Hey all…
It’s been a busy week so I haven’t had time to post anything. DeAnne and I spent last week in Minneapolis house hunting. We had a successful trip and found a place in Plymouth, MN. It’s a suburb about 15-20 minutes outside of Minneapolis. If you’re curious, I posted some pictures in the new photo gallery section of the web site. Just click the Gallery link in the navigation bar to check them out.
We had a really great time in the city. There are a lot of nice restaurants and we basically ate our way through town. It was a crazy week there because the NCAA regional final was at the Metrodome while the Minnesota High School boys basketball tournament was happening at the Target Center. Both facilities are downtown so there was always something going on nearby.
I head out to Minneapolis this weekend and start working at Target on Monday. I can’t believe it’s already time to get to work. I’m off this week just trying to spend as much time with DeAnne and Jack as possible before I leave. We don’t close on the new house until June 2nd so I’ll be away from the family for a while. With DeAnne due in May, it’s a tough time for all of this to happen but it will all work out in the long run. It’s just going to be a tough couple of months. Luckily, Target has a really nice relocation package so I’ll get to fly home 4 times. I’ll use one trip for when the new baby is born and another for when we move. The other two will be used sometime before then. We’ll see how it all works out!
No new news on selling our house here in Ferndale. We’ve had a couple of showings but no offers yet. Keep your fingers crossed!
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posted 03/28/2006 10:36 PM
Ugh. I’m at a loss for words. Yesterday’s loss to Minnesota in the first round of the Big 10 tournament is the latest debacle in this late season collapse by the Michigan Wolverines. What started out as a promising season, even eight games into the Big 10 season, has become yet another in a string of disappointments.
You can blame injuries for some of this year’s problems, just as you could for last year’s lost season, but I’m not willing to let the team off that easily. Even when this year’s team was at full strength it just didn’t seem like they had it all together. You could also point the finger at the players, but I’m not willing to go that far. After a while, you have to start looking at the coach.
I like Tommy Amaker. I like what he stands for and I like how he represents the university. After the Ed Martin/Brian Ellerbee fiasco, the program was in shambles and Amaker has done an excellent job restoring the team and bringing pride to Crisler. But when I look at the job Thad Matta has done at Ohio State in a shorter amount of time with arguably less talent than Amaker has, you start to wonder how effective Amaker is as a head coach.
This leads me to share a thought I had while driving home listening to yesterday’s game on the radio – is Tommy Amaker the college basketball version of Steve Mariucci? Hear me out on this. When Mariucci was hired, everyone rejoiced in Lions nation. Mariucci was polished, presented a good image and came from a winning program. You could say the exact same things about Amaker. With both coaches there were grumblings in the background that they weren’t as great as they appeared on paper. Terrell Owens complained about Mariucci’s offense in SF while others pointed to Seton Hall’s collapse the last year of Amaker’s tenure there. These complaints were ignored, but at least in regard to Mariucci, they were found to be valid.
There have been rumblings around town that Amaker should be let go if the team does not make the NCAA tournament this year. I’m not quite there yet because even though it’s starting to sound like a broken record, you have to take the injuries into consideration. Having said that, I’m far less certain that Amaker is the right person to lead UM basketball toward future success than I was when he was hired. I hope I’m wrong.
[1] | posted 03/10/2006 03:30 PM
If you’re into music but you’re having a hard time finding something new to listen to, I’ve got the perfect solution: Pandora.
It’s a pretty neat system. You type in an artist or a song that you like, then Pandora goes to work and plays songs that are similar to what you typed in. How do they know what songs to play? Well, Pandora is based on something called the Music Genome Project. From what I understand, this group has spent countless hours breaking down music into very discrete categories. To give you an example, I created a station based on A.C. Newman (the lead singer for the New Pornographers). Pandora started playing music from Yo La Tengo, Sugar, Spitalfield and many others. One artist they played was Buffalo Tom. There is a link you can click that basically explains why they are playing a song. When I click it, it tells me “Based on what you’ve told us so far, we’re playing this track because it features electric rock instrumentation, a subtle use of vocal harmony, major key tonality, heavy electric rhythm guitars and many other similarities identified in the music genome project.” Who knew? I don’t know what half of that means but it does a pretty good job of playing things that I like.
