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Mega Money

If you want some of my future wealth, you should ask now.

I don’t want to be one of those people who wins the lottery and all of a sudden has a bunch of new friends and “cousins” looking for a piece of the pie. Your request will be denied.

I mention this now because I am about to take part in my first and last attempt at amassing mass fortune with absolutely no effort.

A few months ago, AV and I were talking about various entrepreneurial ventures for which we had ideas but no funding. I may have suggested helpful things like robbing banks or starting a pyramid scheme, but she had a better idea: “We’re playing Mega Millions.”

Of course, if you’re going to play the lottery, you need a plan. We have a few simple rules for our attempt. First, we’re making one try — no continually chasing long odds for us (though we later amended that to each one of us buying tickets once, so two total attempts). Second, we decided to play only when the jackpot got above $75 million. Friday’s drawing is for a mere $312 million.

And then there are the numbers.

We decided since we are only playing one time, we could go ahead and come up with two sets of numbers. They include things like our ages, her lucky number, a lucky number she picked for me, part of my parents’ garage code and the season number from the Simpsons DVD set I was watching at the time.

Our magic formula is secret

So here’s the deal. On the extremely improbably chance we win on Friday (or Tuesday), you better get in your funding request now.

One in 175 million odds don’t come around every day.

March 24, 2011 life plans Uncategorized
And You May Ask Yourself, How Did I Get Here?

If you have been reading for a while, you may know this blog started on MySpace — which I’m told at least one person still uses — before moving to its current location.

This set of posts dates back to mid-2005, but really the groundwork goes back a bit further to some things many of you don’t know about.

Most writers have a distinct style you can pick out if you read enough of their stuff, and what you might call my “voice” really started during my junior year of college when I took over writing the weekly sports column in our school newspaper. It was a space where I could write about pretty much whatever I wanted, and experiment with different ways of breaking rules English teachers had drilled into my head.

Two years of that column produced some of what you might expect, and some slightly different stuff.

But I guess we can actually take one more step back, to my freshman year of college. That’s when I started my first website on GeoCities (which I’m sure nobody still uses). It was called The Ert Movement, and basically sprang from the idea that if something can be inert, why can’t the opposite be ert? The overall content is, admittedly, a bit ridiculous, but it was another place where I could experiment with a different writing style and see what this whole Internet thing was about.

The Ert site eventually became a “real” website when my brother and I bought a domain and started using a web hosting service.

Later, I used the same host to store most of the pictures you see here on the blog. Sorry to anyone who was looking through the archives in the past few weeks — we changed hosts and the pictures were down for a little while. But we’re back, so no more blank boxes.

The Ert site, which is still up for those who want some interesting reading, has a section called “Journals.” The posts are short, sometimes crazy, and a few of the later ones are actually represented here as well. Towards the end of actually updating the site, I got really lazy and just had my brother post some of the latest blog entries so we had something “fresh.”

But if you read some of the journals, I think you can see the very beginnings of what has evolved here. Here are a few quick favorites:

Soda cans + college kids + hot glue = masterpiece

Non-power windows confuse a nice young woman

In graduate school, I had to make a personal website for an online journalism class. The main part of the exercise was posting a personal story, which in my case was about my grandmother who had died a few months earlier. I later added a longer story — one of my better ones — about a family at our church who lost their mother to brain cancer, which I had written for a college feature writing class. The site also has a section of quick stories I wrote during a trip into Washington, D.C., one day that involved picking out a person I saw and making up their story.

So add up all those things, plus newspaper and magazine articles, and the countless TV/radio/web news scripts I have written professionally, and here we are.

Hopefully a few people have enjoyed reading.

March 24, 2011 ert Nana Uncategorized writing
Kids These Days

I fear for our future.

That’s not based on any 2012 apocalyptic scenarios or the coming pollen season, but rather what I have observed with today’s youth.

I posted a pair of stories related to this topic a few years ago — one about a kid who failed at using a rolling backpack and one I saw eating grass in a high horse-traffic area.

Today, I saw another disturbing sight while driving home from work.

