As I’ve been thinking about Uncle Walt this week, something occurred to me: It’s not a stretch of the imagination to say that Uncle Walt is a big reason why I do what I do for a living right now.

See, when I was a kid, we would go over to Walt and Sue’s house fairly often. Many kids may not have liked visiting their aunt and uncle, but their aunt and uncle probably didn’t have a computer at the time. Uncle Walt had a computer and I loved going to their house to play with it.

Every time we’d visit, while the adults were off in the living room or dining room or wherever they were gathered, I’d be in front of the computer playing for hours on end. Nonstop. You couldn’t get me away from the thing.

I’m not sure what computer it was — might’ve been the Apple II, might’ve been an IBM. I remember it had the green screen with green text, which makes me think it was probably an IBM.

But anyway, there was this geography game that I played constantly. Don’t recall the name, but the computer would spit out the name of a country, and you had to come up with another country whose first letter was the same as the last letter of whatever the computer showed. So, if the computer said “Denmark,” I had to come up with a country that began with “k.” I would type in “Kenya,” and then the computer had to come up with a country that began with “a.” And the game would continue until someone was unable to add another country.

Playing that game taught me one fact that’s stuck with me to this day: There are a zillion countries whose names begin and end with the letter “a.” Seriously, like a zillion. Like in the example above, after I type “Kenya,” the computer would respond with “Austria” or something else, and the game always ended in a race to see who could name the most countries that began with “a,” and most of them also end with “a” — Australia, Aruba, Angola, Argentina, Albania, Andorra, and so on and so forth.

Visiting Uncle Walt’s house made me love computers.

I got to continue using them in the late 80s when I was at Pepperdine – every dorm had a community Macintosh, and we also had a nice computer lab filled with Macs. Even in my early media career, I loved and used computers. Heck, in 1995 when almost no one had Internet access, I ran a segment every Monday night on the KEPR 11 pm news called “Nothing But ‘Net” in which I showed off some new sports website I’d found. (I can only imagine what viewers thought of that at the time. Must’ve been weird.)

And now, since 1997, I’ve made my career around computers. Couldn’t imagine life without them.

And it really all started with that old green-screen computer that Uncle Walt and Aunt Sue owned, and kindly let me use every time we visited. Thank you both.

Walt … I miss you. Thanks for introducing computers to me. It’s changed my life.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog.

R.I.P. Walter Keiss (Uncle Walt)

It’s mostly a photo book, interspersed with about 15 essays from former Wooden players and coaches. But the scan below, and another one I’ll post later, is from the inside cover.

This is the list of basketball practice rules that Wooden gave to each of his players. But it speaks to so much more than basketball. After I read it, I thought it should be given out to every child entering the sixth grade. And to every employee at any company that wants to be great. Read it and maybe you’ll agree.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog.

There are No Words to Describe How Much I Love This

This is what Sean gets to cut starting in a month or two. The lot is about the same size as our current house, but the new house has such a bigger footprint that cutting the lawn should take a lot less time. He’s happy about that!

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog.

Our New House Now Has a Lawn

October 23, 1995 is the day I put my first website online — “Matt’s Mostly U2 Music Page.” It was a site dedicated to U2 and a couple other bands I liked at the time, but it was about 75% U2 content. The header image looked like this:

But in another sense, @U2 was kinda born 15 years ago today: February 12, 1997.

That’s the day that U2 announced its PopMart Tour from inside a K-Mart store in Manhattan. And it’s the day that the 16-month-old website really became a legitimate and popular online source of U2 news. On that day, I knew that it was going to be something bigger than a normal hobby site.

Before the Announcement

In the days and weeks leading up to the tour announcement, there was incredible buzz on Wire — the major U2 listserv of the day — and on other U2 communities like CompuServe and AOL. Fans were looking for any bits of news they could find, which mostly amounted to rumors.

I recall posting articles and bits of information on the website, and then sending out the link to the various online communities … and the hit counter always went up when I did that. (Yes, I said “hit counter.”) Now, I’d been posting U2 news on the site since the beginning, but with the tour approaching, any little nugget of info became breaking news and drew a lot of traffic.

