Bnpositive's Blog

What is with kids these days. I’ll be honest too, I’m talking about my own kids and the kids of my friends. They’re just not willing to work for something anymore are they? I mean they don’t even play hard either. What’s the deal?

When I was a kid I spent hours upon hours trying to get past a single bad guy or some weird level on Nintendo Mario Brothers or some other game. I remember my brothers and I playing Asteroids on the Atari 2600 for 9 hours straight to set things.

Both my kids got Nintendo DSi’s for Christmas and I swear I spent most of the day Christmas being asked to get the kids past some step or stage on their new game. Finally I’d had enough!

I told them both I was no longer helping them "play" their games. Part of the fun of a game is conquering the game itself. Spending that time working on something that’s difficult and not easy to come by. That’s what video games are all about right?

I was helping a friend this evening who had questions about buying a new desktop PC for his family. He was interested in recommendations on brands. At first I was thinking he wanted something just for the kids, but then found out the ultimate goal is to have something capable of doing photo editing and management and potentially even some video editing.

My original thoughts were a real basic, bottom line computer that would be more than enough for the kids to use for their homework and general Internet access. I expected the price to be less than $400 for a decent machine.

After looking at a workhorse of an HP machine though, we were tricking it out to have a beast of a processor and 8GB of RAM, above average graphics card and some other features and it was still going to come in right at $1000.

I’m sure with a bit more shopping, we could find something even cheaper with similar features, but I was just generally impressed with the overall cost for a great, new PC. Makes me really start thinking about finally getting around to replacing my own family’s desktop PC with something to serve more as a our media and communications hub for the family in the living room.

We’ll see what 2010 brings in the next couple of months and go from there.

I hadn’t even thought of this until earlier this evening when someone mentioned it. Ten years ago tonight the world was worried about what exactly would happen when the calendar flipped over and we switched from the year 1999 to 2000.

I’m trying to remember back in that time and I don’t think much of anything really happened did it? It didn’t impact my world really. We had a month old baby in our home and were adjusting to a variety of things.

Was it really 10 years ago?

Time flies doesn’t it?

What’s the biggest worry for us in 2010? I’d say the economy is still an issue. What’s going to happen with nationalized healthcare will be another question that’s up in the air. Then there’s still the looming potential of some kind of terrorist threat on American soil again.

I think I might prefer the Y2K issues honestly.

As a friend of mine said earlier this evening, may the best of 2009 be the worst of 2010. Let’s hear it for a great year to come and looking back 365 days from now and thinking how little we really had to worry about when it was all over.

Image: Jason Bean

As tough of a year as 2009 was for most people. I accomplished a couple of different things towards the end of 2009 that will be providing me a much better start to 2010 than I’ve had in any years previous.

In 2009 I finished paying off the last of my credit card debt. Ten years ago when I got married I brought over $15,000 in credit card debt to our budget. We’re now completely out of credit card debt and won’t be getting back into credit card debt at all.

The other item that was a huge dark financial shadow over my life was a significant medical bill left over from a gall bladder surgery I had three years ago. This past month I finished paying off the $7,000+ of that bill and have gotten that out of the way as well.

2010 will allow me to focus more on the remainder of our other medical bills and debts to move us into an even better financial position.

What are you hoping to accomplish financially in 2010 for you and your family?

I’m not one to make New Year’s resolutions. I figure if something is worth doing and important, the motivation for doing it and committing to the decision should be based on something more than it being the beginning of a new year.

I spent quite a bit of time in 2009 sitting at my computer working on a variety of projects. I really enjoying working on the computer and doing what I do, but I am hoping in 2010 that I can focus on balancing things a little more in my life.

I realize that I need to spend more time focusing on my physical health and reducing my weight. Generally I plan to eat less, I could probably reduce my daily calorie intake by 1000 and not really miss it. I’m not into splurging with sweets, desserts and candy. My challenge is the quantity of food I’m capable of eating. Need to eat at Chinese buffets about half as much as I do now and that would be a significant reduction.

My brother is really into running, that’s not me. I love cycling and hiking, as well as team sports like ultimate frisbee and softball. Hopefully I can increase my opportunities to participate more in those actions next year.

What do you plan on doing in 2010?

I’ve been so busy the last few months that I haven’t really seen many movies that I’d like to see that have already come out and are working their way out of the theaters. We have a local Kerasotes theater here and their $5 Club is when we try to take advantage of current movies in the theaters.

I’m not sure if it’s going to happen, but I’d love to do what I did when I was single and spend the day watching movies in the theater. The ones on my list that are currently at Kerasotes $5 Club that I’d really like to see tomorrow are:

• 2012
• The Blind Side
• A Christmas Carol
• Invictus

I’d like to take the kids to go see A Christmas Carol and The Blind Side, and then they can head home and I’ll stick around to see 2012 and Invictus. Have you see these movies? I’ve heard good reviews for all of them except 2012. However, I’d like to see 2012 because it’s just a huge production and the type of movie to watch on the large screen.

Then perhaps on Saturday I’ll catch Avatar in 3D IMAX and Robert Downey Jr. in Sherlock Holmes.

I’ve had some interesting discussions regarding what it means to be a college athlete these days. If you’re not aware, a college athlete gets a scholarship to attend college and play a sport in exchange.

