The Austin American-Statesman is reporting tonight that Players has been sold to the McCombs School of Business Foundation, which sold it to UT.

My earlier information, apparently, wasn’t quite accurate. The owners weren’t interested in selling at the approved, appraised value, but UT was willing to pony up more money to close the sale.

By law, UT could not have paid more than $2.5M for the property as the university isn’t allowed to spend more than the appraised value. They were able to skirt this law by having the Foundation purchase the property above value, then sell it to the university for the appraised value. In other words, the McCombs School of Business Foundation donated $1.5M to make the sale occur.

The official word is there has been no use determined for the site, although my source said that the entire block would be, eventually, used for a business school asset.

The gritty: Players sold for $3M, plus 10-year, rent-free lease valued at $1M. Under the terms of the lease, UT can terminate the lease (thus closing Players) with 6-months notice, however, would have to pay $100K for each year remaining of the original 10.

After two years, Players can terminate the deal themselves netting $100K for each year left on the lease.

Personally, I’m not sure what I think will happen. Assuming my original info regarding the length of lease for the other properties on the Whitis/20th/Guadalupe/MLK block is accurate, I could see Players staying open, at least, that long. At the same time, I can’t imagine UT would leave an empty gas station at MLK/Guadalupe abandoned for that long nor building something unless it was a component piece of a larger project.

In short, we have at least until October to enjoy Players or 2022 may be the end of the line or anywhere in between.

A year ago, we cut the cord. We struggled with this decision. We used cable as a crutch to help entertain Olivia when making dinner. We watched TV during any downtime and, with the DVR, we only watched shows we “wanted” to watch. Our first home, our condo, provided free cable through our HOA dues, so we took advantage of it.

One house later, the HOA didn’t cover the cost of cable and it is rather pricey. We were less than satisfied with the amount of TV we were watching, but if we decrease it, would our usage justify the price? With Catalina here and her uncovered medical bills arriving, we couldn’t justify it anymore.

Looking back a year and a few days, it was an awesome decision. We were given an Xbox 360 as a present and were impressed with the ESPN3 app. When our trial ended, we sprung $50 for an annual Xbox Gold account. Months later, we added on Netflix for $8/mo. The combo means we can watch a good amount of sports programming and entertainment programming for about ~$12/mo. That price makes sense.

I used to watch PBS as a kid. Sesame Street. Mr. Roger’s. Carmen Sandiego. With the Disney Channel, I forgot what free programming existed over-the-air. When we dropped cable, we started exploring KLRU, the local PBS station. We were impressed with what they had for kids of all ages. Personally, I discovered the subchannels. For those of us who had cable before the analog-digital transition, we were used to having a single channel for each station. With today’s digital technology, KLRU now has four different “subchannels” broadcasting. KLRU (the mothership on 18.1) is your normal PBS station, Create (18.2) is mostly (only?) do-it-yourself cooking/crafting/handyman shows. KLRU-Q, 18.3, has a great deal of adult PBS content and 18.4 is a Spanish channel that is much, much closer to PBS than what traditional Spanish television broadcasts. In other words, something I’ll let Olivia watch since I don’t have to worry about a random soccer highlight including the broadcaster surrounded by 30 bikini-clad women jumping around him.

The local channels are decent. Most of the shows we watch now were already on those networks. There are some nice things like a couple “weather” subchannels and one local station has actual music videos playing 24/7 on one of their subchannels (granted, the music is all about 20-years old). UT’s student television station that we’re close enough to campus to pick up including Bloomberg on one of it’s subchannel, so we have 24-hour news too.

Add on Netflix and ESPN3, we’re doing just fine. We miss the occasional UT football game on FX, Fox Sports Net, or LHN (who actually gets that one, though?), so it is a good reason to make plans with our cable-friendly friends/local establishments. Taking the leap to cut cable was more our own fear that we would miss something, which does happen, but doesn’t make the world stop spinning.

Crickets… I’ve heard them on the site too. A little unannounced communications blackout, if you will. Forgive me.

Vanessa and I are going to for kiddie hat trick. We’re expecting another little one adding to the fray at La Casa de Kraft, with an ETA of October 15th. It was too difficult to write about the joys and pitfalls of fatherhood, freelancing while at home, etc, without mentioning the upcoming addition.

For those keeping score at home, when our fourth anniversary rolls around in early October, we’ll have two kids plus one knocking on the door. We spent our first anniversary with a ~1-month old. Our second, Vanessa was pregnant with Catalina. Our third was “quiet” with Catalina being ~8-months old.

We didn’t plan our first girls, per se, but none of them were we planning not to have a kid either. Without going into detail, our basic approach has been when we discerned that we weren’t in the right place to have a child, we would hold off, but we’re not there.

Olivia doesn’t like the idea of the addition, but she’s not liking how fast Catalina is growing up either. Yesterday, she starting chastising Lina for pushing a doll stroller—”Lina! That’s dangerous! Only Mommy, Daddy and Olivia push it!” She’ll adjust though!

In the near-term, nothing else is changing. Vanessa will continue at SJD. I’ll continue to stay at home and freelance. Now that we’re able to share this now, we’ll return back to our scheduled programming.

[My latest piece over at Austin Catholic New Media]

I’m a big geek. While some guys like to fix cars, build things with wood, or tinker with things like that, I tinker with the Internet. I like digging into the guts of computers, specifically, what makes the web work. One of the reasons the Internet works is open-source software.

Open-source software, by definition, means that anyone can look at the guts, make changes, pass it along in an effort to improve the program. This is opposed to most of the software you buy in store. If there’s a problem or improvement, the best you can do is tell them about it and hope they get around to it.

I realized that open-source software is very “Catholic”. I don’t mean that the actual software or the people behind it are Catholic or that in and of itself, it promotes Catholicism. I mean that open-source software makes sense from a Catholic perspective.

photocredit: flickr/hackny

As Catholics, we constantly strive to improve ourselves and to offer help freely to others who are trying to grow closer to God as well, just as geeks across the world freely help improve these software projects. The majority of these software developers are either donating their time and talent, or their companies are providing their labor, and contributing it to the broader community.

Ubuntu, an open-source distribution of Linux (don’t worry if you didn’t follow that), is named using the Zulu word that can be translated as “I am what I am of because who we all are”. We are a communal people. We work in community and we would be no one without those around us.

One of the possible wrinkles of open-source software is that all of the flaws are public. Virtually all open-source software have bug tracking sites. These are websites where anyone can report a problem with the software. I’ve seen some bugs as seemingly minor as a misspelled comment in the code—something an end-user would never see—yet, the world can see that whoever wrote the code originally didn’t proof-read.

That’s realistic though. All software have bugs, but these are just easier to read about (and thus potentially fixed). That’s the way we are too. We’re flawed. Some of us can hide it better than others, but we all are broken in our own ways. While I hope none of us have websites dedicated to tracking our faults, being able to take inventory of where we have failed and what we need to improve is important. The Gospels tell us we that we are our “brother’s keeper”, we need to hear from others our “bugs” and report them to others. Software doesn’t require us to use our social grace to make sure these “bug reports” are delivered and heard in the spirit of charity, but I digress.

Open-source software, while accepted in many circles, are shunned in others. A friend of mine works at a branch of a large, government-sponsored engineering agency (trying to figure out how to describe it without giving it away…) and while he is a proponent of using well-established open-source software, many of the older engineers reject open-source on face since it isn’t from a company that can guarantee support. While there are plenty of ways to counter this claim, the point is some people reject it outright without giving it a fair shot. Being Catholic is the same way. People will reject us and our opinions at times just because they know we’re Catholic or realize that our opinion is obviously Catholic.

It isn’t fair to the software or to us, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles sometimes.

I’m a Catholic geek though, so I wear those lenses when I look at software (or things in general). What do you see or use in your daily life that seems to be “Catholic”?

[My latest piece over at Austin Catholic New Media]

Rita wrote a beautiful post about the passing of Austin’s own Leslie and how, despite virtually everyone’s uneasiness when meeting him for the first time, he had some impact on many in Austin. My wife and I had a brief conversation with the priest who administered Leslie’s last rites and celebrated his funeral. On the way home, my wife observed that part of the church’s beauty is our acceptance of anyone who wants to come back home, no matter their life circumstances.

Long before I was born, my family fell away from the church. The reasons are for a different day, but it took many decades for parts of the family to come back. Despite being away for many years, the path to return was simple. Celebrate the Sacrament of Reconciliation and start practicing the faith again. That’s it. There wasn’t an inquisition about why he or she left, no list of prereqs we were required to make up, and no barriers beyond what we ourselves have constructed.

Scripture gives us great imagery to support this. The Prodigal Son returning to the open arms of the Father, despite his unworthiness and squandering the gifts already received. The Good Shepherd risking it all to find and bring the lost sheep back to the flock. Jesus Christ giving up everything to reconcile all of us sinners back to our Creator.

Read the rest at Austin Catholic New Media

As my extended social network learns that I’m staying at home with the girls, I’ve been increasingly asked for advice on how to make it work financially.

There is no one-size fits all approach to this issue or else, I believe, more people would stay at home with their kids. The easy answer would be to have a spouse that makes plenty of money, but our society isn’t setup like that anymore for most people.

We had a nice financial setup before having kids. We both worked non-profit jobs, so we weren’t filthy rich, but we (looking back on it) had few expenses. When Olivia was born, Vanessa was making a few thousand more than I was making and Vanessa was going to stay at home. Instantly we took a 50%+ paycut.

It was a shock. Our retirement contributions stopped. Our emergency savings contributions stopped. We rolled back our charitable giving. That accounted for a 30% of our pre-kids “spending” each month already. We used to eat almost all of our meals outside of the house. Most dinners were on a walk on South Congress and most lunches were at the places near our workplaces. Half of our lunch budget was eliminated since V was at home. Dinners, for the first few weeks, were supplied by our friends coming over to meet Olivia. After that, we simply didn’t take Olivia out, so, while we still did take out too often, our dinner spending decreased too (drinks—alcohol and otherwise—and tip add up!).

Spending Less and Making More (photocredit: flickr/68751915@N05)

That stabilized us without us actually having to really think about our spending or change of lives much. Or at least more than having a kid would do in the first place.