So, as the 12th approached — and it had been known in advance that U2 would be announcing the tour on this date — I had to think about how @U2 was going to cover the news.

I was the Sports Director for KEPR-TV at the time — the local CBS affiliate here in Tri-Cities, WA. I did the sports weeknights at 6 pm and 11 pm and was mostly a one-man department. That meant getting sick or taking a day off was a real pain in the arse for the station. They’d have to pull someone else away from their regular tasks to do sports.

Nonetheless, as the 12th approached, I decided that I was going to play hooky. I didn’t think I had much choice, actually. There were a lot of U2 fans online that would be visiting the website looking for news, and I felt more obligated to report that than to report the day’s local sports.

To this day, it still amazes me that I decided to call in sick from my job to update a website with U2 news. Did I really do that? Yep.

The Announcement

I called in sick that morning, and then turned on my TV and fired up the computer. I think it was an Apple Performa 450 at the time, and I might’ve had a 14.4 or 33.6 modem. Good times.

My memory is shaky, but I vaguely recall that the announcement would begin at Noon at K-Mart — or 9 am my time. MTV wasn’t airing it live, as I recall, but they’d certainly report it pretty quickly in those twice-an-hour MTV News updates hosted by Kurt Loder (or whomever it was then).

But there was a huge problem: we didn’t get MTV live in those days. It was delayed; even if MTV News had the story by 12:30 pm ET, I wouldn’t see it until 12:30 pm PT … three hours after the fact!

So, TV was pretty useless. But there were numerous music news websites at the time — All Star Magazine, Addicted To Noise, JAM Showbiz (which still exists) and others. MTV even had a website then, as did a few major news publications. Google didn’t exist yet, but there was Yahoo and a few other search engines that I’m sure I used … probably Excite, Northern Light and others.

I kept an eye on all the music news sites I could find, and all the U2 forums/communities/mailing lists. I must’ve hit refresh 200 times that morning. I don’t know where I first found the tour news, but I remember posting a couple shorter bits of info and then …. BAM! …. MTV News had posted the entire list of dates and details online. They also posted some video from the news conference, and I had software on my Performa that made it easy to do screenshots, so I took a few of those. I posted the news, emailed the mailing lists, notified the online communities and the rest is history, as the saying goes.

You can still, to this day, see the original MTV News story (and my screenshot) on @U2. (Yes, an early form of content scraping! Remind me later to write a post on that topic.)

The Aftermath

Even though I’d been posting news for ages, getting the full list of PopMart tour dates online really established @U2 as one of … maybe THE … go-to sites for U2 news online. I recall the hit counter was off the charts that day, and for several days afterward. And it never dropped back down.

A couple weeks later, Triple J radio in Australia had me on-air to talk about the tour news. And then they did it again in April; they called after the first concert in Las Vegas so that I could give a live report/review to their listeners. (They had me on again in early 1998, right before the tour arrived in Australia.)

Later in 1997, Ireland’s Hot Press magazine mentioned @U2 in one article and also published a guest article that I sent in to preview the PopMart shows coming to Dublin. (You can read that on @U2, too.)

And, maybe the most important result of all was that, as more people visited the site and sent in news to share with other fans, I was able to start growing out a staff. For a while, it was just me and one other person posting news. Then it was 4-5 people. Then 8-10. Then a couple dozen. And today, we have about 40 people involved in one way or another. All volunteers, me included. It blows my mind.

So, yeah. February 12th will probably always have a special place in my heart and mind. It’s not @U2′s formal birthday, but it’s the day that it started to become what it is today. Thanks, PopMart.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog.

The Birth of @U2 – 15 Years Ago Today

And I think we’re both (Cari and me) exhausted!

Everything went fine this past week with the current house. We had an inspection last Saturday that raised some concerns about the heat pump. So the buyer asked for a follow-up inspection by one of the well-known local HVAC companies. They came on Thursday and gave the heat pump a clean bill of health — everything’s working as it should.

