CoolestFamilyEver

We’ve been living out in the suburbia of Sandy for almost 5 years now. During that time, I always thought that we had a pretty good thing going, an affordable house on a relatively large lot with a short drive to work, the grocery store, and anywhere else we needed to go on a routine basis. As I was driving home through the war zone that is 700 E (which, I might add, is part of a coordinated “tear up every major road at the same time” strategy that has persisted during our entire time here), something in me snapped. Part of the road construction included putting up decorative concrete sound walls, walls that stretch on for hundreds of feet separating neighborhoods from everything else. Something nasty happened: I realized that this kind of suburban sprawl was exactly what I left behind in Las Vegas. When comparing that with the walking-friendly neighborhood of Brookline, MA, I’m not entirely sure that I want to continue living in the suburbs.

Granted, there are some benefits to living here. We’re within a close drive of work, school, and a major shopping area. We have a very large yard and the neighborhood is quiet. But all the same, it’s starting to feel somewhat soulless, a collection of strip malls and cloned homes with very little personality. (Seriously, around half of the homes within a one mile radius use the same floor plan as ours.) When I go to downtown Salt Lake City, it feels alive. The Downtown Farmers Market draws in people of all stripes. There’s independent shops and restaurants. Everything is within a short walk of everything else with prolific bus and train service for anything further. This is the kind of experience we had in Brookline; the hospital, restaurants, grocery store, and train station were all within a half mile of us.

Something about that just felt right. Despite the isolated efforts of Hamlet Homes and Daybreak, the suburbs have a distinct cookie-cutter approach to town building that is unnatural and forces you to drive everywhere. I think it may be time to give Salt Lake City or its surrounding areas a second look.

Posted by Jesse | Filed under: Homeownership, Life on July 30th, 2010 at 4:04 pm | 2 Comments »

There’s been quite a firestorm about Facebook and its issues with protecting user privacy. In particular, Facebook has been changing their Terms of Service (ToS) to just about let them do anything with any and all data you provide. I personally find the trade-offs involved to be worth it for the convenience of being able to quickly and easily share information with a wide group of friends, family, and acquaintances, though some have gone so far as to delete their Facebook accounts in protest. I think this is extreme, but everyone should be paying much closer attention to how they use this platform.

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Posted by Jesse | Filed under: Geek on June 9th, 2010 at 5:56 pm | 1 Comment »

Remember that big, long review I posted of our new phones a couple of months back? Well, it’s gotten a long-anticipated update to Android 2.1 which, honestly, almost makes it feel like a new phone. I know at least a few of you have been considering it, so let me give you a run down of what’s new.

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Posted by Jesse | Filed under: Geek on May 25th, 2010 at 11:12 pm | No Comments »

I know, it’s been two weeks since the surgery. I suck at waiting so long. Here’s the scoop on how it went.

Liam’s surgery went very well. Both surgeons were pleased at the outcome. This surgery separated his two joined fingers, removed a bunch of fatty tissue (a process called de-bulking), straightened the fingers with some bone adjustments, and drilled the growth plates to stop further growth. He’s been in a cast up to his shoulder, so we won’t get to see the final results until they take off the cast and remove the pins on the 26th.

He actually did pretty well considering all of the stuff done to him. Nurses were bugging him almost hourly for the first couple of days and no amount of morphine drip was going to reduce his irritation. He surprisingly didn’t do a whole lot to try and pull out the IV, though he did get the various pulse, oxygen, and respiration sensors torn off more than a few times. The surgery was on a Wednesday and we were discharged on Saturday morning with a bottle of oxycodone (for him, not us) and a kid thrown way off his schedule. Thankfully, we didn’t have to use the oxycodone for more than a couple of days before switching off to Tylenol. He was even doing well enough to fall asleep on his own when we took a fun day out in Boston Common and got the world’s best cannoli in the North End. He’s been surprisingly adaptable too. He scoots around with the greatest of ease and can still sit up and lay down on his own. He still likes finger foods and has even tried a few new things. (The dried apricot was a triumph, I tell you.)

This isn’t the end of the surgery, though. We’ll need to go back in the fall so that they can come in on the other side of his index finger for further debulking and to see about correcting his hyperextended thumb. After that, it’s a waiting game to see what happens. His fingers could either grow at a normal rate, or they could start growing much faster. In either case, the surgery in the fall likely won’t be the last of it.

Posted by Jesse | Filed under: Health, Liam, Liam's Macrodactyly, Life, Shauna on May 14th, 2010 at 7:53 pm | 1 Comment »

We’ve been sitting in the waiting area for almost three hours now. Liam’s been going through his surgery and we’ve been doing anything we can to distract ourselves. It’s the longest wait imaginable. I don’t know how the parents here for heart or brain surgery are doing it.

