Gear “Wins”

Posted on by Jordan

Ok, so maybe someday I will find myself detailing the pros and cons of a diaper bag. Today is not that day.

What I do want to talk about are a few items I owned pre-baby that have proven very useful with an infant in the house.

First up, a tablet computer. Now it’s a bit of a stretch to say this was a pre-baby item, because I used the impending birth of our daughter as the excuse I gave myself to justify spending all my post-gift buying allowance on a single item. I purchased a Nexus7 from Google. I don’t know how I would feel about the tablet if Hannah hadn’t arrived about a week after it did. Without a child in the mix I don’t find surfing, or playing little time waster games all that engaging when I have a real computer 20ft away.

That all changes when you have a baby in one arm. The tablet is wonderful for keeping up with light reading online, or doing real basic e-mail etc. The N7 is light enough to easily work one handed, although you need a second hand to do much interaction. I haven’t had much time with an IPad, but I think in this use case, the smaller tablet is probably more useful, simply for the one-handed option. Little time waster games or random online reading make it a lot easier to wait that extra five minutes to make sure Hannah is really asleep before trying to lay her down at night.

The second device that has come in handy is my Kindle. I wasn’t using it a lot early on, in part because I was so sleep deprived I was afraid my retention would be so poor as to make the reading completely useless. I don’t know if that really would have been true, but whatever the case I am not so sleepy now and have really enjoyed reading books again.

The place where the kindle shines, much like the N7 is one handed operation. The kindle is truly a one handed device, where the N7 only kind of is, and a book really isn’t when it comes time to turn the page. One of the other advantages the kindle has over the N7 is being a more paper-like screen so I can light the room with a soft lamp instead of blasting myself in the face with a bright screen. This may sound trivial, but it’s hard to peek down and see if Hannah’s eyes are close when your eyes aren’t actually adjusted to the rooms ambient light.

I suspect this may be the least interesting aspect of a new baby for anyone reading this… but so far I haven’t distilled much else down to an idea for a post yet. 🙂

-Jordan

Wild At Heart, A Sort Of Review

Posted on by Jordan

This is just going to be a micro-review, but I wanted to get a few thoughts down before too much slipped out of my mind.

I finished reading Wild At Heart, by John Eldredge

I really liked the book.

The first few chapters do an amazing job of putting into words things I have known to be true but couldn’t articulate.

I am trying really hard not to say too much here, because I will ether try to say what the book said and fail, or veer into impassioned rant territory and regret having published it on the internet.

Let me just say this, Eldredge does a great job of stating the problem faced by a lot of young men in the church. The first half of the book really resonated with me; leaving me wanting to run up mountains and tackle wildlife… that might be a slight overstatement, but I did come away from every chapter excited and feeling like I had really discovered something about myself and what God has for me.

The book could have been written to address conversations Heather and I had in the weeks prior to my reading the book where I was trying to express to Heather this almost despair I was feeling: That there were so few young men in the church because “the church” has nothing to offer young men.  To read that there might be a place for passion and even *gasp* aggression in a man’s pursuit of Christ was exhilarating.

And then we come to the back half of the book. I remember reading Wild At Heart when I was in college, and I know the second half of the book is why I had written it off as “not for me.”

I still come away feeling like the book cannot answer the question “Ok this is amazing, I am ready to do this! Now what?”

In my second read-through, almost ten years later I have to admit that whatever is there has to be better than not having talked about the issue at all.

I suppose the book can’t possibly say what to do next, because in talking about the wild nature of God (as often expressed in nature) formulas and step-by-step plans aren’t going to explain what is there.

And now, suddenly, I am back where I started when I picked up the book again. I cannot properly express the ideas I am trying to express, but I know there is a book that did a really good job of stating the case.

Anyway… Glad that is written down, even if it isn’t coherent to anyone else… We shall resume stories of day to day life of Heather and Jordan shortly 🙂

 

-Jordan

Finished Reading: “The Medieval Machine”

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Heather and I spend the weekend entertaining some friends from Kansas City.

We had a great time, but the combination of gloomy fall weather and a general goal of taking it easy meant there aren’t really any stories to tell, nor are there any interesting pictures.

This gives me a great opportunity to lay out a few of my thoughts after reading The Medieval Machine.

It was a pleasant surprise to find how much I learned from this book. Often I find nonfiction a little harder to read. (have I ever mentioned my every-other rotation goal of fiction/nonfiction? It’s been tougher to maintain than I had hoped.) Having established that I enjoyed learning, I really wanted to argue with the author at every turn about his conclusions and implications.

