So…Yeah, I didn’t really do well with the whole doing everything local.  Not at all, really.  I’ve discovered that I just don’t know enough about vegetables to make a great go of it.  I’m still trying, and still doing some, just not as much as I would like.  I am, however, spending more time learning to cook better and experiencing new foods.  To that end, I joined the Daring Kitchen with a couple of my friends.  December was my first month, and let me tell you, it was a failure.  I’m not sure if it was me, or us, or the project, but it just didn’t work.  First off, the obligatory check lines:

Our Daring Bakers Host for December 2011 was Jessica of My Recipe Project and she showed us how fun it is to create Sour Dough bread in our own kitchens! She provided us with Sour Dough recipes from Bread Matters by AndrewWhitley as well as delicious recipes to use our Sour Dough bread in from Tonia George’s Things on Toast and Canteen’s Great British Food!

I was super excited about this one because I LOVE BREAD and I love baking bread!  And sourdough is my favorite.  There were three types in this challenge and because of my love of bread, I started all three starters.

And all three failed.  Horribly.  Two were too runny and never got into a dough consistency and all three were covered in mold by day 3 and a half.  I spent some time learning about sourdough and tried modifying just the rye starter following some best practices not mentioned in the recipe.  The first few days were great!  The starter was growing like is was supposed to and smelled just like I expected!

However, by day 4, the starter was dead.

I got together with one of my fellow daring bakers, and alas her starter failed as well.  On the boards, I saw lots of people with success, but it seems like most of them had starters already and weren’t using the recipe for the new starters.  Sigh.

At this point, I don’t know if it was the recipe or if it is the climate here in Houston this year.

Fear not!  I plan on ordering a starter from someone and trying this one again on my own.  I also look forward to the new challenge starting on January 1 and I am sure the next one will be a success.

I embarked on the Localvore Challenge.  My goal, for the next year, is to eat the majority of the food I consume from sources 180 miles from my home.  Over the past few months, there have been a few things that have happened to me that made me come to this decision:

• I have a desire to eat healthier foods.  For a while, I was doing really well eating a healthy diet, but I slipped and I miss it.  My energy used to be much higher, and my clothes fit much better.
• Cooking started to bore me.  And I love to cook.  So much of what I have been cooking feels like it’s the same thing over and over again.  If I have to live fresher foods, I have to cook with what’s in season and it will hopefully stretch my culinary creativity to new levels.
• One of my friends started a business where she does live blood cell analysis and she has been doing readings of my blood for me.  I started out feeling embarrassed by what she could tell.  Now I am just mad.  It’s like a game: I have this junk in my blood and I want it gone, and the best way to clean it up is through nutrition.
• This same friend said that for my blood type, I should be a vegetarian.  That scares the crap out of me because there is nothing I dislike eating more than vegetables.  Going localvore means learning to love and embrace them.
• Chef Monica Pope did a cooking demonstration at the Fourth of July party here in Houston, and let me tell you, she is inspiring.  Check out her website; she offers free classes on Saturdays and I will go soon.

I started the day off at the Urban Harvest farmer’s market on Richmond, then headed to the Houston Dairy Maids shop for cheese and butter, then finished off the morning at Revival Market in the Heights.  More on those experiences later, but let me just say I can’t wait to go again next week.

This may be a tough journey for me; I’m still concerned about the cost (I love me some protein, and fresh meats looked to be a lot more expensive where I looked today) and I hope I can withstand the peer pressure of not doing the right thing, but like I said, the benefits sure look good.

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There are some tools that I just cannot live without; my biggest gripe with these tools that there are several of them, and I really want them all to be integrated.  Amazon just took a giant leap forward in this realm for me, one step closer to getting everything where I want it.

See, it’s all about the cloud and your access to it.

Currently, I use iTunes to play music (because I am a heavy iPhone/iPad user).  I use Dropbox to sync my files amongst all my computers (but it’s expensive to use for much, so I use the low level, free version).  I use Google Docs to write documents/spreadsheets (although I hate the word processor interface, and their spreadsheet is missing tons of functionality that I use all the time at work).  I also subscribe to me.com to keep my mac hardware all synced up.

Today, Amazon announced their cloud drive and cloud player services.  Basically, you get 5 gigs of storage space for free for anything you want to store.  If you buy an mp3 album from their store, you’ll get bumped up to the 20 gig level for free.  After that, it’s a dollar per year per gig of storage.  So let’s look at my usage of tools in light of Amazon’s announcement.

