This is over 2 years old, but it's worth seeing again:
Also, another random tip for the morning - for some odd reason I actually channel surfed this morning. I recommend NEVER watching a show called "Parental Control" on MTV - quite stupid and a bit disturbing. Parents are supposed to pick the person their kid dates while their current boyfriend/girlfriend watches. How low we've gone...
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Thursday, January 29, 2009
A Night at the Charter House
Last evening (Wednesday), my jazz band, the "Notochords" played their annual Charter House concert. I always look forward to this concert every year for a number of reasons. First, the Charter House residents are primarily older people with medical needs, but still independent enough not to be in a nursing home, and the music we play is music they grew up with - big band tunes by Glen Miller, Count Basie, etc. Second, the facility itself is just wonderful, and the room we play in is bright and cheery and just a fun place to be. Finally, there is always a great crowd, and you can tell they really enjoy the music and are very responsive and appreciative. Most of the other gigs we do are dances, and while it's fun to see people enjoying themselves dancing, when you do a concert the focus is solely on the music. The hidden reason I am almost ashamed to mention is that, well, I'm a big show-off when it comes to saxophone, and playing first Alto Saxophone in a jazz band means you ARE the center of the band and the center of attention. There, I just revealed one of my deep dark secrets! :)Other News
Well it's still freaking cold here. I'm really about ready to get to spring now, and it's just February. Last night I finished filing my taxes online - that has got to be a record for me. I will be eagerly awaiting my refunds to tackle a few household projects - I'd like to put in a whole-house water filter, and possibly get a new sink (not sure on that one). For anyone who is looking for an inexpensive and very easy and convenient option for online taxes, I highly recommend H&R Block's TaxCut Online program - it is $14.95 for the basic version which includes federal e-file. If you want to add state e-file it's another $29.95. While there are free ones out there, I've read enough and heard enough to think that you get what you pay for - and $14.95 is a significant drop in price from last year's cost. Plus, being online, there's absolutely nothing to install, you can work on them anywhere, and you don't need any specific operating system. I have used this for 3 years now, and the interface is easy to use and the help and explanations of each field are good.
I am also in the process of putting together a new computer since the one Erin has is slowly dying. I'm very torn - if I order a pre-built one, it pretty much has to come with Vista, and I was hoping to skip Vista and wait until Windows 7 comes out. If I build my own I can still probably get away with XP but Vista probably takes advantage of newer hardware better. (yes, Cory and Michael, I already hear the "skip them both and get a Mac" chorus!) So far I only have one person that I know that has Vista and likes it, but they also know a lot about computers. If anyone has any recommendations about that or hardware in general, I'd love to hear them.
On a sad note, for those of you that know Erin, his grandpa passed away on Monday evening. He is down in Florida for the funeral tomorrow. Please think good thoughts and prayers for him and his family.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Easy like Sunday morning
I had quite a full week last week with work - I can feel crunch time getting closer and closer for our project, and it's definitely starting to show. I'm still enjoying the challenge though - I just hope it all falls into place soon.
This has also been an exciting week on the news, watching all the changes going on in the government. I really hope that this is the beginning of better days ahead - I can already see that the return toward transparency and government accountability has started. The economy, foreign relations, those both have a long ways to go - but I have hope for the future.
Friday night we had people over for dinner and to watch the second episode of the "final 10" of Battlestar Galactica. Not quite as dramatic as the previous week, but still interesting. I will be sad to see the show finish, on the other hand I also like that they planned to have 4 seasons and there will be a definite finish.
Saturday I got to participate in the final Peer Ministry retreat for the season, at Ironwood Springs. This class of 10th graders has spent 3 months learning life skills on how to be a better communicator, listener, friend, peer, etc. We were discussing during one of the breaks how long we've been doing this, and I've been a trainer for 6 years now - hard to believe.
Saturday night both Erin and I were tired and it was cold out and we just relaxed which was nice. This morning I met friend Bill for coffee and Erin joined me for church and the Peer Ministry commissioning, as well as the Sunday School yearly musical which was really fun to watch - this one was titled "Life of the Party". It is great to see the kids doing their own version of ministry - as unique and important as anything else we do at church.