Our spending had some non-negotiables. Vanessa was debt-free coming into the marriage, but I had a car payment (now paid, but deferring the payment amount to savings for our next car), a decreasing credit card balance (mostly paid) and student loans (will be with us to the bitter end).

Fast-forward to today: I switched jobs, we bought a house, had a baby without insurance-that-covered-maternity, between the three, depleted the bulk of our non-retirement savings and we switched up who stayed at home.

We have four mouths to feed, a house to keep and one non-profit salary. It doesn’t add up.

Cutting Expenses

There are two approaches to financial improvement. One says that you just need to spend less than you make. The other says you need to make what you (want to) spend. Frugality can take you a long way, but at some point, you just need to make more money or make large sacrifices.

We spend less now. We eat out less and have started eating out virtually only when my in-laws are in town (they pay!). We drive less (V’s commute is shorter than my daily mileage in insurance). We cut cable. We experiment on A/C settings and don’t water the grass as much as our neighbors would probably prefer to keep the utility bills manageable. We don’t have smartphones with data plans. We’ve changed auto/home insurance companies to the lowest cost at the same quality ratings. We haven’t renewed magazines. Basically, we look at our statements each month and ask “did that expense need to happen?” If not and the “want” isn’t a high priority, we eliminate it in the future.

Making More

I like this idea more. I’m fine cutting back quite a bit, but at the end of the day, I don’t want to have to act out of financial fear when a great opportunity presents itself.

You should see our taxes. In addition to your 1040, you have to file a Schedule C for any business income/expense from a sole-proprietorship. You have to file a separate Schedule C for each business you’re engaged in.

Vanessa writes for Busted Halo as a freelancer/independent contractor. It’s not a lot of extra money, but helps quite a bit.

My in-laws own a condo in Austin (where we used to live) and now is rented out. They don’t want to deal with it, so I’m the “property manager”. I collect rent, field maintenance requests, coordinate normal upkeep, draw up the contract, check out the renters, etc. In return, I get a small monthly stipend from them in that capacity. Again, it’s not a lot of money, but it’s something.

Technically, I’m still getting income from working in insurance. My setup with the company was that they would front me some money in the beginning to keep income (albeit lower than usual) coming into the house while I’m building a client list. My continued commissions are to them to pay off the advance, but still another Schedule C and increases our taxable income.

I’m building my freelance and consulting business. While I started Brandon Kraft Tech Services as a way to formalize/legalize when friends would pay me to host their websites or other really minor things, it has been growing organically to where all of my new projects contracted this calendar year are with folks I didn’t know before them contacting me for service or a RFP. While I’m still narrowing down my niche within the field and haven’t begun “branding”, this is the future. I’ve seen plenty of people with, what appears to be, less skill making a living off of this work and I’ve met plenty who are incredible at what they do that inspire me to expand my skill set (and they make far beyond what I’d like to make someday).

What About You?

Our extra sources of income are random, but they’re what we are able to do without a large investment. I’d like to get further training in XYZ that might cost serious change in classes and materials, but not there yet. For you, what are you good at that could be a marketable skill?

One friend asked about how we did it as she’ll be leaving her job as a bilingual classroom teacher. Besides tutoring, a teacher can’t do much, right? To me, I see her being able to be a translator and contracting with small companies or non-profits to translate materials into Spanish.

The woman who made our cupcake for our weddings is a stay-at-home mom of a flock of kids. She doesn’t own a bakery, just (if I recall correctly) rents space in a commissary kitchen when needed. We met her at a little coffee shop that sells her cupcakes to try out the samples (which, I assume she made at home since it would be a much smaller operation and a little different than a true commercial effort. Check with your local government on those rules though). Her niche is cupcake delivery and special events.

If you’re crafty, sell on Etsy. If you’re techy, do what I do (but not what I do… I don’t want to compete with a reader!). If you’re an educator, find out a different way to educate. If you like to bake, start a baking business.

Be careful and purposeful. You can easily throw away a ton of time and money trying to make something work, so have a plan. Get advice from the SBA and others. It’s not easy, but if staying-at-home is a goal for your household, it is worth the effort to figure out if that’s a reasonable way to get enough money in, after reducing expenses, to make it all work.

She leaned back and put her hand to her mouth during the “Oooooh snap”. Perfect delivery. I don’t say anything like that often, very rarely actually, but she picked it up and delivered.

A bit more arbitrary than a birthday, sure, but a milestone nonetheless. I remember watching a movie when I was around 11 years old about how your 10th birthday is a big deal since it’s when you “add a digit” to your age. We’re in double-digits for a long time, so the 10th is a big milestone too.

10,000 is even more so! I’m haven’t added a digit to my days of life count since I was Olivia’s age (her 1,000th day is coming up in May on my Mom’s birthday) and won’t add another one until the USS Enterprise is responding to a distress call from Vulcan (in the new timeline for you Trekkies).

While about 6,500 of my first 10,000 days were spent at home preparing for the roughly 22,500 days of adult life, I’ve had 3, 500 days to get this far in life. I’ve wasted plenty of those days. What will I be able to do with the next 10,000 if I’m purposeful with them?

Now, I will go, purposefully, and keep pushing forward on getting a client site built.

What's your 10,000th day of life without some fun wordart?

[My latest post on Austin Catholic New Media.]

Alright folks. One week down. How is everyone doing? Been perfect so far?

I admit, I already had a Lenten slip-up. This year, for better or worse, I didn’t mention what I was offering up for Lent on my personal site. In retrospect, I usually fail at it, which not only means I’m unintentionally bragging about what I’m doing, I’m being hypocritical too. That being said, we are a communal faith and we have each other to help us remember God’s grace when we are tempted or fail to live up to our standards.

In that light, let’s check-in with each other.

…

I have a confession to make about Friday’s post.

I had just finished reading Why Men Hate Going to Church by David Murrow. In his recent second edition, he postulates that the reason the gender gap is increasing in many Christian denominations is that many churches are overly feminized. Yes, the vast majority of pastors in Christian churches (and all ordained ministers in Catholic churches) are men, but the participants and those involved in lay leadership are majority women across the American Christian fold. Further, the lack of male participants will result in the death of a church, citing statistics that the higher the gender gap, the quicker a church’s attendance declines.

I found his book extremely interesting. Murrow connects today’s praise and worship music and the phrasing of having a “relationship” with Jesus Christ as one “male repellant”. His reasoning: What man wants to have a “relationship” with another man? Do men talk like that to each other? Did Jesus talk like that to his own Apostles? While we are called to an intimate relationship with Jesus Christ, can’t we find a different way to phrase it, at least some of the time? The book has many examples and his reasoning for how they came about.

He cites that, while we shouldn’t go fire and brimstone exclusively, much of our discussion of Christ is based on Jesus the Lamb while viewing Jesus the Lion (e.g. throwing out moneychangers in the temple) as the anomaly of Christ. Murrow’s claim is that Jesus was “a lion” as much, if not more, than he acted as a “lamb” and that the overall Christian church has decreased that message to, for some, a footnote.

Murrow’s solution isn’t to make churches a den of masculinity, but to reduce the “repellent” aspects some and increase opportunities for men to feel useful. Men like to work with their hands and do stuff. For many churches, the only ministry some men feel useful is the usher or parking lot attendant. (I’m not saying women don’t like to work with their hands. I’m not trying to make any inference about how women feel included in the church community; just my thoughts on getting men more active.)

This book was written for the broader Christian church, so many aspects of it aren’t applicable across the board. From the Catholic position, many of his points about worship services simply don’t apply to Mass or, if they do, aren’t things we’ll change as they’ve been like that for hundreds of years if not thousands. Nevertheless, many of his points do make sense to me and could be applied to the Catholic practice in some way.

As I mentioned in the comments of Friday’s post about chicken broth, sometimes being Catholic is a bit too easy. When looking at the guidelines of excluding meat on Fridays (and Ash Wednesday), if the sacrifice is easy, what’s the point? Yes, there is something to be said to be reminded of the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross, but as a penance, is it effective?

My thought, regarding meatless Fridays and chicken broth, is especially in today’s world where we have a world’s worth of culinary styles at our fingertips, it isn’t that hard to find recipes that completely exclude meat and meat-based products. This is ignoring that for a long time in our history, the Lenten fast was for all of Lent and excluded all dairy, eggs, etc. In the Eastern rites and Orthodox Christianity, this is still practiced (to some degree at least, not researched). They have specific time periods labeled “Meatfare” and “Cheesefare” as the farewell to meat and cheeses for all of the Great Lent.

One reason the Knights of Columbus do so well generally speaking is it pushes men to do more. It gives them a structure that lets them do good work doing work they feel they can do as men. Not saying women can’t do any of it, but something that feels natural for a guy. While men can sit in a room and make rosaries just as well as women, in our society, it doesn’t feel as natural for a guy.

Likewise, I think one reason, at the University Catholic Center, why the men’s Catholic fraternity (Lambda Omega Alpha) has done a better job of recruiting than the Knights is the pledge process. The fraternity’s pledge process gives young men a challenge (to make it through) and a stronger sense of exclusivity. Truthfully, I don’t know if they have ever rejected a candidate for membership who participated fully, but the standard is set that you are expected to rise to this challenge.

The Knights process is easier. Frankly, if you want to join, you talk to someone, we vouch that you’re Catholic (typically by you saying so) and you can attend a ceremony to join. The Knights, even college Knights, shouldn’t adopt the fraternity’s approach; however, there are aspects of the “challenge” that could be adopted.

There’s more to the recruitment issue than the process of joining alone, but we’ll exclude that for now.

My point is that all people need to feel at home in the church and a diversity of opportunities and language need to be used to create that atmosphere.

With “challenges”, there are issues. Friday’s chicken post was examining a point of canon law. There needs to be a fair balance between requirements and expectations.

My mom called me last night to ask me a question. She had gone to confession a couple of weekends before Ash Wednesday. Does that count for Lent? She understood the expectation to be that she had to go to confession during Lent and that, now, some folks are saying that we need to go twice a year, at least, during Lent and Advent.

