Reasons Why I’m Definitely NOT Not Buying a Verizon iPhone in a Few Weeks

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So it goes without saying that yesterday was a pretty happy day for me.

And in turn as anyone might expect, just as the announcement of Verizon finally getting the iPhone after three years of AT&T exclusivity has certainly managed to rile up the fanboys (myself somewhat included) once again, it’s also managed to incite plenty of negative speculation about why buying now might not be such a good idea. My take on the matter? Well, we’ve already decided that both Sara & I will be upgrading just as soon as the Feb. 3rd pre-order date arrives, and here’s why…

1. I have been waiting for this phone for three years now!

2. My existing phone barely works anymore – the battery life is horrible, half the buttons stick, and after seeing an iPod Touch, its opinion of “Internet access” is just plain laughable. It’s almost hard to believe this was a cool phone when I first got it.

3. The iPhone is exactly the kind of mobile device that I need – it combines music, web access, messaging, and the actual phone into a single device, and executes them all cleanly and effectively (crossing fingers on the voice part … I know AT&T had issues). Plus, there are a lot of really cool apps that I want to check out.

4. It’s also not everything that I don’t need it to be – I don’t care if Droid is “technically” the better device! I don’t need to be able to remote into servers from my phone, or customize the desktop, or root it, for god sakes. It doesn’t bother me that Apple moderates its App Store with extreme prejudice, and above all, for what it’s worth I still think the whole marketing campaign for Droid is just fucking creepy…

5. I’m not worried about having outdated hardware come this summer because I don’t think that we’re going to see a 4G iPhone as quickly as people seem to think. Verizon just recently started launching their 4G (LTE) network last month, and AT&T won’t be until this summer, so knowing how Apple prefers to let the technology mature a bit first, I think the earliest we’ll see a 4G iPhone will be 2012 anyways. If they do go ahead and release a new version on their existing hardware schedule in June, I think it will more closely resemble the iPhone 3GS from 2009 that was basically a point release as opposed to new technology at the network level. It still wouldn’t entirely surprise me if they break the cycle altogether, though…

Now it’s just a question of how crazy the pre-order is actually going to be … I couldn’t help but notice that immediately after the announcement yesterday, it took almost five hours before I could actually load up verizonwireless.com to see the announcements on their own site, so there’s definitely some concern that it’s just going to be a madhouse akin to everyone rushing to buy concert tickets from Ticketmaster at 8am on a Saturday morning. Plus, we’re in line for a couple of discounts that I’m not quite sure how they’re going to be applied – I just hope that we actually get to order on 2/3 and don’t end up getting placed on a month-long waiting list for the phones to arrive.

I hope that they’d be better prepared for that given how long everyone has waited, but then again it’s got to be a lot more difficult to build mass quantities of phones than it is to hire a content distribution network to make sure your website is available immediately following your huge, massively-anticipated announcement, so…

*fingers crossed*

Thin Post : My Plan, Part 1 … in a nutshell

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So I actually meant to include this in my last post, but I got side-tracked and didn’t want to make it too long…

Yes, that is what she said…

Anyways, like I said, my plan for the month of January is to just sort of get in the swing of things and try to establish a routine that’s healthier for me than the lying around, eating junk food, and never leaving the computer chair that’s gotten me into this mess, so here’s what I’m focusing on so far…

Drink more water.
So far I actually think that I’m doing pretty good with this one – I’ve been refilling a 16 oz bottle throughout the day and on average have been going through two or three a day. More significantly, while I could never give it up completely, I’ve made a huge dent in the amount of (diet) soda that I drink each day, in that I used to go through two or three cans at work, and then more when I got home, whereas now I’ve been barely drinking a can a day.

Be conscious of what I’m eating.
This one is hard, so I’m trying to do little things over time – less snacking, more fruits & vegetables, less late night meals, avoid getting up to snack in the middle of the night. I also eventually want to start planning meals a week in advance so there’s less temptation for splurging and eating out, but for now I’m trying not to go too crazy here because this is also a very easy one to fail if I get carried away.

