Getting the most out of Twitter

I've sifted, collated, alphabetized and arithmetically shifted to the right the hundreds thousands 5 comments I received on my last post when I asked for what people didn't get about Twitter. Ok, that last post wasn't even close to one of my best. Chalk it up to this late winter crud I'm selling, cheap. I've been feeling like something much worse then garbage but only slightly better then a zombie

Hashtags. I just looked up the definition on Wikipedia. You don't want to read it. It's really confusing. Actually it was so technical, it sucked. I think the best way to help you understand them is to tell you a little about why Twitter is much more then a web page. It's a communication platform in the same way as Instant Messengers are a service much more then a program.

A bit of clarification for you. The Internet is more then a bunch of web pages. There is a whole hidden side to this system that users just never see.  Just like you can use a fax machine over your phone lines, programmers can use tools that communicate in a way that is not visible in your web browser. Twitter has a whole menu of services that it offers to programmers to create a rich collection of tools to do Twittery stuff.

Let's be perfectly honest, the Twitter web page sucks. It's usually broken, it's pretty slow and it's quite ugly. Using a different program to access Twitter is the only way to go.

For me there are 3 main programs in my Twitterverse for reading and post my personal tweets: Twhirl, TweetDeck and Twitterrific. For pushing my blog posts to Twitter, I use a tool called TwtitterFeed. There are few other services I use, but they aren't as visible. Twitteraholic compares your stats with other users, sort of a vanity thing. (Like me, I'm the most prolific tweeter in my town...go figure!)

Why would you want to use these tools? Ease. Terri, you were wondering why or how you can be alerted to replies? These tools make that far easier then hitting the reply tab on the web site. Let's look at the pros and cons of each of my 3 favorite tools.

Twitterrific:
Pros: It's very easy to use. To spot your replies, you simply scroll looking for tweets that are brown instead of dark grey. This tool is WAY to convenient. I do a lot of my tweeting from here. I use this to tweet from the bus stop, on the bus, waiting in line, while shopping with the Mrs, traveling, you name I'll tweet during it. Well, maybe not anything. I like being married and like cell phones, should never be used while sitting on the throne.

It's got a built in tool for posting pictures to TwitPic and posting the tweet associated with it. Extremely handy.

Cons: The version I use runs on the iPhone. You don't have one? There's a for money version for the Mac. I don't have a Mac, so I've never used it. Other cons are its limited in it's history. I will only go back so far.

Overall: This is your Twitter connection on the road and away from the computer. I love this tool. It's one of the most used apps on my iPhone. I'd feel lost without it.

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These next two tools are a toss in some ways to me. There are definite pros and cons against each one. The truth is, I use both and haven't really settled on either.

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TweetDeck:
Pros: This is by far the most popular Twitter client available. It's also free as in beer and offers the most functionality. If you click the picture to see the bigger version, you will see that you know have an entire treasure chest of Twitter tools.

What makes TweetDeck so cool is you get all these columns. I usually choose to display my stream (what you see on the web page), my replies and my direct messages, but you could choose to create a custom column that displays your selected group. You chose only those Tweeters you want to see special. Pretty handy. You can also create a column based on a filter, such as a hash tag (#hashtag). During #snowmageddon, this was really handy. This tool is also integrated with TwitPic for quick uploading of pictures.

Another feature I really like about this is the ability to quickly retweet something. Hovering over a users picture gives that option with one click. It also has a built in tool for handy URL shrinking.

Cons: My biggest con for this tool is it's a memory hog. This thing sucks up RAM like sailors on the seaside bar in Manila. When I'm sitting here editing photos, my computer just can't keep up with this and Adobe at the same time.

Twhirl: 
Pros: Extremely light weight. It's quick and fast and can be set to sit transparently on your desktop. It gives you a nice linear view just like the web, but it does highlight the replies and direct messages as a different color.

It's very easy to use. It shortens long URL's for you automagically.

It also makes for very quick and convenient retweeting.

Cons: Not even close to as many features as TweetDeck. It's does it's job as a twitter client in a nice small package, but feature for feature, it's just not there.

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So what does this have to do with hashtags? One thing the web page really doesn't tell you about is search. There is a web site at http://search.twitter.com does some pretty cool stuff. 

You use hash tags to identify your tweet is carrying on a certain topic or conversation. During the TV show '24', people will tweet about the show and add the tag '#24' to mark their tweets so other can see them in search. 

These tools also highlight hash tags as clickable items. When you are in TweetDeck and want to know what's going on with a hashtag, click it, and it will take you to Twitter Search. BOOM! All the recent tweets using that tag. Very cool.

I've noticed that there are new tools out there popping up all the time that use hash tags for different reasons. One of the most interesting was TweetChat. It uses these hash tags to create virtual chat rooms. When you are on that page, you can create a tag and then when anyone uses that tag, it magically pops in the page.

The biggest advantage to TweetDeck is building your own searches on the tags and then keeping all your tweets together. Cool stuff.

So, hopefully this helps answer your questions about hash tags and Twitter. If I didn't quite do it, let me know. Any other questions about twitter?

While writing some stuff...let's take a break to laugh

I'm probably gonna have 2 posts a day for while. I've actually been writing a lot lately but what I'm writing I'm actually proofreading and researching...go figure.

I'm actually surprise Gadzooks hasn't posted this one yet, but the boys over at CollegeHumor.com produced yet another hysterical video.

Back in the day, I used to love a good practical joke. This is perfection.