Looking forward to what should be a more balanced week - including a band concert at the Charter House, one of my very favorite places to play.
This has also been an exciting week on the news, watching all the changes going on in the government. I really hope that this is the beginning of better days ahead - I can already see that the return toward transparency and government accountability has started. The economy, foreign relations, those both have a long ways to go - but I have hope for the future.
Friday night we had people over for dinner and to watch the second episode of the "final 10" of Battlestar Galactica. Not quite as dramatic as the previous week, but still interesting. I will be sad to see the show finish, on the other hand I also like that they planned to have 4 seasons and there will be a definite finish.
Saturday I got to participate in the final Peer Ministry retreat for the season, at Ironwood Springs. This class of 10th graders has spent 3 months learning life skills on how to be a better communicator, listener, friend, peer, etc. We were discussing during one of the breaks how long we've been doing this, and I've been a trainer for 6 years now - hard to believe.
Saturday night both Erin and I were tired and it was cold out and we just relaxed which was nice. This morning I met friend Bill for coffee and Erin joined me for church and the Peer Ministry commissioning, as well as the Sunday School yearly musical which was really fun to watch - this one was titled "Life of the Party". It is great to see the kids doing their own version of ministry - as unique and important as anything else we do at church.
Looking forward to what should be a more balanced week - including a band concert at the Charter House, one of my very favorite places to play.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Life's Key Points
It's been an interesting couple of days for me. A lot of you know that I recently got moved onto a project at work more "permanently", and it's work that I absolutely love doing and like the people I'm working with. I honestly look forward to coming to work almost every day!
The past few days has made me think again about how it seems that so much of what happens in your life is determined by a few key moments or decisions. While I don't believe that is completely true (I think in the bigger picture, the person you are and how you act and treat other people DOES come back to you), it certainly does seem like you can pinpoint certain moments and decisions that sent you down a completely different path. I tend to do a lot of "what-if" thinking, maybe why I think about this a lot.
In particular, the whole reason I'm on this project at all is because 2 1/2 years ago, my manager at the time, offhandedly, in passing, asked if I wanted to help out on taking the build work for this new team. The work wasn't really the kind of work I had been doing, it didn't really fall under our department's workload, but for some reason he thought I should be doing it and for some reason, that particular day, I said yes. And here I am, 2 1/2 years later, looking at all the amazing opportunities that have opened up because of that one little decision, thinking what if I had been in a different mood and said no. Cool...and scary...at the same time.
Probably bad that spend time thinking about this kind of stuff - but I think it's the same for our new president (hooray!) - he gave a speech 6 years ago, that for whatever reason got a lot of attention, and probably got this whole run started - and now he's president. Had he not given that speech? Who knows...
The past few days has made me think again about how it seems that so much of what happens in your life is determined by a few key moments or decisions. While I don't believe that is completely true (I think in the bigger picture, the person you are and how you act and treat other people DOES come back to you), it certainly does seem like you can pinpoint certain moments and decisions that sent you down a completely different path. I tend to do a lot of "what-if" thinking, maybe why I think about this a lot.
In particular, the whole reason I'm on this project at all is because 2 1/2 years ago, my manager at the time, offhandedly, in passing, asked if I wanted to help out on taking the build work for this new team. The work wasn't really the kind of work I had been doing, it didn't really fall under our department's workload, but for some reason he thought I should be doing it and for some reason, that particular day, I said yes. And here I am, 2 1/2 years later, looking at all the amazing opportunities that have opened up because of that one little decision, thinking what if I had been in a different mood and said no. Cool...and scary...at the same time.
Probably bad that spend time thinking about this kind of stuff - but I think it's the same for our new president (hooray!) - he gave a speech 6 years ago, that for whatever reason got a lot of attention, and probably got this whole run started - and now he's president. Had he not given that speech? Who knows...
