Author: matthew

Just in case you didn’t feel bad enough about your life already, here’s a little gem to remind you of things other people had accomplished by the time they were your age.

Ain’t life grand?

Just in case you have trouble with that link, the guy who created the page was nice enough to set up the whole darn thing in Javascript. So just right-click on the page and “view source” to see all the lists without manually putting in the ages. Spoiler: If you are a negative number, or over 100, you’re SOL, all the entries are the same from 100+.

I read an an insightful weblog entry over at Wil Wheaton’s web site. It had to do with good neighbors. And I couldn’t help but wonder — am I a good neighbor?

Points against us being good neighbors:

• We had a used tire in our yard for over three years.
• The paint is peeling around our front door.
• We don’t have a deck. Our sliding glass window leads off into the vastness of space.
• We have a dead apple tree in the back yard.
• We let our yard die. And we only mowed it twice last year since it was dead. And we only trimmed the weeds twice.
• We have a big hole in the ground that’s also three years old next to the front door where I planned to punch through my basement wall to finish our sprinkler system. It’s still there, and the sprinkler system is still hooked up every year by plugging it into a hose.
• Our then four-year-old daughter repainted one of our rooms without our consent four years ago. The pink blotches are still very visible on the screen on the front of the house.
• Our garage has always been so full of stuff we could never park our car in it.
• We have a nonfunctional lawnmower and rusting bike sitting next to our driveway.
• I record music late into the night (usually, with headphones, but my singing is still loud)
• I grill outdoors in the middle of the winter.
• We have an oil leak in our van that’s permanently stained our driveway.
• Weeds have overgrown our gardens.
• Our stereo system attached to our DVD player can get pretty loud, and we usually watch movies late at night (9-11:30 PM)

Points in favor of us being good neighbors:

• We invite friends over all the time to quietly play cards and chat — including our next-door neighbors, who have three old non-working trucks parked in their front yard.
• We tend to keep to ourselves, and keep quiet.
• Our kids play outdoors, but only within strictly prescribed boundaries, and they tend to get bullied, rather than be bullies.
• Our cars don’t belch smoke, and aren’t really loud.
• We never have knock-down, drag-out fights in the middle of the nights with our windows open like one of our neighbors. Oh, wait, they don’t fight anymore since she left him…
• Once you’re inside our house, it’s cluttered but comfortable and welcoming.
• We take cookies & homemade goodies to our neighbors regularly.
• We know all our neighbors within three houses by their first names.
• We avoid appearing in the front yard in nightclothes.
• We bathe regularly.
• We have barbeques each summer and invite all our neighbors.
• We make it a point to have all our immediate neighbors over for dinner at least once a year.

I think, on balance, we are reasonably good neighbors with lots of room for improvement. What about you?

So I’ve had the tires on my Insight pumped up to 50 PSI on each corner since the day I bought it. I’ve enjoyed the gas mileage, but have noticed that performance was very poor over snow and ice, and even taking corners it felt a little slippery.

Before heading out on our near-disaster New Year’s trip in our family van, I deflated the Insight’s tires back to factory-spec 38 PSI front, 35 PSI rear so that my very-pregnant wife, who was remaining home, would enjoy a smoother ride and better traction.

What I didn’t realize was exactly how much of a difference it makes.

Nine hours after we left, we limped back home due to a blizzard forcing closure of the freeways. I was tired and despondent, and decided to take my Insight out for a shopping trip to help me feel better. Getting 14 MPG in a big van against a sixty MPH headwind can make you feel down like that after driving the Insight Anyway, within a few moments of driving it out of our driveway over the left-over slush on the roads, I was amazed to find it seemed to actually handle slush well! Better than the van I’d been driving for nine hours, as a matter of fact. I was surprised!

Snow was threatening on the horizon in the darkness, blotting out the stars, so I decided to test how my Insight handled dry, windy conditions, with patches of ice and water.

Oh. Wow.

I accelerated from a dead stop and did 180’s in an empty parking lot at twenty miles an hour without going more than two parking stalls wide. I whipped around 90-degree corners at nearly thirty miles an hour — hard enough to smash my shoulder against the driver’s door, yet not a squeal or complaint from my tires. I floored the car from an icy entrance to the highway in “S” mode, and only one tire skipped for a second before gripping hard and shoving me in the back of my seat. I slammed on the brakes at fifty, and seemed to stop almost immediately — easily hard enough to kick in the seat belt restraints and push the air out of my lungs. I was really impressed.

Realize, the only performance vehicle I’ve ever driven was a 2002 8-cylinder Ford Mustang convertible as a rental on a business trip one time. Of course, that one had more power, but I was just flat amazed at how a simple change in tire pressure can transform this little red buggy from a genteel commuter vehicle into a fun, sporty toy.

For those of you concerned about your investments in this era of very low returns in the stock market, Jon Brusco has some sound advice on how to lose less money.