Watch Prank War 7: The Half Million Dollar Shot on CollegeHumor

Tweeting about Twitter: the late winter stuffy edition

I am what you'd call a 'user' of Twitter, but just so we are all on the same page, I use it a lot. I like Twitter. For some reason, at this point in my life, I love exploring the world of social media. I have a Plurk.com account (almost never us it). I was a member of the cre8buzz universe, which is now defunct, and I'm thrilled that there is a facebook app for my iPhone.

Twitter is fun. Twitter is more then a website but a service for communicating in a public way. Each message is 140 character long at most and called a tweet. I didn't invent the name, I'm just telling you what it is.

Earlier this week, the upper Midwest suffered through the single greatest snow storm of all time a snow storm that all the news outlets in this area had promoted like the opening of Al Capone's vault. We truly were lead to believe that this was the beginning of the end. 

I won't deny that I had a blast with this one. Two of the local weather people have Twitter accounts and I had gone so far as to declare that the more they promote a storm, the more likely it is to just fizzle. This storm was a colossal fizzzz.

During the storm, there were many of us writing grand sounding tweets of the mildly interesting storm descending on our areas. To identify the tweets, people were using the hash tag #snowmageddon.

There it is! The basis of all the trouble. People were asking me in several messages just what the heck the '#' was doing in the tweets. Well, they are called 'hash tags' and are used to identify messages with a common theme. There are many secondary services that use these to do all kinds of interesting things. The easiest one to start with is Twitter search.

My head is throbbing and I am not sure where this is going. I'm asking you, my reader(s), for a little help. I'm coming down with a nasty cold and have been trying to figure what people would really like to learn about Twitter. I hate colds. So, what do you want to know about? It's comment time...light it up!

I'll be over here, hitting up the medicine cabinet and wondering how cool it would to go through life not allergic to oranges. *sigh.

One of the reasons I love poker

I love the game of poker. I find it mentally challenging and can be a blast to play. One thing that has struck me in years of playing poker, poker players can be very generous people. Could be our moments of complete disregard for the value of money. It might also be we are always searching for good karma. What ever the reason, good things can come from poker games.

Last month, we hosted a little home game action in our basement. We gather together to play a little Texas Hold 'em tournament. 21 people showed up for the holiday fun. I know some of you don't really know how poker works, so I won't go into great detail, but this month, we did something different.

We offered everyone the chance to get an extra 500 chips in addition to the 3500 they were already getting, if they brought to items suitable for donation to a local food shelf. All but one couple brought the items. The couple that didn't...the hubby forgot to mention that part to the Mrs. She wasn't please.

The idea for this came from my oldest daughter. Every year, here school does a food drive pitting each class against the others to gather the most food. Each year, parents of kids from every class get home from work and wonder what happened to that jar of spaghetti sauce they thought was in the cupboard.

The week following the home game, it was brutally cold here. Folks, I grew up here in Minnesota. 80 hours below zero is cold. Since I work a Monday - Friday job and have no access to parking, I can't bring the food to the food shelf. The job fell to the OhCountess. We also agreed that we wanted our girls to be apart of the delivery. There was no way my wife was taking the kids any where that week of the deep freeze and the following week didn't improve that situation, she started clinicals for grad school. Ugh.

Here it is! Today the girls got all that food to the Channel One Food bank. Thanks to everyone that came that night! Our home game collected 38 items to give to those in need. I'm sure someone else's home game can do better. Your home game or club have what it takes?

I did remember whisky and Mii

Yesterday I told the story of a very special bottle of whiskey. I also mentioned that I'd be putting the details up on my poker blog...well, it was a night of whiskey AND poker. If you are interested...here's the post.

Father of Five (FoF) posted a while back (yeah, I know I'm always like really late on these, but hey, I got it done, did you?) about sharing your Mii. Here's mine. Clever name, huh? It kinda looks like me, only my goatee connects. As you can see by the picture, I have one of those antique TV's. I have a cathode ray tube television. It weighs about a thousand pounds, but it's paid for. I suppose someday we'll get one of those new fancy dancy flat tvs.

I don't remember the last time...

Before I got married, hell, before I met my wife, it was nothing for me to be out Friday AND Saturday night. That's really not true. Friday and Saturday were nights out, but so was Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Sundays and Mondays were by request, but really not off the table either.

This is by no means a complaint. My life has been filled with things so much more gratifying then bottle upon bottle of beer and Jäegermeister shots. Although, I seem to remember really liking root beer barrels and Dr. McGillicuddy's Mentolmint schnapps. Being nocturnal isn't all that's cracked up to be.

The week leading up the weekend continued the theme of grinding stress at work and a schedule at home that seems much more full then it should be. I even wrote a post that has yet been reworked enough for a general audience. A couple of bloggers I respect greatly took the time to read it and give me some great feedback, unfortunately, I need to heed their advice and keep working on it. It's just scary what can happen when I mix emotion, logic and politics. Thank you for helping...

If you follow me on Twitter and Facebook, you saw a glimpse of the build up to Friday night. Strange references to 30 yr old whisky. I think now, I can tell everyone what was going on.

I few weeks back, I was contacted via Twitter by a woman that was interested in talking to me about our whisky club, Bourbonators. Strange things pop up once and a while on places like Twitter, so I direct messaged her back an email address so that we could talk outside of the 140 character limit.She sends me an email introducing herself as a representative of a marketing company that works with Canadian Club. She had a hunch that whisky clubs existed, but until finding some of my writings, didn't really have much evidence to go on.

