Dear god, don’t tell me Ellen grew up to be a Trump supporter…

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I’ve been kind of geeking out on Pete & Pete nostalgia lately after learning that the actors that played the brothers – Danny Tamberelli and Mike Maronna – not only still hang out and in fact do a podcast together, but they also tour and are coming to Florida this spring and I have tickets to go see them!

Nonetheless, after watching this great series of retrospective videos that Nickelodeon did a couple of years ago with Danny and Mike, it naturally got me thinking about the rest of the cast and what they’re up to these days…

And for a brief moment, I got spooked.

Ellen was always one of my favorite characters on the show, particularly for her bond with Big Pete. What can I say? I was just reaching my teenage years when this show came out, so it was girls like Ellen and Clarissa and Melody and Z.Z. who served as my first crushes on my favorite TV shows that I watched during those years. And yet like much of the rest of the Pete & Pete cast, I couldn’t really recall seeing much Ellen represented in more recent shows, so I decided to google the name of the actress who played her…

…and I got a fairly convincing profile of someone who is apparently very into Donald Trump and conservatism and generally just being an awful human being.

Could that be the same crush from my own boyhood who was a girl, and Pete’s friend, but was she a girlfriend???

Well, thank god – no, she wasn’t!

I’m not going to post the name here because there’s no need to attract unwanted attention, but I will say that her picture was close enough that 25 years later you might say, “Sure, I suppose that could be her.” It wasn’t until listening to a couple of interviews – one with Ellen herself – that it came to light that she’s mostly stepped away from Hollywood and instead is a doctor now! And the other lady was apparently just being born at the time Pete & Pete was airing, so that’s a pretty good indicator that they were definitely different people, too. 😉

Relieved is the right word, that’s for sure. I remember how shocked I was to find that an old friend from high school had gone hardcore conservative, complete with gay bashing on Facebook and the whole nine yards. And I recall me and my friends absolutely loving Dennis Miller and his rants on HBO back in our teenage years, despite his bizarre political flip to the dark side that came a decade later. But not someone from the cast of Pete & Pete.

All of the Blue Tornado Bars in the world couldn’t produce a brain freeze capable of that level of mental shutdown… 😀

Cleaning Day, iPhone Edition

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How many apps do you have on your phone right now?

Apparently I have over 130 apps, and honestly when I started going through my list, there were some that I haven’t used in years. And some that don’t even work with the version of iOS I’m on anymore.

And also a lot that I do still use, but not nearly enough to be where they were in my seven pages of apps.

So I decided to do a little digital housekeeping!

I did this with a few goals in mind…

  • To reprioritize my social media apps to make them less distracting.
  • To reorganize my apps so the ones I use more are closer to the front.
  • To finally delete stuff that I either never use or I can’t use anymore.

Step 1 – Inventory My Current Apps
The first thing I did was simply type up a list of every app I had on my phone. I did mine in a spreadsheet and grouped them by page so I could better visualize where I was and where I wanted to be. It was a little tedious to type everything out by hand, but the benefit was that afterwards I had a list that I could easily copy & paste from to shuffle apps around as I designed my new layout.

Step 2 – DELETE THE CLUTTER!!!
Now this is a pet peeve of mine because there are a handful of games and apps that I’ve downloaded over the ages where the developers either didn’t keep up with newer versions of iOS or just flat out went out of business altogether, so now I’m stuck with all of these games that I paid money for that are absolute garbage.

This was the time to finally let ’em go, I switched my auto insurance along with other apps that I’ll never use. Case in point – the other day , so no need to keep the old company’s app anymore.

Step 3 – What do I use the most???
This is how I determined my dock apps. You only get four, so make ’em good!

I ended up only making one change here – previously I had Phone, Mail, Safari, and Twitter, so in an effort to curtail my social media time I swapped out Todoist for Twitter.

Step 4 – What do I use on a regular basis?
This is where I determined my home page, or pages, really, because I had more than one page of apps that fell into this category.

