I’ve been motivated of late to clean up my workspace at my office. Unfortunately, since I do not work from home, there are more limitations to what I can do to improve my surroundings, but doing something is better than doing nothing. I have found that I can be much more productive and much less stressed out if I’m not surrounded by clutter. This morning, I read this article, and I was inspired to continue along this path of cleanliness and super-organization.

I realized that one of my drawers, the top drawer of the smaller cabinet next to me, had become increasingly annoying. This is the drawer where I put my stamps, but I also tend to throw condiments in there, you know, the extra Chinese mustards and soy sauces, salt and pepper packets, some Sugar in the Raw packets, etc. Twenty minutes into throwing away condiment packets, I realized I had never cleaned this drawer out. I’ve been here for six years. That’s a whole lot of condiments. Apparently, saving condiments is not as useful a practice as I once thought it was. It’s staggering to think how much of that crap in particular gets wasted.

Stuffed in the back of this drawer were remnants of whomever worked here before me. Among these remnants were four rubber stamps (I like the IMPORTANT stamp, personally) and a pack of Avery Reinforcements, the kind we used to use back in grade school to secure our looseleaf pages. I thumbtacked the pack of reinforcements to a wall next to me, and left the stamps on someone’s desk. I’d e-mailed her a link to that article earlier. She’s surrounded constantly by clutter, and I think she’s never actually closed an e-mail she’s received (she uses Eudora, a miserable e-mail client that doesn’t appear to have any kind of limitation on how many e-mails are opened at one time, and it also seems to remember exactly what you had opened before you shut your computer down). She’s been here a lot longer than me. I’m hoping I can look forward to the museum that evolves if and when she decides to relaxify.

The title of this post is based on Lifehacks, a nifty website with a catchy name, dealing with all sorts of productivity tips. I figured I’d jot down some things which have improved my own life and, in some cases, the lives of those around me, with some explanations included.

del.icio.us: This website has certainly become popular enough with the technology-savvy crowd, but most of the people I deal with on a daily basis don’t belong to that bunch. That’s unfortunate, though I suspect popularity will increase and begin to catch on with the general public, provided it doesn’t get contaminated with a whole lot of garbage. One friend of mine described it as Google on steroids, which isn’t far from the truth. I’ve been using it to store my bookmarks in a shared area online. My wife tends to check it now and then, so I lean towards posting things that might interest her. It’s also a powerful search engine, which searches through sites that have been recommended by the community, hence the Google analogy. Rather than relying on Google’s algorithms, real people choose real sites that get added to the repository. So, after searching high and low for a perch for our parrot, I finally gave del.icio.us a shot. In a couple of clicks, I found Perch Factory, which was exactly the type of place I’d been looking for. Our bird is much happier now that she can hang out with all of us wherever we might be on her Companion Perch Portable Tee Stand, rather than be confined to her cage in my home office all the time.

Zillow.com: If you have any interest in the subject of real estate, check this website out. You can get a Comparative Market Analysis of your home in seconds, and it’s even fairly accurate in my opinion. (I am, incidentally, a NYS Licensed Real Estate Agent.)

VBA Developer’s Handbook: I’m not affiliated in any way with the writers of this book, and I’m not even necessarily trying to push the book itself. Rather, it’s VBA itself which has dramatically improved my life over the years. Considering how many people use Microsoft Office all day long, it pains me how few even know what VBA is. Whenever I encounter a task which I’m liable to repeat, I look for ways of automating it with VBA. Having done this for many years now, I can say with some degree of confidence that I’m doing the work of ten people at any given time while at work (probably a conservative estimate)- at least, ten people who don’t know what VBA is yet depend on Microsoft Office to do their jobs.

Sirius Satellite Radio: Since moving into our house out in the boondocks, my one-way work commute has increased from 12 miles to over 40 miles. Shortly after said move, Howard Stern made his historic move to Sirius. He was to be replaced with David Lee Roth, whom I admire tremendously, having been a die-hard Van Halen fan from the pre-Van Hagar days (I’m sorry, but Van Hagar was NOT Van Halen, no matter what you say). This combination of events spelled one thing for me: Sirius. In all fairness, I gave ol’ Dave a shot that first morning, driving my sorry ass to work, listening to him grill his old gravelly-voiced uncle whoever about who knows or cares, and that sealed the deal. I was at Best Buy right after work. By that night, I was hooked up with a full one year subscription. My commute turned from a stressfull daily ordeal to a relaxing, humor-filled experience that I look forward to. There’s even the huge added bonuses of Scott Ferrall and Bubba the Love Sponge, not to mention Raw Dog. As of this past Monday, they began streaming all these shows over the Internet. Between all that and Howard Stern On Demand, my life has become richer. My commute is now an ongoing First Amendment political statement. I can spend more quality time with my family, since I’ve been laughing the whole way home, rather than dealing with 40 miles of road rage. The subscription has paid for itself many times over.

