Blog category: Life
(Hey, readaz. With the blog a little neglected and uninspired for the past, oh, four years or so, I’ve decided to try and get it going by writing what I know: how we, or at least I, live life and do stuff in the integrated digital world. Broad topic? Sure. Chance to bump up both the professional and personal content of this site at the same time? You know it. Look for digital-oriented pieces at the beginning of the week — there aren’t many excuses not to write when I’m kicking around a post for an entire week, and if you just can’t get enough regular input from some peripheral online guy you’ve probably never met, there’s always my Twitter feed.)
G and I had a home-decor wakeup call a few weeks ago: We were upstairs at our friends’ place for a few drinks, and not having been in their home for a while, we were gobsmacked to walk in and realize how awesome and grown-up the place looked. After a round of “maybe we should move on from that college-era TV stand” discussions, the only logical step was the one that followed: home improvement.
Doh.
Many years ago, my dad (who’s a home-improvement Natural, like Robert Redford with a miter saw) purchased what he called “the blue book” for himself as a handyman’s guide. Inside were instructions on installing new faucets, rewiring rooms, installing shelves and many other useful tips and tricks. He referred to this book almost every time a floor cracked or something needed to be redone, so the blue book was more or less a self-contained paper Google. (That’s how we People of the Future describe what used to be called “the book’s index”.)
As a Person of the Future, my first instinct is to head online whenever I don’t know anything, and with home improvement, that’s often. (As Habitat for Humanity VP in b-school, I may have hauled a lot of drywall and installed my share of soffit, but that’s a lot more impressive-sounding and a lot less knowing-how-to-do-anything.) You could argue whether this is a better or worse approach than consulting the blue book — and to be honest, I really can’t decide — but as a guy who’s way too proud of himself just for changing out a broken toilet handle, home improvement is a particularly apropo time to head online. Don’t know how to align a ceiling joist? Google it! Don’t know what “countersink” means? Google it! Don’t know how to hammer a nail, you lame ass? Google it!
When I’m at work, the first thing I always think about on a project is, “If I need to do something, what are the best digital ways that this company can help me do it?” Let’s say I’m installing some shelves, as we recently decided to do. Here’s how I went about it:
- Pick out a search term,
- Enter the search term,
- Scan the search results for URLs I consider legitimate, and
- Decide if I like the content enough to listen to what the site has to say.
That last one is the most important — maybe thisoldhouse.com told me shelving takes more time and money than I want to put in, so being a cheap, lazy noob, I’ll go see what ehow.com and homedepot.com have to say until I find an easier approach. I call this the “As a trusted independent source, tell me what I want to hear anyway” theory. (Future installments will show that this inclination is pretty damned important in digital decisions.)
So with those in mind, here’s what I as a novice want a home-improvement website to do for me:
- Be a URL I recognize or that seems intelligent (branding!),
- Have an article addressing what I want to do as closely as possible in my search results,
- Outline clear, concise and non-technical instructions showing me every step of the project and the amount of work involved,
- Give me as many shortcuts as possible without omitting the drawbacks of those shortcuts, and
- Have a mobile site, because I’m probably looking this up on my phone so I can keep the info right there while I work.
Ultimately G and I hired a dude to do the shelves anyway, because I’d rather not take three months of weekend free time to hang a crooked block of plywood that makes all of our photo albums fall in a uniform direction. (I could get those old photos digitized, but remember: cheap and lazy.) Now our shelves look great. Perhaps that doesn’t quite fit with the ethos of this DIY article, but the DVR is sitting damn straight right now. Practicality!
Notable parts of 2009:
- Went to India
- Got an internship
- Hit two years of marriage
- Finally saw Jane’s Addiction in concert
And the aims for 2010:
- Get an MBA
- Get a job
- Get at least minimal guitar skills
- Get the workout trend to continue in a good direction
- Get still more acquainted with Chicago
- Get some books off of my reading list and into my dome-piece
- Get everyone to start saying “twenty ten” instead of “two thousand ten”
May you hit your targets in twenty ten.
I do miss December in New York. As much as the city often drove me up the wall, Christmastime was always a highlight.
I hope everyone’s Christmas is full of good times and tasty treats. Since this is a holy day, in the spirit of Benjamin Franklin’s adage that “Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy,” I recommend a glass of this Chicago Christmas treat when you get a chance:
Merry Christmas!
My time at Slate officially ended at the close of the workday Friday, so that’s the curtain on two-and-a-half years as a web developer for what I think is the best magazine on the web.
It sounds embellished, but before I left TIME I used to routinely tell the editors that the site should work to be “more like Slate,” meaning TIME.com needed to do less news-chasing and more personality-based news analysis. Magazines are rarely going to beat all the wire services, newspapers and bloggers to the punch, so the best way to distinguish a site as a commentary outlet is by letting the writers be themselves and by not being afraid to stick a neck out to get the point across. Maybe two out of every seven people I talk to know of Slate, but those two are inevitably die-hard fans who ask me what particular Slate writers are like in real life. In this era of fragmented audience, that weirdly high level of interest is just what you want for your site.
