Category: Life

It’s seems like just about every weblog I’ve look at lately says the same thing:

I’m off to Austin for South by Southwest!

I don’t know what else to say other than: Me, too.

We’re leaving at around 5:00am in the morning and will hopefully be in Austin by 10:00am. We’ll be spending the evenings with Geoff and Tony and coming home Tuesday night.

It’s going to be great to get to listen to and meet some of my web designer / developer heroes like Joel Spolsky, Jeffrey Zeldman, Jason Fried and many others. I’m even going to bring a few books for signing.

I had a hard time deciding which sessions to attend. Almost all of them were interesting to me. I’ll be booked solid from 10:00am until 6:00pm every day. There are also parties every night until at least midnight, but I’m afraid I’ll be too wiped out afer a full day of sessions to attend any of these.

Hopefully this will be the inspiration and motivation that I need to finally finish a few of the programs that I’ve been working on for the last few years. I haven’t forgotten my new years resolutions yet. I still have to make at least $1000 this year from something other than my day job.

I’ll be taking lots of pictures on the trip and hopefully updating this site with notes about what I’m doing. Check back tomorrow evening to see if I survived the first day…

The last few weeks have been a little hectic, to say the least…

Way back on January 28 I attended BarCamp Dallas. First, it has nothing to do with bars, and very little to do with camping. It was mainly a bunch of geeks getting together to talk about geeky things. In other words, it was my kinda place.

You can see a bunch of pictures on Flickr. Yes, I’m in a few of those. This one’s a bit like Where’s Waldo. I’m not sure what I was thinking in this one.

I attended six sessions on a variety of things – ruby, linux, javascript, etc. I also gave a little presentation. You can grab the audio from my session over at Web Logs Work and see what you think. I guess I should post my Power Point file and source code eventually.

Long story short, BarCamp was great. The event was free, the food was free, and everyone seemed seemed to share and grow. It was really great to be able to hang out and talk with so many smart people.

About a week later I headed off to Austin for Texas Computer Education Association Conference. I stayed in Austin February 7th through the 10th.

I’m not sure what to say about TCEA. I felt a little out of place there. The conference was dominated by teachers who were a little geeky, whereas I am a geek who knows a little about teaching. So, the sessions were mostly not for me.

For example, I attended a session by a “futurist” who flew in from California to speak. During the session he talked about Google Earth, Wikis, Blogs, and Podcasts. Most of the people in the audience seemed fascinated by what he was saying. The whole time I was thinking – I started my blog in 1999, does that mean I’m from the future?

I also attended a session about Linux where the speaker didn’t know the difference between Gnome and KDE. But maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe only the super geeks like me should even care about the difference. If anyone wants to spread the message of free software to the masses, I certainly won’t stand in their way.

I did attend a few sessions about running a district IT department that were interesting. It’s nice to see the way other districts deal with the problems we all face. Some of the other districts had a lot more staff and money than we did, but I did hear one guy say that he was the IT department.

I’d like to post more details about some of the other sessions I attended, but the session list on their website is not very helpful. It doesn’t even give the time that a session ran. Not to mention that session handouts are still not available.

I hope it doesn’t sound like I’m being too harsh on the conference. I really did have a good time there, and I think I learned a few things. I’m sure I’ll go back next year. I’ll probably even try to present something.

I also had a chance to eat at some great restaurants in Austin, and I got to hang out with Geoff and Tony for a while which is always nice. Geoff even took me out to eat for my birthday.

I’ll be heading back to Austin for South by Southwest on March 10. The Interactive portion of the festival promises to be a truly great gathering of web geeks from all over the world.

I’m sure I’ll also post my thoughts on SXSW, hopefully before April…

I love three day weekends. Even better is the four day week that follows. I really wish I could work four days on and three days off every week.

I was actually quite productive yesterday. I usually spend my days off goofing around on the computer and watching TV.

Instead of doing nothing, I broke the time down into one hour blocks. I spent about an hour eating breakfast and watching TV. Then I spent an hour checking all of my e-mail accounts and RSS feeds. After that, I got to work.

I spent the next hour sketching an entity-relationship diagram for one of the programs I’m working on as well as drawing a few paper prototypes for different parts of the system.

The next hour was spent cleaning up and organizing things in my office and around the house. The office is far from complete, but at least I made some progress.

The next two hours were spent having lunch and then doing a little shopping. I picked up some things at Wal-Mart and Office Max. I also avoided buying any more books at Hastings.

Finally, I spent the rest of the afternoon doing some light house work and helping a friend with computer problems.

Overall, this was much better than my usual schedule – sleeping until Paige comes home for lunch around noon and then watching Star Trek until she comes home from work at 5:00pm.

Just how geeky are you? Take The Geek Test and find out. It’s pretty long, but if you’re really geeky you probably won’t mind.

Reading the questions even brought back some memories for me.

I scored 46.35108% which means I’m a Super Geek. I was a little surprised that I did so poorly. I’m the geekiest person I know.

