D's Notebook

Tag: blogging (Page 1 of 2)

Weekend Notes

May 13, 2024 /

A nice weekend here in Indy. I know eventually it will come back to bite us in the ass, but this is like the fifth or sixth straight season here that has been terrific. It got warm early but didn’t turn into summer in April. We’ve had a few cooldowns but none of those surprise weeks when you go from shorts and tees to coats and hats again. All that after a mild winter, a normal fall, a terrific summer, another nice spring, and I believe a relatively warm winter a year ago. Mother Nature is loading up for something big.

The pool has been open since Monday and by Friday the water was both warm and filtered enough to get in. L had friends over Friday night, and after spending the night they hung around to swim Saturday. We hosted S’s dad and stepmom for dinner Saturday night. Sunday we hung out around the pool, with two of the local nephews coming over to get their first swims of the year in.

Kid Props

I mentioned Friday that I had to attend a function Friday morning. I went into school early with L to attend the Blessed Basil Moreau awards ceremony. We knew she would receive an award. We were not told what it was for or who had nominated her when we got the invitation.

When we arrived her religion teacher, Mrs. K, strolled over and sat with us. She had both M and C in her classes, so we chatted a bit about them.

The ceremony began and Mrs. K went to the podium and asked L to join her. She said a series of nice things about L’s attitude, leadership, and dedication. She said L was the kind of kid you wished you had 24 more of in class. She then shared a specific example of L’s behavior.

One day L saw one of her friends getting picked on in class. L didn’t think that was right, so she went and sat with her friend, calmed her down, got her back on track, and after class let Mrs. K know about the situation.

That all sounded pretty good.

After the ceremony I asked for the whole story.

“It was T,” she said, referring to a basketball teammate who is autistic and has been targeted by a few mean girls this year. “This little bitch was picking on her because she knows T won’t say anything back to her. So I went over and shut that shit down.”

Even prouder, especially for how she related what happened! Of course, if Mrs. K had heard that version she might not have nominated L for the award!

Now L is a part of the Holy Cross council at CHS. Not sure exactly what that entails but she acted mock put out about it. “More meetings,” she sighed.

As a parent you hope that your kids have a strong set of core values and that they will speak up when those values are violated. One of the things I am most proud of is that our girls do exactly that. When they see friends in need, they help them. They all, to a certain extent, are wiling to confront people who they think are being assholes.

It’s one thing to convey these lessons to your kids. It’s another for them to have the strength to stand up for their values when presented with an opportunity. Our girls aren’t perfect, but it gives me immense satisfaction that my primary job for the last 20 years has not been in vain.

Pacers

I was pretty pissed after the first two games of the Pacers-Knicks series. Yes, there were a lot of bad calls, most of which seemed to go against the Pacers. I mean, how do referees get kicked ball calls wrong against the same team, in clutch moments, in two straight games? And how do they claim they can’t correct an incorrect call one night, when it goes against the Pacers, then stop the game to huddle up and correct an incorrect call two nights later when it allows the Knicks to keep the ball in the final two minutes of a close game?

But, let’s be honest: bad calls or not, the Pacers lost the first two games because they couldn’t block out on the boards or stay in front of anyone on defense. They reverted to December Pacers ball, thinking they could just score 150 and win by two. That shit doesn’t work in the playoffs. At least not usually.

After two games in Indy, though?

WHOOOOO DOCTOR, WE’VE GOT A SERIES!!!!

An incredibly frustrating and tense game Friday, with the Pacers jumping out early, giving the lead up, getting another cushion just after halftime, then not only blowing that but finding themselves down nine points with nine minutes to play. Were they going to get swept? They righted the ship, made some big plays, and Andrew Nembhard threw in a prayer of a 3 with 17 seconds left to break the final tie.

The Knicks are about as banged up as you can be so there was no reason for this game to be close. Yet the Pacers’ refusal to even pretend to play defense killed them.

Sunday all that switched. The Knicks looked injured, tired, and short-handed. The Pacers defense was nearly as good as their offense. The lead was 20 points in the first quarter. It was around 40 points much of the third quarter. The fourth quarter was one of the most bizarre things I’ve seen in the NBA: both teams cleared their benches early and just let those cats roll for 12 minutes. It was not scintillating basketball. Pacers fans didn’t care.

Two-two, going back to New York.

You figure there’s going to be a huge swing after game four. The Knicks can’t play that poorly again, can they? The Pacers can’t play that good on the road, right? It feels like this series is going seven, unless either Tyrese Haliburton’s or Jalen Brunson’s bodies completely fail on them and their teams are forced to play without them.

Northern Lights

We missed them here. Friday evening it was mostly cloudy in our part of Indy. I walked outside several times between 10 and midnight but never had a clear view of the sky. Where the low level clouds had gaps, higher clouds were reflecting the ground light and preventing any glimpses of the colors. I saw great pictures that people got not too far from our home, so had I hopped in the car and driven even 20 minutes I could have seen the spectacular views on my own.

