Then I was laid off. At first, I have to admit, it was pretty cool. Got to sleep in, spend extra time with my wife and kids and as a bonus (though I think you could hardly call it a “bonus”), I got a check from the state every two weeks. It barely paid anything, but still, money is money. Then the novelty quickly wore off after a couple of weeks, when it became clear that this was not a short-term situation.

That crappy job market everybody was talking about? Yeah. It really does suck. The job hunt has been like the Bataan death march these many months. Resume and application after resume and application have been sent out. Out of almost a year’s worth of applying to jobs and I’ve only received one response. It was in a line of work other than what I want to do but have the skills for. The reason I didn’t get it was because someone had more on-the-job experience in IT than my decade of the same work experience. Okay, fair enough.

There’s something nobody ever tells you about in the Stay At Home Parent Crash Course: The loneliness.

The loneliness and solitude is almost crippling some days.

Sure, there are things to do – I get up, take Things 1 & 2 to school, then take the wife to work and then Thing 3 and I come home. Due to her toddler ways, her nap time is a necessity and is smack in the mid-to-late morning, so it really limits the things we can go do, to get out of the house and break up the monotony. Normally doing so will result in a slap-in-the-face reminder of why it’s a bad idea to try to mess with a toddler’s nap sleep schedule.

For a long time, I’ve felt trapped in my own life. Unemployment has contributed greatly to this. I make just enough on unemployment that it would be harmful to my finances (keep in mind we have very, very little debt, so we’re talking the basics here) to accept most of the jobs out there due to low pay, especially when you factor in the then-necessary day care expenses.

On the flip side, the jobs I have found are in other parts of the country, where I would not want to move my family. So the job hunt goes on.

And on.

And on.

I’ve tried going back to school in the Unemployment-approved hours of the day (read: Not during business hours), but I did not qualify for financial aid because I made too much money in 2010. It doesn’t seem to matter that the gravy train stopped in March of 2011. The fact that I made good money in the past kept me from being able to go back to school. Ironic, huh?

Don’t get me wrong, I have a blast hanging out and bonding with Thing 3. She’s such a fun little person that her smile will literally make my afternoon. I know when she’s older I’ll look back on this time with her without regrets. This point in our lives is but a fleeting moment. The unemployment, the small income, all of this is temporary. I know that. But knowing that only goes so far at times when you feel like all you do is go from home, to the kids’ school, to the wife’s office, to home again.

Even my weekly guy’s night is in my living room. My “night out” is sitting on my couch with friends, pretending not to hear the kids being snotty and rude to their mother in the next room. It’s always fun but after a while I really do start to feel trapped in my own life.

Your sense of time also tends to get hazy and you forget that other people have to get up early to work the next day. So months of random attempts to get some friends together to go get a beer have always fallen on their face. You can’t blame them, of course. That’s life.

But the loneliness persists. It’s borderline debilitating some days. Thank god for the internet, though. Without it, I’m sure I would have almost no link to the outside world.

This isn’t a cry for help, but I figured someone should address the elephant in the room that most of us stay at home parents know is there, but feel slightly embarrassed to talk about. After all, we don’t have a 9-to-5, so how hard could our life possibly be, right?

This week’s edition of Rolling Stone has a great interview with Julian Assange, if anyone’s interested in reading it. I particularly liked this bit:

When people talk about your childhood, the two main words used to describe you are “nomadic” and “hacker.” You first got into trouble when you were 17 for hacking into Pentagon networks, as well as several Australian sites. It seems in some ways that you’ve been engaged in a lifelong campaign against authority.

I haven’t had a lifelong campaign against authority. Legitimate authority is important. All human systems require authority, but authority must be granted as a result of the informed consent of the governed. Presently, the consent, if there is any, is not informed, and therefore it’s not legitimate. To communicate knowledge, we must protect people’s privacy – and so I have been, for 20 years, developing systems and policy and ideals to protect people’s rights to communicate privately without government interference, without government surveillance. The right to communicate without government surveillance is important, because surveillance is another form of censorship. When people are frightened that what they are saying may be overheard by a power that has the ability to lock people up, then they adjust what they’re saying. They start to self-censor.

