2018 Holiday Advent Blog – Day 5 – The Gift of Water Safety

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Swim lessons are expensive for three kids, but it’s nights like tonight when I’m beyond satisfied with the investment we’re making in these crazy, little swimmers.

The swim school that we’ve taken the boys to basically since Christopher was born does this program twice a year called Water Safety Week – during which instead of their usual lessons, every kid wears their normal clothes into the pool and gets taught at their level about the core basics of keeping themselves safe around around water. They spend some time in the pool so that they’re not foreign to the shock of being in the water with their clothes on, and then they all try on life jackets and float around the pool in the most adorable choo-choo train formation you’ve ever seen in your life!

They also take a few minutes to talk to us parents about the importance of using safety features with our pools at home and having designated watchdogs when attending or hosting a party where kids will be in or around the water. Some of the statistics shared are just terrifying – apparently in Florida alone, we’ve lost 86 kids to drowning this year … which is the equivalent of four preschool classes of drownings on average each year.

Fortunately, they say that swim lessons reduces the risk of a child drowning by 88%, so that’s something to help us sleep even just a little better at night.

Plus, the kids all just absolutely love their swim lessons, and it’s always fun to watch them trying out the new things that they’ve learned and being pushed towards new skills in an area that I myself very much struggled with growing up, and honestly still kind of do!

2018 Holiday Advent Blog – Day 4 – The Great Hot Chocolate Quest

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I’m on a quest this year to find the perfect hot chocolate.

Or at least a really, really good one!

I’ve since graduated from relying on Swiss Miss as my go to hot chocolate mix, with my current favorite being this Hershey’s hot chocolate that my wife picked up at Target around Thanksgiving.

I was looking forward to trying this fancy Starbucks Salted Caramel Hot Chocolate that I came across at Publix that just sounded fantastic, but apparently when you make your name peddling coffee, everything else that you make ends up tasting at least a little like coffee, too … which very much didn’t work for me!

That said, my new curiosity is this Oreo Hot Chocolate mix that I found at Walmart and am keeping set aside for our Christmas vacation next week – I figured it might be a good option back in the hotel room at night to sip on once the kids are finally (hopefully!) all asleep in their beds…

And it’s too bad because Disney themselves has a set of flavored hot chocolate mixes that you can also buy around this time of year, but we’ve already tried them and I actually remember them being a step below Swiss Miss … so no good there!

What do you think? Is there a great hot chocolate out there that you think I should try?

Epcot sometimes has some interesting ones with shots of liquor in them that I’ve enjoyed while walking around World Showcase, so maybe we’ll have to stumble over there in the name of my hot chocolate quest, too!

2018 Holiday Advent Blog – Day 3 – A Funko Pop Christmas

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According to my Amazon account history, I’ve officially been collecting Funko Pops for about a year and a half now.

Side note: Do we really need for Amazon to store our purchase histories for all time?! I’m not sure that my consumer profile needs to include a 1998 purchase of Top Gun on DVD…

That said, it’s true that the very first Pop that I ever purchased was that Clark Griswold figure from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. At the time I bought it because I thought it was pretty unique and would be a good cornerstone if I were only to get a select few of these things.

Well, a year and a half later, now I have … more … and so recently I decided to splurge on a few of the Christmas ones to round out a bit of my Funko holiday display, if you will!

I think the one I was most surprised to get a hold of was the Darth Vader glow-in-the-dark Chase figure. Believe it or not, the Amazon seller I got that from was actually selling a bundle where you got two Pops – the Chase and then the regular version, too.

Well, it turns out that before I got home, Christopher got into the box that they came in and was “playing with them” … something he knows he’s not supposed to do with “Dad’s toys.” 😉

Sara warned me in advance that one of the boxes had gotten pretty torn up, so I was worried that the limited edition one was the victim, but when I got home, thankfully glowing Darth had been spared!

I ended up putting the regular one in Christopher’s stocking for him to play with, but he brought it to me and told me it was mine because he recognized it from the dozens of others in my office, so at least he’s learning … sort of! 😯

2018 Holiday Advent Blog – Day 2 – Merry Plex-Mas!

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Plex has become a mainstay in our home over the last couple of years, expanding from only housing our movies and TV shows to also include educational programs and songs for the kids, series I’ve enjoyed and wanted to archive off of YouTube, and now … Christmas movies, too!

