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I listened to the latest episode of the Enough podcast and the guest Pat Dryburgh in relating his spate of deleting his social media accounts, starting ing fits and spurts said off handedly that there was a time bomb attached to every thing he creates.

When I was a print graphic designer I used to design one off logos and projects that I would intensely work on and the after printing a single copy or hearing it, I would delete it (or technically not save it). My fellow designers would ask why I didn’t save it, print more copies, some how keep the design around. I couldn’t explain it except the process of creation and then not saving once it was done was either a form of sacrifice or like a Tibetan mandala.

In the digital world, we have learned on many occasions, everything lives forever. But having things with a finite life time, digital or not, increases the value. Deleting things is not bad, “create and destroy”. Draw something and then toss it.

When the Girl was born, I wrote about 360° awareness, which is something that still gets to me when people lack it. Case in point, this weekend at Trader Joes, it was a mad house. People and carts everywhere. The people killing about, oblivious to those around them, not keeping the lanes of traffic free. It reminded me of Merlin Mann’s video. The rules of the grocery store are:

• keep moving
• if you are not moving, get out of the way

These two things should be universal axioms, things we all understand. Apparently, they are lost on the lady with the smart looking haircut and quilted vest who leaves her cart blocking the middle of the aisle while she internally debates the pros and cons of the organic frozen broccoli and the non-organic broccoli.

Esther, my lovely wife, is off on business, which means that I am the sole parent home with the kids, except I’m not at home, I have a full week of work, coaching and some other thing simmering in the background. Not that taking care of two kids is something that I am not capable of, but it is always nice to have someone around to help lighten the load, sharing the work and wrangling the kids.

I know she isn’t just relaxing and drinking Mai Tai’s, sometimes it is nice to have a reminder of how much someone does.

Esther and watched the documentary “The Queen of Versailles”, following the construction and lack of completion around David and Jackie Siegel’s mansion. It is a great movie, highly worth a watch and now available on Netflix.

While watching the movie, Esther made an observation that paraphrased went like this:

They (David and Jackie Siegel) are clearly greedy, every can get greedy. When the line between want and need is blurred we can all be greedy. Do we really need a bigger house? No, we are comfortable with where we are.

She makes a great point. It is so easy to lose the line between “content” and “wanting”, between “need” and “want”, our society pushes upon us messages of “consume”. It can seem totally justified to buy a new device or build the largest home in America.

I am going to try and keep the aged David and artificial Jackie Siegel in my mind when I start to have the “wants” out weigh the “needs”. It isn’t going to be a sure fire prophylaxis, but trying to recall how unhappy, how isolated and disconnected, they and their children were portrayed should give me pause. If you watch the movie, it should provide you some imagery to use too.

Last week, while coaching the Teens Crossfit class, two of the girls were discussing a television show that I was not familiar with. I inquired about the show and they were were confused about my lack of knowledge of current reality TV. They quizzed me about show after show, some of which I had heard of but a vast majority I had not or only a passing of the name.

“How can you not have seen [name of show]?”

“I don’t have cable.” I replied.

The two girls jaws literally fell open. After a couple of seconds, one asked, “How do you survive without TV?”

I tried to explain briefly how we watch TV, but by the time I got through the words AppleTV, they were already deep in conversation about how weird it was that I “didn’t watch TV”, almost as though I had stated that I didn’t eat food.

In the week since, I have gotten a few more questions from the girls, including “How do your kids live without TV?” and “What do you do at night?”

Their minds were blown.

In a previous post I discussing using services and products interested in taking my money, instead of data about me. I deleted my Facebook account, stopped using Twitter and switched primarily to App.net. This was an interesting change, the conversations were richer, partly because of the increased character limit, partly due to the more selected population. The problem that I found was that there wasn’t a whole lot of social in the social network. Not that there aren’t people who are friends on App.net, it is just that they are not my friends. I’m not re-joining Facebook, although there are plenty of people I “know” on there, I find the signal to noise ratio hard to justify. The one place I’m going to go back to is Twitter. My wife is on Twitter, so is my sister and brother-in-law, and my co-workers. So why am I cutting myself off from them? If you see me on Twitter, now you know.

Version 3 didn’t last very long. While I liked Octopress, there was inherrant friction with posting, and lots of fiddling, things that kill my desire to write. When my Hazel actions started to break down, I stopped writing, which is not what I wanted. The site is now powered by Wordpress again. I have re-released the archives of the site, but they have been significantly edited. Most of the link posts have been deleted, all of my tumblelog experiments have been cleaned out, all of the “Today, I had a sandwich” posts have been removed. I want this to be a curation of the best of the things that I have written. In cleaning out the backlog, I skimmed some of my old writing and some of it was really good, examples of what I want to keep around.

In addition to stock Wordpress, I am using the Just Write and Editorial Calendar plugins, to hopefully keep the writing coming. I am also using Poster for writing when I am not in front of my computer.

Shawn Blanc wrote about his use of Scratch as a follow on to Simplenote. Many others have written about using Drafts in their capture work flow, but I am confused and I feel like I am missing something.

I like the apps, they are each customizable and I get buried in the multitude of options for configuring the different “actions” available. There are so many different options, that it can be dizzying.

So here is the thing that doesn’t compute for me:

If I am going to write email, I’m going draft an email. Same is said for an SMS or any other writing. Everything that I am wanting to look into is a task. Everything that I need to revisit is a task.

