My love/hate relationship with Steve Jobs

Last night at youth group, my phone went crazy. I pulled it out of my pocket to look down and see 4 messages, all sent within minutes of each other. Steve Jobs was dead. Now there's a reason that people would send me this note: I'm a bit of a geek and considered an apple fan boy by some.

My love/hate battle with apple and my appreciation for Steve Jobs began when I was in at MSU studying Computer Science. I worked at a computer store called CompuAdd selling computers, windows machines (in the days of DOS and Windows 1/2/3.1) and selling a few Macs. Prior to the sales job, I in high school worked at a basement PC builder, building and troubleshooting computers for customers. I came to the world with a very PC centric view of the world, working in DOS, OS/2,and Windows 3.1 and I was thrilled when I got my first substantial interaction with a Mac (not an apple, a Mac. Growing up, the Apple IIe/c's were all the rage, but these were not the graphical beauties that the Macs were). Even then, people were in Apple or PC camps, and the Apple camp really didn't have much of a case. The Mac's were new and cool, but it soon tapered as Steve Jobs was kicked out of Apple by Woz & Sculley.

One of Jobs next ventures after being publicly booted and humiliated by Apple was NeXT computers.  This image doesn't capture the asthetic beauty of the computer or the operating system.  Nothing like it had been seen.  It was built on the MACH kernel, which we studied in our Operating Systems classes at MSU and that later came to become the core of the Apple OS.

Towards the time I graduated and got my degree, Apple computers came to represent a tiny but vocal clique (normally headed up by Graphic Designers) that believed that their technology was superior, regardless - just because it was apple (it wasn't even that pretty at the time).  As a newly minted computer science major who had studied most major systems and felt like I knew everything, I was disgusted by the Apple groupies.  There were good things about apple, but no better on the whole than other systems.  Microsoft had become the 800lb gorilla and everyone was taking shots at them, especially the apple fan boys (Noel).

I bought one of the first iPods and loved it.  It drew me into iTunes, which wasn't too shabby either.  From there (just the way Jobs intended) I bought my first mac computer I bought was a mac mini.  I bought it as a multi-media system to hook to my tv for video.  It worked great and I loved it for multi-media, especially iTunes.  Apple then released the Apple iPhone, but it was slow and buggy, as most new products are.  After seeing my friend Noel giddy as a school girl about his 3G, it seemed like it had finally realized it's potential and gotten rid of its bugs, so I jumped in with both feet.  I loved it and even shifted my work laptop over to a MacBook Pro, followed a few years later by my iPad.

I felt like Steve Jobs and I had an understanding.  Apple products were good, but not perfect.  They were beautiful and more focused on the user experience than any other product I've ever experienced.  I respected and even enjoyed the audacity of Jobs to beat the hell out of every other product.  They were great and they knew it.  Jobs's vision created a brand new market with the iPod and iPads that didn't exist before.  His company single handledly changed the way music is purchased.  All very impressive stuff.  I think this quote sums him up best:

“If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.” — Steve Jobs

Today is the 5 year anniversary of my Mom's death

Five years ago today my Mom died of pancreatic cancer.  Only a day after Steve Jobs.  Coincidence?

The sadness is mostly gone, and filled with happy memories of her.  My family and I still talk all the time, with smiles, about things Mom would say in a given situation, things she loved, or things she hated.  "You know what Mom/Grandma would have thought about that?"  It's how we keep her memory alive and make sure our kids remember the amazing woman their Grandma was.

I still laugh when I see this family picture.  As you can imagine, my Mom really loved this picture (not at all). At some point when these pictures were being taken, I thought it would be funny to cross my eyes in every single one of the poses. She had no idea until we went to pick them up.  Her explanation was this: "The people who looked at the pictures probably thought 'Oh, look at that cute little retarded boy' and picked the best out of the bunch."  I still find it pretty funny.

Triad Wheel of Death

This is how we hurt ourselves on a regular basis at Triad during our morning workouts.

Maddie's Reading at Church

Maddie and Jordyn did this reading at all three service this past Sunday. They did a great job.

