Me (to wife, also in the room): Can you find a model number on it?
Both Girls (While jumping up and down and moving their feet, speaking in unison): 5---5---7---0----0
Niece (still dancing): I figured if we put that in Google we could find out more about it.
Me (walking from room): My work here is done.

This phone was given to me by my parents some years ago.  They had purchased a number of them years ago here in West Michigan - as I recall the story was the phone company was selling these off after transitioning to newer technology some time in the 1960’s.  Dad had rigged up two as an intercom between the house and garage, and the leftovers were stored.

After receiving this one it was stored longer - in our early married years we moved a few times and never wanted to mount it until we had settled down.  I came across the phone again in a purging binge and decided it either had to be sold off or used - I was tired of it sitting on a shelf.  Some time online checking it’s potential value found that we weren’t going to make a house payment by selling it, so I decided to put it to use instead. Some measuring and experimentation found that its interior dimensions were well-suited to holding normal size envelopes, so I set about reclaiming it as a mail organizer.

The first order of business was to remove most of the guts of the phone—a bit of a pity since you could still turn the crank and make the bells ring.

Then I got some scrap sheet metal, and a few hours with a cut-off wheel and my welder netted an organizer rack to fit in where the hand-crank original generator was:

I made another shelf for the lower portion of the phone - so now incoming and outgoing mail store in the top and notecards/postage store in the bottom:

Looking to mount the phone it was clear the best place was right over the live phone jack.  Which, of course, I couldn’t do without making the phone actually ring. So I purchased this Remote Bell Ringer for Radio Shack and installed it into the phone (you can see it in the previous picture in the middle shelf area).  The ringer uses an actual brass bell - so the phone rings and sounds almost authentic.  It’s a bit muted being inside the door but still plenty loud.  There’s just something pleasing about it’s sound that’s missing in newer electronic phones.

Here’s the phone mounted into place:

I love these kinds of projects - turning something old and beautiful but essentially useless into something old, beautiful and useful. 

We’re looking for a Creative Writing Tutor for my 9 year old daughter.  Ideally we’d like someone experienced in working with kids, accomplished as a writer of fiction, comfortable with technology (email, Skype, blogs, etc), and available on a flexible schedule. 

If this is you or someone you know please Contact Me.

I’m sorry.  I really am.

But I am fresh out of energy to pick yet another username, fill in another profile, again list out my interests, find and choose “friends” or otherwise participate in your new “community”.

I know - I know.  It’s really cool.  It’s the latest thing.  It’s Web 2.0, it’s community-generated something or other.  It’ll add so much value to my life—I’ll know what my friends like and dislike, I’ll find people that share my interests, other people will find and adore me, I’ll be engaged, energized, actualized and empowered by using your....thing.

It’s just that—I’m already on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace (yes, in a moment of social networking weakness), Pownce, del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, Rollyo, YouTube, Flickr, Skype, three different discussion forums, a couple of IM accounts, plus a few sites that I know I signed up for but can’t remember the name.

I’m just. so. tired. of having to re-define myself to every new web site/service that comes along.  Seriously - enough already.  Either figure out how to connect to a place where I’ve entered all that data, or be gone.  I just can’t find the energy to repeat myself that much.

And - I’m concerned that with all the meta-data, tagging, commenting, bookmarking and sharing going on that I’m forgetting the more important piece—creating. 

Sincerely,
Becoming Antisocial
Holland, MI

But between twitter and the new blog on Train-ee.com I’m actually a bit unsure what to use the Boyink.com blog for anymore.

So today it’s on taking long road trips with kids…

As many of you know we recently attended SXSW which is in Austin, Texas.  Last fall while we parents were secretly considering booking the trip my kids starting voicing the desire to somehow get to Texas for a different reason—to see their Grandparents (my folks) who winter in the Mission, TX area.  I’ll save you a trip to Google maps - Mission is just about as far south as you can go in Texas, and is just a few miles from the Border of Mexico.

At the same time as these two different trips were being discussed and considered, it was also the Christmas season.  In years past I’ve been able to do some sort of special “daddy gift” for my kids - which is usually something home-made and comes just from me.  I’ve written them stories, built toys, and the year before created blogs for them that reside on our family extranet.  This year I had nothing.  No good ideas and not as much time to work on it as usual.

So we had the grand idea to combine the two trips—get down to my folks for some Grandparent time, and fit in the SXSW visit as well.  This way some of the trip costs could be written off as a business expense, the kids would get their wish, and the trip could be my special gift to them by announcing it via a wrapped present on Christmas morning.

