First of all: we’re doing really well. We had some difficult moments throughout 2017, but we have a massive and strong support network, and we’ll be fine. In previous years, thanks to un/underemployment, we asked for donations to our son’s school fund. But we don’t need that anymore. If you’re the donating type, we’d instead ask you to consider donating money directly to his school. They use it wisely, and offer tuition assistance for families in need.

You can also purchase from Amazon this holiday season through the school’s Amazon Smile storefront or at Barnes & Noble (online or in person) with the bookfair ID 12258281. Do your Christmas shopping as normal, and the school will get a percentage for referring you. It helps out a lot.

That being said, everyone in our family maintains some wishlists on various sites where we keep track of the material goods that catch our fancy throughout the year.

1. My Amazon wishlist is almost always up-to-date with games, books, and various gadgets, and I’m pretty active on Pinterest. The main pinboard you’re looking for is this one right here.
2. Natania updated her Amazon wishlist, too. She has lots of stuff on Pinterest: jewelry ideas, clothing, quotes, and general gift ideas
3. Liam has an Amazon wishlist, too. He loves cars, but has plenty of Matchbox/Hot Wheels. So maybe don’t get him any more of those?
4. Elodie has an Amazon wishlist, too, and Natania has a pinboard with some cute ideas. For what it’s worth, she’s still into princesses and superheroes (Supergirl, Batgirl, and Wonder Woman, mostly).

And please, please, please! Don’t be afraid to surprise us! We love gifts from the heart, or cards, or notes, or emails, or you stopping by during the holidays for tea and coffee and a few moments of friendship!

creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-SA ) image shared by knight0323

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But after searching on YouTube for tips on configuring it and finding hardly any sub-10 minute videos, I’ve realized that Midori dorks could probably talk about their Midoris all day long if given the chance. There’s a “Midori 101” video THAT IS OVER FIFTY MINUTES LONG.

PEOPLE! It is a notebook. Show me how the elastics work, what paper refill options exist, and then go write stuff in your notebook. Stop talking about it.

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It’s convenient. It pulls data from all of the various financial institutions we use (and does it for free… trying to do that with iBank, Quicken, or GnuCash, all of which I’ve tried, usually incurs a monthly fee from each bank) and puts it in a centralized place, which helps keep things organized. I’m much more likely to notice when we’re off budget, or if someone has stolen my card and is buying a bunch of junk from a Walmart in Florida.

One area where it should be best in class is in Mint Transaction Rules. For those not aware of the concept, bank line item records are sometimes a bit obtuse. Take this transaction from my bank: Point of Sale Debit L340 TIME 11:15 AM DATE 06-18 AIRPORTRDFAMILY CHAPEL HILLNC.

I don’t need to know most of that information. All I need to know is where the transaction took place. So I want my financial tool to separate the wheat from the chaff and give me useful information.

What does Mint do?

Every transaction from that bank has “L340” somewhere in it. It has “TIME” and “DATE” there, too. Based on a cursory Google search, I’m not the only one whose bank uses these terms in its transactional metadata. And yet this happens all the time in Mint.

You’d think that a tool which is as popular as Mint, which stores zettabytes of financial data, and tons of users going in every day and renaming transactions would be a little smarter.

Like I said, there are Mint Transaction Rules which give you the ability, say, to manually teach Mint that this particular transaction is not from “L Time Date” but is from “Airport Road Family Fare”. I just type in the correct payee and check the box that says “Always rename…”

Wait, what?!

If I check that box, Mint’s going to rewrite any transaction called “L Time Date” to “Airport Road Family Fare”. But… there’s no actual transaction called “L Time Date” on my bank statement. That’s just the useless payee that Mint’s dumb-ass algorithm has invented. The moment I check that box, Mint starts renaming every debit transaction from my bank. Not helpful at all.

My question to the developers of Mint? Why doesn’t that checkbox say:

“Always rename Point of Sales Debit L340 TIME 11:15 AM DATE 06-18 AIRPORTRDFAMILY CHAPEL HILLNC as Airport Road Family Fare and categorize as Uncategorized.”

Use the full description from my bank. Or fix Mint Transaction Rules so they don’t suck. It doesn’t seem like that would be too hard to implement, and it would make your rename rules… truly rule.

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For one thing, the iOS version of the app has a weird glitch that limits all posts—including those to Facebook—to 140 characters.

Secondly, I’m sorta OCD about having URLs in Facebook posts. I love that tools like Sprout Social and Hootsuite will strip out the URL from the text automatically. Buffer could benefit from something like that.

Lastly, and this is something I wish more social media tools would do, I’d love to see a cross-posting interface that looks something like this:

Tweets and Facebook posts aren’t the same. Twitter is limited to 140 characters, and requires URLs. Posts on Facebook can be lengthier (although evidence suggests 50-90 characters seem to work best). So why try to cross-post the same content to both networks?

Sure, I can schedule a post to Twitter, and then go back in and schedule a modified version to Facebook. But that’s a lot of extra work. Give me two separate fields so I can quickly craft my two posts in one window, in one fell swoop.