On the other hand, anything above 75% is considered a Dysfunctional Geek, so maybe I’m right where I need to be…

The other day I mentioned reducing monthly expenses in my New Year’s Resolutions. Here are a few of the things we’ve done so far:

Last year, we had Cox Cable and DirecTV. I had to have a cable modem, and we needed all of the good channels to watch. So every month we paid about $50 to Cox and $55 to DirecTV.

A few months ago Cox added some channels to their line up. They now have every channel that we actually watch except for one. I did some research and found that the better plan at Cox would cost us about $80 per month.

That means we were paying $25 per month for one channel. Obviously, that’s been taken care of.

Now not only are we saving $25 per month, we don’t have a satellite box taking up space in the entertainment center anymore. That means less electricity being used and less wires tangled up behind the TV.

The next problem was a little more interesting.

A while back, Paige and I got cell phones. We rarely use our home phone anymore, so we considered canceling it. But, we’ve had that same number forever and everyone knows it.

So we kept our $40 per month phone bill from SBC. We could’ve reduced this bill quite a bit, but we really like having Caller ID and Call Waiting.

Lately, I’ve been seeing more and more commercials for Vonage. Finally, something in one of those commercials really caught my attention – “Transfer your current number to Vonage.” That’s just what we were looking for.

Their unlimited plan is only $24.99 per month, but we didn’t really need unlimited minutes. On their website they also have a 500 minute per month plan for $14.99. I think that’ll be more than we’ll ever use.

So as of sometime tomorrow, our old number will be transferred to Vonage and we’ll be saving another $25 per month. This is actually a better deal than SBC since Vonage has all of the nice features we had before (Caller ID, etc.) as well as free long distance anywhere in the US.

I’ve also been looking for other small expenses to get rid of.

At one point last year I was to subscribed to four different magazines. They were all interesting to read, but they mostly just ended up in a pile somewhere. These have all been let go. This means a little extra money each year and fewer things to clutter up my office.

I was also a member of the Scientific American book club and the Columbia House DVD club. Trouble is I rarely watch movies, and I already have more books than I’ll ever be able read. The book club membership has already been canceled, and the DVD club will be canceled as soon as I buy one more.

There’s a certain thrill that goes along with telling someone “I don’t need your services anymore.” DirecTV kept me on hold for about 20 minutes yesterday evening, but I persevered and eventually talked to a rather nice guy who canceled my service.

This seems to be a pretty popular topic for New Year’s Resolutions. Merlin Mann has an article called Modest Change: Cancel something over at 43 Folders dealing with this exact subject.

I promised some New Year’s Resolutions the other day, so here they are in no particular order:

• Earn at least $1,000 in 2006 from things not related to my day job. I’m not sure exactly how much I made last year from consulting, but I know it was less than $1,000. I’m going to try to focus on what Steve Pavlina calls “passive income” – that is, things that make money without my having to do any work. For example, a product that I can create once and then sell on a web site many times. I’ll also be reducing monthly expenses wherever possible to make this extra income really count.
• Simplify my life and get things done. If I’m ever going to accomplish anything, I’ve got to get organized. I’ve starting using HipCal to keep up with my schedule. So far it does everything I need. I’ve got to get back into the habit of working out. My office is filled with junk that I hardly ever touch. This means all of the old computers are going away and I’ll be culling my bookshelves. There will be a huge garage sale some day soon as well as some stuff on eBay. I’ll keep you posted.
• Network more with my peers. I’m going to get out and talk to people both online and in person. This means going to community events like Refresh Dallas and the BarCamp Dallas. I might even join the local Linux Users Group. I would like to attend at least one event per month. I’ll also be updating this site (and others) more frequently – hopefully at least 2-3 times a week. I’m also going to try to comment more on other people’s sites or use TrackBacks if I have something interesting to say.

That seems like a pretty short list, but that’s the idea. All of these are things that I can easily accomplish this year.

The idea is to develop a network of peers and a system of organization that I can use to develop my ideas and finally start launching some of the products that I have in my head and on my computer.

Check back this time next year to see how things turn out…

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve celebrated both Matthew’s birthday and Christmas. We had Matthew’s birthday party was on December 17. He had a great time and got lots of presents. Here he is enjoying some cake:

Unfortunately, we didn’t get a picture of him sticking his whole mouth on the cake, but you can see the results pretty good in this shot.

Christmas also went really well this year. I think Matthew got one of everything. Here he is with some of his gifts:

He was obviously a very good boy.

It looks like this will be the last post of the year. Check back tomorrow for some New Year’s Resolutions…

If you haven’t done so already, now might be a good time to think about taking care of your Christmas shopping…

It looks like I got my wish – today’s a snow day. I think I wanted it worse than the kids.

I’m going to try to spend some time today working on a movie of Matthew’s first year. Hopefully I’ll have some clips to post here soon.

Well, actually it’s more like sleet, but I’ll take what I can get…

Another benefit of working for a school district – snow days. I hope I don’t have to go to work tomorrow.

Oh well, I’m off to make some hot cocoa.