some journaling, of sorts…

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

Looking back through my recent posts, I haven’t really done a lot of life blogging, as it were, so tonight feels like just as good a time as any to rectify that situation. Fair warning, I’m probably going to be jumping around a lot, but I’ll try to keep my thoughts confined within each of these handy, dandy bold headlines that you’ll find so eloquently inserted into the otherwise exceedingly verbose text below… 😉

Scott’s Thing-a-Day
I honestly don’t think that I ever got around to sharing this new project here, but a couple of months ago I started this neat, new daily blog that I really liked … but lately I haven’t really been doing it so much.

The problem I’m finding is two-fold, at least – most significantly being that when I launched the project back in February, I was in a bit of a rut and wasn’t writing much of anything at all. But now that I’m recovering from that spell, most notably by writing my humor column on a weekly basis again, the Thing-a-Day posts often feel more forced than I want them to. That, and I often struggle finding things to write about because I already put what would’ve been my Thing post for the day into some other article or blog post or whatever.

So overall I still enjoy the concept of this project … I just need to mull it around a bit with my more productive schedule to figure out what I want to do with it now. There’s definitely a lot to be said for writing a single project every single day, but I don’t like to see my other writing efforts suffer as all of my content just goes there instead of into each of them respectively…

Housework a-Plenty
So I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I’ve got twins coming this fall, and in turn there are roughly a billion things that need to get done around this house in preparation for their inevitable arrival, which I’ve been told repeatedly is going to happen whether I’m ready for them to come or not! 😯

I currently have a list of 31 items in length, divided by room, of tasks that need to be completed, ranging everywhere from painting Christopher’s new room and then re-painting the nursery to finally hanging the TV in our bedroom, cleaning up a bunch of junk out in the garage, and just all sorts of stuff. This past weekend I was actually able to scratch a few off the list and it felt pretty good, but the thing is just so demanding and sadly almost none of them are quick, 5-10 minute tasks … I know that it’s something that I really need to stay on top of all summer long if I want to actually knock it all out by the time we get to October.

Creativity Brewin’
With writing resuming on what is arguably probably my favorite work to date (my humor column), my mind is also a’bubbling with all sorts of other related and semi-related creative projects that I’m now itching to get underway. Most notably … a new book.

Or two, or three… 😕

I’m not going to give spoilers on what any of them might be simply because all three of them have been ideas that I’ve been kicking around for a while, and admittedly probably too long. The last couple of years creatively have sort of been focused in another direction, as evidenced by the release date on my latest book being 2012 – a year that was, in fact, several years ago. Needless to say, I’m kind of disoriented on what I’m supposed to be working on creatively right now at this point in my life, so dare I say that it’s time to try something a little different.

Plus, low and behold I think that it’s surprisingly reasonable for me to actually finish all three of these works this year, so why not spend the next six months pivoting in another direction and try something new? It’s not like I’m getting any younger here… 😛

Welcome to Life, Speed Limit: 1 BILLION mph
…because despite my best attempts to slow down life to a rate more becoming of someone who’s quickly slipping away into dementia, it seems that life has no intentions of letting up – see references to twins and general creative flusterment. Life is a highway and as much as I wouldn’t mind just pulling over and grabbing a few quick hours of rest before pushing on towards Toledo, ride it all night long, we must, nevertheless.

It’s gotten to the point where lately I’m happy just to live life a single week at a time – if you want to ask me about anything that spans beyond the upcoming weekend, good luck with that because about 4-5 days’ worth of mental stuffs is about all that my mind can handle at this particular juncture! Just ask my wife how many times a week I confirm her work schedule for the rest of the week … no doubt she’s looking forward to going out of work early on short term disability simply to reduce the number of times she has to hear that question from me alone…

I’m somewhat nervous to ask just how long it’s going to be like this, although in the back of my mind I’ve attributed a bunch of it merely to the anticipation associated with welcoming more mouths to feed into the human race. Then it will be a different kind of chaos, but at least I’ve dealt with that kind of chaos before … there will just be more of it.