Start exercising.
Nothing too intensive yet, but we got a WiiFit for Christmas and so far Sara & I have both been having fun doing that. I can, and probably will, write up a whole separate post on WiiFit later, but in the meantime I’m enjoying the instruction for how to do exercises that I didn’t know … plus, tracking it like a video game tends to help me. Eventually I think I want to alternate between WiiFit and some more intensive use of our elliptical, but I’m not ready for that yet.

Get more sleep.
Although the food one is tough, too, arguably this could actually be my most challenging focal point simply because I always have so much that I want to do … it’s really hard to force myself to go to bed sometimes, even when I know that it’ll come back to bite me the next day when I don’t get a damn thing done because all I want to do is sleep to catch up! It’s a huge struggle vs. my creative process, but I know that consistency is important.

Obviously, the goal is that by the end of the month, I’ll be doing reasonably good enough in each of these individually that I can start ramping up the stuff like exercise and possibly dieting to really push the actual weight loss forward. There are definitely some that I’m doing better at than others, as you would expect, but I’ve still got three weeks left this month, so let’s see where this new approach takes us!

Thin Post : The First Week is Always the Easiest

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I try to be cautiously optimistic when I start a new diet or exercise scheme for the first week – I just don’t like getting too excited right off the bat because it’s easy to set your expectations overly high while you’re still in that first week rush. I’m sure gyms and personal trainers see it like crazy right now – tons of people coming out of the woodwork to make their lives better because of the new year – they’re pumped, they’ve got new goals, and this time it’s all going to be great!

Fast forward three weeks and ask the gym how many of those people are still showing up. Yeah…

Anyways, that’s why I’m trying to take it nice and easy this month, trying new things, but also not beating myself up when I slip because overall I’m trying to develop a routine that I can continue for the rest of my life. Sure, at the two pounds a week benchmark that everybody cites, I could get all psyched about dropping every last ounce of weight in time for bikini season (just kidding…), but in reality, I understand that it will most likely take longer than that.

And it’s going to take a lot longer if I have to stop and re-start every three weeks along the way because I got over-excited and didn’t set fair expectations for myself. January, for me, is all about figuring out a healthier routine for myself overall and adapting my life to it … and if I still happen to lose a few pounds along the way, then that’s just icing on the cake!

Mmmmmm – cake…

The Golden Voice of Hope, a la YouTube

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I think this is probably my favorite story of the week – this homeless dude has been collecting money at some intersection in Ohio with a sign saying that he has “the God Given Gift of Voice.” Apparently he’s a former radio/voice-over guy who hit hard times with drugs and alcohol a couple of years ago, but has been trying ever since to get his life back. Well, a photographer from the Columbus Dispatch shot a video of him one day, the video ended up on YouTube, and within a matter of days the guy’s life has flipped 180 degrees…

Some 14 million views later, Ted Williams spent the last half of this week making appearances on TV, radio, getting reunited with his 90 year-old mother, and after a flood of job offers, last I could follow it sounded like he was going to take a job announcing and doing other work for the Cleveland Cavaliers, who offered him a full-time job and a house! The videos are numerous at this point, but he’s just such a humble guy – talk about a nice, feel-good story to kick off the new year!

And it was all thanks to the Internet – who knew?!

…

That said, the only negative thing to say about this story is that the Columbus Dispatch made a really bonehead move as far as this video was concerned because about three days after it went viral and had millions of hits, they filed a DMCA claim with YouTube to have it removed for copyright infringement. The video above is actually a repost that they did on a newly-created channel of their own, and I guess my big beef with the whole thing is just how out of touch is proves that at least one person in their newsroom is. I’m not debating their right to remove the video – that’s certainly how copyright works, but doesn’t necessarily mean that it was the right thing to do.

Notice how the “official video” only has a couple of hundred views, tops … whereas the original video had upwards of 14 million. Now I’m sure what happened here is someone from the Dispatch saw those numbers and said, “Why aren’t we getting any of those hits?!” Even though the video listed them as the creator and even had a link in the description, they probably figured that it would better affect them if the video was on a channel of their own instead of the random guy who ripped it from dispatch.com. As a result, however, not only was the huge view count and all of the comment history lost when the original video was removed, but it also killed all of the links that blogs and various news organizations had been linking to, thus making it harder for people to find the actual story.