On a two-lane road, I came up to a line of cars that had stopped for a school bus. I looked to the left of the bus just in time to see a kid emerge from inside a van parked at the top of a driveway and run onto the bus. As the bus pulled away, the van drove down the driveway back to the house about 200 feet away.

I drove on, and my sleep-deprived brain slowly started to put the situation together. A parent had loaded their child into a van, driven them to the top of their driveway 200 feet away and waited there for the bus to come.

Have kids become that soft? They can’t walk to a bus stop 200 feet away and wait outside in 50-degree weather?

My elementary school was almost a mile from my house, and I walked to and from school all the time. Sometimes I rode my bike…while carrying a violin case. The weather didn’t matter.

Of course, maybe that just makes me one of those geezers talking about going five miles through knee-deep snow uphill both ways.

March 17, 2011 kids Uncategorized
What Friends Are For

Don’t say I never did anything for you.

I posted a few weeks ago about my aversion to shaving, but also my bigger dislike of the effects of not shaving. Of course, your comments here, on Facebook and Twitter were all in favor of me growing a beard anyway.

Thanks.

So in the spirit of peer pressure I skipped shaving for 10 solid days, and ended up with this:

Excuse that it looks like I have been up all night, because, well, I had been. I took this picture as soon as I got home from work, and promptly got to removing what felt like a small woodland creature slowly taking residence on my face. I think if I had waited another day I would have been required to give it a name.

The experience was just as I had remembered the last time I decided to let the beard grow. At the end I thought, “Why did I do this?”

And that’s exactly what I will think next time.

March 11, 2011 beard Uncategorized
Brave New World

Whenever I go to a bookstore I inevitably walk past a few books I’ve looked at a dozen times but never brought home.

I even think to myself, “I’ve looked at this a dozen times, I should probably just go ahead and read it.” And then I put it down, walk away and get something else.

I am happy to report that Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” will no longer be one of those books.

If you’re not familiar, “Brave New World” is in the same vein as “1984” and “Fahrenheit 451” — stories that see a future world controlled to an exceptional degree by a government. In my post about “Fahrenheit 451” I mentioned that author Ray Bradbury explained “1984” as author George Orwell tackling the implications of governmental control while he deals with the societal fallout.

Bradbury writes about a government that bans books in order to deny its people information. Orwell’s government changes the information to suit its present needs. Huxley’s government manipulates its people from birth such that it is unnecessary to worry about history. The past is banned and irrelevant, pushed aside for a world of newness and consumption.

I’m always a fan of editions that include extra notes about the story or the author. They help put things in context of the time (“Brave New World” was first published in 1932) and often include primary sources from the author.

My copy of this book has a letter Huxley wrote to Orwell in October 1949, a few months after “1984” was published. Huxley thanks Orwell for sending him a copy of the book, then spends the entire letter explaining how Orwell’s version of a controlling future government is “unlikely.” He sees his story as an evolution of the Big Brother regime.

“I feel that the nightmare of 1984 is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that world I imagined in Brave New World.”

The letter comes off almost condescending and mean-spirited, but Huxley at least ends on a positive note:

“Of course, there may be a large scale biological and atomic war–in which case we shall have nightmares of other and scarcely imaginable kinds.”

In Huxley’s world, children are manufactured through a highly efficient process that creates distinct classes with specific characteristics. The one thing the vast majority of people share is an unquestioning adherence to all of the mantras that have been systematically drilled into their heads since birth.

The system creates a world where dissent doesn’t have to be squelched — it’s non-existent. Everyone has a job perfectly fitted to their abilities and is happy in the simplicity of having everything they believe they want.

The leader explains, “They’re so conditioned that they practically can’t help behaving as they ought to behave.”

There’s no need for Orwell’s Thought Police when the citizens instinctively do what is desired of them.

When reading these “futuristic” books written long in our past, it’s hard not to think about what the author may have gotten right. One tool of social engineering the “Brave New World” government uses is soma, a hallucinogenic drug that will turn any frown upside down. People who feel the least bit of anxiety, fear or sadness say one of the soma-related slogans to themselves as if they instinctively know the drug will solve their problem:

“Half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon…”

Many of the workers get a daily ration as soon as their shift is over. Huxley describes the scene of one group waiting in line for their soma, and the crusading figure who attempts to disrupt the ritual and break the government’s spell.