Click here to read the full interview.

INTERNETS, 18th of January 2012.
PRESS RELEASE, FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.

Over a century ago Thomas Edison got the patent for a device which would “do for the eye what the phonograph does for
the ear”. He called it the Kinetoscope. He was not only amongst the first to record video, he was also the first person to own the copyright to a motion picture.

Because of Edisons patents for the motion pictures it was close to financially impossible to create motion pictures
in the North american east coast. The movie studios therefor relocated to California, and founded what we today call
Hollywood. The reason was mostly because there was no patent. There was also no copyright to speak of, so the studios could copy old stories and make movies out of them – like Fantasia, one of Disneys biggest hits ever.

So, the whole basis of this industry, that today is screaming about losing control over immaterial rights, is that they circumvented immaterial rights. They copied (or put in their terminology: “stole”) other peoples creative works,
without paying for it. They did it in order to make a huge profit. Today, they’re all successful and most of the
studios are on the Fortune 500 list of the richest companies in the world. Congratulations – it’s all based on being
able to re-use other peoples creative works. And today they hold the rights to what other people create.
If you want to get something released, you have to abide to their rules. The ones they created after circumventing
other peoples rules.

The reason they are always complainting about “pirates” today is simple. We’ve done what they did. We circumvented the
rules they created and created our own. We crushed their monopoly by giving people something more efficient. We allow
people to have direct communication between eachother, circumventing the profitable middle man, that in some cases take over 107% of the profits (yes, you pay to work for them). It’s all based on the fact that we’re competition.
We’ve proven that their existance in their current form is no longer needed. We’re just better than they are.

And the funny part is that our rules are very similar to the founding ideas of the USA. We fight for freedom of speech. We see all people as equal. We believe that the public, not the elite, should rule the nation. We believe that laws should be created to serve the public, not the rich corporations.

The Pirate Bay is truly an international community. The team is spread all over the globe – but we’ve stayed out of the USA. We have Swedish roots and a swedish friend said this: The word SOPA means “trash” in Swedish. The word PIPA means “a pipe” in Swedish. This is of course not a coincidence. They want to make the internet inte a one way pipe, with them at the top, shoving trash through the pipe down to the rest of us obedient consumers. The public opinion on this matter is clear. Ask anyone on the street and you’ll learn that noone wants to be fed with trash. Why the US government want the american people to be fed with trash is beyond our imagination but we hope that you will stop them, before we all drown.

SOPA can’t do anything to stop TPB. Worst case we’ll change top level domain from our current .org to one of the
hundreds of other names that we already also use. In countries where TPB is blocked, China and Saudi Arabia springs to
mind, they block hundreds of our domain names. And did it work? Not really. To fix the “problem of piracy” one should go to the source of the problem. The entertainment industry say they’re creating “culture” but what they really do is stuff like selling overpriced plushy dolls and making 11 year old girls become anorexic. Either from working in the factories that creates the dolls for basically no salary or by watching movies and tv shows that make them think that they’re fat.

In the great Sid Meiers computer game Civilization you can build Wonders of the world. One of the most powerful ones
is Hollywood. With that you control all culture and media in the world. Rupert Murdoch was happy with MySpace and had
no problems with their own piracy until it failed. Now he’s complainting that Google is the biggest source of piracy
in the world – because he’s jealous. He wants to retain his mind control over people and clearly you’d get a more
honest view of things on Wikipedia and Google than on Fox News.

Some facts (years, dates) are probably wrong in this press release. The reason is that we can’t access this information when Wikipedia is blacked out. Because of pressure from our failing competitors. We’re sorry for that.

THE PIRATE BAY, (K)2012

Source: The Pirate Bay

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine

Space Marine is a part of the Warhammer 40,000 gaming franchise and, while this is really my first delve into that setting, the folks at Relic did an amazing job. The entire tone and feel of the game was superbly brought from books and tabletop miniature wargaming to the PS3. It lives up to it’s Mature game rating in every sense, due solely to a smidgeon of profanity but almost entirely due to the copious amounts of, literally, explosive blood and gore violence.