Truthfully, there is little required in this category. We are required to take communion annually, during the season of Easter unless fulfilled another time of the year for a just cause (Canon 920). You can’t go to communion if you are conscience of your own grave sin (Canon 916). You are required to confess your grave sins once a year (Canon 989). Thus, the “Easter Duty”, as it has been called, is strictly to receive communion during Easter, in the state of grace, which infers that you should confess your grave sins just prior to communion, which Lent is the time of penance and preparation for Easter. Therefore, going to confession during Lent is assumed to be required. (Other legal documents and extremely laudable practices notwithstanding.)

So for my mom, frankly, yes. Her pre-Ash Wednesday confession “counts” and, save any grave sinfulness, she’s fine to receive communion, as required, during Easter.

But note, that the expectation is to go to confession during Lent, if not twice a year, if not more.

Should we expect more of our faithful? Yes.

Should we require more of our faithful? I don’t know and I’m not in any position to change any of this, so it doesn’t matter.

With Friday’s post, I truly think accepting chicken broth is an invalid reading of canon law, but in either case, we should expect folks to exclude it. We shouldn’t require Liturgy of the Hours for everyone, but we can expect families to adopt some part of it, perhaps Night Prayer.

Why Men Hate Going to Church is a good read for those engaged in ministry. The book shouldn’t be taken as Gospel, but as a reminder to reexamine our churches to ensure that we are reaching all of our members and capturing their hearts and minds. For many men, the challenge will bring them.

Disclaimer: I was given a free copy of the book in exchange for a review. I was not required to give a positive review.

I vote no.

Rocco of Whispers in the Loggia asked the question this morning if chicken broth sans the chicken itself can be used today (as a Friday in Lent). A reader pointed him to Jimmy Akin (another Catholic blogger) who said yes.

I’m not a canon lawyer, but you don’t need to be to get a reasonable answer. The beauty of the Catholic faith is 99% of the teachings, rules and regulations simply make sense if you accept the premises and the authority of the Church to decree certain things, such as the whole notion of Lent.

First, the canon law argument. Mr. Akin tries to claim that since the 1917 Canon Law prohibits “meat and soups of meat, but not” milks, etc and that the Apostolic Constitution Paenitemini of Paul VI (which establishes the rules in force) simply says “use of meat, but not…”, we are no longer bound to avoid soups of meat. Wait… No, sir.

photocredit: flickr/pswansen

I don’t know how you make chicken broth, but in my house, we take leftover pieces of chicken and leftover pieces of vegetables, place them in water and leave it heating on the stove a long time. Then, we extract the solid and the remaining liquid is the broth. I’m just a simple layman, but that seems to be using meat.

Paul VI, of blessed memory, stated that milk, eggs and condiments rendered from animal fat are acceptable. Thank you, as I have zero idea what is in any of my condiments. Wouldn’t it be easy to add broths if such an exemption was foreseen?

Is it that we have divorced the process of making chicken broth since majority of people grab a box or can from a shelf and call it a day?

Penance isn’t supposed to be easy. It isn’t meant to only be done by the superhuman either. Across the board, things in life that make us better are hard.

I want to lose 25 pounds. I’m not going to do it by only walking around the block until it becomes hard. (That may be a start depending on your life circumstances). I can go out right now and run four miles. Run all of it. Damn slow, but I can do it. If I seriously expect results, I need to push myself.

I want to earn a Master’s degree. I’m not going to do it by only reading material I find interesting until I get sleepy at night. I have to work at it. Study both the interesting and the dull. Write the thousand words that come easy and the thousand words that does not. My friend Nate had, seemingly, 19,000 lasers break on him during his PhD research. Was it easy to continue? No. But Dr. Nate did.

I want my family to continue to grow in a house full of love. I’m not going to do it by only doing what is easy around the house. A grocery store trip, two baths for a two- and an one-year-old and cooking dinner in the same 90-minute window isn’t easy.

I want to become closer to God. I’m not going to do it only by going to church on Sundays when I happen to wake up early enough.

Do you see the pattern? Penance is supposed to be attainable, but should require us to stretch. Someone who is vegan has the meatless Friday gig down, but perhaps they should voluntarily give up soy on Fridays. The point of the Friday penance isn’t not eating meat—it is to grow, to be drawn into conversion, to change our hearts. Paul VI says as much in the first chapter of Paenitemini.

At the same time, if you forget it’s a Friday of Lent or started making a recipe and mistakenly missed that it included a meat broth or ordered a meal at a restaurant, then remembered too late to reverse the action (e.g. stop cooking without wasting the food, change the order before the cooks made it, able to use a veggie broth instead, etc), then just eat the food. My personal thought is the waste of food is not the intention of the penance. Learn from the mistake, pay more attention next time and include it as part of your Lenten confession package.

Call me old-fashioned or oppressive, but leave the broth in the pantry today, okay?

Until now.

photocredit: flickr/tompagenet

I love books. I love having a bookshelf full of books. I admitted to myself when buying the Kindle that I would still buy the physical book if it was something that anticipate wanting to add to the physical library. In this case, I purchased The Emerging Diaconate by Deacon William Ditewig, PhD. My interest for the diaconate and my thoughts on this book are for another post, but I thought that I’d want to keep this one in physical form.

I realized I enjoy reading on the Kindle much more. With the Kindle, I can’t flip forward a few pages to see how long until the end of a chapter. I saw this as a defect; however, it is a benefit. While reading the book in the quiet of our room while the girls were sleeping on our retreat, I would be ready to take a break. While reading the previous book on the Kindle, I’d finish that “screen” and the remainder of that paragraph, put the book down and go. With the physical book, I wanted to reach the end of the chapter.

My reading comprehension crashed. My goal wasn’t to read anymore; it was to finish the chapter. I could say that I read the last two pages of the chapter, but I failed to retain any of it. I caught myself doing it again on Monday night. When buying the Kindle, I thought that I would read more, but I never thought it would help me to be a better reader.

That’s a sign of a great piece of technology. It may have flaws and critics will have issues, no doubt, but it enhances something to make your life truly better.

For Lent, I am hanging up my iPod Touch.

I’m still using the same one that was a Christmas gift in 2008 and it has served me well. While working as an insurance agent, I loved being able to update my electronic calendar on the road. I’m not certain it enhanced my scheduling experience, though. I remember apologizing many times while waiting for the iPod to load my calendar. A paper calendar may have actually been more efficient.

Now though, why do I need an iPod Touch? I get away with checking e-mail and Twitter throughout the day, but I don’t need to be consuming that content at that moment. Olivia comes up to me and says “Daddy, stop checking e-mail!”. Usually, I do it when she’s playing by herself and I seemingly have nothing to do in that moment. Truthfully, I’m trying to do two things well at the same time: be with my girls and keep up with the outside world.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to have dedicated blocks of time to do that? Do I carry a book with me everywhere and read a paragraph every time there is a two-minute lull? No offense, but do the 500 people I follow on Twitter actually say anything that I have to read right that moment?

Would I be a better father by being present when I’m present? Would it stretch me to have to figure out how to do activities during the day that entertains/educates both me and the girls? I bet they get bored too sometimes and don’t have the luxury of pulling out a magic device that always gives me something new to look at.

What about you? Are you using Lent as a chance to take away what doesn’t enhance? What helped you decide what you will be doing for the next 40 days?

I like the idea of taking a retreat annually, but have fallen out of the habit. In 2007, I took my last silent retreat at the Montserrat Jesuit Retreat House north of Dallas, TX. I attended a Christ Renews His Parish (CRHP or “chirp”) Retreat in 2010. This year, presented by the ACE Advocates of Austin and Dallas, the retreat focused on the topic of servant leadership.

The need to retreat is essential, whether or not you are religious. A retreat is a great time to step away from the typical grind and reset or recenter yourself. Like a vacation with purpose, the retreat allows you to slow down, enjoy life and remember what direction you want to follow.

photocredit: flickr/haveclipperswilltravel

In religious life, retreats are required. Canon law requires the bishop to ensure candidates for ordination have taken a recent retreat, bounds the religious to take an annual retreat, and dictates that the parish priest’s retreat is not to be taken from their “vacation time”.

In the business world, the presence of retreats is growing. More and more organizations—non-profit and for-profit alike—are taking their staffs or a subset on retreat to rediscover their mission, their goals and objectives and to formulate strategies to realize that mission and achieve those objectives when they return to the office. Businesses are realizing that they can be more successful when they step back for a moment to take in the bigger picture.

Individually, we tend to ignore this. I let three years pass without a retreat and I only went on the CRHP retreat because a member of the Knights that I needed to meet with regarding his insurance said he wouldn’t less I went. (While I don’t encourage this tactic, I knew I needed to go on a retreat, so it worked.)

We’ll go on a retreat when it is required or suggested by a community we are closely associated—work, civic and church organizations and so on. But we tend to ignore our own personal need to seek out the type of retreat that would enrich us at that time and take it.

The Jesuit-style retreat is my personal favorite. Primarily alone. Silent. Large blocks of time to simply reflect. Private. The content fixed. Each retreat is virtually the same as the previous one, although where you go with it differs. The retreat director guides you, but the journey is up to you. The Awakening-style doesn’t do much for me (but does for a lot of people). High-energy, music, small-group orientated with sharing. CRHP was similar to this. That being said, the experience was still enriching and recentered me on being a strong husband and father.

With so many options for retreats, the selection to choose from can stop us cold. There’s an all-men’s retreat by this organization, there’s a couple’s retreat here, the Jesuit center has a retreat every other week available, someone is always telling me that I simply must go on CRHP. It’s easier to do nothing than sort through everything just to figure out where to reserve a spot.

Even when some retreat styles are better for you than others, the important part is going on a retreat. I could have waited another four years before planning another retreat at Montserrat until I felt okay leaving the family for a Thursday-Sunday retreat, or could have found a million reasons to not attend that CRHP retreat, or have put up a thousand roadblocks to taking the entire family last weekend, the important step is actually going.

Something is better than nothing. In experiencing something new, you may discover something that enriches you in ways you never expected or experienced from that style before.

Back to this weekend: As a family, though, wow. The idea of the husband and wife going on a retreat and leaving the kids with Grandma made sense to me, but the whole family? Never occurred as feasible and I told Vanessa as much when she brought up the idea.

It worked. The retreat was at a beautiful camp outside of Marble Falls, TX. The organizing team split the working sessions amongst themselves to run child care in the retreat site’s rec room taking in all ages from our one-year-old to guys who appeared to be around 12. The adults were able to experience the retreat, the kids were able to play (for our girls, more than we do at home) and we were all able to enjoy time with each other outside of the typical weekend routine.