So now we’ll start to think about packing up and getting things in boxes so that the move goes as quickly as possible. I’m going to buy a couple dollies and pads to make the move easier, and we already have a bunch of friends lined up to help. Whew.

Meanwhile, the new house continues to look great and move along at a great pace. The builder told us last weekend that they’re ahead of schedule and should be finished around February 25th. Woo-hoooo! But we won’t be able to move in until after the closings on March 5th. That’s okay, because it may mean that we can use that window to have a nice, custom floor put down in the garage. Still working on that possibility.

We had one minor hiccup this past week with the new house, when Cari and I noticed that the fence was about to be installed high enough that it would’ve blocked the amazing view out the backyard. You can kinda see the poles in this photo:

But we worked with the builder, and they worked with us, and it’s all squared away now. The back yard is going to be graded so that it slopes down away from the house. The six-foot fence will be big enough to keep Sparky inside, but low enough that we’ll still enjoy the amazing view from this lot. Can’t wait….

We’re super excited about the move. Well, not excited about the actual physical process of packing and moving, but about getting settled into a beautiful new home that’s still near our kids’ schools, in a great neighborhood, and has an amazing view of the western skyline. We’re feeling very blessed right now.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog.

It Is Done…

Unfortunately, I’m not much of a chef. The most amazing thing about these shows is how the chefs always know exactly what foods and spices and juices will go well together to make something delicious.

I want to know how that works.

For the past month or so, I’ve been telling the family that, one of these nights, I’m gonna just start throwing random things into a frying pan and see what it tastes like. When I was doing the grocery shopping a couple weekends ago, it took forever because I walked up and down the aisles slowly trying to imagine new dishes that I could try to cook.

I finally gave it a try last night. It was delicious! After I finished making and eating this food, I gave it a name: Honey-Glazed Apples. Recipe is below, but first a photo from the middle of my first Iron Chef moment.

Oh man, it was so good. Here’s what I did….

Ingredients

1 Red Delicious apple, cut into thin slices
Honey
Vanilla extract
Sugar

What I Did

1. First, I sliced the apple into fairly thin pieces, sort of like large potato chips. My slicing wasn’t even, though, and as it turns out, the thicker slices seemed a little better to me than the thinner ones.

2. I placed four apple slices in a small frying pan and poured honey over them — not completely covering them, but enough honey so that they’d cook in the liquid. It was about the same amount of syrup that I’d pour on pancakes.

3. I let them cook for about 5-6 minutes on medium heat, until they started getting soft.

4. I added vanilla. Probably used too much, but it sure tasted good.

(The photo above was taken at this point.)

5. Continued cooking until the apples started to brown and the honey/vanilla was getting soaked up.

6. At the last minute, I sprinkled a dash of sugar on each apple slice, turned them over once more and then they were done!

I had to let the apples cool off a bit, but they were really great — super sweet (obviously!) and a good, sticky texture. As they continued to cool off, they started to look a lot like potato chips. I ate two slices plain, and then put the other two on top of vanilla ice cream, which was incredibly great.

All in all, my first Iron Chef moment was a big success and I’ll definitely do this again. Cari suggested I use cinnamon or maybe brown sugar next time, both of which sound good.

Take that, Bobby Flay!

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog.

My First Iron Chef Moment: Honey-Glazed Apple Slices

Sometimes when he’s outside, though, he’ll come sit right in front of the sliding glass door that leads to our backyard. He’ll just sit there, looking inside toward us. Like in this photo to the right.

And he’ll shiver.

It’s simultaneously the saddest, funniest and most pathetic thing you’ve ever seen.

Sometimes, the shivering is justified. It might be 40 degrees, but if the wind is kicking up (as it often does here), it feels a lot colder. Or it might be that we didn’t notice the drop in temperature in the late afternoon, and he’s really getting cold.

But other times, there’s no reason at all for him to be shivering. Sunny, 45-50 degrees, and he just sits there shivering because he wants to come in.

