Manversation

Since I was a tiny little tot, barely aware of the world around me, I’ve been a Denver Broncos fan. My parents raised me with season tickets in hand, leading the way every autumn Sunday to our seats in the original house of orange and blue worship, Mile High Stadium. The electric atmosphere brought about by 80,000 devotees watching, gasping, and celebrating in unison was like nothing else in the world. Just like that, the Broncos had a fan for life.

Every time I got to watch the Broncos take on a different team, my dad bought me a pennant with that team’s logo on it. I never got to see all the teams in the NFL, but I did get a good collection, and the groundwork was laid for my future status as more than just a Broncos fan, but a football fan.

Eventually, my folks had to let their season tickets go. It was the sad result of my father’s retail business going bankrupt. Although I could no longer attend every home game, I remained a serious Broncos fan into adulthood. Until my early-twenties, I paid very little attention to the other teams in the league.

And then came Fantasy Football

About ten years ago, a good friend asked me if I would like to join a fantasy football league with him. Neither one of us had ever tried it before, so we weren’t sure what to expect. Finally I agreed, and soon I was “drafting” my team. I don’t remember a single player I had on my team that year. I don’t remember if my team did well or came in dead last. What I do remember is that my enjoyment for watching Broncos football turned into a joy of following the sport as a whole. Suddenly, I had players to root for from those teams on my pennants from long ago.

Fantasy football makes the sport more interesting. It makes watching a football game more personal and gives a fantasy team owner a vested interest in how their players perform. It creates a fun, non-athletic way for people to compete based on the United States’ most popular sport.

Analysts try to estimate the value of time lost by companies to fantasy football participation by their employees. It’s a lot. Billions per year; but they can’t estimate how much companies would lose from damaged morale and loyalty if it were banned. Also, I’d like to see how many jobs and how much revenue fantasy football is responsible for creating.

Fantasy football is really not a fantasy at all.

It’s just a fun game based on the statistics produced by real players in pro football games. It requires no more special skill than a willingness to do a little research, but makes the game so much more exciting every week. If you like football, but never tried fantasy, get some friends together and give it a try. You can make it as simple or complex as you want, as long as it’s fun. Check back often or subscribe to this blog for more…I’ll be posting more about fantasy football in the future; from general observations to overall strategy.

Photo by Rory Finneren

I recently read an article in Popular Science how in the near future we may be able to grow biodegradable plastic from Switchgrass.  Plastic does wonders for consumer products with only a couple of minor drawbacks.  It’s made from petroleum products, and lasts for centuries in the land fill.  Well perhaps these are not minor, and I’m pretty sure three hundred years from now a little kid will be pretty dissapointed about finding a plastic spoon in their back yard instead of a civil war button or coin.  “Hey dad look, an early 21st century Dixie!”

Plastic is harvested in the field as a finished product rather than created in the factory with petroleum products.  This saves a significant amount of energy and all the leftover Switchgrass can then be used to create Biofuel.  Very exciting indeed.

Also in Popular Science is a wind turbine that brings me one step closer to producing my own energy.  The Mariah Power Windspire is the first to capture breezes at 30 feet or below and can start in slow winds without the help of a motor.  Combine this with solar power on the roof, A chevy Volt in the garage and I’m set to go.

Preparing for the interview

I recently had an opportunity to interview for a supervisory position in a different department at my job. While I thought I was fairly well prepared for my interview because of the fact that I’ve been on the other side of the table several times as an interviewer for new candidates in my department, there were nonetheless some questions that surprised me and left me stammering as I tried to come up with a reasonable answer.

I didn’t know if there was much I could do to prepare for the interview, but I did find myself reviewing some of my files on the computer at work the day before. Also, the evening of the interview, I brought home my entire hanging file’s worth of past year performance reviews.

I spent the day and the evening preparing to talk in the interview about some of the innovative extra projects I’d taken on such as the rewrite of the written assessment my department uses to further screen candidates who pass the interview part of the process. Whereas before it had consisted of mostly simple word problems and a page full of arthimetic to be done by hand, I expanded it with a scenario in which the candidate had to respond to an angry letter from a customer who had ordered some products from a mock catalog and had things go seriously wrong. It was complete with a phony catalog page, and a mock call log of calls to the ficticious company’s call center. I thought sure I would have a chance during the interview to work in a nice discussion of this project and some other neat ones I’ve been involved in recently.