Sure, their claim was that they had no intention of preventing people from seeing the video, but their short-sightedness resulted in just that nonetheless. Because let’s face it – this video didn’t go viral by people flocking to dispatch.com to see it … it exploded when somebody posted it to YouTube – a site with a little more global reach than a newspaper’s website targeting Columbus, Ohio! Had they pulled this stunt earlier, it may not even had made its rounds at all, and Ted Williams would still be out panhandling instead of getting the second chance that he deserves. On top of that, now the video has been copied more than ever on YouTube and they’ve got a whole slew of angry commenters pointing out the arrogance of their decision.

I guess it’s just disappointing that amidst this great round of publicity that the Dispatch could brag they started (which apparently they have been doing anyways), such a knee-jerk reaction proves just how bad old media still doesn’t get how popularity works on the Internet. You don’t get to pick what’s popular on the Internet – all you can do is be thankful when something appeals to the masses, and if you try to interfere with that process the Internet, it will bite back. Of course, if they had been on the ball and posted their content to YouTube in the first place instead of keeping things on their little newspaper website like every other old media company…

Things I Want to Do In 2011…

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I kind of liked the way that I laid things out in the last post as far as things done in 2010, so I thought it might be interesting to try presenting my resolutions for 2011 in this same fashion as well. I’ve noticed over the years that the more resolutions I write, the more I end up missing anyways, so who knows – maybe the hidden benefit of summarizing my resolutions will be an actual chance at achieving them!

I’ll let you know in a year…

Get to and maintain a healthy weight
I know, losing weight is probably the most popular resolution in the world, and yet it shows up on people’s lists every single year because we’re all horrible at it! I’m certainly not the only one, but regardless of how everyone else chooses to address the challenge this year, I really feel like I need to make this my #1 priority this year, for so many reasons. Not for nothing, but I’m really hoping that my latest discoveries will be the tipping point for actually giving me a chance at making a difference this year…

Make some significant strides with my writing & publishing efforts
Last year was a good year for me, but now that I’ve got some momentum, I want 2011 to be even better. I’ve got a ton of new things that I want to work on this year – writing efforts, new books, new websites – and even though it’s going to be a bear trying to get even half of them done, I think the farther I get the more aware I’m becoming of the prize at the end of the road (writing full-time).

Spend more time…

  • doing things with my wife.
  • lounging around Walt Disney World.
  • relaxing and doing things just for me (usually playing video games).

I decided to bundle all of these together because in reality, they’re all just time management issues that require both less time wasted doing stupid stuff and more productive time spent on the things that I do need to accomplish. As I mentioned, 2011 is going to be busier than ever as far as my writing is concerned, but it’s important that I don’t completely seclude myself from these other things that I enjoy, too.

Spend less time…

  • milling over politics and random controversies.
  • getting sucked into debates that I’m reading purely for the drama.
  • thinking about productivity and more time being productive.

Again with regards to my previous objective, the “good news” in trying to spend more time kicking back and relaxing is that aside from actual work, there are still other areas that are ripe for improvement to get some “free time” back. If I had instead written a new column every time I got all worked up over some political argument last year, I’d have never had a single late column the entire year! Need to focus on what’s really important…

Expand our family
And last but certainly not least, a shared resolution between me and my wife is to see some new additions take place around our home! First and foremost, we’ve recently been trying to get pregnant, so hopefully something will come of that in 2011. Also, it looks like things are finally shaping up where we should be able to get a dog like we’ve always wanted. Finally, sometime this spring Sara’s sister is going to move in with us for a while, which should be fun just in general to have another person around. If all goes according to plan, our house should be quite the bustling place come Christmas 2011!