While not a very contemplative time, the retreat gave us pause, recharged the batteries and allowed us to look above the clouds in order to be reminded of why we’re doing what we’re doing in life. Being married with kids makes it more of a challenge to find and attend a retreat, either alone or with the whole group, but is even more a necessity.

photocredit: flickr/catbeurnier

This year, I decided to do a little. I still maintain that the holiday is primarily an attempt by the greeting card, chocolate, cheap stuffed animal and restaurant industries to get some positive sales numbers early into the year so the Christmas buying season has some padding. However, trying to do just a little something more to show your wife you love her is not a bad idea.

I executed a two-tier plan. Which approach would be more appreciated?

From the heart…

I crafted Vanessa’s redesigned site over the summer. She loves it, even though she doesn’t have the time to do much with it. She has mentioned in the past that she would like to post reviews of recipes that we try out on her site. While she could just write a normal blog post, put it into a foodie category and tag it up a bit, I wanted to make it easier and thus more likely for her to convert “I’d like to write…” to “I do write…”.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been working bit-by-bit on a recipe review system within WordPress for her. <geek>A custom post type with a few custom taxonomies.</geek>  She’d fire up her browser and navigate to her admin panel. Click “Add Recipe Review” then just answer the questions. Where was the original recipe at? What modifications did she make? Her review, her rating, a picture, etc. A custom category set lists the various meal times and holidays to select when within the day and within the year (if applicable). Lastly, a custom tag set allows her to enter each ingredient that she chooses, so later she can easily search all of the reviews in the system based on one. For example, when Johnson Backyard Garden is selling 20 pounds of tomatoes again, she can easily pull up all “tomato” reviews and plan how to use the 20 pounds worth.

I was able to finish the backend and get the frontend functional enough in time to show her today.

Once we get it looking like she wants and she has a few reviews in the system, we’ll show it off. Likewise, I’m thinking about packaging it up as a WordPress plugin.

From the wallet…

During my last HEB trip, I picked up a couple of stuffed animals (based on what Olivia and Catalina would like), some hand-dipped chocolate- and nut-covered strawberries and some chocolate-covered cherries. This morning, before finishing this post, I arranged it all on the table so she’ll see it as soon as she comes downstairs.

No real thought into this until I was at HEB.

What about a note?

One of Vanessa’s friends has a boyfriend who writes some type of love letter/note everyday. Everyday. If you or your significant other does this, wow. I love Vanessa. Without doubt, I give myself completely to her and she is my world. I struggle, though, figuring out a unique way of saying that in a note. I have this mental block against writing a love letter that says the same thing as something I told her previously or written to her before. Ladies, I’m sure you can give me a little guidance here on if that matters or not, but let’s just say I’m not the poetic love note type.

Which won?

That has to wait. As I finish, she’s upstairs getting ready. We shall see.

Either way…

Whether it is February 14th or May 19th or November 28th, showing our significant others and our families that we love them, care about them and want to treat them is always a good idea. While I’m all for bucking the cultural overindulgence of a small religious feast day-that-is-no-longer-generally-a-feast-day into the de facto day of love.

photocredit: flickr/spool32

Last night, I asked Olivia what was the best part of Catalina becoming a little toddler. She replied “I teach her things.” What things? “How to get up and walk around!” I guess she’s been saving that up until she felt Catalina was worthy of such an honor as walking.

I realized recently that I’ve been home with Catalina for the majority of her life. It gave me a moment’s pause. With parenting, I am naturally gifted in many ways and naturally deficient in others. I haven’t focused much on my deficiencies since Vanessa balances me out well.

I realized, though, that Catalina sees my deficiencies more than she sees Vanessa strengths.

Businesses and organizations have cycles they can re-evaluate. Either the academic year or the fiscal year provide a natural time to prune away ideas that aren’t working, seed new ones and generally review strengths and weaknesses. At least until kids are in school, there isn’t a natural period for review at home.

While she won’t remember this birthday or what I’ve done wrong in the last year, I’m hopeful that she’ll see the results of the review into the future.

What’s the Review?

I review a few different areas of my parenting of Catalina, which naturally will branch out to include Olivia and my life as a whole.

Spiritual

Do I pray with Catalina? Do I pray for her? How often? Her favorite book is this little nativity story board book. She’ll hunt it out of her bookshelf every day and is the only book I can start with when reading to her before nap or bedtime.

I’m sure there is something about the color scheme or the illustrations that attract her, but nevertheless, it is attractive to her.

Social

This is two-pronged. How much do I socialize with Catalina? Do I play with her? Do I “talk” with her? She’s still really young, but if I don’t pay attention to building a social bond with her, eventually, it’ll be difficult for me to “break into” her life. I figure to be conscience of it now and she’ll always know that Dad is a type of friend too. (A parent who isn’t afraid to discipline first, but a listening ear as well).

The second aspect is external. Do I let her play with other kids at the park or do I tend to keep her to myself? She has Olivia, so she is better than older kids than Olivia ever has been. She doesn’t quite know what to do with kids her age or younger—she is a bit rough. Outwardly, when other parents give me that look at the park, I say to myself “if your kid wasn’t a wimp…”, but realistically, I try to teach her to be gentle.

Physical

I like video games. I like computers. While I enjoy biking and other things outside, my default activities are typically stationary and indoors. With Catalina, how much physical play do we do? How does it rank in our schedule? Once a week? Once a day? Once an hour? I was lax last week and let the girls watch an entire feature-length movie at one setting. I meant to do a little work during that time, but I hadn’t seen it and ended up watching it with them too. At least at this age, I don’t want to make a 90-120 minute movie a typical activity.

Intellectual

Are we teaching her new things? Are we trying to advance her mental development? With Olivia as her best friend, Olivia helps a lot in that Catalina wants to catch up and be like her sister, but that doesn’t remove any responsibility from us. How often do we read together? How often do I do the age-appropriate tasks, like pointing out everything in a room and telling its name or colors or some creative problem solving with a puzzle?

While I bill this as an annual review process, it’s continual. I wish I could say I had a nice schedule when I consciously do this, I don’t. I end up doing it the week after Vanessa has an holiday—after Thanksgiving, Christmas, a random three-day weekend. The break in the routine is just enough to get me out of the mold.

It’s easy to forget how fast your kids are growing up, at least at this age. Their favorite toys yesterday are too young for them today it seems. The toys you had put away because they were “too old” for them or because you didn’t think they could safely navigate it yet are quickly within their skillset.

Parenting only two who are only one- and two-years-old themselves, I know there’s more I don’t know than do. How else do you review your parenting to make sure you’re being as effective as possible?

photocredit: Austin Chronicle

In 2005, the University attempted to acquire Players too. At the time, the price offered by UT was too low for the owners of Players and UT was authorized to use eminent domain to seize the property. The rub: UT was planning on seizing it for a parking garage for a hotel. A petition drive started with some virtual signatures and mostly physical signatures (remember, this was Facebook wasn’t facebook.com, it was thefacebook.com and looked like this. Long ago!)

The media loved the story. I was on the Bobby Bones Show. The Statesman ran a story about the effort. TV news outlets reported it. We made noise. There was support in the Texas House and a bill won overwhelming support against the University using eminent domain.

I haven’t spoke with the owners since news broke yesterday. If they don’t want to sell, we’re going to help them. Save Players is back.

[ Website ] [ Facebook ] [ Twitter ]

“But Kraft, it’s just a burger place. There’s nothing particularly unique about it.” True, absolutely true. However, it’s that third space. For most of us, we have a first space (home) and a second space (work/school). We need our place to go to where we can relax and socialize. Players is that place for many folks in Central Austin. Virtually on campus (or else UT wouldn’t want it), it is easily accessible to the southern half of campus. From living in Jester to working at the University Catholic Center, Players was the place to hang out, meet with friends, watch the game and get a bite to eat. Picture “Cheers” but on a college level.

After 2005, it was Cheers to me. Everyone knew my name!

But seriously, as often as not, someone I knew would already be there whenever I went there to eat. My fraternity, en masse, ate there after all our major functions. We had one of our 15th Anniversary Reunion activities there for crying out loud. They are locally owned and are part of the community. Players introduced me to Live Oak’s Big Bark, which led to my discovery of local breweries. I wouldn’t be a member of Black Star Co-Op if Players didn’t open my mind to local options that you’ll never see with a Super Bowl ad.

In the end, it truly doesn’t matter. It’s just a burger place. It’s part of the drumbeat of progress. But what do we lose? What would campus be like if the bar at 21st and Speedway held firm? On that ground now stands the PCL, the main library. Yes, north of campus there are burger/beer joints. There’s one further up on Guadalupe. What do we lose when everything in socially-acceptable walking distance to the majority of on-campus students is a chain establishment?

Austin is the big city that still wants to be a small town. Sometimes, that’s bad. Look at our transportation/transit situation if you need evidence. That small town vibe, though, is what makes small towns unique and why half of the planet loves Austin. Austin can’t keep blinders on—as we’ve done with transportation—but we can’t afford to make everything between UT and the Capitol sterile.

No one ever says when visiting Austin “I can’t wait to eat at the MLK McDonalds! Brings back all these memories!”

Building the Business photocredit: Rebuild Lakeshore

My personal dream, professionally, is to someday have a strong enough income off of this site and freelancing to be the sole (necessary) income. Since the vast majority of my work could be done anywhere with an Internet connection, the idea of being able to take extended trips to visit family or friends without always having to close up shop or take vacation days is very appealing.

Monday, I had a great site visit with a client. She was fun to work with, I enjoyed my time, it was an actual paying gig (instead of the too-easy-to-agree-to “can you help a friend” volunteer thing). The rest of the day, I started thinking of the various aspects around the business that I need to do. Brandon Kraft Tech Services’ website, brandonkraft.net, obviously is incomplete. I don’t have a logo or business cards. I need a standard pricing chart and whether I’ll publish it or hold it internally. All types of fun things.

