This was a lot of fun to look through. But where is Mustard Man? Click on the little blue flags to zoom in to see more.

http://www.dipity.com/user/tatercakes/timeline/Internet_Memes/embed_tl

1. The Business Brickyard – This is a wonderful little book that’s available for download in PDF format. Tiny chunks of great advice! Yes, it’s geared to those in business but the topics and lessons are varied and should interest a wide audience. I loved the chapter called “Singles and Doubles”.
2. Favtape – My favorite mashup service. Just feed it your Pandora URL or Last.fm username and it creates an instant mixtape you can share. Here’s a link to mine.
3. CCleaner – Consider it the Dust Buster for those times when the party is over but there’s chips and bottles scattered around your apartment. You will not believe how many programs leave your computer littered with crap. This finds the hidden dirt and takes it to the curb.
4. Killer Wallpaper – So you cleaned up your PC with CCleaner but want to spiff up your desktop a bit? Check out this amazing collection wallpaper to suit many screen sizes and tastes. I enjoy looking through the collection geared to those with dual monitors.
5. Free Flash Games – I found this site a long time ago and my kids love it. The music and games are fantastic. This one is my favorite.

I love when Lincoln tries to give me a ‘wet willy’

I love when Luca gently kisses my cheek each night when I tuck her in bed.

I love when Anna says, “Dad, you being bad. Go to your room” when I don’t give her more than one Tic Tac.

I love when Kai takes my finger, squeezes it and then tried to bite it.

I love when Anna puts on my dress shoes and flops around the house like a clown.

I love to see how happy they get when their grandparents come to visit. (That’s a picture of my father with Luca, Anna and Lincoln during his last visit)

I love taking Luca to Dairy Queen where she’s unable to decide what flavor of ice cream and finally says in her raspy voice, “Dad, you just pick”.

I love when Lincoln asks me questions that are difficult to answer like, “What’s under the ocean?”

I love when Luca tells me how to work the Tivo, the Nintendo or the microwave.

I love when the kids sit on top of me while laughing at the Smurfs while I don’t understand a thing about the show. 

I love bringing up the Tivo menu ready to watch Top Gear and realizing the kids Scooby Doo marathon on Boomerang pushed it off the list to record.

I love lifting Lincoln up to the ceiling and then dropping him onto his bed taking his breath away.

I love listening to the kids say the prayer on the food and including everything under the sun (pets, friends, toys) except a blessing on the food.

I love the outfits Anna puts together like the one today that consisted of an orange summer dress, purple tights and one shoe and one sandal.

I love when the kids run down the stairs to tell me they’ve found a spider so big and so mean that only I could get it.

I love watching Anna eat a bowl of applesauce and wondering how so much ended up in her ears and hair.

As I walked into the kitchen to find Kim washing dishes, she gave me that look all dad’s immediately understand:

IT’S YOUR TURN TO TUCK THE KIDS INTO BED

I rounded up the three oldest as best I could which means I dragged one attached to my leg while one hung off my back while I carried one upside down into Luca’s room where I turned off the lights and began telling a scary story.

I never know where the story is headed but it always includes the following:

1. Gigantic hairy spiders
2. A dark and haunted chimney
3. Growling noises coming from under the bed
4. A child who has to go the bathroom

I ended the story like I do all scary stories which the gigantic spider getting lose and chasing the kids around the house. Then I tickle each of the kids till they can’t stand it anymore.

I was quite proud of my impromptu scary story until Lincoln said, “Dad, that story needed more spiders because it wasn’t very scary”.

1. Men Who Look Like Old Lesbians
2. The Fail Blog
3. Crummy Church Signs
4. The Smoking Gun
5. The Onion News Network

I’ve been running Vista on my work laptop and home workstation for a few months now and the experience has been substantially better since SP1 was released, although doesn’t it deserve a better product page than this confusing page.  For a minute I thought Microsoft was selling laptops!

The upgrade to Vista from XP was painful. In fact, Microsoft should be ashamed for suggesting customers should attempt to upgrade XP machines to Vista. From my experience, the only way to install Vista is to do a fresh install which, for most people, means wiping the XP installation. Because I’m moving more of my work online (Blog, Gmail, Flickr, etc) I have fewer programs to reinstall and fewer files to backup.

