Family Life

Avid readers may have noticed that I don't often write much about my family. I think that's because this blog predates them and the focus of the blog has mostly been my exploits and achievements. Blogging about being a husband and dad has never seemed to fit into the theme of the blog. Part of why I still maintain this dumb blog is because I do want to document periods of my life for future reference.

This fall my second child was born. It's been an adjustment for us, but not nearly as big as the adjustment of having the first child. The one thing that has really struck me is how much additional energy it takes to care for an infant and toddler.

Up until child #2 one parent was always free to do something, but with two young children it gets tricky. After watching both of them by myself for an evening, I was completely wiped out. Then waking up a few times in the middle of the night, and working all day, it's left me with very little time and energy to do much else. Despite the exhaustion there are always plenty of joys of parenthood, but there are times that I would seriously contemplate being able to hit the fast forward button on a few months. It always seems like things will be getting easier when the kids hit the next stage, but the truth is that while the nature of the challenges change, kids always take a lot of work.

I can see why it seems like all the parents I know are stopping at two kids. I seriously wonder how these large families that were so common a few generations ago did it. I imagine it got easier once the oldest were able to help with the little ones, but I couldn't imagine having 5 kids under the age of 10. 

For us I think these two are proving pretty manageable, but it is certainly leaving me with less time and energy for personal pursuits such as blogging.

The Pizza Post

I really like pizza. I figure I've eaten an entire football field worth of pizza in my life. That's a lot of pizza.

When I'm at home I eat pizza, when I travel I like to eat pizza. A couple weeks ago I was up in Seattle and drove an hour out of my way just for a slice from one of my all-time favorite pizza joints.

It's so hard to rank the best pizzas I've ever had. There have been so many, and like many things... context  matters. A $1 slice of backroom pizza is objectively not good pizza. But at 2 A.M. after stumbling out of The Brown Jug it seems like the tastiest pizza in the world. A slice of Giordano's deep dish after a long day walking around Chicago is hard to beat. Even eating a cold slice over the sink on the way out the door to work has it's time & place (specifically in the morning & over the sink).

I can objectively recall the worst pizza I've ever had. It was a ham pizza from a place called Habib's in Florianopolis, Brazil. The crust was floury cardboard, the sauce was the sauce from a can of spaghetti-o's, the ham was gross, and the cheese was a melted Munster-like cheese and Philadelphia cream cheese. It was atrocious. It was so bad, that I mentioned it in my post about going to Brazil. I was able to find a picture of it on their website.

I know this looks bad, but the actual pizza was much, much worse.

So instead of trying to figure out the best pizza I've had, I present the top 5 pizza places by amount I've consumed over the past 30 years.

1 - Cottage Inn Pizza - Ann Arbor, MI

When I was in school there was a Cottage Inn Pizza two blocks away. They had a $5.99 large carry-out special that would be $6.35 after taxes. I probably ordered 200 large pepperoni pizzas from Cottage Inn over the course of three years. Factor in the CIAYCELBs (Cottage-Inn-All-You-Can-Eat-Lunch-Buffet) that we would routinely frequent, and I've eaten a significant amount of Cottage Inn Pizza.

2 - Woodstock's Pizza - San Diego, CA

When we decided to buy a house in San Diego my now-wife got really excited that there was a Woodstock's Pizza nearby. I was unfamiliar with the pizza chain that exists in several university towns in California. My wife grew up eating at the one near UC Davis, and now we routinely frequent the one nearby our house that serves SDSU. Woodstock's makes a great pizza, but it's their specialty pies that really put them over the top. The only downside is that it's a bit pricy, but it's well worth it for the best pizza within city limits.

3 - Central Market Pizza - Poulsbo, WA

Central Market is a grocery store that I used to live by. They have a take-out pizza operation. Their pizza is the best pizza on this list. I long for Central Market Pizza. Their crust is downright perfect. If you're ever in Poulsbo, make a stop at central market for a slice of the Central Market Swiss and the Buffalo Chicken.

Zola is seen here enjoying a CIAYCELB with me in June 2013

4 - Costco Pizza - Nationwide

Not the best pizza, but everywhere I've been we've had Costco Pizza. There was a Costco a few miles from my high school and we used to go there often as seniors when we had open lunch. It's hard to beat the blend of quality, quantity and value from Costco Pizza. Even now, I'll sometimes head to the Costco down the street from my office to grab a slice for lunch.

5 - Hungry Howie's - Detroit Metro Area

My mom liked Hungry Howie's because they would do flavored crusts. This would actually get us as kids to eat our crusts and they were decent, albeit slightly greasy pizzas. I have fond memories of those yellow boxes of hot above-average pizza.

Honorable Mentions:

Little Caesars (The Hot & Ready was a game changer in my development as a man)

Pizza Hut (Haven't been to one in years but in my younger days I could take down their lunch buffet with ease)

Totino's Pepperoni Pizza (not a pizza place, but I've housed plenty in high school & college)

If you have a pizza place you think I should try then mail me one of their pizzas and I will eat it.

