The Cowtown Chronicles

Seriously — All through the campaign I recognized the next path of spin or rhetoric a day or two before the campaigns started spouting it, and would share that with my wife, or comment on another blog about it.

Lately I’ve been saying that the solution to the energy “crisis” isn’t centralized power generation using renewable sources; the answer is distributed, small-scale production, close to where the energy is used.

I’m not sure if Amory Lovins is reading my mind or not, but he says the same thing (basically) in this post on the Freakonomics Blog.

How do I monetize my apparent clairvoyance? I want a job where I get to think about stuff and make predictions every day…

I’ve been working over the last few weeks at making my life easier to manage. The impetus for this was when I realized that I easily had 10+ email accounts, all of which forwarded to each other in a confusing, Kafkaesque way. I also personally own at least 6 different domain names, not counting the ones I own on behalf of Panther City Media.

In the interests of my own sanity, I’ve consolidated all my email down to ONE address: pete AT petewann DOT com. If you have a different address for me, it will likely still work, but this will be my one and only personal email address from now on.

I’ve also made the jump to managing everything “in the cloud.” This was a difficult one for me. I am a BIG fan of the ease of use and integration of Apple’s built-in apps for personal information management — iCal, Address Book, and Mail. I like the way they all work together and how they all integrate with the other Apple apps. But keeping everything in sync between the two different systems I use at work (my Mac Pro desktop and my MacBook Pro laptop) and my iMac at home was starting to become a major hassle. Yes, MobileMe helped with that a lot, but I wanted to try to get away from the $99/yr. charge for what would basically be synchronization services and some online storage. I don’t really have any interest in using the email account or the web space, since I have my own more robust solutions for both of those.

So, I finally got myself set up on Google Apps for Business. Don’t be fooled by the “for Business” part — anyone can sign up, and the service is free. Once you’re signed up, you can host your email, calendar, and documents all “in the cloud.” I’m slowly moving my documents up there, but I’m also using a few other tools to manage the files and information that I need to have available on every computer I touch.

The first is Dropbox. It’s free for up to 2GB of storage, and it works essentially like MobileMe’s iDisk feature. An upgrade to 50GB — 2.5 times what MobileMe offers — is $99/year. I’m using only the free storage until I find that I need the upgrade.

The second sanity-saver is Spanning Sync. It synchronizes my Address Book and iCal to and from my Gmail account, on every computer I use. It’s $25/yr. or $65 for a one-time purchase. (Click the link in this paragraph to save $5 on your purchase.) I’m paying yearly now to see if I continue to use it consistently, but I suspect that I will soon switch to a paid-up license.

Next up is Evernote — With which you can store notes, pictures, brief audio clips, and whatever else happens to be on your mind. This is handy because once you make note of it, you can allow yourself to “forget” it. I use it to store notes about things that I don’t want to remember, like the name of a particular wine that I like and the schedules for the bus lines that run near my house and work. Evernote is equally awesome-tastic because it’s completely cross-platform and web-ified. There are versions for Windows, Mac, iPhone, other mobile devices, and you can also access all of your notes through a web interface. Evernote is free with some restrictions, and $5/mo. or $45/yr. for more storage and file sync features. Again I’m using the free account until I find a compelling reason to upgrade.

Last for now is Backblaze. Essentially this is a backup solution for your computer that works over the internet. If things get sideways on your backed-up computer, you can download the hosed files, have them send you DVDs of your files, or have them send you a hard drive with your data on it. If you’re on a Mac, think TimeMachine writ large. (It’s not exactly feature-for-feature identical to TimeMachine, but it’s good enough for most.) I haven’t had occasion to use it yet, and I also use TimeMachine to a local disk for backup, but I have tested restoring files and it seems to work really well. Backblaze is $5/mo. or $50/yr. per computer. Storage (and therefore backup space) is unlimited. I’m using a $50/yr. account.

Those are the big ones that I use the most often. There are several other applications that I use regularly, but the ones listed here really are what keep me sane and tie my digital world together.

What bit of tech would you be worse off without?

1. Help the wife replace the toilet in our main bathroom.
2. Shop for groceries so I can cook for her while she’s working.
3. Bathe the dog.
4. Rake the yard and bag up the leaves that have been sitting out there for 3 months.

