Country music and Camping? I know many camping fans who would beg to differ.

An 8:35 departure would give me a full day with the client who leaves by 5:00 pm every day. Such a late departure also gave me a little time to explore Milwaukee if only by car. Some time during the day, United Airlines sent me a text message confirming my flight. I visually scanned for the words “on time” and did not read the rest of the message. Of course, it had my correct departure time—6:35 CST.

At 5:00 I leisurely left the client site in Menomenonee Falls and drove due east as far as I could. I jogged south until I found an eastbound through street and then headed east again. I continued this way until I finally found Lake Michigan just a bit north of downtown Milwaukee. Along the way, most of the landscape was urban and often poor. On the “Ideas Network” (Wisconsin Public Radio) they had a show about the best places to live in America. The local host put a Wisconsin spin on it and listeners called in to chime in about how great/crappy their city was. If only I had a few slices of cheese and some crackers, I might have qualified as a Wisconsin citizen at that moment.

View Milwaukee trip in a larger map

Lake Michigan was large. Larger than I expected—I couldn’t see the other side. I inadvertently took a wrong turn onto the Lake Freeway and had a brief tour of Milwaukee Bay before I turned around and took another stab at downtown Milwaukee. I had set my iPhone to take me to the old Pabst Brewery but using Maps on the iPhone for navigation is not as ideal as a standalone GPS. The main shortcoming is that Maps will not automatically compensate for a wrong turn and adjust the course that it chose earlier. Instead you have to tell it to remap the course from your current location and that operation should definitely NOT be done while driving. I’ve also grown very dependent on Portland’s “Next Intersection” signage so I found myself turning around and remapping several times during my week in Wisconsin. Eventually, I found my way to downtown and the famed but now decrepit Pabst Brewery.

Noticing that I was soon approaching my goal of getting to the airport two hours prior to departure, I set my course for General Mitchell International Airport. Twice along the way I missed a turn but I did not panic since I had given myself so much leeway. At approximately 7:00 pm I attempted to checkin at a kiosk for the regional airline that was to take me to San Francisco but it could not find my record locator. Curious, I pulled out my printed itinerary to get the flight number. My heart sank when I finally read my actual departure time. My plane had left just 20 minutes before.

I can’t begin to describe what ensued but if I did I would surely have to use words like “panic” and “meltdown”. Having never missed a flight in my life, I had no idea what my next action should be. I also knew that there would be a financial penalty to be paid and had already started to imagine how much that could be and how I would explain it to my superiors. Or if I would have to pay it myself. Furthermore, United, my main carrier for this trip, had closed down operations for the night and didn’t even have anybody at their luggage office. I called Bill, my old boss at EFI, who has given me great advice in the past in all matters EFI corporate. Unfortunately, I had to leave voice mail. Sometime after that I remembered an acquaintance from college who had left a voice mail earlier in the week. I sent him a message on Facebook that said I was going to be in town another night if he wanted to get together.

I wandered back upstairs to find a comfortable chair and gather my thoughts. I found a very helpful lady at the traveler’s information desk who listened to my story and told me about the “stranded traveler” discount that she could get for me at a local hotel. Already I had begun to contemplate the prospect of sleeping overnight at the airport so this was a relief. It wasn’t long before Bill called and reassured me that these kinds of things did happen and that I could put it on my expense report. That was a huge relief and I had finally calmed down enough to think clearly. I got the stranded traveler voucher from the information desk and was soon aboard the shuttle to the hotel.

After I got into my room, I called United and arranged a flight the next day. Departure from MKE was 4:00 and my connecting flight was out of Chicago. Having settled that, I plugged in my laptop and went to Google Calendar, which I had begun to suspect had screwed me. I took a partial screenshot of the calendar display from my laptop:

Aha! I had correctly entered the time! A few seconds later I pulled up Google Calendar on my iPhone and took a screenshot of the day’s agenda. That is the screenshot that appears at the top of this article.

As I fumed over Google’s bug, my college buddy called and asked if I’d like to go out for a few drinks. My reply could not have been more affirmative and he said he’d be over in 15 minutes. We drank until closing time and I woke up with a slight hangover, but we had a great time. We didn’t know each other that well when we were at Wartburg but we graduated the same year and found that we have had similar experiences in our lives.

The next day went smoothly. I arrived 4 hours prior to my flight (because hotel checkout was noon) and amused myself with my iPad. I had a little more than enough time to change planes in Chicago and my flight landed in Portland ahead of schedule. My kittens were all glad to see me and I was glad to flop down on my own bed at the end of the day.