I couldn’t help but compare them to a Black Friday crowd waiting for a store to open. The ritual, the thing they need, will be theirs if they wait in this line. As long as everything goes according to plan, everyone is calm and continues to be happy.

At the soma line, the character muscles his way to the front. He grabs the daily ration and throws it on the ground. All hell breaks loose.

At Wal-Mart, flatscreen TVs are 70 percent off. The minutes count down as the store prepares to open. The crowd slowly pushes towards the door in anticipation. An employee unlocks one door and swings it open. The front of the line walks in calmy, or rather tries to. The people in the back want those TVs — need them. They surge. In our world, unlike Huxley’s, there’s no police force on hand to spray a calming gas on the crowd.

Nah, that could never happen.

March 5, 2011 books Uncategorized
Yeah, There’s an App for That

I love technology, but things may be getting a bit out of hand.

A lot of video games have advertisements designed into them — billboards you drive past, some kind of statistic brought to you by Company X or the signs at a sports arena.

It used to be that these were completely made up, generic products that just helped to give the scenes a little more feel of reality. You might see Joe’s car repair, King brand hot dogs or A-1 Auto Insurance.

But now, games have real ads, and because the systems can connect to the Internet, those ads can regularly change.

Take the EA Sports hockey game I have for the Playstation 3. I grabbed a picture of the boards this morning as an example:

That’s a T-mobile ad, and yes if you had taken the time to pause the game and type in the link the website does exist.

But that’s nothing.

A new(ish) tool in advertising are these things called QR codes, which are square bar codes you can scan with your smartphone. All you need is a simple app, scan the code, and it will take you to a website for whatever product or company.

So imagine my suprise when I was playing the hockey game and saw one of the QR codes in a Subway ad along the boards. I didn’t take a picture at the time, but I roughly recreated it:

Think about the strategy that went into this ad. Subway is banking on the fact that I will notice it, recognize what the QR code is, own a smartphone, have a bar code scanner app, and take the time to pause the game and line the screen up just right — all so I can visit the website they set up for this promotion.

(Nerd alert: The QR code I recreated will actually take you to the Subway promotion site)

That’s some incredible technology. Whether we need it is another question.

March 3, 2011 nerdness technology Uncategorized video games
Working for the Memories

Last week I posted an audio story about how my mom and her family communicated with each other by tape when my grandfather was deployed in Vietnam.

I mentioned the incalculable hours that in some way went into making that post and said I would explain some of the background work you didn’t see.

In 2009 I was working part time for a company that among other things converted all kinds of old media to digital. That included things like 35mm photo slides, 8mm movie film, reel-to-reel audio tapes, records, VHS tapes and cassette tapes.

Sitting in my parents’ basement were a box of reel-to-reel tapes, a few movie reels, a film projector and a reel-to-reel player. Since I learned how to use that older equipment, I set to trying to digitize my grandparents’ old stuff.

I started with the audio tapes:

Which involved this machine:

A few years earlier, my younger brother and I had tried to use the machine, but couldn’t quite figure it out. Turns out it was broken anyway. After opening it up, and a quick (lucky) find on eBay, I had a replacement belt for one of the motors and a working machine.

The transfer process can sometimes be a bit convoluted. In this case, it involved running an audio cable from the tape player to my camcorder, which was in turn connected to my computer. Slightly complicated, but it worked.

Things went well for a few tapes. For being as old as they are, they sound remarkably well.

Then while I was playing a tape, a loud BANG and a puff of white smoke came from inside the machine. I quickly unplugged it, recovered from a minor heart attack, and found that it had just blown a capacitor. I had to wait a few days for the new $0.15 modern capacitor to arrive, but it was pretty easy to solder in place and finish the recording process.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when I listened the audio files from each tape on my computer. Using Adobe Premiere editing software, I was able to make little clips of each section that sounded like something I might use in the story.

I just happened to be going to dinner with my parents, and brought along a (very cheap) microphone and recorder on the off chance my mom was willing to sit down for an interview. I was kind of surprised that she immediately said yes, and her insight I think added a lot to the story I was already forming in my head.