I hemmed and hawed about getting this game and it wasn’t until I watched a video review of the demo of Space Marine on YouTube (video is below). The video was made by “TotalBiscuit” as part of The Cynical Brit series. After watching the video review, I was sold on it. Luckily enough for me, Best Buy happened to have this normally $59 game on sale for $29, plus an additional $20 discount for buying one of their $4.99 gaming magazines. Well worth every single penny!

Assassin’s Creed: Revelations

The very first game I bought to play on my PS3 was Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. If you’ve ever played any of the Prince of Persia games on Game Cube back in the day, this is very similar. Lots of crazy stunts, climbing, acrobatics and cool tricksy assassinations. I got a large return on my investment, in terms of game play time with AC:B, so I was eager to play the new release.

The thing I like about the Assassin’s Creed games is that you’re free to roam around and pursue your own goals, without being shoe-horned into following the storyline and missing exploring the world the gamers created.

Battlefield 3

This game is one that you’re almost expected to own, for fear of having the Gaming Police kick in your door and take away your video game console. The Campaign mode of Battlefield 3 was, for me, very challenging. I’m no novice to first person shooters and normally breeze through a FPS within hours. This game, however, took a number of days on Normal difficulty mode. There was more than one mission where I put the controller aside and played a different game for a day or two, because of the frustration of “HOW THE HELL DID THEY HIT ME THAT TIME?!” Lots of gamer rage.

In one mission, you fly around in an F-18 fighter and blow up all manner of people, vehicles and buildings. Even before the jet fighter takes off from the aircraft carrier, the chills were shooting up and down my spine. The gradually ramped up sound effects and feel was great. That’s not even getting into the actual in-air dogfights.

My only real complaint is that, while driving around tanks, they tended to succumb to the dumb rule of video games: Big vehicles get stuck on dumb things. I had to restart a tank mission more than once because my tank got stuck on top of a barrel drum or wrecked car.

I suck in multiplayer mode and our military should be VERY thankful I’m not a part of it, what with my 0.255 Kill-to-Death ratio. It’s fun, but a large part of what I’m going through is having to earn my stripes with un-modded guns and resources as I start at the bottom of the totem pole and work my way up. Either way, I enjoy games like this one where I can go back and still have fun with the game at my own leisure.

World of Warcraft

While this game certainly isn’t new, or even a game I just started playing, I’ve recently been able to hit max level (85) on a new-ish character and I’ve been able get my virtual greedy hands on some respectable gear. Which means, I’m able to take part in raids and more end-game content that I previously was not able to do until all of the normal-to-hard-core players were too sick of running over and over. The game is fun again.

Disclaimer: Some links are affiliate links because, well, hell, I’m out of work and have bills to pay. Also, because of Amazon’s amazingly advanced link-building interface, there is stupid padding issues. Please excuse the ugly.

In the January 19, 2012, issue of Rolling Stone, there was a small sidebar article about how artists, specifically The Black Keys and Coldplay, have chosen not to have their latest albums available to stream on Spotify. The article (“The Black Keys, Coldplay Say No (For Now) to Spotify“; page 17) quotes The Black Keys guitarist, Dan Auerbach, as saying, “How is that good for musicians?” and, “We didn’t want it to impact our record sales.”

I’ve only recently even discovered The Black Keys. Want to know how I even tried giving them a listening to? On Spotify.

That’s right. Thanks to Spotify, the very service they’re proactively keeping their new music from is the very service that helped me come to love their music. It’s because of Spotify, that in the past three weeks alone, my household has purchased their two most recent releases, “El Camino”and“Brothers,”with a very good chance of me picking up any of their other five albums.

I’ve said it many times before, but musicians need to know that streaming music services isn’t what’s killing their record sales. Crappy music is killing their record sales (That’s right, I’m talking to you, too, AFI). I stream music all the time and when I find a song or CD that doesn’t totally suck, I’ll happily go and give them my money.

So please, musicians, focus on putting out awesome music and let us, your fans, worry about giving you our money. If you make it too difficult for current and potential fans to listen to your music, then we’ll just keep our money and go our separate ways.

I worked at the Press Democrat from 2004 through 2006 in the Online News department. I was their Overnight Online Producer who showed up at 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning and got the news on the various websites. After leaving the newspaper, I noticed a big decline in the quality of the web-based news.