As for right now, I guess in a way it also somewhat forces me to focus more on the present. I worry about this week’s humor column, I try to work on two or three key tasks for my day job. And I more or less shoot to keep everybody fed seven days a week and properly bathed more days than not! Anything else beyond that, be it a half hour spent lounging in the pool or a few extra posts written that were unexpected, is very much icing on that particular week’s cake!

Recommended Reading…
In closing, I thought I’d share this rather creatively inspiring blog post that I came across just today via Amazon’s monthly newsletter for KDP authors – it rings along the vein of the new books that I talked about writing this year, and it’s pretty true advice even despite the last four paragraphs I just wrote about challenges!

I want to expand more on this idea of writing because you want to write as opposed to for financial or career goals because I think there’s something to be said in that realm that really resonates with where I’m sort of stuck right now about not really knowing what to write, yet still feeling like I need to write something. Especially as one gets later in their profession and the writer dream job seems to be slowly but steadily floating away, it’s easy to get lost in the scramble like I think I have lately and as a result spend all sorts of good time worrying about not making it instead of actually putting that time down on paper and making something out of it … even if it’s not necessarily what you thought it might look like 10-15 years ago when you first decided that being a writer has without a doubt got to be the best job ever! 😉

Fin
But for now, I think I’ve journaled here enough. I’ll try to do this a little more often this summer, both because I want to see that word count inch closer to 1,000,000 there in the sidebar, and also just because I think it’s a fun thing to do.

Writing. Blogging. Whatever.

See you next time! 😀

Dream Journal : Bad, Badder, Worst

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

For whatever reason I had returned to my hometown and was walking down the small street where I grew up when I saw my neighbor walking with a younger girl who was frantically approaching mailboxes randomly and removing the contents.

This seemed weird, but not enough to stop and ask what was going on until I reached my own and found that it was full of loose change piled around the other mail. As I was counting it, the two walked up and that’s when I noticed that what the girl was carrying was a large envelope filled with change, along with upon further inspection a traffic ticket or something that carried a pretty hefty fine … of which the girl had tried to pay with change.

As I asked her why in the world she’d tried to mail so much coinage and didn’t instead just go down to the police station to pay the fine directly, she hinted somewhat scared that she didn’t have any other choice and that she was the victim of some new people on the block paying a prank on her…

And it wasn’t long before I would find out exactly who those new pranksters were…

…because apparently they were a gang.

The thugs had taken up residence in the house kiddie-corner to my own, and soon two of them had come out into the street to see what the fuss was about, causing my change-toting neighbor to bolt and leave me to fend for myself. It started with some verbal harassment, along with noticing the graffiti that they’d done to colorfully change the name on the mailbox as well as a couple of signs in the front yard for a business we were running.

I don’t know why, but I guess I had a feeling that a fight was going to erupt anyways, so despite my nature I threw the first punch and knocked one of the thugs on the ground.

The second guy honestly never really did much of anything except watch and egg his buddy on, who thankfully (and surprisingly) wasn’t much of a match for me! Although we struggled for a while, I always managed to keep the upper hand but it never slipped my mind that eventually more of this guy’s buddies were going to show up and that was going to be the end of it for me…

That said, somehow the struggle subsided and we ended up arguing some more that devolved into these thugs negotiating their bribes that they expected from us to get them to just leave us and everyone else in the neighborhood alone. Now we were back in their house and their demands were ridiculous – they wanted me to pay for a solar system to get them off the grid at their house, and I said no.

I countered saying that I’d give them an XBox or Playstation if they’d just drop it and let it go, around which time someone much more senior – possibly a father figure – arrived and sort of chuckled at the exchange before he put the fear back into me and confirmed that there would be no bargaining.

To show this, he pulled out a box cutter and began cutting up a section of the carpet, as if to show that the alternative was just to kill me right then and there, and roll my body up in the carpet before disposing of it out of sight.

The old man’s counter to me was that I was going to help them sell drugs, and although I had no idea how that was going to work, at the time it sounded better than getting rolled up in the carpet.

* * * * * * * * * *

Flash forward, but back in time – I lived in a society that was heavily monitored by … someone.

I found myself in a small camp that very much just felt like a normal state park, except that there were cameras attached to some of the buildings and whatnot and we all knew that we were constantly being watched.