As songs play, you can give them the thumbs up or thumbs down. The system will then modify future songs to be played based on your input. You can create multiple “stations” based on the type of music you want to listen to. Because you create an account (which is free, btw), all of your stations are saved and can be used on any computer.
The really cool thing for me is that you can use Pandora in conjunction with a Squeezebox player. So, I can create a station and access it through my Squeezebox, thus creating my own personal radio station. Pretty neat.
As I said earlier, you can use it for free, but it sounds like advertising is coming soon. Not a big deal, really. You can also subscribe to it for a pretty low price – I think $36/year or something like that. It’s worth checking out.
| posted 03/08/2006 12:49 PM
That’s right! After 15 years (for me) and a lifetime (for DeAnne and Jack) it’s time to pack it up and move on to bigger and better things. DeAnne loosened the moving restrictions this year and agreed that the job market and future here in Detroit just isn’t as promising as we’d like it to be. I’m not an automotive engineer/designer/etc., and after that, there’s not much else to do here.
So where are we headed? Minneapolis, Minnesota. I never imagined we’d end up there, but that’s where we’re going. I just accepted an offer to work for a really big retailer as a business analyst on their .com endeavors. The job and company are fantastic and I can’t wait to get started. 
What I would like to wait on, however, is all of the upcoming activity preceding the move. In a short amount of time I need to sell our current house, find a new house in Minnesota, move, and figure out where our new child will be born. (Should DeAnne stay in Detroit and have the baby or will things work out so that we’ll all be in Minnesota when the big day arrives?) Who knows? It’s going to be a stressful couple of months but we’re really excited about it.
[5] | posted 03/01/2006 12:57 PM
OK. I know this is slightly disgusting but I need a sanity check here. Is it now ok to clip your nails at work? In your cube?? Did I miss the memo on this? At my current assignment, I sit right next to three different people that clip their nails in their cubes. Not in the bathroom or outside, but right in their cubes. When did this become acceptable? Or am I going overboard here?
Clip…clip….clip…..clip. Ugh!
[5] | posted 02/21/2006 02:16 PM
The Winter Olympics are going on right now. I couldn’t care less, but my wife is a total junkie. Since NBC is showing it in HDTV glory, I’ve been sucked into watching a few things – primarily events that judges can’t screw up.
I’m not sure when I turned on the Olympics…I used to enjoy them but lately I almost dread them. Why? I’m not sure, but I think it’s the endlessly hyped up controversy, scandals and whining that have turned me off. I think the best examples of what I’m talking about are the pairs figure skating debacle and the Ohno speed skating thing-a-ma-bob where all of South Korea went into an uproar. Whatever.
If a judge isn’t involved then I might watch the event – luge is neat, so is the downhill, bobsled and hockey. The one where they ski and shoot stuff. That’s neat, too. Watching cross-country skiers just makes me tired. Ski jump is fun to watch, but judging is involved so I stay away. Skating pixies that cry after each round? Not for me.
Anyway, the whole point of this rambling post is to determine where these events are being held. You see, I’m confused here. I thought they were in Torino. That’s what this official looking site tells me. But when I scroll down the page, the same site that welcomes me to Torino gives me a historical recap by telling me about how the games were awarded to Turin in 1999:
Even better, this paragraph can’t decide what to call the location:
I hopped on Google to try and solve this dilemma, but initially I didn’t have much luck. Dream of Italy tells me that “Torino” is Italian and “Turin” is…something else. They also tell me, by the way, that Turin (or Torino) “is hardly the Detroit of Italy.” Slammed from thousands of miles away! Damn!
Leave it to the good folks at National Geographic to put this issue to rest. It turins turns out that “Turin” is what the English speaking world has called “Torino” for years. The IOC normally uses the English version of the city name, but this time they relented to Italian pressure and switched it to Torino. I think Torino sounds better. I also think Detroit should have promoted the actual Michigan pronunciation of the city during the Super Bowl and used “San Diego”. Sounds more exotic, no?
[2] | posted 02/14/2006 12:26 PM
It only took a year but I finally got around to adding a contact page to this site. Jakob Nielsen would be so proud.
So now you have no excuse for not writing.
