Merry Christmas 2010

I hope this finds all of my friends and family well and happy as we enter another holiday season! And, in a sure sign of the times, I'm attempting to send out holiday wishes to everyone in this new format - via my blog.

Some of us remember years when we spent hours selecting, writing, stamping and mailing holiday cards to dozens, maybe even hundreds, of close friends and family members. Heck, for some of you, that may still be true. But just as cars replaced horses, e-mail replaced carbon paper and my Kindle has replaced most of my book buying, it's now time for this blog post to replace the annual card-mailing ritual.

There's one definite advantage apparent right away: Instead of saving up all that's happened for a single one-page note, I can write when I feel like it - and you can read as you feel like it - from among my blog posts.

Interestingly, it's been a few months since I last wrote. New job, new town, new (rental) house, new chorus to sing in - all have conspired to keep me away from this blog. We just concluded the Christmas season for the Capital City Men's Chorus here in Austin with a concert last night and it was fantastic to be able to be in that environment yet again. I've sung with choruses in San Antonio, Denver, Atlanta and now Austin (along with a great amount of singing throughout high school and college), and there are few things in life that give me greater enjoyment than to add my voice to a beautiful song.

Life in Austin is settling down nicely, although I still look to the northwest, to home, to Denver. I'm lucky enough to be able to travel about once a month back home to see Bill, Gary and the gang, and it's possible that I might be able to work virtually in another six months or so. Stay tuned to see if I might get back to Denver sooner rather than later.

Austin is a fun city in a unique state. There is a wonderful "live and let live" vibe here, possibly due to the mammoth University of Texas campus, which skews the city young, bright and forward-thinking. Weather-wise, it's actually similar to Atlanta: Scorchingly hot summers, but wonderfully mild winters with nary a trace of snow to worry about. Austinites tend to make up for the lack of snow by overachieving on their Christmas lights - they are literally everywhere in every neighborhood!

Come February, I'll ramp up the job travel again - off to our many domestic call centers scattered from Arizona to Iowa to Florida, as I continue to build leadership training and revamp the new hire training. Much as I miss Noble in Atlanta, I feel that I've taken a step in the right direction by getting back west. Those of you who live in the west know what I mean - something about the ability to top a rise and see the sun as it touches the horizon, instead of being able to see only to the next group of houses or trees.

Now that Facebook and other social media have really taken root online, it's easier than ever to stay in touch and reach me - look for my FB profile, or my LinkedIn profile for those of you who are primarily business colleagues. About the only folks I know who might not be celebrating this latest holiday season is the post office - rapidly becoming the buggy whip makers of the 21st century!

Look for me online and say hello, and as we close out 2010, I wish all of you a Texas-sized holiday season with fun, food and those you love close by. Onward to 2011!

The paperless bookworm

My family knows that I bury my nose in books. Science fiction especially, along with a good dose of mystery, non-fiction history and assorted "spices." One room in my house has always been the library - lately, with four large bookcases nearly full with hundreds of hardbacks and paperbacks.

Reading has always been part of my life, since I was 3 if one believes my parents' stories. So it was with great trepidation that I observed the advent of paperless reading - first with books "online," and now with Amazon's Kindle.

It's been very difficult for me to separate from the feel, the kinesthetics - heck, the smell of the reading experience. I always thought that I would be like Sam Cogley, the fictional future attorney from classic Star Trek, that in the 23rd Century still surrounded himself with books. Books! Still the greatest technology mankind has ever invented.

And then the Kindle 3 came along. It's flat. It's thin. It holds thousands of books - it could hold my entire library if I ever chose. It has a battery that can easily last two weeks with the wireless function off.

And the reading experience? Surprisingly good, with a screen that, unlike a computer's, isn't backlit and so is actually best in bright light and full outdoor conditions. You can adjust font size, spacing between lines, and a (limited) set of font types (perhaps something for the Kindle 4).

And I've found I can get just as lost with my nose in a Kindle as I have all these years with my nose in a "tree killing" book.