I suppose a quick summary might be helpful. The book covers the major mechanization of the middle ages (also sometimes called the dark ages). As it turns out, that period was full of advancement and progress, mostly around water and wind power. Access to non-manual forms of energy are easy to take for granted, and the book was eye-opening as it described all the tasks powered by falling water, grinding wheat, crushing ore, and conditioning fabrics, to name a few.

Another aspect that quickly became apparent is how much freedom I take for granted. The book was full of examples where the person who built a new mill was able to force everyone in the region to use it. This compulsion went so far in one case that the local governor sent troops door-to-door confiscating hand mills by sword point, leaving the peasants no way to grind flour except to use the governor’s new mill.

My frustration with the author started in the introduction where he stated with great confidence that there were no innovations left to be had that could significantly impact the course of human progress, and we were doomed to a slow decline… so stated in the year 1970. I may have been so put off by the introduction that I imagined most of my remaining gripes, but I couldn’t help but feel like the author wasn’t sure everything he was describing was actually a good thing. As if he felt that saving millions of man hours grinding wheat was somehow a loss.

In the end, the book made me spend a lot of time thinking. Thinking about the massive wealth of infrastructure we have, thinking about the impact of virtually unlimited access to information regarding nearly anything, and just marveling at how we got here from there.

Given the amount of thought and reflection it generated I find myself willing to forgive most of my gripes and say the book was a good read… although not one I am likely to read again.

-Jordan

Chasing The Dragon — Book

Posted on by Jordan

So before I talk about the book, I have to admit that I remember posting here that I was going to try and do little summary / reviews of books once I finished reading them.

I failed at that plan. There have been a number of things I have read that never made it onto the blog.

Non the less, I finished reading Chasing The Dragon by Jackie Pullenger, and wanted to talk about it here.

I really enjoyed the book! It wasn’t always the most enjoyable read, because the situations she describes are horrifying in many cases. At the same time that was what made the book so exciting to read, was hearing her describe how God was working.

From a practical standpoint, it made it a lot harder to feel sorry for myself about having to sometimes cook food for a bunch of kids at church. I spent a lot of time reflecting on my worldview and relative situation while reading the book, something I don’t typically do… I don’t want to wander too far down that rabbit trail, except to say that it was kind of refreshing.

Going back to the book, it deals with drug addicts within the Walled-City of Hong Kong. It does not in any way sound like a place I would want to be… I find down town Des Moines far too crowded for my tastes. About the time I was finishing the book, a blog I follow had a few Walled-City related items that I found rather interesting.

The first is an old German TV documentary. I will let the linked details fill you in, except to say that most of the commentary that goes with the video is pretty sensationalized, at best, and often directly contradicts situations described in the book. Primarily the idea that “there is no law” because roughly 20% of the book was a Jackie dealing with police and the court system, as they related to people inside the Walled-City.

The Documentary (via io9)

The other item, also Via io9 is a few pictures, and then some sort of informational / layout drawings. They aren’t quite as interesting as the video, but worth linking I suppose.

The drawings

So to sum this up, if you haven’t read Chasing The Dragon, and are looking to pickup some nonfiction (something I always think I should be doing more) you should check it out! 🙂

-Jordan

Quck Book Review, And Other Weekend Notes

Posted on by Jordan

I finished “Pandora’s Star” and it’s sequel finally!

I thought a lot about how I would sum them up. I think my feelings are that it was good, but after plowing through a little over 2000 pages I wanted great! I feel a little unhappy with the author for making me plow through that much book for something that didn’t end up being amazing. I suppose maybe there are people who enjoy having a more substantial read, with well fleshed out supporting characters and tons of trivial sub-plots, but I just didn’t feel like the pay off was there.

If you are ever in the mood for an absolutely massive space-opera style read, I can loan them to you 🙂

Other news this week…

We actually made corn! I don’t know how the entire month of July slipped past without us stopping at a local stand to pickup some fresh corn, but I somehow it happened.

I am forming plans to get some tomatoes from the same stands and make BLTs, but Heather’s aversion to the smell of cooking bacon has been somewhat compounded by a tour of a hog packing plant. Not the most uplifting side of our food production chain I am afraid. The tomatoes should be in season for at least a month, so hopefully there is time for some of the traumatic memories to be repressed or something 🙂

-Jordan

Review: The Millionaire Next Door

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As I mentioned in my initial multi-book review from summer vacation, I really liked this book.