But it was late, I was fired up after the Pacers game, and had drank a beer. Bad combos for an old man. Probably best to stay at home.

Saturday our skies were crystal clear but the lights weren’t as intense in our part of the state. Again, I could have taken a drive but M and one of her friends tried that without success so I stayed home.

Bummer. I’ve never seen the Northern Lights in person and this weekend’s show seems like it was one of the best in memory. Seeing them would have been a nice companion to watching the eclipse last month.

Blog Archives

For some reason I got out of my routine of reading through my posts from 20 years ago in February. This weekend I caught up on three months of blogging from 2004. It was fun to read through a lot of pregnancy posts. I was surprised how much I wrote about American Idol and The Bachelor. That was the one spring I watched both of those shows.

Anyway, if you’re ever really bored, a reminder that I have nearly 21 years of archives you can read through. Could be good for nights you can’t sleep. Probably better than white noise for easing you into a slumber.

2003 NBA Draft Diary Revisited

June 28, 2023 /

As promised, a look back at the very first post I ever published to this site. Perhaps you’ve already gone back and re-read it. I thought it would be fun for me to annotate it with some thoughts.

I have edited out sections of the original that did not inspire me to add something new.

With apologies to the Sports Guy…

Ah, back when I read and loved everything Bill Simmons wrote.

We are coming to you live from the palatial basement of DDB in beautiful Carmel, IN. I have a bowl of Margarita’s salsa with a bag of Tostitos Hint of Lime chips in front of me, and an ice cold Boulevard Pale Ale to my right. We’re ready to watch the lottery picks of the 2003 NBA Draft. Why just the lottery picks? Well, I realized too late that I didn’t have much around for dinner so I only think I can go about 12–13 picks before the real hunger kicks in.

You may (or may not) recall that the first name for this site was DDBinIndy. Very clever.

Our house was at least 50% made up of food and beverages brought from Kansas City a week earlier. I know we did not have real furniture yet, so I was watching on the futon brought from my KC apartment. This was probably the first big event I watched on the fat, rear-projection 62” TV that came with our house. That thing seemed so cool at the time when it was actually kind of garbage. I bet it cost the previous owners a couple grand. When we replaced it eight or nine years later, it was with a LCD screen that cost maybe $500 that I could carry out of Costco with one hand.

One of the more interesting drafts in recent memory. The top three picks are all but locked in, and have been for several weeks. The foreign invasion looks to be as strong as ever. And, most importantly to America’s sports fans, two Kansas Jayhawks are possible lottery picks. So let’s get started.
Have I mentioned how I think ESPN taking over the NBA is going to kill the league? Seriously, Mike Tirico as the lead announcer? This guy is about as charismatic as a bowling ball. He makes Bryant Gumbel look like Soul Brother #1. There’s a reason why he does so much golf.

I still strongly dislike Tirico, but he’s hung around to become NBC’s #1 announcer/host for pretty much everything. Apparently my finger was not on the pulse of what America prefers here. The Soul Brother #1 line was solid.

Stuart Scott is the devil. Wait, if he was the devil, he wouldn’t have to suck up to people in a manner that makes Ahmad Rashad look reserved. He’s just a horrible broadcaster with a tired act.

Harsh. I got tired of Scott’s shtick pretty early in his ESPN career. But apparently he was a really good guy, everyone who knew him loved him, and since he lost a battle with cancer a few years back I feel kind of bad about this one.

And I think we can all agree the Indiana Pacers only signed Tim Hardaway to get him out of the studio. I haven’t even mentioned Bill Walton yet. Tom Tolbert is good, but I think his sarcasm gets lost in the format. Greg Anthony was the surprise of the year with his insightful commentary, but he’s too close to his playing days to be critical of people. I know they need time to prove themselves, iron out the kinks, etc, but I don’t think Marv, the Czar, Ernie, Kenny the Jet, and Chuck over at TNT lose sleep about the ESPN crew gaining on them.

The final line of that section might be the most incisive of this piece. There were several articles this season about how, no matter how many different formats and personalities they try, ESPN can never seem to catch the magic and quality of TNT’s studio show, which still features Ernie, Kenny, and Chuck with the addition of Shaq.

“With the first pick, the Cleveland Cavaliers select LeBron James.” Have there been less surprising words ever spoken?

There have been a few no-brainer #1 picks in the interim, but kind of funny it took until last week for the next “We’ve known who the #1 pick will be for over a year” selection. Also, not sure why I didn’t write more about Victor Wembanyama in my post about this year’s draft.

Is LeBron the next Jordan? That I can not say. I saw some footage this week of him playing two years ago, when he was quite a bit shorter and less athletic. He was scoring at will on people without exploding to the rim. Good, solid fundamental basketball. That base is why I think he’s going to succeed. Hopefully he can keep his head on straight.