I am surprised that your dog is still running free and defecating on yards throughout the neighborhood. I am surprised because I know that several people have requested that you take care of the problem but still your dog still runs free.

I’ve talked with several of our neighbors and none of them is happy with the situation as it stands. I’m told that you have denied that your dog is the one depositing piles throughout the neighborhood but several people (including me) have seen him running through the neighborhood unsupervised. Moreover, I personally have witnessed him squatting on lawns. This afternoon it only took me 12 minutes with a video camera to capture him doing this.

Up until this point we have not investigated our legal and civil options for resolving this problem. Please do not make us go that far. I have faith that there will be some recourse available to us that will make your life more difficult than it is now. Let’s just stop it here and you leash your dog. Or keep him in your fenced back yard. I don’t care as long as he is not in everybody else’s yard.

In conclusion, let me just say that you likely know that your behaviour has not been acceptable. If you didn’t know that, you should now. This is what society expects.

Can you tell when WiFi stopped working on my iPhone?

At 43 years old, the question of who I am is complex. Mostly I’m a father then a husband and then a software engineer. Probably because of my small town roots, I maintain a relatively small circle of friends in the physical world. In the last few years that circle has expanded to many friends I’ve met on the internet and people with whom I have reconnected on Facebook.

My mind still tends to be ruled by logic although I think I’ve grown more empathetic/sympathetic to those ruled by emotion. I like to think that I understand the world a little better than when we were young together, but that may well be an illusion. I’m also much better at handling the hurdles and setbacks that life gives me occasionally.

The smartest (and luckiest) thing I’ve ever done is marry my wife, Tina. She provides me such a great alternate view on reality! We are dissimilar in many ways but alike in our resolve to live a good life together and raise our boys to be great young men. She’s an artist with great talent that she has applied to painting, scrapbooking, movie-making and number of other endeavors. I am jealous of her ability and don’t tell her that often enough. If you remember what an ass I could be at 16-18, you’ll not be surprised that I was not much better when I met her at 25. That she stuck with me through that time is a testament both to her loyalty and her ability to see the potential I had. We’re happier and more content with each other now than we ever have been.

I am surprised that your dog is still running free and pooping on my and Walt’s yard. You know Walt? He lives across from me and is 85+ years old. He also does not enjoy having to clean up your dog’s poop. I asked him because I wasn’t sure if it was just me. It’s not. NOBODY LIKES BEING POOPED ON.

I say “surprised” because my wife had already told you that we did not appreciate your dog pooping on our lawn. But still he runs free. It appears that you are either too dim or too insensitive to understand her request. Let me make it clear:

WE DO NOT LIKE BEING POOPED ON. Until this point we have not even investigated our legal and civil options. Please do not make us go that far. I have faith that there will be some recourse available to us that will make your life more difficult than it is now. Let’s just stop it here and you leash your dog. Or keep him in your fenced back yard. I don’t care as long as he is not in everybody else’s yard.

Also, I could not be happier that you want to go on walks with your dog. I encourage it. I also would encourage you to have evidence visible that you are prepared to clean up after your dog.

In conclusion, let me just say that you likely know that your behaviour has not been acceptable. If you didn’t know that, you should now. This is what society expects.

Last Thursday morning Tina and I got new tattoos in downtown Troutdale. I have a free touch-up which I can use in a couple of months if it starts to lighten. I may get the letters draw bolder then.

Of course, even if I write it down, it may still take a very long time before I remove it from the list simply because other tasks have a higher priority. Currently, I have a 176 tasks on my list that I think need to get done. Those are spread among my personal life, work life and volunteer life with Troop 820. 15-20 items are repeating items such as “Clean cat boxes” (weekly) or “Take glucose a second time” (daily). The bulk of the remaining tasks have been accumulating for years.

Toodledo let’s you group tasks together by assigning each to a “folder”. When you sign up for Toodledo’s free service, there are already several folders created for you but you can create your own. You can also delete any that you don’t use or change the names of the folders you do use. Over the years, I have accumulated these folders (listed alphabetically with commentary in parentheses):

• Burn (music CDs for friends and family)
• Call (as in telephone)
• Career
• Computer
• Development (the preferred term for “programming”)
• Discussion
• EFI (the name of my employer, this folder usually just contains weekly repeating tasks like “Status report”)
• Errand
• Financial
• Graham (tied for most recent addition)
• Health (added last year)
• House
• Mail
• Miscellaneous
• Newton (yes, still a couple of items remaining from the migration)
• Office
• Scouts
• Thomas (second half of the aforementioned tie)
• Writing
• Yard

A few days ago I was looking for a way to set up dependencies between tasks. For example, I might want to tell Toodledo, “Don’t show me Task B until Task A has been completed.” Unfortunately, that’s a feature that the Toodledo developers are still developing. Still, while I was poking around at areas that I don’t usually poke at, I read about a feature they call “Goals”.