Monday, January 19, 2009
QWERTY
I read several news sites, one of them being slashdot.org. I will admit that on slashdot I almost always only read the headline because there are 100+ articles a day. But this one caught my eye and I read the whole article:
http://www.reason.com/news/show/29944.html
To sort of summarize the article and the context: Many of you have probably read or heard the stories about why we use the QWERTY keyboard - the standard keyboard we all use today. The story goes that the keyboard was designed way back in the beginnings of typewriters, and was designed to slow down the people typing so that the keys would not jam (the assumption being if you type too fast the typewriter hammers would hit each other and break or jam). Additionally, this guy named Dvorak who worked for the Navy was said to have designed a keyboard that was super efficient and ergonomically superior to the QWERTY keyboard, but because QWERTY was already out there, it won by default. I generally take everything I read on the internet with a grain of skepticism. But I have read that story so many times, on the internet, in magazines, newspapers, and even had professors in college tell it. So I tended to accept it as fact.
This article points out a lot of flaws with that logic, and our belief that "first-to-market" somehow always has such a huge advantage that it wins almost every time. First, they actually dug into all the studies and trials Dvorak did, and found that they were not really done in a way that did an accurate comparison. Second, another study was done in the 1950s (more accurately and unbiased) and kind of came to the conclusion that there was no major difference in performance or ergonomics.
The main argument though was that if there REALLY was some huge efficiency gain to switching to a different keyboard layout, business would have done it. If a company that did data entry, for example, could improve its entry efficiency by 20% (or more, according to Dvorak's study), they most certainly would have done it by now - given nearly 100 years to have made a transition. All computer operating systems have different keyboard layouts built into them, so there is no reason anymore that you wouldn't just be able to switch.
The article also goes on to debunk other examples of "first-to-market" - DOS vs. MacIntosh, Beta vs. VHS, etc. In fact, when you really look at most examples, first to market doesn't make much difference in the long run. DOS won at the time because hardware was cheaper than MacIntosh hardware. VHS ended up winning because it wasn't a proprietary format and it had more capacity. And if you look at the video game console market, first to market has rarely won - Nintendo always seems to come out behind the others each generation and yet has consistently one. The exception - they were first in the generation with GameCube, and the Sony PS2 won hands down even though it was really the last in that gen.
I have actually tried switching to the Dvorak keyboard. I type 100+ words a minute on a QWERTY, but I was interested in seeing if I could do better. Admittedly I didn't have enough patience to really give it a shot, but it was not nearly as easy to switch as you'd think by reading all the stories.
http://www.reason.com/news/show/29944.html
To sort of summarize the article and the context: Many of you have probably read or heard the stories about why we use the QWERTY keyboard - the standard keyboard we all use today. The story goes that the keyboard was designed way back in the beginnings of typewriters, and was designed to slow down the people typing so that the keys would not jam (the assumption being if you type too fast the typewriter hammers would hit each other and break or jam). Additionally, this guy named Dvorak who worked for the Navy was said to have designed a keyboard that was super efficient and ergonomically superior to the QWERTY keyboard, but because QWERTY was already out there, it won by default. I generally take everything I read on the internet with a grain of skepticism. But I have read that story so many times, on the internet, in magazines, newspapers, and even had professors in college tell it. So I tended to accept it as fact.
This article points out a lot of flaws with that logic, and our belief that "first-to-market" somehow always has such a huge advantage that it wins almost every time. First, they actually dug into all the studies and trials Dvorak did, and found that they were not really done in a way that did an accurate comparison. Second, another study was done in the 1950s (more accurately and unbiased) and kind of came to the conclusion that there was no major difference in performance or ergonomics.
The main argument though was that if there REALLY was some huge efficiency gain to switching to a different keyboard layout, business would have done it. If a company that did data entry, for example, could improve its entry efficiency by 20% (or more, according to Dvorak's study), they most certainly would have done it by now - given nearly 100 years to have made a transition. All computer operating systems have different keyboard layouts built into them, so there is no reason anymore that you wouldn't just be able to switch.
The article also goes on to debunk other examples of "first-to-market" - DOS vs. MacIntosh, Beta vs. VHS, etc. In fact, when you really look at most examples, first to market doesn't make much difference in the long run. DOS won at the time because hardware was cheaper than MacIntosh hardware. VHS ended up winning because it wasn't a proprietary format and it had more capacity. And if you look at the video game console market, first to market has rarely won - Nintendo always seems to come out behind the others each generation and yet has consistently one. The exception - they were first in the generation with GameCube, and the Sony PS2 won hands down even though it was really the last in that gen.
