iPhone-i-fide Goddamn Hero

iphone

Last week­end I offi­cially turned off my Android phone and felt the power in my hands as I began using an iPhone. As I wrote last time, it wasn’t a deci­sion I took to lightly.

I spent a fair bit of time before my last post, and after, con­sid­er­ing why the chang­ing of Android to iPhone bore such weight for me. In some ways, I’ve tried to cham­pion Android among my less tech savvy friends. I held up the open­ness, show­ing off my cus­tomized inter­face with unique icons and mov­ing wall­pa­per. I con­stantly defended Android to my tech savvy friends who had iPhones. I even, for a short time, con­verted one to the world of Android only to see him return to iPhone ‘because it just works.’

The fact is that Android is fol­low­ing the path of Win­dows, becom­ing a more open OS and trad­ing cost to the detri­ment of sta­bil­ity or smooth func­tion. When a siz­able OS change occurs, as did with their still-rolling-out Ice Cream Sand­wich ver­sion, old phones are left in the dust. And unlike Win­dows, where users tend to cling to the ver­sions they know and love, many Android fans lust for the next ver­sion. Why? Because it might do more bet­ter. The OS still feels unfinished.

So here I am, con­verted, hap­pily using my iPhone. I would esti­mate that I spent roughly $50 on apps for the phone, from top notch games like Puz­zle­juice and Ascen­sion, to the best app for Twit­ter, Tweet­bot, and on to other nec­es­sary apps such as ones used to help me eat health­ier. It’s sad, because I’d hap­pily weigh the best Android apps with the best iPhone apps and say that they will often match up excel­lently. But there are also are­nas where Android sim­ply falls flat. Tweet­bot far out­shines any­thing I found on Android, but on Android I found I pre­fer the selec­tion of Red­dit apps such as Red­dionic (which is still in Alpha.)

In the first days I had the iPhone, I spent prob­a­bly six hours toy­ing with it and adding apps, here is the cur­rent list of apps I’ve downloaded.

Games

Ascen­sion: Chron­i­cle of the God­slayer — $4.99
I love this game and was always frus­trated at being unable to play on my Android, so it was one of the very first apps I put on my phone. The game is a great game made by Magic: The Gath­er­ing pros.

Words with Friends — $0.99
I have had a long stand­ing run­ning series of games against my brother Adam, and I enjoy play­ing them so I needed the most pop­u­lar ver­sion on iPhone. Though I am also like to get Scrab­ble. As for why pro? Well, I hate the ads.

Chess with Friends — $0.99
Same as with Words with Friends, enjoy play­ing with oth­ers and hate ads, so I pay the min­i­mal cost to save me the frus­tra­tion of inter­spersed ads.

Puz­zle­juice — $0.99
Now this game, just don’t get it. Don’t put it on your phone. You’ll end up regret­ful and angry that I let you become addicted. It’s like that episode of Star Trek: The Next Gen­er­a­tion where Wes­ley plays that video game, or doesn’t play that video game and every­one else does. What­ever the plot was, it’s like that. This game is addic­tive and awe­some. I’m curi­ous how many hours I’ve sunk into it in the 4 days I’ve had my iPhone.

Bejew­eled — $0.99
Old clas­sic, great for pass­ing time in wait­ing rooms with­out hav­ing to think too much.

Notable absen­tee: Tetris. Puz­zle­juice fills some of my Tetris crav­ings, but I may suc­cumb and send more money to Mother Rus­sia EA.

Pro­duc­tiv­ity

Wun­derlist — FREE
Best pro­duc­tiv­ity / to-do list app I’ve found. I loved Android’s AnyDO, but it hasn’t come to Android yet and until then I shall make do with Wun­derlist. If AnyDO is a 9 on the scale, Wun­derlist is an 8. Still strong, just not the app I know and love.

Ever­note — FREE
Fan­tas­tic note­book app, stores pics, con­tent etc. I’ll use it more now that I’m on iPhone, on Android I used more GoogleDocs.

Pho­tog­ra­phy

Insta­gram — FREE
Insta­gram is great fun. Sort of its own social net­work, but more a fun cam­era app with easy and nifty fil­ters for your photos.

Cam­era+ — $0.99
Another fun cam­era app, has some excel­lent fea­tures miss­ing from the stan­dard cam­era app includ­ing improved post pro­cess­ing and things like timer shot, or set­ting it to snap a photo when the vol­ume peaks which is pretty cool (though I haven’t tested it yet.)

iMovie — $4.99
The most expen­sive app I’ve pur­chased, but also one that I am not sure was worth it. BUT, I also haven’t really tried shoot­ing video on my phone yet aside from a few journal-esque videos.

Action Movie FX — FREE
Mostly silli­ness. Has some fun effects to add to your videos.

