Archive for category About
Ending the Radio Silence
It’s been a few months since my last post, and I’m determined not to let this blog fall into obscurity and disrepair before it even gets going, like so many housing development projects of ’08-’09. My excuse this time around is that my creative attention has been drawn away these past few months by a new job.
I don’t want to spend too many words on that now, as a transition like that is always a personal and delicate thing. Suffice it to say that I really loved my previous employer (www.yogapro.com), worked with a bunch of great people and learned and grew an incredible amount in just 3 short years, but it came time for me to move on. And somehow amid the job crisis I was lucky enough to do just that. In fact, I had quite a long conversation with a very close friend about how I’ve led a seemingly charmed life, with many major events “falling into my lap,” and whether that meant it was important or not to “seek out” your life’s purpose. But that’s all for a separate post.
Which brings us to the present, where I’m currently working for Greenview Data, a very cool and nerdy company whose office abuts a cornfield and who employs a dog named Otis to ensure that no scrap of food goes un-begged for. I wear a few hats at the company and I’m still feeling my way around, but I’m mainly responsible for managing the website (with a redesign hopefully coming soon) and new social media efforts, which is all a fancy way to say I’m spending my days tweeting and blogging. Thus, not as much attention for my own online social presence. However, in the coming months I should have some more time on my hands (more on that later), so now seemed to be as good a time as any to climb back on the horse. I’m getting ready to throw my hat into the Tumblr ring (tumblr.dgoings.com) so hopefully that will fill the void a bit between here and twitter.
In other news, I still really want a Nook but keep forcing myself to hold off for that sweet Android tablet with the Pixel Qi screen that I’m sure is gonna show up any month now. I’m almost certainly getting an HTC EVO next month, assuming they get more in stock, which will be my fourth smartphone since April ’07 (Moto Q, iPhone3G, myTouch3G) and keeping Verizon the only major carrier I haven’t used in the last decade. And I’m more upset by the World Cup not having instant replay for goals than by the U.S. national team losing.
My Hairpocalypse
As promised, in preparation for the 826Michigan Mustache-A-Thon, I have undergone a transformation. I have lost inches, pounds, and perhaps even years off my head (please ignore the copious gray hairs). It was in effect like going through a Haircut Time Machine. Hopefully it won’t get made into a movie.
Before
After
Now the difficult part begins. Many of you have already generously donated or pledged to the Mustache-a-thon, and in return I am going to try and grow the best damn 5-week mustache you have ever seen. I’ll continue to update here as things progress.
And of course, if you haven’t donated yet, please consider it. You don’t have to donate much, even $2 would be appreciated. And it’s super-easy, just use the donate button below and use your credit card (no paypal account required). Or, you can always check out my profile page on the official 826Michigan website. You can even donate for some of the other growers there (just make sure you throw me a little something).
And if you’re interested, here’s a little time-lapse gallery of my complete transformation.
Growing a mustache for a cause!
The walrus. The imperial. The handlebar. The fu manchu. Mustaches: they grow on you.
And, now, they can help school children ages 6-18 improve their literacy, creative and expository writing skills!
I’m going to be participating in the 826Michigan Mustache-a-thon. What’s that you ask? Well, I’ll let them tell you all about it at their official website – http://www.826michigan.org/mustache/. But in summary: author Dave Eggers started the non-profit 826Michigan to focus on mentoring kids in creative writing. It’s a great organization that offers tutoring, writing workshops, seminars, field trips and publishing for Ann Arbor area students and even adults, all at no cost to the students.
The Mustache-A-Thon is an aptly named and equivalently awesome fundraising event, where participants get together and yes, grow out their mustaches for charity! It runs over 6 weeks, during which we’ll start clean-shaven and slowly let our upper-lip hair run wild. No goatees. No soul-patches. And hopefully in return, if you care about education, or creative writing, or just feel bad for the embarrassment some of us may endure, you’ll make a small donation. It’s a mustache cash bash!
So if you’d like to help out, please just use the Donate button below, which will go directly to 826Michigan in my name. And your donations are tax deductible! That’s right, you can get a tax rebate from my mustache. If this wasn’t a charity to support education, I might have said it was too cool for school.
Not sure how much to donate? $8.26 is a great way to start, but even $2 will be appreciated. The A-Thon goes for six weeks, so if you don’t feel like you can make a donation now, you’ll have all the way until April.
