News That Doesn’t Matter

One thing that is tough in these, the ‘information age’, days, is filtering out the cruft from the fluff from the actually valuable information. News that makes America or Australia or China or citizens think or react due to its true value. However, news like George W. Bush’s approval rating based on a poll of a small ‘cross-section’ of America is about as useful as a steel toilette seat in an igloo. George is working, vacationing and presidenting through his second and last term. The American people have an opinion about how he’s doing that list of things. So what? Its his second term. If 98% of America didn’t approve of what he was doing, but he was not breaking the law then when his presidency is over – move onto another candidate that we can all love to hate. Saturday Night Live is not going to be changing their mix of jokes any time soon from 60% sexual humor, 35% political humor and 98% stereotypical humor. That means that unless the guy who comes into office next is either
1) Jesus and doesn’t do anything wrong
2) Sleeping with Tina Fey (head writer for Saturday Night Live)
3) Sleeping with Lorn Michaels
4) Actually Dead
They’re going to keep mocking the president. The people will continue to not have a super-duper approval rating for various reasons like not having a chicken in every pot, naving/not having pot in every household, or PETA still in existence. The president’s current approval rating is about as useful for the average news watcher, reader or listener as the Pony Express for Al Gore, who clearly invented the internets for faster communication.

Email

Jessica was instructing Abby to pick up her toys. Abby had dumped out many of the toy bins in her toy shelf.

Abby’s delay tactic was classic, “Mom, why don’t you go check your email?”

It was hard not to laugh out loud at that!

Bye-bye, Helmut and Heidi

We have some friends from church who are moving to California (which is far too strange an idea to me, but maybe I grew up there for part of my life and found the political culture strange). We’ll miss them and hope that they come back often to visit. They’re from Germany and so Helmut, whose name you have probably not seen in the context of a surname, is full of fun trans-culture stories and Heidi makes the tastiest foods. Fortunately we get to spend eternity with them so we won’t be away from them forever 🙂

License to Boost

Yesterday as we were pulling out of the garage to head to the doctor’s office Abby exclaimed, “There’s my booster seat!”

I keenly replied, “Drive carefully, booster seat.” We all chuckled and then went on about our way. About 8 minutes later as we were on an overpass heading towards Highway 225 Abby said, “Hey, my booster seat can’t drive, daddy.”

Classic.

Randy the Recanter

Some time ago I wrote about working from home and one of my reasons for getting things done was ‘fear.’ I’d like to withdraw that publicly as a reason that anyone should do anything. Fear is a bad motivator in most situations (I’m not going to generalize and say ‘all’ because I’m sure we could put our collective minds together and say that, “fear is a good motivator if…”). In fact working from anywhere should be inspired by integrity instead of fear.

If you get things done with integrity then the only fear you have to have is that you won’t get paid or that you won’t get credit for something. However, you don’t have to fear failure because integrity often includes things that preclude failure [again, that’s a generalization and we can come up with exceptions]. Doing things the right way because its the right way will often lead to better quality work because your work ethic is motivated correctly. Motivation, drive or whatever you want to call it: integrity is the way to go. Lets pass on the fear motivator for working. Don’t fear unemployment, don’t fear ‘not enough money,’ don’t fear failure. God may very well be closing one chapter in your life to open another chapter; further, this life is not the end, death is seperation from this body.

Why Fear when you can have integrity?

Six Dollar Jar Opener

Other than sounding like a mediocre rock band that is actually how much I paid for a jar opener tonight. Three boys from the local elementary school came around because their school was in need of a ‘fun raiser.’ “We really need a fund raiser,” on boy said to me. His two friends quickly said, “Yeah.” I had heard them outside our house arguing over who was going to talk so I was pleased to see that the neighbor at the corner’s son had won. He was wearing what appeared to be swimming goggles on his head (not covering his eyes, but up on his hair) but I could be wrong, they could have been super hero goggles… but I can’t prove either. They wanted me to purchase anything or everything in their catalog. Aside from the usual wrapping paper, crumby candy or large quantities of popcorn… pardon me, there’s another knock at the door.

