So, it is official! We have a new apt. here in Newark. It is nicer, bigger, and in a building full of tenants who are not as likely to fall down the stairs drunk in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. Even if they did, we would most likely not hear it. 

When we move in, pics will be on Flikr, and you locals will of course be invited to a house warming party. Heck, you may even be invited to help us move-lucky you!

Apparently, missing the payment deadline in January jumped our interest up from a 0% APR to _29.24%_.

Oh noes!

moar humorous pics

Engage indignant fury. Asked Ash to reverse it.

Hold music. Was told that he could submit a request to review the situation. Asked why we didn’t pay the bill on time last month.

Because your friggin’ website doesn’t have automatic bill pay.

Actually, we do offer electronic funds transfer by phone and online.

Yeah, I know: the EFT by phone costs $30, and the website is still not an automatic bill pay, right?

Sorry?

It’s not _scheduled_ bill payment, right?

Oh, yes, you’re right; will note on the account. Should hear back about the resolution and reversal of charges (if approved) in one to two billing cycles.

Can also note that we set up bill payment through our _own_ bank and you’ll receive payment in-full, on-time going forward.

Okay, sure.

Kthxbye.
___

Didn’t ask if it’s the 21st century and maybe have you heard of this thing called the internet?

Didn’t explain that every other bank we’ve had in the last five years has auto billpay, because at the end of the day, all I really want to do is just send you my money, will you please just let me send you my money?

Didn’t imply that an institution founded in 1850 might have the dignity of notifying customers of such a drastic account change and will you maybe consider the impact this might have on your brand?

Nope, saving that material for another round in four to eight weeks.

It all started with one little bug . . . a bed bug that is. As nasty as these little critters are, I was thinking that we were done with them after dealing with an infestation in November ‘05 (thank you, upstairs neighbors, for bringing that “bargain” mattress into the apartment). That was mere weeks after Ken and I had bought a gorgeous new mattress as an anniversary gift for each other. Anyway, after fighting a concurrent infestation of bedbugs and roaches (yes, they were havin’ a game of ball on the wall), we were finally rid of the nasty buggers! Until last Thursday.

Dahlia was hanging out in her bouncy seat in the middle of the bed, and I leaned over her to smile at her when I noticed a brown bug hide under one of the seat legs. I immediately recognized it and said some not-so-nice things about it. To confirm, though, I grabbed a tissue and killed it. Sure enough. The bed bugs were back.

I am done with this apartment. We have a nice-enough landlord who sort of gets around to things if you ask continually for a few days in a row. We certainly have a lot of space for the rent we are paying, but I am done. This is the last item on a list of problems with this apartment that have been slowly racking up: broken storm doors out front since we moved in (3 years ago), 18 wheelers up and down our block all day because of the industrial drum company next door, various toxic liquids poured onto our sidewalk daily from the same company, moldy ceiling tiles in the bathroom because of leaks above them (yes– a drop ceiling in the bathroom). Plus, the place is just plain old and ugly. I know that isn’t a very convincing argument, but I get weary of the shabby brown linoleum in the kitchen, the lumpy, thin carpet, and the dirty wallpaper throughout the apartment. To seal the deal, Monday night an entire cabinet fell off the wall in the kitchen. That was a good time had by all.

I hope this isn’t a case of “the grass is greener . . . ” but we are officially apartment shopping.

Last Tuesday’s class revealed that a father’s testosterone levels drop sharply after childbirth. Our instructor Erica explained that this was an evolutionary feature — so fathers don’t eat the baby. I wrote down dutifully, “Rule #3: do not eat the baby.”

Google never fails to impress when you’re looking for a topic that you’ve never in your life thought of before. I just stumbled over “this Guardian article”:http://observer.guardian.co.uk/woman/story/0,,1792138,00.html about fatherhood and the demands of the global marketplace. Money quote (of which there are _many_):

That is another thing no one told me before my daughter was born - looking after a baby is stress-relief. The mythology of fatherhood says that responsibility for a fragile young life will grey your hair overnight. But the urgent simplicity of a child’s needs insulates you from the complex demands of the outside world. When I first went back to work I felt agoraphobia for the first time. My reassuringly narrowed horizons were forced back open. The idea that you are expected, after a few hearty pats on the back, to get on with business as usual struck me as grotesque. I sat in meetings struggling to care. I now live in fear of missing some minuscule step my daughter might have taken down the road of infant development, a newly articulate gurgle or a very prolific poo. Fathering is addictive like that.

Rule #3 (which really was another version of Rule #1, anyway) has now been replaced: “Don’t work too much.”

“Danny and Kim Iverson”:http://www.dannyiverson.com came over last weekend with their son DJ. They’re working on growing a church in one of the more impoverished areas of Newark, not more than a couple miles from our place: real, front lines, give away everything you’ve got and come follow me ministry work. Danny lit up when he saw the guitar case in our living room. “You play?” he beamed at me. “I hack,” I said, admitting that I had learned some chords to lead worship at our college Bible study.