Twenty years later and LeBron sure seems to have kept his head on pretty straight. I have rarely loved him, but I’ve always admired and appreciated him. We should be so lucky that the next super-duper alpha star handles themself as well as LBJ has, aside from the occasional whining. Or manufactured drama about his team’s roster. No one is perfect.

At number two, the Detroit Pistons select Darko Milicic. I’ve been trying to tell you for years that Larry Brown is a genius and the best basketball coach on any level. He just spent seven years putting up with Allen Iverson, got to the Finals once, and had a really good run there. As his tinkering starts to grow tiresome and Iverson gets ready to jump the shark, why not take a job with a team that was in the conference finals and has the #2 pick in the draft? Seems like a good move to me, but no one else would have had the imagination, creativity, and passion to make the move. Only Larry.

Darko went down as one of the greatest NBA busts ever, in one of the greatest drafts ever. So maybe this pick wasn’t so inspired. Yet LB did win an NBA title the following season despite Darko being a wasted pick. Well, not totally wasted if you were into early Blog Era sarcastic sports content.

Can we get some non-grainy video for these Euros some year? Are they still using Beta cam over there or what?

This made me laugh. Kids, Betacam was…

With our final lock pick, Denver goes with Carmelo Anthony. Dude exudes cool, calm, and style. I have some questions about his ability to dominate in the NBA right away, but I keep thinking George Gervin when I look at him.

‘Melo did just fine. Hell, he just retired! That George Gervin comp was pretty close.
Melo’s career line: 22.5 ppg, 6.2 rpg, 2.7 apg, eFG% of 48.5, Player Efficiency Rating of 19.5 and 108.5 Win Shares.
Gervin’s: 25.1, 5.3, 2.6, eFG% 50.7, PER 21.4, 116.3 Win Shares.

Sadly they do not appear on each other’s Basketball Reference Similarity Scores section. Probably because of differing eras and Carmelo taking more outside shots.

4 – Toronto – Chris Bosh. You know, it’s one thing for a Shaq or Kenny Anderson who completely dominated as freshmen to declare for the draft early. But when kids I never heard of, who had nice, but not incredible seasons do it, I think there are big problems with the draft entry process. I think I heard Chris Bosh’s name twice all season. And now he’s the #4 pick in the draft.

I clearly missed here, although I will always say Chris Bosh was overrated and wouldn’t have been nearly as good had be not played with LeBron and D-Wade. Then I looked at his stats and he was very, very good, borderline great, for a five year stretch in the middle of his career.

And, yes, I knew Shaq played two years at LSU. I was just making the comparison between a guy who lit the world up as a freshman and one who was semi-anonymous.

5 – Miami – Dwyane Wade. My first “Whoa!” of the night. Miami has 73 swingman-type players, and they draft another one? I know Eddie Jones is on the downside of his career, but he’s got 157 years left on his contract, making him untradeable. Caron Butler didn’t quite become the next Paul Pierce, but he had a nice rookie year. Wade is a really good player, and I think I have more faith in his NBA potential than my Marquette friends. But if he’s bringing the ball up for the Heat on a regular basis, Riley has truly lost it.

Note that I was higher on Wade than my Marquette buddies!

I think I had Eddie Jones on my squad one of the years I played fantasy basketball, so I always loved his subtle, stat-filling game.

The NYC fans booing Pat Riley still, almost ten years later, was great too.

That shit has never ended, nor should it. New Yorkers will boo Pat Riley’s funeral. I love it.

6 – LA Clippers – Chris Kaman. He’s big, he’s white, and he can shoot with both hands. He’s drafted by the Clippers. Let’s go ahead and give him the early lead for Most Likely to Bust.

Looking back, I should have wondered if Darko was Serbian for Chris.

7 – Chicago – Kirk Hinrich. Best pick of the draft!!!! When even the commish is surprised, you know something interesting has happened. I’ve been saying for months Hinrich is the better NBA prospect than Collison. Whether he’s Stockton, Hornacek, or Kerr remains to be seen. But I think, baring injury, he’ll have a long, solid career.

Decent take. Kirk played for 11 seasons, averaging nearly 11 ppg and dishing just under 5 assists per game.

9 – New York – Mike Sweetney. Great moment, the Knicks select a Georgetown player and everyone in the Garden goes nuts. Crazy insane times. You know there were guys calling their cousins Sal, Vinnie, and Rocco to discuss getting season tickets so they could pick up playoff tickets in April. Somewhere, Joey Tribiani was yelling “KNICKS RULE!!!” off a fire escape. Can’t wait to see how an undersized forward with a history of weight problems does in the Big Apple.

Sometimes I was funny on this site.

10 – Washington – Jarvis Hayes. Clearly, the Wizards weren’t interested in getting Christian Laettner and Nick Collison on the same team. Some draft preview had Nick going here and mentioned they could have the two best white players to sit the end of a Dream Team bench together. Nice.

Christian Laettner was still playing in 2003???

