Posts Tagged me
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 Bracket
I’m certainly no expert, but on the off chance that I get insanely lucky this year, I want to rub it in the world’s collective faces.
Of course I filled out several brackets, but this is the one I like the best. Below is also the link to my bracket on ESPN, to show that it was in fact filled out and submitted on time. No fakery hear, just truth.
http://games.espn.go.com/tcmen/en/entry?entryID=5287089
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.
Review of the Vertical Jump Bible, Part 1
I love basketball. L. O. V. E. love. I love watching it – both college and pro – I love playing it, I love talking about it, and I can already tell I will love blogging about it. And, being that I’m a skinny 5’8″ white guy, of course one of my dreams is to be able to dunk a basketball. Regulation size, on a regulation hoop.
So, I’ve set out on a mission to improve my vertical jumping ability and reach that goal. At 26 years old, I think my peak-athletic window is closing, so it’s now or never, and with that I took the plunge and purchased one of those sketchy-feeling vertical leap training manuals, specifically the Vertical Jump Bible. One look at that website will tell you all you need to know about why I was hesitant to spend money on this, but my own exercise routine wasn’t cutting it and I thought, if nothing else, it would be $40 well spent toward some entertaining blog stories.
I also thought this would be a great opportunity to actually review this manual. There’s a ton of information online (as with all things) for increasing one’s vertical, with some packages claiming “super secret formula” going for as high as $300! And while all of these sites have plenty of testimonials, there’s very little in the way of real review and analysis. The best I could find were short threads on various bulletin boards of people saying it was or wasn’t good, never going in-depth. At $40, the VJB is one of the cheaper options out there with at least some people online claiming that it’s effective. It’ll be some weeks before I can definitively answer that, but I’ve already gained some insight that hopefully will benefit future short caucasians in their quest for that elusive slam-dunk glory.
What you get when you purchase the Vertical Jump Bible
For $40, you get the main training guide, about 150 pages, plus two supplements (20 and 50 pages), all as PDFs. Except, the main guide is protected by Virtual Vault software from CBP, a stupid method of blocking access to things like printing out the document or sharing it with others. The VJB website actually says that you can print the document, but I couldn’t get it to. Not only that, but when you first open the file you have to register it with the Virtual Vault software, after which it becomes licensed to THAT COMPUTER ONLY. Meaning you can’t open and read the file anywhere else. If you registered this on your laptop and then your harddrive died…oh well. Plus, it only works on Windows. Own a Mac and you just paid $40 for this? Too bad. Not exactly customer friendly.
Fortunately, the Virtual Vault software is basically nothing but a file wrapper: I fired up a hex editor, deleted the protection stuff around the actual book, and voila, I now have an unrestricted PDF. To the author of the Vertical Jump Bible: stop wasting money on DRM. Your book is not that special, you’re only frustrating your customers, and you’re stuffing CBP’s pockets for a product that anyone can break in a couple of minutes.
My baseline
Of course, before I can review the performance of the VJB, I needed to get a baseline. How high can I actually jump? And more importantly, how much higher do I need to jump to be able to dunk?
Makeshift vertical jump meter
So I got my best friend to help me set up a makeshift vertical leap measure. With a tape measure, some scrap paper, and some scotch tape, we created this –>
Each strip of paper is 1 inch tall, and we marked from 8 feet to 9’6″. We then took some basic measurements: my standing reach (how high I can reach when flat footed on the ground), my stationary vertical leap (how high I can jump from a standing postion), and my running vertical leap. My friend spotted my measurements (from a step ladder) as I flailed and swatted at tiny strips of paper.
Here are my results:
| Measurement | Height (inches) |
| Standing Reach | 90 |
| Stationary vertical | 108 |
| Running vertical | 114 |
So I have a standing reach of 7’6″ and a standing vertical of 9′, giving me an 18 inch vertical jump. But that’s just straight up from a standstill. With a running start, I reached 9’6″ for a 24 inch vert. Certainly not a bad start. But definitely a lot of room for improvement. After these tests, I’ve settled on a lofty goal: I want to add another 22 inches to my vertical. I figure, 6 more gets me to the rim, another 12 gets my hand high enough to actually dunk, and another 4 gets my elbow almost to the rim, at which point I could do some spectacular things 
. A 46″ leap: the dream of every 5’8″ guy who’s ever touched a basketball.
Standing under my makeshift vertical jump measuring tool
Rising up for a vertical jump from a running start
But can the Vertical Jump Bible get me there? It’s certainly not going to happen overnight, but if the online testimonials are to be at all believed, even more impressive feats have been achieved, so we’ll see. I’ll be back in a few weeks to update on my progress and give some more insight into how much value a $40 pdf about jumping can actually provide.