Health

Weight­bot — $0.99
The best look­ing weight tracker app you’ll ever find. You have your por­trait mode for entry, and then turned one way for stats, and turned hor­i­zon­tal the other way to see a graph of your weight log. Lacks the other fea­ture I wish I could find in a good weight track­ing app, which is allow­ing a sec­ond chart for body fat track­ing. But that’s minor as no one else seems to have it.

Nike+ GPS — $1.99
I bought it, but Run­K­eeper is free and pro­vides the same sort of func­tion­al­ity. I haven’t used this one enough to really be able to talk much about it yet.

MyFit­ness­Pal — FREE
I’ve been using this to track my daily calo­ries which I eat and how many I burn while work­ing out. A great app with a huge direc­tory for calo­ries in foods, and an online web­site it inte­grates with.

Media

Down­cast — $1.99
A fan­tas­tic pod­cast app for down­load­ing and man­ag­ing them on your iPhone. Huge direc­tory, smart play­ing, lots of fea­tures. I use it for my daily com­mute and some­times while work­ing to lis­ten to my favorite podcasts.

Net­flix — FREE
Watch Net­flix. Makes sense to me.

TwitchTV — FREE
For watch­ing gamers stream games on their iPhone. I have a guilty plea­sure of watch­ing Star­craft 2 streams with­out own­ing or play­ing the game, and also Magic: The Gath­er­ing streams have picked up and are gain­ing steam. Great to watch them while on the tread­mill work­ing out.

Pan­dora — FREE
For when I need radio music. A gen­eral guide­line of music and off we go for aural pleasure.

TED — FREE
For inspi­ra­tion and awe­some videos from the TED con­fer­ence. Easy enough.

Xfin­ity — FREE
For con­trol­ling our home DVR box while out and about. I admit I thought there was some more TV stream­ing capa­bil­ity when I installed it but it’s func­tion­al­ity will still come in handy… eventually?

HBOGO — FREE
Watch Game of Thrones on my iPhone? Yes please.

News

AP Mobile — FREE
Seems to be among the best news apps on the iPhone, it’s ad sup­ported but they aren’t full screen or any­thing like that.

The Onion — FREE
The older I get, the more I enjoy the Onion. Hav­ing it mobile is handy and good for an awk­ward laugh in an elevator.

ESPN Score­cen­ter — FREE
This is largely a direct equiv­a­lent to the app I had on Android. Good for track­ing the scores I most care about.

Read It Later — $2.99
Fan­tas­tic for sync­ing and read­ing inter­est­ing arti­cles on the phone. Good for the morn­ing con­sti­tu­tion­als and other such times.

Shop­ping

Ama­zon — FREE
Being an Ama­zon Prime mem­ber, being able to place orders quickly when out and think­ing about it is a fan­tas­tic utility.

Ama­zon Price Check — FREE
Ama­zon does it again. I can’t bear to spend extra money on some­thing i can as eas­ily order from Ama­zon for free shipping.

eBay — FREE
I do very lit­tle impulse shop­ping on Ebay but there are times when I’m try­ing to find some­thing or curi­ous how things are doing, or also for mon­i­tor­ing auc­tions I’ve bid on if I go out and about.

Oink — FREE
Like Yelp, but for the things inside restau­rants or stores. It’s the brain­child of Kevin Rose’s lat­est busi­ness Milk, devel­op­ing mobile apps. It’s a good app though it still is strug­gling to catch on as a ser­vice and so it can be hard to find places which have rated items unless you’re in a metrop­o­lis like NYC, San Fran­cisco etc.

Yelp — FREE
Like Oink but for rat­ing the busi­nesses as a whole, not the things inside them. Unlike Oink, it does have a big fol­low­ing and can be quite good to learn about loca­tions or businesses.

Money

Bank of Amer­ica — FREE
Say what you wish about the bank, but the app is fan­tas­tic and makes my life quite a bit eas­ier in terms of mak­ing sure accounts are what they should be.

Pay­pal — FREE
I don’t use Pay­pal much, but it comes and goes in spurts for side busi­ness or something.

Square — FREE
The main thing I use this app for is for shar­ing the cost of a meal. Got a friend with a card and I have cash, then I’d use this to swipe their card while I pay the bill. Easy, sim­ple, straight forward.

Social

Tweet­bot — $2.99
This is the best Twit­ter client on iPhone and the dif­fer­ence is stark. Allows mul­ti­ple accounts, a clean and respon­sive inter­face. Leaps and bounds above any Android Twit­ter clients.

Face­book — FREE
A good way to access Face­book, it does have some prob­lems in show­ing new con­tent with it being slow to load updates for comments.

Google+ — FREE
I don’t do a lot on G+ right now, but it’s good to have. I do miss the auto­sync of pho­tos that G+ pro­vided on Android.

Pin­ter­est — FREE
I’m still wrap­ping my head around Pin­ter­est, but it is pretty and a good diver­sion from time to time.

