One man's junk

There's a lot to be said for spring cleaning. Most of them are swear words. But every now and then I come up with a nice one. Like "money." My family and I have been having a garage sale this week. In nearly 90 degree sun and only a light breeze, hundreds of people have stopped by in search of that one little thing that they didn't want to pay full price for at a store. Some people come for the hunt, others for the adventure, but they all come for e deal. I'm happy to oblige in return for a little green stuff... They get the adventure, we get to meet quite a variety of people, and we free up more space so that we can fill up more space -- all the while, earning a sunburn and enough money to put toward "edutainment" adventures during our upcoming vacation.

I used to think that garage sales, or yard sales, or rummage sales, or moving sales, or anything similar was a purely Midwestern kind of event. Everyone else had "estate sales." I've changed my mind on that a little, though without much proof to the contrary. I've heard about down-on-their-luck actors having sales, and even not so down-on-their-luck actors or singers, or other personalities selling a thing or two in a fit of common-dome, though the latter generally "donate the proceeds to charity." Whatever the class, or cause, or size, there will always be jun...er um, precious antique hand-me-down heirlooms that will be better suited at someone else's house.

NSFW...?

Well, actually it is suitable for work, or home, or wherever. This site allows you to upload a picture and blow it up to full wall size. It prints on regular size paper, but with a little tape you can have your own custom mural.

Looking for inspiration, check out the gallery and the video walk through. Really cool!

Think you're paying too much for gas?

An article in Wired magazine might just make you feel a little better...

Mashed up Maps

Interested in...anything? This site probably has a mashup for you. Mashups are combinations of data from two (or more) sources, mashed together to give you something new. This site happens to be dedicated to Google Maps Mashups. There are links to all kinds of sites -- from fast food finders, to pub crawls, to UFO sightings and just about everything else. The blog itself is interesting to read, but make sure that you scan through the Mashups and Tools index on the right. It's really interesting just to see what people think should be mapped out...

Who are you?

Have you ever wondered who you are? I mean, really wondered? Certainly there should be a place you can turn to get unbiased feedback on who you are, what you stand for. Have you ever tried to Google yourself? You'd be surprised what you might find...

Me? The first listing I found was for my profile on LinkedIn. I wasn't really expecting that one.

Just like checking your credit history every year, you might want to see what the ol' www knows about you. You never know when it'll come back on you.

Now where?

A couple of days ago, I posted about my brother's travels -- where he'd been so far. I got to thinking, though. Where do I want to go? What do I want to see before I die...

The list is pretty short actually. I'm not really into anything extravagant. I would love to go on an Alaskan cruise. I would like to go to Hawaii. I would like to see the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower. I would like to walk across the equator. That's about it.

What about you? What's on your list of places to visit? Leave a comment. It might give me some more ideas.

If you're gonna fly there, a cool site that I found tells you whether to buy your tickets now because the fares are heading up, or chill out for a few days because they're trending cheaper. A little research could save you enough to check two locations off your list!

Something of small importance

With the new hit show Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader I started reminiscing about how good I used to be at trivia. Trivial pursuit - had them all. Jeopardy - I actually kept score. Well, my wife and her online friends have been playing a private little kinda trivia contest for a while now and so I decided to make one for this blog site too...

Go to this trivia site, sign up, sign in, and see if you can keep up. The more you play, the smarter you become and the more "Fun Trivia Bucks" you earn. There's a new set of 10 questions every day. I've got it set to get harder each day throughout the week, but we all get different questions each day. Who's gonna have bragging rights today?

Nature's resiliancy

Ok, so I'm a little late. My New Year's resolution just started. Well a couple of weeks ago anyway. I resolved to walk around our neighborhood each night, regardless of the weather, or the time, for both physical and mental exercise. A big loop around the neighborhood would get me about 1.5 miles and 30 mins or so of exercise. I made it three nights...then nothing. I guess it doesn't matter when you start your resolutions... :-(

Our spring flowers had already began to bloom and everything was really starting to look full and colorful. Then, Michigan weather struck. The running joke (well one of them anyway) is that if you don't like the weather in Michigan, just wait a few minutes. (The other one is about the two seasons in Michigan -- winter and construction). We had a particularly late frost and all the tulips, daffodils, and other early bloomers were hit bad. They all began to droop their once proud heads to the ground like a little child that was just told that the ice cream man ran out of rocket pops. I was sure that we had seen the last of the beauty from those plants.

