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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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??

In 1996, I knew nothing about owning or buying a car. I have no idea how many miles were on it. It was previously owned by a friend of my Mom’s, and I just sort of looked at it and agreed to buy it for $300. In retrospect, it was a pretty low-risk deal: with my job stocking shelves at the local A&P, the car would have cost me about two week’s worth of work after taxes.

That week, I drove everywhere. To my friend Jon’s house. To my friend Lindsay’s house. And, not least of all, to work to pay the thing off. It was August, and school was due to start up again soon. It was also the week my friend “Ryan”:http://flipsidejones.net/ was visiting the States from his home in London. I told him about the car and we hatched a plan to celebrate the end of the summer and my new ride. We would “drive down”:http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&hl=en&saddr=Long+Valley,+NJ&daddr=537+Monmouth+Rd,+Jackson,+NJ&ll=40.472024,-74.597168&spn=1.055121,1.873169&om=1 to “Great Adventure”:http://www.sixflags.com/parks/greatadventure/ all by ourselves, blow a lot of money, hang out all night, and get back late. He was due to catch a flight early the next morning, but he would just catch up on his sleep on the flight. No big deal.

And somehow, at some point — and I’m not really sure how — we got the idea to invite someone else, too. Her name was Erin. She was quiet, a member of the 4H club, and she liked horses. She was also the first girl I ever dated. I don’t think I was carrying a torch, but I wasn’t unhappy when she said yes.

So we went. We climbed into the Skyhawk and meandered down the New Jersey Turnpike. I had never done so much highway driving. We got to the park, we had a great time. The best time, really — Ryan and I were euphoric with the autonomy of a new car, and Erin played deadpan to our giddiness. We stayed at the park until it closed.

Back in the parking lot, we climbed into the Skyhawk and started it up. We drove a few hundred feet. I noticed the pickup wasn’t as good as it had been. Then it stalled.

We drove around some more until I found a security guard and asked for help. He sent over the park mechanic who, after listening to the engine for 10 seconds, delivered the bad news: I’d “thrown a rod”:http://www.epinions.com/auto-review-3388-1887077-3895269F-prod4. Here we were, three seventeen-year-olds, 70 miles from home, at midnight, and our only means of transportation was completely shot. The mechanic gave us two options. We could leave the car and find another way home. Or, we could hope for the best, take the car, and destroy the engine in the process of driving back. We started driving.

That night, the car burned through two tanks of gas — most of it escaping as white vapor through the exhaust pipe — as we drove a top speed of 40 MPH on the Turnpike, hazards flashing. When I’d run out of money at the second rest stop and had to borrow $10 from Erin to cover the second tank, I knew that any chance of rekindling interest was just gone. I called my 20-something friend Jay for help and car advice with what little change I had left, and he suggested that car would never make it up the hills on the Turnpike. Take Route 1 instead, he said, so we did.

Route 1 is all poorly-timed stoplights through sketchy urban neighborhoods (terrifying for teenage suburbanites). Each time we came to a stop, the car would die. The only way to get it moving again was to restart the car with my foot on the gas, rev the engine in park, and slam the gearshift into drive, chirping the tires and progressively destroying the transmission. I flinched every time. After a few miles, and I started slowly coasting through red lights to avoid having to stop. A sign for a familiar local road loomed into view, and I took it: we drove the remainder of the trip up the winding, farm-lined Route 206.

That was 2 AM. Ryan and Erin were asleep as I coaxed the Skyhawk up and down the hills of the country road, alternately praying and cheering it on under my breath. By 3:30 AM, we’d reached the foot of “Schooley’s Mountain”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schooley’s_Mountain, a couple of miles from home. I parked the car in the lot of a local pub and called my mom, who, bless her heart, came to pick us up and drop off my friends.

The next day, a mechanic met us at the pub. The car sat like a hollowed-out shell: the engine and transmission were both completely destroyed, and it wouldn’t even start. He offered to take it off our hands for free.

That senior year, I took the bus to school. I never went out with Erin. And for my senior formal dance, I picked up my date in the Pink Lung.

“But, she didn’t seem to mind”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/kennsarah/160499005/.