Path — FREE
Another social net­work I’m still learn­ing, but the app is quite good.

Word­Press — FREE
I use this only to post pho­tos and videos to a small pri­vate blog I share with a small group of con­fi­dants. Does its job well!

Misc

Gmail — FREE
A great app for my email. Much prefer­able to using Gmail through the iPhone mail app.

Drop­box — FREE
Ahhh Drop­box, how I love thee. Such a great app.

New York Times — FREE
Why isn’t this Media? Because it’s not clas­si­fied as an app. It shows up on the News­stand in the phone. And the free ver­sion lets me scan the head­lines and see what’s the news from the grey lady.

And there you have it, an in depth look at the apps on my iPhone. Hope­fully I shared some which you haven’t seen or used before!

But, are there any I missed?

Over Android

Today, while dri­ving today, I nearly threw my phone out the win­dow. I thought about rolling it down and chuck­ing it out as I rolled along at 50 miles an hour, watch­ing in joy as the phone shat­tered and broke on the pave­ment and snow. I had had enough.

You have to under­stand, I’ve sup­ported the Android OS since the Droid 1 got into my hands. It was a fan­tas­tic phone and I was very happy… for the first year or so. And then the phone began to fall behind, tech­nol­ogy moved for­ward and the Droid 1’s proces­sor and mem­ory quickly fell fur­ther and fur­ther behind. I was able to com­bat this with cus­tom ROMs and thanks to the preva­lence of the Droid 1 I was able to enjoy a thriv­ing hacker com­mu­nity to squeeze every ounce of power out of it.

Come a few months ago and my Droid 1 was nearly dead. It limped along with a bro­ken power but­ton, poor bat­tery life, and increas­ing forced reboots. I held out and fought, drag­ging the phone kick­ing and scream­ing to my two year phone upgrade with Ver­i­zon, but when the time came the promised phone — the kwisatch hader­ach for Android was not to be seen, the Sam­sung Galaxy Nexus kept get­ting pushed fur­ther back. And I was forced to suc­cumb to a sub­par phone, the LG Rev­o­lu­tion. My patience had run out, and I did not rel­ish the thought of dri­ving across the coun­try with a half oper­at­ing phone. And my loss of patience led me to make a rash decision.

The LG Rev­o­lu­tion has been noth­ing but painful as far as phones go. For our drive we relied on Katie’s iPhone’s GPS to get us nav­i­gated safely. Why hers and not mine? Because using the GPS was caus­ing my phone to reboot. For phone calls we had iffy qual­ity. Some­times when I get a call the phone never shows me a use­ful screen and just vibrate rings end­lessly. The only way to stop it is to pull the bat­tery. I mean seri­ously, What… the fuck.

Now, my anger isn’t against the Android OS. I think it does fine and will con­tinue to improve. But if a per­fect Android phone exists out there, then I might have to go through three or more phones before I find one which works. Whereas if I go straight to the iPhone I know I’m guar­an­teed a sat­is­fac­tory per­for­mance. Maybe not stel­lar. I know there will be frus­tra­tions there, but… well… I’m ready for a change.

So in the next few weeks I’ll be going for it. Time to try out iOS.

Our West Coast Christmas

As it turns out, the west coast cel­e­brates Christ­mas just like the rest of the United States. I wasn’t cer­tain, but am glad to see it’s true. After buy­ing a tree ear­lier last week, Katie and I waited until Christ­mas Eve to actu­ally dec­o­rate it. We had to go through the still packed boxes in our garage before find­ing the right ones. We unpacked our dec­o­ra­tions and enjoyed a won­der­ful tree by our fireplace.

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Where You Might Be Swept Off To

“It’s a dan­ger­ous busi­ness, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no know­ing where you might be swept off to.”

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Five years ago, when I launched Man­a­Na­tion, I had naivë dreams of untold riches as I cap­tured a niche mar­ket and gained throngs of fol­low­ers. Lit­tle did I know how dif­fi­cult grow­ing a Magic web­site would prove to be. It became a mon­u­men­tal task to con­tinue to expand, inno­vate and find new ideas for the site. Then two years ago fate decided that it was time to take it to the next level and the site exploded and I was dropped into pos­si­bly the per­fect job for me.

It’s been quite a jour­ney. One that I admit I had no clue where it was tak­ing me. And one that has swept me off my feet.

Today I get to announce a new leg of the jour­ney. One that is a sur­pris­ing and delight­ful turn: Start­ing next month, on Dec. 12th, I will work for Wiz­ards of the Coast as their Con­tent Spe­cial­ist over­see­ing DailyMTG.com.

So in a few short weeks, with a hol­i­day and a major Magic tour­na­ment (World Cham­pi­onships) in the weeks in the mid­dle, Katie and I will be mov­ing to Seat­tle with an epic 6 day cross coun­try road trip. And like every good war-time com­man­der, I’m ready to throw plans out the win­dow at a moment’s notice.