I have actually tried switching to the Dvorak keyboard. I type 100+ words a minute on a QWERTY, but I was interested in seeing if I could do better. Admittedly I didn't have enough patience to really give it a shot, but it was not nearly as easy to switch as you'd think by reading all the stories.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Taxes
You know the weather has been bad when it gets to 20 and it feels like a heat wave. And now, instead of frozen solid snow and ice, we have snow/freezing rain and semi-melting snow blowing across the road :)
Fortunately I don't have any major commitments this weekend. This morning I had a short handbell rehearsal since we canceled on Monday night due to weather. After stopping off at PetSmart to pick up some more cat food (and it was cat adoption day - it is SO hard to see all those beautiful, wonderful cats without homes), I headed home and that's where we've stayed all day. Fortunately it was a good day to be at home and plenty of things to do, including starting on the dreaded income taxes.
I always do my taxes as early as possible because I always get a refund, and even though I've tried to adjust my withholding over the years so I don't get such a big refund, it is still enough where I want to get it as soon as possible. I spent the past 3 hours gathering information and entering stuff into TaxCut online. The past few years I've come to love the online tax sites - nothing to install, accessible anywhere, and very nice and easy to use now. A few things I've learned over the years....
Fortunately I don't have any major commitments this weekend. This morning I had a short handbell rehearsal since we canceled on Monday night due to weather. After stopping off at PetSmart to pick up some more cat food (and it was cat adoption day - it is SO hard to see all those beautiful, wonderful cats without homes), I headed home and that's where we've stayed all day. Fortunately it was a good day to be at home and plenty of things to do, including starting on the dreaded income taxes.
I always do my taxes as early as possible because I always get a refund, and even though I've tried to adjust my withholding over the years so I don't get such a big refund, it is still enough where I want to get it as soon as possible. I spent the past 3 hours gathering information and entering stuff into TaxCut online. The past few years I've come to love the online tax sites - nothing to install, accessible anywhere, and very nice and easy to use now. A few things I've learned over the years....
- Unless you REALLY have highly complex tax situations, using a tax professional is probably not worth what you pay for it. Most tax software handles all the common normal cases that probably apply to like 90% of the country. And even if you do have a few irregular things, if you're willing to use google you can usually figure it out. I used an H&R Block person last year because I thought one of my situations would be complicated. Turned out, all she really did was the same thing I would have done, and she didn't know any more than I did (and actually, really she knew less about my specific situation because I was familiar with it and she wasn't). I have used both TaxCut and TurboTax online and both are, IMHO, equally good, and inexpensive.
- For the charitable donation line items, make sure you remember to add up mileage for things you did for charitable organizations. I usually forget this one. Things I usually forget are things like the volunteering I do for Engineers Week every year, Destination Imagination, Youth retreats, and my handbell directing. At $.14/mile, it is worth taking a few minutes to think about.
- Don't forget those little donations you make - for example, every time I buy stuff at the pet store, there is an option to donate $1 to the local animal shelters. Also, it's easy to forget those donations you make at work that are automatically deducted from your paystub.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
My goodness
Never mind that time should NEVER be spent in a state legislature on a bill like this, but NOW, in the middle of a collapsing economy and all sorts of other stuff?
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09%2F01%2F14%2F1522214&from=rss
This would never hold up in court anyway, so it is a complete and total waste of publicly funded time. And I think I can clearly say I will never live in South Carolina now.
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09%2F01%2F14%2F1522214&from=rss
This would never hold up in court anyway, so it is a complete and total waste of publicly funded time. And I think I can clearly say I will never live in South Carolina now.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Honk Squeak Scratch Boom
This morning I was asked to help with the annual "Honk, Squeak, Scratch, Boom" - a program put on every year for 4th-6th grade kids in the Rochester area who are looking to play in band or orchestra at school. Instructors are set up around the civic center rooms with various different instruments (wind, brass, strings, percussion) and the kids get tickets which they can use to choose which instruments they want to try out. They get to sit down with one of the instructors and have a short lesson/demo of how the instrument works, and then get to try it themselves. I was part of the saxophone group of course along with 4 other instructors.
