my new favorite ride-along toy, Pandora…

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As much as I love technology and new gadgets, it might come as a bit of a surprise that I’m not normally what you might call an early adopter for the latest and coolest toys. In fact, if anything I’m typically more of a wait a year or two until half the people have moved on and then give it a try-kind of adopter, if anything!

My most recent case in point for this scenario is with Pandora, the streaming radio service that allows you to customize a playlist by specifying types of artists and even specific songs that you like. Up until two days ago, I’d never actually used it myself … I’d referred my wife to it when she was looking for something to workout with because I’d always heard great things about it from fellow technology geeks, however I’d never gone so far as to actually signup for the app or install it on my iPhone until we were driving back from our Christmas in Michigan and I found myself growing increasingly tired of having to constantly scan for new radio stations as the few worthwhile ones in each region would slowly fade out of range…

A couple of things impressed me with Pandora – first, that it didn’t drop a signal once while we were on the road, even when driving through the mountains of Tennessee. It technically had a couple of hiccups, but I honestly think that those were more my wife’s car getting finicky with the iPod USB connection than Pandora’s fault. Anyways, I don’t know if it actually pushes the entire song at once to avoid problems or maybe just does some serious caching, but knowing how much my 3G speeds on my phone can be when we’re moving at 70 mph, I was impressed!

The other thing was simply that with one click, Pandora managed to single-handedly replace my beloved local ’80s radio station that abruptly changed format into a dance station last summer, and frankly that’s why once we got home I was quick to install it on my own iPhone as well. I mean, I’ve been saying that I’m going to sit down and make a playlist of all my favorite ’80s songs for years … even back when 101.5 The Point still existed … so to finally have a reliable, easy to use way to rock out to my Duran Duran and Survivor in my car again is a godsend in and of itself!

Eventually I want to play around with it some more and maybe locate stations for some of my other musical tastes like modern rock and island tunes. Before I took over driving and requested the sounds of the ’80s, my wife was actually enjoying a similar blast from the past listening to the old ’90s favorites that we both remembered from high school. It’s actually a pretty cool, little app, so I’m glad that I finally got around to getting on board with this one… 😉

Words from the Road … errrr, EVEN MORE doggie pics?!

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Ok, ok – I swear I’ll be done after this one, but I just couldn’t resist – it’s a wonder these dogs didn’t rip each other limb from limb over the last week…

“I’ll bite your face off and spit down your neck!!!”

“Lend me your ear!”

“Stop biting my mouth!” “No, you stop biting my mouth!”

“Ooof! Forgot there was a door there…” “Me too…”

I’m pretty sure Mom is buried under that big, old pile of dogs somewhere…

“Come on, let me tell you ’bout my best friend…”

Words from the Road, AdoraPics™

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Ok, I guess I can do just one more post!

Really, after finding these photos of dog and baby amongst my other road pics, I’m not sure if I’d be able to forgive myself if I didn’t post these! Technically some were taken by my wife, and some of the really nice looking ones are more likely than not by my sister with her fancy-dancy digital SLR, but regardless of photographer all are 110% adorable…

Come on, say it with me – on the count of 3 … “Awwwww…”  :mrgreen:

Words from the Road, Epilogue

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Good grief, was that a long drive home!!!

So we ended up hitting the road around 10:30am yesterday morning with the mindset that unless road conditions and/or our collective sleepiness just got too overbearing, we would try our best to make the 1,400-mile commute home from Michigan to Florida without stopping for the night. It’s something that I think I’ve only ever done maybe once in my life – probably when I was young and dumb back in high school – but as much as I would’ve preferred to make it a multiple-day journey (usually I would stop once mid-way, although last summer for our big road trip we actually stopped three times), our schedules for this week were just too hectic and it seemed more sensible somehow to get back this morning and just sleep all day, rather than instead arrive home around 10pm and just be exhausted tomorrow morning!

Anyways, road conditions themselves were in reality kinda mixed – as you’ll see below, they weren’t so great for pretty much all of Michigan and part of Ohio, but after that we just had high winds to deal with pretty much until we made it to Tennessee. In retrospect, I think the wife and I did a pretty decent job of splitting up the driving:

  • Michigan (all – 5 hours) – Scott
  • Ohio (partial – 1 hour) – Scott
  • Ohio (partial – 2.5 hours) – Sara
  • Kentucky (all – 3 hours) – Sara
  • Tennessee (partial – 0.5 hours) – Sara
  • Tennessee (partial – 2.5 hours) – Scott
  • Georgia (partial – 3 hours) – Scott
  • Georgia (partial – 3 hours) – Sara
  • Florida (partial – 1 hour) – Sara
  • Florida (partial – 2.5 hours) – Scott
  • Total – Scott: 14 hours
  • Total – Sara: 10 hours

Payback for having such clear, open roads through Michigan coming up, we kinda got off to a sloppy start – luckily, the roads weren’t too slushy, but it did make it hard to see for a while…

Further south in Michigan, the snow turned to rain … and honestly, that probably made the driving even worse because although snow sometimes slows people down, rainy driving seems to bring out the assholes on the road!