Typical weekend for us, really. We’ve always sort of flouted “traditional” gender roles. To give you an idea — this Christmas I got a new set of knives (Shun Classics), and she got a DeWalt miter saw and stand. She’s much more involved in the repair and refurbishment of the house, and I’m more interested in finding perfect dishes or glassware, and collecting recipes.

We fit, though. All the bases get covered, just not in the way that most people expect. I like that about us.

Today has really been a completely wasted day for me. I’ve gotten almost nothing done, it seems that most of my colleagues are about as productive, and it’s a BEAUTIFUL day outside.

What a crapper. I wish I had a window.

Now you’ve wasted part of your Friday reading this drivel. I’ll bet you wish you hadn’t.

Inspiration Credit: Merlin Mann and his “Most Days” video series.

Jenna and I had a really interesting discussion about blogging and what’s the point of it all, and so on. I wasn’t able to really explain why I do it. Part of the appeal for me is that it is the closest thing to a personal journal that I’ve ever kept, albeit a very public personal journal. There’s also the ego stroking slant: the thought that there are people who visit this site and read what I’m writing definitely makes it worth doing, even if there’s not really any money in it.

I think the main reason, though, is that this site has become kind of my (very public) personal accountability zone. I post my goals and ideas, and then I count on everyone who reads it to hold me to the grand declarations that I make, if not through actual accountability, then at least through the humiliation I feel when I go back through all the goals I’ve set and not accomplished.

Here’s an update on where I am regarding a few of the goals I set for this year.

I haven’t lost any weight that I know of yet. I also haven’t been trying very hard, either. The “trying” piece starts tomorrow. I’m going to go slow and build up to what one might call a “workout.” I think I’ll jog a bit with the dog, then maybe go for a bike ride if the weather isn’t terrible.

I’ve done pretty good about posting more regularly.

The emergency fund is non-existent. I had to buy books for school and haven’t started getting my GI Bill funds yet. That will have to wait until next month.

Credit cards are still there, too. We should be able to pay one of them off by March. I’ll keep you updated.

Life is good so far, so at least I’ve got that one right!

Here’s the house around the corner from my happy place. I know this is totally random, but I’m kinda playing with my new blogging software and want to see what all it can do.

“The Freshmen” by The Verve Pipe from the album Villains (1996, 4:30)

I have this long list of things that I WANT to start doing –

• Exercise
• Cook ALL meals at home
• Spend more time outdoors
• Read more
• Fix things around the house
• Write an article for a magazine
• Write for the blog more consistently

And so on. The list is HUGE (and mostly in my head), but everything on it is something that I’m capable of and generally enjoy. Then why the hell can’t I seem to DO any of them?

Instead of getting up and exercising (which I know makes me feel better and gives me MORE energy), I lie in bed and whine about how cold it is or how tired I am. I use more energy making excuses than I do actually DOING the things on my list.

What is it about me that causes me to be so non-motivated? How do I find my motivation and then act on the things I want to do? Most of the advice I see says I just need to START, but that seems to be the part that I have the most difficulty with. How do YOU get started every day?

It’s here. I’m not sure exactly what I’m supposed to expect when the year ticks over. It’s kind of a feeling like you have on your birthday when you’ve survived another year, but you don’t feel any older.

I’m really looking forward to this year, though.

I had to dig back a long way in the archives of this site to find a post about new years and resolutions. Notice that I didn’t make a resolution, I set goals. I still think that’s the way to go, even though I wouldn’t say that I achieved the goals I outlined in that post, probably because they were too general. (Except that I didn’t do too bad about the sustainable thing. We consolidated down to one vehicle and started using public transit more. I still drive to work too often, but that ends this year.)

Here are my goals for 2009 (in no particular order):

• Lose 40 lbs. That’s 3.3 lbs. a month — a healthy and reasonable amount.
• Post here at least once a week.
• Build up a $3,000 emergency fund.
• Pay off my credit cards. (I have 3 left, about $10,800. This should be achievable with our new plan. I’ll post more about that later.)
• Live the motto “Life is Good.”

Totally achievable. This time I’ll post monthly updates. Hold me to it.