About 6 months ago, I decided to I wanted to do something about the crap that was filling up my mailbox. I’m not talking about my email inboxes. Yes, there’s a lot of junk that finds its way in there, but unsubscribe links and filters are adequate ways to wage digital war on your email inboxes. What I’m referring to is good old fashioned postal mail. The thing that birthday cards from my grandmother appear in…that postcards from my mom’s world travels find their way to me. Sadly those things are needles in the haystack of bills and just plain junk in the form of catalogs and coupons. What I was finding was that I was simply recycling 75% of what was in our mailboxes without even looking at it for more than 5 seconds. The issue was compounded for our family because we actually have a post office box in addition to our street mailbox.
So what did I do about it? Three things
First, I signed up for all the e-bills and paperless statement programs possible. All but one of my regular bills could be eliminated this way.
Next, I started using Catalog Choice to eliminate unwanted catalogs. The only catalog I still allow through is the REI catalog.
And lastly, I used the forms and contacts available on Recycle Works’ Stop Junk Mail page. Another good link for Bay Area people is http://www.stopjunkmail.org/
While I don’t have any quantifiable data showing the reduction after these efforts, I can tell you that its less. Certainly, I can’t remember when I threw out a pile of Pottery Barn catalogs or stack of grocery story coupons.
It’s pretty great that Mason is getting old enough so his taste in movies creeps closer to some of the films I enjoy watching over and over. Kung Fu Panda is great, but after 137 viewings, I need some change. Here’s what we’ve enjoyed together recently
- Ghostbusters – he actually started quoting lines from the film and singing “Who you gonna call?”. So. Proud.
- Tron – unsure if I’ll be taking him to Tron Legacy this December
- Superman II – actually not yet, but it’s coming to Netflix Instant in a couple weeks so we’ll be watching
My friend Dave is fond of writing blog posts that have the line “here it is list form, because people like lists.” That’s probably true, so I’m going to use that writing technique to revive my posting on this site. Anyway, here’s a random list of thoughts for you.
- DVD Later – for adding movies currently in theatres to your Netflix Queue – is pretty awesomely convenient. Especially if you’re lick me and 98% of your annual movie watching happens via Netflix DVDs at your house.
- October just isn’t the same when the Red Sox aren’t in the playoffs. It’s nice having the Giants make it, but its no replacement for the Sox. Prediction: Phillies win it all
- I’m a bit of data geek. Specifically, a data visualization geek, so I’m pretty excited about playing with Daytum.
- I’ve launched a couple new sites in the past week. I’ve fairly obsessed with online curating and determining how much “content creation” online can be pushed to zero effort. Along those lines, I’ve created two new tumblr sites. http://phishtank.tumblr.com catalogues great multimedia capture by fans on current Phish tour. http://gov20.tumblr.com (yes, these sites couldn’t be more different) is a companion to the blog I started at http://nasawebdude.com about Government 2.0 and Open Government topics.
- Speaking of Phish, the 3 night run I attended at The Greek Theatre in Berkeley this past August was one of my summer highlights.
- Was in Chicago a couple weeks ago. I hadn’t been there for over 10 years. Forgot how great a city that is. Need to go there for a long weekend with Keturah sometime soon.
- Finally, yesterday was Keturah’s birthday. Here’s a pic I took at the pumpkin patch we went to with the boys. Sorry that its a bit blurry. It came from my iPhone
Keturah and I were married on this day in 2004. It was the beginning of so much. Including an all night party that ended the next morning with cocktails at The End Up (with me still wearing the suit in the picture below).
Happy anniversary to Keturah. Thanks for making all of my dreams comes true.
You may have noticed that I’ve started including footnotes in my blog posts.
Know this: there’s a really good chance I’m going to grossly overuse these.
I haven’t done this in the past. Why start now? Well, in whatever writing I’ve done whether its a business email, a message to my friends about the current state of the Red Sox, or a letter to my grandmother, I’ve find that my mind wanders as I write. Make that as I type. I go off on brief tangents which I would often include in parentheses. And it really broke up what I was writing into this distorted flow. Lots of sentences would start with stuff like, “But anyway, as I was saying…”
But there were a couple recent external influences in my current reading materials. First, there’s John Gruber’s FANTASTIC blog, Daring Fireball. I’m really enjoying his deep analyisis and long-form writing. Most recently, his coverage of the iPad and the Apple vs. Adobe WWF cagefight.. I’m getting close to saying with full confidence that John Gruber is to tech blogging as Peter Gammons is to baseball writing.
The second element is that I’ve started reading Bill Simmons’ Book of Basketball. In the foreward, Malcolm Gladwell of all people shines light on SImmons’ use of footnotes, mentioning “Oh, and read the footnotes. Simmons is the master of the footnote.” He’s right. The footnotes are a must read in this book. If you don’t read them, you’re going to miss out.
Ok, so we’re at word count of around 330 and I’ve got 5 footnotes. See? Told you I was going to overuse these.
Last thing. Wondering how I’m generating the footnotes in my posts? It’s a plugin called WP-Footnotes and more information can be found here.