I was sitting at a picnic table with my family just enjoying everyone’s company, and spirits were generally upbeat until I for some reason had to go back inside for a minute. Ducking to the side of the building, I was trying to time the camera so that I could sneak in unseen when this guy walked by and, noting what I was doing, he mentioned that he sold tools that people like myself could use to avoid being detected by the powers that be…

I didn’t quite know what this meant, but he didn’t give me much time to figure it out because suddenly he had to leave in a hurry and eventually I just went back inside, cameras be damned.

There I found another family meticulously counting a pile of coins that had been dumped on the table, and shortly after I entered another of them came in – presumably returning home from work – and deposited more change for the family to get to work counting. As I helped them stack a few rows, I commented that it seemed weird that only coins and not bills had survived because bills were so much easier to carry and use … only to be countered by one of the older women who simply explained that they didn’t pay us enough to warrant using any larger denominations anyway … as she continued carefully counting out the pennies as if their food and shelter depended on it.

And then … word got to me that I was being pursued.

I quickly said my goodbyes and took off running long before they showed up, disappearing into a nearby field that was filled with that very tall, iconic wheat that made it very easy to hide in. A couple of men approached on horses, however they proved to be friends – one of them handing off their horse to me and pointing me in the best direction while they took off in the opposite to hopefully slow down my hunters.

Eventually making my way through the fields, I came to a small town on the water where I was able to momentarily relax, and in my quick explorations I found an enemy tank that had been left by the side of the road and happened to be remote controlled.

Needless to say, I had some fun with this, using the remote to send the tank tearing off down the road until it accidentally got derailed on a bridge and just sort of stuck there blocking foot traffic.

That’s when they showed up again, and I was able to duck underneath a rail bridge just before it crossed a large body of water between two countries – myself running one way undetected while my pursuers could be seen through the slats above rapidly running the other way looking for me. I knew that all I had to do was get to the other side and somehow I would be safe, but with the bridge above me covered with troopers, that was going to involve a lot of swimming.

* * * * * * * * * *

And then in a very much unrelated tale, we were at Disneyland with Cleo trying to get around a parade route and somehow she ran off following one of the floats and ended up getting hit. A worker brought her back to us, pointing out that she had broken her back leg, and we were left trying to figure out what to do about it.

Dream Journal : Sirens’ Call

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

We were vacationing at this really nice beach resort – the kind that boasted all sorts of activities along the beach like live music in the evenings and games and whatnot – so I was just lounging around enjoying listening to one of the acoustic guitar players when my ears perked up to hear another type of music that was playing further off in the distance…

Eventually the beach turned into a rocky area that was elevated up from the sand, but also very flat so that you could still walk on the rocks along the shore. There were a few people wandering off in this direction, though not nearly as many as on the beach itself, so I decided to do a little exploring and made my way along the rocks, the music – that of a saxophone player – growing louder as the other people grew fewer, until I was the only person left on this peninsula of rocks jutting out into the ocean, the source of the saxophone music nowhere to be found.

As the rocks seemed to transform into this series of caves, I pushed forward out of curiosity despite the feeling that it was getting more and more dangerous with every step. I soon found myself staring at sort of this puzzle within the rocks, almost like out of an Indiana Jones movie where much larger rocks now rolled back and forth, and you needed to time it just right to make it through the opening without getting crushed.

After waiting for a while and timing out the rocks, I finally decided to throw caution to the wind and went for it, ducking through the last opening to find myself in this bizarre cave that was made up very much like a house and just so happened to be filled with video games!

There I was greeted by three people that seemed nice enough, and they invited me to stay for a while and play some games because they didn’t get many visitors where they were. I browsed their gaming collection for a while that happened to span several walls until I noticed that all three of them were congregated in the kitchen … and something just didn’t feel quite right.

The three of them – a woman, a man, and a younger child – invited me to sit down for some food, but by then I was growing cautious and it quickly became clear that they knew this as well. It was when the youngest made reference of “having Chinese” the night before and witnessing the nearby pots that were filled with something not so much resembling chicken that my gut confirmed that these people were the real danger in this cave…

…because, in fact, they weren’t actually people at all!