So, why have an intermediary app?

All apps that I have should create tasks in OmniFocus. That is part of why I am so enamored with the OmniGroup’s Mail Drop, as email appears to be the only ubiquitous action.

With Instagram’s recent hiccups, Google’s push to ‘plus’ everything, Twitter’s restrictions on app developers and Facebook’s continual disregard for my privacy I am beginning to think that Anil Dash was right about the web we lost. All of the money grabbing, not from me but from people who sell my information is a little disconcerting. So, this year I am working to buy products, not being one.

This is not an easy task. I am aiming to remove all “free” services from my computing experience, but there are so many. Dropbox, iCloud, Google Reader are just a few and don’t get me started on Facebook and the plethora of apps that they have spawned, acquired or require a Facebook login. I left Google Reader a long time ago, around the time they updated, forcing the use of Google+ for sharing. I have been using Fever ever since and have been very happy. This is the pattern I want to repeat, functionality similar, if jot better, wherein i have better control over my data. Ultimately, to get this process started with all of the other processes I have, I made a list of all the processes and what services are associated with them.

email — Dreamhost & iCloud*
blog — Dreamhost
analytics — Mint note: hosted on Dreamhost
status — App.net
videos — Vimeo
photos — Flickr
RSS reading — Fever note: hosted on Dreamhost
calendar sync — Baikal note: hosted on Dreamhost and iCloud
contact sync — Baikal note: hosted on Dreamhost and iCloud
file sync — Dropbox note: Currently on free plan* and FTP/WebDAV via Dreamhost
Writing — TypeRighter
Bookmarking — Pinboard
Task syncing — Omni Sync Server note: Currently free*
1 off Podcast listening (Huffduffer.com) — Home grown note: hosted on Dreamhost
Watch Later service — Home grown note: hosted on Dreamhost
Search — Duck Duck Go note: Currently free*
Dynamic DNS — Dreamhost and iCloud
Launcher — Spotlight

The services with issues:

• iCloud — I have no control of what Apple does with my information even if I am paying them. Having more than a free account lets me have the illusion that I have control, but this is going to be a tough one to break.
• Omni Sync — I hadn’t been using their service until the introduction of Mail Drop, but my automated email catching, task producing system has started to be unreliable, so Mail Drop is a great save. I have purchased about $100 of software from the Omnigroup and plan on purchasing what ever upgrades to the products that I use, so again, I will consider this one covered.
• Duck Duck Go — Search is a weird one. It is like air, or in computer terms, DNS. While DDG doesn’t accept direct support, I will try to put a few dollars towards their Flattr account to offset my use.
• Dropbox — This one is the hardest of them all. I barely use the 2 GB free plan (Currently sitting at 16% and that is will a bunch of things that need to be deleted) and the next tier up is the Pro plan with 100 GB for $100. That is a tough pill to swallow considering I am using less than 350 MB. This one requires more contemplation.
• Twitter — The hardest thing to leave is going to be Twitter. I have cajoled enough friends and family to use the service that moving to the paid App.net feels like I am leaving them behind. I have only been on App.net for two days, and I have felt like it is the most awesome coffee shop, where most of my Internet friends hang out, all it is missing are the friends that I hangout with in person.

Much like my inspiration Partick Rhone wrote the other day:

The mess is something we generally reserve for only our closest friends and trusted sources. The mess is the imperfections we know others know but would only reveal to those willing to forgive us for it.

Yet the mess is the very essence of creation. The planets and stars and life itself is born of chaos and disorder and confusion.

And part of my being able to publish here daily will mean that, some days, it will be a bit messy and you will just have to forgive me for that.

And while I am not posting daily, this will be messy, none the less.

On April 17 of 2012, I wrote about The TV Experiment we started. It involved:

Here is what I am purposing:

We are going to cut the cord. We will get the content for our TV from streaming devices or HD local over-the-air sources, particularly for time sensitive or sporting events.

How:

• We will use the second generation Apple TV and iTunes to get some shows, as well as newly released movies. We will use Netflix on the Apple TV to entertain the kids with the variety of shows they want.
• We will use our upscaling DVD player for movies from the RedBox and public library.
• We have purchased a proper digital over-the-air antenna from Mohu so the few national and international sporting events we want can be watched.
• We will disconnect out TiVO and while not having any issues with the service, it is always a time sink. The fact that it can suggest shows means that there is always more TV to watch (Yes, I know it can be turned off…).

Here is what I have found since “cutting the cord”.

• We watch significantly less television and what we do watch, we are more intentional about in content and intentional in watching.
• The more story driven the show, the more likely we are to watch it. We have found several good series, and only a few so-so series. The good series are worth every penny, the so-so series are either mindless when we really need some mindless TV, or they get dropped pretty quickly.
• We watch on both Netflix and from the iTunes Store. I have “caught up” on all of the science fiction movies I should have seen to carry my nerd card.
• The few times we have needed to watch traditional TV the experience with the Mohu is good, but the amount of commercials is unbearable. The other thing that is unbearable is the advertising of the more adult oriented content during the kid viewing prime time. I don’t need my kids asking about what happened to that man on CSI.

At this point, I don’t see us going back to being cable subscribers, or viewers of traditional over the air broadcast TV. We have enjoyed not having to punch the TV God’s time clock.

As a final note: The shows we have really come to enjoy: Homeland, Downton Abbey, The Walking Dead, Falling Skies, Damages), Elementary.