Death By Longboard

How I'm handling work e-mail these days

I swear I get more and more e-mail every day and it's all being pushed out to my mobile devices (iPad and iPhone). I need to reference my e-mail in new and different ways, in context of the entire conversation and in the context of knowing more about the people. Here's a basic overview on how I'm handling e-mail from a process standpoint and a technology standpoint:

Technology - I'm using 4 tools to manage my e-mail:

1. Outlook 2010 - I'm using Outlook 2010 in Windows 7, which is nice because they've created conversation based e-mails that will pull up e-mails in the context of the broader conversation.  It will also connect e-mails to linkedin and facebook profiles.  This can be good and bad.  It will update contact pictures and contact information by pulling from public linked in profiles, which is nice.  I also had it pull a contact picture over of a co-workers posing on the beach in a man-thong.  Awkward. In a given year, I'm sending and receiving over 10GB of e-mail and I never delete anything.  I use outlook's PST files to archive e-mail and a whole foldering system within that, which brings up the necessity of the next two tools..
2. ClearContext - This tool has changed my life.  It helps with intelligent tagging and storage of your e-mail conversations.  Here's how it works: When you send an e-mail, it will prompt you to file the e-mail and bring up a series of suggestions based on who it's to and the subject line.  That suggestion is a hierarchical series of folders that corresponds to a folder hierarchy in your PST file.  The next time you receive an e-mail in that conversation, it will remember that and automatically tag and archive the e-mail out of your inbox.  It allows you to deal with an entire conversation easily and remembers the tag as you reply to a thread.
3. X1 - I've been using X1 to search my Outlook PSTs and inbox and I hate it.  It used to be amazingly fast and I convinced many others to use it, because it would instantly find e-mails that I couldn't track down any other way.   It's now slow, painful and unresponsive.  Other than that, it's great.  I don't know if it's the number of e-mails I've got, or my environment - but everything else works great on my system, except for X1.  It can take 15 seconds just to launch it.  I need to find something else, or figure out how to get the performance to be decent.  I'd tried Xobni a while ago, but had it dog my machine down. I might have to go back to it.
4. SafePSTBackup - This is a great tool.  It allows you to backup your PST incrementally, while outlook is still running.  I archive my PST's out to dropbox and this lets me not have to backup all 10GB every night.  It's free right now and works flawlessly.

Process:

I wish I could say that I'm going with a zero-inbox philosophy, but my e-mail has been overflowing and I'm not dealing with it well, except maybe with how I archive it.  I archive everything to a PST and never delete anything. I have two PSTs by the year, one for sent and deleted and another for everything else.   I use folders pretty meticulously with top level folders like Customers, Team, Internal, Technologoy, etc and then build them from there.  ClearContext helps simplify this in a big way.  

I would have switched to Outlook 2011 (the mac version) a while back, but my company has not upgraded their servers to Exchange 2010 to support the platform.  Hopefully by the end of the year.  What I love about Microsoft Exchange is the real time syncing of my e-mail and contacts across multiple devices.  This allows me to simultaneously have my e-mail, calendars and contacts sync'd up across my laptop, iphone and iPad.

Any ideas that I'm missing?  Maybe a good search engine or better way to backup e-mail and deal with PSTs?

NFL Field of Dreams

Field of Dreams 2: NFL Lockout with Taylor Lautner from Taylor Lautner

Surprise!

My wife threw me a surprise party. That's the great news. The bad news is that she waited. A long time. An inordinate amount of time, really. Long enough that one might think that I wasn't having a party at all. Long enough (hypothetically) for a person to accuse his wife of not actually doing anything for their birthday. Long enough for a person to believe that they were forgotten and not think that there was anything going on. Yes, I was surprised. Even more surprised, when the event turned into a roast of me. I sat there as story after story was told and I was not allowed to respond. Just sit there and smile. Brad took the cake with his amazing story of his third fella.



If the video doesn't show up in this post, click here to see the video in Youtube.

How to become Dave Kurt

What bigger honor can a person have in their life than to have a documentary (or should i say a 'mockumentary') produced about them. Thank you to Jason Shinn and company for putting together this thorough explanation of how to be me.