11 – Golden State – Mickael Pietrus. The pick was greeted by absolute silence. Is it better for the New York fans to boo your pick as a horrible reach, or greet it with ignorant silence? And this is team #4 that took a pick that has no clear path towards playing time. “I don’t know what they hell you’re doing,” Tom Tolbert. Line of the night regarding Clippers North.

“Clippers North.” NBA Finals appearances/championships since 2003: Golden State 6/4, LA Clippers 0/0. In my defense the Warriors continued to suck until they drafted Steph Curry.

12 – Seattle – Nick Collison. Genius pick. Pure brilliance. Rewarding hard work, commitment, and success in college. Granted, I think Nick’s going to have to work hard and hope he can reach Ed Nealy levels of success, but still, you have to admire the Seattle GM’s foresight. He’s 6’10’’ but doesn’t jump well. He relied on exceptional position and moves to score in college. That will only get you so far in the NBA when you have a three-inch vertical.

Man was I rough on one of my all-time favorite college players. He only hung around for 14 years. He was never more than a role player physically, but became a rock in the Thunder locker room, mentoring guys like Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, and James Harden as they transitioned into a winning franchise. They even retired his number!

Also, it was a travesty how David Stern and the rest of NBA ownership let Oklahoma City steal the franchise away from Seattle.

Other comments:
Did they keep Vitale in his Florida office in an attempt for him to not talk over others? Or do they know he has no clue about what it takes to be a player in the NBA and this way they can minimize the damage he does to his reputation by cutting off his ridiculous comments?

Maybe this was the genesis of the Hot Take Culture that dominates ESPN today: Dick Vitale coming onto the NBA draft show and saying ridiculous things that annoyed people.

So who wins the Paul Pierce – Jermaine O’Neal match-up anyway? Looks like Jermaine just keeps taking Paul to the hole, but the Truth continues to light it up from outside.

I forgot about this commercial. PP was my favorite NBA player of that era. JO become my favorite Pacer of that era. Good stuff.

And with that, I retired for dinner.

Big miss here not sharing what I ate. Decent odds that I went to Qdoba and got some fat burrito with queso added on. One of my favorite activities that summer was going to the gym on nights that S had to work, then stopping at Qdoba across the street on the way home. I wasn’t exactly trying to lose weight at the time, but I think I cancelled out any calories burned when I followed up a workout with Mexican food.

Happy Blog-iversary

June 27, 2023 /

It is June 27, 2023.

That means this site, or at least its earliest version, was Internet birthed 20 years ago today. That first post is here. I’ll be addressing it directly soon.

A lot sure has happened in that span, hasn’t it? If you want a full accounting you can dig through the over 3300 posts I’ve racked up since then.[1]

S and I had been married for nearly two weeks when I posted that first entry.[2] We had occupied our house in Carmel, IN for 10-ish days. I had officially begun the work from home part of my career with C corp.

In that first week as a home-based employee, sorry, associate, I discovered that I had a monumental amount of time for dicking around on the Internet. After blogging about Big 12 basketball the previous winter, I decided to put together a personal blog to stay connected with both my friends back in Kansas City and those who were scattered around the country. I was halfway smart. I had some writing skills. I enjoyed exploring the Internet. I sure had the time. Why not put all that to good use by offering some takes?

A lot of those early posts were pretty silly. When we found out S was pregnant with M, that really changed the focus of my writing. Eventually the kids came to dominate the content here. Going to grad school and becoming a sports writer for a few years both provided material and influenced my writing style.

There has been a ton of KU sports content and a couple years where there were a lot of Royals posts. Plenty of other discussions of all kinds and levels of sports.[3] Overly detailed accountings of our travels. Tons of music entries in various formats. The occasional political post. For only the briefest of times did I tag my posts, as I found it kind of a pain and also struggled with how to label certain entries. Today I wish I had tagged everything so it would be easier to look back and count up how often I’ve written about various topics.

When I started this site I had the secret goal of some random person coming across my writing, thinking it was great, and offering me a ton of money to write for the general public. Such ideas weren’t so crazy in 2003.

Sadly that opportunity never came along, not that I deserved it. Although I did become an official, professional sportswriter, that had nothing to do with what I wrote here. Also, sadly, I’ve witnessed firsthand how the writing industry has fallen apart over the past 20 years. Newspapers have been stripped to the bone. Websites designed the replace them are cutting staff and pay left and right. There are way more opportunities to write for the public than ever, yet fewer and fewer ways to make a living doing so.

Regardless of what my motivations were for starting the blog, it has become an integral part of my daily life. I may not write or post each day, but there’s always a tickle in the back of my brain that I need to bang out some thoughts to publish.

I stopped tracking how many views my posts receive years ago. Typical of me, what began as an effort to try to gain some measure of attention eventually turned into an outlet that is pretty private. It’s been ages since I shared with anyone new that I operate a blog.

There are a few friends and family who have continued to check in over the years. I know a select few will read just about anything I post shortly after it hits the web. Others check in more occasionally.