My criteria for these pages was first and foremost general purpose apps – think Calendar, Contacts, Camera, Weather, Calculator. I also put my music apps here because they’re my go-to in the car. And then WordPress, Notes, and Analytics from a writing perspective.

My overflow home page then got other research apps like Wikipedia and Dictionary, the app and music stores, Settings, the My Disney Experience app for visit the theme parks along with its companion shopping app, and lastly, a couple of apps I’ve been using for meditation.

Step 5 – Where does everything else fall?!
To be honest, by the time I had the first two pages done, I knew what I wanted to do with the rest anyways. First I created pages for each of the major categories of apps that I had, then I sorted them into those categories (a lot of my apps were already sorted this way, so this was about 50/50 clean-up vs reorganization), and then lastly I sorted the pages themselves based again on what types of apps I use the most.

I ended up with something like this…

  • Home Page
  • Overflow Home Page
  • Social Media
  • Kids Stuff
  • Banks & Restaurants
  • Quick Games
  • Long Games
  • Miscellaneous

I honestly don’t play games much on my phone, so those went at the back, second only to those seldom used apps that I didn’t want to delete like FlightAware for tracking incoming flights or Speedtest for testing Internet connections or my web host’s app that I use to remotely reboot this server if I see that it’s having problems when I’m away from a computer.

I made a new page of just apps that I have for my kids to use … in hopes that maybe they’ll stay out of the rest of my stuff! 😉

And then the others are pretty self explanatory.

BEFORE

AFTER

One sort of tip that I can offer is that it is technically possible to move multiple apps from one page to another … the reason for my hesitation is that at least for me, it was really touchy and sometimes more of a pain than it was worth. I’d find myself with a few apps selected, then drop them all trying to get the next one, or there would be a few that I couldn’t select at all. Still, you can give it a try and see how it works for you…

Cleaning up my phone has been something that I’ve been putting off for a long time, but honestly it took maybe an hour once I finally sat down and just did it. I don’t recommend skipping the list and just trying to reorganize right on the phone, namely because if you don’t plan out precisely how many pages you need, it’s easy to find yourself doing a lot of extra shuffling when you realize that you’re a page short in the very middle of your layout!

Here’s to hoping that this will make my phone a little less distracting and once again more of a useful tool in my effort to try and actually get things done this year!!!

Your advertising is making me hate you.

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Nobody ever really liked commercials when we watched live TV, but we dealt with them because after a couple we’d get to go back to our show.

But here on the Internet, the advertising never stops!

It’s on every single page – every article, every YouTube video – and often times you’ve got more than one ad. Or the ad pops-up in front of what you’re trying to read and blocks your view, even though I thought we’d already decided that pop-ups were awful like a decade ago. Or the ad follows you down the screen so that between product ads and publisher ads, you’re only left with about two inches of screen real estate when you’re just trying to read a stupid blog post on your phone while you’re using the toilet.

On one hand, Internet advertising is somewhat revolutionary because it’s the first time that advertisers have had access to actual data to determine the effectiveness of their ads.

On the other hand, though, I think it’s also helped them to understand that the giant money pit they used to dump into for print and TV advertising wasn’t nearly as effective as their billions had thought, and so not only do publishers get much less for online advertising than other mediums ever saw, but they’re more prone to excessive advertising to boot.

My prime example right now is YouTube – where you can see ads every couple of minutes for the exact same thing, to the point where frankly it decreases my interest in a brand when I keep getting interrupted to see the same thing over and over.

TV ads were predictable and always followed the same time slots, so if we didn’t want to sit through them we could go get a snack or something to avoid them.

Print ads were easy enough to gloss over, although we all know the feeling of flipping through a magazine and realizing that it’s more ads than actual content! My wife gets a few parenting magazines like that where it’s pretty clear the reason they’re FREE is because they’re basically just 95% ads for diapers and baby meds and whatnot.