Seth's Memorial

Seth was a kid in my youth group. He's been one of my kids since the 6th grade. He took his life on Tuesday. I'm angry and I'm sad. I was sobbing as I pulled these pictures together. Here's a quick snapshot of Seth.


If you can't see the slideshow, click here for the pictures.

Dave's 40th Surprise Birthday Party/Roast

If you can't see the video, click here to watch it on Youtube.

Getting to the point - Accupuncture

I've been dealing with chronic pain for the past 16 months or so, ever since a botched vasectomy caused some nasty nerve damage in places you really don't want to have it.  I've gone to doctor's all over the place and after two surgeries, they've now told me it's just something I'm going to have to deal with for life.  Not being one to give up, I figured I'd try acupuncture.  What do I have to lose?

I was skeptical.  I don't know a lot about eastern medicine, but the concepts of 'getting my chi aligned and flowing' were pretty foreign concepts to me, hence I went in skeptical.

The first acupuncturist I went to Dr. Paul Sheng,MD in Brighton.  I knew a few other people who'd been to him and recommended him.  I went in, explained my problem and he explained to me in very western, medical terms that I probably had a nerve injury (I forget the medical term) and that he thought he could fix it.  He had me lay on the table facing the wall.  He proceeded to put needles all over, in my ear, my abdomen, my back and my pelvis.  I know what you're thinking: he didn't place any needles in the area of injury, thankfully.  Dr. Sheng didn't do a very good job explaining what he was doing and why.  He took a very doctorish approach to the treatment, very different from the Lotus Center approach.  Interesting side note on the guy, he's a Christian, whose family escaped from communist China after being persecuted for their faith.

This went fairly smoothly.  The needle pricks were tiny and I really couldn't feel them.  What surprised me was the next part: hooking up electricity to the needs and laying there while a current is running through you.  Very strange and slightly painful.

I didn't really feel a change afterwards.  I was still in pain, and Dr Sheng recommended I start to wean myself from the pain medicine I was on, as they would only the dull the pain in my mind, not really deal with the problem.  It was a bigger ask than it sounds, as it had taken me a month or two to build up to the medicine I was on and quitting was no small task.

After a period of feeling pretty due to a group of friends at church praying and fasting for me, I went off the pain meds.  I kept going back to Dr. Sheng, even though I wasn't seeing any kind of immediately release.  The fifth visit, it felt different.  The shock went all the way down my leg when he turned the current on. Leaving the office, things felt the same. A few days later, the pain started subsiding, probably to about 80%.  I had no idea why at the time.  I'm still convinced it was because of the Acupuncture.

At the time, I wasn't sure what was working, and decided I'd try a different acupuncturist.  I went to a place in Ann Arbor called the Lotus Center based on a recommendation from Dana.  My acupuncturist was named Brody.  He sat down with me, looked at my tongue, took my pulse and my chi.  He explained that the flow of my chi was out of whack, hence the pain, and that his job would be to align the energy and take away the pain.  I did my best to be open minded and give it a try.  Brody did a great job explaining everything and making sure I was comfortable.  Very different than the place in Brighton.  Brighton had a very direct, medical approach.  This was a little more squishy and tougher to wrap my brain around it.

I laid on the table and Brody began putting needles in my hands, my feet and my head and then I laid there for about a half hour.  It was the craziest thing, but I actually felt like some kind of wave was flowing around me, I could feel movement.  Maybe it was the needles. Maybe it's something I don't get with a western mindset of believing only what I can see and prove.  It was a weird experience.  I don't know right now whether it's had any impact or if I'll go back.

I feel like the first doctor took a balanced eastern/western accupuncture mixed with medicine view, but didn't have the 'warm fuzzies' of the second guy.  In the end, I'll probably continue with #1 for now as it seems to be working.

I have angered Steve Jobs

I made the switch last week... I switched to and Android phone. It had been coming for a while. I've been bored with what Apple is doing with the iPhone and nothing that was coming downstream at the next iPhone announcement was of much interest to me: no dual core, no real 4G, no real shape difference, so I switched to the more innovative platform: Android - at least for the 30 day AT&T trial period, until I decide if I want to make the switch permanent.