You can also be a grower yourself! If you’re in the Ann Arbor, MI area, check out this poster image to see how you can participate: http://www.scythematters.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/mustache-poster.jpg
The official website will be posting updates as the weeks go by, showing the progress of all the growers. You can check out my personal profile page here, and I’ll also post some updates on this blog. Just to give you some final motivation for donating, I’ll leave you with this – a photo of my current facial hair, which will ALL be coming off, along with a serious haircut, in preparation for this event. That’s right, I’m sacrificing all this manhood and winter-mountain-man pride for the children. All I ask in return is that you skip that double-tall latté tomorrow morning and instead help some kids to become better writers.
Update: Seems that I had the wrong link code for the paypal donate button. Should be working now.
Bad Timing
I thought about why starting a blog would be a good idea. I thought about where, and how, and what.
I did not think about when. When turned out to be in the weeks leading up to a move to a new city. Bad Timing.
This will be, by rough count, my 10th move in 8 years, although easily the largest since most of those were either for college or the Peace Corps (the latter being long distance moves, but you don’t exactly pack up a whole house when you go to the Peace Corps). It’s an intrastate move, only 70 miles, but there’s a very narrow time window to do the actual moving, plus the amount of junk my wife and I have accumulated since those first moves is just astounding. I can’t actually fathom how all of those stuffed animals, board games, juice glasses, fake decorative flowers, Hannukah candles, crappy end tables, bean bag chairs, and ice cream makers fit into our little two-bedroom apartment. And there was no way we were going to cram them all into the next one. Let’s just say the Goodwill drop-off center was a little more crowded this year, and that I’ve had a little less time than expected for extraneous web musings.
Once the move is completed, I’ll follow up with some thoughts for anyone else preparing for a life-upheaval. Until then, why don’t you all enjoy the weather for me while I’m taping boxes.
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I installed my ProClip phone mount in my car today and absolutely love it. ProClip makes custom mounts and holders for pretty much any car and mobile device out there. I emailed them shortly after getting my new HTC Evo because they didn’t have a holder for it yet, and was told that it was being worked on and I’d be notified when it was available.
Sure enough, I got an email yesterday letting me know they were in stock and could be ordered online, along with links directly to the product. I immediately placed my order.
Literally one day later, it was here. Yeah, it only shipped from Illinois to Michigan, but it was sent via ground (FedEx), and we’re talking about an order for a brand new item that was processed, fulfilled, and sent-out same day. Consider me seriously impressed.
And of course, the product itself is awesome. The mount for my car is designed to go on without damaging, marking, or even requiring any disassembly of the dash. It’s on there really solidly (I drove over some rough roads to find out), and the holder for the phone fits perfectly and is covered in a felt-like fabric so it won’t ever scratch the phone and dampens any vibrations even further.
Point is, if you use your mobile phone (or mp3 player) in your car for music/navigation assistant/stoplight entertainment (no texting while driving!), you should just buy a ProClip now. They’re not even expensive.
Dammit, tumblr
I want to like you, I really do. But seriously, this is getting frustrating.
I put things in the queue, and they don’t get posted.
I post things, and they don’t get forwarded to Twitter, or they do - twice.
I put things in the queue, they don’t get posted, so I remove them from the queue and manually repost them, and then they inexplicably show up in the queue again, where I delete them, only to have my manual post deleted as well. WTF?!?!
This kind of reminds me of Twitter’s growth phase (which is maybe still ongoing), where there’s random downtime, and sometimes some things are working while others are not. But look, you’ve been in the news recently for reaching the 1 Billion Posts milestone. I think we could all live with a little downtime here and there, but let’s fix the blatant and obvious bugs, k?
Editing tumblr themes
I just now figured out that you can directly edit the html/css of any tumblr theme. So that only took me like, what, two months? Progress people, progress.
In one way, I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read—if not indeed write—the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?
Hitchens on battling cancer. (via cajunboy) (via soupsoup)
Brilliant and jarring… For as long as it takes to read this essay, you will have his cancer. And when you are done reading it, you will not have it anymore. (Hopefully he won’t, either.) But what you will be left with in your newly-minted “still hopefully cancer-free” state of health is a better appreciation of your life.
(via jhnmyr)
Engineers are notoriously frugal. This is not because of cheapness or mean spirit; it is simply because every spending situation is simply a problem in optimization, that is, “How can I escape this situation while retaining the greatest amount of cash?
Man did this hit the nail on the head for me.
