Creative Jobhunting - In The Age Of Google

I'm sure a lot of other people have tried this approach now that this story is out.

And why the bleep not?

Golf Prodigy!

In Praise Of Dead Sports

Here's what I do with my beloved Boston Celtics in the NBA Finals yet again:

At night I tape, er DVR, the game. I wake up in the morning and check the score to see if they won.

If they were in fact victorious, I'm delighted and will thoroughly enjoy watching the entire recorded game on my low-def color TV.

If they lost, I delete the game from my cable box and from my memory.

Yesterday I was explaining my strategy to an acquaintance down here.

He scoffed, called my approach *ridiculous*, and insisted that it *defeated the purpose*.

The purpose?

With all the drama in my life: landlord fighting, moving, marriage to a 100% Italian broad, homeschooling, trading, and now living with the MIL(!)....I scarcely need the stomach-churning of a LIVE playoff sports event - with it's four-minute commercials and bazillion time-outs.

Now this guy was hardly the first to mock my policy of only watching DEAD sports - as I've had the DVR now for over 10 years.

In his defense, he's not a Boston fan, he's a New Yorker so he hasn't had the burden of watching so many important playoff games!

But to him and every other couch-potato big mouth I say this,

"Have you ever tried to tape a game and watch it knowing the outcome or fast-forwarded? Well I've done it both ways - watching sports both live and dead. How much free time to you have anyway, O sluggard?"

Loading Up On Inflation-Protected, Hard Assets!

Today I bought, or pre-bought, 40,000 balls at the local driving range.

The total bill was $1299 or ≈ 3.24 ¢ per ball.

Sure it may take me 2-3 years to hit them all...

But if I paid normal freight for those 40,000 balls I'd be paying $3,750 or ≈ 9.375 ¢ per ball. So I'm reaping a hefty 67% discount.

I contemplated this purchase for several days. Do I really want to hit that many balls? Of course I NEED to if I ever want to reach my full golfing potential.

I looked at this this way - with the market prices for golf here, I'm not going to be playing too many rounds. So hitting balls is a viable alternative. I actually like to practice very much - especially when *playing* involves considerable time (5 hours!) and money.

And my risks are small (compared to my trading!). As I see them:

    

The club goes bankrupt.

    

We move yet again before I exhaust my *balls*.

    

I suffer some debilitating injury that renders me unable to exhaust my...

    

We end up joining some local country club in the next year or so that provides free range balls (highly unlikely). I told my wife if we have the coin to join a NYC area club....then that $1,300 I spent ought to be an insignificant amount to talk about.

    

The course drastically DROPS its range prices.

    

BP opens an oil rig in Long Island Sound!

Still, this is an awful lot of balls for a non-professional to be hitting.

The girl at the counter said I was *the only one to ever buy that amount*.

That remark put a nice smile on my face. As y'all well know, I pride myself on standing out from the crowd: renting, homeschooling, tuning out the *news*, blogging, etc.

Movie Skip - Shutter Island

After paying $4.99 for it on Pay-Per-View....I promptly fell asleep on it not once, but TWO nights in a row.

I forced myself to watch the last 28 minutes of it early this morning.

This motion picture, IMO, was rather stupid.

(And anyone who tells me the book was better will be dealt with harshly!)

For The Kids, Really?

Y'all can read that as-advertised article about yet another self-help parenting book for yourselves. Surely everyone knows at least someone who fits that bill.

The problem, as I see it, goes beyond the raising of the children.

Parents, spouses, who focus too much on their children, who don't communicate and continue to grow as a couple....when the kids leave they find they've grown apart and can't fill the void of an empty nest. Divorce is more than inevitable.

On the flip side you have those in horrible marriages who are well aware they are merely holding on for the sake of the kids. Those who are looking forward to spousal separation as much as they are to the empty nest!



My wife and I have this philosophical debate all the time. She thinks parents should stick it out almost no matter what. I'm a little more skeptical and think plenty of bad things flow from a sham marriage.

When Animals Attack Morons...

A couple of these I've already featured on my blog - the rhino chase and the pigeon dive bomber - but they're worthy of a re-run in this set:

































Have I ever had the misfortune of being attacked by a subordinate species?

I don't know. I've been shat upon by a couple birds; stung by a bee or two; never been bitten by a dog. Once, when I was 12 or so, me and a friend of mine where chased by a herd(?) of cows. We nearly defecated in our drawers seeing them close the gap as we ran for the fence. But when they caught up with us, they just stopped!

Now that I think of it, I'm pretty unscathed in this department.

Though I have been, numerous times, viciously attacked by lower species on the blogosphere!

YouTube Going To Pull This One Too?

Only posting this because...

He might well be the dumbest Moron in Congress to behave this way in with a camera in his face (and note the stiff competition for that title!):

New York Sticker Shock

Gasoline is $3 a gallon here in Nassau County at the moment. Last week, in Wildwood, New Jersey I paid $2.41 a gallon - for full serve!

