. I like the digest format when I only have a few minutes to read because it bubbles up things that I'm more interested in to the surface.

Finally, I'm giving foursquare a go again. I had deleted it a few months back because I didn't really like how it integrated with Twitter. But this time, I've scaled it back, and they've also added features to their mobile web and Iphone client to send to Twitter or not, which is helpful. A few of my friends are very big fans of the service and use it quite a bit. It's what dodgeball could have been and then some.

Comments on the Star Trek Franchise

2009-05-08T10:27:00.000-07:00

I'm a nerd in many respects - mostly with regard to technology, but I've always lived on the fringes of sci-fi, fantasy popular culture. For example, I'm on the edge of the Trekkie Kingdom. Not quite hardcore enough to have consumed every episode ever made, though I have seen most episodes of next gen, many of the original series, and briefly watched Voyager (I lost interest after the first season). Haven't read more than one or two of the books, and that was back in high school when I worked at a bookstore and got them for free. I have, however, seen all of the movies multiple times - I owned the original cast movies on VHS, all 6 of them in the pretty mid-90s box set seen below (that clearly came out after 5, but hey, we have to add 6 to the set, so there's that extra space.
Exhibit a:
So yeah, that was a great set of films. Of course, the old fan adage holds true for me, more or less, that the even numbered movies were the best ones, and the odd numbered ones, somewhat lackluster. ST IV is my favorite one still to this day.

More recently, I was hankering for the DVD set, so I actually went out and purchased the full 10 DVD set, though I've only watched the first couple thus far.

My fandom with the movies has been less devout more recently, for example, I can't remember if I even bothered with Star Trek:Nemesis. By then, they had totally run the Next Gen shit into the ground. I don't really think Next Gen ever really hit it's stride in the movies.

So, when I started hearing that JJ Abrams and crew were going to be making a prequel of sorts, my interest perked up again. Sounds like something that could breathe some life into the corpse that the thing had mostly become. I've been following the goings on of the "prequel" from a distance, hearing a lot of great things, the reviews that have come out have been favorable, and the Trekkie Kingdom seems to be giving a thumbs up.

I'm going to see the film on opening night, I didn't go to a midnight showing, because damn, I'm not that harcore and I had to work. Plus, the last midnight showing I went to was Star Wars ep I, and that was the biggest disappointment in the world, considering that me and my friends camped out in the parking lot of the theather. But I will brave the crowds tonight for Star Trek, and hopefully it will be worth it. (I hate opening weekends for movies normally, I like room to spread out!!)

I don't know where the franchise goes from here, I suppose more movies. I wonder if they'll ever get a successful TV show off the ground again - I do sort of miss the weekly ins and outs of a Trek-centered show. I gave Enterprise a whirl for a few episodes but just was not my thing.

Urban/Suburban Sprawl

2009-04-28T08:16:00.000-07:00

I am starting to have more concern about this topic then I had in the past. Maybe slightly ironically, because I live in your typical suburban condo development and have for 7 years. All the stores I regularly shop at are sprawled about within a few miles of my home. But there's nothing within reasonable walking distance from my house.

I live in an inner ring or second tier suburb, if you drive out another 10-15 miles on a major freeway, it's just like this all over. It really makes me wonder about the sustainability of it all. Can we continue to develop every last square inch of land for strip malls and spread out, cookie cutter style housing developments?

It really hit me on a recent trip to visit my Grandma in Naples, Florida. Naples is your typical Florida retirement community - it has achieved absurd growth over the last 20 years. Since the 1980s, the West Coast of Florida has been a viable alternative for some looking to avoid the more populus Miami/West Palm/Ft Lauderdale complex. My grandparents first moved to the area in the early to mid 1990s as snowbirds. Upon first visiting you got the impression that it was certainly on the way up population wise. They moved to a well known development called Pelican Bay and it was pretty clear that there was still room for this development to grow. Not any longer - Pelican Bay seems nearly fully developed, as do most of the coastal development in that area. The development of housing communities in that area now extends 10 to 15 miles east of I-75 with no signs of stopping (maybe slowing a bit due to current economic conditions).