What has started to become apparent to me as I have tried to tell people about it, is that they seem to start out expecting that I read some book about how to become a millionaire, or in some way convinced myself that I found the secret to getting rich.

That is in no way the case! This book is basically just a compilation of facts about people who have a net worth of over one million dollars. The authors provide some commentary, trying to explain why they think trends appeared, and in some cases offer advice.

If I were going to give a one sentence summary it would go like this: “This is the book to read once you are doing the Dave Ramsey thing, and want to start thinking about what the rest of your life looks like”

Again, I want to stress that this isn’t about “getting rich”!!

Basically what you start to realize is that the people who actually accumulate wealth are the people who don’t spend it! Living below their means, and working hard, are  two of the hallmarks of the people this book looked at. In no way do you leave with the impression that doing a few things will let you live in a huge house and have all the toys your heart desires. They are quite clear that most of the people living that way have no hope of sustaining it, ether spending everything they make, or being heavily subsidized by a parent or grandparent.

Like a lot of what you get from Dave Ramsey, nothing in the book is really outside of common sense, but it’s easy to get blinded by day to day life. I found this book so exciting to read, as just an encouragement that the plan Heather and I are pursuing really is where we want to be.

Probably the single biggest point thing I got out of the book, as far as things I can use today, was their information about houses and behavior. Basically, if you live in a “high-consumption” neighborhood, you will spend like the people around you. Apparently it is really hard to live conservatively when surrounded by people who aren’t. Considering there aren’t vast enclaves of budget  conscious people in most cities, the authors  recommended simply living in a house that cost no more than double your annual household income. Last year when Heather and I were looking for houses, I can assure you that the banks will be happy to loan you a lot more than that!

I cannot recommend this book enough if you are looking for encouragement to stick with a budget, or just sticking with a lifestyle that doesn’t have as many toys as the people around you. Outside of that I thought it was just interesting to have my perceptions rocked as to who in this nation actually has wealth as opposed to putting on a show of wealth.

-Jordan

Book Reviews

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As I mentioned in the vacation summary post, I read quite a few books that week.

I thought I could throw up some quick thoughts about them here.

The Lost Fleet Series:

The basic hook in these books remains the complications of communication over solar system sized distances, given the painfully slow speed of light. The rest of the story was ok, but probably wouldn’t have held my attention. It helps that the books are an easy read, of the six books in this saga, I read two of them in a single day (one day per book). Strong points of these books: deals with religion without being disrespectful. The author did invent a faith that is very much not along the lines of Judeo–Christian, but sci-fi books gain points with me just for treating faith with some respect. Another strong point is the author keeping the book inside a PG-13 rating. Some of the other books didn’t and I just don’t see a reason for that. In short, the books are a fun read, but nothing too deep.

The Millionaire Next Door:

This book was amazing! I plan to devote an entire post to it later. The quick summary: “If you want to get excited about saving and living a thrifty lifestyle, read this book!” The book is mostly just detailing things the authors have discovered from years of doing marketing research, but I found it really really interesting, and motivating.

Altered Carbon:

The book boils down to a kind of private-eye story, that incorporates a lot of “way out there” science fiction elements. The story had lots of conspiracy, and suspense… kept me pushing to finish for sure. I keep trying to cut the author some slack for just wanting to have a conflict between religion, and tradition against technology, but I felt like the book really beat up on the Catholic faith more than necessary. I know that the kinds of things they were doing in the book would cause some real conflicts for people and churches, namely the ability to move your contentiousness to another body, more or less at-will. It made for an interesting problem to wrestle with, but given how many other things were made up, I don’t see the point in calling out an existing church. That wasn’t a major element of the book it just annoyed me. I should also include a warning that the language is course, and the book includes both sex and torture scenes that were a little more graphic than I prefer to read. Despite all my complaints, I do plan to pick up the sequel to this eventually.

Black Hawk Down:

The book on which the movie is based. As you might expect, it goes into much more detail about the battle depicted in the movie. I was really shocked at how inexperienced the Rangers were in this book. A year or so ago, I read the book “The Unforgiving Minute” that goes into detail about one man’s path through West Point, Ranger school and then on to Afghanistan. What that book tried to explain, and Black Hawk Down did a better job of explaining, is that, as hard and good as the training provided to the army’s best is, nothing actually prepares you to get shot at. We now have 50 years of practice training special forces, and it still hasn’t changed the fact that “green” troops are going to make a lot of mistakes in their first battle.