I bought two slices of pizza yesterday, it was $7.

My weekly supermarket trip today cost $194, up from what used to be around $165 in Boston....and it feels like I didn't even buy anything!

Golf at a course comparable to the one I played up north for $59 on Saturday mornings costs $83 here - but only if you are a town resident. Otherwise it's a cool $113!

My MIL's house, which we moved into, is 2,500 square feet plus an attic and a furnished basement. On Boston's South Shore, in a town like Hingham or Cohasset, it'd sell for around $650,000. But here in Long Island, it's market value is roughly $1,000,000.

A friend of mine who's lived in NYC for much of the past decade left a couple of years ago for London. He said that when he got back it seemed like all of a sudden everything in Manhattan got really expensive.

Yeah people in this area do indeed earn a whole lot more.

But if they're not careful with it, they'll end up giving all of it back.

Greenies Fiddling While The Economy Burns

Check out this car-stopping, camera-grabbing sign I drove by today:



An "Environment Party"?

Hah!

A municipality of what, 15,000 people in Port Washington, NY (18,000 if Sands Point is included)...has as its main ideological priorities trees, birds, electric cars, no-flush urinals, and recycling?

Oh yeah, this tiny town has a $128.2 million operating budget for 2010 - as delusional tree-humpers, both pols and voters, upped it 2.5% from last year.

Good luck to anyone hoping to inject some rationality into the local political dialogue - OR into any level of politics today!

Princess Homeschooling Update

There she is, my daughter adding 4 a week before she even turns 4!

That's from Kumon's Addition workbook - recommended for ages 5, 6, and 7.

For those of you (and you know who you are!) who routinely accuse me of neglecting to give my daughter *equal time*...

Let the record show that she's still at least 2 months ahead of where her brother was at this age - at least in terms of math.

My son, like most boys, is lazy. Girls are a whole lot more manageable at this age anyway. In fact there's some insane statistic that says 90% of *special ed* youngsters at government schools are boys - so I've heard.

From numbers like that an educated person might be tempted to extrapolate that there are genetic and developmental differences between the sexes - even through Harvard!

Ground Zero - 8.75 years later

Wow. It really has been a long, long time.

I took my kids into Manhattan ("the City") today for the first time since we moved here. We hit that breath-taking Battery Park, lingered on the playground there for a bit, met *mom* after work for dinner (pricey $12.50 burritos from Blockheads!), and then took the subway and train home as a family.

Despite a spot of rain, it was a beautiful 72 degree day with a refreshing breeze off the Hudson. And the kids did well with all the walking until about the very end. After all, their strides are HALF as long as ours!

These are the types of things a family can do when they are untethered by *school*. Tomorrow should be just as nice; and around lunchtime we're going to a state park to meet up with our new, local homeschool co-op.

South Shore Requiem

I wanted to dedicate a post to Boston's South Shore - specifically the region of it I just left, where I spent 2.75 of the happiest years of my life, and yet had the stones to walk away from.

Despite being a native Ma$$hole, I'd NEVER EVEN HEARD of the so-called South Shore - no less been there until about 3.5 years ago. We bid on a house in Hingham three years ago essentially blind. Sure we made a couple of reconnaissance day-trips, hung out at the parks, and even attended a family Mass one Sunday to try to get a feel for the town. And we asked as many people as we possibly could about the area. While everyone said it was nice, we still lacked the perspective of well-traveled people WHO ACTUALLY LIVED THERE. There had to be something wrong with it, right? I've long been aware that in life we are routinely forced to make decisions based on incomplete information sets, and we are often forced to take uncomfortable risks...

But still, I was scared to death to bid on those two homes, not just at near 2007 market prices, but I was scared to death to commit to a town that I scarcely knew. My fears were certainly justified AND they proved prescient. Just look how many people today are *slightly* upside-down on their mortgages and are essentially trapped in their homes - even forced to strategically default on their debts. And what if I bought in the wrong part of town? What if my wife lost her job or got transferred (which did just happen)?

Anyways, this isn't a housing bubble post. I just wanted to provide the context for my stay. Where exactly did I live? Well, I lived, as I always seem to, on the precise border of two towns. Combined tiny Hingham and tinier Cohasset only have 30,000 inhabitants. And that was another aspect that scared my wife and me. We'd only really ever lived in cities and densely-populated metropolitan areas before landing on the South Shore. Would there be enough restaurants (no!)? Enough people (yes!)?

Without cataloguing my entire time there I just want to say how WICKED AWESOME this Hingham/Cohasset area turned out to be.

Almost everyone we met there was what I'd call *normal*. I can count on one hand the number of people I met over this period who'd be oozing *politics* and who easily *took offense*. Everyone else was focused on family and their professional life - ballet, youth soccer, booze, and boating. Go ahead, just try to find another place in Moronic Massachusetts where knuckleheads aren't all agitated by the agitprop they consume. This was surely an isle of sanity we landed on.