Leav­ing Cool­StuffInc was a tough deci­sion, my bosses and every­one there have been fan­tas­tic — in many ways it’s been my dream job. They gave me almost carte blanche to pur­sue ideas and explore my entre­pre­neur­ial spirit to find new ways to make the com­pany money. I was a one man mad-scientist R&D, the “res­i­dent dreamer” and it has been awesome.

The truth is that Wiz­ards is just about the only com­pany who could pull me away from here. Talk­ing to my bosses and telling them the news is prob­a­bly one of the hard­est things I’ve had to do pro­fes­sion­ally. But, I’m excited at what’s com­ing down the road.

I wrote an arti­cle about this news for GatheringMagic.com, and in it I use a quote from Conan O’Brien: “Work hard, be kind and amaz­ing things will hap­pen.” I can 100% con­firm this is true.

Villain and Hero

“It’s Easy to Be a Vil­lain, it’s Hard to be a Hero.”

Three Months of Wisdom

It’s been nearly three months since my last blog post. I feel like a lover spurn­ing an old flame, but the trap I con­tin­ued to fall into for the past months is that — my life hasn’t been overly inter­est­ing. I haven’t felt dri­ven to chase my muse across the key­board, though I’ve watched her flit about to and fro.

I’ve con­sid­ered sto­ries, like one I have work­ing titled “RIOT­Ball” which explores a world where sports and police forces inter­min­gle almost indis­tin­guish­ably. It sounds zanier than it actu­ally is, but it’s a con­cept still — nascent and unready to be brought forth.

I’ve done some travel and I could talk about the places I’ve gone and the things I’ve done, but not yet — there is a story there, but as above… it’s time hasn’t come yet.

My wife and I just cel­e­brated our first year of mar­riage, a muted but inti­mate affair. We’re over­joyed that we sur­vived the first year and have agreed to carry on for at least 79 more years.

I have opin­ions on the cur­rent state of pol­i­tics, the cur­rent finan­cial cri­sis, and the whole #Occu­py­Wall­Street move­ment but again, none of these are wholly formed and ready to be put down on paper.

There is wis­dom all around us. Spun out in bands like radio waves from a tower, if only we are pay­ing atten­tion to see them. The wis­dom which res­onates in the world comes from the news of Steve Jobs’ pass­ing, and it’s a quote that is now six years old. I remem­ber read­ing it when the tran­script of his com­mence­ment speech was posted — but it never res­onated with me until he died.

Remem­ber­ing that I’ll be dead soon is the most impor­tant tool I’ve ever encoun­tered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost every­thing — all exter­nal expec­ta­tions, all pride, all fear of embar­rass­ment or fail­ure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leav­ing only what is truly impor­tant. Remem­ber­ing that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of think­ing you have some­thing to lose. You are already naked. There is no rea­son not to fol­low your heart.

To me, that’s three months of wis­dom. Gained at the cost of three months, to be spent friv­o­lously over the rest of my life.

My Current Gadget Shopping List

Being the gad­get hound / tech­non­erd that I am, I keep a run­ning list of the gad­gets and giz­mos I want. And see­ing as how I’m no longer run­ning up credit card debt to buy all my new gad­gets, I no longer just go out and get them — instead opt­ing for a rea­son­able and respon­si­ble approach. I blog about it.

Droid Bionic

The next Android phone, expected in August. It will be a 4g dual core phone and is gen­er­ally believed to be the next must-have Android phone. I’m still rock­ing an ‘OG Droid 1′ and sadly its age is begin­ning to show as app require­ments con­tinue to expand. When I went to my local Ver­i­zon store to get my wife an iPhone, the sales peo­ple unan­i­mously agreed that wait­ing for this phone was the right call. If how­ever, once it is released, it falls short of expec­ta­tions I’ll have to re-evaluate what to purchase.

Base Cost: $299 + 2 year con­tract extension

 

21.5″ iMac 2.7gHz

My wife has been some­what of a home­less com­puter user for the past six months. We got used lap­tops from my pre­vi­ous employer when I still worked for them, we got an amaz­ing deal on them (which may be related to me ask­ing for the deal while the boss was pos­si­bly ine­bri­ated.)  They per­formed admirably until about a year ago when the first lap­top went out. We then switched her over to mine which went out just a few months later. Since then she’s been shuf­fling between machines as pos­si­ble. Less than ideal. So I badly want to get her a new machine and I don’t want to cut any cor­ners on this one.

Base Cost: $1,499

 

Nook Touch

I have a first gen­er­a­tion Nook and I love it. I have almost com­pletely moved away from the world of paper books. I have a ver­i­ta­ble library on my Nook. And while I love it, Barnes & Noble has suc­cess­fully made me feel like I need an improved reader. The new Nook has a touch screen, it removes the e-Ink flicker dur­ing page refreshes, and most impor­tantly — it’s bat­tery is sev­eral mag­ni­tudes stronger. As it is, after one long plane ride, I may need to recharge my Nook. The new Nook’s bat­tery is sup­posed to be able to han­dle a great deal longer before need­ing a charge again.