I opened up the case and showed him the axe; the strings were embarrassingly old and the guitar out of tune. I toyed with it for a minute or two before handing it to him, watched him place the capo at the second fret _backwards_ leaving open the top E, B and bottom E strings (”for that alternate tuning, but open sound”, he explained), and noodle through a few things he had written. He held us captivated for a few minutes before handing it back.

Later that night I went back to my to-do list and added, “practice guitar more often”.

It’s always a one-liner, maybe two. They haven’t yet begun with the words “Where’s my … ?” (opting instead for “I need”), for which I’m thankful. But it means getting on the VPN and spending a little time in Excel or Word or Acrobat. And delivering. Soon.

We call them KJs, short for knee-jerk assignments. There’s little time to think and less time to second-guess. Adam calls them “hero or goat” moments, which I think is funny, since I recently learned that “few animals walk taller than the he-goat”:http://www.gnpcb.org/esv/search/?q=proverbs+30%3A29-31. But I think he rather meant “the stupid kind”:http://www.theonion.com/content/node/40091 instead.

It’s a love/hate thing I have about blogging: design is hard, and harder still to justify when you have to actually _tell_ people that you spent your Sunday afternoon “designing the blog” — looking at the ground, tracing your foot through the dirt. Admitting to having a vested interest in the online world (like having a MySpace or Facebook profile) is still embarrassing for those of us over 25. Well, those of us who are over 25 and aren’t making a dime at this, anyway.

It takes others less time, I think, to realize that there’s a very short window to accomplish anything in life, and a lot of mundane steps to get there. Sometimes it takes me a while to figure stuff like that out.

So I changed my homepage to my to-do list, instead.

The new year and holidays came and went mercifully well, though we honestly wondered if we were going to make it through this one. 2006, a year I thought couldn’t have come sooner on Dec 31, 2005, left as quietly as it arrived. The year was not without its heartaches, which often brought us to tears of grief and loss. But, it was also a year in which there were no murders on our street, no car accidents, no layoffs, no massive hurricanes cutting a swath through my mom’s backyard.

I took a new job, the city of Newark saw its first glimpse of hope in Cory Booker, and we saw Europe for the first time.

And, of course, we got knocked up.

***

Listening to back-episodes of the Gillmor Gang lately has got me wondering what this site would look like if it was more like an attention stream than a blog. There are a dozen web services that I use on a regular basis — all of which have RSS capability. Aggregating that content on this site, I think, would provide a more useful picture of what I’ve been paying attention to over the past several weeks.

I also wanted a web design that wouldn’t just look like I just cobbled together a bunch of text from disparate sites, and I wanted to use a metaphor that would fit in one screen, so you can literally see the stream of my diggs, pictures, blogs (here and elsewhere), and twittering in the context of time. Hence the timeline up top (a free AJAX widget provided by those bright guys at MIT). Ultimately, the timeline will show different colors for the varying web services, the current design is a start — what do you think?

***

I actually get paid to play with the web in my job. A large portion of my responsibilities lie with the team Intranet site, which our managing director wants to use as our main communication medium and platform for tools inside our organization. There’s a lot of room to breathe with this new gig, and I’ve been able to come up with some interesting and creative ideas, leveraging ajaxy web 2.0 goodness like MIT’s timeline. Did you know that the Yahoo Maps API lets you use their software inside a firewall? At a commercial organization? For FREE?

It also occurred to me the other day that we can use Microsoft Access as a content management system for the site — and not how you would think, either. We’re currently restricted by our web host to HTML, CSS and JavaScript (with some server side include capability), and /that’s it/: no ASP, no Java, and don’t even think about open-source. With daily pressure to get graphs, charts, figures, news, and documents on the intranet daily, what’s an overworked web-monkey to do?

Well, one might surmise that said monkey could build some tables inside of Access to accomodate news items; maybe design some sweet forms to do the data entry for the news “blog”. Writing code to export that content in the form of an SHTML include file in Visual Basic is trivial, and the monkey knows how to write a batch file that will FTP the exported file to the right location on the intranet. Done. Now any member of the team (technical or no), can log into this Access database, type in their stuff and click “Publish”. And the beautiful part is that it works just like Moveable Type. Sure, it’s not very web 2.0, but it’s agile, doesn’t require a bureaucratic change request process, and will be up and running by tomorrow (I started working on it today).

You can also import all sorts of data, analyze it with queries, and output HTML tables which, combined with the PlotKit JavaScript library, can be graphed and charted with ease, which I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader.

***

Sarah got me a few books on fatherhood for Christmas this year, which I’ve just started plodding through (I figure they’re due by March 27th!). Aside from adding a number of to-dos to my list of things to talk about during our “Family Meeting Night”, it’s been a welcome sanity-check on just what we’re getting ourselves into. I told Schmoo tonight: “did you realize that that baby has to come /through/ your pelvis?” To which she replied, “well, how else did you expect it to come out?” And, of course I knew this had to be so. Only, it was only /too/ clear when I saw a drawing of an inverted baby floating through a skeletal pelvis on page 51 of The Birth Partner.