I never did find out what they really were – I didn’t want to know – but seizing the opportunity, I first knocked the youngest one unconscious with a nearby pot and then struggled with the other two until I was able to subdue them and make my escape. Grabbing the towel that for some reason I had brought with me, I made my way back through the caves and along the beach until I returned quite frantically to the resort and tried to explain to my wife what had happened, though I think that she was even more confused at that point than I was!

We sat in sort of a ballroom area where other family was gathering for the next activity that we were going to do together, the whole time my eyes remained locked on the same door that I had come in, convinced that these things were chasing me and would eventually track me back to the resort. Admittedly I sort of freaked out when at one point I turned around to find that the ballroom had not just the one, but three open doors for my aliens to sneak through in their pursuit and I certainly couldn’t be watching all three of them at the same time.

For some reason, it was then that I pulled my wallet out of my back pocket and opened it up in shock to see that in my hasty retreat, I had somehow grabbed the wallet of one of their other victims instead of my own … meaning that they had all of my information at their fingertips, including my home address where I slept at night.

Death of a Newspaper

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

It was a little sad, but honestly not at all surprising to read today that one of our two local papers – The Tampa Tribune – is closing up shop, as it was just acquired by its competition.

I’d link to the video by their CEO “announcing” this exciting change, but even ironically it’s a painfully stale video to watch … one of those pieces of evidence that will surface 50 years from now and make people think, “Wow, so your print journalism was still alive back when this guy was somehow a part of it?!”

Anyways, I was just thinking about how when I first moved to Florida … or technically even before I moved here, I was an avid reader of The Tampa Tribune. As soon as I got here, I signed up for a full subscriber to kind of soak in the locality as much as possible, but I think a good year prior to that I actually would get their Sunday editions mailed to me at home up in Michigan! They would arrive about a week late and I would use them mostly for scoping out jobs and apartments, but also just in general to sort of fantasize about this far off land that I dreamed of moving to eventually one day…

Hell, I think I actually even applied for a few jobs with the Tribune over the years, but clearly those never got too far! 😯

I guess I stopped reading the Tribune probably 5-6 years ago when it became more common to have a stack of papers sitting in the corner that I had to make a conscious effort to flip through before throwing them in the recycling bin. Slowly there became less and less that they had to say that I hadn’t already read in one form or another online, plus computers have always had this nice way of not turning your thumbs black while you’re reading them, and so eventually I just canceled my subscription altogether and really just never looked back.

The state of journalism itself these days kind of has me torn because although some publishers have done ok or better at embracing digital media, most of the big guys like the Tribune and the Times have not and as a result it’s left a bit of a hole in the news that needs to be filled one way or another. In some cases we’re seeing TV stations and even radio branch onto online to snag in those readers, but they still ultimately have the same issues that print ran into – finding a way to financially support their efforts without either selling out to special interests or else just putting entertainment first and making it hard to take them seriously when it comes down to real news.

And of course, the web and social media have made it easier than ever for groups and organizations themselves to share their own news, so I suppose that some of the playing field left behind is still covered by them, but then there’s always the conundrum of honesty vs. being self-serving, too…

Personally I’d think what I’d like to see is some new local news organizations popping up to take the place of these corporate behemoths who can no longer seem to make a profit in the space. The Internet being a super cheap replacement for the classic printing press and technology in general continuing to rival that which goes into professional productions, there’s no reason that a small team of passionate journalists couldn’t get together and create their own local media company to cover the same types of things that these newspapers used to cover. Unless their plan is to strictly target senior citizen communities, newspapers aren’t going to make a comeback – at least not with any generation who can operate an iPad without having to call their grandkids for tech support – so the barriers for entry in this new age world of journalism are really lower than ever.

Because we need local coverage in our daily lives to talk about the things that didn’t happen around the country in New York or Los Angeles. And a media company for a mid-sized metropolitan area like the Tampa Bay region may not be able to support the 250+ employees that the Tribune was said to have had prior to today’s announcement, but 20-30% of that including a decent, local sales team? It seems like it should be very doable, and it would be a great asset to a community that continues to grow despite its conglomerate-owned media giants flailing for relevancy because they simply don’t know how to do business in a world where most readers don’t care about print and won’t pay for an online subscription.

