Keturah held our first gathering of friends at our place over the weekend.  Partially a BBQ.  Partially a housewarming party with a lot of kids play date flavorings (there was a bouncy house after all).  We called in Sudtoberfest. Lots of people I haven’t seen in quite a long time.  Some over 15 years.

Anyway, the question “Why did you decide to leave in Sudbury?” was directed my way by at least a half dozen different people.  So, let’s address that.

First off, I’m thinking that the question was rooted with one of the following underlying sentiments by that individual:

1. Some people who were thinking “You guys are crazy to move out here to deep suburbia. You’re an urban type who likes to catch a band playing a small club on Tuesday nights; who likes hipster, speakeasy type coffee joints; and who enjoys dining at places where you order at a counter and take a number to your table.”
2. Those who are secretly wondering, “Wait, I’ve got two little kids myself that about to head off to kindergarten and maybe it’s time for me to consider a place like Sudbury”
3. Surely some people wonder “You’re working exclusively from home, why aren’t you living on the Cape or even better, from Tahiti?”

As I’ve previously alluded to, it was time for us to leave California in part due to the weaker family communities out there.  Or to be more diplomatic about it, weaker than what is commonly found in New England.  We are here in part for the strong family oriented communities and the excellent schools systems.

We are also here partially to be near some family.  Keturah has family down in Southern Massachusetts and I have family still in Glastonbury, Connecticut.  Given that, it made sense for us to stay west of Boston.  Our search started the day after we landed at Logan.  It started with a massive list of towns from Newton all the way out to towns on the edge of 495 such as Sherborn.  Eventually, we crossed off a bunch of towns and zero’d in on Sudbury and Wayland.  With those 2 towns identified we pretty much tracked what was coming available via RedFin.  Ultimately finding a home to our liking on Willis Road in Sudbury.  We easily could have ended up in neighboring Wayland.  In fact in many ways, Sudbury-Wayland feels like one big town.

Why Sudbury, specifically.  Well…

• It’s awfully pretty here.
• There’s plenty of families here.  Plenty of people here, but it certainly doesn’t feel overcrowded.  Everyone has a decent sized lot for their house.  Lots are measured in acres here.  Not the 5000 sq. foot increment measurements that happen in California.
• There’s a fair amount of convenience here.  And you don’t have to work overly hard to drive to the grocery store or Target.¹
• Public transportation isn’t totally out of the picture.  The commuter rail station in Concord is 10 minutes away. The one in Framingham is 15-20 minutes away.
• Waltham, a tech hotbed in metro Boston is about a 15 minute drive away.
• Great cycling up here.
• Our house is 15 minutes from Walden Pond. Same with downtown Concord.
• Are you noticing how everything is about 15 minutes from our house?  It’s nice.  Much different experience than our Half Moon Bay existence²
• The schools are amazing.  Someone told me that all but 2 people from last years graduating high school class went to college.
• Lots of youth programs. In fact, what’s available for kids in this town is almost overwhelming.

1. It’s amazing how pleasing it is to be able to drive 10 minutes to Target and only have to deal with a single traffic light. [↩]
2. Of course, there’s no ocean view here. [↩]

It’s nuts how psyched I get by day of Apple’s press conference to (presumably) announce their next iPhone – or as I like to refer to the iPhone, Apple’s gateway drug.  There’s no question that a couple of years ago, the iPhone was THE phone.¹ Before I had an iPhone, our household was void of any Apple products.  We were a technology family knee deep in Windows products. But then Keturah and I both got our iPhones and over time more Apple products have creeped into our lives. We bought the first iPad when it came out, the slowly lost control of it when our kids discovered it and quickly became proficient with it.² Keturah bought the Macbook Air this past summer and I have to admit, it’s quite a nice machine.³ Even I’ve been browsing Mac Mini listings on Craig’s List with the intent on setting it up as media server in the living room.  Lastly, we’re in a new house and it’s only a matter of time before I fill the rooms with sound via Apple Airplay.⁴

So yes, I’ll be following the announcement online today and yeah, that sounds awfully silly.  But what can I say?  The iPhone was a life changing product that hooked me.

