It’s not ALL about video!!!

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I’m not entirely convinced that video is the future of online media.

Don’t get me wrong – I think online video is really cool and it’s a part of the future of media, but I don’t necessarily agree with the folks who claim that in the future, everything will be web video or mobile video or whatever. Case in point – I don’t always feel like watching your video!

There are a lot of times where I’d rather just read a blog post or skim through some photos, so when I see that my only option is to watch your five-minute video about a topic or news story, a lot of times I’d rather just find another source for the same information. This happens to me a lot on C-Net’s website, but most recently what spurred this particular rant was by encountering a tour of a very swanky room at a new Disney resort. I would’ve loved to see a photo blog tour of the suite, complete with commentary of each shot, but instead the blogger opted for a 10-minute video tour, and thus I passed.

Maybe I’m just a web curmudgeon, I don’t know, but for me it’s usually one of three scenarios – if I’m just casually browsing the web to kill time, then I don’t mind video at all; if I’m procrastinating when I should be writing or working on something else, I want short, quick bursts, in which video is not fine; and if I’m on the go, I almost never want to watch video because I prefer whatever I read in tweet or Facebook-sized updates.

And I hope this perspective isn’t simply because I haven’t really done anything with video myself. In fact, there are some avenues that I’d like to explore eventually in the future – it’s just not really at the top of my list and I still need to figure out what I can bring to the table because there are already so many amazing things being done on shoe-string budgets.

I think it’s more simply that I see video as another tool for the web publisher – there are some really cool things that you can do with video better than any other platform, but the same can also still be said for the others. When you’re a video-blogger, everything seems better through a camcorder’s lens, but in reality the key is to use each and every one of these new mediums effectively to best reach your intended audience.

Lessons Learned, Moving

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No matter how much time you think you need, give yourself more.
Last time we tried packing everything the week before and it was absolute hell, so this time we thought we were being awesome by giving ourselves three whole weeks to pack and prepare for the big day. Trouble was, we started getting complacent and slacked off halfway through, and thus we didn’t finish cleaning up until 6am on Wednesday! We had left a lot of cleaning and painting until the last minute because we figured it’d be easier with an empty house, but in reality we could’ve had much more done weeks ago.

If you don’t need it, don’t move it.
Probably our biggest godsend was that in what preparatory cleaning and packing that we did do, we got rid of a lot of stuff! Probably a couple dozen bags of garbage, along with a good 10-12 bags of clothes and some furniture donated to Goodwill. Looking around our new place, we’re still not quite sure where it’s all gonna go, but we’re still far better off than had we brought even more junk that didn’t get used once since our previous move!

Splurge for the bigger truck.
Sure, the 26′ truck would’ve costed another ten bucks and is a little harder to drive, but it would’ve eliminated a second trip AND allowed for our moving guys to muscle everything themselves … instead, that second trip was probably $40-50 between gas and mileage, and we had to do all of the heavy lifting ourselves. Oops…

Paying people to help is money well spent.
I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again – I’ll never not pay someone to help us move ever again!

Admit that some things will fall behind.
And lastly, something that I’m sure I’ll be coming to terms with even more this weekend as I spend more time putting things away and unpacking than I do writing – some things will fall behind when taking on such a herculean task as moving, and you either have to be ok with that or be prepared to pull your own hair out trying to keep the balance. I wish I would’ve realized this a little earlier this time – maybe I could’ve written some stuff in advance to make the transition a little easier, but at this point all I can do is take a deep breath and slowly start to pick up the pieces one at a time.

So much to do!

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Sleep is good.

Yesterday was a long day, as noted by my post that went up just after we left around 6:30am! I ache just about everywhere, and yet now that we’re officially here at our new home, there’s just so much to do…

  • Get my fish tank setup so that my fish don’t die in the 5-gallon buckets that they were transported and are now currently living in.
  • Figure out how to get our hot tub working so that we can enjoy a much needed, muscle-relaxing soak!
  • Clear out garage so that I might actually be able to park in it alongside Sara’s car.
  • Get the entertainment system & Wii setup so that I can try to get back into an exercise routine once again.
  • Clear out space around the elliptical so I can make use of that as well.
  • Go grocery shopping because we’ve been eating out way too much throughout this whole ordeal!
  • Decide how I want to design my office this time, and subsequently where to stash whatever doesn’t end up on shelves somewhere.
  • Get spare bed setup and clear out extra bedroom for when my sister-in-law will be here next week.
  • Possibly change locks, dependent on whether we get remaining keys back from old tenant or not.
  • Change of address forms a plenty!