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Did you ever see the film where a man is given spectacles
That make the world look upside down?
He falls about the place, but in time he somehow readjusts.
And when they take the glasses off,
The eyes he’s always had see sky below him
And he falls again.

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In other news, we’re expecting the arrival of our second child any day now. Natania is very ready to be finished with this pregnancy, and I’m looking forward to meeting our Elodie.

Liam continues to do well at school, which is a huge relief. After his behavioral issues at the beginning of the year, we were quite concerned. But he walks home every day with me, telling me how much he enjoyed his day, how much fun he had, what he learned, etc. And his reading skill is growing by leaps and bounds every day. Most parents think their kids are geniuses, and I guess I’m no different.

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I finished reading Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One today. I checked it out for the Kindle from the North Carolina Digital Library (which made me feel super cool and “future is now!” and everything, fitting pretty well with the book). I hope Mr. Cline doesn’t mind that I didn’t pay anything for it…

It took me about five days to finish the book, which is a pretty good clip for me, these days. And I really enjoyed it. It’s not that the world of Ready Player One is particularly original, or even that the characters are that interesting–it is, and they are, but not any more than those of most books–but that Cline’s ability to capture the love and nostalgia for the 1980s is superhuman.

I was born in the ’80s, so I’m really a child of the ’90s. That’s the era in which I did most of my formative obsessing: listening to music (The Smashing Pumpkins, Weezer, Dinosaur Jr.), playing games (any and all Zelda games, Final Fantasy, and, of course, Dungeons & Dragons), watching loads of movies (I worked as a projectionist and in a video rental store), pining after girls, etc. But I have–had, even then–a healthy respect for the culture of the ’80s, including many things that Cline touches upon in his book. So I ate up every reference to WarGames and Pac-Man and 80’s arcade culture.

Another amazing and dangerous thing is that the instant I was finished with the novel, I began to miss my time in Azeroth. I’ve only ever played one MMORPG and, like most other gamers, it was World of Warcraft. There was something in Cline’s descriptions of Parzival and his friends’ exploits throughout OASIS that made me long for those days where some guildmates and I would work together to bring down a difficult dungeon boss. That teamwork and camaraderie is so often missing from day-to-day RL. Which is, of course, why it is so damned attractive. And dangerous.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’m going to go play some Zork.

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I was lying in bed last night, on the verge of falling asleep, and I realized that the best way to get myself writing regularly again is… well, to write. And it’s been so long since I wrote regularly, I figured the best thing to write about is myself and my life and the things that go on inside of my head. So I grabbed the little Moleskine I keep next to my bed and the pen with the flashlight that I got from ThinkGeek and I wrote, “Every night, write for 15 minutes”.

So… that’s what this is.

I’m using my favorite text editor of all time, TextMate, and a little timer widget that runs on my dashboard. And I’ve set a reminder in Google Calendar: every night at around 9pm, I will be ordered to do this little exercise. Some of what I write might make it to GeekDad, while the bulk will likely remain here on my own blog.

Today was Liam’s second-to-last day of spring break–they’re off on Monday, too–and we spent the morning in our pajamas. After sending Natania off to work, he and I watched Spy Kids on Netflix. At first he didn’t want to watch it, as he is stuck in an entertainment rut of Overhaulin’ (ugh) and Top Gear (yay!). But I convinced him. And he loved it, wanted to watch it when mom got home, can’t wait for the sequels, etc.

Then I tried something very ambitious. I pulled out our Legend of Drizzt board game and told Liam we were going to play some Dungeons & Dragons. He was excited. I had, of course, forgotten that I haven’t actually unpacked the game, so we spent about twenty minutes punching cardboard tokens and tiles and organizing all of the pieces.

After a cursory refresher of the rules, we started. He played Regis the halfling and I was Drizzt. In the scenario we played, we had to find a lost artifact, and Artemis Entreri was after Regis for his crimes against the thieves’ guild.

I was a little light on the Encounter card draws (I made him pull one whenever he didn’t explore, but not on black arrows; I gave myself all Encounter cards that the rules called for) and at one point, he got discouraged by the appearance of the assassin Artemis and being pinned in against a bad monster, so I role-played that the monster, a spirit, didn’t give chase as he ran away. I also let him pull a special tile so that we could be reunited on the board (we had split the party… d’oh!)

Other than that, though, we played the game rules-as-written. And had a lot of fun! About halfway through, I realized that I was playing it too much like a board game, so I amped up the characterization and made sure that Liam knew it was fine for him to do the same. When he smashed Artemis down with his magical mace, Liam was excited and described it to me, swiping the assassin’s miniature off the board to illustrate.

All in all, a lot of fun. He immediately told me that the crown we had fetched from the ancient throne room was cursed, and I told him that we’d have to explore the further adventures of Regis and Drizzt and the cursed crown on another day. He’s looking forward to it.

Which, of course, means that I have succeeded.

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My drug of choice is, of course, coffee.

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