The freedom is exciting and terrifying. While working for the Knights of Columbus, I was, technically, self-employed. I could use virtually any method I wanted to secure the sale—use or not use their sales material, create my own (with approval of compliance), make appointments whenever I wanted—but, in the end, I had a plethora of materials already in place. While I could have designed my own, I had a basic business card design, logo, standard (and fixed) pricing and so on. Now, I can do everything to grow the business or shoot it in the foot.

Thankfully, there is a community online and in Austin for support. Kathryn Whitaker, who herself is a stay-at-home parent running a successful freelance design firm, is an inspiration. The web developer circles in Austin are vast, especially compared with most cities. While I made all the choices, I’m not going it alone.

The same goes for parenthood. We’re making all the decisions. Plenty will be a good and plenty will be bad, but there are great physical and virtual communities that allow for the village to help rear a child.

The key for me is to not get overwhelmed. Being a parent has taught me to take each day at a time. Grand, masterful plans that are works of art, are only as good as their effectiveness and practicality, which means their flexibility. As a parent or as a new freelancer, you can only do so much. You have to craft plans and strategies, but overall, just focus on the task at hand and have a good idea of which direction the next battle will be.

Two extremely popular Internet services companies top the list of companies of the latter. HostGator and GoDaddy.

photocredit: flickr/striatic

I started out with HostGator many, many years ago. I had an absolute horror of a nightmare with them. The story is for a different day, but in short, imagine if your website and e-mail were suspended during the middle of the night due to high usage without any explanation of what, specifically, had high usage, inability to access server logs to track down the problem and no recourse except to start paying for a monthly plan five times more expensive. Their CEO was in on the conversation thread and was unapologetic that my little blog in 2007 when no one read it was too popular for them to handle, but in the end, I was offline for three days—e-mail included.

I stuck it out with them for awhile.

I used to have all of my domain names registered with GoDaddy. Previously, I had a single domain (brandonkraft.com) that, because I didn’t know any better, registered with the original registrar, Network Solutions, which was expensive by comparison. When I started picking up more domains, GoDaddy was the default that everyone mentioned. I’ve heard horror stories, but thankfully, never experienced my own.

I stuck it out with them for awhile.

I left both companies, in the end, not due to their customer support, the quality of their services or anything else related to anything to do with their actual business.

I left both because of the personality of the business embodied in the CEO.

HostGator’s CEO pulled a stunt in 2007 after the company moved to Houston to have himself and some of their employees act as homeless people for a few hours. That was enough to push me off. I stayed with the company through a three-day outage, but their CEO blogging on the company blog about him and a few employees being “bums” for a few hours was too far for me. I pulled my website, the University Catholic Center’s website and a couple of other clients off their services as soon as possible. We moved to Nexcess and are still very, very pleased.

GoDaddy… Just look at their Super Bowl ads. One showed their female spokesmen body painting another, mentioning at the end how they missed a few spots followed with something like “See the unrated conclusion online!”. The other one I saw was the old “heaven is like a room full of underwear models” ploy, which also ended with the “see the unrated conclusion!”.

Their CEO took fire for going on an African trip that included shooting elephants and the company as a whole took intense heat for support SOPA, which led to tens of thousands of domains being transferred away from their services.

I left GoDaddy sometime ago and ended up starting my own reseller registrar service, partnered with Tucows (http://domains.brandonkraft.net) primarily as a way to best assist clients while allowing them to have full ownership of their domains while knowing that the profit going to the seller (e.g. me) won’t be used for sexist Super Bowl ads, elephant-killing safaris or Internet-killing legislation.

In both cases, the lack of leadership displayed by these companies is why I decided to terminate my professional relationship with them. Technically, they could have been the best, but it wouldn’t have been enough.

The CEOs might be able to lead a company to be profitable, but are they a leader in society? Are they advancing common good? I don’t need them to go out of their way to do anything besides not do things that make the world worse. Nexcess hasn’t done anything, I’m aware of, that has brought any attention to them beyond their technical services. I’m fine with that. They’re not making the world worse.

When you’re a leader, you’re inviting others to follow you both within your specific realm and as a person. You need to embrace both of those roles and manifest that.

Within the home, if I put food on the table, get the girls bathed every day, put them to sleep on time and, in every physical way, serve their needs, but am a jerk to them or their mother, I’m failing as a father. Within a company, if the balance sheet looks good, but my employees hate me for being a mean, insensitive jerk who drives them into the ground relentlessly until they quit, I’m failing as a business leader.

As consumers, we have to pay attention to the companies we patronize. Sometimes, it is easy. Plenty of people boycotted Taco Bell during their tomato labor issue, but it goes beyond that. What do you believe? Is a company violating what you consider decent? CEOs and leaders are accountable for their actions, but the followers are too.

In conclusion, leadership is a two-way street. Leaders have to be accountable for what they bring to the table and followers/consumers are accountable for who they choose to follow.

photocredit: flickr/aaabbbccc8d

I’m torn on this issue. The first amendment freedom of assembly is extremely important. We, as citizenry, have the right to protest peacefully and that is an absolute cornerstone of the American democratic process.

But, I’m a pragmatist. A protest designed to be indefinite, seeking vague goal (“end corporate greed”) with an unclear reason to protest at City Hall seems silly to me. After reading their own brochure, I don’t understand what, specifically, they’re trying to protest.

I watched part of the eviction by way of OccupyAustin’s livestream team. One women, very upset, was decrying being evicted from “the home they have known for four months.” I’m not part of the 1%. Hell, I’m not in the top 50%. That plaza is my city hall too. It is as much “my home” as your home. This group has monopolized a very visible public plaza for four months. I care about the abortion issue. Could I have organized a protest at City Hall to attempt to impact decisions within the competency of the City around the anniversary of Roe v Wade?

I care about transportation issues. Could I have staged a “bike-in” at City Hall during that time? I care about electricity rates being fair for both Austin Energy and consumers, especially those struggling already. Could I have staged something at City Hall during this time, as Austin Energy (owned by the City), is debating rate increases?

Many will say yes, but it would either be mixed in with Occupy or, by virtue of the limitation of space, be smaller than it could have been. These are issues that the City not only can take action on but is the entity to take action.

Should the City have ordered their removal? I don’t know 1st Amendment law enough to begin to answer that question. I don’t know how absolute Freedom of Assembly is within our legal precedents. Can a protest use a public space permanently? Do I have a legitimate claim that they are restricting my ability to (effectively) protest by hogging City Hall?

What do you think? Leave a comment!

If you know me personally, you know there is much physical chaos to my environments. I like the idea of organization, but I miss the boat when it is time to execute. Being married to Vanessa has helped with execution, but I still need to take a timeout once a week when I realize that my desk became a mental distraction.

photocredit: flickr/CarbonNYC

Olivia is putting away her toys and books each night more and more often, but not yet every night. When I put them away, I become very anal. The train cars must be “parked” in the parking spaces on the city playmat. Each toy veggie must be reassembled and go back to the grocery bag to which they belong. This bin is for wooden building blocks. This one is for the plastic blocks. The boxes slide onto the shelves like this, not like that. Until very recently, each night, I would reassemble and correctly order this alphabet puzzle that has a letter on one puzzle piece and a picture of an item of that letter on another.

Within five minutes of either of the girls being set on the playmat in the morning when making breakfast, the chaos has returned and any semblance of order has been eliminated.

The girls will eventually not pull out every toy for the sake of doing so and they’ll eventually understand the desire for organization and order, but Daddy needs it now.

When Olivia puts away the toys, she can do it anyway she sees fit. When I actively help her, I guide her toward my organization, but am not ruthless about it. As long as some sense of order is achieved, we met the objective.

Being home all day, chaos is the primary state. After breakfast, the floor under the dining room table always magically has attracted crumbs, if not larger pieces of food. The changing area always seem to have a wild sock or wipe that Catalina pulled out of the box lying about. The bookshelves always seemingly reject half of the books and forcefully removed them. But, for a few short hours, we reached perfection.

We can’t micromanage our families. Our desire for organization and order, on some level, will have to be flexible and adaptable. The girls would revolt if I tried to get them to fit into my little mental boxes at every moment. But, there will be those mornings that they awake to find every toy put back into an exact place in an exact position.

photocredit: flickr/brunogirin

WP Engine made me an offer to try them out and I’ve heard too many good things to not explore an Austin company dedicated to hosting sites built upon the same content management system that I primarily work with now.

Touchy-Feely Stuff

I made the switch to WordPress in late 2010 from Moveable Type. I should have made the switch years before, but hindsight is 20/20. A major reason for the move is the WordPress community. It is huge! MT’s community seemed to dwindle down to just a handful. With the WordPress community, if you need peer support, a plugin to do something, a theme that looks somewhat like you already want it, there’s a very high chance someone out there has already experienced the same need and either wrote about how to fix it, or wrote a plugin to automagically do it.

WP Engine is neck-deep in the WordPress community. I’ve read on their blog that they’re going to WordCamps (little conferences across the country/world for WordPress folks, mostly, in that community) across the map. They fully sponsored WordUp Austin, an advanced-level WordPress developer gathering. They are building a dashboard for people, like me, who either own or administer multiple WordPress installs to allow easy access to all of them.

Giving back to the community is a strong selling point to me. No web developer would be in business if they weren’t standing on the shoulders of those who went before them and freely offered their work to the public. If all those before us sold everything under licenses or kept proprietary within a company, the web would be much more sad.

Features

This isn’t fully inclusive. Check out their website to see more about what they offer. They offer managed WordPress hosting. Daily backups are automatically created, in addition to being able to set “restore points” (think Mac’s Time Machine or Window’s System Restore) so you can very quickly “undo” a massive change that goes all to hell, which shouldn’t happen with their staging server.

For my non-geeky friends that made it this far (bless you), when you make changes to your website, it is always recommended to try those changes out on a second version of your website that isn’t facing the public. Before, for me, it would mean either transferring my blog to a WordPress install running off my home computer for design changes or another install on my server for technical changes. While a good idea, the work of setting that up always seemed worse than the glitches that might occur or the damage if my site was offline for 20 minutes to fix something. Client sites are different, but for me and my blog, 20 minutes isn’t the end of the world.

WP Engine, though, allows me to create a second “staging” version of my website with one click that is an exact replica of my site. I can throw anything at the staging site. If I like it, I can merge the edits back or if I screw it all up, one click to recreate the staged version.