They didn’t ask the questions I wanted them to

As it turns out, not only did I not have a chance to, I was asked several questions that left me at a loss for words. Now, I consider myself as good an extemporaneous speaker as any when the situation requires it, but some of these questions were just outside of my experience, or concepts that I merely hadn’t considered.

For instance, one of the questions was “Describe a time a coworker give you some negative feedback. How did you react to it?” This is the one that was just outside of my recent experience. On my current team, we’re all way too busy to give each other any grief. If anything, if someone were dissatisfied, he would probably complain to the boss and she would probably talk to us about it.

Another stumper for me was, “Do you usually make decisions quickly and instinctively or slowly and methodically? Give an example of when your preferred methods failed and what did you do to fix it?” I think this one was difficult for me because there are things for which I use both methods, and in reality, I think a lot of my decisions are a mixture of both.

How I could have prepared myself better?

In reflecting on my experience it occurred to me that there were several things I could have done to prepare myself better for the interview. Maybe this list will help you on your next interview too:

• Know your strengths and weaknesses. One question that seems to almost always come up in one form or another is something along the lines of “Describe your three greatest strengths / qualities and how you feel they would be an asset in this position. I was actually ready for this one and I think I aced it. My strengths were extreme reliability, innovation, and willingness to take on extra work/ go above and beyond. Some of the questions I didn’t do as well on had to do with describing my weaknesses or situations I’d found challenging. To help out on future interviews, I’m going to:

• Set up a system for cataloging your accomplishments and failures (and what you learned from them / how you fixed them). I’m going to start taking some time every month to write down a little bit about some of the accomplishments and challenges of that month. One topic that consistently came up in the interview was how I’d dealt with past challenges and I stumbled on some of these. I think that by taking some time to catalog these things on an ongoing basis, I’ll be better prepared to talk about this in the future.

• Once you have identified some weaknesses, take steps to improve them. One of my weaknesses is a lack of personal organization. My desk is often cluttered and I write important memos on easy-to-lose sticky notes. However, I have taken steps to improve. Last year, I went to a Frankin-Covey class about time management and organization. I decided the Franklin-Covey system was a little too rigid for my personal style, so since then I’ve read Getting Things Done, and I’ve had a lot of success with the Hipster PDA as described on Merlin Mann’s excellent website, 43 folders. I can therefore talk about concrete steps I’ve taken to address one of my weaknesses when that topic comes up in an interview.

Maybe it wasn’t as bad as I thought

It turns out that I made it past that first interview and into the second round of interviews for the position. After much reflection, I decided to withdraw myself from the selection process after the second round of interviews (I’ll write more about that later), but it was a very valuable learning experience overall.

What have your recent job interviews been like? I’m especially interested to hear about how the interview process works outside of the M-F office job world. For example, one of my friend’s wives is a nurse and she says the interview process at the hospital is completely different. Join the manversation and post a comment below!

handshake photo by  A. www.viajar24h.com

Well, I’ve done this a little out of order, it would seem. I’ve already posted on a few other topics before writing my intro post. There were a couple reasons for this:

1).    I thought it might be kind of monotonous to have four days straight of intro posts about us.
2).    I wrote the content for my other posts first.

Anyway, as you’ve no doubt surmised from my previous posts, I like travel, cooking, working with my hands and doing creative things in general. I think of myself as a Renaissance man or jack-of-all-trades kind of person. I was very heavily into art as a child and drew and painted pretty much whenever I got a chance up through about high school. Since discovering music in my junior year of high school, I’ve sang in choirs and played classical guitar and other musical instruments on and off for about 12 years including a 2 year stint as a music major where I played upright bass in the university orchestra and jazz bands. I’m fluent in Spanish and that’s what my undergraduate degree is in.