This is a little project that I’ve wanted to do for a while because previously all of our holiday shows were scattered throughout the regular movie and TV libraries, which are then separated by adult and kid content, whereas I always thought it would be nice around the holidays to have a dedicated library where you could look through only the Christmas stuff when you were sipping hot chocolate and looking to get all jolly and bright and whatnot.

There are a couple of different ways you can do it…

  • Create a separate folder and copy all of your holiday movies and shows into it, then add it to a new library dedicated to holiday shows … but this takes up twice as much space.
  • Create separate TV and movie folders for Christmas movies, then add them to both your existing libraries as well as your new holiday library.
  • (my choice) Create a new folder for Christmas shows and point your new library at it, then create symlinks to all of the media in their original locations.

This last option ended up working out well for me because it saved me from shuffling a bunch of files around, plus it gave me a fix for an unexpected problem that arose from certain Christmas specials that are normally organized under TV shows…

See, with the main Christmas library in Plex defined as a Movie library, it doesn’t find a metadata lookup for Garfield – S00E06 – A Garfield Christmas.mkv. The nice thing about symlinks, though, is that the linked name doesn’t need to equal the source name, and so I’m able to turn the TV-friendly filename into something that the IMDB can actually recognize like this – A Garfield Christmas Special (1987).mkv.

The command I used in Linux to create these links looks like this (executed in my new Christmas movies library folder):

ln -s "/path/to/TV Shows/Garfield & Friends/Specials/Garfield - S00E06 - A 
Garfield Christmas.mkv" "A Garfield Christmas Special (1987).mkv"

I’d say it took me maybe a couple of hours spread out over several sessions of searching through each library for the shows & movies I wanted, then copy & pasting the links into a Terminal window to create each symlink. The result is a nice, clean library with nothing but Christmas, and if I need to hide it away come January 1st until next season, that’s easy enough to do, too. 😉

2018 Holiday Advent Blog – Day 1 – Look at the Christmas!

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Tonight we put up our Christmas tree, as people often do when the calendar slips over into December and the official countdown is finally upon us.

Also tonight, Christopher ended up going to bed underneath the Christmas tree, so here’s to hoping he doesn’t wake up in the morning wondering where all of his presents are!

I think this is going to be a really fun year for celebrating Christmas.

Money has been pretty tight this year, so we’re not exactly splurging like we tend to do around the holidays (or in general, really), but the spirit of the kids seems to hold a unique promise of joy all on its own. Earlier this week as we were leaving swim class, Christopher saw a bunch of lights across the street and exclaimed, “Deeda! Deeda! Look at the Christmas!”

And it was absolutely adorable. 😉

So tonight we started decorating the house and got the tree put up. The boys then proceeded to decorate the tree with their cars, after which we had a fake snowball fight and listened to Christmas music and they jumped around like crazy people until bed.

We’ve already started threatening that they need to be extra good if they want to get something under the tree from Santa … so we’ll see how that pans out!

And tomorrow, in theory, we’re putting lights up outside … because several of our other neighbors already have and I feel awful that we’ve got young kids and haven’t even put up our lights for them to gasp at every time they come home yet.

Hopefully I’ll be able to find it in me to blog all of the fun this year. I know that I’ve kind of slacked with my advent blogs in recent years, but I’d really like to get back into them, and besides, I’m soooo close to hitting 1,000,000 words on this blog that I figure if I can advent blog the entire month, I should just about hit it!

These kids aren’t going to be little, adorable toddlers forever – better blog these holidays while I can… 😉

What I Want Out of the Internet in 2018…

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Sometimes it’s both fascinating and a little sad to see how the Internet has evolved in the last 25 years since I first logged on as a teenager.

Lately I’ve found myself doing a lot of soul searching because while there are parts that I absolutely love, I also recognize that there are parts which have grown to be a bit unhealthy and I need to find better ways to deal with them going forward.

Social media is obviously one of the biggest ones. I love staying connected to friends and family, and I still maintain friendships online with people who I’ve never met before in real life. That said, social media has some unsettling qualities as well…

  • It’s addictive.
  • Sometimes it leads to senseless arguing with complete strangers via comments.

Frankly, I’m kind of done even arguing with non-strangers simply because at 38 years old, you’re not going to change my mind about most of the political beliefs that I hold. I may be open to better understanding some of the nuances around them, but let’s be honest – that kind of discussion is much more likely to happen in person than it is on Facebook.