So if you’re considering upgrading to Vista, here’s my take on why it’s been worthwhile:

SEARCH. SEARCH. SEARCH.

Vista’s best feature is the massively improved SEARCH. I can’t overstate how well it works. I use it dozens of times each day and it never fails me. XP search is so terrible that I installed Google Desktop which was an improvement, but is nowhere near as slick as Vista search. The best thing I can say about Vista search is that it just works. Windows users who have trouble organizing documents will find this a Godsend because every file is now only a few clicks away.

And that’s it. That’s the only substantial reason to upgrade to Vista. But search is such a helpful and oft used feature that it makes the upgrade worthwhile. Oh sure, there are other, less significant reasons to upgrade such as:

1. Aero Interface – Vista is better looking than XP if that matters to you. It mattered to me for about 2 days.
2. Photo and Music – If I drag a picture or mp3 to the desktop, Vista displays a thumbnail of the picture or album.
3. Windows Update – I don’t know why but it works better on Vista and I don’t have to launch IE to run it.
4. More Backup Options – If you’re running higher end versions of Vista (Enterprise, Ultimate) Vista offers a slick computer or file backup. Microsoft should stop the absurdity and put this feature into every version of Windows.

A word of warning: Vista demands newer hardware and runs best on when paired with a fast CPU like an Intel Core Duo or Quad. And even then, don’t expect much more than a small performance increase if any compared to XP. But Vista is stable doesn’t get in the way of things once you turn UAC off.

A few of my friends are going to be shocked, but I have to admit that Vista is growing on me each day. I wish it I could rip out all the features I never use (Movie Maker, Paint, Sound Recorder, Wordpad, etc) and only install a bare bones Vista. But overall, it’s a welcome upgrade to XP.

Plus, it runs Firefox just fine.

Why did you upgrade to Vista? Or are you going to wait for Windows 7 or move to the Mac?

It’s been a lot of fun having my dad in town for a few days. One topic my dad and I always discuss for hours is sports. We’ll talk about how the Utah Jazz are doing or how the season might turn out for the Seattle Seahawks. It’s something we have in common and something we enjoy sharing with each other.

We also talk a lot my grandpa Nordquist who passed away a few years ago. He loved athletics and stared in basketball, football, tennis and track while attending Westminster College and the University of Utah in the 1930’s. He passed on his love of sports to my father who become a coach and a teacher for over 30 years. 

When my father’s mom passed away a few months ago, my dad came upon a number of photo albums, some of which contained pictures few in our family have ever seen. Most pictures taken of my grandfather depict him him running or throwing a ball. I knew he was an excellent athlete but I had no idea his skills were so diverse. I don’t know many athletes today who play soccer and throw the javelin.

I spent last night going through these pictures and it brought back a lot of fun memories of the times I spent listening to my grandpa tell stories of his athletic career. He’d recount plays from the last Utah vs. BYU football game. Or he’d tell me about the latest drama surrounding the Jazz when the team was coached by Frank Layden. Some weeks he thought Rick Majerus was a saint and other times he’d call for his firing. I didn’t care which sport we talked about because his passion for them was infectious making it all interesting.

I’d give about anything to sit on the back porch of his old red brick home and chat with him and my dad about the Utes are going to torch BYU in the “Holy War”.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that every outing with the kids has to be an elaborately planned event they’ll remember forever. I used to think that I had to compete with the many organized outings the school or church plan. I’m glad they have the opportunities to visit places such as the zoo and aquarium.

I learned a valuable lesson this past spring when I chaperoned Luca’s first grade class to the zoo. I was excited to show them the gorilla and bear exhibits that I’d seen a few weeks before. I assumed the kids were as excited as I was. We jumped off the bus and I pulled out my map to find the bear exhibit. We walked and walked till we were just yards away. I figured the kids would be so excited to see the bears they would sprint the last 100 yards. But as we neared the entrance the kids noticed a big tree and ran towards it. They took turns climbing up the tree until all five kids were hanging off their own branch asking me to take their picture.

What I learned is the kids just wanted to spend time with each other. The bears could wait. I wasn’t sure if I should allow them to climb the tree but I stayed close and didn’t let them go very high. I wanted to climb the tree with them until I remembered I was a chaperone.