I’m sure there’s much, much more, but in the meantime, I’m hungry and good Chinese is one of the few takeout places that we haven’t hit in the last two weeks yet.

WiiFit is gonna be so mad at me when I finally get it hooked up again…

Saying Goodbye to Meadow Reach Drive…

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So we literally just got back from our final cleaning efforts over at our old house, and maybe it’s just the lack of sleep because we’ve been cleaning for over 12 hours straight, but I’ve got to admit that I got a little emotional when I flipped off the lights and locked the front door for the last time…

A lot of years went by in that house.

We lived there for almost 3.5 years – almost the entirety of my time together with Sara, and more time than either of the other places in Tampa that I’ve lived since I first moved to Florida back in 2003.

It was the first house since moving here where I was actually able to put up lights outside for Christmas.

It was the house where we endured two grueling years of nursing school.

It was the house where I published my first book.

It was the house that we packed with entirely too many people during the week prior when we were going through the last-minute preparations for our wedding!

It was the house where, over many, many … many nights, I finally came to terms with the idea of being ready to have a baby.

In that regard, it’s kind of sad to think that that chapter of my life is over – no more late night walks from one end of the subdivision to the other, some chatting with Sara and some by myself just to help clear my head. The quaint, little 3-bedroom house that we had felt so unbelievably lucky to find within our price range back in 2007 is now just as vacant as the day that we moved in … albeit arguably a little cleaner than we had found it!

It’s time for us to move on now, and leave that house for another family to enjoy … hopefully one that has kids so they don’t get as frustrated as I did about the neighbor kids playing in their yard! Ultimately we’ve still got a lot to look forward to upon moving into our new house – puppy training and pool parties and eventually maybe even birthday parties for a new generation of our family, too. Still, it’s hard not to get a little sentimental as we close one door to make way for another…

There’s a part of me that’s going to miss that house, just like the condo before that, and even my very first apartment before that. I hope the next people who live there make as many new memories during their stay as we did, and also that they don’t mind the little, orange stains that we couldn’t get out of the carpet in the bedroom.

Worth. Every. Penny.

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Yesterday was our big moving day, and eventually we made the decision to splurge a little and pay a company to help. We still did all of the packing (over the last three weeks, and it was crazy), but these guys would show up the day of, load the truck at our old house, and then subsequently unload after I drove the truck over to the new house. We honestly weren’t really sure what to expect and at some points felt a little slackish for not doing the heavy lifting ourselves, but looking back now that it’s all done, I’ll never not pay someone to help us move ever again!

Of course, it didn’t help that I wasn’t able to get a bigger truck – it was either 17’ or 26’, and stupid me opted for the smaller of the two, which was in fact smaller than the truck we had used to move into that house some three years earlier – so I warned the guys right out of the gate that it was probably going to be a tight fit at best. Amusingly enough, their response was a chuckled, “That’s par for the course – we’ll make it fit!” and with that, they went straight to work.

The whole ordeal was like watching an expertly played game of Tetris, and aside from me helping to pack up Sara and her cousin’s cars for them to transport the more fragile and awkwardly-sized items, I pretty much kept to the sidelines and answered questions about prioritizations while they worked. There were times that admittedly I even felt a little guilty because these guys had to do all of the heavy lifting, wrestling with our dresser and TV and countless numbers of boxes, but the truth was there was just no way that Sara and I could’ve done it on our own.

That’s how we did it last time, and although I can’t recall if she actually had back problems before, she most certainly did afterwards. I even had friends that offered to come help, but that’s still an awful lot of work for a couple of non-physical people to handle and we easily would’ve been at it all day. With these guys we were loaded in about 2.5 hours and unloaded in another hour – it was truly amazing.

The (sheepishly) funny thing is, when we first considered hiring people, I did a lot of searching around about tipping and after a healthy debate, I had decided that we were already paying them enough – they didn’t need to get a tip on top of that (their fee was $45/hr for two guys – we had them for 4 hours total). By the time they were ¾’s of the way done loading and the truck was bursting at the seams from floor to ceiling, my opinion had slightly changed on the concept of tipping and I had Sara stop by an ATM for some cash!