Typographical errors went live.

Corrupted articles from the feeds went live without being fixed.

Photos had mismatched captions.

All sorts of things like this led to me no longer visiting the Press Democrat’s web site. I don’t subscribe to the physical paper because, like more and more Americans these days, I don’t have time to sit down and read the newspaper. What I do want, however, is a quality, annoyance-free local news presence online, which I could read on lunch breaks at work. Or on my phone in the checkout line. On my laptop at the coffee shop. Or in the car on my Kindle while waiting for the kids. All of this, though, comes back to a consistency problem.

Unfortunately, I’m not the only one who noticed this. Many people I know quickly became disenfranchised with the Press Democrat’s web presence due to these problems. While these are all relatively small issues, they all gradually chipped away at the reputation of the newspaper. Death by a thousand papercuts, as the saying goes.

I know many people who work for the newspaper still and they do their jobs spectacularly. They’re talented and passionate about their community and I wish them the best of luck with this transition. What most people don’t realize is the transition that takes place in getting a news article from the reporter to the printing press is much different then the process for getting that same article from the reporter to the screen. During that process, as was a big part of my job, someone needs to be on hand to correct import errors and formatting quirks as the articles are about to go live. A majority of the time, the errors appearing online are not caused by those writing the original articles at their desks in the newsroom.

Online News is sort of the Lone Ranger in most newspapers. It’s viewed by many seasoned journalists as a necessary evil and like that pain in the ass relative you have to deal with from time-to-time. When I worked at the newspaper, I was told on several occasions that, if given the choice, many of the reporters would still be doing their reporting with “pencil and paper” instead of with computers. Because of this, I theorize, many Online News departments get minimal funding and minimal support to do the bare minimum that’s “required”.

I love my local newspaper, but all you have to do is look at their “Demo the eEdition” page to see how vital calls to action are implemented poorly. It’s a mess and, as a Kindle owner, doesn’t give me any reason to subscribe to the eEdition of the Press Democrat for $10.99 per month.

Newspapers need a dedicated team of web content producers, online editors and UI people to adapt the news for digital readers. Until that happens, there will continue to be a shift away from establishments who do not make that a priority and toward those that do.

Press Democrat columnist, Chris Coursey, put it best in his recent post when he said, “It was quite telling and not a little ironic that news of the pending sale of The Press Democrat this week broke not in any newspaper, but on the Internet.”

My hope is that, with this sale, Hallifax Media Holdings LLC will invest in these 16 newspapers and give them the tools and resources they need to become competitive once again and retake their dwindling audience. If they can do that, then I have a strong feeling they’ll see a sharp increase in subscribers and, in turn, advertising revenue.

Disclosure: I am a former Press Democrat employee. I have not be compensated or solicited to write this post. These views are my own and are not necessarily endorsed by any current Press Democrat employee.

Note: I found this image online. Credit goes to whomever created it originally.

One of the things I do that drives people around me nuts (one of many, I know) is downplaying my birthday or, really, any gift-giving event. I think it comes across as some sort of ploy to make me seem like I really don’t like receiving gifts. On the contrary, I LOVE getting presents. Who doesn’t?

Every year, without thinking about it, I mention to Keli, “Don’t worry about getting me anything for my birthday, let’s put that money towards the kids’ Christmas presents.” And every year, without fail, she promptly replies with, “Oh Jesus, Dan. Shut the hell up already!”

My best friend growing up was a kid named Ryan. We were best friends from kindergarten, with our hippie, knee-high-rainbow-sock-and-Birkenstock-wearing teacher, Mrs. Koshari, all the way through high school graduation. Ryan was and still is a Jehova’s Witness. For those of you who don’t know, Jehova’s Witnesses don’t celebrate holidays or birthdays. This made things interesting growing up because our families were polar opposites.

We were and are total junkies for damn near anything Christmas-y. They couldn’t be.

When we would go the day after Thanksgiving to chop down our Christmas tree, bring it home, crank up the Christmas music and decorate. They couldn’t do that to their own home.