Awesome.

What makes WP Engine different than a traditional non-WP-engineered hosting provider is how they’ve built their internal network to support WordPress. The old server had the static files (images, etc), the database containing the content and the WordPress software that puts everything together all on one single machine. If I had a traffic spike, that one machine is taking the entire impact. One of the biggest complaints I’ve heard about WordPress from those not using it is, if you get too popular, your website will buckle under the pressure.

WP Engine has their clients covered. Without diving too much into the geeky stuff, they’re distributed the various aspects of your WordPress site over multiple servers with the ability to easily add more to assist if your website gets popular. If you’re ever went to a site off of Lifehacker, Drudge, TechCrunch, etc and it failed to load, they’re on a hosting provider that didn’t allow them to scale up to meet a quick, seemingly random, and massive increase in traffic.

Included with all services, they offer a content distribution network (CDN). I had one setup on Nexcess that I built using Amazon’s CDN CloudFront system, but had to pay extra for the usage. Avoiding the geeky stuff again, a CDN put the static, unchanging parts of your website on servers throughout the world. Since images are typically changed very rarely and are some of the largest files related to your website, it helps speed quite a bit if a visitor from Europe can get the images from a server in England instead of waiting for the image to cross the pond from Texas.

Their customer service, so far, appears to be top-notch. I have yet to have any critical issues, so I haven’t tested them in a crunch. When activating the CDN when I was ready to go live, they noticed an issue. They opened a ticket and had an engineer working on it before I realized the issue existed.

When grilling them about hosting my site, I spoke with Trafton, their developer champion, on the phone, for nearly an hour throwing every question I thought of his way. He was happy to share their philosophical approaches, their technical approaches, their upcoming and secret features and more.

Whatever, I don’t care… just tell me about site performance

First, with managed hosting, they strive to take care of you. I had a script on my server that was outdated. It was for a plugin I’m not currently using, so I hadn’t reviewed it for a security concern announced to the WP community. Their servers automatically found and patched the defected script. While that action didn’t speed up the site, it make it harder for a hacker to break in and either screw up or take down my site.

Speed.

WP Engine is really excited about speed. I mean, their name is Engine, which produces speed. I ran every variation of speed test possible, mostly through webpagetest.org, looking at total load time. In 48 of 50 tests, WP Engine was faster. In the two that were slowed, it appeared to be due to offsite objects (an ad, a script being pulled from Google, etc) that were being delivered slower than the other tests.

I geeked out with my old social stats textbook to crunch some of the data while running three variations of the test: previous host without a caching plugin, previous host with a caching plugin and WP Engine, which doesn’t allow caching plugins since they handle it themselves already. For the sake of comparison, I used only one connection speed for the summary results, which are typical across the board.

• Without a caching plugin on the previous server, my site is downright slow, by my standards. Approximately, 7s for complete load on the first visit.
• With W3 Total Cache on the previous server, my site is significantly faster at approximately 4.90s for a complete load on the first visit.
• With WP Engine, the site is slightly faster at approximately 4.5s for a complete load on the first visit.

Without question, either use W3 Total Cache or host with WP Engine. But check out the comparison on the return visit. This test assumes a user has visited your website, fully quit their browser, opened their browser and visited your website. It is meant to simulate a return visit after a prolonged absence.

• W3 Total Cache actually took longer, approximately 4.95s for a complete load.
• WP Engine served it up at an incredible 1.8s for a complete load.
  

Without WP Engine, my returning visitors, whom I love so dearly, would have waited 275% longer for my site to load.

The Negative

The only major negative, which is positive too, I’ve found is that they only handle WordPress. If you have other apps running on your site—a Gallery photo sharing site or your e-mail still hosted on your server—they cannot be your only host provider. On the positive, it means they direct all of their energy toward making WP awesome. On the negative, you might not be ready to cut the cord on your previous host.

Summary

If your web presence is built on WordPress, WP Engine is a fantastic hosting provider. They have absolutely defined the niche of the market they wish to dominate and their driven to give you the absolute best hosting experience for your WordPress-powered site. While not the least expensive provider on the market (plans start at $29/mo), they will deliver results that will far, far outmatch anything the screwball host providers can give you.

I strongly recommend checking WP Engine out for your needs. Tell Trafton I said hello.

My wife and I are fundamentally different. My idea of “on-time” is arriving 10 minutes before needing to be somewhere and being able to take my time to get into position, ready to go when I’m supposed to be there. In college, I was the guy that would rather skip class than walk in after the professor started the lecture.

My wife’s idea of “on-time” is arriving 20 minutes or less after the event starts.

Add to the mix Austin traffic and that I-35 from Airport to Oltorf is our most direct route to most of the places we go (work, church). Hello marriage counseling!

Continue Reading…

During a conversation concerning having both girls cry it out at night
Vanessa: There will be yelling in the House of Kraft tonight.

Sleep has been a constant struggle with Olivia. We were those parents that simply couldn’t understand how any type of “cry it out” method was humane. She was just 8 pounds of joy…how could we just let her cry? Her first three months of life, she would not sleep without being held and we were too wimpy to let her cry herself to sleep ever.

We were zombies for a long time.

photocredit: flickr/xlibber

While it had overall improved for both girls, they took a few steps back recently. Catalina shouldn’t still eat at night. Olivia went from not waking up most nights to waking up more times than I have fingers. We would rock her for a minute and put her back down. When she occasionally woke up once a night, that was fine. When it is 10 times, it is just stupid. 

We’re back to tough love. Both girls. We added a digital clock to Olivia’s room so she see the time. From the time she’s asleep until 6:30 a.m., she’s on her own. We remind her that we’re just next door and everything is okay, but she is a “big toddler” and can go back to sleep without mommy or daddy. Catalina doesn’t understand it, but she’s in the same boat. Catalina has always slept better, so the adjustment isn’t as drastic.

Last night, it took her 10 minutes to realize she needed to put herself back to sleep and she was fine. Olivia is a little more stubborn.

The downside is that I don’t know how to go back to sleep myself when Olivia is crying her little heart out, so none of us are getting our now-expected levels of sleep. Thus far, it was only resulted in one complete foul-up of a day. Just do me the favor of not asking how last night’s dinner turned out the first time I tried to make it. Much appreciated.

No leadership concept or realization about being a dad out of this post. Just a little story time.

<satire type=”political judicial”>

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor appeared as a guest star on an episode during the current, 42nd season of Sesame Street. I’m not a follower of Supreme Court activities, but if she is portraying to America’s true her true views, I am in shock!

photocredit: flickr//donkeyhotey

While Justice Sotomayor was having coffee with her friend, Maria, when Baby Bear interrupts with a civil complaint. Goldilocks, allegedly, had entered his home uninvited and damaged a chair. Neither the plaintiff nor the defendant give Justice Sotomayor information concerning any criminal charges levied and the judge did not seek additional information, as this appears to be a prima facie criminal offense.

Goldilocks defense included self-testimony that damaging the chair was an accident. No explanation of why she was in the plaintiff’s home uninvited.

To me, as the untrained legal mind that I am, equipped with one semester of constitutional law as applied in an educational setting from freshman year of college and a semester of a law review in 8th grade, this is clear that Goldilocks is at fault for the damage from a civil standpoint, as well as criminally liable for her trespass and subsequent damage of Baby Bear’s property. Financial retribution to the plaintiff and, using her confession, either probation or jail time as part of a criminal procedure, appears to be in order.

How do we expect the 8th highest-ranking judge in the United States to rule on this case? Would she use this as an opportunity to turn Goldilocks’s life around as it appears this could be a beginning of a petty crime career that could lead to much worse?

No. Not at all.

The judge ruled the only retribution required of Goldilocks would be to assist in fixing the chair. With glue! The chair was split in half! There is no way to repair that type of damage to bring the chair to its original condition.

There is more. If you’re standing, sit down. Put down your coffee. Cover the eyes and ears of the young. The Justice then orders as part of the settlement that Baby Bear forgives Goldilocks. Not only does she only wag a finger at Goldilocks, she required the injured party to forgive the unwarranted and unexplained criminal action of a burglar!

With Sotomayor on the bench, kids won’t be singing “How do you get to Sesame Street?” It will be the throngs leaving Riker’s Island.

In other news, Sesame Workshop announced the 43rd season will be filmed in conjunction with the 25th season of COPS.

</satire>

photocredit: flickr/mike_miley

But, I, um, on occasion, would exaggerate. Brady and I doing a trick with our hats on the field during the last game our senior year would turn into:

You should have seen it, honey. Our senior year. Last game of the season. The entire drumline was in on this awesome gig. We soaked the ends of our mallets and sticks in kerosene the night before the game. During the last song, we lit the sticks and had this awesome flaming stick routine. We were throwing sticks between each other during rests, spinning them. It was incredible. I don’t know if Andrew’s eyebrow ever grew back.

Alright, the exaggeration was never that bad, but I talked a good game about my percussion skills. As far as my wife knows (until she reads this post), I might well have been the best drummer living in Wichita Falls between 1996 and 2002.

The truth is I was good. I loved marching season, choose/assigned an instrument freshman year, loved it and purposely stayed on the same one (largest bass drum—bigger the better and heavier than a cow). No desire to move up to snare, quints or quads. Happy seeing myself as the de facto leader of the bass line. I was in band for marching season. I never actually tried to learn the audition music for varsity concert band, so I was that senior in JV band with a bunch of freshman and sophomores. Happy to be there. Had fun.

In short, I knew my part and knew it extremely well. But, I never had a great diversity of experience or pushed myself to be well-rounded percussively. My wife, though, had nothing else to go on besides my Al-from-Married-with-Children-style glory day talk.

Her school started a drumline this year. The performers, mostly, were new to drums. Good kids who just need time with a good instructor.

Wednesday, Vanessa comes home. “Oh, I almost forgot. You’re going to lead the drumline’s practice tomorrow.”

I did express interest in helping when the line formed, but I know I don’t have the knowledge nor the recent playing experience (null in nine years) to be the guy with the big baton.

Thankfully, Christian, a good friend, offered to help (at nearly 9 p.m. the night before!) and he’s much more knowledgeable than me. He functioned as the director while I took on the assistant’s chair. He’d lead most of the session and, when he needed to work with on something with a specific members, I kept the rest busy.