It finally stopped raining near the Michigan/Ohio border, but the gloom stuck around for a while longer…

The photo didn’t really capture it best, but the sun started peeking through the clouds here in mid-Ohio in about a dozen different places at once, which made kind of a cool-looking effect off on the horizon!

Night-time driving in Kentucky – kinda hard to believe that we’d only been driving for, like, 9 hours at this point…

Atlanta at 2am – we actually avoided the bypass and drove right through the city because, well, it was two o’clock in the morning! Pretty lights and nice views when you’re not stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic across six lanes… 😉

We stopped for a quick breakfast about an hour into Florida at 8am – not in a long time have I been so excited to actually start seeing road signs naming Tampa as a destination once again!

Clear skies, non-freezing temperatures – welcome home. 🙂

Our full route, all six states, 1,370 miles, and 24 hours of it! Back to reality, we were … but not before a very big nap, of course…

Words from the Road, Part 4

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Twas the final installment of this ye travelogue before hitting the road for our 1,400-mile journey back home! Just a few random bits that didn’t make it into previous posts, plus a special glimpse at how I spent my New Year’s Eve!

Hint: Kinda like Times Square, but in London…

Muppets Encore … Didn’t Actually End Up Happening…
As you may have noticed on Twitter a couple of days ago, one thing that I didn’t get to do that I had actually been really looking forward to doing was take my family to see The Muppets in the theater. My first mistake was simply in not remembering one of the big differences between small towns and big ones – namely, whereas back home I’ve got more than a dozen theaters within 20 minutes drive, each offering at least 15 screens a piece, their local theater up here has 5 screens total and the closest ones are more like 45 miles away. When I pulled up the listings, nobody had it, so at the time I figured that was the end of it…

…until persistence paid off and a day or so later I found one rogue theater offering a single showing of it each night. It seemed like DESTINY!

Well, except that when we actually showed up, we came to find out that they had actually stopped playing the movie two weeks ago and frankly, they had no idea who updated their own listings on the Internet, but it wasn’t them. It was that typical, small town “Gosh, that’s too big for little old us here to understand…”-mentality that used to drive me nuts about this place, to the point where it kind of soured my whole evening there for a while. If I was a business owner who learned about something incorrect online setting my customers up for disappointment, I’d want to take whatever steps necessary to figure out how to get involved and get those listings up to date so that it doesn’t happen again and keep impacting my business in the future, but I digress… 🙁

Lack of Cell Coverage in BFE
Of course, it only served to further fuel my frustration when during the 40-mile car ride back home, I found myself unable to use my phone in many areas because it wasn’t able to find a signal! Wow – talk about a snap back into the reality of rural life … here, this whole trip we’ve been reveling in the idea of not having to worry about maps and simply using our phones’ built-in GPS features to plot our courses, even to the point of getting a considerable kick out of watching the blue dot move with our car on Google Maps, and yet this is a place where all of that awesome technology is null and void because they don’t have cell towers out in the middle of nowhere?!

Check please!

It’s Really, Really Cold in Michigan!!!
And one more iPhone screenshot while we’re at it, just to prove without a shadow of a doubt that my previous concerns about freezing our asses off in Michigan were completely, entirely, and unequivocally valid…

Just in case you can’t make out the numbers, that says 7 DEGREES!!! Seven is a single-digit number and should NEVER be used to describe a temperature, of all things!

What Happens at a WiiParty Stays at a WiiParty
But nonetheless, to end on a high note – because it is a new year and all … woohoo! – we did manage to have a particularly wonderful New Year’s Eve celebration in a manner that even someone like myself could enjoy … by playing video games. Despite having to get up ridiculously early tomorrow for work (think 3 hours from now), my sister and her husband hosted us over at her house for a fun couple of hours of Wii sports, by means of the new Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympics game that was released fairly recently.  Our Mom actually got copies of this for each of us after hearing how we’ve had a blast playing Mario Kart online against each other over the Internet, so we thought we’d take this rare opportunity to actually give it a whirl in the same room before retreating to opposite ends of the country for any further deathmatches!