My mom would spend hours every year making pounds of holiday sweets. Fudge. Snowball cookies. Little cookies shaped like Christmas trees, little scotty dogs and pinwheels. They couldn’t come over and have fun helping.

But we found ways, every year, to include them. Over the years we were able to meet half-way on things. We would take them a plate of cookies, but it wouldn’t be on a holiday plate and the cookies would be normal ones, devoid of a holiday theme. But, as it would happen, we always did it at Christmas time.

When it came to birthdays, I didn’t really expect much. My birthday falls on December 10th and, while I love it due to it’s closeness to Christmas, it sucked because more often than not people like my Dad would get a wicked cold and be stuck in bed. There was always a cake and some presents and it was all really, really fun every year, but there’s something to be said about having your birthday approach and knowing that your best friend can’t be there. It wasn’t just my birthday that I missed his participation with, I wasn’t allowed to help him celebrate his own birthday.

As a kid, that’s just bonkers! I think it was in grade school I decided to spent my allowance on a little orange and blue Nerf football to give him as a present. Ryan’s birthday is on November 27th so the day after I started giving him a gift as a “friendship present” and not as a birthday gift. His parents left the rules slip a bit on that one, too.

I can count on one finger how many birthday parties I had growing up. It was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-themed party in second grade. It really wasn’t even that I wanted a party, to be honest. Looking back, it just seems like, for many, many reasons, birthdays just weren’t this big production a lot of kids grew up with. Gift receiving wasn’t an expectation, necessarily, it was an appreciated luxury. We knew our family wasn’t rolling in dough, so my sister and I wholey appreciated every thing that was given, knowing how our parents worked overtime hours and had to sacrifice to give it to us.

I’m not saying all of this for sympathy or as a bid for gifts. It’s just been something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, with my birthday approaching. And not just any birthday, but my 30th birthday. I know 30 isn’t old (unless you ask my kids) but it feels old. I’m finding more gray/white hairs every day. I’ve accomplished a lot, but a part of me still feels like I should have accomplished so much more.

So, with my current role as a Stay At Home Trophy Husband & Dad, I’m looking forward to the holidays to re-energize my spirit a bit. This year, as I mentioned in an earlier post, my parents will be back in California. I know I’m getting older when I want to spend my birthday having a few beers with my dad and not going out to do a pub crawl.

With people like my wife and Logtar in my life, they take a twisted kind of pride in pushing me past my comfort zone, when it comes to gift giving. I’d be mad at them but, really, who could be mad at someone who tries to make sure you don’t sabotage your own personal holidays?

A number of years back, my parents lost their jobs within a week and a half of each other and moved to Boise, Idaho. Since then, it’s been a struggle to save money to make the long ass drive there and back, while juggling work schedules, holidays and extended family.

For a number of reasons, Idaho saw fit to kick the crap out of them for these six long years. Everything they attempted to do, to put down roots there, blew up in their faces in spectacularly unimaginable ways. You name it, buying a car, expanding their back patio, trying to start a businesses, getting fair and long-term employment, etc., all became monstrous problems in Idaho for them.

After my father was laid off from his job in Idaho (due to “not progressing” as fast as they wanted, while he was given zero training), my parents decided to put their house on the market and move back to California. This was both to be closer to their families, but also becasue my grandma (my mom’s mom) isn’t doing as well as she once was. My parents will be moving in with my grandma and helping to take care of her.

As the market goes in the US, things can rot while waiting for a buyer. My parents, however, got a buyer for their house within three weeks of putting it on the market and we received a text message and call from them two days ago saying, “We have a buyer and we will be back in CA in time for Christmas!” Anybody who knows my family or myself, knows we’re total junkies for Christmas, so the timing itself couldn’t have been more perfect.

A lot has happened while they were away. In many ways, the person I was then is remarkably different than the person I am today. While I’m sorry for them that things in Idaho didn’t pan out the way they had hoped, I can’t wait to be able to hang out with my parents again pretty much whenever we want, and not just when we can make it work.

As it looks right now, I may be able to enjoy a beer or two with my dad on my birthday, which is something I haven’t been able to do for 10 years.

tl;dr version: My parents are coming back to CA in about 30 days. Peace out, Idaho!

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