Titles are usually a bit more than a paperback but less than a discount hardback - $11- $13 for a title is common. You download them via the wireless in the $139 version that I bought, or get them a bit faster via 3G connection in the $189 version - but the reading experience is exactly the same for each. I'm immersed in John Birmingham's After America, his sequel to his speculative fiction piece Without Warning. And I have selections in queue, as it were.

I'm looking forward to adding a leather cover for my Kindle - one that will allow me to stand the Kindle at an angle. I think then I'll have fully embraced this latest geegaw of the 21st Century.  Now then - can I get a road atlas on my Kindle? (My family will certainly understand that question!)

Who knew we needed to be so connected?

With the new house in Austin comes all the myriad things I must do to bring the house alive: Electric, gas, water, TV...and internet. It's still fascinating to me that the latter has existed only for about 15 years in its current state.

Without internet in the house, things get really boring really fast. I have found myself in the Highlander shuttling to a local Holiday Inn Express to poach free wifi from them twice a day, so I can get e-mail and (God help me) Facebook. Unlike my condo/townhome in Atlanta, there is no free community wifi in my neighborhood, and the neighbors here are all tech-savvy enough to have their wireless broadcasts password-protected.

I was originally going to get AT&T DSL service, but when my DISH network install collapsed in a heap of tech-speak ("We cain't run but one line in this here house!"), I added Uverse into the mix. Many days later, the AT&T customer non-service has blown one installation appointment and cannot give me any estimated time for a real install. Time Warner cable is another option for TV and internet, but if it's possible to loathe a company more than AT&T, it's any cable company.

So...I bit the bullet today and signed up for Clear WiMax internet mobile service. For about $58 a month, I received a cute little USB antenna that kind of looks like a mini satellite dish and picks up the new 4G speeds wherever it's available...and it's available at my house, all over Austin, and in numerous other cities (though curiously not Denver just yet).

The peppy college student at the Clear store set me up in less than 10 minutes, presenting me with a box about the size of two decks of cards. When home, I inserted the mini satellite dish into a USB port on my ThinkPad, and voila! Software automatically installed, the 4G service was found...and I'm downloading at speeds I have NEVER seen before. Faster than DSL and the free wifi at my previous place, by far.

I will take great pleasure in informing AT&T that they just lost the internet part of my order.

Meanwhile, my DISH network may actually be viable after all, so I might also be able to tell AT&T to go pound sand entirely.

TV isn't so much of an issue for the first couple of months, since I can pick up all the local channels in HD with a $20 antenna. But, in 2010, a house without internet is like a house without indoor plumbing. It was truly painful for the last three weeks!

Austin: Nice town, nasty real estate market

Austin's always been 2nd on my list of places to live in the US - first place reserved for Denver, of course.

However, I'm quickly learning that Austin is anywhere from blah to downright evil when it comes to real estate...as in buying a new house.

I blew into town with a goal of securing new digs as quickly as possible, and quickly ran into a set of obstacles, some of them unique to my own needs as a single guy. Austin is a land of ranch homes - one-story spread-out ramblers with huge yards. And with my travel for Sears at 50% or more, the last thing I want to deal with is a yard. If I have to spend for nice landscaping, I'd rather pay a homeowners association and own a townhome.

With my budget, unfortunately, townhomes are few and far between, especially in Austin's "sweet spot" - northwest and west of downtown. I found exactly one nice townhome community, and it's a beaut: Hillside on FM 2222. Wonderful finishes, reminiscent of my great townhouse in Denver. Sadly, prices are about $50K over my budget, and selection is almost nonexistent, as the community is fully occupied in Phase I, and Phase II is still about a year away.

Off to Steiner Ranch, sometimes known as the Orange County of Texas (strike one!), or the Highlands Ranch for those of you who know Denver. I found a home in my price range - one of those sprawling ranches (strike two!) - but almost immediately, the builder, Taylor Morrison, started reneging on promises and representations made. Can I specify the carpet going in? Yes - er, no, it's already ordered. Can I specify how the stairs come off the back deck? Of course - er, oops, we already built them. Can I use my own financing and still get $8,000 towards closing costs? Certainly - well, actually, no. Is the view towards the back going to remain open? Forever - well, that is if you count forever as 18 months, when we'll be building a bunch more homes behind you.