• Dropbox for storage: Currently free for me for 2 gigs of storage, so I have to be selective on what I store there.  If I want 50 gigs?  Yeah, that’s 120 bucks a year.  With Amazon?  20 gigs for free, and $50 for 50 gigs per year.  That’s a no brainer for me price-wise.  Will I still use Dropbox?  Yes, because Amazon is missing one very key feature for me: Dropbox becomes part of my file system, so I can read/write to it from all of my computers like I can any other file without having to use a special application to do so.  But any files of significant size?  Yeah, those are going to Amazon.  Added bonus?  I am ditching my 37Signals backpack account.  I only had important documents stored there anyways.  As soon as Amazon has a file system add on, I am closing my Dropbox account.
• Google Docs: I used Google Docs mostly because it was a way of having all my documents searchable in one place and it doesn’t matter if I am on my work PC or my Mac, the word processor and spreadsheet app is the same.  Amazon gets me half way there, I can store all my documents, but Google search still dominates, and I am still left to use different tools for editing on different machines.  I will continue to use Google Docs.  For now.  It wouldn’t surprise me, however, if Amazon soon has a tool to make editing of your online documents possible.
• Music via iTunes: This is where Amazon *almost* has me sold.  The idea that I could free up TONS of space on my computer at home (around 40 gigs in music alone…there are also movies out there) just gets me excited.  But the fact that I cannot listen on my iPhone/iPad?  That’s not cool.  I can’t stream that to my Roku?  Yeah, that’s not cool either.  As soon as I can integrate that music with my iDevices and stream them to my TV at home?  Yeah, I will probably ditch iTunes altogether.  Apple, do you hear that?  Better hurry it up with your cloud solutions.
• Finally, me.com.  The only reason I have this is to sync all my mac software.  And I may be able to deal with just the google contacts/calendar integration enough to dump me.com.  I’ll give it another year, but if Amazon/Google really build up these offerings, you can kiss my subscription to me.com goodbye as well.

So to me the Amazon is exciting news in the right direction, and it gets me excited.  It’s very close to a solution that I could really use, it just needs a few more hooks into my operating systems, a little more connection into my devices and a few more features, and I will be able to consolidate what I use and how I keep important things safe.

Related articles

• Amazon Cloud Player Doesn’t Work On iOS – But It’s Not A Flash Issue (macstories.net)
• Amazon launches ‘cloud locker’ music service (tuaw.com)
• Amazon launches cloud storage, music service (macworld.com)

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If our government could really be held responsible for managing money (and yeah, I know it would take a lot of overhaul), but if it could, would you be willing to pay money each month to help bring the national debt down?
You know, when we talk about figures regarding the national debt, we always look at big scary numbers.  For example, the national debt is right now at 14 trillion dollars.  When I look at my Discover bill, I get overwhelmed, when I see 14 trillion dollars, I just want to drink.

But considering there are just over 300 million people in the US, that works out to around $45,000/person.
Now I know a lot of people would never be able to pay off a $45,000 debt, but I know a lot of people how could, without blinking, pay even more towards that.

So what if, for the good of our country, there were a way that you could voluntarily pay towards your portion of the debt?

Here is Texas, our schools are at risk because we can’t fund them (and they are trying to convince our more expensive “seasoned” teachers to leave, so the cheaper teachers with less experience can help make up some of the deficit), roads need to be repaired, people are going hungry, cities are falling apart, crime is rampant, health care is a mess and I could go on and on.

And we expect our government to take care of all of this while still trying to pay off a huge debt.

Now I know this is assuming a lot, it’s assuming that if we step in and say, “hey over the next 10 years, I am going to pay XXX amount to pay down this debt,” that the government is going to say, “Ok, great, we’ll start being more responsible.”  It means that we will need to step in more, start being more than just an arms length away from politics.  We would need to shake things up and really get some financial people in there who are going to take a hard look at the fiscal situation of our country, start running it like a business, and start getting that down.

So what do you think?  If we started this movement, would you join in?

Related articles

• Visualizing the National Debt (adask.wordpress.com)
• National Debt Tops $14 Trillion … Increased 60% Under Speaker Pelosi (pumabydesign001.wordpress.com)

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On my way into work today I was on the phone with my friend Angela and we were talking about confidence.  She noticed that one of our mutual friends appears to have lost his.

Funny thing, confidence.

Is it really possible to lose confidence?  I’m not so sure that once you have it, that it can really be lost.  I think what could have happened is a change in forced arrogance.

Take this example: someone goes to college and decides to “rebel” from society, as many in college are want to do, and chooses to dye their hair blue and stand out.  Are they confident?  No, but many people may see them that way because they are noticed for something; they stand out in the crowd.  This new, blue-haired person may walk around like they own the campus, try things they would never have tried before or given off an air of “I am so confident, I don’t care what anyone thinks.”

In many cases, however, it’s not true confidence.  It’s forced.  Take that same person a year later, remove the blue hair and add brown.

Now they blend in and now is when we start to see the difference between confidence and what I like to think of as forced arrogance.  Once someone removes the thing that made them stand out, if they aren’t truly confident, they will lose their arrogance; their perceived confidence.  The ones who always had confidence?  They will continue to stand out; their confidence will continue to shine.