We did Liam’s pre-op appointments yesterday. It took around 4 hours for all of them and he was a trooper. We even got him to nap through all of the x-rays. Afterwards, we took him to the aquarium to look at fish. He was too tired to get very excited, but he sure did a lot of looking around. And he wasn’t cool with the manta ray getting that close to him, glass tank or not.

He slept long and deep last night, exhausted from the long day. He woke up in a good mood this morning, blissfully unaware of what his day held.

Two hours or so of surgery to go. It feels like forever.

Posted by Jesse | Filed under: Family, Health, Liam, Liam's Macrodactyly, Travel, macrodactyly on April 28th, 2010 at 9:33 am | 2 Comments »

Warning: If you don’t want to read a geeked-out in-depth review of a cell phone, turn away now. No, seriously. Unless you’re getting ready to pick up a new one and like Sprint, this isn’t the post for you. Afterwards we will continue your normally scheduled broadcasts.

As I recently posted, Shauna and I picked up some new phones. I had a lot of enthusiasm for the Samsung Moment because of the capabilities offered by Android and the hardware keyboard and managed to sell Shauna on it once she found out she could “skin” the phone. (In her view, the stock model is too masculine.) Now that we’ve been using them for a couple of weeks, I thought I’d share my thoughts and opinions on the devices.

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Posted by Jesse | Filed under: Geek on March 20th, 2010 at 12:20 pm | 3 Comments »

As a first-time smartphone buyer, I really didn’t know what I was looking for when I picked up my Motorola Q9c a couple of years ago. All of my research centered around the checkbox features of the phone delivered at the price it was offered for. To be fair, getting a smartphone with a keyboard, camera, Bluetooth, and tethering for $150 was a good deal at the time. Not really knowing any better, I thought Windows Mobile would be a fine choice. So, with much enthusiasm, I went home with a phone that did more than any phone I previous had could ever do.

Gradually, though, it became painfully obvious that Windows Mobile was getting a bit dated. The number of apps available for it was limited at best, mainly because many required a touchscreen. I also found that many mobile websites didn’t much care for the shoddy browser that came with the phone. Alternatives like Skyfire, while functional, would often disconnect for no reason and prove only useful in absolute emergencies. While I was initially excited about all of the things I could now do that I couldn’t do before, I was now running into the frustrating wall of hardware and software limitations. It was time to swap out for something a bit more functional.

Being soured on Windows Mobile, I needed to look elsewhere. I already knew that Blackberries were right out. I had one about six years ago and didn’t much care for the way it worked at all. It also seemed like the application selection was running into the same limitations as Windows Mobile despite a very large user base. And the iPhone? As exciting as the initial announcement was, Apple has earned my ire over the years. I don’t want to deal with their insane application rejection behaviors (I would say policies, but that would imply consistency), I don’t want to deal with AT&T’s crappy and oversaturated data network, and I don’t want to suffer through an on-screen keyboard. Palm was also off of my list since it appears that company may not have long left in this world. WebOS is a pretty darn amazing platform, but the lagging sales make me think that Palm’s offering is too little, too late. I didn’t want to be bitten the same way we were by investing in Sandisk Sansa MP3 players.

Enter Google and Android. For those that don’t know, Android is what’s powering hot phones like the G1 and Motorola Droid. The open app store and easy-to-use SDK has lead to a lot of apps being available for it. The phones are also reasonably powerful and come with a lot of useful features. Once Sprint announced the Samsung Moment, I knew I had to have one. It had all of the hardware features of my old Q9c, but it also added WiFi and a large touchscreen. Once I heard it would be updated from Android 1.5 (Cupcake) to 2.1 (Elcair), I was sold.

Oddly enough, Shauna got kind of excited about the idea of a new phone too. Yes, my wife Shauna. No, she was not abducted by aliens, brainwashed by a cult in the jungles of South America, or the recipient of any blunt force trauma to the head. (For those of you not in on the joke, Shauna has used her phone so infrequently over the last several years that it often would have a dead battery for months at a go.) So two weeks ago, we jumped in the car and drove on down to the Sprint store to check this phone out. A few days later, we had them in our hot little hands and were excitedly grapping apps left and right and playing around with them to our heart’s content. Funny enough, the new plan we got on actually gives us triple the minutes of our old plan, adds unlimited texting, and gives Shauna unlimited data, yet we’re now paying less than we used to. Go figure.

Both of us love these things. I’m very excited to see Elcair rolled out sometime next month to unlock even more features. If you like Sprint’s data network (which, FYI, is the best as far as I’m concerned) and want an awesome smartphone, this is the way to go.

(I’ll be writing up my own review of the phone and what apps I think are must-haves later on. I’ve already rambled on enough.)