I was quite spoiled with my semi-custom builder in Denver - Jeff Braiman, a wonderful builder who answered every question, handled every issue no matter how small, and delivered a stellar townhome for me. Taylor Morrison? Something along the level of used car salesmen.

So I've abandoned the idea of buying a new house for now. There are simply no good options with a reasonable commute to work. Much as I wanted to avoid a double move, I'll have to once again rent for a while. My real estate agent and I are looking tomorrow.

Of course, this could be incredibly prescient of me, depending on how the economy recovers or erodes further in the next twelve months. Stay tuned.

Things I will not miss about Atlanta

It's a slow day in the office on my last day in Atlanta, and I thought I might muse about things I will miss from this town...but I quickly realized that it would be the world's shortest blog post if I did so.

Instead, I think it's far more fun to list all the things I will not miss about Atlanta as I leave for my return to the West and Austin:

• Traffic. This is quite possibly the reason that 90% of people who leave this wretched town leave. I have driven in bumper-to-bumper traffic in LA, Houston, Chicago and even New York City. They are rural excursions compared to Atlanta. Routinely, it takes 60 minutes to travel five miles in this town. At 1 PM. On a Sunday. You simply can't get "there" from "here." It has choked this town and creates daily stress that I will blissfully leave behind for Austin. They complain about the traffic in Austin, of course. They haven't a clue how bad it can be.
• Sidewalks. Or rather, the complete lack of them in Atlanta. The town pulls a double whammy on people - it conveniently avoids sidewalks on most major streets, and when they are present, they are ripped up, too narrow, made of 17 different surfaces, or otherwise impassable by pedestrians; and because the lack of sidewalks forces too many people to drive, well...see point 1.
• Unhealthy people. Atlanta must be #1 in this category nationwide. I have never seen more waddlers - more 400-pound behemoths. Amazingly, some of these people smoke. And have diabetes. I wouldn't be surprised if a few hundred of them didn't suddenly collapse on a single day, similar to whales washing up on shore. Given that there are approximately 200 fast food restaurants per square mile in this town, I really can't blame them too much.
• Veneer hospitality. As a friend of mine has pointed out, Atlanta hospitality is a mile wide and an inch deep. It was always ironic for me to drive on the "Hospitality Highway" and observe a driver laying on his horn for a good 30 seconds because someone had the utter gall to try to merge into his lane.

I could write more, but that's sufficient catharsis for me. Besides, I'm leaving to go to Austin - a town that has a sterling reputation, lots of choices for eating (healthy!) and socializing...and gets me back to the West, where my soul longs to live. I'm on my way this weekend. Can't wait.

Singles

Lately I've been enjoying Pandora, an online "radio station" music streaming service that does its best to play only music you like, based on how you seed the station with artists and songs that you like. It's not flawless and the service likes to overemphasize certain artists (how many Coldplay songs are there, anyway?), but it is free and it does allow me to hone in on music in my favorite format: the single.

Since I was a kid saving up my allowance to riffle through the 45's at Mason's in Phillipsburg, I have always avoided the albums and preferred to consume my music one great song at a time. I honestly think that's how most people would prefer to collect music if they have a preference, and in the very early days of recorded music, that's how people got it.

Unfortunately, music became a business somewhere along the way, and savvy marketers realized that they could "package" a bunch of songs by an artist into an "album" of music, with perhaps one or two good selections and a whole bunch of filler. The LP record became the music distribution method of choice in the 1950s, primarily because it simply had better profit margins for the burgeoning music industry.

Exactly one popular group ever had the talent to be able to consistently create an album's worth of excellent music at a time: The Beatles. For almost everyone else, albums were essentially excuses to promote and gain more income for a popular single song.

I never bought into this hype. While my friends were oohing and aahing over album cover art, I always headed for the 45's. I'm sure this was partially influenced by my lucky teenage years being a DJ at KKAN, but still.