Mind you, *I* certainly have no desire to take on that challenge myself, but for our local journalists who are really passionate about the thing that they do – you’ve probably got better odds trying your own thing than you do vying for a spot at the paper.

movie thoughts … Deadpool

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

deadpoolWell this movie was certainly not like the others, and I think that’s why so many people have been enjoying it since it hit the theaters a few months ago!

Let’s be honest – Ryan Reynolds’ other superhero role as Green Lantern was kind of awful … they even elude to this in Deadpool … but after so many great movies between the Avengers and X-Men franchises lately, they needed to do something special with Deadpool to make it stand out because I think if it had taken a more serious approach, it probably never would’ve held a candle to the likes of Captain America and Iron Man…

…but instead, this movie ended up being a fucking riot, which is probably how good, old Deadpool himself would’ve referred to it and was most definitely part of this psychotic assassin’s charm. 😉

If I had to make but a single critique of this movie, I guess I’d say that when it ended it kind of felt like it ran a bit short … and it was about 20-30 minutes shorter than some of the other superhero movies we’ve seen lately … but honestly I think that was probably more just a result of the movie’s use of flashbacks to tell the story, which in this case was really kind of genius because they knew that they needed to lead on a killer action scene that the story sequentially didn’t have … so telling it sort of MIDDLE – BEGINNING – END actually worked well.

All in all, I really enjoyed Deadpool because not every superhero movie can be a Cap or an Iron Man, and these studios have got to try some different approaches to telling comic book stories if they’re going to continue kicking them out as fast as they have been in the past. With these universes being so vast and (hopefully) plenty of fans being so god-awfully tired of hearing the origin stories for Wolverine and Spider-Man over and over again, movies like this give me hope that they might not be gunning every single superhero for that same cookie cutter template.

Not to mention the fact that Deadpool ran a budget of nearly 1/3 of the average superhero movie, yet so far as been more successful than just about any of the recents – save Avengers 2!

The Merc with a Mouth may not be the right formula for every superhero, but hey – we’ve had our share of civilized men in tights lately – maybe we were overdue for a foul-mouthed, slightly less bad guy who just enjoys killing people and pushing the envelope. 😉

Definitely not a movie for kids, but honestly, my kid’s going to have to be a teenager before he sees most of these films, so no real difference there.

Reclaiming a domain name, 13 years after squatters stole it…

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

So this happened today… 😀

Cfy6GaUUsAAukXP

Now I know that I’ve told the story many times before, so here’s the highlight version:

  • Just Laugh, my humor site, was established in 1999 using the domain justlaugh.net because somebody else owned the .com and wanted $3,000 for it.
  • A couple years later, that guy let it lapse, so then I owned both justlaugh.net AND justlaugh.com!
  • In a twisted case of cruel irony, I let justlaugh.net lapse when I moved to Florida in 2003 and somehow forgot to renew it.
  • After a squatter scooped it up almost immediately, it proceeded to bounce from one reseller to another, usually with overseas registrars, leaving me almost no legal recourse to bother trying to reclaim it even if I did have the $1,000 fee or whatever.

So I’ve had backorder monitoring setup with GoDaddy on this thing for years – I seriously don’t even remember when I did it, but it was like $18 and came with a year of hosting, so I figured why not … maybe they’d catch it one of these years if the squatter fell off his game, even though it always seemed to magically renew a week or two before the expiration date rolled around.

The notification emails from GoDaddy were kind of torture, watching that happen year after year…

…until this year when surprisingly the expiration came and went without renewal, and the registrar threw the domain into pending status!

Even then I tried not to get too excited about it because I know that there are companies that do nothing but stalk the expiring domains list to scoop up anything that could be of value to them. In fact, I even got a curious email about it last week asking “if I was interested in the domain” … which made me wonder if he was either the guy deciding whether to renew it again or just another stalker fishing leads to see if it was worth picking up. So I didn’t respond, and I also tried to avoid any of those backorder sites that might accidentally trigger a notification to the owner that someone was poking around about it.

And then this afternoon, I unexpectedly got this email from GoDaddy saying that the backorder had been successful!!!

