I’m usually left with way more books that I want to read than I have time to read, so keeping track of them all can be a hassle. After trying a variety of methods, I’ve landed on GoodReads and it seems like a pretty good tool. There are apps for all phone platforms which is important so you can save a book when you’re on the go and it integrates with Facebook to quickly find friends who are also using the site. That being said, it doesn’t look like many of you are using it. If you’re looking for a site to help you keep track of your reading list and also suggest books that you might like, check it out and add me as a friend! Or if you have a better system, I’d love to hear about that too.
Bitcoin
You may have heard about a new currency called Bitcoin. Taken on the surface, it’s just another way to transfer money between individuals except that this one isn’t controlled by any government. It’s as secure as cash (or probably more secure since it can’t be counterfeited) and while it’s not quite as anonymous as cash, it’s much more anonymous than credit cards or checks. Like most other currencies, the value is set by what people think it’s worth. One of the most popular Bitcoin Exchanges is called MtGox and it says that right now one Bitcoin is worth $120 USD. Bitcoins are almost infinitely dividable so you just pay for stuff in portions of a Bitcoin. More and more retailers are starting to accept Bitcoin as a direct payment option or you can just use it as an investment strategy and a way to transmit money between like-minded people. You can never actually hold one in your hand. It’s all handled digitally.
From the geeky math side, it is even more interesting. The project was launched in 2009 by someone who still remains anonymous. Bitcoins are found by solving an unpredictable cryptographic problem and the whole system is configured to only dole out a specific number of Bitcoins every year. There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins and they get increasingly hard to find. These “miners” who find Bitcoins are also helping to cryptographically validate every Bitcoin transaction.
I haven’t listened to much of what the general media says about Bitcoin but I’ve heard random snippets trying to link it to terrorism, drugs and clubbing baby seals. That’s nonsense. What really scares people in charge is that no one is in charge of Bitcoin. Governments can’t print more of it or directly affect it’s value. There are many other crypto-currencies out there, but this is by far the most popular one.
It’s a remarkable system and I’ve only begun to scratch the surface with this post. If you’re interested in learning more, check out Leo Laporte’s interview with Gavin Andresen, the chief scientist at Bitcoin.
Rechargeable Batteries
With our son coming any day now, I feel like we’re about to really ramp up our battery usage. For the past couple years, I’ve been investing in Eneloop rechargeable batteries. They hold a charge very well in storage and can be found at a decent price. I charge them with a La Crosse BC-700. It’s a wonderful little device that gives you detailed readouts about the state of your battery and provides a variety of charging speeds and options to get the most life out of your batteries.
I recently also picked up some spacers which lets me put AA batteries into a device that takes C and D batteries. They won’t last nearly as long as a full C or D cell, but those suckers are expensive so using a rechargeable is an attractive proposition. I suspect it will be a fine substitute in many cases. There are also bigger C and D rechargeables but I’ll need a new charger for those and I haven’t made the commitment there yet.
Based on current Amazon prices, a rechargeable AAA or AA battery is about 4 times more expensive than it’s alkaline counterparty. That means that I don’t generally use rechargeables in extremely low draw situations like clocks, but we use them everywhere else. And I suppose if you look at a big enough time span, even using them in clocks would pay off.
Is there anything you like better than Eneloops? Do you use C or D cell rechargeables?
State Of The Uterus
“You’re still here?” That’s the question I get from people at work who know that Tyla is about ready to pop. There’s no baby yet, but we’re really getting close. The due date is June 6 but we’re about smack dab in the middle of the “normal” window for birth. The national average for first time moms is that they go five days past their due date which would put us at about a week from now. They won’t let her go more than two weeks past the due date so one way or another he should be coming out before the 20th!
While we do talk a bit about enjoying these last few minutes of peace and quiet, we’re incredibly eager to meet this little boy who has been following us around for almost 40 weeks!
Arrested Development On Netflix
Arrested Development was cancelled after only three seasons. The ratings must not have been where they needed to be, but I think the show gained quite a bit of popularity when it came out on DVD. At least I know that’s how Tyla and I got into it. We were both thrilled to find out that years after it was cancelled, Netflix had put up the money for a fourth season! We renewed our streaming membership to get a crack at the episodes when they were released on Memorial Day.
Netflix was really slow that day. A quick check of Twitter indicated that lots of other people were having similar difficulties and I wonder if it was because Arrested Development came out? It’s still pretty big news to have an internet streaming company fund a “real” TV show so it doesn’t seem unlikely that the hype was more than they could handle.
As for the show itself, it’s fun to see all the characters again, but I’d probably rank the fourth season somewhere around the quality of the first season. It’s good, but not as good as seasons two and three. It is really nice to have all the episodes available at once instead of having them doled out one by one each week. I’ll be very surprised if this isn’t very close to the future model for shows. Getting one episode a week with a bunch of commercials in the middle really seems ancient and backward.
Thank you Netflix for funding this project and thanks to Ron Howard and crew for cranking out more episodes.
There’s Always Someone Cooler Than You
When you hang out in the same groups and same areas for a long time, it’s easy to think that you’re getting to be a pretty good skier, hiker, etc. Skiing at Crystal always reminds me of this. You can ride up the Forest Queen list and hear people talking about how incredible they are (on blue and green beginner runs), but if you head out to the Northway lift, you’ll see people throwing backflips off cliffs and not bragging at all. Living in the Pacific Northwest, there’s always someone nearby who is infinitely better than you. We have some incredible outdoor athletes around here!
