CoolestFamilyEver

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 | 2 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 »

Shauna and I are normally very excited to have 11AM church. It gives you just enough time to sleep in and be lazy in the morning without spending all day waiting until it’s time to go. When we got the switch this year, we thought it would be a good thing. There’s just one problem: Liam.

You see, his normal nap time is between 10AM and 11AM and he usually goes down for about an hour and a half to two hours. You don’t have to be a math major to figure out that this doesn’t jive too well with a church meeting block from 11AM to 2PM. We used to be able to take him into the hall and get him to nap between blocks, but he’s outgrown the carrier and has gotten a bit pickier about where he naps.

The last time we took him to church, we had to leave before the end of sacrament meeting because he was acting up so much. The problem with sticking it out with him is that we’re basically just trying to keep Liam from freaking out and distracting everyone else in the room. One of us is always with him in the hallway trying to get him to doze just a little bit with very limited success. So what do we do about the crazy kid?

Basically, we’ve decided we have to go to church in shifts. I take a week, she takes a week, the other stays home with the kid to make sure he gets his nap. If he wakes up in time, we join the other at church. And I hope he grows out of it sometime soon.

Posted by Jesse | Filed under: Church, Liam, Life on February 7th, 2010 at 12:30 pm | 1 Comment »

Like 7 million other people (literally), I tuned in to watch Conan’s final episode of The Tonight Show last night. I even re-watched it this morning on Hulu because it was that good. If you don’t have the time to watch the full thing, at least watch this clip of his closing speech to fans.

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Posted by Jesse | Filed under: Entertainment on January 23rd, 2010 at 5:24 pm | 2 Comments »

Dear NBC,

Look, guys, I know you can’t help but screw up, but you’ve pretty much put the icing on the cake now. It’s not very surprising, though. You made Heroes suck for two seasons after a mind-blowing premier and making “save the cheerleader” a popular meme, ABC stole Scrubs right out from under you and ended up with an amazing season 8 finale, and you just about canceled The Office, now one of your most popular shows, until someone clued you in about a little thing called iTunes. Heck, all any of the people I know can talk about is Chuck and you seem hell-bent on sending that one into the garbage can as well.

I guess I should know better after you fumbled your late-night lineup almost 18 years ago. The Tonight Show was run by a living legend, Johnny Carson. I remember staying up until entirely irresponsible hours on Friday nights and all during the summer just to catch his hilarious sketches and monologues. Meanwhile, David Letterman was being just as funny in the time slot right after and would have been a natural fit. Even Johnny Carson thought Letterman would be the  best replacement. But no, you instead get that giant sack of unfunny chin, Jay Leno, to take over, losing Letterman to CBS in the process. About the only saving grace is that you had the good sense to grab Conan O’Brien and gave him a few seasons to find his own.

It almost looked like you were on the way to making some good choices. You put O’Brien in charge of The Tonight Show and he’s been on fire. A week doesn’t go by that some major website doesn’t link his sketches. He’s an Internet sensation in an age when that means something. All the same, you had to counter that good idea with the lame-brain idea that Leno should have his own prime time show, and we know how that’s been working out for you. You should have just sent that horse to the glue factory.

Now you realize that keeping The Chin on staff wasn’t a terribly good idea, but you’re about to “fix” that mistake by making an even bigger one. I mean, you’re seriously going to not only let him keep a show, but slap your best decision in the face to do it? Do you remember at all what happened when you did that to Letterman, or is your memory just that short?

You’re about to take your best late-night asset and chase him off to another network, splitting that coveted late night audience even further. NBC, pull your collective heads out of your collective rear ends and realize you’re about to goof up big time yet again.

Posted by Jesse | Filed under: Entertainment on January 13th, 2010 at 12:36 am | 1 Comment »

Due to a crawler that thinks sending hundreds of requests at a time is an acceptable practice, something that effectively results in a denial of service attack on the web server, Yahoo’s crawler has hereby been completely and totally banned from indexing any of our websites. While I may lose a visit or two every day from this, it beat losing the dozens of other visits because the web server is effectively tanked. I even tried to play nice by using a robots directive to limit requests without any change.

You suck, Yahoo. No wonder you’re becoming so irrelevant.

Posted by Jesse | Filed under: Rants, Website on January 6th, 2010 at 1:46 pm | No Comments »

For Christmas, Shauna and I took Liam to Alabama to meet my side of the extended family. All of my living grandparents and most of my aunts and uncles (as well as both cousins) live within the state, so it was a great way to get to all of them at once. Even the ones from further away were in town, an added bonus. Everyone gushed over him (predictably, he is a pretty cute kid) and we had a great time.

Liam was a great traveler. Considering that we were more-or-less asking him to sit still in cars and planes for 12+ hours, he was barely fussy at all. I guess those long road trips to California conditioned him to that kind of activity. It still took him a day to bounce back from it all, but we were not that family with the screaming baby right behind you.

It was kind of a bittersweet visit with my grandmother, though. My mom recently moved back to start caring for her because she was concerned about her mental health. After a week, I can see why. She would forget that she’d recently told us a story just minutes prior, sometimes recanting the same anecdote several times a day. (Apparently this is a early sign of dementia.) I noticed that she was also having trouble moving around, often hunched over by the end of the day, yet she refuses to consider a wheelchair. I really enjoyed seeing her and spending time with her, but I fear she may not be around long.  I made sure to get pictures and video so that Liam will get a chance to remember his grand grandma if he doesn’t get a chance to see her again.

Posted by Jesse | Filed under: Family, Holidays, Travel on December 30th, 2009 at 9:13 pm | No Comments »

The best part of a roasted poultry is the inevitable soup you can make with the carcass. A lot of people get intimidated by making a soup, but it’s one of the easiest things you can do. If you can fill a pot with ingredients, you can make this soup.

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Posted by Jesse | Filed under: Food, Recipes on November 30th, 2009 at 4:00 pm | 2 Comments »