Contrary to many opinion-heads, e.g. Forbes editor Rich Karlgaard, I maintain that one attribute of great-to-live-in regions is a dearth of colleges. Sure it may be impossible to find a $10 per hour responsible, EFL college student babysitter, but the plus side of being far from academia is not having to put up with all the never-done-anything, know-it-all cranks that dominate college-towns. Charlotte, where I lived for 11 months in 2004-5, was a similar case. I submit that the Queen City and the people there were so beautiful precisely because it wasn't ruined by colleges, a la Raleigh. (Hospitals bring a good share of cranks with them as well.)

Careers? Well, everyone in Cohasset/Hingham either works in finance or real estate. Seemingly, everyone was an analyst for a mutual fund company - or a consultant in the same field. I don't think I met a single doctor in 2.75 years; and I only met socially maybe 2-3 lawyers. Essentially, everyone nominally worked in the private sector. So I guess that's why the political BS, alluded to above, was kept to a bare minimum.



Friends? Here's the example I've told countless time already when selling this area to potential movers. When I lived in Chestnut Hill, MA (the Newton, Brookline, West Roxbury border), though my kids were younger I still took them to the park just about every day the weather permitted.

Yet in two full years there, I DIDN'T EVEN GET A SINGLE 'HELLO' from the weirdos at Larz Anderson park and the like - from all these people *socialized* by higher education. Contrast that with Hingham/Cohasset where, on one of my reconnaissance missions at South Elementary School playground, as a potential newcomer I instantly had all the parents in the park surrounding me and offering helpful advice on where to live and what to do in Hingham.

Socially, this area was a place many people, including me before I moved there, would not be able to understand in the slightest. Even though I'm not even a likable guy(!), I made friends everywhere I went. People there did the strangest thing - THEY TALKED TO EACH OTHER. Some of my really good friends were made through casual chitchat on the beach, at the parks, and I even made a friend at McDonald's of all places. There was a palpable small town feel here in the bluest and rudest of States.

We weren't there but a year and my daughter's 2nd birthday barbecue had 40 attendees.

For her 3rd birthday celebration, even after cutting MANY guests from the prior year, try as we might we couldn't keep the party small - we had 70 people! (I had two grills working and probably didn't sit down for a minute.)

Yeah, the social life which my wife and I feared in a lightly-populated town actually turned out to be a deep well of opportunity. It was so good that one could be extremely particular about whom they hung out with.

Because everyone worked in the private sector, there was quite a bit of geographic diversity among the townspeople. I estimate that a full one-third of the adults in this area had grown up outside of New England. And that's a huge degree of foreigners for this otherwise intensely parochial State. I had thought my résumé of 5 former cities was impressive but I routinely met people who were on their 7th or 8th landing spot. Not only are people who bounce around a lot inherently more experienced and more mature, they also are friendlier since they don't have the built-in, decades-old circle of family and friends to lean on. Even the native Ma$$holes there had generally moved around a bit, e.g. most everyone had lived in NYC or on the West Coast at one time, before coming home.



Did I mention the ocean yet?

It's pretty nice to live in a beach town for the two-month(!) New England summer. Some of the beaches even permit alcohol - a rarity for this Puritanical, Moronic State. Summertime Friday nights, the Cohasset beach turns into one big town-wide party. Kids run around, swim, play in the sand whilst the adults order pizza or cater their own dinner and enjoy what has to be one of the best *happy hours* I've ever experienced. It truly is sublime; being really only sand, alcohol, and peace, time on Sandy Beach begs the question of *how much do we actually need?* in life.

My wife and I had NEVER before endured a long commute. In Philly we both walked a few blocks to the office. In New York we took the subway only a single stop from Borough Hall to Wall Street. In Charlotte my wife walked a half a mile whilst I started working from home. And in Newton, MA my wife only had a 5 minute drive to and a 22 minute train ride in. Even before the babies came we always thought those who suffer long commutes to be complete Morons.

But moving to Hingham/Cohasset we were going to be a full 23 miles from Boston. Neither my wife nor I was looking forward to what would end up being nearly an hour commute for her each way. After all, she'd see her kids less each day; and I'd be on my own with them for that much longer. Do any of y'all remember what it was like to be a new parent of a couple of small children AND be on your own for the whole day? I can't recall at the moment - having expunged the traumatizing memory from my brain!

I'll let my wife editorialize the commute:

Mrs. C-Nut - Before (in Newton) I hated everything EXCEPT the commute....But here (Hingham/Cohasset) I love everything EXCEPT the commute. It was a most worthwhile trade-off.

Of course right after we got to the South Shore they opened a brand new commuter rail line - which had a station only 90 seconds from our house. On a train she could at least get substantial work done. And don't forget that my wife *worked* from home on Fridays so both of those things blunted the sub-optimal commute.

Mrs. C-Nut now hypothesizes that one has to move a good ways out, away from the cities, commuters, and what she calls *transients* to get to the really nice towns. Other examples might be Duxbury, MA and Lattingtown here on Long Island. Though one has to be rich or secure enough to move far out, beyond the "riff-raff" - if that's what's important to them.



