The Key to 25 Years of Marriage

Relationships
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Celebrating 25 years together

Today my wife and I celebrate 25 years of marriage. This is a real milestone. 25 years is an insanely long time to do anything. It’s an even crazier amount of time to actually live in close contact with somebody and still get along, much less love that person.

After we reached our 15 year anniversary people started asking every year; “How do you do it.”. And honestly I think that’s a dumb question. Does anyone go into marriage not expecting to be together forever? I think Michelle and I started with the assumption that we would be together forever. Period. No exceptions. Failure is simply not an option. This was never a spoken thing, but it’s ingrained in both of us. It’s part of our core beliefs, and I think that’s one of the attractions I had to Michelle to begin with. So that’s first. Expect that you are going to grow old together, and push every other option out of your mind. You can’t just give up when it gets hard. And you can’t just have something new when you get tired of what you have. Don’t be jerks.

The next part is the part people seem to have a hard time with, but it’s so simple; Just treat each other well. I think that means different things depending on the couple. Some of the things Michelle and I have no problem with would drive other couples crazy. We give each other a lot of personal freedom and honestly we spend quite a bit of time apart with our various commitments and interests. For us that works and is necessary for us to get along and not smother each other. For others that might not work. But the key is to identify what works for both of you, and do that more! Then, Identify what causes stress and don’t do that at all! It’s really not that complex. Don’t be jerks.

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At the alter in 1988

Lastly, extend some grace to each other. So many couples spend so much time trying to “fix” each other. Forget it! Know that your partner is going to be screwed up in some ways. And realize that you are screwed up too. Together you’re a screwy pair, and that’s what makes your relationship unique.  Respect each others wishes. Sacrifice for each other. Don’t be jerks.

So I could go on and on about marriage, but I think you can see I prefer the simple approach. Don’t be jerks!

So here’s wishing a Happy 25th Anniversary to my wife, Michelle! Thanks for hanging in there! I love you!

Independence Day

Politics

Happy Independence Day! This is a special day of remembrance for Americans. Despite what Facebook says, it’s not about BBQ, or fireworks, or “the troops”. We didn’t even have “troops” back in 1776. No, it’s about something that took an incredible amount of courage to do. This is the day our country wrote a letter to the King of the most powerful country on the planet and told him to bugger off (that’s English for “get screwed”), and we weren’t going to take his crap anymore. We were starting our own country.

When you think of the magnitude of that action, it’s pretty frightening. We were a country of farmers and business men. We didn’t have an army of any kind, no fighting ships to speak of, and we were picking a fight with a world superpower. That’s freaking scary. I could not imagine all the hand wringing and debate and prayer that must have gone into making that decision and actually writing up the document, knowing that signing it was going to result in a full on war with England. And you can tell they put some serious thought into it. This wasn’t a pissed off mob. These men were smart, and thoughtful and moral, and you can see that in the writing of the declaration.

So today, take a minute to get past all the cheesy cliche’s, the gluttony, and the bad photoshop images on Facebook and read the declaration for yourself. I’ve provided a link below. And then stop and thank God for our forefathers and their courage.

The Declaration of Independence

 

Nexus 10 vs. iPad Shootout to the Death!!!!!

Technology

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I really despise these whole “this versus that” arguments, especially when it comes to tech. C’mon people, why are we so damn competitive? Why does there have to “be only one”?

I got a Nexus 10 tablet this week, provided by my awesome employer, Community Medical Centers. See, I’m a web developer and so we need to make sure our sites look reasonable on all devices, or at least the popular ones, and after a few days of using it I realized a few important things; everything I’ve read on the Apple fanboy blogs is complete garbage. This is a dang good tablet! I’ve also realized however that the Android guys are also full of crap because owning this tablet has not made me a stud with the ladies, nor has it made me hate my iPad. Let me explain…

There are similarities and differences in the tablets. I mean, there’s a ton of patent battles going on so there are slight variations in how you do things between the devices, but honestly these things are just minor things that require a bit of retraining. Now I know that people get all bowed up about who created this or that first, but I don’t give a crap about that. Every creative endeavor starts with copying somebody else. Take music for example. There’s only 12 notes people! Are you going to criticize T-Pain because he first used a C chord 30 years after Iron Maiden? Artists steal, and improve. That’s how it works. So what I want to do here is point out some things I’ve noticed about the Nexus using my previous iPad experience as the baseline. There is no “winner” here, it’s simply a different way of doing things.