Personally, I know that I would much rather see an ad once that’s either funny, informative, or interesting, and if it’s a regular advertiser on a show that I watch, then so be it. But when I’m watching 5-10 minute YouTube videos and I see the same ads for Wix and Grammarly and the local ambulance chasing law firm every minute and a half, it doesn’t make me want to use their services.

In fact, I’ve purposefully avoided what are probably perfectly good services and products just because their advertising was absolutely obnoxious.

The sad part is, I know the reason they do it is because it works, just like spammers fill my inbox with scams because a fraction of a percent fall for them. And maybe that’s a strategy that works when you’re casting a huge net and need mass market appeal. It’s probably why I wouldn’t do well in marketing because I’d be much more interested in the quality of a customer rather than just plastering people with ads so that a couple of them will remember our obnoxious jingle when they’re at the store and throw a box of our miscellaneous product into their carts.

Is acquiring new customers cheaper than keeping existing ones???

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I thought this was a little weird.

So I changed my car insurance today – from esurance over to Progressive. Or rather, back to Progressive, as it was about six or seven years ago when I left them to come to esurance because the prices were cheaper.

What stood out as strange to me was that in both cases, I called up my current insurance company and told them what the other was offering, and neither one did much to lower my current bill.

This time, esurance tried to offer me their creepy tracking tool that you plug in under the dash and you get a discount if it doesn’t detect you driving like a maniac, which I declined.

I think last time Progressive tried to beat esurance’s rates by removing the coverage from one of our two cars. 

Huh?!

At the end of the day, I’m only saving about $40/month … so $240 on a 6-month policy term or a little less than $500 a year.

I was just kind of surprised that there wasn’t any retention effort other than what they’d offer any day of the week to keep me from switching to their competitor. So I’m curious why.

Is it a case where there’s simply so much churn in their industry that they’ve decided retention isn’t really their strategy, kind of like cable and cellular providers that focus more on earning new customers than keeping existing ones happy?

Or do customer service reps just not have much they can offer, so it’s really just another call in the queue for them to deal with?

Thankfully it was a surprisingly seamless transition from one to the other – I asked the guy from esurance to cancel mine policy, effective tomorrow, after he reviewed it for discounts, and I was finishing the new purchase from Progressive before I was off the phone with esurance.

It’ll be interesting to see if I end up switching again in a few years if the prices sway back in the other direction. I hate doing it, but at least it’s easier than switching cable or cell providers because it’s just a question of whose site I’m printing my new ID cards from.

Which reminds me, I probably need to do some research into our homeowner’s insurance, too. We’ve had the same company there for seven years now as well…

Do We Really Need Billionaires???

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I thought this was an interesting article from the other day talking about comments made by new Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez about income inequality and the hoarding of wealth at the top end of the scale…

As usual, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is right: There should be no billionaires

Just looking at billionaires in the US, there were roughly 540 people back in 2016 with a combined net worth of $2.4 TRILLION!!!

I’m sure you probably recognize the names in the top 5:

  1. Jeff Bezos – $112B
  2. Bill Gates – $90B
  3. Warren Buffett – $84B
  4. Mark Zuckerberg – $71B
  5. Charles Koch – $60B

It’s worth noting that three of the top five have made pledges to donate 99% of their wealth (Gates, Buffett, and Zuckerberg), but what about the other $2.15 trillion spread out among only 537 individuals in the United States? $2+ trillion is more than the GDP of Brazil. Or Canada. Or Russia. Or 180 other countries around the globe!

Put it another way, the average billionaire is worth about $4.1 billion.

The median net worth in America is about $11,000.

On top of that, there’s the old statistic that something like 70% of Americans don’t have $1,000 saved that they could tap in the event of an emergency.

Now I’m not saying the answer is just take it all from the wealthy and redistribute their wealth more evenly – at 350 million people, that would only end up being about seven grand per person!

That said, when do we get to a point where maybe we have to say, “You have way more than enough. Please share with the little guy…”???

A million dollars is something that all of us have fantasized about at one point or another. You can buy things that cost millions of dollars such as mansions and yachts and sports teams and other expensive things that people think about when they dream of being rich.