Regardless of how often you read my writing, or whether you read it closely or just skim it, I appreciate every one of you who has kept this site bookmarked and part of your Internet routines.

Keeping this site alive another 20 years seems both crazy and daunting. I don’t have plans to stop any time soon.

Thanks for reading.

  1. Obvious asterisk here: not all posts have been carried along the many times I’ve bounced the site through different platforms and hosts. Let’s say I’ve lost 100 posts in those transitions, so we’re pushing 3500 total entries.  ↩
  2. That was our Summer of Weddings, a season in which many of my readers and friends also got hitched.  ↩
  3. I’ve written about my teams in four Final Fours with two national championship teams, two Super Bowls and one Super Bowl champion, and two World Series and one World Series champion. Not bad. Pacers need to step it up.  ↩

My Podcast Life

May 10, 2023 /

We are coming up on the 20th anniversary of this blog. Or at least the original site the current iteration grew from. I’m sure I’ll whip together something to commemorate the proper anniversary in June.

This morning I saw an article about podcasts and got to thinking about my history with them, which was somewhat tied to my blogging history.

I’m pretty sure I first learned about podcasts sometime in early 2005. I was a loyal reader of Macworld at the time (RIP print computer magazines), and there was a How To article that spring about recording your own podcast.[1] I was fascinated! You could make your own radio show and share it with the world with a minimum of hardware or expense? This was right up my alley, especially as a stay-at-home dad with a lot of free time who loved music and was also exploring the world of new media as a journalism graduate student.

I began downloading various “pod catching” apps – iTunes did not directly support podcasting yet – and tested them to find my favorites. I dug through the directories on each app to find the coolest pods to check out. Some were about the concept/process of podcasting (The Daily Source Code), but most were music pods: random dudes (always dudes) playing music for the world. Insomnia Radio and Never Mind the Bollocks were two of my early favorites.

Again, dead center of my alley of interest.

I looked into investing in some modest equipment to create my own podcast. Then I realized I could do it perfectly fine with what I already had: my Mac’s built-in microphone and GarageBand.

One day in early April I dropped M off at my in-laws for a playdate with her Mimi, bought myself a large coffee, sat down in front of that clunky eMac, and recorded the first episode of Carmel Liberation Radio. I kept that pod going for over ten years. Eventually I got a good microphone, but other than that all 337 transmissions were recorded by plugging into whatever Mac was sitting in front of me and its built-in software.

This was back in the day when the Web Sheriff would scrutinize the podcast world, looking for programs that used music without proper clearance. Usually they issued a polite but stern takedown warning. Occasionally people got sued for copyright infringement. I wanted nothing to do with that so kept my pod invitation only, first on Apple’s .Mac service, later via a Blogger site I turned off search engine indexing for. At its peak, 40–50 people got the notification that a new pod was available; a much smaller subset actually listened to it.

All that seems funny now, because A) I wasn’t trying to make money off the podcast, B) I had legally purchased most of the songs I played, and C) at some point record labels finally realized that podcasts are free advertising in a world where it was harder and harder to make money and backed off the takedowns.

When I saw that article this morning and started thinking about my own podcasting past, it also got me thinking about how cool the 2000s were for personal technology. From the rise of Apple via the iPod and the iTunes Store to the introduction of the iPhone, that decade seemed to be moving very quickly with new products that brought exciting new opportunities. It was fun to be on the early end of that process, when crude, DIY efforts ruled the day as corporations were figuring out what their strategies should be.

Podcasts are an integral part of my life now. There are several I listen to weekly, while others cycle in-and-out of my feed based on my interests of the moment. They soundtrack my gym visits, my work around the house, and help me to fall asleep at night. Even the lowest budget of them sound great and have solid production values. Hell, my girls all made podcasts in middle school for group reading assignments and they sounded decent. A huge improvement from the days of a couple people sharing a microphone on a coffee table while playing their favorite songs or discussing their favorite team.

I often have the itch to get back into podcasting. Ideally it would be an updated take on Carmel Liberation Radio. In the streaming era, though, it’s harder to get those individual tracks lined up into a unique playlist with your own audio in between. My Friday Playlists kind of fill that void, although with text instead of voice comments. I still have that microphone, though, so you never know…

Oh, I was digging back through the archives and it looks like this piece was the first time I ever wrote about podcasts. I posted it about a month before I launched CLR.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

I also found my notes from that very first CLR transmission. I carefully scripted the entire thing. In time I would record with a loose set of notes about the songs I shared and come up with my thoughts on the fly.

I have recreated that first playlist for you here. I closed most transmissions with a cover. That is the only track I’m missing here, a cover of The Magnetic Fields’ “Born on a Train” performed by Arcade Fire on KCRW. If you are a completion-ist, you can find that here.

  1. If you pay attention to such things, you might notice that is from June’s Macworld. For some reason computer magazines were always arrived like three months before their official published date, so I would have received that sometime in March.  ↩

Blog and Weekend Notes

August 16, 2021 /

First day of the new school year with all three girls in class, which I guess makes this the first day of “fall” for me. Seems like I should get into a better groove about posting here than I did most of the summer. I have a few works in progress, but I think I need to do a better job of translating thoughts in my head to text on the screen.

