life

Thought I would take a time to update everyone on what is up with me.

- If you know me, you know I’m dreadfully terrified of having to end up in some corporate desk job punching numbers for the man. I am so terrified of it in fact that I have moved back in with my parents for a few months, to save up some money and continue work on a few of my startup projects. It really hasn’t been that bad, and in all honestly I’m happier here then some of my past living arrangements. My brother is still at home so we have been able to hang out more, and time with the folks has been nice. The saving has been great in allowing me to pay some stuff off, and hopefully make some fun trips this summer before getting a new apartment before the fall.

- We got a new dog! He’s an Alaskan Husky named Trecker. He actually showed up out where my parents are building their new house. We were sure he was a neighbor’s dog, being that he is fully trained. Yet, after putting up signs and asking neighbors all over the area, no one claimed him. He has since become a big part of the family!

- Speaking of that new house, work still continues. I hope and pray that the folks are in there by the end of the summer at the latest.

- Those startup projects are coming to a critical point, I’ll soon be able to blog in greater detail about them.

- My Good friend Noah has had a lot of success with his TwitPic project.

All in all, I am quite happy, things have been very good in the last month and I feel like I have put myself in a much better situation to chase my dreams and work in the areas that I will excel at.

In case you missed my last post on Randy Pausch’s last lecture, or didn’t have time to watch the whole thing, here is a 10 minute condensed version of the lecture.

Randy highlights some of the things that I find so important in life, in particular putting people over things. Listen for the line about pouring a coke in the back seat oh his new car, and how his parents let him paint his room.

If you have not taken the time to watch this… you need to.

Dr. Randy Pausch, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, is not your everyday academic. He’s one of the good ones out there. He was diagnosed with metastatic pancreatic cancer in September 2006. After aggressive treatment he was told in August of 2007 that he had 3 to 6 months to live. In September of that year he gave his last public lecture at CMU, which has been widely viewed on the Internet, below is that lecture.

My favorite quote from the whole thing is “You have to choose if you’re a Tigger or Eyeore”

From Wikipedia
Pausch delivered his “Last Public Lecture,” titled “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” at CMU on September 18, 2007.[5] This talk was modeled after an ongoing series of lectures where top academics are asked to think deeply about what matters to them, and then give a hypothetical “final talk,” i.e., “what wisdom would you try to impart to the world if you knew it was your last chance?”

Before speaking, Pausch received a long standing ovation from a large crowd of over 400 colleagues and students. When he motioned them to sit down, saying, “Make me earn it,” some in the audience shouted back, “You did!”

It’s been one of those days, well I guess one of those weeks. I’ve been procrastinating. Between moving, the part-time job, freelance work, career searching, etc… I’ve inadvertently put a few projects on the back burner.

Here are some interesting sites with a little advice…

Get More Done
Web MD

Staying in touch is hard enough these days… I can barely keep up with all my emails and text messages, I’ve all but given up on replying to personal messages, even from friends, on MySpace or Facebook. It’s non stop. I added a new weapon to my arsenal of constant contact this past week. A new AT&T Mobile broadband card. It’s first real test was on a quick weekend trip to Houston. Surely enough it came in quite handy and paid for itself by not having to throw down extra cash for wifi connections at TUL & HOU. The speeds even worked good enough to have a few iChat video conversations while on the road!

Oh and be sure to check out this great shot of a Windows crash on one of TUL’s flight info screens!

So I guess I’m growing up. Here’s some reasons why….
- NPR is the most listened to station in the car.
- I can’t go out the night before I have to work anymore.
- Little kids coming into the Apple Store drive me CRAZY.
- I worry more about paying for health insurance then buying a CD, or something else fun.
- I worry about interest rates.
- I spend more time looking at stock prices then sports scores.
- It’s a goal to get up early and go to the gym.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I hope everyone has had a wonderful day! Heres a picture that my Mom took with her new Razr 2 at Thanksgiving dinner at the Eber house. Yeah, thats Dad and I playing on our MacBooks at the dinner table.

I’m a little annoyed today. I’m getting a cold, my parents are pissed at me that I’m not out slaving away at the castle in the hills. The house smells like a clorox factory because roommate is cleaning, and won’t open the door cause of bugs, which is bad. Yet none the less I saw this video and it cheered me up.

Now I’m sitting on my porch smelling the fresh air and being positive, though I still have a box of clean-ex next to me for that pesky cold.

So far this week I have been in front of the computer for a good 40+ hours, and its just Wednesday. Recovering from my stolen laptop has added a ton of work flow since I lost a lot of projects that I was working on. (I can’t tell you hope important it is to back up everyday) Right now I’ve got 4 + web development projects working, plus changing servers, and rebuilding some of my work flow. So things are hectic.

Here’s a few things I’ve stumbled upon this week from around the web.
- Your boss is on facebook, don’t lie (Valleywag)
- Facebook Workers are also stalking you! (Valleywag)
- More dry runs on airlines (The Aviation Nation)
- Some truths about bottled water (TreeHugger)
- Maybe when all these crazy projects of mine are done, I can relax in one of these awesome infinity pools. (Hotel Chatter)

Over the weekend I was in Denver for the World Series. The car I traveled to CO in was robbed, my laptop along with a number of other valuables was stolen. I’ll spare you most of the story, but take my advice, BACK UP regularly and in particular before taking any trip… I can’t even begin to add up the hundreds of hours of work that I have lost from the last time I backed up. Enough for now, I can’t take to much time up on my friends laptop… BACKUP!!!!

Fortunately Oklahoma’s new monsoon season freed up some time by not working on the house this week, because it’s been a busy one already. Between hitting up the Jewel opening party tonight, moving to a new house, taking my last final ever, and volunteering at a youth camp I found some time for a quick blog post.