Mind you, I don’t really have much use for it – after all of these years, it’s purely a nostalgia grab, primarily fueled by the poster on the wall in my office that all of our contributors signed for me back in our heyday that just happens to still bear the justlaugh.net address…

justlaugh

I’ll pretty much just redirect it to justlaugh.com and 99.999% of visitors will never even know that it exists … but I’m a nostalgic guy, so that doesn’t really matter to me. It’s just neat to have finally reclaimed the name that I’d originally bought fresh out of high school when I started this whole thing in the first place, back when the website was entirely hand-coded in PHP and looked a little something like this…

Screen Shot 2016-04-12 at 2.11.51 AM

Good god, St. Patrick’s Day and the Christmas menu buttons were still up?! Well, that was 2003 for you… 😉

Banking Made Easy-ish

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

So I thought I’d write a little about this because it ultimately took up a bit more of my day than I was really expecting, but in the end I’m still feeling pretty positive about the whole situation so I kind of wanted to share… 😉

I’ve written a few times in the past about my personal banking and my position on the matter continues to evolve, ironically to the point where now I’m actually more or less content with the same place that drew from me much ire only two years ago! And honestly, it’s really not so much the bank changing their ways as it is me changing my perspective on their ways, so let’s dive into it.

If I had to pinpoint one single idea that defined my personal banking relationship these days, I’d have to say that it’s in acknowledging that to a trillion dollar bank, I personally represent a very, very … very small fish in a very, very very big pond.

That’s all there is to it, and so despite issues with my finances being all-encompassing for me, I’ve found that it’s important to put things in perspective that if I want to argue with these guys over a few percentage points of interest or some late payment fees, there’s simply no real reason for them to care. As a financial institution, they exist much more for my benefit than I do for theirs … and that’s a tough one to swallow when “The customer is always right!” is your mantra, but remember, we’re trying to find compromise (and peace!) here…

I came to this realization over about the last month as I’ve been working to migrate a couple of stock accounts over to a brokerage account with Wells Fargo because they’re not a ton of money – maybe $5,000 total – but to a brokerage managing customers with portfolios containing literally millions of dollars, my little nest egg is pretty much a single fish egg sitting beside a dinosaur egg … and that’s ok because they’re still willing to work with me – they’ve got specific tiers within their reps to do so (e.g. call center vs. dedicated advisors, etc…).

This is good for me because it allows me the opportunity to invest, and to keep my investments easy to manage along with the rest of my banking at Wells Fargo, whereas I could technically spread out my accounts between an assortment of discount brokerages and credit unions that individually might handle each account a little better in their own way, but for me at this point, I’m willing to sacrifice a few dollars a trade or a tenth of a percentage point of interest in exchange for my time and my sanity.

I think it’s easy to get into that mindset when we’re customers that we’re the most important customer that XYZ Corporation has and so they should bend over backwards to make us happy, but let’s be honest – that usually isn’t the case. I recall a time many years ago when Sprint made headlines for “firing high-maintenance customers” so that they could focus on the rest, and even though it probably filled twenty-something me with all sorts of angst and rage, looking back – and having worked in a call center since myself – I can kind of see where they were coming from because really, you can only take so many complaints before you can’t help but say, “If we’re such an awful cell phone provider, then why are you still here???”

So that being said, I guess you could say that I’m trying to be more conscious of my place in the world, if you will … which isn’t to say that I devalue my position to these kinds of companies, but maybe just that I’m not the only customer they have and that they need to make money, too – even if their executives get paid ridiculous bonuses that just make me want to throw their late fees right out the window!