Goals are sort of a secondary classification system, similar to Folders but independent. You can assign each task to a goal and then ask Toodledo to report  your success in achieving each of your goals. Success for each goal is measured by the number of completed tasks that are assigned to that goal. In addition, there are three different kinds of goals: lifelong, long term and short term. Long-term goals can contribute to a lifelong goal and short-term goals can contribute to either a lifelong goal or a long-term goal.

Seeing the usefulness of such a metric, I quickly took it upon myself to go through each of my 176 tasks and assign them a goal. I made up the goals to fit the tasks and it wasn’t long until I saw commonality and relationships. After going through the whole list of tasks, I found that I had 11 lifelong goals, 4 long-term goals and 8 short-term goals. They are as follows (again, listed alphabetically):

Lifelong Goals
• Be a good citizen
• Be a good parent
• Be kind to others
• Be organized
• Be social
• Become debt free
• Develop career
• Keep a neat house and yard
• Maintain a balanced intellectual life
• Maintain a clean and neat appearance
• Optimize life
• Stay healthy

Long-term Goals

• Be a good EFI employee
• Clean garage
• Contribute to Troop 820

Short-term Goals

• Build CD shelf to encircle the room
• Make Iowa vacation plans
• Create Troop 820 website
• Develop a plan for bike storage
• Learn PHP
• Transition data from Newton
• Transition to iPhone development

I include the Long-term and Short-term goals here in order to illustrate how one might use the different kinds of goals. However, the point of this article is about what the Lifelong goals reveal about me. After classifying every task in my life that I think is important enough to note, I may have described the credos by which I live.

I suppose there is one missing from the list. One item so integral to my sense of self that I don’t ever need to remind myself to pursue it. What is it?

Be unique

In all seriousness, though, from the day Apple publicly announced it, my feeling has been that this device could be groundbreaking with the right software. The video below demonstrates just how powerful and remarkable iPad software can be. In the video, Robert Scoble interviews DJ Rana Sobhany, who demonstrates the software she uses with two iPads to create music.

In order to get the full context, you have to watch the whole video. However, I’ve attempted to summarize below just how amazing software on the iPad can look and feel:

• 3:00: Demonstration begins for the Korg software
• 5:20: Explanation of what the Looptastic app does
• 6:10: Demonstration begins for how she puts it all together
• 6:50: Notice as she adds more music on the left iPad, she uses two fingers to drag two different things into the mix.
• 8:00: Again multiple simultaneous finger interactions with the controls.
• 15:44: Demonstration of using audio effects like the high pass filter

What I find amazing about this demo is that how obviously simple it is to use this software. When she drags things in from the musical palette, the motions she uses look completely natural and it’s obvious she doesn’t have to think about how to get where she wants.

At the beginning and end she makes the point that iPad applications are going to get better now that developers actually have iPads. The initial influx of apps were created using Apple’s software simulator that runs on a Macintosh computer. While it gives you a good idea about sizing of controls and such, there are many lessons you learn once you pick up the iPad and try to use an app. In the case of the Korg app (the first she demonstrates), it is obvious that the developers were seeking to mimic a “real” (i.e. hardware) component by having things like dial controls. Although they look cool, such controls will likely morph into other controls that are easier to control on the iPad (for example, sliders).

You can follow Rana Sobhany on Twitter or visit her website, destroythesilence.com.

If you’re not on Facebook, this is a couple of screenshots from my “feed” there. This particular person first became a “fan” of  ”Fox Business and 11 others” which included Sean Hannity, Steve Doocy and Fox News. Two minutes later they posted their message opposing the new health care reform law. Subsequent comments revealed that it’s extremely unlikely this person understands anything substantial about the debate.

Yesterday I donned gloves and shoes for trimming back some of the blackberry vines in our yard. As I put them away in our shed, it occurred to me that I regarded them in an equally utilitarian way — occasionally useful for protection but usually just an encumbrance that I don’t need.

If you don’t have flash on your device, you can view the video on YouTube with this link. Why didn’t I just embed the YouTube video? Damian Kulash, Jr., one of the guys in the band, wrote a very interesting article on a fan forum a few days ago that did an excellent job of explaining the intricacies of the music industry’s DRM machine. Today Kulash followed up with a tremendous New York Times Guest Op-Ed.

I think celebrities sometimes reach a tipping point where they will forever be boxed in by their past actions. Welcome to the club, Mel. Tom Cruise and Gary Busey are glad you’re here.