Growing up is hard to do. I mean, come on, why should I be concerned about things like housing prices, making responsible decisions with my money, and our government’s inability to balance a budget? For some reason, I’m supposed to be concerned about these things now that I’m a father and a husband and … a grown-up. Ooh! Who wants that label? Not me. Funny thing though, even though I don’t want the label, the concerns I’ve brought up are things that I am really worried about.

Many people make resolutions when a new year approaches. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t. Usually when I do, they only last temporarily so that’s why I’m hesitant to make any for 2008. Plus, when you write them down, you’re so earnest in your determination but it never works out like that, does it?

Maybe it’s the Christmas season and being around family and friends, I always get introspective when a new year is right around the corner. I worry about the economy, the kids, the house, the job, etc. I wish that I had the time to examine the moral and ethical decisions that I have to make this coming year before they happen. What will they be? I wonder if the mistakes that were made in 2007 will be made in 08. That includes my mistakes as well as others. The big four-oh is right around the corner for me. What will that be like? Read more  »

Update (09/14/08): While most of the information here is factually correct, my use of each social network has changed drastically since December of 2007.

The web is more interesting when you can use it to find long lost acquaintances, share web sites, and interact with your friends and colleagues. The term social gets attached to web sites and networks but its hard for me to think of them as being social. I’m not really interacting with people on social sites, I’m interacting with information about people. But, its pretty clear that these sites have changed the way we use the internet; its not just shopping and email anymore. I like to think of my collection of social networks as one big personal information manager.

So, in order to expose myself further to the online world (and hopefully, get to know others), here are the social networks that I’m apart of and how I use them. I’m not pretending to have just discovered any of these. They’ve been around awhile but I recently came across someone’s blog where they shared their StumbleUpon account and everyone noticed. I listed the applications in order of my preference but, before you go trying all of them, please be aware of each’s reason for existing (for example, please don’t contact me via LinkedIn if you want to see my movie preferences).

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For the longest time, I was against using an online email client like Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, or Gmail. I remember thinking that I couldn’t afford to have my valuable emails sitting on some other computer (i.e., their server). I needed to have emails stored locally so I could access them when I didn’t have a connection to the internet.

But that all changed over a number of years as I, and many others I’m sure, came to embrace the “network is the computer” mentality. Eventually, it was a rare occurrence that you couldn’t find an easy wi-fi connection. You might have to pay T-Mobile at Starbucks or you’d have to wait just a little bit until you found a place. Now, its just ridiculous to think of a hotel without a connection. Besides, many individuals and companies don’t really take wi-fi security that seriously so open connections can be found just about anywhere. We were recently in a hotel in San Diego which offered $10/day internet access but I was able to find three other wi-fi connections to the internet from my room. Our local airport has had free wi-fi for years.

And as this mentality in local versus network computer was taking hold, a new equation was developing. Part of the old way of thinking was that checking one’s email meant sitting down at one particular computer. But now, I have multiple computers. There’s the household computer, my laptop, and my work computer. So, the new equation is “checking email = having a connection”. A connection, not any particular computer. You’re probably thinking, “No Duh, you’re just now realizing this.” But think about it for a while. Think about it in terms of how we as a society are tied to the internet. Just as revolutionary was the advent of the internet is the way we use the internet. And now that the connection is virtually everwhere, so is email.

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My son starts a new season of soccer this fall. He’s playing on an U6 team in the Gilbert Youth Soccer Assocation (GYSA). The team was without a coach so I decided to take the plunge into the world of coaching youth soccer. If I’m ever going to manage a Premiership team, I might as well start here.

For interested coaches, the league paid for us to receive a Y-Level Certification through the Arizona Youth Soccer Association this past Saturday. Though I’ve played soccer for most of my life and have a pretty good understanding of the tactics involved, taking this course dissolved some of my misconceptions about how kids learn and how they ought to be trained and developed, especially at the U6 level.

At the age of 5, kids are constantly in motion and they have a very short attention span. Because they have no sense of pace (they will run until they drop), practices and teaching sessions should be done with short games that will keep them from running themselves down too fast. They are individually oriented. They bring their own balls and they want as much time with “my ball” as they can. They are not team-oriented at all and, therefore, the concept of passing the ball will not be grasped by most of them.

So if passing and team-formations are out, what’s a coach supposed to do? Well, the most a coach can do at this level is to teach them how much fun they can have with a soccer ball. They want to have fun and so the best a coach can do is to plan games that help them to keep “my ball”. Of course, sharing is the foundation of passing the ball and building that foundation is a healthy goal for the entire season. But, at their level, especially since they are easily psychologically bruised, activities that emphasis ball control and primitive eye-foot coordination should be the only things going on in a U6 practice.

The implications of this are profound. I remember last season taking the kids and having them line up in front of the goal. They would then take turns kicking the ball into the net. This was standard fair at practice. Yet, when you think about it, none of the kids are actually getting enough time on the ball to be beneficial during game time. Sure, they learn to kick the ball, but they spend most of their time in line.

Running drills like this are spill-overs from what we’ve learned from other sports. In baseball, basketball, and football, we run laps, we line up to hit the ball, we run plays. All of those things help the player to learn the mechanical play of those sports. Soccer is a different sport. It is spontaneous and requires a player to make critical split-second decisions during the run of play. So, at the U6 practice, we want to describe each game we are going to play, but we want to leave some leeway for learning what is required up to the kids. Tell them to use their hands, their feet, or their heads and leave the interpretation of the rules up to them. We want to start getting them to think about what they’re doing instead of just doing what’s being asked of them.

I’m looking forward to our first practice next week. I’m planning all sorts of games and, hopefully, fun activities so that I’ll be able to share at least a little bit of the love I have for the game of soccer. I’ll be blogging about the season and how the kids progress.

Its been a long time since I’ve said anything here. What can I say? Work, family, kids, exercise … they’ve all taken priority over this blog. But now its going to become a bigger part of my workflow through out the day as I chronicle web technologies and data quality issues that arise. Stay tuned for more and better content as well as a new design.

We had the privilege of touring Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater in Pennsylvania last week.

Fallingwater is recognized as one of Wright’s most acclaimed works, and in a 1991 poll of members of the American Institute of Architects, it was voted “the best all-time work of American architecture.” It is a supreme example of Frank Lloyd Wright’s concept of organic architecture, which promotes harmony between man and nature through design so well integrated with its site that buildings, furnishings, and surroundings become part of a unified, interrelated composition. Wright embraced modern technology to achieve this, designing spaces for living which expressed architecturally the expansive freedom of the American frontier.

I think it was the best house I’ve ever been in and I don’t think I will ever see another like it. It was absolutely amazing. Here’s a link to my pictures.