I want to conclude with a word about the teenagers in this area. Never before have I seen such well-mannered punks as I did in the Hingham/Cohasset region. Never.

They say please and thank-you. They greet you by standing up and with handshakes. They're not bouncing loudly all over town and whatnot. Now I'm hardly naive; I'm sure they are still out there getting drunk and smoking pot and whatnot in someone's basement; but at least they have the sense to be somewhat discreet about their immaturity. Heck about a month ago I was at Papa Ginos with my kids. Seated next to us were about 15 teenagers - boys and a few young lasses. But I wouldn't even know it if I hadn't espied them halfway through my meal. They were incredibly quiet, sitting there conversing like full-blown adults. To this day I'm still dumbfounded by that scene. These kids here really are a tribute to their parents and the overall community. Perhaps in pimple-faced teeny-boppers I have discovered an unlikely barometer for identifying nice places to live?



My wife suggested that I forgot to mention my favorite attribute of the area - Widow's Walk golf course.

And she is correct in how much I truly loved and will miss that track. But my love for it was personal; no one else has any appreciation for extraordinarily difficult golf courses - which it was.

Of course there were some real negatives with Hingham/Cohasset living but they pale in comparison to the good stuff.

I'd rather not touch on them now and sully this post (which my wife already read as *too negative*!).

It was definitely time for us to leave and return to New York - for a host of reasons. I'll discuss all that as time goes on. AND, I can always move back if it turns out moving was a mistake, right?

In conclusion I want to reiterate how remarkable of a place to live that part of the South Shore is. If the rest of Massachusetts knew truly how much nicer, and how much less snow(!) Hingham and Cohasset got the towns would be overrun!

EBook Goldrush

I'm seeing it more and more these days - people, especially bloggers, are writing and peddling their *ebooks*.

So why is that?

Consider this recent article from the WSJ:

This month, Amazon is upping the ante, increasing the amount it pays authors to 70% of revenue, from 35%, for e-books priced from $2.99 to $9.99. A self-published author whose e-book lists for $9.99 on Amazon's Kindle e-bookstore will receive about $6.99 for each book sold. The author would net $1.75 on a similar new e-book sale by most major publishers.

The new formula makes digital self-publishing more lucrative for authors. "Some people will be tempted by the 70% royalty at Amazon," Mr. Nash says. "If they already have a loyal fan base, will they want 70% of $100,000 or 15% of $200,000 for a hardcover?"
Traditional book-industry players and tech companies are jumping on the digital self-publishing bandwagon. Apple last week announced a digital self-publishing program for its iPad giving 70% of revenue to authors, similar to Amazon's formula. Last month, Barnes & Noble also announced a service called PubIt!, allowing authors to post and sell e-books online.

Seventy percent profit margin....that's huge! It really reduces the windfall profit threshold.

Here's one example of the math:

Mr. Konrath says he's already earning more from self-published Kindle books that New York publishers rejected than from his print books. In the past 14 months, he has sold nearly 50,000 Kindle e-books, and at the current royalty rate, he makes $58,000 per year from his self-published works. When Amazon royalties double this summer, he expects to bring in $170,000 annually.

"I'm outselling a bunch of famous, name-brand authors. I couldn't touch their sales in print," Mr. Konrath says.

Y'all catch that....making MORE from the content gatekeeping publishers rejected!

With margins this high, there're plenty of nuggets out there to be mined.

The other day my brother, who was thoughtful enough to email me this article, informed me he was considering writing an ebook on how Westerners can launch businesses in the former Soviet states. This happens to be his area of business experience.

I thought about it for a second, wondering how big the market for such a book might even be. Then it hit me that the targeted customers would certainly be willing to pay-up for this kind of book before dumping substantially more money into the scary *outlaw economies* over there. My brother could easily price his book at say $100 and given the current ebook margins he'd only have to sell 1,000 copies to net around $70,000. That's not too bad at all.

Surely, given the explosion in iPads, Kindles, and other tablet devices it won't be long before some lucky dude/chick sells 5 million copies of some hot new $10 ebook and garners a profit of $35 million.

Obviously, I should be directing my energies toward an ebook as well. After all, my little angry man/rant posts aren't at all monetizable. Perhaps it's time to get paid for the six years and thousands of hours I've put into teaching myself to write?

"We Con The World"

Some of you *bigoted* clowns will find this a bit funny:



It's clever if nothing else, I guess.

Remembrances Of 'Old Bags' Past

A group of 40 year old girlfriends discussed where they should meet up for dinner. Finally, it was agreed upon that they should meet at the Ocean View restaurant because the waiters there had tight pants and nice buns.

10 years later, at 50 years of age, the group once again discussed where they should meet for dinner. Finally it was agreed that they should meet at the Ocean View restaurant because the food there was very good and the wine selection was good also.