***

I mentioned the Gillmor Gang, which, if you check out my Digg profile, is one of my dugg podcasts (note in passing to the Digg crew: please make it easy to check for the latest podcasts in my digg profile, thanks). It’s actually defunct now as Steve’s funding or time or patience had run out with his podcast provider, the last “Thanksgiving Gang” having been recorded way back in November. Undaunted, I’ve been making my way through his past episodes, whiling away the hours hacking databases and spreadsheets at work, listening to the crew of marketers, journalists, and entrepreneurs talk about their work, their predictions for the industry, and generally b.s. about the personalities behind the press releases.

It’s a brilliant model for a podcast: six or seven industry insiders get on a conference line and talk about whatever they feel about talking about. I’d love to use it one day — it reminds me of the days back at Ironworks when we’d just hang out and talk about the world’s problems until the middle of the night.

“Jason Calacanis”:http://www.calacanis.com, one of the resident entrepreneurs on the show, has been downright inspiring. His narrative of growing up a poor kid in the Burroughs and covering the tech scene in New York during the bubble before he launched his own blog network resonates with me. Between him and web 2.0 wonder-boy Mike Arrington and totally random (emergent?) Christian cartoon ex-Silicon Valley blogger Hugh MacLeod, I sometimes find them grasping towards the intersection of art and business — that place you get to when you find you’re doing great work, what you later will consider your life’s work. These guys love what they do, and I think for many of them, the day-to-day job — of writing, of deal-making, of building, of whatever — has transcended getting a paycheck into a craft. It’s always encouraging to those of us in the trenches to hear that it doesn’t always have to be this way: that there’s more important and interesting work out there waiting to be found.

***

I discovered Wesabe the other day: it’s like Microsoft Money for the web, with half the features. If it hasn’t been said before, let me be the first: CONSUMER BANKS (ESPECIALLY THE BIG ONES) NEED TO PROVIDE THIS KIND OF SERVICE IN THE NEXT 18 MONTHS OR DIE OF IRRELEVANCE. It’s actually offensive to me now that my bank doesn’t automatically provide me with analysis tools to track my spending and investment habits.

I actually did receive a year-end statement from my Credit Union last year that attempted to break out my spending into various categories for the first time ever, which I very much appreciated. But the first thing I did when they asked me to fill out a survey was to tell them: great job with the year-end spending breakout, now please do it every month, and put it online within a year.

Microsoft Money is a tragedy of an accident of a failure of a software product. I’ve been using it since 1998 and, much like the rest of Office, have come to loathe it in the last two or three years. They’ve added features I don’t use, they’ve left reporting bugs that drive me crazy, they’ve attempted every bit of lock-in they could think of to prevent me from getting my own personal financial data, and they’ve screwed with the user interface — which once looked like I was logging into a sophisticated, stately banking application — so that it now looks like a bad imitation of a Fischer-Price toy.

Wesabe is the first salvo of web 2.0 coming to banking apps, and I fully expect this trend to continue as the privacy issues are hashed out. I’ve already switched completely: how could I pass on instant financial analysis available anywhere I have a secure web connection? Now I’m just trying to figure out how to get five years of data out of Money to load into Wesabe.

***

Well, if you made it this far through the brain-dump that is this blog, I wanted to thank you, dear readers, for sticking around through these past nearing-five years of Our Story. That some people with whom I’ve had passing encounters (such as “Nikkiana”:http://everytomorrow.org, “Sean”:http://semanticbible.org and “Dale”:http://wp.theoblogical.org/) continue to read this blog just amazes and humbles me. Thanks for reading.

***

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

– ??Steve Jobs??

Things are good, really, though. I like working hard. I like showing up at the office, dressed sharp and ready to take names and…well, “you know the rest”:http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&q=%22taking+names+and+kicking+*%22&btnG=Search. It’s a nice change from hating my job and being stuck in spreadsheet hell.

I’ve been writing at the Newark blog again, which I’ve been calling the “Daily Newarker”:http://blog.newarker.info/, of late. The “K2 theme”:http://getk2.com has been pretty stable, so I’ve been able to add some features. I recently was annoyed when I couldn’t get Google Ads working on the site. It took me 30 minutes, but eventually I figured out that my “ad blocker”:http://adblockplus.org/en/ was preventing my from seeing them. Lol and all the rest.

Europe feels like it was 6 months ago, but I’ve been working on the next blog entry about our trip. Sorry to leave y’all hanging there. We’re alive and well, and better for having gone. I spent what must have been five hours this past weekend trying to grind out another story, and I have a newfound respect for trilogy authors: part II is always tough.

More pictures will be going up soon of our trip to Europe. The hard drive on the laptop is stuffed to the rafters, though, so I can’t post new stuff until I can get it off the camera. I had this problem in Europe, too, and spent not a few hours paring and slicing and thinning out the content on the drive to make room.

I religiously rate my iTunes music so every once in a while I can dump the crap (songs rated 2 *’s are not long for this world). I’ve started the same habit with photos, too, which makes a lot of sense: why keep 20 photos of the same sunset trying to catch just the right shot when you can keep the one photo that tells the story and clear 30 MB of disk space by deleting the other 19? I might blog about our photo workflow at some point, but that’s it in a nutshell.

I got an email today telling me that “Festivus is upon us”:http://flickr.com/photos/matthewkrautheim/76472941/. I can’t wait.