When all was said and done, they most definitely earned that tip, and probably even a little more. Sure, it was a good chunk of change for a long afternoon’s work, but not having to wrestle our elliptical up into and then back out of the truck … priceless!

Why are the best domain names always owned by cybersquatters???

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Sometimes I think that there should be a rule about registering domain names if you’re not actually going to use them.

I don’t know how it would be enforced or what the criteria would even be, but it’s really, really frustrating to have four or five ideas for a new project, only to find that most of the prime domain names have already been scooped up and are currently parked with advertising and offers to resell for an inflated price.

I mean, I’d be fine if I pulled up the name and there was a site already made doing the same thing as my idea – sure, it’s a little disappointing because somebody beat me to the punch, but to find somebody who’s just sitting on the name because it’s catchy and can bring in a few bucks a month in keyword search advertising – that really bugs me because I feel like it’s a waste of space on the internet, so to speak.

Of course, the problem is there’d really be no way to actually prove intent – if you required a “website” within a certain amount of time after registering, you’d see template sites just like you see now with the “What you want, when you want it!” garbage that poses for parked domain sites nowadays anyways – there’s no real way to enforce making a decent website to justify owning a particular domain name. We’ve got enough of those cookie-cutter, syndicated content sites clogging up the tubes these days anyways – I have a feeling that trying to put the crunch down on parked domains would just exacerabate the problem ten-fold.

I guess the sad thing is, the only real way for a guy like me to combat this problem is to think ahead and do the exact same thing myself so that I can hold onto the names before someone else gets a chance to! Which sucks for this particular idea that I had because a) I don’t ever know if it’ll even come to fruition or be worth persuing a year down the road when I’d likely have time to start working on it, and b) it’s an idea that would fit into a larger scope, meaning that I’d likely want to register a handful of similar names all at once to ensure that they all fit into the same naming convention … which could get expensive at 6-12 names @ $9.95 each.

It’s either that or just wait it out and potentially consider settling for subpar names, but seeing as I’ve already done that a couple of times and ended up missing out on names that seemed innocent enough at the time but later got scooped up anyways, maybe it’s better to just squat now and then if things don’t work out, drop them in a year or two for someone else to immediately grab and put ads on themselves… 🙁

tough to be a teacher

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I feel really bad for teachers here in the state of Florida right now.

Our new nutjob governor has declared some kind of war on education and decided that it was time to both do away with tenure and start tying teachers’ salaries to their students’ performance on standardized tests. Next week I hear he wants to establish a program where he visits random houses just so that he can kick people’s puppies, too…

What’s even more depressing is that when I read about this on our local paper’s website, there was an overwhelming consensus in the comments that people agreed with him! “Teachers have it far too easy! If they can’t make our children learn, kick ’em to the curb!” And I know from past experience that I need to read those comments with a ginormous grain of salt … if I’m even going to read them at all … but it’s still sad to see the perspective that some people have against the educators of our next generation.

It was actually kind of disappointing to me when Sara left the teaching profession to become a nurse a few years ago because being a teacher to me has always seemed like one of the more “noble and selfless” professions that someone could choose to undertake. These people work long hours, spend money out of their own pockets after budget cuts remove essentials from their classrooms, and are often times up against students who don’t want to learn and parents who consider the public school system to be a free daycare provider. Truth be told, Sara left because she had just had it with the local administration – the woman taught at 3 different schools in a three year period, two during the same school year – how is someone supposed to get comfortable and establish a positive learning environment when you keep bouncing people around because of headcount problems?!

That’s why it always burns me when I hear people spew misconceptions about how well off teachers have it – how “they get two weeks off at Christmas and all summer off,” even though teachers don’t technically get paid for that time unless they have money set aside the rest of the year, or how they “only work five hours a day,” even though every teacher I’ve ever known went to school early, stayed late, and always brought home loads of work to do in the evenings. Why there’s such animosity against teachers these days, I don’t know, but frankly I think a lot of it is just parents not wanting to take responsibility for their own children.