So last week we came up with the bright idea of heading up to Idaho on New Year’s Day so that we could check out my brother-in-law’s new sleds (note: “sled” == “snowmobile”). He bought four, and three are in working condition. Apparently, they are pretty fast. Anyway, I wanted to just drive up there in my Insight (Hey, there and back again on a single tank of gas isn’t bad), but Christy impressed upon me the necessity of taking all the children with me if I went. She’s eight months pregnant, having fairly regular contractions, and did not want to worry about delivering a child while three other children panicked around her.

Well, the idea was sound, except for the fact that it decided to blizzard on our way up there. Sixty mile per hour crosswinds. Five to fifteen feet of visibility. Horrible stuff. We made it as far as Pocatello (at least an hour later in our trip than usual) before we took a break because they’d closed the freeway.

The freeway remained closed.

We waited three hours, then gave up, turned around, and headed back home. There was some negotiation on the phone with the in-laws about taking back roads until the manager of the Subway we were hanging out at, who lives on the aforementioned back road we would have used, informed us that there were three-to-four foot snowdrifts on that road. Practically impassable.

The options at that point were to rent a room, wait it out, or head home. I decided to head home. Scary trip back, really — the snow hadn’t gotten shallower behind us — but within twenty miles after Malad Pass was behind us (two hours after leaving the Subway when it normally takes about forty-five minutes), the snow slacked off to rain, then to nothing but wind for the last two hours of our trip home.

Talk about a wasted day. A wasted tank of gas. It basically turned out to be a nine-hour round trip to go eat out at Subway. At least my low-carb Turkey & Bacon wrap was good.

I was grateful that Elijah slept much of the way up and back since he was up very late last night. He was downright cordial when he was awake, too — an unusual state for this nearly-two-year-old tornado. The other kids entertained themselves on my wife’s old Palm M500, and my current one, playing Bejeweled. We liked that game enough to buy it, it rocks, and our kids really enjoy playing it.

So anyway, here it is, over nine hours after leaving the house to try to make what’s usually a four-hour trip, back at home. That’s just a bummer. But it beats wrecking ourselves in the middle-of-nowhere Idaho wilderness.

John Olsen is a published author and mega-computer-geek, with a similarly geeky wife and wonderfully geeky children. He’s written hit computer games that have sold millions of copies. He’s the kind of geek other geeks look up to.

He enjoys over-engineered solutions to common household problems. The problem here: how do you set up an impressive display of timed fireworks using only commonly-available, Utah-legal fireworks? I mean, my family usually follows the tried-and-true approach of “set up three fountains, and try to get the last one lit before the first one burns your hand off”. Not John! To the right is his July 24th (Pioneer Day in Utah, a big celebration similar to Independence Day elsewhere in the U.S.) automated conflagration setup — and below, his setup for tonight’s festivities. Regarding this arrangement, John says, “last July 24th where I was going more for duration than intensity. This new one is relatively small in comparison. The box said to light one at a time, so I redefined one.”

What do you think? Could you do better?

Here’s the latest on life, in summary form:

• Ditched Qwest wireless service in favor of Sprint. They are very nearly equivalent, but Sprint offers nationwide service without roaming if we want/need it, cooler phones, and data service. We’re getting a couple months of free “Vision” service, which will let us take pictures with the nifty phones we picked up, and transmit them to other phones or email addresses. Not sure if we’ll keep the Vision portion of the service (it’s an extra $30 between the two phones, ugh!) — I just liked the small, high-tech phones more than the stock old Nokia ones they offer for free.
• My new Honda Insight has been performing fairly well even in bitterly cold, snowy, iced-in weather. We had to get to the doctor’s office yesterday for my wife’s OB appointment. The snow was drifted up to two feet. We had a bit of a problem with traction going uphill after being stopped on an exit ramp when in a foot and a half of snow, but we got through it. I put on chains eventually (ugh, I don’t want to do that again soon), then found that most of the pavement was dry and I almost hit a guy trying to stop (anti-lock brakes + snow chains on dry or icy pavement = very LOOONG stops). I took the chains off, deflated the tires a bit, and was satisfied with the performance of the tires in snow/slush/ice at 38 PSI per corner. Time to buy snow tires, though, I think. These Bridgestone Potenza low-rolling-resistance tires feel a bit like Matchbox plastic wheels on the ice.
• My weight hit an all-time low this morning: 220.5 lbs! I have not been this weight since 1995; it feels good. Another twenty pounds, and I’ll be roughly around the weight (180-200 lbs) I fluctuated between in my early college days. Rather than a strict low-carb approach, I actually prefer to follow a “weighted average” of my weight, using the “Eat Watch” program created by John Walker as part of The Hacker’s Diet. I’ve found that, for me, the combination of low-carbing (following the Atkins recommendations for gradually increasing carb intake), plus watching the calories, has been very effective at helping me maintain a consistent 750-calorie deficit per day over the last two months. My goal is steady weight loss, not really fast weight loss. The problem I have with calories while on Atkins, really, is making sure I eat enough every day! If I don’t maintain at least 2000-2400 calories per day, my body kicks into famine mode, and the weight loss slows way, way down (I’m a six-footer that used to be six-foot-one before a car accident). So far I’ve been averaging around 2200-2400 kcal/day, as long as I track what I eat via FitDay. When I don’t track, it’s easy to not eat enough; I really want to avoid weight-loss stalls due to famine-mode metabolism. It does mean that I have to occasionally force myself to choke down some more filet mignon, or have a second or third helping of barbequed chicken, but that’s a burden I’m willing to bear.
• I start my new contracting job January 5. I’m excited and nervous. The most frustrating thing, though, is figuring out insurance… COBRA will cost us $612 a month. I’d rather have that money in our pockets and pay our expenses as we go, you know? Over a year, that would pay for a pretty major surgery. But if we go without insurance, and then I eventually get a job that provides insurance, that new insurance company will end up insisting many health problems are pre-existing conditions and deny coverage. Been there, done that, it’s terrifically obnoxious; even if a condition was undiagnosed, insurance companies like to call it “pre-existing” if it’s not an injury due to accident. The cheapest coverage we can find, independently, is Intermountain Health Care, at about $280 a month. Even that feels like highway robbery. I think we’re just going to do without — except Christy and the new baby, whom we’ll cover with COBRA through February to cover newborn health problems and pre/post-natal care. (Spending around $400 for the two of them for two months seems totally OK since that money will be basically sucking up around $2000 in hospital bills).