I wanted my favorite music to have variety, and while I might accumulate multiple singles from some artists (Daryl Hall and John Oates; Heart; The Eagles; KC and the Sunshine Band!) I always had my eye out for the new, interesting, unique single. I collected a lot of one-hit wonders.

Vinyl moved to CD, and the CD Single was an especially rare species. In the 1980s and 1990s, the record companies did everything they could to force the public to buy by the album instead of by the single. I have about 900 vinyl 45s but only about 200 CD singles in my collection; the last one was purchased about 1999 or so as I recall. The music industry was getting fat and happy, but leaving a huge swath of the public frustrated.

Then of course, along came Napster and the concept of downloading music, by the entire album if you so chose, but oh so especially by the single song. The music industry responded by simultaneously jacking up the price of album CDs to $15 or more...and ruthlessly pursuing people who might have had the audacity to download a single song, because there was no other way to get it.

iTunes and Amazon have successfully collapsed the "greed" model. Today, I can listen to Pandora, and when I hear something interesting and special, I can go right to Amazon and pick up the single song for as low as 79 cents. My music buying is re-invigorated. From 2001-2007, I might have added 10 songs a year to my collection. These days, I'm back up to 50 or 75 a year. All because I can once again peruse the virtual racks at the 21st century music stores and get my music the way I like. One great song at a time.

My 900 vinyl 45's? They're all sealed in protective bags, 25 at a time, awaiting the day when they might be valued and wanted by someone who wants to hear music that was recorded and played back without benefit of any computer or internet whatsoever.

If I ever sell them, I'll likely put them up for auction on eBay or its future cousin. One song at a time.

Oh, and: Here are a few singles I'm listening to this month.

"Hand Me Down" by Jeff Larson
"Kandi" by One EskimO
"I'd Rather Be With You" by Joshua Radin
"Downtown II" by Fancey
"Right Where I Belong" by Beggar's Caravan
"Sinking Wishes" by Matthew Perryman Jones

...I guess I'm still into one-hit wonders.

Memphis Belle and Commando Chief

For $3 in a bargain bin, I was able to pick up a DVD copy of Memphis Belle, the 1990 homage to the B-17 Flying Fortress and all who flew that aircraft over the skies of Europe during World War II.

Dad was one of those airmen. He's in the standing row, last one on the right, in this picture.

Tom knows a bit more of the story than I do, but in 1944 and 1945, Dad flew in the B-17 over Europe, based out of England. I seem to remember that he was a belly gunner and a navigator or bombardier; Tom probably knows something closer to the truth. While Dad was a relatively small man at the time (he was 23 then), the Memphis Belle movie indicates that one had to be almost elfish to fit in the small bubble of the "ball turret."

In watching the movie for the first time in many years, I was struck again by the parallels to today's Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. In all these cases, we have taken kids off the farm, away from their families, and forced them to grow up in severely important ways in a severely restricted time frame. I think about what Dad must have felt at 30,000 feet in what was far from today's modern airliner - a literal rattletrap that wasn't pressurized and kept its men alive only via cranky oxygen masks that could freeze up in an instant. Then, of course, there was the flak, and the German Luftwaffe determined to blow him from the sky.

As far as I know, Dad survived with no battle wounds and little damage to the planes he flew. (Commando Chief seems to have been his primary plane, though we also have pictures of Dingleberry and Our Baby.) Indeed, he told one story of a return to England that was diverted because of weather over his base - to Ireland - and how he convinced his crew to fake a problem with the plane to keep the gang on "instant leave" in Ireland for a week!

With Dad dying in 1970, we never got the chance to hear more of his "war stories" - and as many know, WWII combat vets are generally reticent to relate their stories, even to their families. The closest I've been able to come to any of Dad's youthful experiences in that unbelievable, almost mythic time has been movies like Memphis Belle. I'm glad the movie was made.

Indeed, the real Memphis Belle still exists and is undergoing restoration in Dayton, Ohio. I hope to visit her someday and get a bit more of the sense of the life of my father.