The day that Apple killed the iPhone (for me, anyway)
I’ve had the iPhone 3G for a year now, and I’ve been really happy with it. My wife and I switched from Sprint to AT&T to get it (even paid a hefty early-termination fee) because Sprint was sucktastic and we wanted the new hotness. And all was good in the land of Oz, until…
Apple and AT&T started crippling the iPhone with their “amazing” App Store. Which really is amazing, but could be so much better if they’d actually open it up and let in all the cool stuff. You can find tons of info on how the App Store approval process makes no sense with a simple Google search, but just a few examples are blocking the video streaming app Qik, crippling the Sling Player app (wifi only), and recently forcing Google to make their Latitude service into a web app instead of native application.
And now, for me at least, the last straw came yesterday when Sean Kovacs, the developer of the GV Mobile app that lets you connect to and use your Google Voice account, announced that Apple was pulling his app from the App Store (along with the other GV apps). After that news broke, more info leaked out about how Google had even submitted their own GV app some six weeks ago which Apple would not allow into the App Store. Meanwhile, there are native Google apps for Google Voice available on both Blackberry and Android phones (as well as other iPhone-unavailable apps, like Qik), and there remain apps in the App Store that do the same kinds of things GV Mobile did.
If you don’t yet know about Google Voice, I suggest you look into it. It’s still an invite-only service, but Google is making a strong effort to open it up to many users, and for a lot of reasons it looks great. The big ones though are that it gives you a new, “central” phone number that you can use to channel all of your phone calls through, along with the ability to have your voicemails transcribed to text and emailed to you, and free sms messages. All big things for cell phone users and people juggling several numbers (office, home landline, cell, perhaps a business cell, etc).
However, there are some limitations to using the service, the biggest of which is that while you may have a shiny new GV number for people to call you, when you call them they still see your old phone number. An iPhone (or Blackberry or Android or Windows Mobile) app can fix this, which is exactly what GV Mobile and others were doing. And now, inexplicably, that’s over and gone.
Personally, I’m sick of it. I laid out a lot of cash in order to get a device that was supposed to free me from the constraints of typical cell phones. And while it started out on the right path, things took a wrong turn somewhere and now I’m more aware of what I can’t do with it than what I can. If somebody asked me today whether they should switch to AT&T to get an iPhone, my answer would be an emphatic NO. And if you’re already on AT&T? Well, it would be a big MAYBE, depending on what you want it for. Personally, I want streaming video and Google Voice on my phone, and it’s looking like I’m going to have to jump ship again to get it.
If you’re in the same boat as me, you have a few options. You could jailbreak your phone to get some of these restricted apps (Gizmodo has a great step-by-step guide) – Kovacs has released GV Mobile for jailbroken phones. Or you could sell your iPhone to pay for the early termination fees and pick up an Android or Blackberry handset (or maybe the Palm Pre) from Verizon or Sprint. I’d also suggest leaving Apple some feedback, in the hopes that they get the message and repent. Here’s what I submitted to Apple through their iPhone feedback form:
The news today that Apple is not only pulling all of the Google Voice apps from the App Store, but has also already blocked the addition of Google’s exclusive GV app, has infuriated me to the point of considering my options for ditching the iPhone and AT&T. There’s been plenty of examples of the shoddy state of the App Store and the decisions about what gets in or not, and this is for me just the last straw.
I switched from Sprint to AT&T to get the iPhone 3G last year, and I’ve been extremely happy overall with both the phone and the carrier. But the main reason I love the iPhone, and why I tell others to get one, is because of the App Store and how it opens up the platform to be so much more than just a regular cell phone. I’m sorry, AT&T, if Google Voice scares you, but you’re already doing enough to discourage me as a customer with exorbitant sms fees and blocking or crippling other apps like Qik, Sling player, and Google Latitude. But keeping these apps away from me is not doing anything to persuade me to stick with you. I’m not going to stop paying you over $100/mo for cell phone service just because I now have a Google Voice app. It just means I’ll be using a new number, and not texting through your service (which I avoid like the plague anyhow). And Apple: bowing to the pressure of AT&T, whatever the reasons, makes you just as culpable.
If it means switching to Verizon or Sprint and buying an AndroidOS phone or a Blackberry so that I can get apps like Qik and Google Voice for my phone, so be it. I’m sick of this shit, and unless you all do an about face really quick then I’m not going to deal with it anymore.
I don’t have any delusions about my (in)significance to Apple and AT&T, but that doesn’t mean I have to sit idly by and accept their baloney, and neither do you. If there’s one thing these companies will listen to, it’s our dollars, and as long as they’re blocking Google Voice apps I don’t want to give them any more of mine.
Update: A great article from TechCrunch (with some amazing comments) on why Apple may have pulled Google Voice
Update: And a great article from LifeHacker exploring why this is such a big issue, and ultimately not just for iPhone owners.
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.
RSS
My Tumblr
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.