As much as it was great working at Slate in the publication-wide sense, on an individual level I’m ready to move on after this period of strictly technological work. Working solely in web development just isn’t where my main interests lie. A well-functioning piece of code is a linguistic treat — it has the ability to convey exactly the commands and results that you want within a delimited set of communications, and being that linguistic skillz are how I roll, I’m all about it. But after so much time building pieces of the site, I miss the variety and sense of direction that comes from a more multidisciplinary job — I want to use not only my technology skills, but my journalism knowledge, my sense of creativity and my ability to play a bigger role in direction and strategy. That said, the web-technology work will be invaluable along the way, and technology got my foot in the Slate door in the first place. So while it’s not entirely what I want to do with my career, big ups nonetheless to web technology.
Slate is opinionated and intellectual, and so too are the people who fill the pages. As a result, it’s a great workplace where everyone throws ideas back and forth to pick out the best ones. I really will miss working there, but sometime in the future I hope I get the chance to work with the site again.
Meantime, I’m getting my vacation on for a week. After that, it’s on to Phase Michigan in just a short while. Peace out until then.
Yo all.
It’s been a mostly post-free summer for this website, but life is good right now, so I’ve been living it instead of blogging it.
It’s just a few short weeks now until I quit my job, go on a quick vacation and then move up to Ann Arbor for b-school. While going to Michigan is bound to be fun and rewarding, at the moment it feels sad as an indicator that the summer situation will come to an end. A quick list of just what will be ending:
- I work from home in Chicago, giving me an extra two hours of the day that would have otherwise been spent commuting. Sure, I miss the social interaction of the office and the chance to catch up on my train-bound reading, but dropping my daily commute down to the 22 seconds it takes to roll out of bed and walk down to my computer is a phat tradeoff. Admittedly it has had some deleterious effects on personal grooming, but funk doesn’t travel through phone lines.
- The Wife is busy studying for the bar, but the plus side of that is that she doesn’t have classes (except recently ended half-day BarBri lectures) so we get all day to be the obnoxious married couple that enjoys each other’s company. And I do usually shower at her prompting. Word.
- I have a pile of friends living here the likes of which I haven’t had since being in New York. Oddly enough, several of those friends have moved here too. Flip-cup and late-night taco stands just weren’t the same without the homies.
- Our condo is totally sweet-ass. That’s really the only compound adjective to describe it.
- Chicago. Summer. It’s the bomb. This summer has featured July 4th fireworks from the 70th floor of the Sears Tower, running along the lake, getting my lift on again, the discovery of my all-time favorite barbershop, relatively cool weather, plenty of socializing, and madd Italian beef sandwiches and Chicago dogs.
Ann Arbor right now represents the following: not getting paid to work in my pajamas, a wife living 250 miles away, confusion over football loyalties, and a paucity of Italian beef. That’s overly harsh and I really do think it’s going to be lots of fun, plus I hear Zingerman’s sandwiches are quite tasty, but UMich won’t be fun the same way that this summer has been.
They say you don’t know what you have until it’s gone, but I’m well aware that I have a shitload and I sure as hell am enjoying it. Here’s hoping the rest of you peeps are enjoying yours as well.
My new copy of Esquire arrived today, featuring a list of 75 things every man should do by Tom Chiarella. (Sadly there’s no online link yet.) This is a sequel, the previous list being 75 skills every man should master. I notice this month’s version got a big fold-out ad placement from Patron, and on the heels of the previous list it’s one of those nice edit specials that practically sells itself to advertisers. In this day and age of the media industry, it’s reassuring to see nearly any ad buy, much less a foldout.
While there are many good entries, and by that I mean several that I’ve done, this list is at times a bit too cosmopolitan for my taste — eat mussels in Bruges? Live in a hotel suite for a week? I don’t think it takes riches to achieve a great list of worthwhile accomplishments. Here are my addenda:
- Buy a home. Care and ownership is a surprisingly humbling experience.
- Read from the Western canon. Going back and hitting those high-school requirements you missed really is worth it.
- Have more than one bad-date story. Mine are the time that I was three hours late, bombed the execution, gave up on things completely, then later found out I should have called anyway because the girl was disappointed that she never heard from me; and the time a date of mine got drunk and started heckling the comedians at the stand-up club. You need a good supply of these for when you’re married and still at a party with single people.
- Own a pet. Good preparation for kids. Plus, fun.
- Gain a firsthand memory of just why violence is bad. Get beat up, beat someone and feel guilty, or just watch a fight and be sickened by it — it’s far too easy to be a cheerleader when you’re far away.
- Swim in a natural body of water. Fewer people do this than we’d think.
- Join a national organization. The military is a great one, but so are the Sierra Club, PADI and the Elks Lodge.
- Go to a city council meeting. The business of altering people’s lives can be surprisingly mundane.
- Listen to an old guy’s stories. That’ll be you someday wishing it mattered just as much to someone else.
- Put one of your stories in writing, even if you’re the only one who rereads it. Nothing like the written word to imbue meaning.