Other items coming soon:
- A photo gallery
- A store
- ??? Any other suggestions? Other than interesting content? ;-)
[3] | posted 02/11/2006 11:52 PM
37signals opened up Campfire this evening for some pre-release testing. If you don’t know what it is, Campfire is 37signals’ response to IM. It sounds like they plan on releasing it some time next week.
It was interesting, but nothing I’m dying to use at the moment -probably because I don’t have a need, but that could change. In typical 37signals fashion, the interface was nice and clean. There aren’t a lot of bells and whistles to it. People that you have invited to a conference all have a name and are displayed in a box in the upper right hand corner. The majority of the page contains the current conversation. Your name is highlighted in yellow, while others are in gray. You can upload files that can then be viewed by the conference members. As an example, I uploaded a text file. The section of the window containing the conversation displayed my files as an icon with a link. Clicking on the file icon (or the filename) launches it in another window (this depends on how you configured your browser, I’m assuming.) Someone uploaded an image and it displayed in the conversation. Clicking it displayed a full-size version in a new window. Others uploaded pdf files.
You can’t format your text as you type. I tried to use html and textile to format things and it didn’t work. No emoticons, either. If you enter a hyperlink, this is correctly displayed in the conversation and people can click on it. That’s about it. As I understand it, there is a feature to save the conversation so that you can all review it later, but it was unavailable during testing.
I had a conversation with another tester about how this could be useful. The best reason we could come up with is that you don’t have the distractions with Campfire that you get with other IM clients like MSN Messenger and the rest. You don’t have buddies constantly popping up and sending you things. It’s just the people you invited to the conference at that time. But, as others mentioned, you can get similar conference type features in other IM clients. We’ll see. The folks at 37signals are master marketers (at least Jason Fried appears to be…) so they’ll sell me on it shortly.
As I said, it was neat, but I don’t have a reason to use it yet. I’m sure when the need arises, I’ll have an “a-ha!” moment and it will all click. I’m not there yet. I will say that this doesn’t come close to their Basecamp project-management product. That thing rocks. Backpack is cool but I’ve got a wiki on my site that has similar functionality. Writeboard is similar to Campfire in that I haven’t had a reason to use it yet but it could be cool. Finally, as I wrap up plugging all of their products, Ta-da List is super-fun (and free!).
[1] | posted 02/09/2006 11:09 PM
Congrats to my sister, Julie and her husband John on the birth of their second child today. It’s a boy, but there’s no name yet. I don’t know what’s up with that…9+ months seems like plenty of time to pick a name, but to each their own! ;-)
Baby Rootes was born at 7:30am PDT, weighed in at 7lb 13oz (the same as I weighed, evidently), and tops out at 21 inches. From what I hear, everyone is doing just fine.
As I learn more details and receive some pictures, I’ll post them here…
Update
After a few days of what must have been intense negotiations, Julie and John have named their son Jules Minor. I know Minor (if I’ve spelled it correctly) is a Rootes family name. Jules is a new one to me!
Famous Jules:
[3] | posted 02/07/2006 04:53 PM
Last night wrapped up a pretty exciting week of action here in Detroit as the Steelers obtained the “one for the thumb” by beating the Seattle Seahawks 21-10. From what I’ve read on various web sites and newspapers, Detroit did a great job as host. This pat on the back from the media will finally allow the area’s residents to relax and quit worrying about what could go wrong. Few will admit it now, but most of the people I know here were just waiting for the whole thing to fall apart. It didn’t happen and that’s good news.
We didn’t get to participate much in the festivities, although we did attend the Motown Winter Blast downtown in Campus Martius. We [my wife, son and I] had a great time despite the constant drizzle. Jack went down the ice slide, which impressed DeAnne and me because it looked rather intimidating from the side lines. Jack has little fear when it comes to these types of things and he had a big smile on his face when his ride came to an end.
I did not receive my expected invitations to the SI/Maxim/Playboy/Penthouse/Jenna Jameson parties so I don’t have any great stories for you. The invitations must have been lost in the mail. I can only assume that’s what happened. My big chance to hit the bars in Royal Oak fell through when my friend Alex called and said he was too tired to party any more. Lame. Since DeAnne is pregnant and Jack is 18 years away from legal drinking in public establishments, I had no readily available drinking buddies and was therefore forced to watch the end of a Tivo-d One Tree Hill episode. DeAnne had the remote.
[1] | posted 02/06/2006 05:47 PM
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