So there you have it – five “simple” goals for 2011. Sure, I could add plenty more, but honestly if I can just manage these ones as they are, I should come out just fine at the end of the year…

Things I Did In 2010…

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So apparently I didn’t actually make New Year’s resolutions last year, but nonetheless before I lay out some goals for 2011, I thought it might be interesting to look back over what I did manage to accomplish in the previous year first. I always tend to get a little hard on myself when I don’t meet these things, which is made all the worse because I also set extremely high expectations for myself, so I think it’s good to take a look back every now and then and consider the high points even if they weren’t necessarily expected at the beginning of the year…

Started blogging again on a regular basis
I honestly never realized how much I missed doing this until I actually started back up again … plus, it didn’t help that my blog was getting weighed down by all of those stupid LoudTwitter posts! The bottom line is that I think it’s really neat to be able to look back and see where I was a 6-months / 1-year / even 5-years ago, and jotting down my random thoughts via blogging makes that possible.

Published my very first book
And some seven years in the making, no less! It’s hard to believe that I first entertained the idea of putting out a book of humor columns way back in 2003, but I suppose life just got busy and it took me a while to see things through. That said, I’m hoping that having the first behind me now will act as sort of a catalyst of more to come in the new year…

Actually made money with my writing
Granted, I won’t be buying my first yacht with the proceeds from book #1, but it did get my foot in the door and some actual revenues for my taxes, which I’m sure the IRS will be happy to finally see after … well, a while! Again, I’m hoping that this year’s performance can if nothing else serve to get the ball rolling for more writing income in 2011.

Went on three separate, very awesome vacations
What can I say – we work hard, we play hard! But seriously, my wife and I had kind of come up short in recent years of spending time together due to other obligations, so it was really nice to actually set aside some time for us for a change. I think we were gone for something like 5 weeks total – a long weekend in Seattle, about 3.5 weeks for our road trip, and then a week out at Disneyland for our anniversary. Good times, indeed…

Paid off a boatload of debt
Now I’m not going to list numbers and we certainly could’ve done more if we hadn’t gone on all of the vacations, but it was still a fairly significant dent nonetheless and got us one step closer to being debt-free and saving for a house. In addition, we also started making regular contributions to an emergency fund, which also still has a ways to go, but I think is going to provide a vital security blanket when I’m finally ready to transition careers some day.

I suppose the more that I think about it, 2010 was really all about laying the groundwork for more things to come in the future. There are a lot of other things that could go on here as well if you wanted to talk about half-completed projects and things that didn’t go as planned, but I think as it is, this is a good, solid list of five accomplishments that I can be proud about looking back at the past year.

Now as for 2011…

2010 in movies…

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Worst Line: “This must be some sort of … hot tub time machine!” (Hot Tub Time Machine)

Best Line: “Underwear would be fine … if I were wearing any.” (She’s Out of My League)

Most Sentimental Line: But the thing that makes Woody special, is he’ll never give up on you… ever. (Toy Story 3)

Chick Flick That Wasn’t Actually Too Bad: Valentine’s Day

Chick Flick That Was Absolutely Horrible: Eclipse

Better Than Expected Cop Movie: Cop Out

Just As Bad As Expected Cop Movie: The Other Guys

Non-Pixar CGI Movie That I Actually Really Enjoyed: How to Train Your Dragon

Only Went Because I Lost a Bet: Shrek Forever After

Hated Even Having to Watch the Stupid Trailer: Legend of the Guardians (aka That Stupid Owl Movie)

I’ll Be Happy When the Series is Finally Over: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1

3D Movie That Gave Me a Headache: Alice in Wonderland

Movie I Kinda Wanted to See, But I Guess I’ll Just Catch It on DVD Later: The Social Network

Worst Movie of the Year, or Possibly Ever: Get Him to the Greek

Other Stuff That I Hoped Would’ve Been Better:

Top 5 Favorites for 2010:
5. Grown Ups
4. The Losers
3. How to Train Your Dragon
2. Toy Story 3
1. She’s Out of My League

I hate the cold, pt. 2.

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(a sequel)

I hate tile floors, and having to wear socks around my own house.

I hate not wanting to eat anything except meatball subs, not for their sustenance, but for their warmth.

I hate having not put up all of our Christmas lights outside because it was just too damn cold out.

I hate that gross, burning smell that the heater in my car makes because I only run it one month out of the year.

I hate reading about all of the selfish strawberry farmers who are pulling water out of the ground like crazy to try and preserve their crops, knowing damn well that it’s going to result in sinkholes opening up all over the place in the months to come.