Every now and then I’ll go back and read some old blog posts. I find it funny how much more I posted back in the old days of nearly 20 years ago. Any half-formed thought often got its own post. Some of that was simply because the first year of the site’s life, I was also working from home. In a position I did not love. With no coworkers within 500 miles of me. So there was a lot of dicking around on the Internet to avoid doing actual work, which translated into blog posts when something amused or outraged me.

There were also The Kid Years, when each day of parenthood brought something new and exciting that I felt like I had to share with the world. Those taper off as your kids hit double digits, and again when they hit high school. Thus I have less material from the girls’ lives these days, too.[1]

I’ve wasted plenty of space over the years talking about sports, current events, etc. Lately it feels like I’m more focused on pop culture, though, between music, books, and what I’m watching posts. Which is fine. It’s obviously how I spend my free time.

Recently I’ve realized some of those blogging gears that used to turn so freely in my mind now grind and fight against each other just a little. Ten years ago I couldn’t wait to write 2000 words about some KU-Iowa State game in January. Now it feels like a chore to do so, and I find myself less eager to get to the keyboard to bang them out even though I have more time than ever to do so.

My joints also ache a lot, I can’t run as fast as I once could, and even a minor change in my regular workouts can cause days of pain as my muscles revolt. It’s all part of getting older, I guess, including having a different passion for sharing thoughts with my friends.

This isn’t some grand announcement. Trust me, the blog will live on! It’s more an acknowledgement of the blogging version of low testosterone, I guess. Sometimes actions that came easily in your 30s and 40s just require a little more effort in your 50s. In this case, it’s purely mental effort, thankfully. And I hope by sharing this realization with you, it will help me find some techniques to get beyond this little mental lull I’m having.

The girls all had fine starts to their school years. Today was the first day that M and C rode to school together. I was going to sit them down and give them some ground rules. Like, “M, don’t be bossy. C, don’t distract your sister while she’s driving. Communicate in advance if you need to be at school early or stay late.” Etc, etc, etc.

But S told me last night that C suggested to M that they make a shared playlist to listen to. They would both put an equal number of songs in and alternate them so it was even. M thought it was a great idea. So did I. Thus I decided to save the lecture. I’m sure it will be needed at some point, though.

It is really freaking weird for two of my kids to be riding to school together in a car neither S nor I are driving.

L said their homeroom teacher, who is new to St P’s, let them pick their own seats. So she ended up with two of her best male buddies in one desk pod, with her three closest female friends in the pod next to them. We’ll see how long that lasts. She said they almost got kicked out of Spanish on the first day because her one buddy would not stop talking the entire time. Cracks us up that he talks so much because everyone else in his family is very quiet. He must do the talking for them all!

She also had tryouts for St P’s basketball Saturday, because CYO sports schedules are dumb. She said she played pretty well. She’s hoping to make the 7th–8th grade A team. She’s worked hard on her game all summer, but it’s all been drills and shooting. It is a totally different thing when you’re on a court with other players. She should find out what team she’s on in a week or so.

  1. Never fear, kickball season begins Wednesday!  ↩

Weekend Notes

June 22, 2020 /

First off, obviously some changes to the site’s look. Big changes, for now. I know it’s a little jarring and I’m not sure if I’ll stick with it, but as I was doing some other administrative work, I figured why not throw up a theme that looks like nothing else I’ve used in my 17-year blogging career? I’m happy to read feedback, good or bad, if you want to share in the comments.

I won’t waste your time with too many details but I changed hosts for the second time in a year. I moved last year to get around some security issues my previous host could not manage. When I made the move, I screwed a few things up royally with the new host and while I was able to fix most of them, a few things I never got right. With the contract coming up, I figured it was easier to make another fresh start than try to deal with tech support.

So onto my third host in about a year. The transition seems to have gone smoothly, so far. The security features I wanted to add a year ago are now in place. I have access to everything I need to have access to. Hopefully there’s not something I messed up Sunday that will show up in a month or two and make this a hassle again.

Onto the weekend, which was all about me.

Saturday was my birthday, Sunday was Father’s Day. Obviously I tore it up.

Saturday morning L took me to over to the pitch and putt course. Well, I drove and paid but it was her idea.

She tried to play with me but got frustrated and gave up after the front nine and just putted on the back nine. It didn’t help that even at 8:00 AM it was already very warm and muggy. She was more interested in running through the sprinklers that were on near a couple holes than actually working on her swing. As always there was one bad hole on each nine that kept me from challenging my lowest ever score. I shot a 67, well off my best of 63. Just couldn’t buy a putt over three feet.
– – – –
After cooling down and eating lunch, L and I got into our big project for the weekend. A couple months back she started asking for a gaming PC. She’s really into Fortnite and has a YouTube channel with one of her buddies where they post videos of their games. She also streams their games. They’re up to 30-ish subscribers, which I think is pretty impressive for a couple of 11-year-olds. She’s learned how to edit video, add graphics, do voice-overs, etc. She’s gained some skills. Plus she’s good at killing virtual people, which is a little concerning.