OK, so here are some things I really dig about the Nexus:

I love the launch screens. You have 5 screens and each can have any combination of info widgets which show weather, mail messages, etc, app icons, or “folders” that contain multiple icons. You can also arrange your icons with spaces in between them rather than having to have all your icons flow to the top left like on the iPad. You also have the standard launch bar at the bottom of the screen. In addition you have an “all apps” button that pulls up a screen of all your apps in alphabetical order as well as all your available gadgets. All this is very handy and customizable.

I like the notification window. Its a small pulldown window in the top left of the screen. Not all that different from the iPad but I think its more purposeful and less cluttered than the iPad equivalent.

I like the setting window. Its a small pulldown in the top right that gives you access to your settings rather than having to find the settings icon in one of your many launch screens.

The Nexus has a rubber back which I thought I would hate until I set the tablet down on my lap and it didn’t slide into my crotch. Very handy.

I absolutely love the integration of Google apps. Honestly I think Apple’s iCloud apps suck. I’ve always used Google apps but on the iPad they are second class citizens.

OK so there’s the main things I like. Now here’s the things that suck:

The keyboard! In writing this on the Nexus and its a pain. Honestly, the iPad keyboard sucks too but this one is giving me fits. It just feels like getting to numbers and special characters is a pain. And the fact that the home button is a software button rather than a hardware one, I’m constantly returning “home” when I go for the space key.

It crashes more than I would expect it to. I’ve already had two hard lockups in the 10 or so hours that I’ve used it.

As a whole, and this is very subjective, the OS feels stiff and rough around the edges. It’s just not as forgiving or polished as IOS.

Several apps that I love are not available on this device and others are clearly not as good as their IOS counterparts. This is not an issue with Android as much as it is with individual developers but still, it’s an issue.

So there you have it. Pretty minor annoyances eh? And that’s my point. This is a darn good tablet and I like it a lot. All in all I think if you took a complete noob and gave them one or the other they would have no problem using either one. So which would I buy if I only had $500 of my own money to spend? I can’t say yet. To me its a wash. If you had real specific needs such as controlling you prosthetic leg or running your Mackie mixer, I’d say iPad all the way, but if you’re just checking mail, browsing the web and playing some games, honestly you could go either way and, after a bit of getting used to the quirks of each OS, function just fine.

Son the moral of the story is to not buy into the fanboy hype. The differences are minor and mostly related to user training, not core defects in design. I would definitely stay away from any of the third party Android tablets though. Pure Google is the way to go.

Well, that was quick.

Uncategorized

I decided a few weeks ago to kill this blog. I’ve been blogging for over 10 years and this is the third or fourth iteration of the blog and it had just become stale. So I killed it.

But a few days later I suddenly decided I had something to say but nowhere to say it. I had originally figured Facebook was where everyone posts these days, but quickly realized nobody wants to hear anything serious on Facebook. Facebook is like Christmas dinner with the in-laws. All small talk and smiles. The people who bitch about stuff are quickly sent to the back porch to hang out with that pimply cousin who smokes pot 24/7 and are not invited next year. Yes that my best analogy for Facebook filters.

So I fired the old blog back up. I thought about adding back all the old posts, but I figured screw it, it’s not worth the effort. I might dig out my Africa diaries since people seem to like that series of posts. But for now I’m starting fresh. A clean slate. A blank page. An empty canvas in which to split my head open and fling my brain goo onto. I hope you’re not eating spaghetti right now.

One thing I’m not doing this time is allowing comments. I’m so sick of spending time deleting fake handbag and viagra posts from my blog. So if you have an opinion about what I’ve written, you’re just gonna have to keep it to yourself.

Talk to you soon.