The job search continues, and I’m really crossing my fingers about a few positions here in Tulsa. As hard as it is for some of my friends who live on the coasts to believe, I really like it hear and I want to stay. Before you get to things like the low cost of living and second best housing market in the country, its a great place. A somewhat liberal city in mid-America is hard to find (outside of Austin). There is a ton of growth, a fun urban arts scene is developing, and the city has an all around good future.

Yet, the job market still pretty much blows, especially if you want to do anything outside of being an accountant or MIS person, so it looks as if I’m going to have to start looking elsewhere for employment. Topping the list, Washington DC, Denver and New York. All great places. Denver is awesome, its been a home away from home for a large part of my life, NYC is just amazing, and DC has a lot of opportunities/leads. So, we’ll see how that progresses over the next few months.

Moving flat out stinks, I’m getting rid of a LOT of stuff, especially since there is a chance of moving again in the near future. I’ll throw some shots of the new place up here in a few days.

At least this past weekend was a blast! Here’s a picture out with some friends…

Over the weekend Dad, Brother and I spent some time getting the room about the garage on the house all framed up. Thought I would throw up a few pictures real quick.

Also spent the end of last week working to get the 2007 TU Uncorked Wine Festival all set up, so I thought I would share a quick picture of that…

My free time has increasingly become more sparse over the past month. As such, the several articles/blog posts I’ve been working on over the past few weeks are not yet done. So be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed to know when they get posted.

Many of my close friends know that I am quite the news junkie. Hours of my day usually involve keeping up with the dozens of blogs I follow while the voices of CNN or CNBC anchors project in the background. Most of my childhood fantasies were filled with visions of reporting the stories of people from around the world. While many children laid in bed listening to the stories of sports legends or science fiction wonders, I would listen to my mother read the autobiography of Walter Cronkite, or Dan Rather. They were the great ones in my mind.

This upbringing instilled in me the belief that it is my duty as an individual to be aware of the things happening in the world. The stories of others, be it the tragedies or accomplishments, I felt I needed to know. Yet, most importantly I wanted to share these stories. I wanted to take something from them and make a difference.

That desire perpetuated in a short stint as a Journalism Major at OSU. In reality, I don’t think I ever even took an actual Journalism class. Several years later I ventured into politics thinking I could have a major impact, before quickly becoming disenfranchised with the red tape and political stagemenship of it all.

During the holiday weekend I made a point to spend several hours watching the media coverage on stories of our soldiers. Especially poignant, was CBS War Corespondent Kimberly Dozier’s interview with Larry King. (I have yet to watch the CBS Flash Point Special) Her point of view, being a nearly killed war corespondent, gave an unique and more civilian perspective on the injuries our soldiers and their families are dealing with.

Tom Foreman’s Reporting,Ambush at the River of Secrets, on CNN’s AC360 also told a powerful story of a group of young men who lost their lives during an ambush in Iraq. Foreman’s reporting took the time to focus on the aftermath of the soldiers deaths back at home.

Scott Pelley’s report, Fathers, Sons And Brothers: The Call on Sunday’s CBS 60 Minutes reporting struck me most strongly. Pelley’s report followed the story of a battalion of Iowa National Guardsmen and their families over two years.

As we start a new week, the war continues, and regardless of opinions on the war one must continue to be aware of the trials facing our soldiers, their families and friends.

I have a follow up to this post that I will be posting tomorrow….

You may have seen the movie “Life as a House.” If you haven’t, I wholeheartedly recommend it. The story is more-or-less that of a son and father, neither of whom are close to or even capable of having a strong healthy relationship. As the movie progresses the father takes his troubled son to help him build a new house on the beach. From there, well… you’re just going to have to order it on Netflix.

Nearly three years ago my father embarked on a mission to build a new house. Now this was no trip over to Simmions homes to build some McMansion in the crappy Tulsa suburbs. This has been a full fledged effort to build a house with very little help from anyone more then a few friends and family.

Tomorrow morning, three whole years from the conception of this project, we will be marking a tremendous step as a huge crane will lift the roof trusses in place over the second story.

Throughout this whole project I have spent time helping my Dad, either with my brother, a few random workers he has hired, or just the two of us. I have always been blessed to have such a great father and to have such an open and close relationship with him, but working together on something as unique and powerful in ones life as a house has been a truly rewarding adventure.

I’ll have some pictures of the house and the progress posted tomorrow.

Less then two weeks ago I finally graduated from college, a little later then some, but still not to late. My friends and family were amazing, hosting a quite enjoyable cocktail hour and dinner for me, I was truly blessed.

Though after my long college journey I am still clueless on what I want to do next. I have applied for several good jobs and am optimistic about my chances with them, yet still I am not entirely sure what tomorrow will bring.

Hence, the waiting game… More later…

Earlier this morning our office building had a major power outage. “Some guy” ran “some tool” into a circuit breaker and “everything went down.” Whatever happened we were powerless for around an hour. Everything switched over to backup generators, but those only powered our servers and not our workstations. So here we are completely disconnected form the world for a few hours in the middle of the business day.

Within minutes, all of our staff was briskly punching away on blackberries and making cell phone calls to insure key clients that we are all OK.

It got me to thinking about how connected we all are, especially in my industry. We hear that all the time, this being the “information age,” but if you really think about it, it’s pretty amazing.

For Example, I have now reached the point where I have about 4 land line phone numbers between work and home, an ungodly about of email addresses (20+), Blackberry, and it’s gotten to the point where facebook/myspace is another essential tool in keeping in touch. (I found myself using facebook several times last week to make sure I have clients names right) I have even made the decision to get a second cell phone to try and keep somewhat of a wall between work and my personal life.

Good or bad, who knows… but, I can’t imagine living without it.