Some of the television news shows started warning people to just leave well enough alone. Don't touch the weeping plants. Let them be. They'll come back. I didn't really believe them, but hey - it gave me a reason to defer a little yard work!

Mother Nature has been at this gardening thing a little while longer than I have, so I guess she knows what she's doing. She's had time to work out the "ways" and the "hows."

The sun shone brightly the next few days and started to warm the little greens from the outside in. I have to admit that I was a little impressed and surprised at how resilient the plants actually were. Something so seemingly fragile. My hat's off to you Mother Nature. Bravo.

It's for your own protection

It's a sad world we live in sometimes. Sometimes bad things happen to good people. While I disagree with the extent to which some policies and rules are enforced (re: zero tolerance gone too far?), there is one that I will never disagree with -- keeping the kids (and others) safe. To that end, many schools have been engaging in lock downs when there is a threat of harm to the students, faculty or visitors. Often times the parents of the kids learn about these lock downs on the news or when they return to try to pick their child up from school.

LockDownAlert is addressing this communication gap by sending alerts to your cell or email when a designated school notifies them that there is a lock down in progress. You specify the school(s) and give them your contact information and in return, you get a little more peace of mind.

I can't vouch for the site, its speed, or accuracy, but if the bulletins on the front page are to be believed, this is a much needed service -- 10 across the country yesterday.

Idea hamster

I have a coworker who is an idea hamster. Everyday he's got another idea to make things better. In fact, he's go so many ideas that he doesn't know what to do with them all. So he doesn't...mostly. He's paralyzed by information, and choices, and chances. And by perfectionistic tendencies. His fear to date with most of his ideas is that he doesn't have the time to make them good enough to stamp his name on it. None of us want to release a poor quality product.

Right now, he's got the time (if he makes it) and certainly the talent to take any of his ideas to an incredible place. Yeah, he could make millions off one of them someday, or thousands of several, or nothing off any of them. You never know til you try.

They say that life is a journey, not a destination, and that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Well, in much the same way as my starting this blog, not knowing if I'd have enough, or too much, to talk about, or if anyone would actually read this (outside of my immediate friends and family), we all have to "leave the harbor, because a ship in the harbor is safe, but that's not what ships are for" -- or something like that. What I'm trying to say is that whether you're an idea hamster, or someone with a single fantasy that you keep putting off because you don't think you're ready for it -- GO FOR IT! DO SOMETHING! START! You can, and will, make it better, but if you don't have anything to make better because you didn't start, where are you?

Good luck man!

Losing a little weight

I noticed the other day that my main entry page to this blog seemed a little bloated. It was taking a little longer than I would like to load, so I've tuned the settings to show only the last 7 days worth of posts on the home page. According to the Blogger FAQ, this is the last 7 days of active posts, not the last 7 calendar days worth of posts.

What does this mean to you? Two things. First, check back often so that you see all the new stuff right on the home page (or set your RSS reader, or subscribe to the Feedburner email). Second, if you do happen to miss a new post, you can always scroll down a little bit and check the archives which are grouped by week on the right hand side.

I'm hoping that this will make the site a little lighter, and make the ads more relevant to the current postings as well... :-)

Don't forget to chime in and leave a comment if the spirit moves you. I'm also going to try to create a place where you can add suggestions for things to discuss or new stuff that you discover in your world. Look for that coming soon...

CSI

Found this site today that let's you play CSI forensic sketch artist... Draw the guy that you saw in the bar, the woman who keyed your car, an old schoolmate, or try looking at yourself in a mirror...

Ah, those were the days...

...when we thought $2.00 for a gallon of gas was high. Seems like only yester-year. :-(

I'm not really that old yet, but I find myself falling in the same storytelling that we used to joke with my dad about. His was about walking 5 miles to school each day...uphill...both ways...in 3 feet of snow...with no shoes. Another was working at his first job - Dairy Queen I think, for $0.25 an hour. Mine now involves recalling fondly my Junior year in high school when gas prices dropped to $0.68 a gallon - a mere 20% of the national average cost of a gallon of regular today!

Find out more about the average gas prices in your area via AAA, or find the cheapest stations via Gas Price Watch or my favorite Gas Buddy.

A little, ok BIG, pet peeve of mine is the way that stations will jump 20+ cents in a day, and then drop back down the next day. I know it's all about supply and demand (and greed), but I would like to think that a station that exhibited fair pricing practices would get more business in the end. Only increase retail prices when their wholesale prices rose. I'm not blaming the stations directly, I know that even they don't completely control price at the pump, but...