A billion dollars, on the other hand, in a way just seems silly. You can’t spend a billion dollars on any one thing, or even a whole bunch of things! I would challenge anyone to go to NYC or LA and try to spend a billion dollars without buying companies or whatnot – I don’t think you could do it, and for the people who do, they’re not even doing it themselves because investors always travel in packs. 😛

And sure, that’s the real counter argument – billionaires invest that money into whatever ventures interest them, and it creates jobs, and hopefully additional wealth … but all in the same, it just makes me wonder if all of that is worth it when A) profit is still their primary motive for those investments, and B) we’ve got all sorts of people around this country who are really struggling in one way or another, whether it’s the guy living under a bridge or the family in suburbia embarrassed to apply for food stamps because dad just got laid off from his job.

I don’t claim to know the answers, or even how to connect all of the dots here, but I do believe that if part of our income equality in America stems from CEOs skimping on wages because it’s better for corporate profits, they should be taxed to make up the difference because no one should work a full-time job and still live in poverty in America.

Looking at the math, if 540 people – or 0.000001% of the population – own 3% of the entire nation’s wealth, which expands to over 50% of the nation’s wealth if we widen the net to 5% of the population (17.5 million people) … something’s not right there.

So what do we do about it?

more home office musings…

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I know I’ve shared in the past how it’s common for me to have dreams about office space – not the movie, mind you, but the place in which I do my work!

Last night I had a brief one about moving into a new space, oddly enough right next to the warehouse that I used to work at back in my hometown, and the defining factor seemed to be that it was big … like a huge canvas with infinite possibilities.

I think it’s fun to think about what you would do with a new space, whether it’s a house or an office or whatever. Plus, right now my own house is filled with an insane amount of clutter, so this idea of starting fresh with a completely empty room is particularly exciting!

To some extent, I think that a clean space can also be good for creativity, too.

I’ve been slowly working at cleaning up my home office, and though I’ve still got a ways to go, it’s amazing just what being able to walk through the room and see my desk has done for improving my desire to actually want to sit down and write in my office again. Before you could technically get to my keyboard – if you had to – but it certainly wasn’t someplace that I wanted to spend hours on end, but a couple of evenings with garbage bags and the shredder have already been a huge help!

I’m also exploring some ideas for little enhancements I can do to freshen up the place … things like adding a second DAKboard solely for my to-do list and some new shelves for my rapidly growing collection of Funko Pop figures. Eventually I really want to build out something to help track my word counts across various projects – maybe that’s something I could feed into DAKboard via a widget or whatever they call it.

It’s amazing how surrounding yourself with those kinds of fun and interesting things that you enjoy can influence the work that you’re trying to do, too. 😉

How long do you hold onto domain names you’re not using anymore?

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I used to be of the mindset that because domain names are relatively cheap, there’s really no reason why a person’s assorted web projects shouldn’t stay online indefinitely.

And yet right now, I’ve got a couple of different domain names coming up for renewal … and I’m not so sure that I want to bother renewing them anymore.

In total right now I have about a dozen domains registered and I think if you twisted my arm, I could make reasonable arguments for keeping maybe seven of them. It used to drive me nuts when I’d see domains snatched up by spammers just looking to make a few bucks in bulk off the old site’s referral traffic as long as it lasted, although surprisingly if I lookup the last handful of names that I’ve let lapse … they’re actually able to be registered right now.

And not even for $1,200 from a reseller, either!

Maybe that bizarre bubble just finally burst, but it’s still increasingly hard to justify when A) the sites get almost no traffic, and B) if I want to maintain them, I can always throw them under a subdomain on this site like I’ve done in the past. At this point they’re just as good to my portfolio as xyz.scottsevener.com as they are xyz.com … plus, it saves me ten bucks for every one I kill off.