The second thing that really stood out to me in the book is how vastly different the culture of Somalia is from ours. The book is full of examples of women and children gladly acting as shields for the tribal fighters. Pregnant women running through gunfire to bring more ammo up to the fighters in cover. Frankly the behavior seemed more alien than some of the stuff I was reading in my sci-fi books. I haven’t nailed down what I think about that, or how a we deal with that without going places nobody wants to be… I probably won’t write whatever conclusions I come up with here…

I thought it was a great book, and I guess I would say if you could handle the violence levels in the movie, and you want to spend some time thinking about the actual conflict, you should check it out.

-Jordan

Sunset Beach

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I went to North Carolina with her parents the second week of June. The place we stayed is apparently kind of a tradition for Heather’s family, called “Sunset Beach.” The area is actually an island of sorts, being cut off from the mainland by the “Intracoastal Waterway“, meaning that you have to wait for a little draw bridge to be closed to make it out to the island. They are in the process of building a much more substantial bridge, but for now the access remains pretty rustic.

Once we got to the beach house, we had an ambitious week of not doing all that much planned! Besides walking on the beach, and playing in the waves, I managed to squeeze in a little reading.

I read (in chronological order):

  • The Lost Fleet Book 5
  • The Millionaire Next Door
  • The Lost Fleet Book 6
  • Altered Carbon
  • Black Hawk Down

I will probably do some sort of a micro review of most of these, but the short version is that I enjoyed them all. Heather spent quite a bit of time reading too, we stuck together in the shaded deck of the beach house while most people were down on the beach. She didn’t manage quite as many books as me, I think in part because she was constantly distracted by our little nephew Holden.

By the end of the week, Heather and Holden were getting along well enough that she could hold him for extended periods of time without him crying. Everyone at the house enjoyed having him there, babies just provide so much entertainment it seems.

Mid way through the week, it was declared “Family Golf Day” (another tradition I guess) and the majority of us went to one of the many golf courses in the area. Now, Heather and I have been married for 13 months, so you might think we would have found the time to go golfing, or at least go to a driving range so she could show me how to swing a club. Somehow though, we hadn’t. I was more than a little concerned going into the even that I would be woefully outclassed, but I quickly discovered two things: I am at least competent at golf, and the “Family Golf Day” includes plenty of people who aren’t all that good. I think it helped that Heather and a few of the people on our team were providing great coaching, but I really enjoyed playing, and felt that I did ok!

The only really eventful part of our trip was the return. We started out early Saturday morning driving back to Charlotte NC, where our flight would then layover in Detroit, and eventually take us to Kansas City. We were hoping to then push through and drive back to Des Moines that night giving us an entire day home before going back to work.

Thing started off on a sort of bad foot when we were following the lead car through back-roads so small they didn’t even have lines painted on them. We assumed they had done some research on the map and had found some sort of optimal route to beat all the traffic going home from the beach. It was a scenic drive, if somewhat unnerving. We later found out they had mis-configured their GPS to pick routes with “no traffic” and really hadn’t meant to take us off the beaten path.

Once we got to the airport, we found out that our flight was at least two hours delayed, and possibly more thanks to major problems in Atlanta. This was going to be a problem as our connecting flight to KC was going to leave before we even boarded our plane to Detroit! The ticket agent managed to book us on the first flight to KC the next morning from Detroit, while still preserving our tickets on the flight we were destined to miss that day. Apparently that was bending the rules fairly aggressively. The rest of the day went almost exactly like it looked like it was going to, we boarded our flight about 2.5 hours later than we were suppose to, missing our flight to KC. An hour or so in line at the Delta counter in Detroit and we had two meal vouchers each and a hotel voucher for each couple in our group. Six dollars will not buy a real extravagant dinner, but we were more than ready to just grab something to eat quick and go to bed.

The next morning we got to the airport bright and early, got checked in and made our way to the gate. Things were looking good, no delays! Then the gate agent started paging that the flight was over-booked, and would anyone be willing to wait for a later flight. We were really concerned that maybe we weren’t going to get home after all. 40 minutes of this paging with nobody willing to give up their seat, and a woman who hadn’t been quite so early to the gate discovered that she didn’t have a seat on the plane. She went into total melt-down… It wasn’t pretty, I haven’t ever seen anything like it. After a few minutes Heather’s sister felt merciful, and offered to give up her seat. It turned out that she would not be able to get on the plane unless three people gave up their seats. After a few minutes of talking Kelsey, Jim and Pam all decided to give up their seats.