What is a whisky club? Some friends of mine started ours some 5 years ago. The best description is that it's like a book club for men. We get a bottle of some whisky, scotch or bourbon, usually one that we've never had. A fingers worth is poured into each person's glass and served neat. Everyone starts sippin and then we talk about the pour. All the while, someone is counting out chips and getting ready to play poker. We've been doing this every month with out missing many for 5 years. It's pretty awesome. To the best of our knowledge, we are the only group of this kind, any where. Feel free to contact us if you want to start your own chapter.

Any ways, she offers to send us a bottle of Canadian Club’s 30-year reserve. Um, OK. That's a $200 bottle of whisky that's spent more time in a wooden cask then several members of the Bourbonators have been walking this earth.

There was no way I was going to miss Bourbonators this month. OhCountess loves a good story like this as well, so with her blessing, I went out with the guys for an evening of good whiskey, laughter and poker. I will be detailing the evening on my poker blog here shortly. When that post is up, I'll put a link here. Besides all of the crazy poker action, I'll also be telling the story of the whisky in greater detail including our opinions.

Around the same time I was contacted about the generous offer from Canadian Club, we received an invitation in the mail for a surprise birthday party. The wife of one the Bourbonators was planning a party for her husband. Probably the coolest handmade invitation you've ever seen. They looked liked FBI files and were stamped "Confidential".

This night was definitely co-ed. A date night with the wife and other couples was long over due.

The plan for the night was hors d'œuvre and cocktails followed by a show at Goonie's Comedy Club. The Mrs. and I haven't been to see a stand-up comic since our honeymoon. We've heard nothing but positive things about this place...and it delivered!

The night was fantastic. Lot's of great food, drinks and company.

If I do the math correctly, I went out two nights in a row. Holy crap! I haven't done this in years. Friday seems so long ago.

FYI: Keep your hands away from ravenous beast

I'm working on a couple of much longer posts but felt compelled to warn the world. Our Girl Scout cookies have arrived. There are Thin Mints in the house.

Milk be worried. I can't eat just one.

Thank you.

You are free to move about the intertubes.

It's back!

For the love of Pete! The snow is back.

A wordle of this blog

Weirdly random. Yet somehow I think I should have just gone to bed.

Check out the front page of Blognosh.com...

So, I'm on Twitter one day (I know...the shock) and I noticed Mr. Lady soliciting for people with blog posts that didn't vote for President Obama. This was right around the inauguration. She's the Politics editor at Blog Nosh magazine. I submitted to her my post "A Vision of Hope". You know what? They published it today. Dang!!! I'm feeling a bit "toot my own horn"ish. So, what are you waiting for...go check it out!!!!

And once more for good measure....http://www.blognosh.com/2009/02/a-vision-of-hope/

Valentine's Fun - Family Style!

We let each princess invite a friend over for chocolate fondue and movie night. We had apples, kiwi, strawberries, pear, banana and marshmallows. To top it off, there were crushed graham crackers for a little crunch. Nummmmmy!!!!!!

A Morning Treat

The most beautiful woman in the world insisted on making breakfast this morning. I think she had a plan. 

As Weaselmomma said, 

Romance is stealing moments together in the midst of life's chaos to kiss while dinner is cooking and the kids are making gagging noises to show their disgust. Romance is making time for each other and to remember how all the insanity that surrounds you started to begin with.

Happy Valentine's Day everyone! Um...stay away from warehouses in Chicago today...please!

PS. I just did the math. Looks like this is post #300. Might have to do a blogaversary post later. The pink heart shaped pancakes were too much to pass up! Thanks for reading!

How do you say thank you?

Hello. My name is OhCaptain and this is my blog. It's been a while. Just a little bit longer with a project at work and life should return to normal. I'd love to write about work but I like it that they pay me.

So, what's up? I understand that the Microbiologist has won a Nobel Prize. NukeDad is holding Flat Weaselmomma hostage. Terri burnt her finger on the clothes iron. Tismee2 and Kat got snow. BusyDad got screwed by an airlines. I could keep going and going and going. Everyone seems to be living life and writing. Yeah! I miss y'all!

I've been living life too. I just haven't been able to write about it. Tuesday was my one year anniversary at work. Yippee! After one year on the job, I'm busy as hell. That's not to say I didn't have any fun this week. Quite the contrary. Today I'm going to tell you a story in with a lot of pictures. 

Tuesday, my OhCountess reminds me I need to ask a friend to accompany me on Wednesday night. Where are we going? We've got two tickets to the Minnesota Wild hockey game. For those of you that are unaware, we live in Minnesota. I understand that the popular belief is that this is Canada. Unfortunately, that is not true. Minnesota is in fact on of the 50 states. But like Canada, hockey is about as important as breathing in some parts...but I digress.

I have to friends that are HUGE wild fans. Much more so then I am. I grew up playing hockey, but found that I really am not a fan of watching it on TV. Years and years of having the best seat in the house (in goal), and I starve to wath the action up close. "Honey," my wife says, "these are seats in a suite.'

This isn't funny. HOLY CRAP! 

I have to pick ONE friend and ask them to join me in the best seats in the house. This is going to suck. It's like asking me to pick between my kids. There was no other way to do this, so Tuesday morning, in my cubby at work, I flipped a coin. MumblingSages get first dibs.

It took him all of a second to blurt out "Yes."

As big a fan as he is, I've been to more Wild games then he has. This will be his first...