Ahh, life is grand!

Sorry to not post many interesting, insightful blog entries lately. We’re snowed into about two and a half feet of the white stuff, and I’m simply exhausted, mentally and physically, from all the snow shoveling.

All things considered, though, I’d rather shovel the snow myself than buy a snowblower. Snowblowers are expensive, take up a lot of garage space (which is in very short supply in our little townhouse), and only get used a few times per year. A snow shovel takes up much less space, and at over 400 calories burned per half-hour, although shoveling may be exhausting, it may well be one of the most calorie-intensive commonplace activities on the planet.

So now I’m shoveling my neighbor’s driveway, too!

We enjoyed a fabulous Christmas celebration with some good friends. We feasted on freshly-baked turkey, honey-glazed ham, fantastic sausage stuffing, breads, veggies, jello, and all the trimmings.

All the while watching the snow pile higher and deeper throughout Christmas day.

Yep, over the last eight hours we’ve gotten nearly a foot of snow, with much more to come, it looks like. The National Weather Service has this to say:

…NORTHERN WASATCH FRONT-SALT LAKE AND TOOELE VALLEYS- SOUTHERN WASATCH FRONT- 1000 PM MST THU DEC 25 2003

… HEAVY SNOW WARNING THROUGH FRIDAY…

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE WILL CONTINUE THE HEAVY SNOW WARNING FOR ALL OF THE WASATCH FRONT THROUGH FRIDAY. THIS INCLUDES THE AREAS FROM IDAHO BORDER SOUTH TO NEPHI… AS WELL AS THE TOOELE VALLEY.

SNOW… HEAVY AT TIMES… WILL CONTINUE THROUGH FRIDAY. STORM TOTAL ACCUMULATIONS THROUGH FRIDAY ARE EXPECTED TO RANGE FROM 5-12 INCHES NORTH OF SALT LAKE AND 6-14 INCHES TO THE SOUTH.

Merry Christmas to me! We planned on putting a humongous bow on my new Insight Christmas morning, but were precluded by snow on the car.

Now I guess I better reconsider my plan to not get those snow tires to replace my Potenzas for the next four months… then again, I don’t think the Insight can even get through more than 6 inches of snow due to low ground clearance!

In case you wonder about the ground clearance question, here’s a picture. This is on the lee of the house (the side away from the wind) so where the Insight is parked, with snow partially cleared off, is about four inches shallower than the rest of the snow past the house where our van is parked…

Here’s Salt Lake compared to the rest of the nation on Christmas Day, and my Insight around 1 AM after getting back from our Christmas party:

It wasn’t bad for our van to plow through the slush, but it will be interesting driving if this continues nicely through the winter as we hope it will (we badly need the water). Ahh, the fun! Too bad I won’t get to drive my baby for a day or two — except out of the driveway to shovel!

If you’ve got a Happy Holidays comment, leave it here! From me to everybody else, have a Happy Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanza, New Year, Winter Solstice, or whatever.

This year we told our kids the truth about Santa Claus — that we are Santa Claus, but we enjoy pretending such a being exists. When asked an honest question, I gave an honest answer 🙂 They were mildly curious about it, and kind of get a kick out of the idea that there wasn’t some magical man in a red suit that brought them presents. They asked us if they could help put the unwrapped “Santa Gifts” under the tree this year, since they already know, but we drew the line at spoiling the surprise that way…