With that in mind, if I look at my personal finances – the places where big banks earn money from me are really pretty limited:

  1. Mortgage Interest – the BIG nut, thousands of dollars/year
  2. Credit Card / Loan Interest – not nearly as huge as my mortgage, hundreds of dollars/year
  3. Brokerage Account – even if I do a handful of trades, maybe tens of dollars/year
  4. Deposit Accounts – almost nothing, especially if I meet my minimums and don’t overdraft, less than a hundred dollars/year

When you consider that my needs to interact with the bank is completely inverse to how they actually profit from me, it kind of helps to put into perspective why people feel like their banks don’t really care about them … because they don’t need to. You don’t make millions of dollars for shareholders by spending 90% of your focus on 10% of your profit-generating customers – it’s just the sad reality of how business works. And again, the lens that I’m trying to look at this all through isn’t that I shouldn’t waste my time with them because they don’t need me, but more so that there are some great things they can do for me if I play my cards right, but that I also have to remember where I fit into their puzzle because if I’m not kind and don’t know what to expect from them in advance, there’s not much more incentive for them to really go above and beyond for me.

In all of my investment research fun that I’ve done over the last month, I came across this forum thread where the poster was complaining about a brokerage because in his eyes they were rude to him after he asked for some advice and then after deciding to transfer some of his money elsewhere, the bank transferred his account from a dedicated advisor back to simply using their call center as his primary point of contact.

Now from his perspective, $30,000 was a lot of money and he’d been with them for over a decade, so just handing his account off to a lesser rep felt like some sort of travesty … but in reality? That advisor probably spent more preparing that single, unused recommendation than his years of $100 annual fees in one swoop.

So not only with banking, but with many of the people who I find myself interacting with these days, I’m trying to put myself more in their shoes of how *I* fit into the relationship we share before I let myself get too bent out of shape over something that rubs me the wrong way. Should that cast member at Disney World have been more helpful when ApplePay wouldn’t work at their kiosk? How about the doctor’s office that screwed up my prescription refill and then blamed it on the pharmacy when I called them out on it?

In any of these scenarios, I’m not necessarily willing to walk away from Disney or my doctor or Wells Fargo, so as much as I’d like to rant and rave and get the attention of their CEOs for times when I feel like I’ve been slighted, sometimes … sometimes … it’s just easier to take a deep breath and let one slide for the greater good because if there’s one thing I’ve been learning a lot lately as I get older, it’s that time spent arguing with customer service is almost never worthwhile. 😕

What do I want to write about???

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

Over the weekend I’ve spent some time rethinking productivity and trying to reassess the different things that I want to be writing because truth be told, I’m really not writing as much as I would like to be right now.

And while it’s too soon to say for certain, the hunch that I’m riding on at the moment is that realistically I could be getting a lot more done by curbing the procrastination and a good chunk of the time that I waste griping about things on social media because if you were to really take me to task over how I’d like to be able to look back at my time, which do you honestly think that I’d rather be able to boast – a portfolio of great writing over all of these subjects that I’m passionate about, or having posted some really great zingers arguing with my Republican friends (and even complete strangers) on social media?!

I really want to try to refocus on creating and leave the petty bitching for those other people online who don’t create.

So going back over my repertoire, I’ve already tried to post a thing or two this weekend on Just Laugh, and eventually my rarely weekly humor column should stumble back into that fold, too.

I’ve also got this really swell Thing-a-Day project that I haven’t blogged about here or linked to just yet, but I’ve really been enjoying that because it sort of forces me to write at least something every single day!

So the question from here is … what else???

Though I’ve had fun with the editorials that I’ve been occasionally writing, I really want to keep them a limited engagement for topics that I find myself motivated to write more serious and in depth about, as opposed to it becoming a regular feature where I have to actively hunt for stuff to comment on every single week.

The one that I keep circling back to is Disney World, although at this point I admittedly have conflicting thoughts about it…

  • Pros:
    • I love Walt Disney World.
    • I always find myself overwhelmed with things I could write about whenever I’m there.
  • Cons:
    • It’s a great place to unwind for me and I’d hate to interfere with that by adding deadlines, scheduling, etc…
    • I’ve tried a few different ideas in the past and none have really caught on … humor, reviews, general commentary.
    • There’s always the possibility of hurting my other projects by further segmenting my time instead of really focusing on one or two things.

But then again, it could just be that I haven’t found my beat with regards to writing about Disney World yet and I really do feel like there’s a project in there somewhere that could be a whole lot of fun, so maybe I just need to put a little more time into it and really think about some of the things I’d like to read about that I can address in a unique way, and also don’t require twice-weekly, rigorous trips to the World and/or reposting the same park updates and press releases that a lot of other WDW bloggers already do today!