Somewhere in there, I dabbled a little bit with computers, I think around junior high. I wrote some role playing game type programs in basic on the old Apple IIe but unfortunately didn’t stick with it so my bio isn’t going to read like so many others on the web that state something like: “…then went on to learn Linux, C++, html, JavaScript, built a circuit board in my garage, started a web-hosting service, and am now making boatloads of money writing this blog.” Nope, sadly, that’s not me; I lost interest after tinkering with good old basic on the Apple IIe for about six months and I rely on Nate for the heavy lifting when it comes to the design and programming on this blog.

Like many (most?) other people with a non-professional degree, I work in a field totally unrelated to my major. I think my job is really about as good as it’s going to get for an office job – my bosses are quite reasonable, my coworkers are generally pretty good people and the pay and benes aren’t bad at all - I get five weeks paid vacation per year and in less than two more years that will go up to six. However, like a lot of other people who are “knowledge workers,” or office drones, I don’t feel like this career is my calling and I can’t see myself staying here until it’s time to retire.

However, after dabbling in many different things as listed above, I have found what I believe to be my true calling in life. About three years ago I bought a house (big mistake, more on that later- perhaps much more and many posts), and was looking around for furniture and getting pretty annoyed with the flimsy crap that was available in my price range. I remembered having read or heard about some woodworking classes at my local community college and decided to go learn how to make my own coffee table. Now, three years later, what began as a one-semester plan to make a table has turned into six semesters (and counting) of studying woodworking and furniture design. I’m in the process of building a workshop in my garage and my goals for 2009 include opening an online store to sell some of my smaller projects such as boxes and turned items like peppermills, and getting into an art show to exhibit some of my larger work like coffee tables.

I’ve been perpetually single with the occasional random fling for the last few years. During that time the longest relationship I had lasted a little over two months. I think both my threshold for putting up with female craziness and my inherent drive to get sex are lower than that of the average man. You know the guy who lives for nothing but to chase the ladies and spends every spare moment (and dollar, probably) thinking about his next hook up, trying to get numbers, buying girls drinks etc? Well, that sort of thing has always seemed like a waste of money and energy to me and I’m pretty much at the other end of the spectrum. I like having a girlfriend but I think I’m just too lazy to go through some of the customary and necessary gyrations to get one.

I guess I do need to make more of an effort in that department, though it has grown increasingly difficult to generate quality leads as more and more of my friends get married. This has the twofold effect of; 1). Reducing my pool of available wingmen for heading out to the bars and clubs, and; 2). Reducing the amount of single girls in my social circles that I could easily meet or that people could set me up with (married couples don’t tend to hang out with very many single women). Though as I write this, I’m still feeling pretty good about the girl I met last weekend, and if that doesn’t pan out, there’s always online dating again. So, I’m sure that with my long list of other interesting topics I’d like to cover, you will be hearing about some of my observations about wading through the modern dating scene.

I’ve been noticing a trend lately.  I know there are certain burger commercials out there displaying men as bumbling idiots in the kitchen.  While quite funny and thoroughly enjoyable, I truly believe this portrayal to be false.  Of all the men I know, married or otherwise, I guarantee you won’t find the female cooking dinner.  My wife has two sisters, both of whom couldn’t cook a meal to save their life. It’s the husband or male counterpart who makes the meal; and I’m not talking hamburger helper, but seriously good stuff.  Now, I lucked out, my wife can cook and in fact we switch off cooking dinner for each other nightly.  I enjoy cooking and thank my mom for teaching me while growing up; although I think she saved the best recipes until after my brother and I moved out.  My wife, however, is self taught as her mother did not teach her.  When the art of cooking via mother teaching child was lost I’m not sure, but my best guess is only one generation ago.  There is no shame in cooking, everyone loves to eat. The better the food the more you eat.  There is a sense of satisfaction when a meal you made comes together and you make yourself sick it tastes so good.

I hear time and again how people just don’t have time to cook a meal anymore.  My wife and I both have full time jobs, and at times are tired and don’t want to cook.  But the fact of the matter is the meals we cook trump any restaurant nearby 9 times out of 10 and we save boatloads of money to boot.