On top of that, I hate coming to realize just how much time I’ve been sinking into social media!

The latest iOS release has screen time tracking to help measure how you’re using your device. The first week I used it, it said I’d been on my phone an average of 92 minutes a day, with a whopping 65% of that time using social media!!!

Now I’m ok with some of that time – the parts when I’m sharing photos of the kids or making new connections on LinkedIn (something I did a lot of last week because I finally updated my profile for the first time in years), but when I’m just aimlessly scrolling to see if anything new is going on … and I’m seeing the same posts over and over again?

That’s time that I’d rather be spending creating new content, or promoting my work, or lately even putting my phone down altogether and actually spending time with my kids!!!

😯

Bad content is also becoming a sore subject for me online because although in theory it’s great how more people are publishing content online than ever, a growing percentage of it is either misleading or false information, or barely useful information created merely to promote something else or snag low-hanging ad dollars.

If I look back to when I first started using the Internet, circa 1994-ish, it was still vast, but also much more limited. Now there are a lot more trade-offs…

  • 1994 – Niche content was limited at best … you maybe had a few hacked together sites for specialty content, but mainstream got the focus.
  • 2018 – Niche content is becoming popular, but to the point where it’s also super easy to exploit it by farming out micro articles for pennies that rise to the top of search engines.
  • Also 2018 – Wikipedia has pretty good articles for almost everything – something the old, 26-volume encyclopedias could never touch!
  • 1994 – Online gaming was new and hip, and technologically it was amazing that it worked at all. I spent most of my time exploring text-only worlds.
  • 2018 – The options are vast, but technology has made it very easy for kids to learn terrible etiquette while they play. Also, micro-transactions have made lots of games that are more about spending 99 cents at a time than actually playing a full-fledged game.
  • 1994 – Online shopping was just getting started! I remember buying my first DVDs and books from online vendors, and it was incredible!
  • 2018 – With more choices than ever, buyers need to be ever-vigilant about scammers and people selling counterfeit merchandise … even if we’re talking about toy cars for your kids.

On more than one occasion lately, I’ve definitely found myself realizing all too clear when I use certain websites that users are often the products of these innovative sites, which is frustrating when I’m trying to use a site like LinkedIn and it has painfully obvious UI issues, yet there are opportunities for them to mine my data and promote things to me at every turn.

And to some extent I’m ok with that, but I want a balance.

The other day I ordered something for Christmas from ThinkGeek, and two days later I found that they’d subscribed me to their mailing list without asking me first.

I’m currently browsing a lot of job sites and my inbox is inundated with emails generated by random searches and profiles I’ve read with no intention of triggering a subscription.

Facebook sends me notifications several times a day about promoting the various pages I’ve created for my projects over the years, even when they’ve denied my advertising in the past for one reason or another.

The company that I’ve used for my home phone for several years keeps sending emails about increasing their rates, but encouraging me to lock in my existing rate now … a message they’ve sent more than half a dozen times just trying to get people to renew over the last couple of years.

Tying back to a post that I wrote about greed earlier this summer, I know that people need to pay their bills and keep the lights on, but I hate seeing the Internet become just another place where profit takes priority over quality. And no, not every website would be able to make an honest living – that’s absolutely why some of these places stoop so low … but I don’t want to waste my time with those sites, either.

Is it ironic that despite loathing the earliest iterations of “The Mobile Web” where ISPs like Sprint and Verizon would give users dumbed down versions of only certain websites and not full access – mostly because devices couldn’t yet support them, today I kind of want a curated Internet where I can search for something and get reliable results that have been selected based on the quality of each site and not those that I’m most likely to click through on to drive ad revenue???

Sickening

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Last night I spent more time than I’d like to admit browsing the Florida Sex Offender Registry.

Normally I’m not one to watch this thing like a hawk anytime someone new moves into the neighborhood, but we’ve got a handful of people coming to the house for therapy for the kids so it seemed like a good idea.

Thankfully, everyone checked out on that front just fine.

That said, afterwards I felt inclined to follow-up on an old (former) friend of mine who a couple of years ago apparently got busted for being in possession of child porn, and also creating it. (???)