10 years later, at 60 years of age, the group once again discussed where they should meet for dinner. Finally it was agreed that they should meet at the Ocean View restaurant because they could eat there in peace and quiet and the restaurant had a beautiful view of the ocean.

10 years later, at 70 years of age, the group once again discussed where they should meet for dinner. Finally it was agree that they should meet at the Ocean View restaurant because the restaurant was wheel chair accessible and they even had an elevator.

10 years later, at 80 years of age, the group once again discussed where they should meet for dinner. Finally it was agreed that they should meet at the Ocean View restaurant because they had never been there before!

Triumphant Jabroni's!

So I told y'all I was heading down to south Jersey to watch my GutterBuddies play in a competitive golf tournament.

Guess what, they won the whole shebang!

In the finals they beat this guy - Duke Delcher - a reputed golfer in this region who's made the quarterfinals of the US Amateur (losing to Joel Kribel in 1996), allegedly played in a US Open (I can't verify that), and starred on the 1997 victorious Walker Cup team - which is the amateur version of the Ryder Cup.

The 54 year old Delcher was awesome to watch. On the second day he and his partner were 5 down after 6 holes yet caught fire to win 2 and 1 anyway. His short game was in a whole other league.

But he was *no match* in the finals for my jabroni's who trounced him 3 and 2! As I told y'all last year....these guys are darn good.

Here is Delcher hitting one of his laser-guided wedges:



It was a fun, relaxing weekend *down the shore* for me: booze, some light golf practice, cheesesteaks, Alfe's, and a couple of Primo's hoagies - and seeing these long-time friends, who've dedicated YEARS to their golf games, win was a terrific bonus.

Next year, now that I'm geographically much closer....I hope to play in this tournament myself.

Now it's back to business on the homefront, unpacking boxes, homeschooling, carving out life in a new place, etc.

What's that stock market doing these days anyways?

Quasi Golf Trip

I'm hitting the road in a few hours and I have to go early to beat the worst of the Manhattan-bound commuting traffic. I'm heading down to Wildwood, New Jersey - that's the southern-most tip of the sewer State! - to watch my jabronis play in a competitive golf tournament.

I'm bringing my clubs and I may try to play somewhere else on Saturday morning but I'm not sure yet.

Mostly I'm just going down there to get away from my kids/wife/MIL/moving boxes for a few days and to see my old South Philly GutterBuddies. I believe *last call* in Wildwood is near 4am!

So I'll be silent on the blog until at least Sunday night. Enjoy your weekends.

WWW and C-Nut - Reunited!

Today I, still in the fog of my 4-week long staggered move to Long Island, I FINALLY got my computer set up and re-connected to the internet.

FiOS, which amazingly is now three years old, came this afternoon and after a few hours the technician was able to hook me up with a modern cable connection and a hard-wired internet line in the basement/office. No problems so far for me or my wife at her station behind me. She's hard at work after midnight, yet again, sifting through the 400 emails in her inbox.

It suffices to say it's been a long 3-4 weeks of being technologically unsettled for our entire family. Personally, I've grown sick and tired of using laptops and other people's networks. It feels good to be back in my $900 ergonomic desk chair and in front of my dual-monitor display - which, by the way, is due to be upgraded presently.

I'm trying to order myself a brand new, souped-up PC from Dell with a couple of 24 inch monitors AND a new PC for my son who needs a computer as much as anyone on this overheated Earth.

But I am having an extremely hard time navigating the Dell website. I do appreciate the fact that their computers are infinitely customizable and that their prices are near rock-bottom...

However, someone over at DELL Inc. has to design a dumbed-down/user-friendly version of their online store.

I don't well care if I save $185 on my new PC if it's going to cost me 2-3 hours of precious time to imagine what I'm buying!

YouTube Overshooting

If one skims through my older posts they'll find that many, if not most, of the YouTube clips I've artfully embedded into the context of my profundity are *broken*. These music videos, color TV show excerpts, movie trailers, etc. have been mostly been pulled due to *copyright claims* from Hollywood lawyer-thugs.

The censorship has been so bad recently that I'm not even sure I should be highlighting any more YouTube clips at all on my blog because I essentially have to assume they'll only be online for a short time. So, what's the point? I'm not writing for a contemporary audience. No, my posts are intended to be timeless, fodder for at least the next millennia!

Sure if you put up a Dave Matthews song or video and tagged it as such it could easily be caught. So just leave the title of the song out of the video's text description.

But that only worked for a little while. YouTube was soon able to find unannounced songs that enthusiasts had burned into their photo collages and whatnot. I myself had tried to put up clips of all my blog pics set to music some time back. However, eventually YouTube came and removed the *audio* from my uploaded content - yet again due to *copyright claims*.

I've been long wondering if there was an easy work-around - a way to get music on your clips that wouldn't alert Google's copyright-searching algorithms. And I'm sure there are still plenty of such strategies.

But they must keep getting harder and harder to implement. Check out what happened to me last week.