So take a moment and think about your “confidence,” are you really confident, or does it come from a place of forced arrogance?  Confidence is something we all need, but make sure its coming from the right place.

I am a huge fan of making sure that you take time every day to do something that you love.  My mom always said that if there was something you wanted to do, do it today; you may not be able to do it tomorrow.  This is advice I give to everyone.

The phrase, “make time to stop and smell the roses” always meant, to me, what my mom always said.  That I needed to make sure to do “me” things.  Recently, however, I have seen a different side of the roses coin.

Ever met one of those people who sometimes seems they aren’t paying attention to you at all?  I am one of those people.  I am always in my own head, thinking about all kinds of things, and sometimes I appear to not really be with the people I am around.  As much as I want that to not be true, it really is.  As much as I would love to say I really carefully pay attention to everything everyone says, I just don’t; my mind is usually at least partially somewhere else.

So last week I challenged myself.  I was going to become more observant to my surroundings.  I decided that every day, I would observe something new about my environment.  On my first day, I noticed the flowers in my neighborhood.  I’ve lived there over a year, and never noticed there were flowers not 2o feet from my front door.  I was stunned.

Since then, I have noticed new places to shop, new people that live around me, new places to eat.  I have met new friends, taken more walks, and breathed more deeply.  And you know what?

I am happier.

So take some time and take on this challenge yourself.  If you are going to stop and smell the roses, make sure you know where they are first.

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There has been a lot of talk around the web about people cutting the cord (or ditching cable/satellite).  I didn’t set out to do that, but effectively that’s what’s happened.  Here’s how it went down:

Lost was one of my favorite TV shows, and for a while there I was addicted to it.  When it wasn’t on, I had to find other addictions with which to replace it.  The result?  A crazy bad addiction to TV.  I had DIRECTV with TiVo, and ended up watching way too much TV and not getting any of my own, personal things done.

I decided to take a year off from TV.

And I ended up going a year and a half away from it.  I got lots of projects accomplished.  Got promoted (twice), got a new job, read a ton of books, made lots of new friends, and developed a much richer social life.

Then I bought a Blu-Ray DVD player, and discovered the amazing world of streaming Netflix.  Seriously.  It changed my life.  For the first time ever, I felt totally in control of what I watched and when.  Where I used to be bound by time constraints or the space on my TiVo, I now could watching anything I wanted, any time I wanted, without any problems.

Now I have a Roku box, a subscription to Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime, and I can’t think of anything I can’t watch.  Although Hulu is the piss poorest of the streaming solutions (and makes me feel like I am time bound more than I was with TiVo), the combination of all of these things gives me control and flexibility that I didn’t have before.

And I love it.

I am still social, I still get things done, but I can still watch programming.  When I lost the time constraint, I gained the freedom I didn’t have before.  Clearly it was that time constraint that kept me from being able to get things for myself done.

This year, I think, will be an interesting one for streaming content.  Content providers are going to have to rethink their strategy for making money, and are going to have to start moving with consumers.  And Hulu needs to take a stand and make this happen sooner.  More on that later.

Anyways, if you’re looking for more time in your life and looking to cut some costs, I highly recommend the roku box and subscriptions to netflix, amazon prime and hulu.

I haven’t updated this site in quite some time, mostly due to time constraints.  I took a job at a startup company, and it’s been quite the ride.  Things are really starting to come together, and breathing room is becoming easier to find, so hopefully the posts will start coming more quickly.

At my new company, I have now had a few different roles; I started out as the Pre-Sales Manager, then was moved to Managing Consultant, then Manager of Consulting Services and most recently added Customer Support Manager to my Consulting Services Manager role.  With each of these changes came new things to learn and new things for me to think about and observe in real life.  You see, I am one of those people who believes that you can learn and apply what you see around you to your daily job.  When you can relate what you see and experience outside the office to what you do inside the office, then you greatly expand your opportunities.

Although I have performed application support in the past, I am more usually the consumer of support and have never had to think much about what made good support, only that I knew when I had received it and when I had not.  With the new support management addition to my role here, I have started to think about what it is that makes good support good, and what makes bad support bad; I need an outlet for those thoughts, so I think I will share them here.

To kick things off, how do you define amazing customer support?

• But never fear, if I pay them another 200 bucks, I can get signal through my own internet. nice one #att #
• #ATT to me: Sorry you can't get signal in your home. We don't guarantee that. Service is getting worse because people are moving to us. #

• For that price, I can drop you #att and go with #verizon who has no signal issues at all. Glad you work hard to keep your customers. #
• So the service in my apartment complex keeps getting worse. ATT says to spend 199 to boost the signal. Super fail #att #