OK, so another neighbor kid was just at the door selling the same stuff from the same catalog. He said something like, “Will you buy something for me?” To which I replied, “No, I’ve already bought something.” I had to resist all of the genes that my mother passed onto me to not correct his grammar. That may have not been a grammatically incorrect statement, he may have actually wanted me to buy him something. I hope he didn’t/doesn’t but I don’t know, its a bit tough with youth these days.

As I was saying they had lots of nice things in the catalog including kitchen items like double wire wisks, the jar opener and an egg cutter. The last thing I need is an egg cutter. The wrapper paper is over priced and the candy is probably the same candy we sold as kids… and that’s just wrong 🙂

I just hope that the jars open more betterer with our fancy new opener.

Review: Switchfoot – Nothing is Sound

If you love rock and roll music, and don’t mind Christian undertones (this is not your overtly Christian album, in case saying Jesus 5 or more times is a criteria for your album purchasing rules) then this album is definitely a contender. I secretly bought the album about a week ago on iTunes, and then got it as a present in the CD form yesterday. I’ve listened to it about 8 times now and can confidently say that this is still Switchfoot, and that they’ve grown some musically. One thing that strikes me about this album is that each new album that Jon Foreman (frontman and one of the guitar players) writes has more emotional passion in it. I can’t think of another lyricist that has grabbed me from album one and held me close to his emotions like Jon. There is great guitar work here but you can tell that the band has been touring hard and learned about playing emotionally edgy, passionate rock and roll.

The song “Stars” is surely one of the songs that will get stuck in your heads, but I like every song on the disc with the exception of the last ‘bonus’ track (this is the Target special edition CD) “Good Night Punk.” Good Night Punk is definitely a demo song and it doesn’t fit the album’s style at all. Happy is a Yuppie word is where the album’s title comes from, its a powerful song about where your priorities and values come from. If you’re looking for happiness in stuff, cultural exceptance or any other place besides God, then you’re looking in the wrong place. “Politicians” is about… politicians and how we may have patriotic notions for our nation but that doesn’t mean that we blindly follow our political leaders or that by not supporting some of them we are not being anti-patriotic. Some politicains are scummy 🙂 All the songs are at least ‘good’ but the ones I pointed out should get (or not get) attention because they’re strong and will most likely get radio airplay.

The CD has Digital Right Management (DRM) software built into it so that on Windows you have to do a dance to get the songs into MP3 format, but on the Mac (yeah Apple!) you just insert the disc and tell it to rip the MP3s. Ironically the bass player and background vocalist, Tim Foreman (brother of Jon), posted on the Sony forums how to get around the DRM stuff on Windows 🙂 This disc is worth owning if you are wondering if DRM should be an issue.

I am not comfortable ranking this album among the other Switchfoot albums yet because frankly, they grow on me as I discover little nuances, harmonies and variation in instrumentation in their albums. Jon is creatively genious and every time I see Switchfoot (3 times so far) I’m impressed by their performance – I’m glad they came around for fifths 🙂

Also, the DRM has been handled by Sony. You’ll need to go to Sony’s site and request a replacement.

Welcome to the Tree, John

My brother-in-law John – who used to let me sit in his room and we’d play games, watch Nowhere Man, and various other manly things like fart, have push-up contests, and eat ice cream – just got a Mac. A 12″ Powerbook with Superdrive. Welcome to the Apple Tree – sure there are some low hanging fruits here, and sometimes people get a little distracted by the OS… but its OK, because we’re all, unitedly, thinking different 😉 Enjoy the ride.

JVC – Model GZ-MG30

They’re Here! JVC – Model GZ-MG30 are camcorders that start, and remain digital. They’re hard drive based video recorders and they are going to be ubiquitous in the next 10 years or my name’s not mud Randy Peterman. I have spent hours of computer time recording video onto computers and the editing afterword is time intensive as well. These sort of devices will remove one of those steps and allow for much greater efficiency.