I’ve tried to keep this lesson in mind as I sometimes feel I don’t plan enough big events for the kids. I’ve taken the kids to movies before and they can’t remember what they watched but they remember sitting on dad’s lap skimming off the well-buttered pieces of popcorn. We’ve taken them to nice restaurants and they were more interested in the bubble gum machine than the food. I took Lincoln to a Mariner’s baseball game and his favorite part was the train ride home.

The point is that what I feel is most important isn’t necessarily what my kids will remember. They tend to focus on the small, usually inexpensive and spontaneous things that happen outside of the main event. It’s taken me a while to appreciate these times.

Before the kids went to bed tonight I played “Simon Says” with them. When we finished Luca said, “That was so much fun, dad. It was even better than Nintendo!”

Dad 1 – Nintendo 0

Robert Cringely writes the best article about Microsoft and Apple I’ve come across in a long time. I’ve had many discussions with friends who are current and former employees of Microsoft and they can’t seem to grasp what Cringely explains in  exquisite detail:

In every business there is some version of the 80-20 rule that says 80 percent of the business comes from 20 percent of the customers. Smart businesses do whatever they can to play to that powerful 20 percent…There’s another kind of company, however, that applies the 80-20 rule in a different manner and Apple is one of those companies. They aim everything they do at that top 20 percent and ignore the rest…There are other companies that take a similar market approach to Apple, but few of them are in the computer business. BMW and Porsche are good examples…If Microsoft gets only 20 percent of any market it enters, they consider that effort a failure and it would be, because Microsoft’s business is scaled and its cost structure is optimized for really, really big numbers of mindless and fairly undemanding customers

This describes the differences between Microsoft and Apple better than anything I’ve come across. This explains why Microsoft products like Zune and Live Search haven’t been widely accepted. Those products aren’t aimed at the top 20%. They are products aimed as the masses which might work when your previous version has a huge installed based for a product like Vista. But it’s an uphill battle when your product doesn’t stand out against the likes of the iPod or Google search.

Microsoft isn’t the Porsche or the BMW of software. They are the Toyota Camry: cheap, lots of features, reliable, but not very exciting. But good enough to meet the needs for the majority of drivers.

And when I listen to Balmer and Gates keynotes all I hear are references about OEMs and partners and resellers. You seldom hear either of them talk about products for the consumer. I find it interesting that my two favorite Microsoft products are ones they give away for free and don’t have giant armies of programmers and marketers behind: Windows Live Photo Gallery and Windows Live Writer. They are both simple and fun to use programs.

As I read the Cringely article I was reminded of a blog post Seth Godin wrote a while back about titled, “Why Downloading Firefox is like getting into College”. Very similar concept.

Back in 1980, just one week before the general election at a debate against President Jimmy Carter, challenger Ronald Reagan ended the night with one of the most brilliantly executed parting shots at the incumbent when he looked into the camera and asked Americans this question:

“Are you better off than you were four years ago?”

I was only 13 years at the time but I remember how things changed at the moment Reagan asked that question. A week later Carter was defeated.

I keep going back to this question as I watch Obama and McCain fight for the right to lead our country. Am I better off today than I was 4 years ago when Bush began his 2nd term? How about 8 years ago? In same respects I’m better off and others I’m worse off. Eight years ago I didn’t think much about health care or retirement, but after 4 children in 7 years, I’ve given a lot more thought to both. Health care scares me as the costs continue to climb at a pace much faster than my salary.

I listen and both Obama and McCain, and I hear them toss out buzzword after buzzword that works the crowds into a frenzy. But I don’t have a clue what they mean or how it will help my family. I don’t know what they mean when they speak of “change” tossed into every other sentence. I don’t like where President Bush has taken this country, but I’d like to hear specifics instead of tossing out meaningless buzzwords.

I look forward to watching the debates between these two candidates. It’s difficult to watch Obama and not be impressed with his speaking skills and charisma. I have no idea how either would factor into making him a better leader of this country anymore than it would for me to vote for McCain based on his heroism as a former POW.

But there’s something about Obama that gives me hope. Hope for a better next four years compared to the last four. Maybe I’ll have the same feelings for McCain when I hear him speak more than I have. But right now I’m having a difficult time casting a vote for another Republican given where we stand after 8 years of Bush. Are you better off today than you were 4 years ago?