PhoneBoy Says

A couple weeks ago, I did the unthinkable: I mostly stopped drinking coffee. Even decaf. It was a combination of lack of availability of decent coffee and the fact I was just not feeling good. Of course, I think part of that was I was actually going through caffeine withdrawals as I was used to a couple of cups of high-octane Starbucks drip coffee per-day. Going cold turkey, which I did before when I was following the dietary advice of Dr. Atkins, is an option, but I actually enjoy it. With heavy cream. In the morning.

After my system got over not drinking coffee, I began to wonder if coffee actually does anything at all. I mean, plenty of people (including my wife) get by without drinking it at all.

Turns out, there are mixed results. Certainly if you are a caffeine addict, you need a certain amount in order to normalize. As my wife reminds me, that's a sure sign you're an addict (in the physiological sense anyway).

To make matters worse, there's no good yardstick for determining how much caffeine you are ingesting daily.A cup of Starbucks coffee can vary substantially from day to day, same store and same blend.

I guess the best thing to do is drink it at home where I can brew it myself and thus have some control over the brewing conditions, which can lead to this variance. I tend to like my coffee weaker than most people brew theirs, which probably helps moderate the caffeine content as well.

Maybe I should stick to tea at Starbucks, which still has caffeine, but apparently a heck of a lot less of it than their brewed coffees do.

No, I'm not voting for him, but rather this guy.

via Osfoora

Made With Love

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Recycling Propaganda for Youngsters

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Can't wait to try it!

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Before my father passed away, I went to visit him and saw the state of his relatively small house. There was stuff everywhere, stuff I had no idea why he was keeping or what (if anything) he was planning to do with it. It made me realize just how deep the packrat genes run in my family. And that's just my dad's side. It's just as bad on my mom's side.

I'm determined not to be like that. Even though I fully expect my kids will wonder what crack I was smoking when they go through my accumulated possessions after I pass away, hopefully there will be less possessions to go through.

And thus, why I think I am on a drive to simplify. Not just my possessions, but what things I do and how. I want less obstacles between me and what I want to do. I don't want to have to continually troubleshoot everything. I want everything to just work and stay out of my way.

It's one of the reasons I've decided to move my personal blog(s) over to Posterous--it's got a drop dead simple interface that mostly gets out of your way. It does lots of cool things without you having to think about it. It even imported my older "personal" blogs without a lot of effort.

I'm also looking a lot at what I am doing and the value it brings me. Twitter and Facebook are services that bring me value without huge amounts of effort. I also have work-related reasons for using these services. Blogging is a huge effort that had stopped paying off as much, so I cut way back.

Evaluating what I am doing is a bit more difficult. There are a number of concerns I must balance, and the calculus is not easy.

While I was driving around today, I heard a couple of very loud BOOMs. Turns out President Obama was in Seattle pimping for Senator Patty Murray and a seaplane breached the restricted airspace around the area. A couple of F-15s scrambled to the area, causing a sonic boom that was heard all over the Puget Sound. People were talking about it in Gig Harbor, that's for sure, though at that point, nobody really knew. Twitter eventually got the story out.

Meanwhile, some enterprising fellow already created t-shirts celebrating the sonic booms.

One of the things I did recently was go through my dad's old camcorder videos and digitize them. Fortunately, he had a camcorder with a Firefire port, and I had a Mac, so getting the videos off was pretty easy, albeit time consuming.

Given that I barely communicated with my dad during the past couple of decades (and won't ever, now that he's no longer alive), the videos were interesting to watch, if only to catch a glimpse to see what he thought was valuable enough to capture and save.

What struck a cord in me was that most of the videos involved nature on some level, whether it was the birdbath he made out of an old satellite dish (the birds never came at least in the video he took) to the sheer natural beauty that accompanied his drives to visit customers all around Northern California. And yes, there's even videos of his animals, too.

I took a few screen grabs of some of the videos he took and posted them below:

While I'm thankful I don't have to drive all over creation every day to make a living, I'm pretty certain that if I had to, I would enjoy it more if I saw what my dad saw when he did it.

Top to bottom:

1. The base station for a Skype phone (the Skype Dual Phone)

2. Linksys Cable Modem (CM100)

3. Check Point VPN-1 EDGE W

4. Safe@Office 500W with ADSL

5. Linksys WRT54GS

Yes, I actually do use all this stuff in my network.

I haven't been blogging much lately. Also, it seems like every time I go onto any one of my blogs (and I have several), I have maintenance to do. Upgrades. Plugins. What have you.

Quite honestly, it's more overhead than I want right now. Even though I prefer to "own" my content on a server that I pay to use, it's just not something I want to mess with.

So here I am "starting over" on Posterous for, um, well I lost count how many times I've done the personal blog. But I'm doing it here. The fact I can get everything in from my old Vox blog is a huge plus. The fact that posting is dirt simple is also a plus.

Theoretically, Posterous is not a roach motel, so I should be able to get my content out at some point if I so choose. At least "there's an API for that." We'll see. The content distribution options are also a plus.

Eventually, I will redirect phoneboy.info here. I'm also going to move the Gig Harbor Tweetup site over to Posterous as well. I'll probably leave my main blog over on Wordpress for right now until I figure out something I like better.

Of course, the next step: coming up with something I actually want to write about.