The fact is that most of us do pursue a lifestyle rather than following our passions. I did it without even realizing it. Of course, my lifestyle choice was stability for my family. But along the way that also included a big house, two cars, big screen TVs, game systems, and all the usual trappings of a modern, 21st century American lifestyle. And I sought out jobs that afforded me those comforts.

I’ve always said that I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. But that might be a lie I’ve told myself for the last twenty years. That’s a hard truth, isn’t it? That you’ve been lying to yourself for two decades.

I love writing. And I love comedy. I enjoy design and, to a lesser extent, programming. I crave learning new things. It’s that craving that’s let me park my career in idle for the whole of my 30s because my jobs have required me to constantly learn new things. I’ve reached a point though where that’s just not enough anymore.

What does that mean? I don’t know. Addiction to a lifestyle is like any other addiction. The first step is to admit that you have a problem. That’s all this is. Me admitting that I have a problem. I don’t know what comes next.

I have to preface this post with the fact that I missed Friday because I stayed home with strep throat. I didn’t want to be patient 0 and ruin SXSW for God knows how many people. And, because I have strep, I’m on antibiotics, which means I can’t drink. I know most of you would still go to the parties, but I’m what people call a “social drunk,” sometimes known as a sober introvert. So even though I made it to Saturday, I went home after the last session to put my son to bed after watching an episode of Dr. Who with him (the Library episode with River Song).

There are some advantages to not going until Saturday. It took me less than 10 minutes to get my badge and my bag. I had an extra day to look over the schedules and bookmark interesting sessions. I wasn’t at all hung over Saturday morning. And… that’s about it.

I always run into local friends that I haven’t seen all year. I have just as many non-local friends in town, but I always have the hardest time finding any of them. Today it was Matt Fangman. He and I are both interested in storytelling this year. Luckily, there seems to be a lot of sessions devoted to that. Visual storytelling, storytelling for your brand/company/marketing campaign, actual storytelling, talks with storytellers, well, you get the drift.

I ended up looking at the wrong day and missed “Does Your Product Have a Plot.” If anyone went to that and sees this, please send me your notes! (A good nights sleep apparently wasn’t that great of an advantage.) Baratunde Thurston’s keynote “How to Read the World,” was good. I would summarize it if I could, but I can’t. You had to be there.

Looking forward to tomorrow. Not sure what I’m going to yet. I might start out with the Yoga though. It might just make me alert enough to look at the schedule for the right day.

• First, I wasn’t eligible for the upgrade because the account was past due.
• I logged into AT&T to check.
• Called my wife to confirm she hadn’t made payment.
• Made payment.
• Went back to Apple to purchase iPhone and was eligible.
• Went through several screens and it changed our plan.
• Went to AT&T website to purchase instead but iPhone was gone.
• Logged out and back in.
• Got the iPhone purchase screen and followed the prompts.
• Discovered the plan changes were required by AT&T.
• Couldn’t find explanation of whether it would fuck up my family plan. It probably will.
• Went back to Apple because I trust them more.
• Went through the purchasing prompts.
• Debit card was declined.
• Tried again.
• Debit card was cancelled.
• Remembered that AT&T called me yesterday because they shipped me a new card because my existing one had been compromised.
• DROVE HOME.
• Picked up the new card and activated it while driving back to the office.
• Tried to purchase iPhone 4S AGAIN.

And I finally placed a successful order.

At home I found it on the nightstand, right where I left it the night before. Kissed my boy on the head again. Kissed my wife again. Left the house and drove to Starbucks again.

When I got there, the barista was so happy to see me because, on my first visit, she had sensed my dismay and made me a cup of coffee on the house. And when I drove off she wasn’t able to give it to me.

That made my day just a little bit brighter.

One day I hope to have time to read some of these.

Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design

The Art & Science of CSS

Create Stunning HTML Email

Don’t Make Me Think

Fancy Form Design

JQuery Novice to Ninja

365 AIGA Year in Design

Online Marketing Inside Out

Photography for the Web

Build Your Own Wicked WordPress Themes

The PHP Anthology

The Principles of Beautiful Web Design

The Principles of Project Management

How to be a Rockstar WordPress Designer

Sexy Web Design: Create Stunning Web Interfaces

Simply SQL

That’s it. A short but open-ended list for the year. What are your resolutions?

New Year's Eve Fireworks

This is my second attempt at a Project 365. I hear that’s normal. Rather than having to take and post a picture every single day for a year, which would not only be tedious but nearly impossible with work and family, my goals are more modest this time around.

I want to post something every day for a year.

It will usually be photos and they will usually be posted within a week of being shot, but I might also throw in sketches, wireframes, moodboards, design comps, etc.

The goal here is to be creative, hold myself to a publishing schedule and not otherwise limit myself.

The name you enter is also the name associated with your account’s billing information. Any previous reviews that you have written with a nickname will now display the name you list here instead of that nickname. To remove any reviews you have written from the iTunes Store, go to your account and click Manage Reviews.

Not only is it eroding your privacy and forcing you to use your real name for things you had previously done under a username/pseudonym, but it’s retroactively pinning your real name to things you had previously done under a username.

That’s not acceptable. Anybody who wrote a review did so with the understanding that their personal information was anonymous. In my case, the two are close enough that it doesn’t really matter one way or the other, but for a lot of other people it does.

And look, I get that Facebook uses real names and everybody wants to get on the Facebook bandwagon and, OMG, you could attach a much higher dollar value to my profile if you could associate it with me the person instead of me the random anonymous user. But you know what, fuck you. I’m not here to service your bottom line.

So I guess what I’m saying is, I probably won’t be using Ping.

p.s. This is my instant reaction. I reserve the right to calm down later but I doubt I’ll change my position. I’m just getting fed up with companies constantly trying to extract more and more of my information for their use.

Enough time passed that I had calmed down. Having a toddler will teach you a patience that playing a game never could. I was drawn back to the game. Initially playing only about an hour a week. Then two nights, then more. I was still a losing player but a trip to Vegas helped me sort that out (honest!).

But simply playing the game isn’t enough for me anymore. I’ve always wanted to combine my love of the game with my skills as a design technologist. As a result, I’ve begun to roll out my own poker news aggregator:

Chat's Poker: a Poker News Aggregator

Right now it’s a single page site inspired by Type Daily which, in turn, was inspired by POPURLS.

I rolled my own code to pull most of the feeds and add them to a local database for speed purposes and I set up a cron job to update the oldest feed every five minutes. This ensures fresh content and a quick page load. Over the coming weeks I’m going to explore better code options, like this one called “Building your own Alltop or PopURLs” from Delic. (I wish I had found that sooner…)

I’m also going to add more feeds, including hopefully more videos, some images, an Amazon bookstore, and maybe some other stuff. I’m going to build out a few other pages to break down feeds by news, instructional posts and pro blogs. And because I’m not an entirely altruistic person, I’m also going to add affiliate links to the various poker sites. I already have the top three on there: Full Tilt Poker, PokerStars and Absolute Poker.

If you want to play online poker, feel free to sign up through one of those links.

Edit: Oh, hey. It’d probably be cool if I linked to the poker news aggregator. I also linked to it upstream in the post.

Writing is a personal goal of mine and one that I will continue, but the artificial nature of the once a week construct has inhibited me. I structured the blog around the concept and the way I feature the current post dissuades me from posting shorter content that my time allows. At the other end of the spectrum there is some longer form content I’d like to write that simply can’t be completed in a week.

It’s also hampered the other goals I set out for myself at the beginning of the year and, I suspect, making progress toward those goals will provide plenty of things to talk about. At the end of the day I simply don’t have much time to devote to my personal projects so if I pick one it’s at the expense of the others. Between my job and my family I struggle the way most everybody else does, but sometimes it feels like I struggle a bit more.