Some final random thoughts:

• My iPhone 3GS is absolutely crawling to the finish line. I’ve pretty much pushed that device to its performance limits.  It’s either that or it senses it’s about to be passed down to a five year old and is rebelling.
• I’ll still buy an iPhone 4S, but for some stupid reason of vanity, I want the new phone to be an iPhone 5.  I decided that I was going to put myself on a two year upgrade cycle with the iPhone⁵ I’d be even happier to be on the upgrade cycle that involved major product advancements instead of the feeling of iterative steps that the iPhone 3GS was and the iPhone 4S would feel like.
• I really want NFC technology to be in this thing.  I’m ready to speed up the death of the plastic credit card.
• The 64GB iPhone rumor doesn’t make sense to me in an era when Apple wants to be pushing iCloud.  Maybe I’m not understanding Apple’s iCloud strategy, but it seems like if content is stored in the cloud and streaming from the cloud, devices would need less storage not more.
• An even crazier rumor is the one that the iPhone 5 is exclusively coming to Sprint.  In this scenario, it is speculated that an iPhone 4S comes to Verizon and AT&T while the iPhone 5 version drops only on Sprint, then the other carriers in early 2012. First, if this happens I’ll be pissed.  I’m not interested in switching to Sprint.  Since moving away from San Francisco, I’m actually pleased with AT&T iPhone performance.   I would expect some Apple fanboy revolt if this played out.  Actually, the only way it might make sense is a 64GB version of the new iPhone came out exclusively on Sprint.  Here’s why that might make some sense.  Apple has probably done enough research to realize that a 64GB phone isn’t necessary, especially with iCloud becoming a reality.  At the same time, they know some consumers always fall for the “bigger is better” type specs.  Their big questions are how much such a phone would actually sell?  Can they actually price it way higher? So instead they hedge their bet by getting Spring to pay $20 million to carry the iPhone and can up that price by giving Sprint exclusive right to sell an iPhone version (where the only difference from Verizon/AT&T versions is that is has more onboard storage)  they’re not actually sure anyone truly wants. If all that’s true, what a move by Apple.

1. Even with all the Android phones out there now, it still feels like THE phone. [↩]
2. Actually, when we get the new iPhone, our old iPhones are being passed down to the kids – to be pseudo iPod touches -  and we’re hoping to bring the iPad back into our control. [↩]
3. Ordered on the first day it was available. [↩]
4. I tried doing something similar in the old house with DLNA. And let me tell you, that tech sucks. Never worked smoothly. Haven’t tried Sonos yet, but hear good things [↩]
5. Dropping a few hundred on a new phone every year just seems silly. [↩]

There was a fairly interesting and amusing thread in Bill Simmons recent mailbag column on Grantland¹ regarding the what people would select as their 3 favorite Tom Hanks movies if they weren’t allowed to pick Forrest Gump.  I’ve been spending (probably too way too much) time thinking about this over the past few days.  The question is being stored away in my “use this topic of conversation if you’re ever in an uncomfortably silent circle of people at a cocktail party” category for future use. And since I’m thinking about it, I might as well write a blog post about it.  So here goes. 

My three favorite Tom Hanks movie performances that are not named Forrest Gump (in no particular order).

Big – I haven’t grown tired of watching this film over the years.  I still secretly wish to live in large Manhattan loft with celings high enough to have a trampoline in it. In fact, I’m going to encourage some of my single guy friends to do that just to find out if the “hey, I have a trampoline in my apartment.  Wanna come over?” line works. 

Road to Perdition – Not sure why whenever I channel surf to this movie I end watching the rest of it, but I do.  Perhaps its because I’m amazed that one on the guys that used to star in Bosom Buddies can go toe-to-toe in a movie with Paul Newman.

Saving Private Ryan – Really?  Tom Hanks lost the Oscar for Best Actor that year to Roberto Benigni? That sounds like a future Trivial Pursuit question.

Now that I’ve done this little “exercise”, I’m surprised that Catch Me If You Can isn’t in that top 3.  I enjoy watching that movie more than any of the above.

1. Grantland, btw, has cracked my top 10 web sites list [↩]

I was 15 years old the first time I can accurately recall hearing an R.E.M. song.  I used to listen to 105.9 WHCN in Hartford on this cheap Emerson brand AM/FM clock radio while I got dressed and ready for school in the morning.  And there it was – “Fall on Me.”  It had an immediate impact.  I went out and bought Life’s Rich Pageant later in the week and R.E.M. and I went from there.  R.E.M. became one of THOSE bands.  One of those bands was always with me while I growing up during high school and starting to figure out who I was during college. 