Ta-da List: They say “Necessity is the mother of invention,” but really I think laziness is the proud parent. It occurred to me one evening as my wife was dictating yet another shopping list to me over the phone that there must be a better way. Sure enough, there’s this free online list sharing service. No more paper (except for when I print the list out prior to actually shopping). She can add items as they occur to her, I can add things I need, and life is good. I also recently discovered Wridea, which is a similar concept, with some cool features which set it apart from Ta-da List, such as categories and a “Print View” option, but I haven’t gotten too deeply into it. Ta-da has been working just fine.

Fairway: We like to cook, and we really enjoy gourmet, preferably organic foods. They opened one of these markets a mile from my job. Try their freshly sliced, organic smoked salmon. With all the bagels and lox I consumed growing up, nothing could have prepared me for this stuff. Now I could never go back to prepackaged lox. They also have the best meat, seafood and deli departments I’ve ever seen (which include plenty of organic items to choose from, of course), and I’ve seen more than a few. Try their organic Peruvian coffee. Surprisingly, they’re not great with the fresh mozzarella- though they do carry mozzarella curds, which I hear is the way to go if you’re up for the added steps of making your own mozzarella. Supposedly, it’s pretty easy, but I haven’t tried, yet. There’s also bulk olives, sundried tomatoes, organic spring mix… I could go on and on. The place is overwhelming, and we’ve struck gold.

Bonterra: Speaking of organic, we’ve tried a bunch of different organic wines, and maybe it’s the lack of sulfites in most of them that we’re just not used to, but frankly, the vast majority really suck. These people, on the other hand, aren’t quite as sulfite-phobic as the average hippie. They’re probably not even hippies. Their wine has sulfites, it’s organic- and, in my humble, non-connoisseur’s opinion, it’s great. Thank my wife for turning me on to it.

This list is by no means exhaustive. I’ll probably be posting a lot more in more specialized areas. There is, for instance, the Bumbo Seat, which deserves mentioning here as well as under the Parenting category. From their website: “The Bumbo is a soft, safe and comfortable environment for your baby. This innovative infant chair is designed to fit the contour of your baby’s body while supporting their spine and encouraging good posture. It lets babies sit upright all by themselves as soon as they have head control. The Bumbo Seat provides the trunk control. This helps your child learn the skills they need to sit up on their own.” There’s also Wikipedia, an endless source of information, The Internet Move Database (IMDb)…

When I was accompanying my wife to her doctor’s appointments during her first pregnancy, I noticed a distinct lack of male-oriented reading material in the offices. It occurred to me that there might be some value in starting some sort of publication geared towards expecting fathers. At some point, I might actually do that. In the meantime, I’m still in the researching phase. This research consists of my raising two daughters. Since the overwhelming consensus seems to be that our children are extremely happy, maybe my sharing some of my experience can lead to more happy children. I hope so.

I’m not recommending anything or dispensing advice. All I know is, our kids are either really good actresses, or those smiles are genuine. Since our youngest is only six and a half months, I’m going to go ahead and assume she’s being genuine. The two and half year old, well, she can be a big faker at times, but I’ll trust my own intuition on this one. Her happiness seems real to me, and everyone else for that matter. Of all the reactions to our children upon meeting them, the most common comment is, “They’re so happy!” There have been times in my life where I received some external validation, whether it was through applause after a musical performance, a good grade here and there in school, a compliment here and there on my appearance, not to mention ongoing validation from my wife, but to date, by far the greatest validation I have ever received is my children’s happiness. I interpret those smiles to mean I’m doing the right thing somewhere.

We have a small house, and our kids are at ages where they need our attention constantly. The fact that they appear to really want to hang out with us at all times is, I find, extremely flattering. We include them in everything, which is pretty easy to do, since as things stand right now, we don’t do too much. I work, I go home, and that’s it. From Friday night until Monday morning, I’m with the family day and night. I hope to arrange things so I can spend more time with them, but that’s another story entirely, which I won’t go into here. We are fortunate enough that my wife can stay home with the kids when I’m not around. I intend to do anything I can to keep this going as long as humanly possible. The results speak for themselves.

We’re tired, and that’s OK. We haven’t had the benefit of a huge support network. We live in a sort of rural, remote area, far away from what little family we have that happens to live in the same state. The rest are scattered around the country. I’ve called on my sister a couple of times to help, before our second daughter was born, just so we could go out to dinner for Mother’s Day (or was it Easter?), then so we could go househunting after we found out we were about to have a second child. So here we are, nestled in our cozy first house, far from everyone we know, in a new neighborhood. We could use some help, so we’re hoping to find some kind of babysitter or something, someone we can call a couple of times a week so we can maybe get some time to ourselves, however brief that time might be.

