The Captain: Rebirth Issue 4

Previously in The Captain: Rebirth......I lost weight. Had surgery. Got depressed. Moped around. Got a baby. Moved. Had surgery again.

Issue #4 - 2015: The Most Humbling Year....Not Necessarily in a Good Way

This issue actually opens in November of 2014. I had just had surgery on my right knee for a similar injury as my left knee. This was different though. My left knee was due to heavy lifting and stress during 2 back-to-back moves. This was just me. I had done this. My weight had put too much strain on my knees and caused this damage. This hit me pretty hard. I was in a REALLY bad place. Add that to the usual holiday depression and anxiety it was just a perfect storm of sadness. I went into 2015 feeling worse than I did going into 2013. Little did I know the hits would just keep on coming.

In December my boss had a sit down with me about my job performance. It had slipped due to my depression and people were beginning to notice. I started 2015 knowing things needed to change at work if nothing else. I really did try, but my heart was not in it and I knew it was time to start looking at other options. The baby, now pretty much a toddler, was continuing to be the enemy of everything so I was not getting any workouts in. In my continuing poser theme I bought a new piece of workout equipment that has just sat in my garage ever since. Once again I made all these grand plans that I did not follow through with. Every time I was going to start a workout program (4am is the best time for me to work out which sucks) the baby would not sleep through the night or he would get up stupid early. I would basically tell myself, "well you could not start today so you should just not even bother." I am REALLY good at persuading myself not to work out. It's the great ironies of being fat: A: you eat because you are unhappy that you are fat, which makes you fatter, and 2: you have no energy to work out because you are fat but if you would work out you would not be fat and would have more energy. The universe is really stupid sometimes.

I coasted through the 1st several months of 2015 business as usual. In April things with work really got exciting. Back near the end of 2014 I became a Google for Education Certified Trainer. I was so proud. This was the biggest professional accomplishment I had ever achieved. In February I presented several sessions at the annual educational technology conference in Austin. Things were looking great professionally except at my actual job. My wife and had decided to use our tax refund to pay off my car. I had never done this before and was super excited. I went to the bank and wrote the final check and went back to work. I was asked to come speak with my boss at 2pm that afternoon. It was not a good meeting. Long story short in the course of about 5 hours I went from elated that I paid off my car to crushed because I had lost my job. Not only had I lost my job but I had to run out my contract which still had 2 months on it. That was awful.

This disappointment led into the summer where I still had no job. Most people do not realize jobs are like relationships and job hunting is like dating. You go out looking for jobs (single people) and go on interviews (dates) and hope they like you enough to at least continue to see you for a while. Job hunting is the worst. I hated it. I had so many times I was SURE I had the job only to be fed a line about going another way. I was beginning to question my entire career choice and wondering if I had made a terrible mistake in choosing this profession. I did eventually find a new job, but that did not change the fact that based on my contract with both jobs I was going to be without pay for the North end of 90 days. Let me explain that again: after being laid off and finding a new job I was still going 3 months without pay. The only shining light in all this job business was I got the summer off to spend with my kids.

The summer ended and it was time for me to start my new job. I was NOT looking forward to this job. I felt like I had settled. I did not want to go back in the classroom but I had to have a job. The fall semester of work was unlike anything I had expected. I LOVE my job! Everything was coming together so serendipitously. I really felt like things were looking up. The only downside is I drive an hour to and from work every day which is not very fun. This job also allowed me to get my very 1st professional training gig which was a lot of fun. Things are going really well, despite a few setbacks I can't talk about here, and I am actually enjoying work. For the 1st time in possibly ever I feel like this is where I am supposed to be professionally. This whole experience was very humbling. I had never lost a job before and it truly made me appreciate what I had.

2015 had one more sucker punch in store, but since this post started getting a bit long-winded I decided to break it into 2 posts. Hell if Harry Potter, Twilight, Hunger Games, and Divergent can do it, why not? Peter Jackson can stretch a single book in to 9 hours worth of a movie; I can split a wordy blog post into 2. That being said stay tuned for the final installment -- The Captain: Rebirth Issue #4.5: The Final Insult

\m/ THERE IS NO TRY \m/

In Defense of Android (Part the 2nd)

Previously, on Geek in the Heart of Texas... My EVO crashed and I had decided to try out a custom mod. Around this same time I was given a tablet to test drive...

So I had been researching custom Android mods for a while and had come to the conclusion that CyanogenMod was the way to go. I read up on how to flash the rom and was ready. Using Revolutionary, I rooted my phone and flashed CyanogenMod 7 (CM7). It was like I had a brand new phone. I was amazed at how much better CM7 was than the stock HTC Sense UI. I found no issues with apps or anything. It made me love Android that much more. I have played around with jail breaking and iPhone and was not really impressed. This is so much better.