Base Cost: $139

 

Doxie Scan­ner

My mother used to pub­lish a newslet­ter called “The Get Orga­nized! News” which was a monthly newslet­ter all about orga­ni­za­tion. I am far from an overly orga­nized per­son. I’m fine with piles of papers, and a lack of obvi­ous orga­ni­za­tion. How­ever, there reg­u­larly comes a time where I need to find some­thing. Bank info, account cre­den­tials, etc. Going paper­less is a won­der­ful dream. The idea that I can sim­ply uti­lize my extra-appendage of phone or lap­top to find what­ever it is I need. I can uti­lize this scan­ner and the cloud to achieve this dream.

Base Cost: $149

 

WD TV Live Hub

For our wed­ding, one of my bosses gave us a WDTV Live box, it’s a lit­tle box which con­nects to our TV and lets us watch media files eas­ily on it. It’s become a sta­ple in our home enter­tain­ment, and while it works well in most cases, it has a few prob­lems such as view­ing MKV files and requir­ing an exter­nal hard drive to be con­nected. Shortly after we got our box, West­ern Dig­i­tal released this new box, WD TV Live Hub which cor­rects a lot of stuff includ­ing all of the issues I out­lined above. So, obvi­ously, I need to have it.

Base Cost: $199

 

Unde­cided Gadgets

There are still a hand­ful of other types of gad­gets or tech­nol­ogy I have yet to decide on. These are ones where I know I have a need to fill but I have yet to decide what I want.

Enter­tain­ment Sound Sys­tem — Katie and I want a bet­ter sound sys­tem for our tele­vi­sion and enter­tain­ment sys­tem. I don’t yet know what sys­tem I want.

Tablet — iPad 2 seems like the clear choice, but aside from peo­ple going, “ooh you have an iPad” — I’m not sure it’s worth the $$$. Is there a bet­ter choice? Would a Chrome­book be worth it? Or a net­book? Or even the Nook Color rooted to give full tablet con­trol? I just don’t know yet.

Dig­i­tal photo frame — One of my projects has been to begin archiv­ing fam­ily pho­tos. I want to have one which shows fam­ily pho­tos, but could also be used to show art. On a larger scale, I wish there was a dig­i­tal photo frame which I could give to my grand­mother and be able to eas­ily update via cell phone sys­tem (she doesn’t have wire­less inter­net) remotely. Liv­ing in rural geor­gia there is cell phone cov­er­age but no wifi.

 

The Craziest Thing I’ve Ever Done

Dean Karnazes

Dean Karzes, image cour­tesy of UltraMarathonMan.com

Some­where along the line we seem to have con­fused com­fort with hap­pi­ness. — Dean Karnazes

If you’ve never heard of Dean Kar­nazes, you shouldn’t feel too bad. He’s not a bas­ket­ball player. He’s not an olympian. He’s not a bil­lion­aire. What he is though, is a mar­vel of what the human body is capa­ble of. He’s the Ultra Marathon Man. He ran 50 marathons in 50 days in 50 states. That’s pretty impres­sive. In fact he had an episode of Stan Lee’s documentary-esque show about Super­hu­mans, and in it they revealed that his body has devel­oped such a strong sys­tem for trans­port­ing lac­tic acid (the stuff that makes our mus­cles hurt after exer­tion) that his body main­tains or low­ers its lev­els while he’s run­ning. That’s insane!

I love that quote, because it’s so true. I love being com­fort­able, and for 27 years it’s made me happy.

And it’s what made me weigh 360 lbs.

Yep. I had a pound for almost every day of the year. While not quite mor­bidly obese, and given that I am rather tall, it’s not the num­ber that would get me on Extreme Makeover: Weight Loss Edi­tion, I’m still very unhappy with the con­di­tion my body is in.

I’ve yoyo’ed numer­ous times, I’ve tried gym mem­ber­ships, I’ve bought equip­ment, I’ve trained with the wife, etc. I’ve done lots and lots of wrong things and fallen off the bal­ance beam every time.

And it sucks.

So I’ve taken to yet another strat­egy, this time key­ing off my buddy Doug, who has been train­ing in prepa­ra­tion of a triathlon. And it’s done amaz­ing things for him! (Look­ing good Doug!)

How­ever, I’m not train­ing for a triathlon (not yet at least.) I’m train­ing for:

Spartan Race

You only fail when you give up. If you don’t give up, you have not failed, you just haven’t suc­ceeded yet.

I’m train­ing to race three races in Jan­u­ary, Feb­ru­ary and March of 2012.