I hate being sick, then feeling better, then feeling even more sick than the last time.

I hate the only warm place in our house being in bed.

I hate when even the 10-day forecast doesn’t show an end in sight.

I really, really, really hate the cold!

Is it finally time for me to migrate from LiveJournal to WordPress???

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As I’m getting ready to do a redesign of my main personal site, one of the questions that I keep coming back to is whether or not it’s finally time to just wave goodbye to LiveJournal and migrate everything over to something that I would host myself. This used to be something that I was really passionate against because I’ve been using LJ since 2003 and have accumulated nearly 1,700 posts here, but the more I go back and review the reasons that I didn’t want to leave, the less weight they’re all starting to have…

It’s where all of my friends blog!
Well, hardly any of those people actually use LJ anymore! The people that do still blog are either self-hosted or using another platform, and several have just thrown in the towel altogether and just post updates to Facebook these days. My Friends List, and even Friends of Friends List, are pretty much both just filled with RSS syndication of comics nowadays – I rarely ever see actual blog posts in there anymore.

LiveJournal Icons are cool!
While I still can’t necessarily deny this, I do think that I know enough about WordPress now to just mimic the feature there … that is, if there isn’t already a plugin available for it. I also used to argue that icons made my friends list more colorful to read, but if nobody else is posting…

I like the app that I use to post my updates.
I’ve been using a program called Semagic for a number of years that’s really easy to use and offers pretty dropdowns for all of the LJ-specific features (icon, mood, music, etc…), however the downside of this is that it’s actually a pain to post when I don’t have access to the application. Like for this actual post, for instance – I’m actually writing it in Word, but when I paste it into Semagic to post later, the formatting will look really ugly because of how Microsoft bloats its HTML output … I usually end up posting as plain text and then re-adding all of the formatting manually anyways.

Although I believe that Semagic can actually post into WordPress, too, I also have the option to post via the regular interface wherever I have web access OR I can paste via Word without formatting issues … this is already verified because that’s exactly how I do my humor columns each and every week.

Migrating everything is going to be a pain in the ass, and I’ve already paid for another year…
True, 1,700 posts is going to be a pain, especially considering that whatever import tool that I use likely won’t preserve all of the tags and formats as clearly as I would like, but on the other hand … you’ve got to start somewhere, right?!

I guess in looking over the nitty-gritty, I basically just convinced myself that it’s finally time … at least to say that I’m going to do it, anyways. Sure, it’s only $20 a year for a paid account with LJ and there’s really no reason why I couldn’t just go free, but the more I look at it the benefits are really dwindling these days … namely, nobody else uses LJ anymore and everyone I do follow I now use RSS for. Plus, I’m kind of making it a point to dump old online stuff that I don’t really need anymore this year, anyways. Already I’ve let a few domain names expire for projects years old that just never came to fruition, and although I never paid for Flickr, I’m still debating whether I want to get a pro account with them or use my own hosting account for photos as well.

Again, the money isn’t really a big deal, but a) like the placeholder domain names, it’s dumb to keep paying for something that I don’t need; and b) I already have a monthly bill for webhosting, so to some extent it does seem a little silly to pay an extra fee for another service that I could host myself … unless it offers some amazing features that open source software doesn’t currently replicate (arguably, this is my debate with Flickr right now…).

My requirements are pretty simple for this blog – I don’t even know if anybody else reads it because I’ve always looked at it more just as something for me to look back at reminiscently from time to time, so if we’re finally to the point where it makes more sense for me to just host a simple WordPress blog for it myself, maybe that’s finally ok. Besides, maybe that will put it in a better position to actually get read by more random people, and a few cents here and there from Adsense never hurts. I’ve already proven this year that even though something may seem stupid to me, that doesn’t mean other people won’t be interested in it nonetheless!

Anyways, I’m sure I won’t stop posting here for a while, but I suppose it’s something for me to start playing around with when the redesign for scottsevener.com gets underway. My original plan was just to keep it a portal pointing to all of my other sites, but I was planning on using WordPress as the framework, so including a blog in the mix shouldn’t be much trouble on that part. I’m not really concerned about the design, but the 1,700-post import could get a little ugly! Then again, maybe it’d be a good task to do 6 months at a time – that way, I can go back and tag all of those really old posts at the same time, too!