Who knows – maybe it even involves dumping MyTimeWithTheMouse.com and trying an entirely different approach using a nice, simple (and already done!) WordPress theme that I don’t have to spend a year custom coding to get exactly the way I want, only to later become horrendously outdated until I just want to scrap the whole thing and try something else a few years later!

This is clearly going to require some thought, so in the meantime – here are a few fun pics from recent trips this year that will hopefully serve to motivate me, and I guess you can feel free to enjoy ’em if you’d like, too… 😉

20160321_dis1

20160321_dis2

20160321_dis3

20160321_dis4

Dream Journal : Dude, Where’s My Jacket?!

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

I had ran into someone at the grocery store, and we chatted for a while as he made his way back over to his wife which was coincidentally the same direction that I was going. In route, I was distracted by a table where I had left my nice, leather jacket that was now conspicuously empty, and this made me genuinely upset!

I first got into a shouting match with the nearby checkout clerk who said that somebody had taken it, and when pressed as to why she had let them, she asked why *I* had left it there in the first place … which was also odd because additionally I had with me a laptop that I had deemed valuable enough to keep in my cart, but not this strange, leather jacket…

Eventually I got tired of yelling and she pointed to a group of guys in the parking lot playing football, saying that they had taken it and I should take up my issue with them.

This I tried, but oddly enough I could never quite catch up with them as they were running around in between cars. Plus, it was winter and there was snow on the ground, so it was really, really cold.

My continuing search for this special jacket then took me to a local video game store that was apparently one of the coolest stores ever – retro stuff galore, to the point where I actually pulled out my cell phone and was tweeting pictures of their stock as a temporary reprieve from my jacket-oriented quest.

At one point I even ran into James Rolfe who was stocking shelves there … I asked him where I could find their NES games and then we both went our separate ways…

Ultimately a manager of the store came by and inquired about my missing jacket, and I explained that because it was somehow a gaming-related jacket (it had a Playstation logo, I guess?), I wanted to see if the alleged thieves had tried to hock the thing already and maybe by some miracle she would have it in the back.

She ended up having a similar jacket, but not my jacket.

…

I’m sharing this story not because it was particularly interesting to me after I woke up, but more so because this was a dream that throughout it was somewhat disturbing to me, leaving me to wonder if there’s any real correlation between the quality of one’s dreams and the quality of their sleep.

I don’t know the answer to this – I did find one article that said to encourage happier dreams, one should “remove stress from their lives” … easier said than done! Not to mention that this was such a random dream to begin with – it wasn’t like reliving a bad experience through a dream and feeling those same emotions all over again.

If only there was some definitive book that could tell us The Meaning of Dreams… 😉

A special place in Gmail for advertising (that I actually want)…

Posted on by Scott / 0 Comment

I like pizza, but I don’t need coupons for it every single day.

I noted the other day how it kind of bugs me to get promotional emails from likes of Pizza Hut and Domino’s several times a week when in reality I don’t order out quite that often, and even if I do it’s certainly not from all of the places at once!

Sure, I could go to RetailMeNot and look for deals there, which works for some eateries, but you’ve also got rewards programs – particularly Red Robin comes to mind – who actually require you to be on their mailing list in order to participate and get free stuff from their rewards programs.

So after mulling it over for a couple of days, I finally sat down and setup a couple of filters in Gmail to do exactly what I wanted to do – route my preselected ad emails to a separate folder (or label in Gmail), and then when anything gets older than 45 days, automatically delete it. The idea is that now my promo codes will be there when I want them, but I don’t have to waste any time sorting through them when I don’t.

Here’s what they look like:

Filter #1 routes any emails from the specified addresses to my new Ads label so I’ll never see them in my regular inbox…

(note: use curly brackets {} around multiple addresses to specify OR instead of AND)

gmail_ads1

Filter #2 then does the dirty work and cleans up afterwards, monitoring for any old emails and deleting them once they’re 45 days old because more than likely any promo codes within will have expired by then anyways…

gmail_ads2

PROBLEM SOLVED – that’s one less thing cluttering my inbox without actually unsubscribing from any lists!  8)