Now’s the point where I tell you, I’ve never run a mile in my life. Despite hav­ing played foot­ball, and rowed Crew dur­ing high school. I was lazy even then! I did the least amount of work required and often less while mak­ing it look like I had done my part.

So, hav­ing never run a mile in my life, I’m going to do a 3 mile, an 8 mile and a 3 mile race within 6 weeks of each other. But that’s not all. These races have things like this:

I have no mis­con­cep­tions. I know this is going to be hard. And I’ve already heard from sev­eral peo­ple that they don’t think I can do it. Or that they think I’m insane.

But also, I’ve found a grow­ing num­ber of friends who think this is awe­some. Who think I can do it. And of them, a small hand­ful who have decided to take on the races with me. That’s the really awe­some part. Not only am I being dri­ven to suc­ceed, but I’ve got a group of friends who want to share this experience.

So the race is my end goal, but what about the in between? Where do I want to be when it comes race time?

You have to earn your body, nobody gives it you.

Well, based on my body fat per­cent­age, and esti­mat­ing mus­cle gain and tar­get body fat per­cent­age I’m look­ing to be around 275–290 lbs. I’m not look­ing to be mus­cle­bound, less Vin Diesel and more Jason Statham. Mus­cled, but not over­whelm­ing, to be so would make my life nearly as dif­fi­cult as being fat has.

Ath­let­i­cally, for the 8 mile race I’d like to be able to run 10+ miles by then, because the obsta­cles will absolutely require higher sta­mina and energy.

Now for another admis­sion: I’ve never suc­cess­fully down a pull up in my life. Maybe in ele­men­tary school but even then I don’t think so. So the obsta­cles will absolutely require upper body strength, not just fan­tas­tic sta­mina. So between the siz­able weight loss, and the gained mus­cle, I’d like to be able to do 20 pull ups.

So where does this leave me? I’ve got 205 days as of this pub­lish­ing for the first race. That one is test­ing the waters. Then a month later I’ve got the 8 miler. And assum­ing that goes well, we’ve got a 3 mile to do just two weeks later.

I’m stu­pidly, naively, heart warm­ingly, ter­ri­fy­ingly excited about this. I’ve got a can­dle burn­ing, and with the work­ing out and begin­ning to see results it’s turn­ing to kin­dling that will soon become a rag­ing inferno of… AWESOME!

And now is the time I tell you, this is hardly the cra­zi­est thing I plan to do in my life. So be excited to see what else is in store!

There comes a time dur­ing any work­out when your mind says, “Okay, we’re done. Let’s go home.” Strength and power is when your body smiles and turns the other way.

Review: “The Richest Man in Babylon” by George S. Clason

The para­ble is one of the time­less meth­ods of shar­ing wis­dom and infor­ma­tion, from the same vein of mytho­log­i­cal sto­ries, fables and leg­ends. George Cla­son fell on this method of writ­ing, giv­ing us a faux his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ment to share wis­dom which — in truth — is com­pletely time­less and most likely were points of wis­dom shared by teach­ers to stu­dents and elders to youth.

The wis­dom held in this book is indeed valu­able insights, though ini­tially I strug­gled with the idea of work­ing to gain wealth when I myself sit in a hole of debt. This was addressed fur­ther into the book though it took a stand that was less than mod­ern, basi­cally say­ing that if you have debt, you should talk to all your debt-holders and explain your sit­u­a­tion — that you can only pay 20% of your income towards your debts. Since the debt hold­ers will clearly under­stand this and respond favor­ably, you can get used to spend­ing less but while still mak­ing at least some small pay­ment towards your debt.

While it is hope­ful of the best case sce­nario, that’s quite clearly the goal of the book. Its goal is not to train you for every even­tu­al­ity but rather pro­vide you some solid stones as things to think about for your finan­cial suc­cess. Here are some of my favorite pas­sages from the book:

That what each of us calls our nec­es­sary expenses will always grow to equal our incomes unless we protest to the contrary.

A PART OF ALL YOU EARN IS YOURS TO KEEP. It should not be less than a tenth no mat­ter how lit­tle you earn. It can be as much more as you can afford.

When I set a task for myself, I com­plete it. There­fore, I am care­ful not to start dif­fi­cult and imprac­ti­cal tasks, because I love leisure.

Advice is one thing that is freely given away, but watch that you take only what is worth hav­ing. He who takes advice about his sav­ings from one who is inex­pe­ri­enced in such mat­ters, shall pay with his sav­ings for prov­ing the fal­sity of their opinions.

The quotable lines in the book are numer­ous, and I could argue that per­haps every line in the book is quotable. This says less for the amount of what is being said, and instead for the qual­ity of the edit­ing work that trimmed the novel down to the barest of forms leav­ing a sleek and eas­ily read­able novel filled with wisdom.