After making the drive to the Twin Cities, our instructions were to go to the "V.I.P. Will Call" They have such things? Here's a photo of MumblingSages. He's crying with joy.

This place is amazing! All of the suites have this private concourse. Gate 5 is for V.I.P's only. It's carpeted. And beautiful and has no waiting to get in. Wow.
Xcel Energy Center was constructed using materials from the area. This lovely wall is limestone. Yes, hockey is that important here.
We found our suite. Dang! Plenty of room. Free beer and food. I think we died and went to heaven.
That smile was fixed. It never changed. If you look closely in his eyes, you can see a 12 year old boy. I think he was a happy 12 year old boy...did you see him?
This is our view. Note the location of center ice. We picked seats that seemed to line up directly with the center line. Holy crap. This are the best seats in the house! We called my wife. Both of us took turns saying thank you. At this moment, we weren't sure that was enough. Nope. It probably wasn't
MumblingSages took this picture. That would be his favorite player. You can't really see it in this picture but he's 6' 9" 257 pounds. He's a big guy who's only job is to beat people up - called and enforcer a wing. Being the not huge fan that I am, I found out he's only got 4 goals in his enter pro career. Most could be accidents. He's really good at his job.
Did I mention free beer and food? The popcorn was fantastic. Those are indeed leather seats and this should provide with an idea of just how good the view is. I think we called the wife again and said thank you. Promises might have been made...the beer was tasting really good.
How do I get to ride on the party Zamboni? Really. I want to know. 
At one point, the host comes up to us and says the desert cart was here. At first I pictured a cart like on the train going to Hogwarts. Everyflavorbeans? Nope. That is one of the best pieces of chocolate cake I have ever eaten...with ice cream. The cake was still warm. Our diet tracking software was turned off. I think that was for the best.
See, he's still smiling.
The hockey game was fantastic. The action was fast a furious and score was close. They were tied 2-2 until there were 71 seconds left in 3rd period. [fog horn] The Wild score!!! Yeah!!! The home team pulls it out at the buzzer!
One last shot before we leave. On the left is the really good popcorn. I couldn't believe it, but several of the people sat at that table most of the game.
The team of 18,000 were victorious. This calls for a trip to the Wild store. Ah, capitalism.
What a fantastic night. We left a little hoarse. Our throats sore from screaming. Our tummies were filled almost to bursting with great food. We a bit more then an hour drive home to burn off the extra energy. It gave us time to wonder if we'd said thank you enough to my wife. She's an angel.

Thank you, honey! It was a real blast.

MumblingSages turns on the game the next night. It tried watching it but it just wasn't the same. He'd been to the best seat in the house. The TV just wasn't the same. I don't think any game will be quite the same.

I could get used to living like that :-D

Much more later. Let's play HOCKEY!

Tonight, I'm at the Minnesota Wild hockey game. Much more later.

Game on!!!!

We don't need no title

So I'm sifting through Google Reader trying to catch up. My work week's been a bit%^$ and I've fallen behind again. (Damn you guys for being so good at posting). I come across Mrs. 4444's post "Music that takes you back." A fun post about a student that tries to introduce her to that new Korn song "Brick in the wall". I'd go read it if you haven't already done so. Good stuff!

In the post she's curious to know about people associations with music to events. My goodness. For me, that's like a lot of posts. If you follow me on Twitter, you know how much music is a part my day and life.

This post reminded me of a similar event.

I'd only been married a short while. I was working as an assistant manager of a local music/book/movies store. You see a lot of strange things in a music store. Teenagers are always really interesting because they lack any knowledge of music. Understanding the origins of most new songs escapes the mind of a 13 year old. Everything is new and there is no such things as cover songs. 

Let's preface the following story with the fact that Pink Floyd is one of my favorite bands. They are the only band that I've seen on 2 separate tours. My first Internet nickname was 'Gilmour', after the last name of the band's lead guitarist. 

While working straightening bins in the music store, I had a young kid in his early teens browsing the Pink Floyd CD's. Looking very disappointed, he stopped after a couple of minutes and was walking towards the door, I asked him if there was anything I could help him find.

"No, this store is lame and there's no way an old guy like you would know what I'm looking for." (I was 27)

"Try me," I said.

"There's a new song by Pink Floyd called 'We don't need no education' but you don't have it."

"Sure we do. It's track 5 side 1 album 1 of the vinyl version or just track 5 of disk 1 of the CD. The real name of the song is "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2". (No, seriously, I'm that into music and knew it)

"Ha ha. I'm not stupid. You don't know what you are talking about. It's a new song." (It's 1998) He huffed out of the store.

Needless to say, I lost the sale.

It's melting

Temperatures were well above freezing today. There is a lake forming behind our house. We haven't seen it in weeks but that looks to be liquid water. Liquid water!

Be back later...there are Christmas decorations I need to take down before they freeze solid again!

Varoooom!

Hello? Is there anyone still out there? [tap, tap] Is this thing on?

Time is zooming, probably because we have been hovering around absolute zero in these parts for far too long. Global climate change sure feels like a long cold winter to me. But what do I know.

I polished up my math skills and noticed that this blog is closing in on a blogaversary...300 posts! Which is very interesting in that my very next post on my poker blog will also be 300 posts. No worries, they are the only two that are close...although I think the photoblog is actually approaching 200, but who's counting.

My life at this moment seems very hectic. Work has been very busy. The kids busy as well and OhCountess is in the home stretch of finishing her masters. To top things off, this winter weather just seems to zap the energy right out of me. Normally, I'm a 6 hours of sleep a day guy, lately...I'm loving the warm covers and long naps...scary.