I’ve got four more days to make my decision… 😯

Late Night Productivity Tips

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I shared this link a couple of weeks ago during a bit of a productivity binge that I was on at the time, but now that a couple of weeks have passed, I wanted to circle back to it and go through some of my favorite ideas and add a few comments about how they’ve been working for me…

https://doist.com/blog/how-to-focus-better-at-work/

7. Schedule your email time.
It’s taken me a long time to get into the mindset that I don’t have to respond to something the second it appears in my inbox, but it’s incredibly freeing and helps me to dive deeper into important tasks when I give myself permission to wait until later in the day. I’ve also found that surprisingly it can help your co-workers to become more self sufficient because if it’s important enough that they need an answer immediately, sometimes that’ll drive them to start looking for the answer themselves!

…and nothing’s more rewarding than getting that follow-up email, “Nevermind – I just found this on your team’s website…” 😉

8. Keep a to-do list with focused, actionable items.
I recommitted myself to using the Todoist app at the beginning of the year and so far, I think it’s really helping. I feel more productive and less overwhelmed, and I can look across my work to plainly see that I”m getting more of it done, even when there are days when I feel like I just postponed all of my tasks to the following day!

10. Schedule your daily to-do’s.
I find this is a good way to spend my commute in the car … which I otherwise despise, but at least I can feel like I’m being somewhat productive if I take the time to go over everything I want to get done today and figure out what I’m doing first, what I’m doing after lunch, and so forth.

15. Keep a “read later” list.
This actually has been helping me to keep less tabs open in my browser, which in theory should lead to less distractions! I just need to also remember to make time to check back on it so that it doesn’t just become a list of stuff that I never got around to reading.

16. Keep a “bright ideas” repository.
This is easy enough to do in Todoist – if I think of a blog or column idea that I want to work on, I just throw it into my Writing project without a specific deadline … unless it’s something I want to write in the near future, then it does get a date attached to it. Again, here I feel like my biggest challenge is going to be simply remembering to look back every once in a while so that all of my great ideas don’t get lost to the void!

19. Forgive yourself when your day doesn’t go as planned.
And this one, frankly, is huge for me because I have toddlers at home, and sometimes work flares up in unexpected ways, and I know that in the past I’ve lost a lot of time just being angry with myself for not working on something that I was trying to get done in that particular moment. In reality, I know that stuff is still getting done, even if it’s not exactly what I had planned, and at some point it’s important to give yourself credit for that because otherwise it’s really hard to be productive when you’re also beating yourself up.

Dream Journal : The Time I Almost Hit Paul Rudd with My Car…

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We were at a fancy, tropical resort nearing the end of our vacation.

Apparently said vacation had also been combined with a scout trip, which was now over, but some of their equipment had been left behind for us to bring back because we had rented a van that had lots of room. Still, it wasn’t something that I was looking forward to because they needed to be broken down in order to fit in our van – for some reason, they had big sheets of glass that needed to be cut and a couple of chairs that we needed to take saws to in order to make it all fit.

We stalled at the resort for a while because for the last night of our vacation we’d gotten put in a really nice room with a huge hot tub, and it was right next to the tiki bar, so you could hear the band playing Jimmy Buffett music from pretty much anywhere in the suite.

I really wanted to just lay around and relax because the last week had been spent doing stuff every day with the scout group, but we couldn’t afford to extend our trip by another day, so eventually we begrudgingly left our swanky resort behind and headed back to where the van had been left to deal with loading it.

But not before stopping off at Toys ‘R Us to kill another hour or two, of course!

So now we’re driving in LA in separate cars – I’ve got my wife and kids in my car – and traffic is really heavy, so we pull up to a light and I look out the window to surprisingly see Paul Rudd on a bike like I almost hit him.

After struggling to get the window down, I finally asked if he was ok and if he wanted a ride, even though the car was completely packed and there was no room for him or his bike. Instead, he instructed me to follow him and we drove a short ways down the street before pulling into a small parking lot with several large tents setup in it.

It was only then that I noticed he had been dressed like a pizza delivery driver and had several boxes of pizza on the back of his bike.