From my daughter's first dance recital, I tried to upload a video my wife took of the grand finale where all the classes, ages 3-17, piled onto the stage and danced to Miley Cyrus' smash hit Party In The USA.

But after tediously uploading the 108 MB file - wirelessly, with my cheap laptop and my parents' even cheaper internet connection(!) - I received instant notification that my uploaded content infringed on some obscure company's copyrights. In disbelief that the violation was accurate I Googled the specific company only to discover that they in fact held the rights to Party In The USA.

You see, my wife recorded the footage on my 6-year old Jurassic digital camera. So Miley Cyrus' song was only coming onto my .MPG file with a TON of noise - meaning...

How in the world has Google designed algorithms that can unearth specific music that's merely playing in the background? How can they find these haystack-needles given the zillions of clips out there?

AND, why would they want to?

Surely no judge would hold them responsible for essentially a song playing on a radio in the background. I wouldn't think anyway.

Since I already have two strikes against me for prior YouTube infractions, upon getting the notification that MY DAUGHTER'S dance recital was essentially copyrighted content....I pulled the clip in a nanosecond rather than risk YouTube cancelling my account altogether.

Can people even safely upload video of their wedding first dances now?

What next? Are they going to pull clips of girls kissing, great-grandmothers doing yoga, and boys farting if ESPN is visible on the color TV in the background?

See also my very first YouTube post, nearly four years old today:

The Future Of Video Media Has Arrived

Check Tonsils Before Ferberizing

Roughly 2 years ago, when she was just 2, we put our precious Princess in a *big girl* bed and threw her binkies (pacifiers) in the garbage. Ever since then she has been a horrible sleeper. Sure, there's the expected adjustment to being mobile and out of a crib but it was more than that. My wife, of course in typical female-hindsight fashion, lamented that we took away the binky too soon.

My daughter not only kept waking up at night - she'd wake up screaming her head off and/or she'd make her way down to our bedroom - perhaps 2 out of every 3 nights. It got so bad that we turned the door-knob around on her bedroom and started locking her in her room! See - On Child Incarceration - for the start of this saga.

Though we didn't actually lock her in for more than a handful of times. We used it mostly as a threat, that if she got out of bed one more time that night we'd lock her in. This worked but only to a small extent. Over time we've grown used to her climbing into our bed in the wee hours - after all she's as cute as a button, still only 29 pounds, and a great snuggler. Plus her *night terrors* are pretty scary. She'll sit up in bed screaming - even when sleeping between me and her mother - and we all but have to slap her silly to wake her up. So given all that, what's a loving parent going to do but slide over in the bed and make room?

But help may be on the way...

A few weeks ago, while at the pediatric dentist the hygienist there informed me that my Princess had *extremely large tonsils* and that they were *almost touching*.

So, what does that mean? They should come out, right?

Well, apparently tonsils this big often cause severe sleep problems as they retard proper respiration at night - they induce some sort of *sleep apnea*. Hmmmm...

I mentioned this potential insight to a local *mom* who told me her daughter had the same sleep problems until enlarged tonsils were fingered as the culprit and removed. Her daughter, post-surgery, instantly started sleeping like a baby.

Then yesterday I found this precise affliction listed in some *baby/toddler* sleep book so I'm pretty confident, and hopeful, that simply removing our angel's tonsils will restore peace to EVERYONE's sleep schedule.

Now I don't need much sleep, nor am I much of a through-the-night-sleeper myself, but I was up with my daughter probably 6 times on Saturday night. It's been a long last two years - actually a long 5.5 years since that's when her brother arrived!

See also - To Jail Or Not To Jail?

On Those Nutty Allergies

A week or so ago, when I was making my son a peanut butter sandwich for a late-morning boat ride at a friend's house....I noticed a bit of brown in the jar of peanut butter. I said to the young lady whose peanut butter I was using,

C-Nut - Is that chocolate or something in there?

YL - Yeah, probably.

Then I thought for a moment.

C-Nut - It isn't Nutella, is it?

YL - Yeah, it's probably Nutella.

Thank God I noticed it in the jar AND thank God I didn't give that sandwich to my son when we were out on the ocean in a slow-moving sailboat for lunch.

You see, the 5.53 year old Prince is allergic to nuts (and sesame). He can eat peanuts but not the other category (tree nuts) which would include the hazelnuts in Nutella. How bad, how traumatic would that have been for my son to have an allergic reaction while we were stranded out on a boat? We've never had to use the epi-pens, thankfully, and have probably gotten a little lax in making sure we have one on us at all times. So there was a good chance that I wouldn't have even brought one aboard with me.

Like I said, thank God I noticed the Nutella when I did.

But let this post also serve as a warning to those of you who ever have allergic kids under your care. Most people use the jelly knife for peanut butter as well. And once that knife has gone back and forth the jelly has been cross-contaminated. Ice cream, with all its nutty varieties, is another candidate for allergen cross-contamination.

I myself have to carefully watch all this stuff because not only is my son allergic to nuts and sesame, my daughter is allergic to dairy, eggs, and peanuts - though I believe she's outgrowing the dairy/eggs restriction.