What really struck me was the strip malls, they've continued to multiply in somewhat of a willy nilly fashion in that area, and the saturation of businesses is pretty crazy - you have every type of restaurant imaginable, what seems like a grocery store at every major intersection, stores of all sizes and shapes plugged into themed strip malls. Naples has virtually no high density areas, it has a downtown that's 8 or 9 square blocks, but the rest of it exists in this massive strip mall sprawl along US 41 and other east/west and north/south coridores, and the massive-mega acreage developmens with fancy names. There is a good mix of density in many of these developments, but most of them still require you to get in your car to dine, shop or run errands.

I'd imagine that, eventually, it will hit a critical mass, where new development will slow down, but there's no sign of that occuring as of yet, and there's more and more baby boomers retiring every day.

I'd like to see a more thoughtful approach to community design in this country, and we have to do more than building poorly desgined "city center" type developments that end up being a bust. But I wonder where that's going to come from or when it will ever happen. I have hope that higher fuel prices will spurn people to think about this more, and I think it might be one of the only things that does so. Otherwise, cheap land and developer greed seem to be winning this battle - in the short term it's beneficial, but the long run damage that we are doing seems to be too great to ignore anymore.

The evolution of social networking in my life

2009-04-13T07:49:00.000-07:00

I've been on Twitter and Facebook for a year or two now, and been a user of various social networking sites since I can remember, long before sites like myspace and friendster were popular. I enjoy them quite a bit, though they've, until recently, tended to be used by the more technology literate in my life. Which is a large number of my friends, unsuprisingly.

The bar on sites like Facebook seems to have come down recently - the generation gap has subsided - with various aunts, uncles, and parents on the site (can't tell how much any of them actually use it on a regular basis, doesn't seem like a lot). With the requisite filters set up to deal with mom and dad not being able to see every detail of my social life, I can deal with the fall of the generational barrier. Now if I could just get them to use the service in some meaningful way. Even an occasional status update or picture posted would be better that the mostly barren profiles I currently see. The youngest in my family are the heaviest users of facebook, I seem to fall somewhere in between, but even my sister and my cousins who are early gen-x'ers (as opposed to the borderline late gen x/early gen y'er) that I am seems to be using facebook quite a bit.

It occured to me at family Easter activities with my in-laws yesterday that the technology barrier is becoming an increasing problem for those without - I've seen lots of pictures of my 6 month old nephew via facebook, but my sister-in-law is less inclined to email or share those pictures in ways that the older members of my family can see. It's motivating people to want to get on facebook - my mother-in-law, who is seemingly always alternating between fear and disinterest of technology is even wanting to get in on the action. No Facebook account for her yet. Father-in-law does have an account (assuming for purpose of viewing said photos) which does not have so much as a profile picture (another sign of an extremely casual facebook user).

Meanwhile, my phone and unlimited text messaging plan has become a huge and constant distraction, and it is starting to impact my actual 1:1 communications with people. My phone rings, buzzes, beeps so much that I ignore legitimate calls and text messages till often long after they are relevant. I find myself leaving my phone in places where I will not hear it ring or buzz.

I became very keenly aware of how big of a distraction it was becoming when the new service Four Square recently opened its doors. The service is an evolution of Dodgeball, a now defunct service that a number of my friends used for several years. They've integrated it with Twitter versus making it it's own thing, which on the surface is a great thing for those of us that use Twitter. It has a better website then dodgeball ever did on day 1 and the mobile web experience is great. I really like the service. But I've already deleted my account. Why? Because of the level of distraction and the inability to control it. You can choose to publicly post your check ins on your twitter stream, which I was not interested in doing, but many of my friends do. So I can already see those there. But there's another option to send a direct message. I see this as sort of an either-or, but some of my friends chose to do both. It became a constant stream of text messages and twitter spam on a Friday/Saturday night. The last straw for me was when I awoke one Sunday morning to over 100 new text messages, many relaying the check in statuses of my friends out and and about the night before (and many in duplicate). I could turn off Dodgeball and completely ignore it when spending a night in - but not as much with this service. I think I've just hit a time and a place in my life where the appeal of going out to the bar often gets trumped by having a more low-key evening with a group of friends at somebody's house or just hanging out with my wife watching movies and such.