It worked out great and, both Christian and I had a great time. The kids appeared to enjoy and respond to us. We gave them permission to drum on everything everywhere as long as they didn’t annoy parents or their teachers and kept it still during Mass. I taught them half of the Waco cadence. Good day.

The take-away is clear: the seemingly impossible task will always fall to you. Leaders, in corporates, organizations or at home, plow through and figure it out. Especially as a parent, you’ll find yourselves in situations you never foresaw with a reaction required immediately. When we discovered, the hard way, Olivia’s allergy to milk, we had to act and not panic. Even when the nurse is giving you instructions on what to tell the 911 operator if she starts doing X, Y, or Z before you travel across town through 5 p.m. Friday traffic to Dell Children’s ER, don’t panic, just make it happen. Or that time that Olivia got sick and you had to… um, not all stories are Internet-friendly.

The other take-away, of course, is not to give your wife the impression that amazingly incredibly awesome at something if you’re only just awesome.

The level doesn’t matter. I’ve learned this lesson to be true in every leadership position I’ve held. Every one, from president of a fraternity and a leader in other student organizations, to a leader in the Knights of Columbus, to a leader in numerous church organizations, to a manager overseeing employees, to a father and husband:

Showing respect to those your serve is not charity. Showing respect is a duty.

photocredit: flickr/runran

With the spat with Sen. John Cornyn, his disrespect for a higher office, the Presidency of the United States, is serious issue, but the lack of respect toward a constituent, a person he serves, was more telling of this lesson of leadership. As a leader, sometimes you’re the first among equals—anyone in the room could switch out positions with you without the wheels coming off the axles. Sometimes, you are the leader because your skillset, your knowledge, your abilities are deemed better equipped for the time. Sometimes, you are the leader because you simply are smarter, stronger and have greater ability than anyone else.

In all cases, respect is the cornerstone of an effective leadership platform.

My two-year old provides the perfect test subject for this theory of leadership. I am her leader because I am smarter, stronger and all around better at all things. As her father when she is a toddler, in no area, in which I can defer to her decision. She can have her opinions, but feeding her nothing but cookies in a day, I can never allow.

On my bad days, coffee didn’t kick in (or heaven forbid, run out), both girls protested the peace of sleep all night, they don’t want anything healthy for breakfast, I have my moments of losing it, without true need:

“OLIVIA! STOP! DO THIS RIGHT NOW!”

Her reaction is almost universally the same.

“NOOO!” and breaks down crying. Or her yelling back while trying to hit me.

On most days, I can converse with her to get a resolution. “Olivia, I understand you don’t want oatmeal right now. It’s really good for you though. How about you have just a little bit?” or “Olivia, I hear you, but you have to eat. You can either eat oatmeal with blueberries, or oatmeal with raspberries. Which do you want?” or, what I’ve used as a life-saver when trying to get her sleep on a bad night. “Alright Olivia, do you want two blankets or one blanket?”

Almost always, she responds positively. She gets to make a choice and have some say in the process, which she enjoys, while I get to impose the way which I know is right for her. Win-win.

What struck me about Sen. Cornyn’s attitude toward me is that he sounded like me when I lose it. A quick, snappy response that only results in the other person getting upset while losing their support. Of course, my initial reaction was quick and snappy too, but part of being a leader is to be above when those you serve express themselves in less than ideal ways.

The at-home example: Sometimes, Olivia just gets upset and frustrated. I come over to her and she recoils and is just mad. If I responded to her the same way, I’d alienate her and not begin to understand—much less solve—her original issue.

If I calmly attempted to listen through the tears or the “I don’t like you!” or whatnot, I can usually discover the root of the issue—a toy that she can’t get to work or Catalina constantly trying to steal every thing Olivia has in her hands.

The same is true for all levels. When a member of the fraternity was upset, or a member of the church community was frustrated, in the vast majority of cases, a calm, listening leader is all that was needed. Through the conversation, I understood them better and they understood the position. Sometimes, they were able to convince me that the leadership needed to change, sometimes not. But in both cases, we walked away with a better understanding.

True listening can only happen when respect exists.

Leadership is a privilege. We are all called to some form of leadership: in our homes, workplaces and the civic and church communities. However, positions of leadership are something to be earned and carry a great responsibility.

The present reality in our political system amazes me. If we believe the media and the pundits, “the American people” each fall into a distinct category. We are either liberal or conservative. We are either Democrat or Republican, except for those crazy third-party people to whom no one pays attention.

Our politicians should know better. I know many self-identified Republicans who disagree with the Republican Party on certain platform policies. I know plenty of self-identified Democrats who disagree with their party.

Our politicians, by virtue of representing us before the nation and the world, should strive to be above the mud. I’ll grant that their campaigns are waged by underlings, but the politicians themselves should strive to be the model of decorum and respectful, productive disagreement.

Before I show the example that got me fired up last week, this is not a single-party issue. Both sides have this problem. While I’m about to call out a Republican, I could just as easily done it with a Democrat.

The Honorable John Cornyn, U.S. Senator from Texas, is an outspoken critic of President Obama. His right to be, and truthfully, his duty when he believes his constituents would not be well-served by a policy of the President.

He tweeted this on January 19th:

POTUS in Disneyland today. Not much new here.

January 19, 2012 9:15 am via Twitterrific for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

@JohnCornyn

JohnCornyn

For background, he wasn’t there on vacation. He delivered a 13-minute speech on boosting travel and tourism.

Sen. Cornyn mixing up Disneyland and Disney World is quite forgivable. The Senator implying that our president lives in a fantasy land is not. It isn’t helpful. Rhetoric like this, from our country’s leaders, doesn’t serve any purpose. If Sen. Cornyn said that the President’s tourism ideas are wrong or misguided, that’s fine. An empty dismissal of the President is incredibly disrespectful to him and his office.

My dad served in the Air Force for 21 years. He worked in civil service for the DoD for another 15, working until two days before he died. My father’s entire professional life was dedicated to this country. Of the things that he taught me, which were crystal clear, is you never disrespect the Office of the President or the current occupant.

It didn’t matter if you voted for him, liked him, hated him. You respect the President. Disagree with him, but do it respectfully.

I didn’t get the memo regarding senators. I flipped when I read that my senator, one of 100 that lead the upper, more dignified chamber of the U.S. Congress, bashed the President as such. Out of respect for him, I sent him, via Twitter’s direct messaging function (thus private, not public), a few of my thoughts. I admit, I was a bit of a hothead:

Yeah, okay, pulling the plank out of my own eye. I wasn’t very respectful. Honestly, I didn’t think he would read them. I figured a PR staffer handled his social media, dismiss them and call it a day. Something akin to writing an upset letter to a company. I was wrong. The senator replied back on Sunday.

Holy! The United States Senator who, along with Sen. KBH, represents me and 25,145,560 other Texans, replied back personally to me? On a Sunday morning? Whoa. +1 to Sen. Cornyn for having personal dialogue with his constituents. I don’t expect my mayor, much less my senator, to read constituent letters, much less hotheaded rants from them.

But, what did he say to me? That I’m bothered by disagreement and free speech? Wait, what? He just told one of his constituents who was upset that he was being disrespectful that I have a problem with disagreement and free speech? There is an absolute difference.

My freedom of speech gives me the right to say “Senator John Cornyn is a jerk who, I believe, hates puppies.” But, I wouldn’t say that. Not publicly outside my close circle of friends, at least.

Disagreement would mean: “I disagree with Senator John Cornyn’s policies on Tweeting. It is the wrong approach for a Senator.” Disagreement isn’t “The senator lives on fantasy island and hates puppies.”

My response:

(These were sent Sunday. I sent him another message informing him that I’d be writing about this on here. As of 6:55 a.m.  Tuesday, no response).

Without a doubt, I could have handled my initial reaction better. But he is a UNITED STATES SENATOR. People stand when he walks in a room. If he visited a foreign country, he would get a diplomatic passport for the trip. I don’t represent him—he represents me. We pay him $174,000+ a year to lead.

I’m not a Democrat or a Republican.  I’ve voted for candidates on both sides of the aisle. I want government to work.

As a country, we need politicians who are better than this. Both sides of the aisle. Both elected branches.

Proverbs: “Reconstructed” (Gus Dallas, WestBow Press) is an incredible effort by the author to reorganize the Book of Proverbsinto topical categories for easy reference. I enjoy the wisdom in Proverbs and I greatly appreciate the author’s effort to make this book more usable.

Proverbs: Reconstructed by Gus Dallas (WestBow Press)

The book breaks down Proverbs into virtually every possible category—both reasonable (fatherhood, wisdom, justice) and confusing (ant, apple, bear, dog)—and defines each category as “Good” or “Bad”, or divides the proverbs on a topic into each definition, as needed.

It is handy to be able to save time, pick up this book and quickly find a few words of wisdom from this ancient text. I prefer a different translation, but as a quick reference, it’s great. The book is fairly-priced just below $10 for both the paperback and Kindle versions.

I cannot tell from the book itself (and I’m not going to take the time to verify myself) if it contains all of Proverbs, or leaves out any that do not fall into a particular category. There are plenty of categories that have only one or two verses within them, so I assume it is fully inclusive. Nevertheless, an assumption.

Despite some critiques, I recommend this book. In leadership—whether inside or outside the home—sometimes we need just a little inspiration at a moment’s notice. The ancient texts of the Book of Proverbs is perfect for a moment’s reflection and now, thanks to the author of Proverbs: Reconstructed, we have an easy way to access it when we only have a moment.

Disclaimer: I was provided a free copy of this book by the publisher in exchange for a review. I was not required to give a positive review. Links to the book in this review are affiliate links. This review is fully my opinion and not a paid advertisement.

At about 10 a.m.
Olivia: How about crackers? (asking for some crackers)
Me: Okay, I’ll give you crackers now, but then no more for the rest of the day.
Olivia: No deal.

This was after Olivia doing something silly.
Me: You’re being a goosey-goose!
Olivia: Don’t call me that! Call me mija! (Spanish slang for my daughter)
Me: Okay, Mija, I’ll call you that, but you’re still a goosey-goose.
Olivia: I’m not a goosey-goose! I’m my own monkey! I eat bananas!