In preparation for my poker blogs 300th post, I did some clean up of the blogroll. Clear away the deadwood and make sure that I'm linking to everyone that needs the link love. You read my blog? You link to me? Link love is coming your way...let me know if you notice I'm missing you. Since I missed Delurking Day...consider this a delurking.

Winter routine has also left me dry in the old witty topics category as well. I get up, I freeze my ass off at the bus stop, I get on bus, I go to work and spend all day doing things that I can't write about, then I freeze the remainder of my ass of waiting for bus home, join family in the meal process, eat, clean up, fall asleep on the couch. Not sure I want to write about that every day.

The Microbiologist recently went through my entire archive. Bravo! She was commenting on post I'd forgotten about. I'm thinking she should help me with the retrospective celebration of my 300th post? A look back through the eyes of scientist...whatcha think?

Right this very second, I'm thinking a nap would be wonderful. We just finished a stint of weather where we didn't actually cross the freezing point for 32 consecutive days. We hit 39-41 for one day, low 30s the next and back to the deep freeze. I like winter, but this is getting ridiculous. I'm exhausted...

So my faithful readers that made it this far...the things we need to get done:

• Clean up the dead links in my blogroll (assigned to me)
• Delurk (assigned to you)
• Spread the link love (assigned to all of us)
• Prepare 300th post (assigned to me...maybe with some help from you)
• Sleep (we could do this together, but I'm thinking OhCountess wouldn't approve)
• Inspire (assigned to you and the world)

I'm keeping my eyes open, I am a live and I will find a nice place to curl up...someday :)

What happened to my baby?

We dropped off OhPrincess2 at her first ballet lesson. OhPrincess1 and
I went on our walk. When we got back, we were greeted by a little girl
a little scared and a bit lighter in tooth count.

My baby lost her first tooth.

Out for a walk

Taking a walk with OhPrincess1.

Napwarden does it again!

The designer of both this blog and my poker blog is doing another blog design give away!

Just subscribe to her blog (very funny stuff!) and leave a comment. It's that easy.

You can comment every day until midnight on January 31.

Get off your butt and get over there!

Sleeping is for the weak and the childless

3 weeks into the new year and I'm already showing signs of failing on one of resolutions. Although, I think I have a decent enough excuse for not posting...I'm friggin' tired.

Enough whining! Back to the writing.

If you read this blog and my poker blog, you already heard this story. Too bad, it's funny and goes along way to understand what makes me tick. That's a stretch, but at least it's a story, or more to the point, a string of letters arranged on the screen.

Last Friday night was my guys night out. Bourbonators. It's a whisky club that functions much like a book club only there is lots of booze, no woman, meat/cheese/crackers/bbq'ed meatballs (no veggie tray in sight) and we play poker most of the night. This was only different from other Bourbonator nights in that I had an awesome night playing cards, I found the beer and whisky extra tasty and the laughs extremely enjoyable.

My Saturday morning was NOT night like Mr. Weasel's. When I got home, OhPrincess1 was sleeping on the couch in the living room feeling pretty yucky. Sore throat, fever and an upset stomach.

~2:00 am - Fall asleep.

5:30 am - The OhCountess suggests I head down and sleep on the other couch...fair enough. The word sleep was used, good word.

6:15 am. Again, the wife is waking me up. Through eyelids that weight 8 tons, I see my bride and she tells me about water boiling on the stove. Will you make Jello for your daughter? I'll do anything for my family...of course. (inner voice used bad words...shh...don't tell) Jello made. Back to couch.

7:15 am. Phone is ringing. I'm too cheap to just break the phone so I make the hero call and answer. Sexy siren on the other end informs me of a scheduled Dr. appoint at 8:15 am. Great! Brain cells burn off enough haze to realize that if go any where near a pillow...it's all over. I head to the fridge and grab two bottles of Cranergy and a diet Pepsi. Large bore needle would have been handy too.

8:00 am. Drive to Dr. with two kids. Breath mints used. 3 large doses of caffeine delivered to blood stream. No wait at Dr's office is a beautiful thing.

8:45 am. Go to grocery store and buy supplies for the long day ahead. Oh, and OhPrincess1 would like pain meds...stat.

10 am. The phone calls from work start. The department I work for is upgrading the single most important piece of software they use. I maintain enough cognitive abilities to answer questions through out the day. I have no idea how that worked.

Muddling along, I drifted in and out of consciousness. OhPrincess2 has decided that it's too scary to go through life if Daddy is taking a nap. This has been true for years. I'm ready to strangle who ever it was that planted that seed.

Sunday was a waste.

This is really no way to transition from one work week to the next.

By Monday, I'm at work, on call and recovering from the weekend without sleep. A cool thing did happen on Monday, I drank enough caffeine to get twitchy the Clinic called to ask a question of the parents of OhPrincess1. Our large medical provider is also a place of great research. They were interested in doing some follow up throat cultures to track the residual strep bacteria and find how long it's still there. My wife listened to the details and didn't think it sounded too bad. Money would be paid for each visit...not too shabby.

OhCountess tells the person it sounded interesting, but she really needs to ask OhPrincess1. "Um, why?" asks the researcher.

In our home, we have a philosophy about teaching kids to think for themselves and that their opinion, at times, is very important. They are willing to pay to do something that even I think is a really yucky thing to do to someone. Does she really want to do 4 more of those? Being the good kid that she is, she heard the dollar amount and immediately started spending it in her mind.