The Dvorak Post

I've been using the Dvorak keyboard layout since 2006 and to be honest I'm surprised I've never blogged about it except in passing. For many years I was a fervent pro-Dvorakian, although in recent times I've tempered my outward passion for more efficient keyboard layouts.

I first heard of the Dvorak layout the summer after my Freshman year of college. I was living in Ann Arbor and spring term classes had just wrapped up so I had plenty of free time to learn a new keyboard layout. I don't recall how I first heard about it, but when I realized the benefits of the Dvorak layout, and realized that I was probably going to use a keyboard the rest of my life I knew I had to learn it. 

The QWERTY layout is the standard keyboard layout for nearly all modern devices, and one that I spent many hours practicing on in my youth with the help of Mavis Beacon. It was patented in 1878 for use on the typewriter. One of the issues with early typewriters was that if you typed too fast the keys would jam. So the QWERTY layout was developed to minimize jams by limiting the speed at which one could type. I mean, just look at your keyboard. The most valuable real estate is under your right index finger, and it's occupied by 'J'. J!!!!. The letter that's worth 8 points in scrabble gets top billing on QWERTY. Not to mention the reserved spot on the home row for the semi-colon. Clearly such a high-usage punctuation deserves a better spot than the comma or period key right? 

By the 1910's typewriter technology had evolved to the point where jams were no longer a serious issue, but the layout had become the dominate keyboard layout. August Dvorak set out to use science to design a better layout. Through his research he found that people typed fastest alternating letters between the hands and that it was easier to reach up for a letter than down, and he spent a long time researching letter frequencies in text. Like 20 years later he came up with this:

The Dvorak Layout

The Dvorak Keyboard Layout solved the biggest issues with QWERTY by putting all the major vowels on the left home row, and the major consonants on the right home row with the remainder going above the right hand. Above the left hand was reserved for the apostrophe, comma and period. It just makes sense intuitively. 

Pros of using Dvorak
- Faster typing
- Less fatigue
- 70% of keystrokes are done on the home row, compared to just 32% on QWERTY
- Harder for people to steal your password. Alternatively you make make a really easy to type password in Dvorak that looks very complex in QWERTY
- In Windows you can switch between the two seamlessly.
- Adds to your mystique
- Confuses your enemies & Robert the IT guy at work

Cons of using Dvorak
- Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, are no longer next to each other.
- Sometimes you sit down and start typing in Dvorak but it's still in QWERTY. That's annoying.
- If you can't touch type it can be hard when trying to use a laptop or something else
- Gotta switch back when playing games that require WASD. Unless you have very nimble fingers.

It took me about two weeks to learn the basics of Dvorak and I had to print out a sample keyboard layout to refer to. Within a month I was equally as fast at Dvorak as I was at QWERTY. For many years afterwards I would use Dvorak at home and QWERTY at school/work. It wasn't hard to switch between the two, similarly to someone speaking one language at home and another at work. It wasn't until maybe 2013 that I decided to switch over to using exclusively Dvorak, although I can still type decently on QWERTY when I need to. Whenever asked about my favorite obscure keyboard layout I always recommend it, although I've never been asked.

If there is one reason to keep blogging it's to call people sheep. And you all are sheep for continuing to use an outdated, poorly designed system that continues to be used due to societal inertia and a resistance to mass change. So break free and convert to the metric system Dvorak keyboard layout. I'm a wolf behind this keyboard, typing away at an incredible rate.

Happy Birthday to Me!

As this year's blog theme happens to be blogging in poor taste, I can't think of anything in quite as poor taste as my annual foray into narcissism that is my birthday post.

Your intrepid blogger and his Grandfather with whom he shares his Birthday.

I won't bore you with a long intro. I know what you are all here for, and I hope you are impressed with some of the new features to the chart!

That's right, I've added icons to track some of the events from year-to-year. They are all pretty self explanatory to avid readers of this post, but for those uninitiated here's a rundown:
- My friend Beth normally wishes me happy birthday fartface so there is an icon for that. Luckily she remembered this year since she forgot last year.
- My goal of getting both former Rachel Morgans to wish me a happy birthday fell one Rachel Morgan short. A full Rachel Morgan meter is a pretty rare feat. Perhaps in 2020.
- I've promised several times to no longer mention Ray Smith, but given our convoluted birthday history together I find it hard not to. Since he was the first thing I really tracked I feel obligated to put him on the chart. I tried to use his face for the icon, but he has deleted his facebook account, which likely means no more happy birthday messages from Ray. So without his picture I was forced to use that of Ray Smith the Welsh actor who played the tough-talking police chief, Detective Superintendent Gordon Spikings, in the television series, Dempsey and Makepeace.

In a family tradition, I received 5 drum solos!