One last warning about sesame which is less talked about but is often coincident with a general tree nut allergy (I think). Watch the supermarket, or even deli bagels. They have sesame seeds flying all over the place. I inspect bagels thoroughly before letting my son have one. Also, forget Burger King. Although they will say they can deliver a burger with no seeds (using two bun bottoms or something), upon examination I found tons of sesame seeds embedded in the bread they gave me. Progresso bread crumbs are made with sesame - which is a bit of a surprise so watch homemade meatballs (pizza joints ALL make their own breadcrumbs). Hummus (or Hommos) has sesame concentrated within it. In fact, that's how we discovered our baby boy was allergic way back when. His mother let him lick a piece of hummus and pita and he instantly projectile vomited. The last food I'll warn about is those *wraps* that sandwiches are fashionable made in these days. Many, though not all, of them are made with sesame flour. Our son had a reaction to a wrap years ago when we were making a long trip somewhere on the New Jersey Turnpike.

Oh, and if you ever take a nut-allergic kid to get ice cream....ask the server to wash out the scoop UNDER THE SINK rather than in that little cesspool where they drop all the other scoops. AND lean in and watch them clean it!

A Large Red Circle Restaurant

Every once in a while I'll green-light a restaurant or a particular foodstuff on this blog.

But this time I have to red-light one.

Cafe Spice, some sort of wannabe-chain of Indian restaurants, is absolutely terrible. After spending a whopping $12.10 (takeout!) for a tasteless lunch there yesterday I'll never, ever, go back.

Dawn Of A New Day

Being not much of a sleeper AND an early morning golfer....I've seen my share of peaceful sunrises. It's the most serene time of day with all the lazy Morons indoors, for sure - I don't know why everyone doesn't set their alarm clock each morning so as to not miss it!

Anyways, I was up at 4:20am this morning and, for lack of anything to do, I started frying up a pound of bacon. At 5:25am I woke my wife and at 6:12am I drove her to the local Long Island Rail-Road train station for her first commute into Manhattan from our *new* abode.

We still have to change drivers' licenses and plates in order to get a station parking permit. As y'all might guess, dealing with two states' DMVs won't be a whole lot of fun. Already I've learned that I can't simply convert my Massachusetts license into a New York one. Why is that? Well, because Mass licenses don't have a *date of issue* printed on them. New York has some law that one can only convert an out-of-state license if the out-of-state license was issued at least six months ago. It's a stupid stipulation in the sense that the *date of issue* can be easily extrapolated from the expiration date which is clearly denoted on the license.

So it looks like I need to spend $20 ($40 for me and Mrs. C-Nut) to get some official document from the Mass DMV which will testify to the date my license was issued. I understand and respect the fact that States can, should, and do make their own laws....but still, this smells like a scam. It smells like a way for Massachusetts to hit people who leave town with a $20 tax.

Until I get our licenses changed over I'll be unable to not only buy a train parking pass for my wife, but I can't get a town pool pass, and I can't get the resident discounts at either my local course or the state golf courses like Bethpage and Montauk Downs. This type of bureaucratic BS can really drive you crazy if you think about it. So much for my sunrise serenity!

Where Are Your Kids?

I always thought those *kid leashes* were bad...

But how about putting RFID chips on them?

And I don't mean by their own parents, but rather by GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS!

Alright, now that I think about it, perhaps it's not such a bad, intrusive idea. There's worse stuff for sure.

Elevating My MIL, The Trader

She told me the other day that she bought "IHOP" (ticker DIN), the pancake place at $10 a share about a year ago when poop was being splattered by the fan...

AND that she just recently sold it for $46 a share!

She had two other decent flips in there, one was SLB and the other escapes me at the moment.

Homeschooling - No Voucher Required!

Self-professed libertarian John Stossel laments - School Vouchers Die Again.

Apparently the state (government) of Illinois just failed to pass some measure that would jump-start the government school voucher program.

Snnnnooooooooooooooozzzzzzze...

One of the small chinks in Stossel's libertarian armor is his ardent support for *vouchers*. He just doesn't quite understand this one. And I do kind of laugh at people who tell me they are libertarians but when I ask them if they homeschool they say *not THAT libertarian*.

Yeah, they're all for the free trading of widgets and marijuana but ignorant on how much the free trading of IDEAS is restricted by age-graded, curriculum-bound, and adulthood-deferring *schooling*. Hint - widgets come from ideas.

Some of these types say they are FOR private schools but the fact remains that most private schools today are, from an organizational standpoint, mere facsimiles of the flawed government school model.

There was one good comment on Stossel's blog by cb750:

Who are gov unions unionizing against? You unionize against an employer who you are adversarial towards. Since their bosses are also gov workers, who are they unionizing against? Its us, the taxpayer.

Indeed!

Now that I'm back in New York I think I'll try to get some tickets to attend one of Stossel's color TV shows.