When our daughters were born, we insisted on NOT piercing their ears. We had friends that had it done and we were getting pressured from people that it's really the best thing to do, but to me, piercing a baby's ears is just wrong. I mean, immorally wrong. (I'm beginning to think that I might just be the only person in the old folks home that doesn't have any piercings or tattoos)

I really had no doubt that someday they would have their ears pierced, but we came up with a simple test for when they could get their ears pierced. They had to ask Dad.

For us, this would show that they were making this decision themselves. We wouldn't influence them. OK, I wouldn't be talking them into it, but I might make it sound scary...it's part of the test.

Asking your kid to be the research subject for some experiment seems to me like the same thing. Thoat cultures SUCK BIG ROCKS! No one like them. I'm sure there are parent's out there that see the $$$ and think "Cha ching!" but we have no desire to take that money. It's hers. She's the one saying "Ah" and ... I can't imagine. Sure, we spend gas money and time getting her to the Clinic for the test, but that's nothing.

Teaching our kids about making decisions and living with the consequences is very important to us. It's all part of the "preparing them for the world" goal I think every parent should strive for.

How much do you let your kids control their lives? Did you find it odd that the researcher asked why? Is giving your children free will a bad thing?

A Vision of Hope

Today, we celebrate a tradition in our nation unlike any other in the world. Today, we transition from one president to the next.

The 12th Amendment to the United States Constitution has set January 20th as the date on which one president ends their administration and next begins. The President-elect is sworn in at noon by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court using the Oath of Office from Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution and reads, 

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States

Every president since George Washington has had to state these words to the public with these words as their bond.

I like to point out these words to everyone for it demonstrates one of our Founding Father's most important ideals. This nation is bound together by one thing, the rule of law, as stated by the Constitution. No where does it say the president shall consider the Constitution or make sure to do their darnedest to circumvent the Constitution. There job is is preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. Period. The Constitution.

"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one." This is a quote spoken by the fictional character Spock in the movie, "Star Trek II: the Wrath of Kahn." Yeah, I know, this is all serious and there I go quoting a sci-fi movie, but this quote has resonated with me since I first saw the movie. People believe we live in a democracy and in some ways we do. The majority opinion is used to determine many aspects of our society, but technically, we live in Constitutional Republic. This means our elected officials must represent the wishes of the people under the rules of law as defined by the Constitution.

President Obama is inheriting a nation in trouble. Our economy is struggling. Our stature throughout the world has never been worse. Let's face it, George W. Bush is leaving the nation far worse then when he got it. Many things about this departing administration has left me wondering how the nation could have ever chosen this man to lead us, but today, we must move forward.

President Obama campaigned as the candidate of hope. As a father, I hope for a world for my children that is better then the world I grew up in. Barrack Obama is our newest president. He deserves our respect, he's got a big job ahead of him.

The picture I chose at the top of the page is one of the few photographs I have ever taken that I would consider a concept photo. I staged this. I liked the symbolism of my daughter standing at the spot where Martin Luther King, Jr, gave his famous speech. It's at the top of the stairs at the Lincoln Memorial. My daughter stood their reading the words of a man with a vision of a nation united. I share that vision.

I didn't vote for President Obama but that doesn't mean I don't want him to succeed. In fact, I believe the opposite. I so much want him to succeed.

The magic of this nation is that every 4 years, we get a chance for a fresh start and a new beginning.

Welcome to Washington Mr. Obama. We have a lot of hard work to do. Today, it's your party, tomorrow we start fresh.

Talking 'bout my generation

I love reading and hearing people completely screw up the lyrics to songs. Heck, from my youth, we had all kinds of alternative lyrics for songs. Who really sang, "Come on feel the noise, girls "ROCK" your boys." I'm pretty sure that's not what I heard in the gym during a dance in Junior High.

This morning, at the breakfast table, OhPrincess2 decides to show how well she can sing the song "I love rock and roll" from Joan Jett and the Blackhearts.

"I love rock and roll, let's put another dime in the juice box baby!"

I guess we sing what we know.

Finally home

Figured I'd take one last picture of the display in the van. It's
actually supposed to be warmer tomorrow. We could only hope.

Yep. That was a cold walk

Got the kids picked up and home. Thought I would share with everyone
the view of the minivan's thermometer. That's an F for Farhenheit.

Discovering your inner music

I'm sitting here at work, my headphones on, music playing. I've written before about how I use the Genius Playlist tool in iTunes to keep my music properly randomized. You will often see me tweeting about what song I've used to seed the playlist. By seeding I mean the song I tell the tool to create the list.

This morning I picked Bon Jovi - Dead or Alive. Probably my favorite Bon Jovi song. The Genius tool usually does pretty well at picking good songs and mixing them appropriately. Unfortunately, sometimes, AAACCKKK! Today, some how, it assumed I was looking for 80's pop, NOT 80's ROCK. In the playlist it created were the songs I expected. A little Warrent, some Queensryche and even Van Halen...but what's this aaaiiiieeee!!! Madonna and [gulp] Air Supply????

This got me thinking about a meme I saw a while back. I'd love to remember where I saw it, but yeah, what ever...it's not in the noodle.

Here's what I remember:

How many songs in your library? 20,246

How much time would it take to listen to it all? 57.7 days

What's your top ten songs by play count?