I've taken it a step further though, and something that happened at work prompted me to take it there. I was on a number of distributions that were crucial to my job a year ago, but now are unnecessary. I got off of these recently, and realized that they were generating a good 25% of my email. I also realized that I'm now able to focus more on the communications that actually need my attention. It occured to me that my personal cell phone was becoming much the same way - all the twitters and facebook updates were causing me to become distracted from matters at hand or communications with people (ask my wife, I've missed several crucial phone calls because of this). So, I've turned it all off, and I'm going to try and keep it that way for a while. I'll still look at Twitter and Facebook, but I'll pull the info when I want to see it, versus having any of it pushed to me. I think it will work out well and allow me to focus more with less distraction.

Financial Ignorance

2008-10-04T01:26:00.000-07:00

It's downright amazing to me how many people out there are so blissfully ignorant or naive regarding what is going in the financial markets right now. Granted, I might be a bit biases since my background is in finance, and I work at a bank, but people can't seem to take the time to understand what is going on, and base their opinion of things like the bailout bill and various other economic events on media or political soundbites. These soundbites are often stated by individuals just as ignorant or naive about the issues.

I don't, by any means, claim to be an expert regarding the situation that is occurring. I do truly believe that there are few people in this country that fully understand what is going on and the impacts it is having. There may not even be anybody, when it comes down to it. But still, part of the reason we are getting into these messes is that they are too complex for any reasonable person to comprehend.

Anyone looking to start with a primer on what's going on in simple layman's terms ought to listen to this episode of This American Life. It's from last April when the collapse was starting to really hit hard. Another thing to watch is this interview with Warren Buffet from earlier this week. I'm also about 40 pages into the new biography, The Snowball, about Warren Buffet. It's a great read so far, and I reccomend it.

If people just took a fraction out of their day to educate themselves about what is truly going on, it might help to quell the fear, panic, and loathing that the mainstream media is blathering all over the print and airwaves.

Hurricane Coverage on Twitter

2008-09-13T13:08:00.001-07:00

I've been watching the Hurricane Ike coverage for the better part of the last 24 hours. I did sleep a little bit in there too.

Having grown up in the CNN era, I am used to flipping on CNN and watching it for hours when something big hits the news cycle. I still do that, but I also find myself using Twitter and Twitter Search to find people reporting from Houston and Galveston. It's been quite interesting to follow activities there.

You can constantly refresh various Twitter Searches, such as this one on Ike. Lots of stuff pops up on Twitter before it ever makes its way to the cable news nets - and there's also a lot more variety. This morning I watched Betty Nguyen talk about the same building that lost their air conditioning, and showing us a traffic light that had blown over for 4 hours. She must have repeated this same cycle 6 times. And they were not re-playing this footage, it was live.

CNN is starting to understand the power of Twitter - CNN correspondent Rick Sanchez was Tweeting in between live spots last night on his Twitter account. On the other hand, Anderson Cooper's producers kept recycling links to old blog posts on his Twitter. Not terribly useful.

The Austin Statesman had their reporters and photographers send twitters to a special Hurricane Ike account and it's been great coverage so far. They get that Twitter should be more than just another place to aggregate links to blog posts or articles and can provide blow by blow coverage of live exploration pretty easily. The Houston Chronicle could learn a thing or two from this coverage, their Twitter account seemed to mostly be linking to blog posts or new articles.

I've always disliked reading Twitter accounts that mostly use it as a link aggregation tool and don't follow those accounts that just do that - Google Reader is a much better tool for gathering those...

Twitter has gotten so popular that it's really become the tool on the net for reaction to live events. It's pretty cool.

First Post

2008-09-13T13:06:00.001-07:00

I am a winner at blogging and life.