ESL Homeschool Math

Recall my 5.52 year old homeschooled son formally started algebra several months ago. I paid up for the Life of Fred series whose unconventional approach taught about X and equations through *story*. Feeling the text a bit tedious - a bit tailored for math-haters - I went out and got a much ballyhooed Singapore Math book (pictured above). And my son is just about to finish what's advertised as the first half of *Grade 7* math. Since about November, I've really cooled it on the math curriculum - as we've been reading a whole lot more. Plus, I guess, seeing his meteoric progress, I guess I've become much less worried and frantic about taking the responsibility to educate my own. The idea that my children will EVER fall behind or underperform any of their peers has become provably laughable.

So how was this acclaimed book for the *leading math program in the world*?

Well, it was simply okay, IMO.

The cover says it was *Reviewed and Recommended by Teachers and Parents*.

On that I'm going to call BS. This English translation, sold at Barnes & Noble, was riddled with mistakes and what I'd call "illiteracies" - the kind you'd find at American Chinese restaurants.

Sure I could instantly spot the errors and make do....but it's inexcusable for a simple algebra book to be so poorly written. Heck, I, or anyone else competent in this subject, could have proof-read the thing in only a few hours.

One other beef I had with the text was the queer, forced multiculturalism. Check out the obscure names from some of their word problems:

Ping

Sisay

May

Dawit

Stoya

Rabi

Sachiko

Fala

Vanida

Taye

Sorin

Minya

Basir

Jolin

Amiri

Nari

Jong

Zahara

Zara

Fina

Lurene

Every time my 5.52 year old son came across one of these....I all but had to rename person for the sake of clarity!

On a related note, last week my embattled and aging 96.5 year old grandfather complained to me about the non-traditional names of some of his great-grandchildren. Not only are, most expectantly, his eyesight and hearing on the wane, but his memory as well. His complaints to me last week were adamant; he genuinely considers those weird baby names an act of inconsideration to him!

Getting back to Singapore Math...

I've already purchased the second half of the *Grade 7* material so we'll definitely make our way through that.

As for my general homeschooling plans, on the agenda at the moment are: buying my son his own computer, getting started on Spanish and perhaps computer programming, ramping up his blog output, and buying him a guitar (hopefully his nearby teenage cousin can help on that front).

And by July 1st, I have to register my son as *homeschooled* with the local school board. That should be real fun! How exactly am I not going to *not offend* one of these administrators - as the very essence of what I do is a complete rejection of them and their *system*?

Part of me would very much like to *get into it* with one of these knuckleheads...but it's far wiser to make nice. I just don't know. Perhaps I'll just delicately tell them we have to homeschool on account of my wife's job - that we have to be in Florida in the wintertime???

That Nasty Neighbor

Great article here.

Buried In Boxes

Shoot. What day is it today?

Saturday? The moving truck dumped all our stuff here, at my MIL's house, early on Wednesday.

But we've still got a ton of work to do in terms of unpacking and whatnot. You see, this is essentially a full house here we moved into. The MIL emptied out the three bedrooms (and a chunk of her basement and attic) but still a lot of our earthly possessions need to be *managed*.

The movers deposited most of the boxes in the attic and the garage and we are in the process of unpacking them and making decisions: store, replace what's already here, sell, donate, or trash. Even though the boxes were labeled somewhat, we still really have no idea what's in each one until we unwrap all the contents. Heck, they packed the pegs for my shelves in a box (instead of taping them to THE SHELVES!) and I had to waste a back-breaking hour in the steamy attic looking for them. Because until my shelves were up I couldn't unpack my books or pictures that adorn them - like a butterfly effect.

Anyways, we're over the hump work-wise now, I think. Although we still have a ton of little things to do: change license plates, drivers' licenses, get train parking stickers, join the local homeschool group, register my son with the local school administration (for homeschooling), get FiOS,....and defibrillate my MIL!

People say that moving is a PIA or that it's hard work.

Of course I disagree somewhat. Sure it's disruptive, but we would all benefit from more disruption in our soft daily existences. It's therapeutic to purge material belongings; and it's healthy to be forced to rebuild one's social network once in a while. This will be my sixth abode in the past nine years (Philly to Brooklyn to Charlotte to Newton(MA)to South Shore(MA)to Long Island). Almost every move was a non-mistake; each one took me to a superior place for that particular time in my life (though Newton, MA is firmly entrenched in last place!). Long Island is a place I've long loathed for its traffic, lack of golf, steep prices, shallow people, and what I perceived as a ludicrous go-go mentality. If one had told me, even a year ago, that I'd be voluntarily moving here AND that I'd be extremely excited about doing so I'd brand them a Moron.

But it's all true and genuine - my enthusiasm.

So where exactly did I move?

Well, I'm on the border of Port Washington and Manhasset. That's the north shore, just a couple towns removed from Queens. Bill O'Reilly lives right down the street (on the water, I believe) and old pal Barry Ritholtz lives just one town over!

Maybe Barry will hire me to tutor his litter!?