As far as I knew, he’d lost his mid-level job with the military and got sent to prison. I honestly hadn’t talked to the guy in over a decade, so it was more of a shock than anything else, and then last night I stumbled upon a court document in which I guess he’s arguing a bunch of legal details on how it was handled…

…and inside, it also contained the legal review of the original video that had been taken…

…and words just don’t even describe my reaction.

I don’t know if it’s because now I have kids of my own that it feels even more heinous than it did originally, but I can’t imagine someone taking that kind of advantage of a kid … in this case, from what I’ve been able to discern, his own teenage daughter.

Reading through the text, and how he coerced her into what they did, I guess all I can say is that it most certainly wasn’t the same person who I was friends with as a teenager myself … who I worked at scout camp with and went to concerts with. It’s been about 20 years since those times, so I suppose that people change, and sometimes those changes cement the reminders why they’re not a part of your life anymore.

There was the friend who I knew since grade school that I had to block on Facebook because he had grown into a severe religious homophobe.

There was the uncle who had always been fun growing up, but in his later years wanted to argue about literally everything with a particularly conservative and often ugly set of views.

One thing that surprised me when I was browsing the registry was not only just how many offenders lived within a 5-mile radius of my cozy, little suburban neighborhood, but how many had gotten in trouble for offenses relating to kids. Some got busted for attempting to do something horrible with a minor and others for actually doing it.

Hell, last fall our kids’ pediatrician got busted in a prostitution sting here in a neighboring county!

I guess the point is, regardless of a history that you have with someone, you have to remain vigilant to those closest to you. I don’t think anyone ever expects something like that to happen. All you can really do is shake your head and think, “Thank god we didn’t keep in better touch.” 

It’s a little sad because I’ll never forget seeing Aerosmith with him from the second row as Steven Tyler twirled his mike stand over our seventeen year old heads. Or all of our shenanigans in scouts together. In fact, he was the one sitting in the passenger seat when I wrecked my sports car the same summer that I bought it.

But we were different then.

Customer Service with Extra Syrup

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It seems like sadly more often than not, we receive terrible service worth ranting about instead of great service worth bragging about, so I wanted to share a quick story I experienced this morning about somebody doing customer service right…

I was grabbing breakfast through the drive-thru at McDonald’s and when the cashier gave me my total through the speaker, it was a few bucks lower than it usually is.

I questioned this when I got to the window and asked if the prices had dropped, to which she quickly noted that she’d rung me up for a meal instead of the two sandwiches that I wanted instead.

Then she mentioned that I should check out their app because it occasionally offers customers coupons, such as buy one, get one free deals and whatnot.

It didn’t feel forced at all. She made a mistake, but corrected it seamlessly. And then saw a chance to help me out with a deal by referring me to their app.

A+ – Would buy McGriddles from again! 😉

Classy Like John McCain…

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I always thought that this was a pretty classy moment during the 2008 campaign when John McCain stood up to his own supporters in defense of Barack Obama. It was something that I’ve NEVER seen another politician do.

And I think it says a lot about the Republican mentality of those whose first action upon news of McCain’s death was to cut him down as less of a soldier, or a veteran, or a politician. That party – and its supporters – could stand to learn a few things from a man like John McCain.

Wrong Way

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Earlier today while I was getting gas, I had an encounter that to me seemed like a pretty good analogy for our current political climate and what the Trump admin and the Republican party are doing to our country…

Although the car started out at the pump behind me, I almost hit them pulling away because they got impatient and decided to pull up between me and the car on the other side instead of just waiting their turn.

Circling the parking lot to get out, despite the large WRONG WAY signs posted at the driveway meant for incoming traffic, the driver chose to go out the wrong way anyways.

It didn’t matter that she was endangering her own kids in the car.

It didn’t matter that she was endangering anyone else who wanted to enter the parking lot the correct way.

She was just going to do what she was going to do regardless of the warning signs and the rules that were put in place for everyone’s safety.

And it’s for this reason that I’m done arguing with Trump supporters about politics.

They don’t care about the warnings, and they don’t care about the other people around them. As long as they get where they’re going, everyone else be damned.

It’s useless to try and argue with these people because we’ve seen plenty of terrible results over the last two years of Trump’s presidency, yet they continue to cheer his name – anything to be anti-Democrat, even if they’re endangering themselves with every horrible decision that their faithful leader makes.

The best we can do, just like the careless driver in the parking lot, is avoid them at all costs, and when the time comes – we vote them off the road and vow never to let this kind of mistake ever happen again.