Listening to This American Life’s camp episode last week, originally aired 12 years ago, I started thinking back to my own child hood camp experiences. From the time I turned 11 or so I started going to at least one week long camp every summer. I’m pretty sure my mother used the one or two weeks I was gone during the summer as a personal vacation from motherhood, and with a son like me who could blame her?
Camp was a personal escape from me too. As a kid I never felt like I belonged, while friends seemed to always be easy enough to make I always felt like an outsider. For some reason those week long immersions in to a new social dynamic felt refreshing and allowed me to not worry about fitting in or being liked. Maybe it was the length of the camps that didn’t allow the complex groups to form that left me feeling so alienated at home, but whatever it was I felt like camp allowed me the freedom to be a different me. Not that I lied about who I really was, or became someone different, but that being able to let go of my insecurities and my doubts about being worthy of friendship and just be a kid.
Whether it was YMCA Camp in Boone or church camp in Guthrie Center with my friend Brad, or, in high school, Track Camp at ISU I always went away feeling that at camp I would be the kid that everyone wanted to be friends with. Strangely, or maybe not so strangely, while I still keep in contact with friends from high school I never made lasting friendships at camp. Maybe that says something about how real friendships are grounded in the sometimes hard real world, not in the fantasy of a week long vacation from oneself.
Did you ever go to camp? Were your experiences similar to mine or drastically different? I’d love to hear about your thoughts.
So, after owning an asus UL30VT-A1 for a month I decided that, since I want to start doing some iPhone/iPad development, I need to own a mac. It was either buy a mac mini and have two different machines other than my main windows desktop or sell the asus and grab a mac laptop. After finding a buyer for the asus at just a little less than I paid (the price has actually gone up since I bought mine) I made a trip to my friendly neighborhood apple store (getting the “Jobs” badge at the same time) and grabbed a shiny new 13″ macbook pro. 
My question to you loyal reader is, since I’ve been sans mac for quite a few years now, what are the must have apps that I might not know about? What apps make your life easier? I’m going to be giving aperture a try, but I’m not sure I’m awesome enough to justify $200 for it. What else am I missing out on to get the full mac experience?
Once again I’m a trend setter. You may remember a couple weeks ago when I waxed poetic on my love of snaps.
Today Kenny voiced a similar opinion.
Sorry Kenny, I beat you to the punch on this hard hitting opinion piece, but hey there’s enough hipster faux western wear shirts to keep us both in mother of pearl snaps for years to come, so no hard feelings.
A friend on Twitter was complaining this week about their cable company provided DVR and it reminded me of the couple months when I first got HD after having a standard res TiVo for many years. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say it was the worst two months of my life; okay maybe I’m exaggerating a little bit.
At this point I’m going to assume that everyone knows what a DVR is, but if you don’t then just quickly it’s a device that records your TV to a hard disk so that you can either watch it later or to give you the flexibility to pause or rewind live broadcasts.
What sets Tivo apart from cable company DVRs is ease of use and extra features. Tivo is so easy to use that even my mother can do so (hooking it up to her television is a different question, but I digress). The people at tivo have really taken the time to understand how people want their digital content presented to them and the organization of the entire menu system just makes sense. Nice little touches like organizing a show in its own folder that you can either navigate into to pick particular episode or play all in chronological order (can you say “90210 marathon”?).
Now, that might not sound much different than your standard DVR, but prepare for me to blow your pants off. If you hook your tivo up to your broadband service you open up a whole world of online content. Subscribe to video podcasts, watch youtube video, rent videos from Blockbuster or Amazon, or watch movies from your netflix instant queue. All this is presented in an easy to access manner too.
Tivo does have a bit of a price to it. You’re gonna pay around $300 for one of their new “Premier” series boxes, though you can get older machines for discount the stuff I’ve seen with the new interface is really impressive. You also pay $12.95/month for the service, and if you have cable through someone like Mediacom you’ll need to get a cablecard so that your tivo can decode your digital signal. On the plus side the rental fee for the cable card is actually cheaper than the rental fee for a set-top box; last I checked it was $10/month for a box rental vs. $5/month for the cable card.
Really the thing that makes tivo stand out for me is just how it really changes the way you watch visual media. I don’t even know what time or channel shows are on anymore. I watch my programs whenever I want to and if I need to pause it to go do something then I just pause it and save the program for later. Now if I could get Tivo and Hulu to work together I’d die from sensory overload.
Do you have a tivo or another dvr? What is it about tivo that turns its users into evangelists? Am I just crazy?
Wednesday May 5th I start an exciting new direction in my career as the lead developer at Catchfire Media. (sidebar: what was I thinking when I set my start date as Cinco de Mayo?) Instead of working for a slow moving and massive insurance company, doing what they tell me to do, I’ll get to work with a team of smart people that love what they’re doing and really work together to come up with some great stuff.
Thank you for this opportunity Catchfire Media. I think we’ve got great things in front of us and I look forward to the challenge of growing together.