Although the controls are going to take some time to work out (some of the events are really weird), it did make it a little easier to suffer through some of the lesser ones together, and I definitely look forward to the four of us connecting online some evenings in the future once we’ve all had a brief chance to hone our athletics skills just a bit! Aside from a healthy bout of Wii-ing, our celebration was pretty sane and down to earth – sandwiches from a local place that I always enjoyed before moving away,  I sampled some pumpkin beer that my brother-in-law had set aside specifically for our trip, and of course, the dogs got one last tussle around my sister’s house before having to say goodbye. Sure, it may not have included Lady Gaga or Times Square or even that bright, shiny ball atop Times Square, but aside from not having a glass of champagne to toast with my wife at midnight, it was probably one of the best ways that I’ve spent New Year’s Eve in a long time… 🙂

But that said, I suppose that I should finally go to bed now, considering that our plans for tomorrow are precisely drive from Michigan all the way home to Florida in a straight shot. Happy New Year, folks … oh boy, am I not looking forward to that car ride!

New Year’s Resolutions, 2012 Edition

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So where do we go from here???

As I somewhat eluded to in my last post, the more I’ve thought about it there aren’t really a lot of changes in my resolutions from 2011 to 2012 – some because I didn’t exactly accomplish all that I had set out to in 2011, and others simply because they’re really good things to always be striving to improve on in general. Nonetheless, as a tradition I think it’s still always a good idea to rededicate oneself to these kinds of things from time to time, so without further ado, here’s what I would like to accomplish in 2012:

Continue working to lose weight
2011 was a good start with about 25 pounds down, but I’ve still got a ways to go. What I now need in 2012 is both acceptance that I’m going to need to reserve more of my time towards making this goal, and then also motivation to keep me pushing at it until I get to where I want to be. My guess without looking at a scale is that I have about 30-40 more pounds to go, which is totally reasonable in a year’s time or less if I can find the time and the drive…

Make haste to wrap up my remaining creative projects from last year
So the number probably sounds worse than it really is, but I’ve got a total of 10 things leftover from last year that I need to finish up creatively before I can take on the new projects that I have planned for 2012. Some are bigger than others, and they might very well take all of the first quarter to finish entirely, but rather than jumping from one to another and spinning my wheels like I did a lot last year, my new direction is to work on these one at a time until each is done. If I feel myself getting excited about something else, I need to figure out how to channel that drive into finishing what’s already on my plate first or I’ll never get anything done! 😳

Make strides to take on (and complete!) new creative challenges in 2012
Likewise, I also want to use that same approach for the new things that I want to do as well, and I do have some cool things in store for the new year once I get the old year finally packed up and on its way. I don’t want to say too much, but whereas last year involved a lot of building new things, my plan this year is to be very content-focused … meaning lots and lots of writing, and hopefully some other new avenues to explore that I haven’t necessarily tapped yet…

Do a better job of managing my time, both personally and professionally
This one frankly applies to so many different areas of my life, it’s not even funny. Much like in years past, I want to do a better job of spending quality time with my wife (and Cleo!), I want to be able to devote more time to trying to lose weight, I want to make better use of my creative time when I’m trying to write … along with more time at Disney World, the beaches, and laying about time just for me as well! I think it’s mainly about learning to curb my dicking around and really focusing on the task at hand, whatever that may be.

Baby steps on this one, but I do recognize it as an important one because it’s really the keystone to just about everything else on this list.

In addition to the big ones, I’ve also got a couple of other more manageable tasks that I’ve honestly just really been putting off for a long time, so it seems just as well to list those here while we’re at it…

Really Settle in and Make Our House Feel Like a Home
I don’t think we’ll be in the neighborhood to actually buy a house for ourselves for another couple of years, so in the meantime I’d like to make a point in 2012 to do some simple things around the house to really make it feel like our own – cleaning up and re-doing the massive gardens out front, finding some patio furniture and maybe even a pool or ping-pong table to make our backyard more inviting, and perhaps even finally finishing unpacking the last boxes that are still sitting around from when we moved in last spring! The sky’s the limit… 😉

Backup. Our. Files.
Frankly, it’s a little embarrassing to be as big of a geek as I am and not have a reliable backup system in place, but this is just something that I’ve been putting off forever that really has to get done. A decade’s worth of writing, probably 50 GB of digital photos and another 150 GB of music and video … in this digital age, it’s just irresponsible not to have a fail-safe in place should the unthinkable happen. I need to finally take care of this once and for all in 2012.

