PhoneBoy Says

In response to Ken Camp's "I see you" post. With apologies to They Might Be Giants.

09182006(002).mp4

Several months ago, I had recorded a podcast for a "community tech podcast." They never ended up using the thing. I also feel their production schedule is a little too unreliable and ad-hoc. I had recorded the thing in Garage Band and still had the original project files around. I did a little editing/replacement of the voice and decided, what the hell, I'll upload it here.

This is a brief overview of Garage Band. When I was playing with this, it was like crack. Here I was, someone who knows jack about how to make music, and I'm making music. This is cool stuff, and it comes with every Mac.

Garage Band Demo Podcast

Also posted on phoneboy.com and on YouTube. Just trying to see what will work best for this.

PhoneBoy vlog 20060917

Music seems to have deep, personal meaning to me. I can usually associate a particular memory with a particular song or album that I am listening to. It might be the first time I listened to a song, might be a particular time in my life, or it might be something entirely different.

For example, I am currently listening to The Final Cut by Pink Floyd. I have plenty of memories of listening to this album in the dorms in high school. I also have a scrawling in the yearbook by a girl that quotes lines from the title track. Earlier today, I was listening to Factory Showroom by They Might Be Giants. While this is a newer album (by my standards anyway), I have a memory of me driving to a friends house while listening to this CD. I was coming back from my high school reunion and it was pitch black. Pretty much anything by The Eagles reminds me of my dad because my first singing in public was with my dad singing an Eagles song when I was three. I barely remember it now, though.

I seem to be fairly reluctant to listen to newer music, or at least music from artists that I don't know. Maybe it's because I don't have memories to associate to those songs or artists, making them have far less meaning. It might explain why I like some songs at certain times and not others--depends on what I am trying to remember or forget at the time. Music seems to be that kind of gateway for me.

My wife has somewhat different tastes than I do. She also, as near as I can tell, doesn't listen to all that much music. At least not anymore. Some of my musical tastes aren't child-appropriate. As a result, most of my music listening occurs when nobody is home or in headphones at night. Usually, though, it's not at all.

I recognize the need to bring more music into my life. The question becomes: how do I work it in? Having iTunes at my fingertips seems to help a lot, at least for the past few weeks. I need a strategy for this that is doable.

What do you collect?

Mobile phones. It's an occupational hazard. :) Over the years, the technology and the needs change. The result is I end up getting new phones. Sometimes I'll go several months without getting a new phone, then all of a sudden, I'll get a whole bunch at once. This past year was a goldmine.

I pretty much save all the phones I've ever had and give them to people who need a new phone for one reason or another. Nice to be able to save my friends and family some cash.

What's your motto?

I think two quotes fit the bill:

"Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion." -- Christian Fredrich Hebbel

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw

Because, apparently, my parents didn't like the sound of the name with the long 'e'. I still don't know why they bothered to keep the useless letter, though.sigh

I have fairly narrow interests. I will be the first to admit that. When left to my own devices, I don't tend to do much outside of those very narrow interests. Call it inertia or "internal focus" as I've sometimes referred to it. That works great if you live alone, but not so great when you have a wife and kids.

Before my wife and I got married, or maybe it was early in our marriage, my wife told me there were certain things that she, quite simply, wasn't interested in talking with me about. The minutia of my workday was one of them. Some of my geek projects are another. She doesn't share my passion for technology and I have done my best to respect her wishes and not share. Over time, this has evolved into a more general rule: If what I am doing doesn't directly affect her or the kids, she not only doesn't need to know about it, but doesn't want to know about it.

The problem with this rule is that outside of stuff going on with the kids, schedules, home administrivia, and maybe the occasional program on TV, there isn't much to talk about with my wife. My wife doesn't do much beyond stuff related those tasks, so it's difficult for me to latch onto something to even try to talk to her about. With kids around, it's hard for us to have a conversation even we do have one. We don't have a whole lot of "alone time" as there are just some things that can't be done with the kids awake. It doesn't leave a lot of time for "alone time" and without much to talk about, what "alone time" we have is spent in bed sleeping.

However, I have a different "life" as it were, most of which happens in my office during working and late-night hours. This is stuff, by my rule above, I am unable to share with my wife. Most of it is of little or no interest to her. If she's going to tell me "why the hell are you telling me about this," why bother to tell her? I've just wasted her time and mine. About the only time I'll tell her is if she asks, for example when I show up in bed at 3 or 4am instead of a more normal 1 or 2am. And even then it's one or two sentences at most.

I sometimes wonder if I am making a big deal over nothing. It's not as if our relationship is bad. We can usually have a reasonable conversation, though on sensitive issues, emotions can sometimes get involved on one or both sides. We can usually resolve our differenes and move on, and I assume that happens in any relationship. One thing I can say is that our relationship seems to be missing something.

This is a topic I will have to explore more another time.

My parents are the only Dangling Threads in my life. I have a few others as well. Whether or not I choose to tie up those threads depends on a number of factors.

Around 7 years ago, my (half) sister decided to try and tie up her loose ends with me. We had grown up together on and off (mostly off), and managed to lose track of each other when I was in High School. My dad had long divorced her mom. Sis had her own family to be a part of. Dad didn't do a great job of keeping track of her either. Anyway, she ended up being in Europe around the time I was for work, and so she made arrangements to come up to where I was in London and hung out with me for a weekend.

Right around that same time, my best friend and I drifted apart at a very critical time. I was trying to get him to come to my wedding as my best man. Keep in mind this is a person I'd known since the 6th grade and we had always been close friends. But for whatever reason, he chose to choose that time cut off all contact with me. No explanation, not even a "eff ewe." To this day, I still don't understand it.

Meanwhile, contact with my sister also meant contact with my step-mom, who was fairly close to me when I did live with her. Getting in contact with her was a wonderful thing just because she was--and still is--a wonderful lady. For a while there, she was sending my kids birthday and Christmas gifts. Ironically, it's more than any of my blood relatives do.

Meanwhile, I only occasionally have contact with my sister. I think she shares that Welch trait of being inwardly focused. She seems to have survived her own childhood well-adjusted. Conversations I have with her, when they do happen, are pleasant and natural. Her step-father was, in many ways, like my mother. I experienced some of his venom first-hand. I can only imagine what she experienced having lived with the dude for a decade or more.

One other dangling thread to mention is a close friend I went to college with. I stopped seeing this friend maybe a couple of years ago because it became increasingly difficult to "be around" this particular person because he was so self-absored in his pity about his particular situation--not having a "real" job, living at home with his parents, and having a crappy girlfriend. This was in sharp contrast to me having a stable job and living in my own house with wife and kids. While we never discussed it, we just mutually "let things go." A mutual friend called me recently and I hear he's doing a lot better--has a gig at Cisco and is on the road a lot. Still living at home, if I remember right, but he's supposedly saving his money for a new place.

I guess what it comes down to is that just about every blood relative I have and two of my good friends are dangling threads in my life. I am on good terms with most of my living blood relatives that aren't my children. I do not believe there are any issues there. My parents are a different story, but I don't think there is much I will be able to do there. I have made peace with that. My kids, weil, I've got a lot of time before they leave the nest. For my two friends, I have a connection to one of them thru a mutual friend. I can track him down if I feel the need to. The other--my former best friend--I have no known connection to.

There is a thought here about being inwardly focused and how that relates to how many dangling threads you might have in your life, but I have an inability to express them correctly at the moment. Maybe because it's almost 2am and I should be sleeping.

Here are a few pictures I snapped on my phone during my travels this weekend.