My brother makes most of the meals in his household.  Now, as far as my brother-in-law goes, I’d like to hire him as my personal chef.  My friends can make a mean jalapeño popper, a decent curry, and chile rellenos that make you do your best Homer Simpson-impression just thinking about them.  Am I wrong in this observation or am I just in a bubble surrounded by great men who can cook?  I was on foodnetwork.com the other day and not only are there some decent recipes but videos showing how to make the meal.  Good stuff.  So, why is it that cooking is becoming a lost art and people claim that it is so difficult?  Is it because of clever marketing, or just laziness?

Gentlemen, have a great recipe to share or a way in which a crock-pot saved your life?  Post it!

Burger photo by Yogma

My travels in Europe

I’ve been to Europe four times – Once on a backpacking and Eurail trip with some friends, once as a foreign exchange student in Madrid, Spain, and twice more back to Spain for vacation since then. One thing that has been true on all of these trips is that my most cherished memories have come not from visiting the obligatory museums and monuments, but from getting off the beaten path and seeing what things are really like in the places I’m visiting.

How do you get off the beaten path? Well, one of the simplest ways is to just start walking. I know that sounds totally obvious but I have come across many tourists in my travels in Europe that were so busy rushing from place to place that they didn’t see the really interesting things right in front of them. Most European cities are extremely amenable to just talking a stroll and taking in the sights and sounds (and sometimes the smells) of a new place. I’m told by other world travelers that this is also true in many other international destinations. It seems that the rest of the world isn’t quite as dependent on driving everywhere as we are. Here are some other ideas for getting off the beaten path:

Local festivals

While staying in Barcelona, I went to a traditional festival in one of the nearby small towns in the hills of Catalonia. There was great food, and traditional performances by Castellers, groups who form human pyramids five levels high. A couple other Americans I’d met in a hostel and myself were the only tourists there and we had quite an adventure getting back as we missed the last bus back to Barcelona and then tried calling a taxi that never came. To make a long story short, one of the locals was very generous and gave us a ride back to Barcelona! (It was about an hour out of his way to do so).

Strike up a conversation or ask the locals for a recommendation

Most people in Europe were quite friendly and willing to supply a recommendation of a favorite local restaurant or thing to do. On a train ride from Madrid to Bilbao, a city in the Basque region in the North of Spain, I was seated in a compartment with a Spanish guy who shared a six pack of Mahou (Spain’s equivalent to Budweiser) with me and gave me two recommendations for unique things to do – 1. Try Bacalao a la Vizcaina – the local specialty – salt cod in a special sauce, and 2. Watch a match of Pelota vasca or Jai-alai.

I wound up doing both things and had a great time. It was much more fun talking to people around town and asking for pointers on where to get the best Bacalao a la Vizcaina or about when the next Jai-alai match would be than it would have been bouncing from museum to museum all day long. (Though I did make the obligatory visit to the Guggenheim Musuem while I was there too). Plus, I think the locals really open up a lot more than they might for the average tourist once they realize that you’re asking questions about things that are off the beaten path and are thereby demonstrating a real interest in their city or culture.

It turned out that there weren’t any Jai-alai matches going on while I was in Bilbao, but I found out through asking around that it was possible to go by the frontón (Jai-alai court) and watch some of the players in a practice session. When I got there, I started videotaping some of it and one of the locals noticed me doing so and starting talking to me. It turns out this gentleman was a serious aficionado of the game and since I was very curious about the game, he and I wound up talking for about an hour. He went over some of the different variants of the game with me and explained what was going on during certain points of the practice match I was watching. He also knew some of the players and he asked them to sign one of the special paddles they used in the game – made of a nearly 2” thick piece of red beech - and presented it to me as a gift afterwards. I still smile every time I see it and remember my time in Bilbao – it’s the kind of souvenir money can’t buy.

Here’s a neat mini-documentary about Jai-alai:

The video is interesting, but it only talks about one version of the game, that played with the long basket-like glove called the cesta punta. In the practice match I was watching, they were playing another version in which stout paddles made of 2″ thick beech were used to hit the pelota.

Sign up for a class

If you’re traveling to an English speaking country or if you have some proficiency in the local language, signing up for a class in almost any topic is a great way to see another side of that country. The year that I lived in Spain, I went to a cooking class and learned how to make traditional Spanish dishes such as paella and tortilla española. The class was initially just a one-time deal that was set up for some of the American students but I was so enthusiastic about the topic that the teacher told me I should start coming to her regular weekly classes for Spanish people.