The next day I started writing the script, but stopped after about a page. What I had wasn’t terrible, but I just wasn’t happy with the direction it was going. Mainly the issue was that I did a lot more of the setup before you ever heard any of the old audio, which is really the whole story.

I stepped away for a day, and on the Metro ride into work I brought along a notebook and started over. It took a second night of writing on the subway, but I think the result was much better the second time around.

The next step was recording my audio. Without access to a recording studio, I opted for the next best location — the closet in my bedroom. With the Flashlight app on my cellphone lighting the way, I was able to record my track and feed the audio into my computer.

From there, it was just a matter of using the editing program to splice together my audio, the interview with my mom and those small clips I had pulled from the original audio.

The post last week included two pictures from the era. Those are part of more than 1,700 of my grandparents’ 35mm slides that I scanned in 2009. Just like the audio tapes, the pictures are things I had never seen and provide a look into what their lives were like back then.

They even help connect to our family today. In some of the pictures you can see a striking resemblance between my mom and aunt and some of their kids. The backgrounds of the photos inside their various houses are interesting too. They show a lot of the artwork and decorations they had that were the treasured keepsakes in their house when we packed it up five years ago.

Many of those things are in our homes today. For example, check out the wall behind my grandmother in this picture:

As I type this, I can actually reach out to my left and touch one of those scrolls, which are hanging in my bedroom.

Here’s a bonus piece of audio (50 seconds) from the tapes that didn’t make the original story, with my grandfather talking about where he got the scrolls:

So, lots of overall work, but definitely worth experiencing those memories.

February 25, 2011 audio family Nana Poppop technology Uncategorized
To Beard or Not to Beard

I don’t hate many things in this world, but shaving is one of them.

Unfortunately, so is the result of not shaving.

I can go about three days without shaving and be perfectly comfortable, and most weeks that’s what I do. On the third day, I even start to think crazy things like, “You know, this isn’t so bad. I could rock this.”

The Day 3 look usually gets mixed reviews. Judge for yourself:

The problem comes on the fourth day. A miniscule amount of growth happens, but it’s just enough to become uncomfortable and make people question if I have bathed recently.

So on Day 4, I go through the routine of returning to normal society, knowing in a few days I’ll just have to go through the same process all over again.

If anyone happens to travel into the future anytime soon and sees some sort of auto-shaving robot, please pick one up and bring it back for me. Thanks.

And if you’re not sure about the beard yet, I’ll share this picture from a few years ago. I believe it was taken during a period when I would let the facial hair go a few extra days longer than normal, but put some effort into cleaning up the look a little:

February 23, 2011 beard Uncategorized
Glass Mostly Full

When someone presents you with a good news/bad news situation, I definitely advocate taking the bad news first and ending on a good note.

So I won’t even give you the option.

I wrote a few weeks ago about a writing project I’m working on in a quasi-partnership with my friend AV. We both had projects that had been set aside last year and just needed a little push in order to get going again. We planned on setting benchmarks to make sure we were progressing towards a goal of being done this summer.

The bad news today is that AV has dropped her writing project, because, well, she’s a slacker.

Actually that’s not true at all. She actually had too much going on, and instead of giving a half effort on three projects (the math somehow works out on that) she is rightfully pouring all of her energy into one of them.

The good news is that although we are working on vastly different projects, the spirit of collaboration and pushing each other is the same. You’re still going to eventually see two fantastic things.

I can’t share what she’s doing just yet, but we have made a lot of progress on both projects in the past few days and will let you know about them as soon as we’re ready. Maybe tune in for something April 1…just saying.

February 22, 2011 Uncategorized writing
Voices From the Past

Some of these posts, I admit, take really no forethought and about three minutes to write.

This one doesn’t have much text, but I assure you I couldn’t begin to count how many hours went into it.

It’s a radio story — think “This American Life” — so you’ll need about 13.5 minutes and either some speakers or headphones.

It might also help to have a picture of the people involved so you can have something to look at while you listen:

Enjoy.

Next time, a little about how all of this came together. Stay tuned.

February 17, 2011 audio family Nana Poppop Uncategorized