(Artist) - (Song) - (Play Count)

1. Beck - Loser (46)
2. Collective Soul - December (46)
3. Alice in Chains - Man in the Box (42)
4. Temple of the Dog - Hunger Strike (42)
5. Pearl Jam - Even Flow (41)
6. Alice in Chains - Would? (40)
7. Blind Melon - No Rain (39)
8. Pearl Jam - Jeremy (38)
9. Stone Temple Pilots - Interstate Love Song (38)
10. Jane's Addiction - Jane Says (37)

This list always surprises me. Since using the Genius feature, I don't really go looking for music very much. I would appear to be listening to just a bit of the grunge music of my youth...hm.

More random trivia. (It's random trivia Tuesday, right?) I have 397 songs that have played a minimum of 10 times. (Nice random!) The song played the longest time ago with 10 plays or more? Another Brick in the wall, Pt. 1 - Pink Floyd and the date was 8/21/08 (my youngest's b-day...weird)

Go forth, me liege. Consider yourselves tagged. Let me know if you chose to torture yourself with this list. I'd love to read what everyone else is pushing into their craniums.

Oh...and apparently no one took me too seriously and delurked yesterday. Don't make me wait until next year's delurking day...feel free to delurk today as well.

How to forget about Friday

You know, I can't remember Friday. It seems like it was weeks ago. That my friends is the sign of a really good weekend.

Saturday night, we hosted another one of our co-ed poker home games. I've linked to the recap on my poker blog. We used it as a food drive to help raise some food for the local food shelf. What a great idea OhPrincess1 had! Since we were hosting living, breathing people at our house, there was no way OhCountess was letting them come in without the house getting a thorough cleaning. If we weren't sleeping or in the bathroom, we were cleaning...well...except for Saturday morning.

The local chamber orchestra and chorale group provides a program called HoNk*SquEaK*ScRaTcH*BooM! This program provides an opportunity for kids in 4th through 6th grade to try out and learn a little about playing band instruments. And not one salesman is allowed to sell you ANYTHING.

Here's OhPrincess1 playing the flute

The trumpet

The harp

And back to the flute!

What a great program! When OhPrincess1 was done looking around, she decided she wanted to go back to the flute for a little more time. The rule is, if there are no new kids in line, you can go back for a second look. The professional musicians were fantastic. They were so very patient.

On Saturday night, I told you earlier about our poker tournament, we asked everyone that came to bring some can goods suitable for the food shelf. The response was FANTASTIC!

On the right is the pile of food we gathered.

Thanks to everyone that attended!

The kids spent the night at grandma's. Saawwweeettt! We cleaned up a bit after the party and the went to bed. The silence was beautiful Sunday morning, but it didn't last all that long. 

We were to attend a memorial concert for my wife's stepfather. He past away a few years ago, but during the 70's and 80's, he rocked with a band named Combrio. Three remaining members of the band did a show in our hometown. What a fun time. When the band was doing it's thing, there was a little girl on the side of the stage at lots of shows. She was something of a mascot to them. You might have guessed, it was OhCountess. 

Late last night, I finally pulled the van back in the garage. I realized when I got into the house, I couldn't remember Friday. It seemed like such a long time ago. I took some really cool pictures this weekend. I've started feeding some of my favorites to my photoblog, maybe you should check it out. This first picture is one of my all time favorites. No, seriously, I love shots like this because, let's face it, I will never again be able to just stage a shot like this. It's just that good.

While we are at it, I hear it's delurking day...so...delurk yourself :-P

How timely! How to use Google Reader

I subscribe to many types of blogs, like a mentioned a couple of days ago. One of the blogs I subscribe to is the Google Reader Blog. It's kinda nice to read about changes before they happen.

Today's post on the Reader Blog was all about getting started with Google Reader.

Hope you enjoyed the video. I think the post mentions a few more vids that they've been posting. If you aren't using Reader or some other aggregate and love reading blogs, I think you should give this a gander. You might just learn something.

iTunes Tip - Finding a home for ripped audiobooks

It better not be a secret to anyone that I'm a "heavy" user of iTunes. I'm also an avid music listener with a nasty obsession of owning every song ever recorded that doesn't suck.

Not long ago, I did get some audiobooks on CD. I ripped them at work on a machine that didn't have iTunes but a different ripping program. I'm not that big an iTunes snob, ripping a lot of stuff doesn't really matter which program you use.

I had, at the time, every Harry Potter book on CD. Sweet! They are, in fact, good listening. Somewhere along the way, though, I noticed that these files were showing up in "Music". Extremely frustrating. Without these audiobook files I have 57.6 Days worth of music. Add these couple hundred files in and...well, I'm a bit OCD when it comes to my music. They shouldn't be here.

I tried changing their Genre to "Audiobook" - ya think? Well, the genre was correct but these files were STILL in Music. 

Just a couple of days ago I finally had enough. I found the property value on the file to move it to the audiobook section in iTunes.

On the "Options" tab of the properties of a file, there is a setting called "Media Kind" - change that to Audiobooks and WHIZ, BANG, BOOM! They vanish from Music and appear in Audiobooks.

Another of life's mysteries solved.

If you already knew this, why the hell didn't you tell me? If you don't care? Ok. Fine. Whatever. I thought I'd at least be friendly and share something extremely exciting to me. Meh.

---

In other news:

I did a cross between the read all button and the read all never sleep again methods in Google Reader. I pretty much just zoomed through last night stopping if I could clearly define the topic of a post in the first couple sentences. Many of us are too scatterbrained to get to the point (no worries, I'm TERRIBLE at it) so I took about an 2 hours but I finally got my unread posts count to Zero. That lasted about 5 minutes, but hey, it was better then it was. My sincerest apologies if I missed something important. Oh! Mike...you are free to keep on truckin'.