I went to her class almost every week for the rest of the year and came back with some wonderful memories and a recipe book that I made by taking the handouts and notes from class to a copy shop and having them bound.

If all else fails, don’t be afraid to “point and pray”

This strategy mostly refers to choosing items off of a menu in a language you don’t understand, but I think it can be expanded to mean choosing your next destination or activity as well. Your itinerary should never be so heavily scheduled that you can’t afford a day or two to take an interesting detour off the beaten path.

What are some of your most cherished travel memories that involved getting off the beaten path? We’d love to hear about it, post a comment below!

Photo of Amsterdam by MorBCN

Last night I met a girl at a friend from work’s party. We exchanged a glance or two across the room (or at least I thought we did, maybe I was just in her line of sight for the TV, ha!), I checked her finger for rings (no rings! Yea!) and later our mutual friend introduced us and we hit it off right away. Conversation flowed easily the rest of the night and appropriate humor occurred to me at the right moments like it never has in a long while- when she said she worked for the federal government, for example, I put on my best ‘wow’ face and said “are you an agent?,” even though I wasn’t really getting the law enforcement vibe from her at all and she thought it was funny.

Towards the end of the night we were talking about skiing and I said, “Well, I’ve really enjoyed talking to you tonight, would you like to go skiing with me or perhaps to dinner sometime? Can I get your number?” Well, she got that look, you all know the one, the one that speaks of some sort of inner conflict and seems to say well, I’d love to give you my number but I can’t.

Turns out someone had broken up with her that very day and she was still reeling from that blow. I understood this was a delicate situation but I persisted. 9 times out of 10 I wouldn’t have, but my inner voice was telling me to press on a little more than I usually would in her case. In the end I got her to agree to take my business card & I wrote my personal email and phone number on the back. We left the party at almost the same time and she gave me a big hug.

I’m pretty hopeful about this one actually. We don’t seem compatible on surface things – she’s East Coast, I’m native Colorado, and her manner of more formal dress and behavior was evident (though I’ve always been attracted to a well-dressed lady). We’re on opposite sides of the political spectrum, at least for this election, though I’m registered unaffiliated, so I reserve the right to change my mind! Also, she’s a smoker and I’ve always been really apprehensive about dating a smoker.

But I don’t know what it was, surface incompatibilities like those above just felt like trifles compared to the way I just instantly felt at ease around her (It didn’t hurt that she was tall, very cute and had great legs) and by the end of the night it seemed like our body language was almost like that of a couple. We were standing quite close as we talked and I could tell that part of her definitely wanted to give me her number. I can’t remember feeling this sure about wanting to see a girl again for a long time. Usually by the second or third hour of a conversation, my mind is already whirring, calculating the pros and cons of a relationship and coming up with reasons to disqualify the lady in question. With her it was just the opposite, I felt nothing but a calm inner voice telling me to proceed.

I’ve got a good feeling about this one  and even thought the timing is not optimal it’s better than it would have been one night earlier- she still would have still been dating some other dude! A month or two later, and a beauty like her might have already started dating again. No doubt it’s a tricky situation and I will have to proceed with caution but I just get this feeling it was meant to be.

Hello. My name is Brian; a proud member of this group of gentlemen, determined to hold a meaningful conversation with the men of the world, filled with substance, value, and real significance. Welcome to the new definition of the Manversation! Allow me to introduce myself and my point of view.

I’m a very young 32 year old married guy. I love who I am, but I deal with my fair share of frustration. I’m still uncertain about my direction in life. I’ve been going to school for what seems like forever but I still don’t have a degree. I work in a corporate hive of cubicles, toiling at menial office tasks, dreaming my life away. While that probably sounds depressing, it’s not meant to be. It’s not who I am.

I’m a risk-taking entrepreneur in spirit, a conservative realist in action. I’m a good athlete, and a good sport. I love my wife, and I cherish my friends. My interests include self education, technology, fishing, poker, science, racquetball, working on cars, camping, filmmaking, road trips, dogs, soccer, cooking, gardening, trivia, tinkering in the garage…okay; the list could go on forever. As I’m sure many readers can relate, my interests are so broad that it’s hard to devote all my time to just a few. You can expect this same expansive vision from my posts on this blog.