That was the case yesterday morning. It wasn’t all that cold, and he was outside. I noticed him shivering and decided to do a little experiment.

I tested him. I walked into the family room where he could see me, and he was shivering like he wanted to come in. Then I walked out of the family room, out of sight — he couldn’t see me at all. But, I peeked around the wall and could see him plain as day.

As soon as I left his sight, he stopped shivering! He just sat there, looking around, looking at the birds in the trees, etc. I spied on him for 30 seconds – nothing. No shivering at all.

Then I walked back into the family room where he could see me, and as soon as he did … he started shivering again.

My dog is a total actor!!!

He was trying to play me like a fiddle. “Oh, there’s my master. I’ll pretend to be cold now so he can bring me inside.”

It didn’t work. But I have to confess … I admire his acting skills and the fact that he’s smart enough to try acting his way back inside. Well played, Sparky. Well played.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog.

My Dog Deserves an Academy Award

We had some people come to look at our current house on Friday, so we used that as an excuse to go see how the new place is coming along. We were poking around and looking through windows late in the afternoon, when the one worker still inside saw us and invited us in. Sweet!

Turns out that all of the interior walls and ceilings are now in and he was doing … something. (I have no clue, but you can see him below.) And it probably goes without saying by now, it looks amazing! Can’t believe how quickly it’s all coming together.

On the exterior, the only thing left is to paint. The garage doors are installed and even the faux rock on the front is in. Here’s a look at that.

We got to walk around the whole house and see all the rooms. Here’s an interior shot. I’m standing at what will be our dining room table and looking across into the “great room” where we’ll have the TV mounted, etc. They still have a bunch of stuff to install there — shelves on both sides of the TV, a window bench along the right side windows, etc.

And then I’ll share one more photo from outside again. It’s basically the same shot as above, but I tilted the camera a bit. That makes the house darker, but the point was to get a sense of how things will look with the setting sun in the background. After all, the amazing view/sunsets is one of the main reasons we chose this spot.

So that’s where things stand. Since the house is now locked, I don’t know when we’ll be able to go inside again. And there’s probably not much point taking more exterior photos until it’s painted and/or the landscaping is done. And we have no idea when those things are scheduled.

Should be a little more than a month until we’re in … as long as our existing house sells soon. Please cross your fingers/say some prayers for us. Several showings this weekend and everyone likes the place, but no offers yet.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog.

Last Tour Inside the New House?

56% of registered voters said they’d vote yes if their ballot included the option to replace every member of Congress. on.wsj.com/AmP6nU

— Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) January 26, 2012

Me, too. Just as I said almost two years ago:

If it were up to me, we’d toss out the president and every member of both houses of Congress. Tomorrow. And we’d start from scratch with people who want to lead a country, not people who want to win an election.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog.

I Would Totally Vote For This, Too

Cari watched it, too, and we’d occasionally talk about how cool it would be to get on the show, which room we’d want our neighbor to tackle, which neighbor we’d choose, etc.

And in the years since then, we’ve watch all kinds of similar shows — HGTV, TLC, DIY Network, Food Network and others. And the same subject comes up: Wouldn’t it be cool to get on one of those shows and get a new kitchen, or a new mancave, or whatever the show’s theme is/was? Yes, it would be cool.

But those shows never, ever had any people on from Washington state. And they never visit Washington state.

Fast forward to today, when we still watch some of those shows and still think it would be cool to be on … like, wouldn’t it be fun if Cari somehow was chosen to be on House Hunters??

Every day, I get email alerts with PR opportunities from HARO and several of the recent newsletters have been advertising opportunities to appear on upcoming cable TV shows — mostly from TLC. And every time, I read the show description and then the requirements. And every time, the requirements are this:

Every show! You have to live within an hour of New York City??!! Does TLC know that it’s a big country out here? So frustrating.

Hey New York … and hey, TLC:

Thhhppfffftttttt!

(Thanks. I feel better already.)

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog.

Thhhppfftttt to New York City (and TLC, too)