I bring this up because someone just forwarded me an article that blew my mind. When I hiked up to Camp Muir at 10,000 feet on Mt. Rainier, it took me 4 hours and 10 minutes to get up there. We have a guy in our church who is in great shape and can get from Paradise (5400 feet) to the top of Rainier (14,400 feet) and back down in less than 24 hours. The guys in this article did that whole route from Paradise to the summit and back in 4 hours, 19 minutes and 12 seconds! So in the time I went from Paradise to Muir (halfway to the summit), they had done the entire trip. Unbelievable! You can read their full writeup on coastmountainskiing.com.
PS. While writing this I also learned that there is now a web cam at Camp Muir!
Chug
At the beginning of this month, I mentioned that Zane Lamprey is trying to fund his new TV show through Kickstarter. He did get an impressive amount of money, but with only a few days left, he only had about $350K of his $500K target. The way Kickstarter works is that if you don’t hit your goal, nobody pays a penny. Amazingly enough, he blew through his target with about a day to spare! He’s said that for $500K he can do five shows and for every $100K over his goal, he’ll add another show. He posted a pretty thorough breakdown of where the money goes. Here’s part of his post from http://chug.tv
Someone posted on my Facebook yesterday questioning how it could possibly costs $100,000 per episode to “follow you around with a camera”. I explained to him that $500,000 six ways is actually $83,000. But, there is also a 5% cut that Kickstarter takes and another 5% that Amazon takes to handle the thousands of transactions. And, we have to fulfill all of our obligations to you, the Kickstarter backers. We’ll still have to buy, print, and ship thousands of t-shirts, hoodies, medallions, posters, DVDs, Blu Rays, as well as the travel, food, and venue rentals for the dinners and parties that we’ll be doing in LA, NYC, and Chicago.
And while that may still be a lot of money to have a camera follow a guy around to bars, it’s a very small budget to make an actual network quality TV show. With Chug, as we did with Three Sheets, we’ll have over a month of planning and pre-production where the producers will need to lock down locations, hire fixers (international translators and location scouts), get shooting permits, carnets (certificates that allow us to ship our gear in and out of the country), coordinate travel, and get insurance (which alone is about $25,000). Then, while shooting, there are: two camera guys, (with expensively rented cameras, gear, and lights), a sound guy, (with expensive rented gear), two producers, and the executive producer. This is aside from hidden daily costs like the flights, rental cars, train tickets, hotels, per diem, and food. Then, as we’ll end up with dozen of hours of raw footage, we’ll need to hire editors, assistant editors, a post production supervisor, motion graphics animator, writer, and producers to put the show together. And, during the several months that the production will be on-going, all of those people will obviously need to be paid… except me.
The money raised by Kickstarter, in fact, won’t be enough to fund Chug. No money that comes in from the Kickstarter campaign will go into my pocket. I’ll actually be putting in my own money to get the show made to the quality that you should expect from a TV show. The fact is that I am gambling on the idea that I can sell Chug to a network after the show is made and after the Kickstarter backers have all been given their rewards. Even though they’ve all said “no” already, I have faith that some network will see what an amazing show we’ve made, be surprised by the dedicated fan base, and hire us to make more episodes. That’s my contribution and dedication to the show.
It’s interesting to note that he’s not making a penny off this and is using it as a way to produce some episodes and attempt to sell them to a network. It’s a lot less risky for a network to buy episodes that are already done than to fund production and hope to make their money back. Then if the episodes do well on TV, they might buy more!
Congrats to Zane and his team for surpassing their goal and thanks to them for making more episodes! I’m excited to see them!
Bathroom Paint
To save some money during our bathroom remodel, we decided to do the painting ourselves. The contractors left three months ago, but it took us a while to get to the painting. But now it’s finally done! We were shooting for a straight gray color but it definitely has a blue tint to it now that it’s on the wall. It looks good though.
I also had to paint the ceiling (white) because of some drywall repair they did when installing the new vent fan. That turned out to be a bit tougher than anticipated because of the sky light. It’s really hot up there when the sun is shining!
The last piece of the puzzle is some kind of drape or valance for the window. Tyla had one picked out but when we put it up, we decided it was a little too short so we’ll look for something else.
Why People Fear Guns
As I’ve started to get more involved in shooting sports over the last couple years, I’ve been thinking about why people view it any differently than golf. Whether you go to a gun range or a country club, you’ll be surrounded by retirees joking around and having fun. It’s a very similar environment. Somebody could use either a golf club or a gun to kill you, but most people don’t have an irrational fear of golf clubs. Why?
One theory is that people generally only see guns in the news or a movie. That image is usually showing something that is illegal. Unfortunately, that represents the vast minority of gun use in the world. Just about every round fired through a gun has a happy sport shooter behind it. While it’s always good to have a healthy respect for any device that can injure you if used improperly, there’s no reason why a gun should be immediately correlated with violence.
I don’t know if that will ever change, but if you’re interested in seeing the most common use of guns, I’d be more than happy to take you along to a range where you will see normal humans enjoying a fun sport. Even if you decide it’s not a sport you enjoy, at least you’ll have one other picture that might pop into your head when you hear about a gun.
Shingles
But anyway, from a geek perspective, I found this interesting enough to blow right through that “Too Much Information” barrier and blog about it:
Concern that I would give my newborn son a disease sent me to the doctor much earlier than I would normally have gone. That was a great move because catching it in the first 72 hours makes it much more treatable. The doctor said there was no concern about passing it on to my pregnant wife or to my newborn son. We double checked with our OB and she completely agreed. Woohoo!*
So while this week has not been at all fun, I’m very happy that it won’t affect my wife or my son!
PS. Please note that advice was given in my specific case. Don’t extrapolate to your situation. Talk to your doctor!