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