It helped that back then, they had a new album out every year.  Document became one of my favorite albums of all time.  I purchased Green the first day came out.¹.  Out of Time became the album of the summer of ‘91² and dancing to “Shiny Happy People” was a great way to meet girls during that time.³  Monster came out right when I was moving across the country and I listened to it continuously on some long days of driving. 

But then R.E.M. started to fade for me.  It was one of those cases of just not being able to maintain the high level of musical excellence they set early on.  Pretty much every album after Out of Time frustrated me to some degree, regardless of how much I wanted to like the album.  “Everybody Hurts” may be a great song, but I still hate it.  To me, it was a sign of the edgy college radio band I loved completely losing it.  The Michael Stipe started showing up places I could care less for him to show up in.  Like that show Iconoclasts on the Sundance Channel.⁴  In fact, in the last 15 years my favorite R.E.M. memory is the time Keturah and I went to see a Patti Smith concert in Seattle and Peter Buck joined in to play a few songs. 

R.E.M. will always be part of my youth.  And now that they’ve broken up, perhaps its time to for me to forget about how disappointed I am in what they became and recall how great they once were. 

1. Bought it on tape actually.  Which I partially blame for not liking it the album so much [↩]
2. Summer of ‘91 was when I moved into my first off-campus house in Burlington, VT [↩]
3. But the more interesting girls knew that “Me in Honey” was the best song on the album. [↩]
4. And by the way, I’m not overly happy about Eddie Vedder being on that show either [↩]

Good show by Wilco at The Wang Theatre this past Tuesday night. Certainly not the best show I’ve seen them play¹ but one of the better performances I’ve seen from them in recent years.

It helped that it was at the beautiful Wang Theatre in downtown Boston.  It helped that it was a standing show. Past few Wilco shows I’ve seen have been at The Greek Theatre in Berkeley.  Which itself is at a great venue, but less great when everyone decides to sit on their ass. 

It helped that the album Wilco is releasing next week is a bit more up tempo and exploratory² than the most recent releases, especially the boring to tears Sky Blue Sky album.  The new album – The Whole Love - certainly isn’t Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but then again Wilco will never make another album that great again. If you haven’t accepted that yet, you should.  Give it a listen if you haven’t yet.

One thing of importance I noticed during Tuesday’s performance was less reliance on Nels Cline.  He’s still great and ever present and I certainly can’t imagine Wilco without him.  But in past years, he was more at the forefront and the band would, at times, just get out of his wand let him explore his sonic space.  There was much less of that on Tuesday. He was more integrated with the rest of the band. The power drill he sometimes brings out was nowhere to be found.

Some final ruminations:

• “Art of Almost” is a great song.  Nice direction the band is heading in with this one.  Actually, it reminded me of LCD Soundsystem and makes me think of what an entire album of that sound would be like from Wilco. In the future, I bet we see this take the role previously occupied by “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” during their live performances.
• Speaking of “Spiders (Kidsmoke)”…first time I’ve seen them³ perform without that as part of the set list
• “I’m the Man Who Loves You” really needs those horns.

2011/09/20 Set list.  Wilco at the Wang Theatre.  Boston, MA. 

1. Art Of Almost

2. I Might

3. Black Moon

4. I Am Trying to Break Your Heart

5. One Wing

6. Bull Black Nova

7. At Least That’s What You Said

8. One Sunday Morning (Song for Jane Smiley’s Boyfriend)

9. Shouldn’t Be Ashamed

10. Whole Love

11. War On War

12. Born Alone

13. Handshake Drugs

14. Impossible Germany

15. Dawned On Me

16. A Shot in the Arm 

    Encore –

17. The Late Greats

18. I‘m The Man Who Loves You

19. Monday

20. Outtasite (Outta Mind)

1. Best show I’ve seen from them was at the Fillmore in San Francisco after they released A Ghost is Born. Among other things that night, they closed with a cover of “Don’t Fear the Reaper” [↩]
2. My friend Jeff refers to that as Wilco’s krautrock-y stuff [↩]
3. If my memory is correct, this was Wilco show #5 for me [↩]