Posted by Jesse | Filed under: Geek, Life, Shauna on March 13th, 2010 at 3:57 pm | 4 Comments »

The backbone of any company, especially one that deals in technology, is innovation. You need to come up with better ideas than everyone else to be the best at what you do and win the hearts of your customers. Inevitably, though, companies will fall into the trap of thinking that they can simply rest upon their laurels and coast on previous successes. Some of them, like IBM, simply lose their ability to command the direction that market innovation takes. Others (I’m looking at you, SCO) “drown in a sauce of their own fail” and die a terrible and often publicly humiliating death. Apple has, in a single lawsuit, decided that they want to begin their slow death spiral to complete and total irrelevance to the technology market.

Let me take a moment to explain myself. Apple, for a long time, did a great job of driving the market in places it needed to go. The iMac, while often derided as a kiddie toy by hardcore PC users, brought a much-needed sense of style to a market dominated by the same old gray and beige boxes. The iPod single-handedly dislodged MP3 player as the word for a portable music device and became the de facto standard. iTunes defined what digital marketplaces are supposed to look like and function like. The iPhone created the concept of an easy-to-use repository of simple applications that anyone could create or download. All of these things are truly revolutionary changes to the way we use technology and we owe Apple a great big thanks for making it happen.

Lately, though, most of Apple’s products are more evolutionary than revolutionary. I don’t know if Steve Jobs has been losing his touch or if the cancer has forced him to delegate to the less capable, but none of the company’s PC products have really been more than a periodic refresh of the latest technology. The new generations of iPhones, while improved, haven’t really been compelling enough to entice everyone to upgrade ASAP. And the iPad? Aside from an unfortunate name that’s become the butt of far too many immature jokes, it’s really not much more than a really big iPhone. Apple’s biggest opportunity is in really putting something behind the Apple TV, yet they don’t seem to be willing to make that necessary investment and truly transform the emerging web video market with a subscription-based service and, heck, an extension of the app store. There’s more innovation on this set-top box from XMBC and Boxee than from Apple and that’s a big problem.

Therein lies the real issue. When a company can’t come up with any more game-changing products or ways of doing business, it tried to jealously guard its existing products and business models by any means necessary. This inevitably turns into a game of legislating or litigating success. Telecom companies are notorious for getting all kinds of regulatory special favors; their last Christmas present, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, has cost us all around $300B and growing. Now Apple, by deciding to sue HTC, has started down the same slow death spiral that so many failed companies before it have gone down.

What this is really about is Steve Jobs and his enormous ego. Google managed to out-iPhone the iPhone with the Android platform and the Nexus One handset. Apple hasn’t been beaten at its own game in quite some time, especially not with a flagship product, so this is serious egg on their face. Now, instead of realizing that they have ceded the market lead through relative inaction and only minor product updates, they want to try and stamp out the competition for doing it better. (Kind of ironic since CEO Jobs said that stealing ideas is a good thing.) Apple has admitted, in so many words, that it’s out of good ideas. That’s the sure sign it’s as good as dead.

Posted by Jesse | Filed under: Geek, Rants on March 2nd, 2010 at 9:21 pm | No Comments »

A lot of people are asking about it, so I thought maybe I should just get it written down in one spot so I stop having to repeat myself. Liam’s hand surgery has been scheduled for April 28 at Children’s Hospital Boston. We were accepted to stay at the Yawkey Family Inn, a sort of boarding house for patient families that has private rooms, a shared kitchen, laundry, and common areas for just $30 a night. Our moms are hooking us up with free flights thanks to frequent flyer points from Southwest. Shauna’s been saving all of the tips she gets at school to pay for the stay and any other expenses that may pop up.

Right now, the plan is to fly out the Saturday or Sunday before to give Liam a chance to recover from a long day of flying. We’ll be in Boston for about a week after the surgery while he recovers, then we’re going to head down to the DC area to stay with Shauna’s brother Bill. I’m probably going to fly back home not long after that and Shauna will stay with Liam until his followup 2-3 weeks later. The reason I may be coming back early is our dogs. They’ll be twitchy enough after two weeks of us being gone and really need to have someone around the house on a somewhat consistent basis. If you want to volunteer to watch them, please let us know. This doesn’t mean just to come over and feed them twice a day, but also to hang out for a bit and give the dogs some socialization. I certainly wouldn’t mind being able to stay with Shauna and Liam for the entire time.

Posted by Jesse | Filed under: Annabelle, Chloe, Family, Health, Liam, Liam's Macrodactyly, Travel on February 21st, 2010 at 2:11 pm | No Comments »

Butternut squash is one of those ingredients that seems to intimidate a lot of cooks. It’s often served in fancy soups in fancy restaurants, an ingredient like filet mignon that seems out of reach of the home cook. Well that’s a load of hooey.

Sunday night I found myself in possession of a butternut squash and in need of a side dish to go with a roast and mashed potatoes. The squash had been sitting on top of our fridge for the better part of a month (yes, they have amazing shelf life) and was just begging to be cooked. I ad-libbed the entire process, but it worked out pretty well.

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Posted by Jesse | Filed under: Food, Recipes on February 9th, 2010 at 9:24 pm | No Comments »