Around this same time I was given a Viewsonic GTab to play around with as a potential gift for my grandfather. The stock rom and UI is TERRIBLE. Five minutes after using it I went searching for a new mod. I decided to go with CM7 as well. Now it is a bit buggy being a tablet and a custom mod, but it works beautifully. I have used my iPad less and less since getting this tablet. If I can figure out how to load my eboks on it, I may not have much more use for my iPad. I would love to get my hands on a proper Android tablet, but this one it pretty slick.

Overall, my experience has been wonderful. My biggest obstacle was how to get out of Android what I was getting out of iOS. Below is a list of things I needed my Android to do that my iPhone/iPad did and how it solved it. Many times the solution works better on Android...

Sync Contacts, Calendars, Email, etc.: I use Gmail and Google Calendar. With my iPhone it was hard to keep my Gmail contacts clean because my Amy (my iMac) always wanted seemed to duplicate entries. I used iCal and had the same results. Android syncs to the cloud seamlessly and I have no problems with duplicate entries.

Sync Music: iTunes does not sync with Android well, and OSX even less. I use Amazon Cloud and Google Music. Prefer Google Music.

Apps: on this, they are about even. Although I do like that I can buy and app from Amazon from anywhere and download it later. Such as at work where I do not have wifi or a good signal. I can buy an app on Amazon and download it when I get home. I no longer have to wait until I have a signal or get back to Amy to buy apps. I can buy it right then and don't have to worry about forgetting.

eBooks: I still use my iPad for iBooks. I have a really good reader on my GTab, but I am still struggling with adding content. iOS wins that round.

Storage: I CAN UPGRADE MY STORAGE! I recently bought a 32GB card for my phone. With iPhone you must decide at that moment what storage space you want and hope its enough. Also, I can take the card out and load it as an external drive to manage files if I need to.

Podcasts: Recently, as in this week, I have found a podcast aggrigator that will download my podcasts directly to my phone so I do not have to carry around a separate device for my podcasts. This can be done in iOS as I understand it, but this keeps me from having to carry more than one device.

In closing, I love iOS. I loved my iPhone. I love my iPad. Android serves my purposes better. Hopefully if you are on the fence about whether to go iOS or Android, this helped a little. Now that the iPhone is on Sprint, I have been asked several times if I am going to go back to an iPhone when my upgrade comes around. No, I am not. Android works for me and I can't see myself going back to iOS for my phone.

In Defense of Android (Part 1)...

Let me start by saying that I am a Mac guy. I love Macs. I only use Windows at work and when I MUST at home (usually for work-related stuff). I have had many different iPods. Personally the 4th Generation iPod Nano is the best iPod ever. Currently I have a MacBook Pro (Suzie), an iMac (Amy) (best desktop machine I have ever owned), and an old G4 (Suzanne) I just can't bare to part with. I also have (between my wife and I) 2 iPads, 2 iPod Nanos, and an iPod Touch. I think iOS is a great operating system and it does what it does VERY well. There are some amazing apps, I loved my iPhone 3gs dearly, and I think the 4gs is an awesome device. I said all of that to say this...

I LOVE ANDROID! When my wife and I got married in March of 2011 I had to leave AT&T and go to Sprint. This was hard. Not that I was heartbroken to leave AT&T, though I do love having no frakking service. Ever. The hard part was I was giving up my iPhone (Gwen) (yes, all my Apples have names). I was crushed. I was saying goodbye to my beloved Gwen. I had anxiously awaited my upgrade so I could get an iPhone 4, and now I was having to walk away. I had been interested in Android for a bit and knew I wanted to get an Android phone. I did some research and my buddy @ErikH1981 suggested I get an EVO 4G. So I went to Best Buy and got my EVO. It was fun, but I still missed my iPhone. I began to explore the ins and outs of Android and became increasingly impressed with what it could do. Mainly I was impressed with how seamlessly everything integrated. I use just about every Google service available and Android being a Google OS worked out perfectly for me. My Gmail, Calendar, Tasks, and everything were there and worked out of the box. I had several issues getting everything to sync with my iPhone. I still carried Gwen around with me as an iPod Touch because I just could not cut the cord. I noticed I was using it less and less. I realized I had moved on when I went to check on something and I had let the battery run completely down. I was now an Android user.

About six months in to my Android experience, the unthinkable happened... my EVO crashed. I thought I had lost everything because I had never synced my EVO*. So I did a full system restore back to factory and prayed. I had all my data back and was able to re-download my apps from the Market**. I was amazed. The "cloud" sync worked wonderfully (much better than I have since seen with iCloud). Many months later, I had another crash and was not worried since the last crash recovered so well. Since I was going to have to go back to factory and "start over" anyway I took this opportunity to do what I had been considering doing for awhile: install a custom mod.

That's it for Part 1. Part 2 will cover my experience with an Android tablet, Cyanogen Mod, and where my Android voyage is headed next. \m/



*what I found to be a downside at first was lack of native sync with Mac for Android, or any phone that does not start with i.

**I greatly prefer to Amazon Apps Store over the Android Market