What a human being should be able to do!

One of my favorite authors is Robert A. Heinlein. I fully intend to write a post or two about the absolutely sublime science fiction he wrote and the uncanny understanding he seemed to have about where society was (is) headed. While I’m writing about a different topic today, one of my favorite quotes from his work is quite relevant. It’s from “The Notebooks of Lazarus Long” in Time Enough for Love :

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects

The above quote described the typical American of a generation or two ago

The American male of up until about the 1970’s or 1980’s or so was the epitome of this idea. (Or so I’m told, I mean let’s face it, it’s not like I’m old enough to remember much before the 1980’s). But, for the men my age (early 30’s), think about your fathers (or if need be your grandfathers – maybe the modern decline began a little earlier than I hypothesized above).

Chances are your grandfather knew how to keep his car running, participate intelligently in a town hall meeting, hunt, fish, do at least a basic amount of carpentry, take care of any basic electrical wiring that needed to be done around the house, maybe do a little welding, help his wife plant and maintain a garden, along with a whole host of other things, such as house painting and balancing his checkbook, that were so elemental to him that he probably wouldn’t have even thought of them as skills.

Going even further back, think of the rugged pioneer men and women that helped shape this great nation. Alone or in small communities on the frontier, they were their own doctors, protectors, providers, sources of entertainment, and makers / builders of all objects great and small from their homesteads to their socks.

But today, we have become “insects” or specialists

Fast forward to this modern life where we sit as so many drones in the hives of our office jobs, pushing papers, crunching numbers and otherwise doing our own special little piece of the overall work. Many friends and acquaintances were surprised, if not downright shocked, that I would choose to paint the outside of my house by myself rather than just hiring it done. Just a sampling of the reactions I got “Isn’t it pretty high?” “You should just hire a crew, it will be so worth it!” and my personal favorite from a co-worker who refuses to paint anything including interior painting (is there anything easier than that?), “Homey don’t paint!”

I’m not picking on my coworker; his attitude is actually quite typical of some modern Americans in general and the upper middle class in particular. But, I think we’ve lost something as a nation by gradually adopting this attitude. It’s true that we need to specialize more than we used to, but I don’t think that the average office worker should give up changing the oil in his car, learning to shoot a gun, or how to wire a new electrical feature in his house. Similarly, someone such as a mechanic who already works in a more manual field shouldn’t shy away from learning some things about how computers work. This pioneer spirit, “can-do” attitude and willingness to take on new tasks is what made America great in the first place and were going to need to turn to it again to stay on top in these new times of globalization and economic crisis.

Some encouraging signs

I would say that the attitude of certain so called “menial” tasks being below oneself for a professional-type person peaked in the 80’s and 90’s and that we might be seeing an encouraging reversal of the trend now. More and more people are becoming interested in recovering some of the lost skills of the average homeowner and how-to networks like HGTV and DIY network are thriving. More and more men are learning how to cook.

Also, as a woodworker, I can attest to the fact that woodworking as a hobby has seen a tremendous surge in popularity in the last ten to twenty years. We are in what I would describe as a new golden age of hand tools with high quality chisels, saws, and hand planes available from modern manufacturers such as Lie-Nielsen, Veritas, Adria and Blue Spruce Toolworks, the like of which have not been seen since they began to decline in quality sometime after WWII.

So, I think after years of being confined to “professional” office-type roles, the modern man feels a craving to round out his personality by being creative, getting his hands dirty, learning how things work and being truly useful.

Are you ready to get your hands dirty?

All right, maybe you’ve been inspired to manly action by this post. How does one get started learning some of the manly skills of the past?

• Volunteer. maybe a friend or a neighbor or your church needs help with an upcoming carpentry project. Offer to help a friend change the brake pads on his car. Getting involved in someone else’s project is a great way to learn new skills without spending any cash of your own. If you really want to go all out, I’ve heard that getting involved with a habitat for humanity project is a great way to learn some new skills.