We’ll see whether I still renew my paid account here in Sept. 2011 whether this plan actually worked out or not…

Thin Post : A New Beginning (Yeah, Another One…)

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So admittedly I haven’t written one of these posts in a long time because I kind of hit rock bottom with the whole diet & exercise efforts. The last post that I wrote was just before going on our three-week road trip, so you can guess how well I ate during that whole excursion! Sadly, I can probably count the number of times I’ve hopped on the elliptical since then on one hand, attributed to a toss up between stress and just not making any progress whatsoever, but nonetheless I want to start back up and try again for a couple of reasons.

1) As usual, one of my New Years Resolutions for next year is going to be to lose weight.
2) Over the last couple of months I’ve seen some medical diagnoses that are hopefully going to make this goal actually attainable going forward.

First and foremost, a few months back my doctor finally diagnosed me with some sort of thyroid problems, which honestly I don’t know all of the details about offhand except that it can really screw with your metabolism. Admittedly, I was kind of hoping that this would just be the magic pill that would cause the weight to simply fall off once it got stabilized, and it didn’t … but at least it’s one less hidden variable working against me going forward.

The other more drastic change is that earlier this fall I was diagnosed with sleep apnea – something that my wife has been suggesting for a while because I snore like a buzz saw (and apparently stop breathing during the night!), but I never wanted to accept because it would mean that I’d have to wear this creepy gas mask to bed for the rest of my life. Well, after continuing to not show any signs of weight loss after stabilizing my thyroid, the doc sent me off to do a sleep study (a horrible night spent with wires taped all over my body) and at the end of six hours of “sleep,” they concluded that I had woken up from not breathing something like 40 or 50 times over the course of the six-hour period.

This is important because apparently the body needs to actually get rest in order to properly burn fat, which it can’t do if instead it has to focus on waking me up subconsciously every 15 minutes when I start to suffocate in my sleep!

Yikes, indeed.

And as much as I really didn’t want to hear all of this, it was kind of a relief because it actually makes a lot of sense. It’s the same reason that I was feeling lethargic and tired all of the time – because although, yes, I’m fat and that plays a big part of it, at the same time I’m also feeling drowsy because I’m not actually sleeping in the truest sense of the word at night, and of course, shorting myself sleep to stay up late working on stuff just compounds that even further! Looking back, it seems really obvious, but frankly, it took a long time getting here and I honestly probably would’ve kept on denying it even longer if I wasn’t beyond ready to give up with weight loss…

So the long and the short of it is that as a result, I now have to use a CPAP machine when I sleep, which is the creepy gas mask thing where I wear a little mask over my nose that pushes air down my breathing passage and keeps me from stopping breathing in the middle of the night. I hate the thing and it’s a huge pain in the ass, but on the bright side, I do feel a little more rested and I don’t feel like I yawn during the day nearly as much as I used to. At the time I’m writing this, I’ve been using the thing for a little over a month.

Also, Sara says that my snoring disappeared completely, which I know is a huge bonus for her!

That said, the game plan now is this – basically, try again!!! These were two potentially huge variables working against me that I had absolutely no knowledge of over the past years, so it could very well be that now that I’m actively managing them, I actually stand a chance at losing weight on my own. Granted, I don’t expect the weight loss to be handed to me – I’m also starting to accept that as I get older, my metabolism isn’t exactly working for me anymore, but at least if I have a fighting chance instead of doing everything I’m supposed to and then still just failing miserably, that’s gotta be worth another try at this whole thing. For all of those other reasons that I don’t want to be overweight, and now also because I don’t want to wear this stupid gas mask for the rest of my life!

Holiday snacking and our ridiculously cold weather has made diet & exercise tough these last couple weeks of December, but so far that’s the plan and I’m slowly inching myself back into the habits of working out and eating better that are supposed to make this whole thing work. Today’s post is really just an attempt to bring things back up to speed, but I’ll do my best to write more in 2011 once I get things back into gear…

*fingers crossed*