We strive to enjoy what we have, which includes eating well, enjoying ourselves and generally trying to laugh often. My wife and I share diverse tastes in music, food, life, spirituality, business, you name it, so there is no shortage of conversation going on. Our older daughter is an increasing participant in those conversations. I think our youngest is attempting to stick her two cents in there as well. Apart from the nagging feeling that I don’t spend enough time with my family, our routine is pretty comfortable and consistent. Our children are safe and loved, and they are constantly reminded of that. Perhaps this is the benefit to having no significant external support system. We didn’t plan it that way. In fact, we didn’t plan much of anything. We’ve been flying by the seat of our pants the whole way, and that’s forced us to live in the moment. There really hasn’t been much of a choice. We went from living in a cramped one bedroom third floor walkup apartment with a lousy parking situation to finding out we were expecting a second child in another five months to having to go househunting for our first house to finding that house to moving into our new house, all within a very short time. There’s been very little opportunity for us to reflect on the whole situation, and maybe it’s better that way. It feels good.

My wife and I are pretty self-aware, in my opinion. We’ve both seen a lot and been through our share, and we’ve explored a wide variety of lifestyles and belief systems, maybe excessively at times, but what the hell. We both value the importance of self exploration and expression, and we talk about it frequently, and we value those qualities in others. We try to encourage our children to develop those qualities in themselves. It seems to be working thus far. Those kids are a couple of characters, that’s for sure. They each have a tremendous sense of humor. I think that might be one of the most important things to possess.

We recently registered our older daughter for preschool starting in the fall, three days a week, three hours a day. It’s a Montessori school, and I don’t know how we’re going to pull it off as it’s really a stretch financially, but I intend to continue to do whatever it takes to provide them all with a safe environment in which they can flourish. I can’t believe she’s going to be starting preschool already. I’m almost glad I won’t be there to drop her off all the time, so I don’t have to face leaving without her. The whole separation anxiety thing works both ways.

I used to write a lot. It was a great way to avoid paying attention in the majority of my high school and college classes. Ironically, some of my writing got published in the monthly Physics Department publication of my alma mater, of all places. They mainly published a couple of my comic strips, samples of which can be found here.

I’ve always loved writing, though it has been a painfully long time since I’ve been able to devote much time to it. So, recently, I decided it was time to write my novel.

Five or six chapters in, I realized I was churning out an autobiography. It was good to get a lot of this stuff out, but I’m not nearly presumptuous enough to think anyone else would care to read it. One chapter, if you can even call it that, is now a blog entry.

I am now a little less ambitious in the novel department. With all the writing I’ve done in my life, I never had the attention span to write anything lengthier than a short story or series of comic strips. For the moment, blog entries will do fine, and thanks to this guy, I’ve got a little more inspiration to do exactly that, particularly from this post.

Whether or not anyone besides me or my close family reads any of it, maybe it will bring me a little closer to that enlightened place, wherever that might be…

I was born and raised Jewish. For the most part, that meant bagels and lox with the family on Sunday and living in a middle class neighborhood in Queens, New York. A fair percentage of my parents’ friends who lived in the vicinity were Jewish, and there was some tradition involved in sending your kids to Sunday School, which was about the last thing I ever wanted to do on a Sunday morning.
Three years of Sunday School led to three more years of Sunday School along with three years of Hebrew School. There was a Bar Mitzvah at age 13 in there somewhere, along with a Confirmation at 16. That’s a Jewish Confirmation, which I still believe was nothing more than an excuse to extort three more years of temple dues from parents who couldn’t resist doing the same thing all their friends were doing, which was sending their kids to religious school.
In all of my four years in High School, I had one fist fight, and that was during Confirmation Rehearsal. The Rabbi pulled me off some kid. I decided against throwing the Rabbi off of me and proceeding to pummel said kid.
I liked the Rabbi. He was one of those young, hip Rabbis. We were Reform Jews. That means we were more liberal, we could eat seafood, we really could do whatever we wanted, which included having hip Rabbis. I think we were the first temple to have a female Cantor. These days, there are even female Rabbis.
Years later, I would get involved with a girl who used to be Chasidic. She claimed not to be religious anymore. Still, when I told her we were Reform Jews, she just kind of snickered. “You’re not Jewish,” she said.
I admire the dedication of the Chasidic Jews. You don’t see too many cultures in America that subject their children to living in the middle of poor, depressed inner city neighborhoods, keeping to themselves, and walking around dressed head to toe in black suits. Try doing that in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the middle of a sweltering August day. Dedication or not, I consider that to be child abuse.
To a Chasidic Jew, I’m not Jewish. To me, they’re fanatics, though I don’t think they’re especially dangerous. They’re not the Taliban, much as some of them might bear a striking resemblance, minus the suits.
When asked about my religion these days, it’s more convenient to say I’m Jewish. Most people don’t have the time to hear me go on about my feelings on the matter. It’s sort of like saying, “How are you doing?” You never want the real answer to that one.
The real answer is a simple one: I don’t know. I haven’t tried that answer out on anyone yet, but I suspect that if someone asks me what religion I am, “I don’t know” might prompt some discussion.
I really don’t know what, if any, religion I am, because I don’t know what religion really is. There really is no single definition for the term. One popular definition refers to a belief in some higher power, or god, or whatever; another common one refers to practices based on the teachings of a spiritual leader; a third is simply a cause, principle or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion.
Maybe “I don’t know” is my religion. It seems like a pretty safe one to me. It’s honest. I really don’t know, and I’m not trying to pretend that I do. I don’t feel compelled to force “I don’t know” on anyone else, much less react violently if someone disagrees. In fact, if anyone does disagree on this matter, I would recommend counseling, and definitely not religious counseling. There are far more important issues to be concerned with, so anyone who would spend any energy at all on voicing their disagreement with this might want to consider they might not be spending their precious time wisely. I don’t use “I don’t know” as an excuse for anything; rather, I’m finding that “I don’t know” makes more sense to me with each passing moment, and the more I realize I don’t know, the more inspired I am to learn new things. It seems like there are always new things to learn, because this whole cycle has been keeping me pretty busy.