Me: [Telling Olivia she shouldn't do whatever she was doing that she had been told not to before.]
Olivia: (Fighting Tears) Don’t say that! Just stop!

For those wondering, Catalina isn’t talking yet. She’s trying. Hard. She has a solid “Dadadada” and some sign language, but nothing that would translate well to QOTW.

If you haven’t seen it, Jeffery Bethke, a 22-year old poet/performer, released a now-viral YouTube video about how he hates religion, but loves Jesus. Most folks in my Catholic circles are knocking it; to a degree, rightly so, as it jumps to some conclusions and seem to imply more than it should.

But, I really like it.

First, if you haven’t seen it. Watch it:

Yes, there are glaring issues with it. Jesus didn’t come to abolish religion; he says exactly that in Matthew 5:17. Much of what he says could be accurate. Wars, degrading people by judging their sins harshly (i.e. Scarlet Letter) , preaching poverty and serving the poor while purchasing expensive cars and other goods (Google “pastor embezzlement“), etc does happen and much of it occurs under the cloak of religion.

Religion has been abused for thousands of years by people trying to gain power, wealth, prestige. Religion has given beautiful holy texts to the world that have been twisted by people trying to convince others that they must listen to them. Religion has, at times, ignored Jesus Christ.

But not all religion. Not all religious people. Not by a long shot. This is the prime example of a bad apple leading people to throw out the whole bushel. Religion, though, has preserved the message of Jesus Christ for thousands of years.

I’ll give Jeff, the poet, this: he thinks this too.

In digging around, trying to understand this gentlemen a little more, I found a post-viral interview with him at ChurchLeaders.com. He basically admits that he didn’t mean religion, not in the way the vast majority of the world means it. His church, wrongly I say, uses “religion” as “synonymous with hypocrisy, legalism, self-righteousness, and self-justification”.

Take that in account, find/replace his usage of religion in his poem, and I think most critics would change their opinion. Even some of the seemingly obvious digs at Catholicism (nice buildings but not helping the poor) make more sense if you think of it as hypocritical Christians who really do put serving the poor far far below the physical building. The Church has done both really well—create beautiful buildings dedicated to God while supporting the poor.

He has the right heart and the right idea. He just had the wrong word. (Leadership lesson: Make sure your audience understands the message. A grabbing headline is one thing, but to use a common word by an uncommon undefined definition isn’t helpful.) You can’t take his poem at face value and, regretfully, most of his 12M+ viewers have taken it as such.

One Catholic response, made in the same style by Make A Friar, that I enjoyed:

While stereotyping isn’t what it was years ago, there is still the expectation that women can stay home with the kids if she chooses to, but men don’t. There is a massive shift of your self-image in a change like this. “What do you do for a living?” is one of the first question someone asks when you meet for the first time and one that others use to figure out an image of you in their minds.

What do they think of me? Do they think I’m a guy who couldn’t bring home the bacon? Do they think I wear a frilly apron all day? Am I just a lazy bum (although, if you’ve been/are a stay-at-home parent, you know that couldn’t be the case)? What would Det. John Kimble think?

Arnold Schwarzenegger in Kindergarten Cop (photocredit: Imagine Entertainment)

Related, I have to qualify my stay-at-home status to myself. In reading a couple of books about stay-at-home dads and reading stories of stay-at-home dads, many find their ways to this role after being laid off. I find myself defensive that I was not laid off. I left my job in order to stay-at-home and to allow Vanessa to pursue her career.

This self-image ego thing has to go. Vanessa and I decided that unless there is no other way possible, one of us would be home with the kids. Not every family can do that (not every family wants to do that either!). I shouldn’t be so negatively self-conscience about us making a decision about the structure of our household and actually executing it. How many people dream of something, but don’t make it happen? While working and V was at home, I thought about how rewarding it could be to switch roles, but now that it has happened, I’m self-conscience about it?

While stay-at-home dads aren’t as rare as they once were, it still isn’t well understood. It reminds me of growing up Catholic in a Baptist town. You can’t stay defensive or afraid without driving yourself a little mad. You learn how to explain to other the what and why of your belief and how to correct their incorrect assumptions and stereotypes.

A positive difference between the Catholic/Baptist analogy in relation to being a stay-at-home dad is that the other person won’t try to convert you to their line of thought using techniques they learned at Sunday School!

Doing something against the grain or different from others’ expectations of you is an opportunity to help others understand a different way of thinking.

For most of my life, Dr Pepper or, in more recent time, one of the off-shoots, would be my soda of choice.

News articles are still, days latter, being published around the quick death of one of the most beloved variants of Dr Pepper: Dublin Dr Pepper.

photocredit: flickr/megpi

For those out of the loop and under a rock, so-called “Dublin Dr Pepper” is the same Dr Pepper made everywhere else, except using pure Imperial sugar instead of the now-default high-fructose corn syrup. In the 1980s or so, when the rest of the beverage world switched over to HFCS, the first Dr Pepper bottling company in little Dublin, TX decided to continue making the product with real sugar.

The variation became a cult success. I was introduced to it by my band director in high school. She’d, on a regular basis, make a 300-mi round trip to Dr Pepper’s mecca and purchase a few cases of the drink. A few lucky souls in band were able to get a few ounces of the sugary sweetness from her.

To settle a lawsuit, Dr Pepper acquired the rights to sell Dr Pepper from the little bottler, in short ending the only mainstream drink bottled by them.

The lawsuit, I admit, at face value, was legit. Dr Pepper (corporate) claimed that the Dr Pepper Bottling Company of Dublin violated their bottling agreement by diluting the trademark of Dr Pepper, by selling the drink under the name “Dublin Dr Pepper”, and for violating the territorial aspect of the contract, selling outside their authorized area (e.g. I’m thinking how Galaxy Cafe in Austin had “Dublin Dr Pepper” on tap).

I don’t know how the agreement came to pass. There simply had to be a better solution than end production of the “vast majority” of the small bottler’s revenue source (as corporate admits), in all likelihood, beginning the slow death of “Dublin Bottling Works”, as it will be known now, and the decline of the small town of Dublin.

photocredit: flckr/cmiked

Dr Pepper’s official response to my inquiry for more information tried to assure me that I can still get the same beverage in certain areas around Dublin (no response on my follow-up about if Austin would have continued access to the sugared version). Honestly, I couldn’t care less about that anymore; I’m upset that this is yet another example of a corporation going overboard destroying the fabric of a community. Dublin’s bottling efforts didn’t die out because of lack of customers or them not respond to the needs of their clientele, it was an execution of a small business by their big brother corporation.

(Quick aside: Corporate calls the variation “Heritage Dr Pepper”. Maybe they should look at doing a little marketing toward the segment that rejects HFCS. Jason’s Deli, for example, makes a marketing point out of their decision not to include HFCS in any of their food products).

Ever read Dr. Seuss’ “The Lorax“? While that’s more of a tail of businesses ignoring the environment around them, but perhaps because it is one of Olivia’s current favorites, I draw a parallel: the little guys that have been around long before the corporate structure are dismissed and ran out of town because “business is business”.

If the Dr Pepper corporate violated some law and were busted by the FDA or whomever, would the sentence be the termination of production of their primary product? No way.

Dublin’s plant, yes, may have violated some terms. I don’t know what their contract says or what the local plant was thinking when it did those alleged actions. Perhaps, yes, something needed to change to “protect trademark” or keep other bottlers happy (which is quite understandable). The sentence imposed is too harsh. There had to be a different solution. Dublin just isn’t another bottling plant. It is more of a Dr Pepper town than Waco, where the drink was invented. Hell, for a week each year, the town renames itself as “Dr Pepper, Texas” and throws a huge birthday party for the bottling company that is mostly free to thank the loyal fans of the bottling company and the corporate parent, per the city’s press release.

Additionally, the cult status of Dublin Dr Pepper led to me choosing Dr Pepper more often in other situations. At a gas station on a long drive, I was more likely to pick Dr Pepper over a Coke or Pepsi product because of the connection I felt to the brand. The brand that now rips the heart out of little towns less than 3,000 whose bottler accounted for less than 1% of all their product produced.

In short, screw you Dr Pepper Snapple Group. Dr Pepper is dead to me now. I’m leaving the possibility they can still make this right, but it will be a very long time before I purchase a Dr Pepper or Snapple product.

The Morning Routine.

photocredit: flckr/atomdocs

Previously, we let the girls serve as our alarm clocks. They’d wake up before we’d want to get up, we could throw some clothes on them, stuff some food in us, get out the door to work in plenty of time. What more does someone need to do in the morning? As we evaluated how to improve our home life—get more personal time while not staying up as late—we realized something: our mornings must be more efficient.

Our morning routine:

• 5:00 a.m. –  Alarms go off, coffee machine automatically turns on.
• 5:15 a.m. –  Start being productive. For me, that includes writing, working on my tech services consulting, being a geek, etc. For V, that includes running.
• 6:30 a.m. – The girls generally wake up within 10 minutes of 6:30 a.m. – Time to get them ready.
• 7:30 a.m. – Start prepping breakfast.
• 8:00 a.m. – Breakfast.
• 9:00 a.m. – Lina starts “1st nap”, V finishes getting ready for work if needed.
• 9:30 a.m. – V leaves for work (10 am to 6:30 p.m. work schedule)

Those 90 minutes have been clutch. I never really understood those folks who beat everyone to the office or talked about how much they got done before breakfast, but for us, I don’t see any other way to increase productivity without lengthening days to 36 hours.

The nice thing, too, about this setup is what happened this week. Yesterday, no post went online. I have a few things in the hopper, but nothing is ready for prime time. Tuesday night, I went out and thus didn’t get to my primary nightly duty (dishes). Wednesday morning, at 5 a.m., instead of writing, dishes were done. This schedule allows for evening social possibilities without completely disabling the house the next day due to incomplete dishes, unprepped meals, etc.

That being said, I’m working toward having a few days of posts built up in the queue. I didn’t like seeing this yesterday:

Can you guess which days I didn't write?

After having one of my strongest days in the last month with Tuesday’s Tim Tebow article, I had one of the worst recorded days ever for viewership the next day. Even Sunday was stronger and the virtually all of days when I only wrote once a month were better even though the freshest content was quite stale.

What tips and tricks have you discovered to get a little more time out of your day?