Find a new place to display my toys
Seriously! My legos are getting a little out of control again because I simply don’t have very many places to put sets once they’re completed … in fact, at this point I think I’ve got just about the entire series of Alien Conquest sets still sitting there in boxes waiting for me to put them together because I won’t have anywhere to actually put them when I’m done! I know that I need some shelves or something, but I kinda wanted to avoid just throwing up rows of shelves on a wall like I had in my bedroom when I was 12 … I’m 31 now, so I want something a little classier for my toy displays this time around…

So there they are – what do you think? Some are pretty ambitious, but standing here on day 1 with the full 365 days left to go, I think they’re more or less reasonable and should serve as a good set of guidelines to help drive my year. :mrgreen:

2011, a Year in Review…

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Last year I started a trend that I think I want to continue – in taking a few moments to look back at what I accomplished this year before trying to lay down new goals for next. And besides, as you’ll see soon enough that for the most part the majority of my 2012 resolutions are pretty much the same as they were in 2011 anyways, so at least this way I get to write something fresh! 😉

Published a new book, and almost a second one
What I expected to be a simple archive collection from the comic strip I did with my sister a few years ago proved to be a bit more frustrating than I had anticipated by the end of the process, but ultimately it was worth it because I think the end result in full color really looks beautiful and does the project proud! Also, not to spoil anything, but I’ve almost got my next book completed – it just kind of fell behind the horse with the holidays and whatnot, so hopefully that’ll be out sometime early spring…

Got about 90% done with several other major projects
No excuses – I kinda took on a bit more than I could chew in 2011, and as a result I have several really cool things that are almost done, but not quite. I have a well-known bad habit of jumping from project to project when I get excited about new things, and as a result sometimes older ones get left behind … but it’s something that I’m going to be working on a little harder in the new year!

Did A LOT of blogging!!!
Over 120,000 words worth of blogging, to be exact! And even though I’m not generally in the habit of tracking word counts on everything that I write, it’s become sort of an interesting motivator for me because I look at this blog as more of a long-term journal just for rambling and brainstorming and keeping track of life and whatnot. So in this particular scenario, more is better. 🙂

Moved to a new house
We’re still renting, mind you, but earlier this spring we found an opportunity to move into a larger place that has more amenities that we’ve been looking for, so in the end it was definitely worth uprooting the family and enduring the 2 months of chaos that it took to get us out of the old and into the new!

Got a puppy!
Cleo … cute, little beagle-pointer mix … I’ve blogged about her once or twice … maybe you’ve heard of her?

Lost 25 pounds
And granted, I have a feeling that I very well might have gained part of it back with all of the snacks and cookies and other holiday indulgences that I’ve been enjoying the last couple of weeks, but it’s significant nonetheless because 25 is a big number and I’ve been trying really hard at losing weight this year…

Made the trip home for Christmas
And here we are today! What can I say? It’s sometimes tough living on the opposite end of the country away from family, especially during the holidays when my nostalgic tendencies are in high gear, so this trip has really been a nice way for me in particular to wrap up the year and try to recharge the old batteries after being absolutely buried in work for the last 12 months! Knowing that it doesn’t happen often has really pushed me to try to make the most of it while we’re here, and overall it’s really been a lot of fun. 😀

Now that that’s out of the way, though, I suppose next we have to come up with some of those dreaded New Years resolutions for next year, don’t we? 😯

Words from the Road, Part 3

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Cleo & Friends
Needless to say, despite any preconceived notions upon our late night arrival, ultimately Cleo the Wonder Pup had a stupendous time the following morning once my sister arrived toting two particularly spry and playful dogs of her own!  Although Kirby eventually later in the week somewhat soured to playing, instead opting to assume the role of the old maid to ensure that nobody had any fun in her general vicinity (or maybe she just didn’t want Cleo, the smaller one who kinda looked like her, getting hurt???), Sunny on the other hand went absolutely freaking nuts and played with this dog with little concern whatsoever for health, sanity, or safety of the furniture and other breakables potentially around them! Seriously, after a while I think we all got used to it and learned to tune their rough housing out, but initially to hear all of their snarling and biting and tackling each other, you’d think that Michael Vick had decided to stick his head in and say hello for the holidays…

Still too soon on that one?