So, there’s a Gold Rush going on. Thank you, Fortune Magazine, for compelling legions more drooling freaks to invest in places they have no intention of living in, driving up property values to even more insane heights, making it even more inaccessible to, say, a mid- to late-thirties, single-income parent renting in a neighborhood with a good school district, living paycheck to paycheck. I love the picture of the 22 year old who ‘decided not to go to college.’ I can’t wait for my daughter to grow up so she can tell me to go screw myself for forcing her to get an education instead of dropping out and making real money. Let’s see, what’s more appealing… to be poor and educated, or rich and ig’nant…

I’ve made the blog the main focus of this website. The old site can still be found HERE. I haven’t gotten around to updating the links back to the home page yet. They’re a bunch of static HTML pages, most of which have not been updated since… a long time ago. The site was in dire need of a facelift, so here it is.

I’ve just added FrontLines, where we can “collaborate on ways to improve technology and make our lives more livable.” Contributions are welcome.

Yes, at long last, I have a blog. Here it is, in all its glory. There’s even a chance that at some point, I might have something meaningful to say- meaningful, that is, to me. There’s also a chance that this whole thing might serve as a grim reminder that I actually have absolutely nothing meaningful to say. It just felt like it was long overdue, as if I’ve been missing the party. After all, I’m a computer guy, I guess. Here’s the scenario: Stranger and yours truly engage in some conversation. Before too long, stranger asks, “What do you do?” After some thought (but not too much, since by now it feels like a waste of time to even try to come up with a succinct answer), I say, “Computer stuff. Basically. Lots of computer stuff.” I’ve been around computers for what seems like forever. I spent many sleepless nights at the age of 11 or 12 trying to recreate my favorite arcade games in Basic on my Atari 400 computer. I’ve played classical piano for most of my life, played in some bands, published a couple of cartoons (rather, friends of mine published them, probably out of pity), wrote some short stories, and throughout all of this I did “computer stuff.” When it came to paying the bills, “computer stuff” did just that. It hasn’t made me rich, yet, but I’m still young. Well, I’m not old. Then again, ask any teenager who is about as old as I feel and they’ll probably tell you I’m way over the hill. According to this guy, I’m at the cutoff for starting a startup. He has a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard. Despite that, he seems pretty smart. It’s a good thing I learned a long time ago not to look around for discouragement. I’d like to start a software company, for a couple of reasons. First, I want to get rich. There, I said it. I want to make a whole lot of money so my daughter can live comfortably and go to the best schools; then, I won’t feel too guilty about treating myself really well. Software design seems like one good avenue in that direction. Second, I’d like to piss off all those people who call themselves “programmers.” I never went to school for computer science. I’ve taken a programming class or two in my time, but that’s about it. I know a whole lot of people who have gone to school for it, most of whom hold highly technical-sounding positions and make decent money to boot, but getting any useful information out of these people is like pulling teeth. In fact, pulling teeth is easier. Incidentally, I feel about the same way about people who call themselves “artists,” “writers” and “musicians.” I’m not talking about artists, writers and musicians- just people who call themselves those things. I apologize to the handful of those who aren’t spoiled and pretentious. The painful irony here is that people who call themselves these things piss me off, yet I still don’t know what to call myself, and despite my aversion to labelling and stereotypes, that pisses me off. It would make conversation so much easier if I had a nice, simple label to call myself, such as “fireman,” or “spot welder,” or “wrecking ball operator.” It might even help me get to sleep at night, since I wouldn’t be spending time thinking about this.