I thought that she was fine sticking to the Xbox but she made a very persuasive PowerPoint presentation arguing her cause and a month ago we agreed that she could go forward with the PC. She’s taken on a bunch of chores around the house and agreed that when her birthday rolls around and she is eligible for a phone, she will get a cheaper one that her sisters have.

I did some research, found a recommended build list, and have been ordering parts for about three weeks. The final one arrived Saturday morning so we were off to the basement to start assembly. I had a bunch of YouTube videos queued up to guide us and had a general idea of what I was doing. But it is still pretty harrowing knowing that if I screw it up, I’ll have several hundred dollars of useless electronic gear staring back at me.

We hit a couple snags along the way that cost us about an hour. There are two cables that we never figured out how or where to connect. I spent a good 30–40 minutes trying to figure them out and eventually gave up. Turns out they aren’t needed because eventually everything worked fine.

The first time we flipped the power switch nothing happened, which next to sparks and an electrical fire is about the worst outcome. Fortunately after a quick review of some wiring, I realized I had connected the main power switch to the wrong pins on the motherboard. I clipped them to the right spot, flipped the switch, and the fans kicked on and the RGB lights lit up. But we had no video, our monitor a black rectangle.

I troubleshot on Google. I checked connections. I was getting seriously concerned that the most expensive piece of hardware in the case, the graphics card, was defective. But it was L who realized that I had connected the monitor to the main I/O HDMI port rather than to the HDMI port on the graphics card. I swapped them and – voila! – we had video.

It took another hour or so to download new drivers, make a Windows installation disk, and get the operating system installed. But before dinner L was downloading all the software she needs for her gaming. Between dinner and my annual birthday cheesecake, she was playing Fortnite on her new rig.

I’m pretty pleased that we pulled it off. It’s not super difficult, but as my issues with the power switch showed, simply putting the wrong cable in the wrong spot can throw the whole build off.

Not sure if there are any gamers out there, but her rig contains the following components:
MSI B450 Gaming Plus Max AM4 motherboard
16 GB of RAM
AMD Ryzen 5 3600 CPU
Deepcool GAMMAXX 400-CPU Cooler
Sapphire Radeon Pulse RX 5600 XT Graphics Card
All in a Phanteks Eclipse P360X case

She also cashed out some money and bought a fancy gaming keyboard and mouse.

She seems pretty happy. Now we just need her to start collecting some of that sweet YouTube ad revenue to make this worth it!

Why build vs buy, you may ask? Well, when it comes to gaming computers, who can be a lot more cost effective if you pick and choose components and put it together yourself. This was probably 60–70% the cost of an equivalent assembled gaming rig, and comes without any bloatware to slow it down. The big downside is there’s no warranty on the final, assembled product and any errors in construction are all on you.

Oh, and the girls enjoyed asking me, “Sooooo, how does it feel to be in the last year of your 40s?” over and over while giggling. Did not love that part of the weekend.

Sunday was pretty chill. It was rainy here so we didn’t ever open the pool. We needed the rain so that was fine. I read some. Worked on updating the site. Took the cardboard we’ve accumulated over the past three months to the recycling. After dinner – grilled steak and chicken, although sadly on the gas grill rather than charcoal because of the rain – the girls took me out for ice cream. It was a big moment: the first time M drove the entire family somewhere. C and L tried very hard to remain quiet but about two blocks from home they got the giggles and couldn’t stop. M did just fine. Then S and I watched “Knives Out” and enjoyed it.

Pretty, prettyyyy, prettyyyyyyy solid weekend. Hope the other fathers out there had good weekends, too.

Changing Neighborhoods

August 20, 2019 /

A busy start to the week, but hopefully things will begin to slow down during the day and I can transition some of the thoughts in my head to the screen.

Speaking of this site, I’m about to undertake some fairly major, behind-the-scenes changes.

I’ve been having issues for months with my hosting service. There were lots of little issues, some you may have noticed, others you may have not. Those were bugging me a little but I figured they weren’t really worth fixing.

Then I ran some normal updates in early July and totally wrecked something in the process. If you were checking in on the afternoon of July 3, you may have gotten an error message saying the site was not available. That’s because I was making small problems worse and frantically skimming through about 20 different Safari tabs trying to find the fix. As tends to happen in tech, the repair ended up being making a change in a file that flipped an option from “Yes” to “No.” It took me roughly three hours to find this fix and then the appropriate file. That got the site back up and running but the underlying issues remained. It seemed like a good time to move to a different host, save some money in the process, and start over.