Meeting Baby Madelyn
Tell me – is this kid freaking adorable or what?! Being completely serious for just a moment, despite all of the anticipation that has been building since this little girl was born back in September, I was honestly a little taken aback by just how much I enjoyed seeing this kid face to face, and holding her, and watching her smile, and trying to make her smile when she wanted to be stubborn. I don’t really know a lot of babies, so I wasn’t really even sure if I knew how to hold her right and all that jazz, and yet much to my own amazement when Lori handed her over it all just sort of came naturally.

I don’t want to ruin a perfectly nice blog post by getting all mushy and stuff, but there were definitely more than a handful of occasions where I caught my wife “pleased” at my sense of ease through it all with a smile on her face…

Maybe next year, but in the meantime – look at that baby!!!

There’s No Business Like Snow Business
Now one thing that admittedly I’ve found extremely weird since I’ve gotten here is that for the most part, there really isn’t all that much snow on the ground at all. I mean, there’s maybe a couple of inches – enough to make your shoes crunch when you walk through it – but certainly nothing anywhere near what I recall growing up, when the yard would literally have at least 3 or 4 feet of standing snow in it at all times, thus pretty much rendering the fence around the backyard completely moot and also ensuring for a variety of playtime activities like sledding, snowball fights, and the building of forts and snowmen and whatnot.

And it probably sounds a little out of place coming from me, of all people, because I’ve always been very clear that the weather in Northern Michigan was one of the primary factors that drove me to Florida, but I actually kinda miss all of that snow … at least while we’re here on vacation, anyways! As long as I don’t have to drive in it and I’ve got enough clothes so as to not completely freeze to death during my encounters with it, I don’t necessarily mind the snow strictly as a wintertime backdrop and for playing around in it. I mean, the dogs have still managed to have a good time with it … well, once Cleo figured out what it was, anyways … but my wife had kinda been hoping to make a snowman while we’re here and unless we’re willing to shovel up half the backyard (…which I’m not…), it looks like we might be stuck just watching Frosty on tv… 🙁

Merry Nostalgia-Mas
But speaking of classic ’80s Christmas programming, I’ll end tonight on something that we’ve been doing a lot of since we’ve gotten here … frankly, it’s a big part of what I’ve been looking forward to in coming up here … and that’s just really embracing holidays past and reliving all of the fun things that we used to do during this time of year growing up. On more than one occasion, we just sat around watching Christmas specials – A Garfield Christmas, Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas, A Muppet Family Christmas, A Charlie Brown Christmas – the list goes on and on! My Mom ordered a Honeybaked Ham, and even though we actually have it a lot back home because there’s nearly one right across the street from us, it still all built to help bring back all of those great memories of sitting around snacking on crackers and Christmas cookies, watching Big Bird contemplate Santa Claus’ bigger than a dump truck fate, all the while with lights on the tree sparkling and snow falling gently outside.

Sure, overtime my wife and I work to develop our own holiday traditions and I’m sure that once we have a kid they’ll spring about all the more, but in the meantime reliving some of those old memories and really just relishing in the good times I enjoyed growing up serves my holiday cheer just fine… :mrgreen:

“Why is it every Christmas I get drug out of my warm bed just to see some stupid old relatives? And why do we always have to go to that stupid old farm? Why can’t they come here where my warm bed is? And why am I whispering?” 

A Q&A (or two!) with Robert Khoo…

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So on a bit of a slightly more positive note, I also stumbled upon this Ask Me Anything thread with Robert Khoo, the business guy behind Penny Arcade. I have a lot of respect for pretty much any of these webcomic guys who’ve been able to build a living off of their creative works, but it’s particularly interesting to listen to Robert talk because while the rest of us are constantly trying to find that friendly balance between business and creative, Robert’s all business – it’s other people’s jobs within Penny Arcade to create the content, and it’s his job (and others now) strictly to monetize that content and move the business forward. Just an insight into his mind is one of the many reasons why I love watching Penny Arcade: The Series, and of course their latest book sheds some interesting light on just exactly how he’s driven that business from literally two guys living together, playing video games, and occasionally making comics into a 15-employee company that not only still creates the most successful webcomic online, but has also spun off a convention that brings in 60,000 people twice a year and a charity that raises millions of dollars each year to help entertain sick kids while they’re in the hospital.

For those like myself forever hungry for more, he’s also done a couple of Q&As now over at webcomics.com, however you do have to be a member to access those. For what it’s worth, though, I’ve been a member for two years now and even though I don’t even create a comic anymore, the business insight and savvy that Brad and his cohorts make available over there still makes it one of the easiest business expenses for me to justify each year…