“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink…” Teachers can do their best to make their lesson plans exciting and interesting, and really engage the kids, but if some kids just want to fight it and don’t actually want to learn, what else can they do?! Are you responsible at work for things that are just completely out of your control??? I read one comment from a teacher on the subject who said that she had already had a student threaten her by saying, “Well, I’m just gonna fail the FCAT so that you have to take a pay cut!” – why in the world would you want to make it even less of an incentive for someone to take such a thankless job by making their own paychecks hang on the line because of a few bad apples?!

Now I understand that there are most definitely some bad teachers out there and those people need to be removed, but cutting the legs out from underneath the entire staff certainly isn’t a way to root those bad eggs out because who in their right mind is going to deem it worthwhile to stick around to fill those empty spots? Education is hard enough without making teachers fight the governor AND the parents, in addition to the trouble kids in school every day.

It really makes me wonder what state of affairs Florida’s public schools are going to be in when I have kids of that age because although I can’t see us being able to afford private school for multiple kids, public schools are just seeming like less and less of a place condusive to learning, and that’s of no fault to the teachers.

Thin Post : Making Time, and Getting Busy

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So the last couple of weeks have been really frustrating for me on the exercise and diet front.

I mean, I think that going from February into March, I was doing really good! I was up in the double-digits of days exercised in a row and was even managing fairly well of keeping eating out down to more limited, higher quality meals, and at one point I was motivated to try and keep my streak going the entire month of March. You may recall that the stats showed 9 exercise days for January and 13 for February; well, I really wanted that number to be 31 for the month of March…

…and then, we found a new house to rent…

Granted, otherwise I’m extraordinarily happy about our move – I’m really looking forward to all of the changes and frankly, I’m really proud of us because in a way I feel like the new amenities are a well-deserved payoff for getting to where we currently are in life, and it feels good to feel like we’ve accomplished something like that. The downside, though, is that it’s been a horrendous time sink for me – a lot more than I was originally anticipating.

Now mind you, I’m typically horrible at judging time anyways – it’s a constant struggle with my creative work because I schedule twice as many things to do in a weekend than is reasonable, and then at the end I get frustrated because I’ve only gotten through a fraction of them. So managing time has never been my strong suit anyways, but admittedly I am a little extra frustrated this time because I’ve also had to watch my decent workout record that was so hard to build up get shoved to the side as well. Between sorting and packing, making arrangements, and then also still trying to meet the occasional deadline, I’ve watched my workout frequency drop from nearly every single day, to every other day, then every third day, and right now I’m honestly not even sure anymore the last time that I used the elliptical or logged into WiiFit…

I’m trying to tell myself that once we’re done with the move, I’ll get my time back and dive right back in (also, literally because we’ll have a pool!), but it’s still tough in the meantime because I do feel guilty that I’m not earning those calendar stamps every day … and also it makes me even more petrified of what the graph of my weight is going to do when I finally do start back up. It doesn’t help that I’ve been kind of stressed out by the lack of time, too, which has lead some less than honorable eating habits to come creeping back as well.

My new goal is either next week, or if nothing else, the week after to get back into the swing of things. Hopefully I don’t do too much damage to my progress between two weeks ago and then – I’d like to think that all of the sweating from lifting boxes would count for something, but the pizzas and junk food comfort afterwards are probably negating any gains there.

Stay tuned for more…?

my iPhone just got even more awesome!

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I just found out today that Square released the original Final Fantasy as an iPhone App!!!


The thing took forever to download, even via wifi…


…but the graphics look gorgeous!


The touch interface is admittedly a bit tricky…


…and yes, my heroes are all named after Fraggles!


Granted, I’m not sure how the playability for this will be long-term because already I can see how grinding for levels could get a bit tedious with the touch interface (you can’t just hold down the A button like you could through battles on the NES). I’m also curious to see how the battery life manages, both with the rich graphics and a full soundtrack. Honestly it’s been so long since I’ve played the PS1 port of this game, I can’t remember if these are just the new/updated graphics from that transfer, but I was still impressed of just how sharp they look on a 3″ screen!

From what I’ve gathered, they’ve also made available Final Fantasy 2 and 3 as well – not the SNES versions that are technically 4 and 6, but the original 2 and 3 from Japan. I never actually got around to playing those on the Playstation, but maybe they might be worth checking out now.

Either way, very cool iPhone port!