My contract with my current host is up in a couple weeks so I just opened one with a new service. Now comes the delightful task of trying to take everything that is at the old host to the new host without blowing the entire site up in the process. I used to be good at this, when I did it like every six months. But it’s been something like four years since I’ve made any changes, and now I barely know how to do the most basic web hosting tasks. I spent much of this morning reading various tutorials as some painters wrapped up some warranty work around the house.

I have a few more hoops to jump through, and a few more tutorials to read, before I go all-in with the move. So this post, if you’ve made it this far, is just a warning that I’m liable to do something wrong and the site may disappear for awhile. Never fear, I’ll get it back eventually, even if I have to rebuild it post-by-post. Our shared history here is important!

Oh, and you don’t have to worry about any new site address. It will still be dsnotebook.me. I just have to make everything works when you get there.

As always, thanks for reading.

Looking For A Spark

June 30, 2016 /

This is year 13 of this site.[1] That’s kind of crazy. Over the past maybe year or so I have, for the first time ever, struggled to find things to write about. It’s not because I lack time. I have plenty of that. It’s not that I don’t want to write. That’s still something I feel compelled to do at times. And since I don’t enjoy phone conversations, this site has always been my way of staying in touch with friends who are scattered about the country. That remains a central goal of my writing.

I’ve found that what is missing is those little nuggets of inspirition. Some of that is because I don’t watch nearly as much TV as I used to. A pretty good chunk of my posts in the first 6–7 years of the site were based on things I saw on TV. I don’t have a little notebook full of silly/interesting tidbits I saw on TV anymore.

The bigger change, though, is my kids. Those of you who are parents know that your kids slowly do fewer delightful things as they get older. It’s not that they don’t still do interesting things. They absolutely do, sometimes even more amazing things than when they were little. But these moments come with greater gaps between then. I think it may be easier to share those infant/toddler moments than older moments, too. Everyone loves hearing about a baby rolling over for the first time, saying its first words, taking its first steps, etc. Sharing the brilliance of a fifth grade social studies project has a less universal resonance. Even with three kids, those little moments of must-share brilliance are less common.

I’ve been trying to come up with a way to prime the writing pump. The other night it finally struck me: rather than bundling the links I share into single posts I put up every couple of weeks, I need to use those linked stories as fuel to kick off my own writing.

So that’s my plan. I’ll be sharing links more often, with more of my own thoughts attached. Hopefully this gets me going again, and gives you more enjoyable things to read here more often.

As always, your attention is very much appreciated.

D

  1. First post here. Shame on me for missing the anniversary.  ↩

A Periodic Site Housekeeping Update

August 25, 2015 /

Perhaps you’ve noticed, if you’ve dipped into the site’s archives in recent weeks, but I’ve been working on another clean-up project around here. I wrapped it all up this morning.

A couple years back I stopped putting pictures of the girls on the site. Well, at least ones where you can clearly identify them. The idea being I wanted to reduce the chances for people to connect their names with a picture online. That could be just for their friends who were Googling them and ran across some silly baby picture as much as for anyone who might try to use that information for something truly dangerous.

(At the same time, I scrubbed the site of full names of all my readers and friends. Since then I’ve tried to use either first name, last initial, or just last name when referring to someone that is not in my immediate family.)

Well the latest project was to get rid of the girls’, and my wife’s, names completely. Again, this is just to protect their identities a little. I don’t want people able to search for their names, come across this site, and then read some story about one of them having a blowout when they were a baby, or throwing a fit when they were two, or other anecdotes that could be used to embarrass them. The likelihood that would ever happen is very small, but I wanted to reduce it to as close to zero as possible. I figure they’re getting old enough that they will have plenty of chances to shame themselves online on their own. They don’t need any help from pops.

Same thing for my wife. I doubt anyone would take the time to search this deep, connect this quasi-anonymous personal blog to her, and then use it to somehow harm her professional life. But again, I want to try to make those chances even smaller.

So, from now on, first initials only for my family. My regular readers know who everyone is. And any random passersby won’t miss any great context by not having full names.

And with that done – which involved manually searching through each post and then Finding/Replacing – maybe I can get back to a regular posting schedule finally.

Something Old Is New Again

August 6, 2014 /

You may have noticed there was a comment on the site yesterday.

No joke. After many years of not having comments I have turned them back on. I’ve even added the little Latest Comments widget over on the right sidebar so you can quickly see if anyone has offered up their opinions.

It’s appropriate that my pal Stace was the first person to comment in this new era. We had a really ugly scene last week while eating lunch together in Kansas City. She cornered me while I was attempting to devour my half Planet Sub (sans dijon) and rather cruelly jabbed me with her finger, demanding that I turn commenting back on. When I hemmed and hawed, she snatched my sandwich from my hands and threatened to toss it into the trash.

Hey, I’m all about making my readers happy. Especially the ones whom I’ve known since middle school.

I’ve installed the newest, latest spam-blocker that’s supposed to make it super easy to filter the real comments from the trash. Hopefully it works as expected/promised.

Have fun, and be nice.

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