As a friend of mine, Cris, pointed out: Apple makes it very tough to make the move. They try and lock you in at every turn because your media, your apps, your desktop and your devices are all incredibly interconnected. But it's tough to remain in top spot for long; Apple seems to have gotten lazy, or spread too thin.

The Android devices, while fragmented, have leapfrogged Apple. Their interface has many companies bringing new ideas to market and the best of those make it into the next version of the OS. Far better than just having what Steve Jobs thinks is cool making it into the device.  There's also a great hacker community out there rooting (equivalent of jailbreaking) the device and installing more functionality that the telco carriers have locked you out of for some reason.

The first couple of weeks are normally full of me being all excited about the device and then after that finding all of the holes. I've spent the first week figuring out how to make sure I can duplicate all of the critical functionality like exchange e-mail, contacts and calendaring and other nice to haves like run-keeper. I think I've got all of the baseline stuff nailed down right now. I'm having to learn a whole new paradigm from a UI standpoint, and I'm having to manage my batter and multi-tasking much more closely than I did with apple.

Some top of mind observations around my Motorola Atrix and Android OS in general:

• First, I LOVE how tightly this is integrated with Google.  I use Google for everything in my world: blogging, video, maps, documents, RSS feeds, pictures - EVERYTHING.  As you would expect, Google integrates very well into their own system and has tons of apps out there to bring them right to the device.  The only thing I'm disappointed in is the Gmail reader, which I'd hoped to be more like the iPad dual pane viewing of e-mails and their content side-by-side.
• It's a pain to sync it with iTunes, especially on a mac
• The phone is wicked fast. Dual core is impressive
• I like that I can expand the 16GB it comes with another 32GB with an SD Card.
• I love the widget concept, that they're constantly pulling down data so that it's ready when I want to read it, and not having to open an app to do it.
• Going from one button to four buttons is a big change
• I love the way all of my contacts are automatically linked
• Why doesn't it let me sort my contact list by last name instead of doing it by first?
• The battery goes fast on this, but I like that the battery is replaceable
• The voice recognition is amazing. I'm using it much more often, especially for stuff like text messaging and e-mail while driving
• The fingerprint reader/power toggle is a very cool idea for unlocking the phone
• I'm not sure if it's the dual core of the HSPA+ (AT&T's fake 4G network) that makes it faster, but the browser is ridiculous
• The phone can be hooked up to a TV via HDMI cable (included) and has a beautiful interface for watching movies, showing pictures, music, etc.  You can get a laptop docking station so you can connect the phone in and use it like a laptop, or get a multi-media dock and use it like an AppleTV.
• It's interesting to see my kid's take on my phone.  Apparently in the schools an iPhone is much more of a status symbol than an Android device.  Nate's just disappointed that I would make the switch and leave him behind with his iPhone.

I have 25 days left to test drive this.  We'll see if I keep it.  So far, so good.

This is an interesting article on how Apple is still ahead of Android in many ways, and I can't disagree with any of them.

Who is stranger? My kids or dogs?

2011 Kurt Family Mother's Day

Emily's 10th Birthday

Emily turned 10. We got her Taylor Swift concert tickets. We were touched at her response, almost as amused as we were by her response at being sung to at TGI Fridays.

If you can't see the video, click here to see it.

Stop motion videos we made at the Science Center

Ruby

I stumbled across an article in Lifehacker called Ruby For Kids Teaches Your Kid (And Yourself) The Ruby Programming Language. The article talked about how to get your kids involved in programming games through an easy to use language called Ruby on Rails.

I setup the Ruby programming environment for Nate and gave him the link to the tutorial. After dinking around with getting the programming environment setup right, he started watching the video tutorials and ended up making a very cool video game, a pac-man type game. He's moving on to the next level with another book I picked up for him called Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial. Nate's 14 and I think he connects with the problem solving aspect of programming that's similar to the problem solving aspect of video games.

Clean Sweep

My wife did a clean sweep of the basement and my office is now visible once again!

Youth Group Paintball Video & Photo Album

For those of you seeing this on Facebook, click here for the video.

Here's the photo album for Paintball