• Look for classes at a community college. We’ve got some great community colleges where I live offering classes on a whole range of interesting topics including: carpenty, electrical wiring, plumbing, welding, photography, web design, pottery, automotive repair, etc. etc. With a relatively low commitment of time and money (most of these classes meet just once a week and cost about $300 - $400 for a 15 week class), you can learn a rewarding (and potentially money-saving or even money-making) new skill.

• Ask a friend – I’d be happy to teach any of my friends anything they wanted to know about woodworking. I’m sure you’ve got a lot of friends who’d be willing to share their expertise with you too.

• Next time you have to hire a professional, ask if you can watch or help. The last time I lived in an apartment I watched the plumber repair a leak in my shower faucet and learned a little bit about plumbing. You’re already paying them, might as well make it a learning opportunity too.

• Look it up on the internet. Well, if you’re here reading a blog on the internet, it’s not as though that’s never occurred to you, but seriously, there’s detailed instructions for everything from charging a battery to cooking Indian food available online these days. If you can’t find any other source, you don’t have an excuse any more for giving something you’re interested in a try.

Above all, I’d say just get started and don’t be afraid to fail. (Of course, make sure you know all the relevant safety procedures if you are trying something dangerous such as working with power tools), but don’t be afraid of messing up the project either. If it’s a minor home-improvement type project and you follow basic safety guidelines, the worst that will happen is you’ll just have to hire the professional you were going to in the first place, and you’ll still have learned something in the process.

The next time you have a new project to tackle, it will be even easier and before long you’ll be on your way to being one of those all-around useful guys that are admired by all around them!

Greetings and salutations all, let the Manversation begin.  Thank you for stopping by.  This first post will be about me and my interests.

My name is Nate; I am thirty two years old and have a lot of hope along with plenty of angst for what the future holds for me, my family and my friends.  The purpose of this blog is to cover some of the pressing topics we all face today.  I will tell you up front I am neither heavily political nor religious.  My interests lie in the intrinsic value of the human being, the incredible innovations we are capable of, the amazing technological advances created by the human brain, and our limitless imagination.  My absolute favorite magazine is Popular Science, which feeds my craving for what’s new and what’s on the horizon.  My ultimate dream is to have my home off the grid via a combination of solar power and wind power.  Jay Leno has been doing it for around a year and a half. I know, he has plenty of money and the reality of me being able to afford such a system is unlikely, and yes, I know the link is for popular mechanics (I said my favorite magazine is popular science) that’s just where the info is.

My reasoning for the solar and wind system is not to offset my carbon footprint or to buy “carbon credits.”  I just like to be self sufficient and through technology I am able to be. In fact, the whole idea of buying carbon credits makes my head hurt, it’s just about the dumbest idea I’ve read about in a long time.  I saw a bumper sticker on a Subaru Forester recently stating they bought enough carbon credits to offset their cars emissions for a year.  Congratulations, the sad thing is your car is still polluting and all this individual has done is made themselves feel better about it.  You are either polluting or you are not, there is no buyout option to make your emissions vanish.

Spending time with my beautiful wife is my favorite part of any day, we are well into our second year of trying for our first child, and I’ll have a series of posts chronicling the challenges of becoming a father.  If anyone else is having a hard time starting a family perhaps we can relate and talk about how sex becomes business and not so enjoyable.  I never thought it would happen but it has.

My degree is in Media Arts and Animation so naturally along with learning web design and 3d modeling, playing computer games is a part of my life, most notably Half Life 2, World of Warcraft, (yes, I said World of Warcraft, and no, I don’t spend the entire day glued to the computer, while sucking down lethal amounts of Mountain Dew, wreaking havoc in an imaginary world, all the while satisfying my ID through immense amounts of immediate gratification.  Although, I secretly wish I could.) Diablo III is coming out soon so perhaps the statement about spending time with my wife will soon be rephrased to “spending time with my divorce lawyer.”

For the times I get outside I enjoy snowboarding, hiking, wakeboarding, camping, etc.

And a final note for this first post.  I love listening to Glenn Beck.  He makes sense, and cuts through all the crap with which the mainstream media floods the public.