The only way that we're gonna get lower gas prices now is to reduce the demand -- that part is in our control. "They" will control the supply to balance out the gains we make, but at least we can say that we're doing something about it. I'm not a fan of the "gas boycott" email that gets passed around all the time because it's not a boycott -- it's a deferment. The station owners know that the next day after the boycott, they'll simply have higher sales. The only way that we can change things is to be smart about the way we're using the supply. The sites above have a number of ideas to help. To shameless paraphrase a tag line from the TV show Heros -- "save the gallon...save the world..."

Thanks Mom!

Nothing more need be said... :-)

i

Last week Google re-branded it's Google Personalized Home Page as iGoogle. It reminded me of a couple of similar re-branding efforts in the past at my company. First it was e-this, and e-that. I think that the e was supposed to stand for electronic. Every ting was renamed to begin with e. Then there was the i-this and i-that era, including the iPod and iPhone, famously Apple. Now iGoogle joins the parade.

I've mentioned before, that I'm generally in favor of all things Google, but I really think that this is i-silly. Especially since no one is advertising what it really means. Does it mean individual? Does it mean internet? Does it mean iwantmoreattention? In no article that I've read do they actually say why they're re-branding with i, just that they say it stands for personalized/ation. So why not use pGoogle? Why waste so much time on this?

What do you think it stands for? Have you seen an article that supports that?

A little cloudy

With so much information out there, a lot of sites are starting to investigate a better way to see, at a glance, what's the most relevant information in a collection. Tag Crowd is a free, alpha site that allows you to create tag clouds from text. Basically, the more frequent the word (or topic) is used, the more prominence it's given in the cloud. It's intended to make it easier to get the gist of a collection of text quickly, without reading the whole text. For example, I took my last post titled Peas...and carrots and pasted that into the TagCrowd site. This is what it spit back.

3-year addition adjusted adventurous air answered anticipation anyone apart around asked away bad balloons become carrots cents character children compound computer concerned consonants construction continue corny cost couple curious deal deeper done door draw early easier education elements enjoy enjoys enunciation etc exercise extra extremely family focus fresh fun game gave gets giving hard hold immediate instance instead instill interesting job joke kids knowledge knows learn light lives lot memorization miles mix motion multiplication needs neighborhood nowadays nugget ones others parents peas people planets plants please pocketful polite pretty proper protective question questions raising rather really reward says science sense sesame sets simple slow smart something started street tables teaching thank theme things think toss trash tv unprompted vegetable walked wanting wants warranted whole wife words working world wrote youngest

Peas...and carrots

I think that my wife and I have done a pretty good job raising our kids. They are as well adjusted as anyone can be in this world. They are all extremely smart and curious and adventurous. We may be too protective a parents as far as some are concerned, but I think that's warranted nowadays.

One thing that we started teaching our kids really early, and one of the things that I think sets them apart from a lot of other kids, is how to be polite. We often have people tell us how polite our children are, as they hold the door for others, say thank you - unprompted, when warranted, etc.

My youngest is still working on proper enunciation of some of his words, and I like to joke with him about it as I help him learn. He has a hard time with compound consonants, so when he wants something, he says peas instead of please. After he says that I say, "and carrots." It's become a little game between he and I and he knows that he needs to slow down, focus and say please before he gets what he's asking for. It's a little corny, to continue with the whole vegetable theme, but he enjoys it and he's learning at the same time.

Learning has to be fun for kids to really enjoy it. There's a place for wrote memorization in the mix too (addition tables, multiplication tables, etc), but to really instill a sense of wanting to learn in our kids, we try to keep it fun. When they as a simple question, rather than just giving the answer, I provide that extra little nugget of knowledge, and them draw them in deeper. They really like that and they learn a lot more than if we just answered the question asked.

The other day all of the kids and I went on a "penny walk." We walked around the neighborhood for a couple of miles, but to keep it fun and interesting, I asked them science questions as we walked. For each one that they got right I gave them a penny (immediate reward. Good thing I had a whole pocketful in anticipation!). These were questions about things like planets, plants, light, motion, elements, construction, balloons, etc. I had to toss a few easier ones for the 3-year old that weren't as hard ("Name a character on Sesame Street who lives in a trash can," for instance), but he got into it as well. It cost me 35-40 cents, but we got exercise, family time, education, fresh air, fun and some time away from the computer and TV our of it. Not a bad deal.