Brothers In Blog

The past 2 weeks have been a blur, which is unusual for me. Yes, I have busy and stressful moments, but the variety of issues taking place recently took me to uncharted waters.

For those of you that follow our blog, I discussed our family taking in a foreign exchange student for a month. Midway through her time with us, the agency that brought her and about 2 dozen other students to our city had a major personnel upheaval. The situation brought a lot of confusion and mistrust between host families, students, and the agency itself.

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To make the merger deal between XM and Sirius satellite radio more appealing to lawmakers, the two companies have created an a la carte subscription package. If the plan goes through, subscribes will be able to choose any 50 channels from XM or Sirius for $6.99 per month, or $14.99 per month to pick any 100 channels from both satellite providers. If the 50 or 100 channels package feels slightly limiting, subscribers can always add additional channels for 25 cents a piece. This progressive packaging model sounds like a dream come true for satellite radio subscribers, and a painful reminder to cable television subscribers: why can’t I get a la carte cable television?

Technorati Tags: cable television

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This past month, my wife and I did something completely different by opening up our home to a foreign exchange student. In an effort to protect her identity, I won’t tell you which country she came from or her name. During a church gathering, the program’s area representative made a plea to our congregation for Host Families. The placement term would only be 1-month, which is the time given for the incoming students to get familiar with life in the United States before moving on to their long-term placement for the upcoming school year.

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One of the greatest parts of blogging is being part of a virtual community. Regardless of who I am, where I am, or what I blog about, I’m part of the larger community that makes up the blog-o-sphere. Being part of that community allows me to take part in its larger initiatives, and one such initiative is the upcoming Blog Action Day.

On October 15, 2007 bloggers around the world will unity and put a single issue on everyone’s mind: the environment. To learn more about this community wide initiative, visit the Blog Action Day web site. Even if you don’t have a blog you can participate in other ways on October 15, 2007.

Technorati Tags: blog-o-sphere, Blog Action Day, the environment

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This past weekend I went and saw The Bourne Ultimatum, and like the previous installments I loved it. Unlike other action movies, you need to keep your brain turned on for the Bourne series or you’ll get lost in the story. Regretfully, the story does end with the rolling of the credits and the trademark Moby song and then I have to drag my carcass back into the real world.

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By the time you read this post I should be completely entrenched in one of two books I have set aside for my summer vacation reading list:

• The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture by John Battelle
• The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business, Media, and Technology Success of Our Time by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed

Technorati Tags: summer vacation reading

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By the time this post is published I will have returned home from a 3-night trip to Arlington, TX for software training. While just the thought of sitting in a lecture class for 3 straight days makes me drowsy, I still like getting out of the office.

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Everyone has something that consumes them to such a degree that they can waste hours and not even know it. For me, it’s YouTube.com. I love the seemingly endless piles of entertainment, and I hate it for the exact same reason. The kiss of death to my personal productivity is an email from a friend with a line such as, “Hey, you really have to check out this YouTube video.” If I follow the link, I’m almost certain to get sucked into the black hole called YouTube.

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When the affordable personal computer came on the scene, one of its many promises was to make redundant tasks easier. Then, with scanning and the low cost of data storage we could now eliminate the need to retain so much paper that were the source documents for those aforementioned tasks. In my opinion, and employment experience in IT, those promises have fallen short of a “WIN” for technology.

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