I’ve never liked Sprint – and here’s another reason. I use the Ovation U727 3g card for my laptop, and was just prompted to install an update. “No thanks” I responded. “Are you sure, we really think you’d like to install it Y/N”. “No thanks” I clicked again, slightly annoyed. “Well, sorry but we insist you download this, it is a small file and really important”. Ummm…. ok why did you ask my permission if in the end you weren’t going to require it? How hard is it to state up front “this is a key update that must be installed, is small and safe to download over 3g”. Bad engineer, bad!
Franny is now driving an FJ Cruiser (Mee-ma’s car as Isaiah says) and I am now driving the A4 Avant (Dee’da’s car). We love them both – the FJ is the best over-sand vehicle I’ve driven on Martha’s Vineyard / Cape Pogue, and awesome in snow. It also works great for 2 kids and is as safe as a tank (um, it kind of is one). Plus it’s got a funky look that we both loved. The Avant I recently extolled in another post.
Both of us gave up something precious for these cars. We gave up the cars we bought for ourselves from our first post-undergrad jobs, cars we loved and cherished for 7 years. Franny gave up her Jeep Wrangler, and I gave up my Mazda Protege. So thank you to these cars which kept us safe and happy for so many years. Both had > 150k miles when we traded them in and were still going strong. The Jeep brought us to Alaska and back, not to mention uncounted snowboarding trips. The Mazda took care of me and various members of my family as needed through the years. Pics below from our first dream cars:
I have always loved cars. From my first car (1984 Cutlas Supreme) to my first new car (2002 Mazda Protege Sport) to our recent Toyota FJ Cruiser – I just love a nice machine with attractive lines. For me, cars are more than people-moving-vehicles. I realize this isn’t the most logical (or cost effective) attitude, but there ya go.
I’ve had a few dream cars – and ever since driving Pat Shine’s brand new 2002 Audi A4 turbo an A4 has been one of them. Now that I’m a family man, that means A4 Avant (ie wagon). And I just picked one up (used, 40k miles) – beautiful looking black 2007 A4 Avant – 6 speed manual, turbo, quattro (ie all wheel drive). I love the red interior lights (reminds me of my fishing days – red lights maintain night vision) and the power / snappiness of the ride. Here’s the Car and Driver page on this car.
Close family friend, fellow rocket monkey James Yoneda recently launched SeeMonkey – his DIY Photobooth (or DIY Photo booth for Google’s benefit). So cool! I had the privilege of setting up the very first SeeMonkey photo booth at James & Lauren’s wedding – it was a fantastic idea, well executed, and completely loved by the guests. The resulting candids from their wedding are far better than any I’ve seen elsewhere.
And yes, I’m shilling hard for a good buddy and fellow member of Team Rocket Monkeys, but you can ask any guest at his wedding and they’ll validate that this is an awesome addition for any wedding or party .
Whenever I can, I read from my iPhone. Email, blogs / RSS, books – everything. (I am a Google Book Search PM, it’s kind of my job – but my interest in this pre-dated the job – check out my iPhone skin).
So it is annoying that I can’t read The Economist on my phone. No mobile version of their site, no iPhone app, it’s painful. I trust they will get there, but it’s annoying they haven’t yet.
In the past (college) I would have implemented this myself. Not anymore. This is an interesting observation. In college, I had mobile phone email by auto-forwarding emails from my personal server to SMS, and vice versa. Well before Gmail for mobile. Now, I trust that progress will solve many of these little annoyances, and there is enough competition for my attention / interest that if something isn’t perfectly meshing with my desires, I find something else that is. (Or, for The Economist, which deserves my attention, I put up with its annoyances).
Our family has settled in Scituate. We think we’ll be here for a good long while too. With Gabriel on the way, we were looking for houses in the Boston area, and ran into this cute little cottage over Thanksgiving (Abe’s Uncle lives 4 houses down the road). Franny and I drove back the next day to check it out, and we were sold. We pushed the sellers down an additional $85k from their ask, and we had a deal.
We bought the house without a realtor or lawyer – saving $$$ – go us. We can read our own contracts, and who is better aligned with our own interests than, um, us? (If you’re interested, there are great HBS cases on why realtors are completely unaligned with either the seller or buyer’s interests).
We were then the proud owners of a house on a cliff, overlooking the ocean, with a beach at the foot of the cliff for surfing and playing. This was literally the way Franny and I would dream about our perfect house – “wouldn’t it be nice to have a house on a cliff, with surfing waves, by the ocean?”
The house was being sold as a knockdown. We knew better – but it was a scary proposition. The house was built in 1920, fairly solid, but hadn’t been occupied in 8 years, wasn’t completely winterized, and had been destroyed by a bad 1970’s makeover.
Long story short – we are in heaven, we bought at the low point in the market, at a truly hardball price (paid for land only) and then “flipped” our own house with the help of tons of family and friends – thanks everyone! We now live in a beautiful, inspiring, livable, warm Cape Cod summer cottage, we play daily at the beach with our children, and we wake up to sunrises over the Atlantic. Incredible.
(Update: fixed themes and comments, all back to normal)
Annoying, I don’t have time in my life to play at sysadmin anymore, I’ve already learned this stuff. Why can’t wordpress, from the admin screen, just perform an update in the background? Totally stupid that I have to download a file, unzip it, upload it, and then it borks everything. Serious wtf moment.
I’ll fix it sometime soon, perhaps when I get around to delivering on those promised posts from earlier .
My wife and my buddy have been working on Monkey Analytics – a fantastic web startup, which they just launched. Go Team Rocket Monkey! Next step for them is sales and marketing, so I thought I’d share some link love.
It’s so exciting to see this – I remember ~1.5 years ago walking on the beach in Long Island when Franny first had this idea – to bring science / math computation such as Matlab to the cloud / web application space. She built out the concept into a business plan, and then started executing. My good friend James was pretty excited about this too, and had the flexibility (he is a freelancer) to pitch in as well.
Say hello to Gabriel Moyse Murray, our second baby boy! Vital stats: 8lbs 10oz, 22″, born 4/20 at 11:45pm. Franny did this au natural once again, which was impressive (and fast, again – only 10ish minutes of pushing – she was a rockstar!) He is huge like his older brother, but totally unique in his own way.
Gabriel means God is my strength, which plays nicely with Isaiah (God is my helper). We also like the similarity of the short name Gabe with Abe without actually having named a child after ourselves . We liked Gabriel, but didn’t think we’d get to use the name – we were pretty convinced this was a girl. Were we surprised when the new baby had boy doo-dads!