Doing this for 2 1/2 hours really makes you appreciate the work teachers do every single day. I realize that as a teacher you get used to the set of students you have for an entire year, but it still must take a lot of energy. One of the other sax instructors is a middle school band teacher, and I told him that, and he said it does take a lot of energy, although it takes more energy with the beginners, teaching the ones who have a year or 2 of experience is actually a lot of fun.
Doing this for 2 1/2 hours really makes you appreciate the work teachers do every single day. I realize that as a teacher you get used to the set of students you have for an entire year, but it still must take a lot of energy. One of the other sax instructors is a middle school band teacher, and I told him that, and he said it does take a lot of energy, although it takes more energy with the beginners, teaching the ones who have a year or 2 of experience is actually a lot of fun.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Sad
I just found out that Dan, a friend of mine from college (fellow saxophone player from marching band) passed away yesterday from cancer.
http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/danfulwider
Very sad - he was a fun guy to be around and always had a great attitude.
http://www.caringbridge.or
Very sad - he was a fun guy to be around and always had a great attitude.
Friday, January 2, 2009
Resolutions
I hope the new year has found everyone happy, healthy, and for us Minnesotans, staying warm. I have to say that mine didn't start out great health-wise - I woke up Thursday feeling kind of sick. I thought it was probably just too much festivity from the day before, but I now think it might have actually been something I ate - Erin was somewhat the same sort of sick. Plus I'm still getting to the end of a cold...anyway a hard-fought Husker bowl victory against Clemson and some Pizza Hut pizza helped sooth the aches and pains!
Inspired by my friend Shelley's resolutions blog entry (she's in the "official" blog world where she actually gets paid to do this sort of thing) I decided to review my resolutions from last year and make new ones for this year.
I wrote 10 resolutions for last year. While I won't list them all, I will say that I believe I accomplished 5 of them. I failed miserably on 4 of them, and one got some progress. I also believe part of the problem is that sometimes resolutions can be very broad and vague - either biting off more than you can chew, or not really accomplishing a specific goal. For example, "Be More Green" - there are 1000 ways you can do that. While I did some stuff in that area last year, I decided to set specific goals this year for that.
So I am now looking at my very specific list of 7 resolutions for this year, which I think are all doable.
Texting
Unrelated - for all of you that use cell phones and text messaging in particular - I've recently read some articles on how ridiculous the charges for text messages are. I knew from a technical standpoint that just simply the amount of data being sent (160 bytes) is nothing in today's world of data transmission - that's about 1/6 of 1k, or to put it in terms of something relevant, about 1/31250 of an average mp3 file. So it shouldn't even cost $.01 in terms of data transmission cost. However, these articles point out why it really costs phone companies nothing because, being so small, they just sneak it into voice transmissions. Brilliant - I am in the wrong business!
Articles:
Inspired by my friend Shelley's resolutions blog entry (she's in the "official" blog world where she actually gets paid to do this sort of thing) I decided to review my resolutions from last year and make new ones for this year.
I wrote 10 resolutions for last year. While I won't list them all, I will say that I believe I accomplished 5 of them. I failed miserably on 4 of them, and one got some progress. I also believe part of the problem is that sometimes resolutions can be very broad and vague - either biting off more than you can chew, or not really accomplishing a specific goal. For example, "Be More Green" - there are 1000 ways you can do that. While I did some stuff in that area last year, I decided to set specific goals this year for that.
So I am now looking at my very specific list of 7 resolutions for this year, which I think are all doable.
Texting
Unrelated - for all of you that use cell phones and text messaging in particular - I've recently read some articles on how ridiculous the charges for text messages are. I knew from a technical standpoint that just simply the amount of data being sent (160 bytes) is nothing in today's world of data transmission - that's about 1/6 of 1k, or to put it in terms of something relevant, about 1/31250 of an average mp3 file. So it shouldn't even cost $.01 in terms of data transmission cost. However, these articles point out why it really costs phone companies nothing because, being so small, they just sneak it into voice transmissions. Brilliant - I am in the wrong business!
Articles:
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