I think one point which the book doesn’t high­light is the impor­tance of know­ing peo­ple. It talks about seek­ing wis­dom from those who know, rather than tak­ing advice about invest­ing from a brick layer. But you must still know these peo­ple, or know how to find them, and val­i­date them.

This is a book which will def­i­nitely merit reread­ing from year to year and will fall into the stack of books that my future chil­dren will be forced to read and endure.

The Rich­est Man in Baby­lon
ISBN: 0451205367
Length: 120 pages
Rat­ing: 4/5 stars

Help me pick my next book to read by vot­ing on the books in my queue!

My Own Personal Reading Rainbow

So I had this idea. One of those lit­tle things which stuck in the back of my mind. It wasn’t any­thing earth shat­ter­ing, but I was strug­gling with the real­iza­tion that I was about to fin­ish In the Plex, and I couldn’t decide which book to pick up next. I’ve got about 25 unread books on my Nook, so what should I read?

Well, I should ask my friends, clearly. They’re smart peo­ple and they’ve got good ideas.

But how? Do I put up a list of books I haven’t read yet? And then it came to me, I’d setup a sim­ple polling sys­tem ala Red­dit or Digg or Hacker News. But way sim­pler. Your upvote is worth 2 points, a down­vote is worth 1 point. When I fin­ish a book, I take the cur­rent top book and reset the bal­ance as well as adding any new books to the pool of eli­gi­ble choices.

Bril­liant!

I sat down this after­noon and in the course of watch­ing some mind­less tv spe­cial, I ham­mered out the very first 0.1 alpha ver­sion. Put it up and began the fast iter­a­tion sys­tem which has proven so suc­cess­ful for startups.

The first point of feed­back came from my friend Davin via Face­book and his com­ments boiled down to “Uhhh, wtf is this?” Quite right. Bet­ter expla­na­tion needed, check. Then rather than using some rather unclear up and down arrows, I changed to “Read” and “Skip” as the vot­ing options.

Total time invested: 3 hours.

Then I was off for an evening with my wife, went to see a show at the Orlando Fringe fes­ti­val. After we laughed and had a grand ole’ time, we came home and turned on the boob tube and cud­dled on the couch. As she went to bed I pulled out the lap­top and began improv­ing upon the day’s ear­lier work, I still had a few hours of energy left in me.

I set about to improve the sys­tem to allow track­ing of what I am cur­rently read­ing, and dis­play­ing it as you’ll see in the side­bar to the right. Also, I added the abil­ity to col­lect fun facts like how long it took to fin­ish etc. And lastly I added some admin tools to improve the man­age­ment, make it eas­ier to add new books, remove books, etc.

Addi­tional time invested: 1.5 hours.

And for now I call the project com­plete as a solid beta. Leave it out and let it breathe, we’ll see.

So I intro­duce you to, “Trick’s Read­ing List” — Have a look and cast some votes. Any profit made from the Ama­zon refer­rals will be used to pur­chase books for the local library or donated to some other book related charity.

This Weekend’s To Do List

Some­times I fancy myself an artist, so I took a blue pen to graph paper to try and sketch my week­end to do list. It came out okay, included a text tran­scrip­tion below in case you can’t read my chicken scratch. I won’t explain any of the sketches though…

  1. Go to SCG Open, shoot some video?
  2. Code side projects
  3. Write
  4. Read more of Bill Sim­mons’ book
  5. Rewrite project code for GatheringMagic
  6. Edit Pod­cast

Happy Mother’s Day Mom

Happy Mother’s day mom.

Secret Word or String

This morn­ing I find myself deter­mined to write a blog post. I’ve been up since 7, work­ing on Man­a­Na­tion, and as I fin­ished a small (but impor­tant) Word­Press tweak I felt com­pelled to blog.

So after I tried to log into this Word­Press site using the stan­dard array of pass­words I go dig­ging through my email. Sure enough there was a pass­word reset at some point, for some rea­son, so I have to use this to get in.

Enough stu­pid monot­ony for you?

Well it is pass­words I want to dis­cuss. After the Gawker data­base was hacked, I went through a fairly siz­able secu­rity rehash and have started using a pass­word stor­ing sys­tem. To some it seems para­noid and a waste of time as I fum­ble for pass­words, to oth­ers it seems a lit­tle over the top (usu­ally when they see my 128 bit pass­word get copy and pasted into the login field.)

But I regard it as smart secu­rity in the mod­ern age.

No, I’m obvi­ously not a hacker tar­get. I agree with you there. But I’m also not a car-jacking / house-robbing / identity-thieving tar­get either. Being a tar­get is not some­thing which is part of this equa­tion. If I waited until I was a tar­get, it would likely be too late.

So I use the open source KeeP­ass app, stor­ing the encrypted file on my drop­box, so that I am able to access it via my phone. This is a new piece of tech­nol­ogy and is still prov­ing trou­ble­some as I have had a few failed attempts to get the file open.