Part of the agreement is that they cannot accept gifts or any other compensation from anyone during their college career.

I get frustrated when college athletes leave school early to pursue a professional career in the NFL, NBA or MLB. I get frustrated because I think they’re throwing away the opportunity for a great education at their school. The more I think about it though, if I were in their position, would I turn down the opportunity to immediately cash-in on a sports contract, or wait to finish school and risk injuring myself as I finished my college career.

What if the scenario could change, what if a college recruited athletes to play for their team? Their “scholarship” would be a voucher that could be exchanged to pursue their education. So, a “student athlete” could play four years for a college in exchange for the ability to come back to that school and get their education at any time.

Then, an athlete could capitalize on their athletic skills in the prime of their lives and focus on their “career” as an athlete. Then, when they go injured or decided to retire from professional sports they could return to school, all expenses paid and then focus on their education.

After I was married, there was an item that I owned as a bachelor that didn’t make it into the house and back on the wall where it was in my own apartment. It was one of those photomosaic posters of Yoda that was nicely framed.

I don’t see that artwork making it back into the house in the near future, but I might be able to create my own photomosaic with Pixisnap and set it as the wallpaper on my laptop or on my wife’s laptop computer.

You simply upload your image or collection of images and Pixisnap duplicates, shades and colors them, then puts them all back together to create the photomosaic of your picture. Pretty sweet processing functionality for an online service I’d say.

If you don’t like the photomosaic option, you can also create the impression of a stack or pile of old Polaroid images laying together to form an image. All pretty neat stuff. I think I’ll be playing with this a little more this evening as I wait to roll in 2010.

Uncover your own personal photomosaic with Pixisnap.

I just received an automated email from a web service that was warning me about just tweeting my email address in a recent tweet to a friend. I knew it was something I didn’t really want to do, but I wasn’t sure of a way to really share my email address via twitter without opening it up to be harvested by potential spammers.

The Emails @ Risk website provides an option to save your email address as an image that you can share with other people on websites. That in and of itself is easy enough to do, but you can really share images via twitter without forcing the person to click on a link and then view the image on another website.

The other solution provided by Emails @ Risk is to allow you to put in your email address on a form, then they create an image of your email address and display it on a website that you can then share with others when you want to give them your email address.

Both of these are great options to keep you from putting your email address online in a format that spammer bots can harvest the address very easily. Nothing is foolproof, but this helps.

I’m thinking I may put my email address in an image on my own website and then just link to that image file whenever I want. I also just tried adding a bit.ly URL to a mailto: link of my email address wondering if that would work too. It links and tries to open in Gmail, but doesn’t pre-populate a message. I’ll bet it would work if I had Outlook serve as the default email program to use when clicking on a mailto: link.

I grew up in the church my entire life. Over that time I’ve heard a number of pastors, including my father, say some pretty funny things from the pulpit. Whether they get their tongue tied when trying to say something or say something that just didn’t come out as intended, it’s usually a pretty funny event.

The video below is one of my favorites that’s been caught on video for everyone to enjoy.

This is Blake Bergstrom speaking to his youth group at Southeast Christian Church in Parker, Colorado.

If twitter is good for anything, it’s great for getting people to come together and chat, discuss or support an identified cause. Think about the Iran events or just about any other major trending event topic you’ve seen on the network.

When you decide to promote an event and you want your supporters to be uniquely identified on the twitter social network you can use the Twibbon website to accomplish that goal.

The Twibbon website allows you to upload a simple little graphic that can then be over-layed on your twitter supporters own avatars. Think of the little ribbon magnets you see on everyone’s cars supporting our troops, breast cancer awareness or autism. It’s the same idea, but for twitter.

You can upload a simple colored ribbon icon, or some other small graphic, or just place text over the avatar, which comes in handy for displaying a nice #hashtag that everyone can start using and recognizing.

Twibbon even makes it super easy to show your support for your favorite sports team.

When you ad your own cause or promotion, you can provide details about what you’re trying to accomplish and let others decide if they want to help support your cause.

If you ever decide to stop showing your support or a particular cause, you can always revert back to your normal avatar or a different cause.

I was in Best Buy earlier today and noticed the copy of EA Sports Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2010 on the shelf. I then began to think about all the news involving Tiger Wood’s personal life over the last month. Do I want to give money to Tiger Woods in this way?

Without getting on a huge soap box on personal beliefs, my preference would be to not hand money to people that I have significant disagreements with their chosen lifestyle decisions.

Tiger Woods PGA Tour golf has been perhaps my favorite game to play since I purchased my original Xbox years ago. I’ve continued to buy each year’s version of the game since then and continue to buy them for my Xbox 360. I’ve even debated buying copies of the game for our Nintendo Wii as well.

I found a blog post that says EA Sports isn’t turning away from Tiger for future releases of the game:

Our strong relationship with Tiger for more than a decade remains unchanged. We respect Tiger’s privacy, we wish him a fast recovery and we look forward to seeing him back on the golf course.

The post makes a good point that if they ditched Tiger, they don’t really have another big name draw for the namesake. Now I’ll just have to decide if I’ll continue to purchase the game. The graphics and game play are looking sweet! Arrrgghh!