As for trends, my facebook birthday posts continue to decline. I was down to 16 this year, but that was expected. It was really 15, but I counted my cousin calling me a garbage man on facebook since it happened on my birthday, but he didn't even include a happy birthday. But there was an uptick in overall messages, mostly due to strong returns via the group chat medium. I'm really interested to see how the numbers come together in 2022 when my birthday falls on the weekend again. Until then, thanks for all the "Happy Birthdays"!

12 Years Behind the Keyboard

My last blogoversary post was in 2016 when this blog turned 9. I completely missed my 10th anniversary (and 11th).

Keen-eyed readers may have noticed an uptick in blogging output in 2018. 6 posts is the most production this blog has seen since 2014. About a year ago I decided to improve how I manage my life. I found an app where I can manage tasks and set up recurring reminders to help me remember to floss twice a week. One of those is to blog every 8 weeks. That's how you get to 6 posts in a year. Maybe I'll up it to every 6 weeks, but I'm not sure if my readers can handle that much content.

I think the key to blogging for 12 years is a combination of holding on to obsolete technology along with learning the dvorak keyboard layout. If you're going to pound out this many posts you might as well use a better keyboard layout than QWERTY. I know I've mentioned it in a few posts, but I've never officially blogged about it, since I learned to type on the dvorak keyboard layout about 6 months before starting the blog. Maybe that'll be a good post.

I feel like since I started the blog that people are much more wary about putting their personal information on the internet, especially facebook and other social media. I too share that concern, and have really reduced how much info I put on my social media. I realize how much not-so-great info I have on this blog about me, but my hope is that no one thinks to look for someone's blog anymore. But I'm trying to put less personal info out there on the blog, and at the same time trying to find interesting things to post about.

I am also well aware that some of the things that I blogged about in college would probably no longer be a good idea to post on the internet today. Maybe I'm more mature or maybe societal values have changed. I'm keeping these posts up, since I see the blog primarily as a diary to remind myself of how cool I used to be. Please ignore the ones that are now in poor taste.

Here's to blogging in poor taste in 2019!

From Simple Blogger to Published Essayist

For the first time since he wrote for the high school newspaper your humble correspondent has again been published. Sure, I've been the subjects of numerous crime notes, and even done my fair share of local news interviews; but to have your writing published by a respectable media outlet, and not some filthy self-published blog is the epitome of greatness. Especially when you're a third rate writer.

An excerpt of my 3,500 word essay on the history of the Navy Fleet Ballistic Missile was published by the United States Naval Institute Proceedings. They were more focused on the portion where I suggested how the successes of Fleet Ballistic Missile could be applied to the modern Navy. As a result they glossed over the other 2,000 words about the fascinating development of the weapon system. I originally submitted the essay into a Naval history essay contest where it finished 7th out of 170 entries.

If you're interested, you can read the excerpt here until the link breaks in a few years.

Burning Man

I recently did something cool. I went to Burning Man.

My wife and sister went last year, and after they came back they wanted to go again. I was on the fence for awhile about joining them since I didn't think it was my scene. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I shouldn't close my world off to potentially amazing experiences because they don't fit my preconceived notions I have about what I think I like to do. So I went, and I'm glad I did.

Looking good!

The past few months were spent gathering supplies, making costumes, and preparing for a week of radical self-reliance. Since nothing is sold at Burning Man (except coffee and ice), you have to bring everything with you and plan to take it back out with you (except pee and poo). After plenty of prep we began the long drive up to Sacramento to drop off the progeny with her grandparents. Then we drove through Reno and turned north towards the barren dry lake-bed that gets turned into the most creative city in the world for one week a year.

Our house for the week

We arrived during a brutal dust storm and after 6 hours of waiting made it to our camp. We camped with a group camp that my sister & wife had been a part of. It was a pretty eclectic group, but everything about burning man seems to be built upon eclecticity (and not electricity, since there is no power).

Out on the playa

The cool part of the event is that everyone does something unique and creative, and it's all done as a gift to the community. Some Canadians put up a street hockey rink for anyone to come play. Another camp brought trampolines to jump on. There was a bike repair camp, a camp that gave out poutine at midnight, a camp that would take glamour shots of your genitals and hundreds more. They pretty much had it all. And there was no shortage of camps that ran bars and were out in the dusty streets recruiting people to partake in all the booze you could guzzle.

Nighttime on the playa

While wandering the various camps was fun, the real joy was going out into the desert where the Man is and so are all the great art installations. At nighttime the the barren desert becomes awash with neon lights, thumping beats, bikes and art cars which are almost impossible to tell they were at one time vehicles.

One of the art cars

The amassing of so much culture and art, with an expectation of it being all temporary and there to be experienced made me really see why immediacy is such an important component of the event. I really tried to embrace as much of the event as I could, and try some things I've never done (I went rock climbing!), do some things that were right up my ally (the canned fish/meats symposium was terrific!), and still avoided other events (shoving guacamole ingredients up your butt and pooping out fresh guac - I'm not making that up). I guess I have a reason to go back.