I think my biggest regret in this process was chang­ing the secure pass­words I already knew. I used a pass­word for my online bank­ing which was, for all intents and pur­poses, secure. It was alpha-numeric, with mixed case, and sym­bols included. I had it mem­o­rized so I was able to use it for log­ging in via my phone. But when I went through and did a mas­sive rehash of pass­words, I felt com­pelled to change it.

It hadn’t been com­pro­mised. It wasn’t a weak pass­word. I had sim­ply been using it and decided it was time to change.

There are cases to be made for rotat­ing pass­words, such as in cor­po­rate set­tings, etc. The longer a pass­word is in effect, the longer time a hacker may have access to sys­tems of yours. So when it gets changed, the hacker has to get in another way. But when it comes to some­thing like bank­ing, a secure pass­word should be a secure pass­word. Until proof of intru­sion,  you don’t really need to rotate it.

I made a very smart deci­sion a few years ago. And that is, I have stan­dard pass­words I use on the web. Four or five pass-phrases which I use when log­ging in and can’t remem­ber what the pass­word is. How­ever, I use one pass­word for log­ging into my email, and only for log­ging into your email. In some ways, your email is more crit­i­cal to your online secu­rity than any­thing else. It’s the cas­tle, if a hacker gains con­trol of your email, then he gains con­trol of your dig­i­tal life.

So when the Gawker data­base was hacked, I was only mildly affected. My email was secure, it was all the ancil­lary logins which mat­tered, things like online stores, ser­vices like Rdio.com, etc.

The pass­word stor­age sys­tem is both use­ful and annoy­ing, I use an absurdly strong encryp­tion and comedicly long pass­word to get to it, all to pro­tect about 20 pass­words which are used occa­sion­ally. It’s like car­ry­ing a comed­ically large key ring, and keep­ing an encrypted guide book to help me find the right password.

And there we have it, a mean­der­ing, kind-of-on-topic, blog post about pass­words. But hey, it’s a blog post!

Missed Connection: Skateboarder Whom I Nearly Hit

Dear Skate­boarder whom I nearly hit with my car last night,

I real­ize that it was late, you were skat­ing across the straight seg­ment of road between two turns so your view hid any oncom­ing traf­fic, how­ever I must cau­tion you as I was going, at the time, below the speed limit and yet I came around the bend to nearly slam into your frag­ile form. Instead I chose to slam on my breaks, in doing so I also pressed the horn and held it.

I must admit I admired your abil­ity to trip off your skate­board, remain on your feet, stop the board with one foot, and never spill a drop of your mocha-latte-frappachino. How­ever, when you ges­tured dra­mat­i­cally for me to drive past you as you stood in the road, and I con­tin­ued hold­ing my horn, it struck me that you thought I was honk­ing to make you aware of my presence.

This is not the case.

I am fairly cer­tain you noticed and were thus aware my Honda Ele­ment as I sat mere feet from your body. The horn was because we were in a stretch of road where peo­ple would be com­ing around curves and pos­si­bly not pay­ing atten­tion such that you, or more impor­tantly me, might be hit still. So my judi­cious use of the horn was intended to alert other dri­vers who might turn the cor­ner while we stood there.

I must say though, I did not appre­ci­ate your mim­icry of those with men­tal hand­i­caps as you skated in front of me. As you were clearly a genius, I felt it in poor taste to both make such an action, and direct it towards me. I under­stand you were try­ing to save face with your friends who had smartly stopped at road’s edge and were thus watch­ing your moronic actions unfold, but it still might not have been the best choice.

As you skated on and nearly were hit by oncom­ing cars in the next two lanes of traf­fic I pressed the gas and drove away, hop­ing you made it safely across the road. Since I heard no tires skid and no horns honked, I have to assume you did.

But fuck man did you piss me off.

– Patrick

The Proud Fraternity

Today I joined a fra­ter­nity. A proud fra­ter­nity. A fra­ter­nity of like-minded men, who bear a sin­gu­lar badge of honor.

Tonight, 2 days before Christ­mas, I bought a Christ­mas card for my wife.

In fact, I bought the last card the CVS had in stock with the label, ‘Wife.’

When Katie read the card, and my note inside, she said, “It’s so you.” And it was hon­est, as well as true. It so hap­pened that the only card left was the per­fect card for her.

Though I am part of the fra­ter­nity, I am the black sheep. This card wasn’t pur­chased in a panic. I didn’t sprint in in a cold-sweat fran­ti­cally toss­ing cards aside as I looked for one to take home to a wife.

I have her presents already; I had not planned to get a card for her. I looked at the card sec­tion on a lark on my way back from the Men’s room. And there it was, alone in the des­o­la­tion. A card meant to be taken.

This fra­ter­nity is casual, I’ll miss the meet­ings, and I’ll turn down any Face­book friend invites from my fra­ter­nity brothers.

Next year, I plan to let the mem­ber­ship lapse.

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