Following Paul into one of the tents, it was there that he revealed that the whole stunt had just been promotion for his new movie in which he played a bicycle delivery driver. The tents had several catering stations in them and we were invited to have some food. Dominos was a big sponsor, so there was lots of pizza and wings and some other dishes that they were experimenting with, along with candy and these giant peanut butter cups that cost $5.15 a piece and just all sorts of stuff.

We explored and snacked for a while until eventually it started to rain and we realized we really needed to get back to work because I was worried that it was going to take a lot longer than we thought to pack everything up.

Before we left, I wanted to get a picture with Paul because I thought that it would make for a neat Instagram post, and someone pointed out where other people had started lining up for pictures. Unfortunately when we got to the front of the line, Paul was nowhere to be seen and instead we took pictures with Dave Franco who was apparently promoting his own movie where people hung from ropes with their feet off the ground and whoever was the last to touch the ground won a car or something.

We all hung from pipes and other things in the ceiling of the tent using these ropes that the staff gave us, and I could barely keep myself up for the picture, so it quickly became clear that I wouldn’t have been able to win the car anyways…

ONE MILLION WORDS BLOGGED!!!

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And so here we are, some seventeen years since my very first blog post went up back in 2002…

A million words … wow!

This is a number that I’ve been chasing for years – typically whenever I’d hit another groove and get back into blogging every day, I’d think to myself, “This is going to be the big year!”

And then it wasn’t. 😛

2012 was apparently a very good year for blogging when I averaged 1.4 posts per day and 156,606 words total!

Surprisingly, despite occasionally being a bit long winded, my average post length is only 284 words, which just shows that those little posts that you knock out in 15 minutes can really add up over time. 😉

One stat that I found particularly interesting was my most popular tags by word count…

  1. rants – 153,136 (293 posts)
  2. geek stuff – 90,574 (258 posts)
  3. summary posts – 79,726 (130 posts)
  4. creative-type stuff – 79,380 (195 posts)
  5. politics – 75,683 (184 posts)
  6. movies – 71,840 (187 posts)
  7. diet & exercise – 65,736 (161 posts)
  8. dreams – 49,736 (86 posts)
  9. video games – 48,056 (198 posts)
  10. technology – 41,673 (141 posts)

Note: All of these stats come from the WP Word Count plugin by Link Software – the pro version is less than twenty bucks for unlimited sites … I’ve been using it for years and I love it!

One more of interest – looking at the blogging platforms that helped me to write those ONE MILLION words…

  • Fusion PHP (2002) – 9,747 (<1%)
  • LiveJournal (2003 – 2011) – 462,133 (46%)
  • WordPress (2011 – CURRENT) – 528,670 (53%)

It’s just amazing to me to look back over everything that I’ve blogged about over the years – mind you, I don’t really make any money or anything from this site, but it’s immensely valuable to me because it really serves as a journal where I’ve publicly shared so many of the most important moments from my life…

…and of course, plenty of nonsensical, rambling or otherwise just plain weird moments and thoughts and ideas, too!

So what’s next???

The short answer is – I have no idea!

No more than I could’ve predicted any of what got me to this point, anyways. One of my favorite things about my blog is that by not locking in to a particular theme or topic, it frees me to write about anything and everything! One day I might feel inspired to write about video games or a movie that I just saw, and others I might be feeling a bit more nostalgic or want to share vacation photos or even, dare I say, share some thoughts about politics!

*shudder*

One thing I will say is that with my first one million behind me, I hope that this inspires me to write more … you know, so that maybe I can get to two million before I’m ready to retire! 😉

Blogging is something that I really enjoy because it’s personal, and yet it’s a way to share a little bit of me in a medium that I’m very comfortable with considering just how much of an antisocial, introverted hermit that I am. 😛

Over the next million words, I’m looking forward to sharing even more milestones, and ranting about things that bug me, and bragging about my kids, and everything else that has made the last million words so enjoyable. :mrgreen:

Only 998,905 words to go…