We boarded right on time and made it to Kansas City with no problems, but if you ask me there was a real air of “escaping in the nick of time” getting on the flight. The three people who stayed behind, managed to get on the noon flight (two hours behind ours) and made it with no other complications.

Despite the… adventure getting back, the vacation was very relaxing. Both Heather and I enjoyed the time to just slow down for a while.

-Jordan

Quick Link, For A Long Read

Posted on by Jordan

I really hope to get something more substantial posted later this weekend, but in the meantime I wanted to post something I read.

How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America

A few notes:

  1. It’s rather depressing, I hope he is wrong about some of this
  2. It’s really long, I read it in bites over the course of a day
  3. As I reflected on it, I have a huge amount of respect for someone putting that together. There is a lot of research there, plus interviews.

As a side note, if you use Firefox (and you should, although I haven’t even managed to sell Heather on that yet) Delicious has a plug-in you really need to be using. Being able to bookmark anything you think you may want to look at later is wonderful, and you just attach meta-tags so finding links is typically easy.

-Jordan

Shipping Woe

Posted on by Jordan

I had grand aims of pulling together a wedding anniversary one-year retrospective recap thing, but I just cannot begin to think how I would pull that together. Even if I did it would be a massive post, and really I try to avoid painfully verbose posts.

Instead I will tell you about the misadventures I had getting some items here from Amazon.

The catalyst for this was, interestingly  enough, my reflection on the year past and the upcoming year. Heather and I received several copies of the book The Five Love Languages during our engagement and as wedding gifts. We read it eagerly, and I think it was helpful then, but I thought it would be an interesting thing to re-read now that we have a tiny bit of perspective on marriage. Not surprisingly, after two  moves, we couldn’t locate the one copy of the book we had retained from before. I then jumped on Amazon to order a new one, because I felt I had fully torn the apartment up and clearly the book had been lost.

At this point, three things happened.

  1. Heather also bought a copy, because I was halfway wanting this to be a surprise and hadn’t told her about the order
  2. I found our copy of the book
  3. The Amazon shipment was listed by the USPS (United States Postal Service) as “delivered” on their website, but was not in my mailbox.

I should point out that the mailboxes at our current apartment are fairly large as far as apartment mailboxes go, and open with a key. I am fairly confident that the Amazon box would have fit into our mailbox. Even if it had not, there is a large drop box area with a single-use key system that allows the carrier to secure a larger box, and leave the key locked in your mailbox.

I filled out a missing parcel form on the USPS website a day or so later. After three or four days, I started to think maybe that wasn’t going to get any traction. I thought I should contact Amazon, as maybe they could demand a little more attention from the Post Office. I sent an e-mail to Amazon, explaining the missing package, and that I was still waiting to hear from the Post Office. I should point out I did not in any way imply they were to blame, nor that I expected them to do anything, just that I wanted them to be aware of the situation.

I got an e-mail back from an Amazon representative within ten minutes! The e-mail stated that they were sorry the package had been lost and they would be happy to ether re-ship the package or refund my order, and they would do so as soon as I responded to their e-mail.

I replied that I would like to have them re-ship the order (I had several books in addition to the now duplicate Five Love Languages).

The Amazon representative then communicated that they would be unable to re-ship the Five Love Languages as they were sold out, I would be refunded the price of that book and my other books would be shipped over-night express for no charge. The order would have been shipped express even if they had been able to ship all the books.

The next day, UPS dropped of my order, several hours after I got the call from the UPS guy using the entry way system to our apartment, I finally got a response from the USPS regarding my missing parcel. To their credit, they actually sent out a postmaster to check the “large package drop box” and area around the mailbox before responding to me. All the same, I have to point out the incredible speed Amazon had compared to their process.

The end result of the USPS investigation was that the parcel was lost. The recommended I fill out another form on their website for “stolen mail.” I filled out the form just to try and keep their attention on the issue. I don’t know if a package being shipped to the wrong person and them not sending it back is really theft, but frankly the frequency with with which we get mail in our box that clearly has someone else s name and address on it makes me willing to pursue any option I have to try and steer attention to our local mail system.

Three to four days later I got an e-mail saying my report had been processed and would be used for statistical reporting by the USPS. As far as I can tell, they consider the mater closed.

I almost feel obligated to write this post simply to thank Amazon. I never intended to ask them to eat the cost of the lost items, and am amazed that they would do so without hesitation.

-Jordan