Here's couple of items that's I found spreadable like a nice jar of Cheez Whiz:

Nap Warden did an awesome job on Weaselmomma's site redux.

Greg and Nellie are having a baby.

There were so many more, but alas, it's Thursday and my mind can't stop thinking about Friday.

How do you catch up?

On the right side of my blog, you will notice "My Blogroll". If you find that your blog is missing, make sure you let me know.

The list is created by Blogger using the blogs I've added to Google Reader under the folder "personal". Works pretty well. I find blogs, I like blogs and add them to Reader. I tried Bloglines, Outlook and a couple of other ways to aggregate the blogs I liked. Nothing really compared to Reader. How many of you use it? What do you like about it?

I currently subscribe to 345 RSS feeds total. Now the vast majority of those blogs update, um, rarely. You might have also guessed that the number 345 is quite a bit bigger then the list on the right. Well, I like to read about other things. There's poker, tech, humor, iPhones, Wii, photography and a few private blogs that don't want to be linked in.

Photography blogs are typically only updated a couple times a week at most and most are, well, pictures. I can get through my photo blogs in a just a minute or two each day. Some are a bit more beefy, like Digital Photography School, but the rest are just pictures and a caption or paragraph. You can see my list on my photography blog.

The poker blogs are another breed. Many of them are similar to the personal blogs I read. In fact, many of the poker bloggers write about many topics, not just poker. Their blogs are in many ways deeply personal.  The blogroll on my poker blog is a good place to start if poker interests you.

The posts on the other blogs are really quite often scimmers. I can usually scroll through 50 tech posts in about 2 minutes and most of the Wii posts are the same or about games I've got 0% chance of ever playing. Zoom!

All of this leads me to a problem that I'm wondering how you handle. As you probably noticed, I was a smidge busy in December. Somehow, I fell behind.

I've been trying to tackle this by coming at the pile two ways. I start by catching up to my last stopping point, usually about a 75% of the last days posts, then I change the sort order to oldest to newest and read from the past. Wow. Some of you are fantastic AND prolific writers. Not to mention, the story lines. I miss one post and I end up wondering, WTF? How did this happen?

I feel like I just can't catch up. I've been hovering between 100 and 150 unread posts in poker and personal combined. Does any one do Cliff Notes versions of their blogs? (Gawd that would be fantastic) I really do enjoy reading and commenting on everyone's blogs, but this just seems hopeless.

Really, what do you do when you fall behind?

Letting go of the old and moving on to the new

Welcome to 2009.

2008 was quite a year for us. So many exciting things happened, there are things that I haven't even written about yet. Yikes!

I was planning on reviewing 2008 and see how I did on the old list of New Years Resolutions...yeah...resolutions. Did I publish those? Apparently not. So, for the sake of tradition, it looks to me like I accomplished everything I set out to do! Go Me!

Tomorrow starts the beginning of the long haul to Memorial Day. My next official office is closed holiday. Yowza. Does that make 5 full months of no time off? On the bright side, think of all the PTO I'll be hoarding.

OhCountess and I have been making lists for 2009. Our family seems to be really hitting it's stride. We share with the kids a love of travel and exploring. That's leading the list right now. Got any good vacation ideas? It's nothing personal, but Virginia is out. Our last two family vacations have been there. It's time for something NEW!

Debt reduction and elimination is our other main focus this year. This is the continuation of a work that has been in progress for a few years. We done a pretty fabulous job of getting rid of credit card addiction. It's that other debt we are looking at now: student loans, home equity line of credit...mortgage. I seriously doubt we can be debt free by the end of '09, but have you seen mortgage rates lately? If you have a traditional mortgage and haven't shopped around lately, you might be surprised to find mortgage rates are now back in the 4 and 5% range.

On a more personal note, I plan to keep up with the getting healthy progress I started in 2008. I'm down 20 pounds and would really like to lose another 40. I have no idea if it's realistic to even shoot for that much in just 12 months, but I'm gonna see what happens. For me, making and attaining goals is about set realistic and quantitatively attainable benchmarks. What does this mean? It means for this goal, I'm charting my weight and the goal is to keep a downward slope to that graph for 12 months. What the slope of that line is, I don't know and don't really care just as long as it trends lower continually.

My plans for this blog are simple and hopefully enjoyable to everyone involved (think you AND me). I enjoy writing and I need to do it more often. Over the last year I've noticed that I seem obsessed with writing something long and wordy...but I don't always enjoy long and wordy. Twitter has opened my mind up to thinking 140 characters or less. Not that I hope to post every day, but my goal for 2009 is to post more often, sometimes even something short and sweet. Let's see what this turns into. Hopefully, even you enjoy it. Got things on your mind? Let me know. Looking for an opinion? I got plenty! Heck, we might even get more pictures this year. I got REALLY cute kids :)

Yep, this was vague. Hardly a hard target in the group. There should be absolutely no reason I can't just finagle my way into rationalizing these one year from now. I'm really looking forward to 2009. I turn 40 this year. The 30's have been fantastic. Probably the best years ever. I have no intention of turning into cry baby at the loss of the 3, but I love the idea of being 40 and feeling like a 20 something.

So, rather that keep going and babbling on and on and on. Here's a toast to 2009!

Cheers!

Happy New Year!