In reviewing every possible way of making this trip it really became clear that the cheapest way to do it would be to drive.  Well, fine - except for we live in West Michigan - a round trip of approximately 3200 miles.  Or, at my rough estimate of an average of 60 MPH, roughly 53 hours of driving. 

With two kids.

Yes, visions of Chevy Chase and the Vacation movie came immediately to mind - not helped by the fact that our daily driver is this 1996 Buick Roadmaster station wagon complete with fake woodgrain sides.  We’ve affectionately dubbed it “Edna” in honor of the Great Aunt in the movie:

What spurred me to finally sit down and write this blog post today was seeing this post and comic:  When We Were Kids on StuffThatHappens.com.

See - one of my big concerns (or pet peeve) these days is how often we plug our kids into something with a screen so that they can be entertained - and we as parents can “get a break”.  People think some sort of DVD player is a “must for long trips”.  Don’t get me wrong - we’ve used “movies as baby-sitters” too—it’s just that I think there’s a point where being in front of a screen too much just isn’t healthy.  We’ve taken steps to reduce it in our home life - mostly by getting rid of cable TV, doing movies more as a family event, not having a game console of any sort, and limiting the time that the kids are on the computer.

Families have been taking long road trips for years without the aid of screens in our vehicles - so I don’t agree that “it’s a must”.  I think it’s just the easy way out.  Without the electronic babysitter the onus falls back on parents to help fill that time and keep kids attention on something besides “how long until we’re there?” And that takes work, no doubt.

So for us and our trip the first decision after “let’s drive it” was “with no DVD’s, video games or iPods”.  I wanted the driving hours to be time together as a family - and not just an empty void to fill.  I wanted the kids to actually see things on the way - to get an idea of how other areas of the country were different and how other people live, and just how big the world is outside of our home.

I should throw in here - for those of you who don’t know - we’re also homeschoolers.  One nice part about homeschooling is that trips like this aren’t occasions to pull the kids out of school so much as they are about taking school on the road.  Homeschooling also tends to also change your focus - from looking at how to most easily get through potentially boring periods of time to how you can turn that time into teachable moments, or how to fill it with creative activity.

We had some time before the trip - so were able to do some research and brainstorming for how to fill that time.  MsBoyink checked out books on road games, and we reserved some books and new music on CD from the library.  We found websites like MomsMiniVan.com that had all kinds of simple (non-electronic) ideas for road games and toys. 

I remembered trips I had taken as a young boy and that my folks had daily “road trip gifts” wrapped up for us - so each day would start with a new gift to open and play with.  One of them (and here I’m dating myself) was this Super Add O Matic grocery store mechanical calculator.  We had hours of fun with these - choosing different things to count and having contests to see who could count the most.  I missed a couple of these on eBay so bought some simple lap counters instead. 

So - how did it go?  Really, really well. 

The lap counters were a hit - we listened to the kids clicking those things for hours.  It’s amazing how something as simple as counting can keep you engaged and actively scanning the landscape or road going by rather than focusing on how long you’ve been traveling.  The stories on CD worked well - except for having to turn them off when important route changes were coming up. 

Another hit was some balloon animal kids MsBoyink had found - consisting of a small air pump and balloons.  I was happy to see these got played with much longer than the handheld electronic “Deal or No Deal” game we bought. 

We discovered a mutual love for the Beach Boys and even attempted some harmony singing together.  On the way home we came across a Christian station on the radio - and we a bit of church on the road.  Listening to the kids young voices singing along with the praise songs they knew while driving through the countryside in Arkansas on a sunny day will always be a special memory of mine.

Now - I had the kids blog what they liked about the trip, and neither of them listed the drive time.  No surprise there - but they also didn’t list it in the 3 things they didn’t like about the trip.  It wasn’t all sunny, filled with music and laughter.  But for me, when I hear the phrase “quality family time” I never count just the “happy time” as quality.  Working through the missed highway interchanges, the need for a bathroom break soon, the squabbles about what music to listen to, the waiting for the food to warm up on the camp stove—those moments aren’t ones to throw away either as they are moments to learn about how to deal with stress, how to interact with others during stressful moments, and learning ways to avoid that stress in the future.

I had great fun telling people at SXSW that we drove - and seeing their reactions.  While other folks might avoid long family road trips, for me it was something I both looked forward to and enjoyed doing.  And would do again. 

But not too soon.

These are mainly for myself - so that if the opportunity comes up again next year I can look back and see what I’d do the same or differently.  These are going to be somewhat stream-of-consciousness - so just be forewarned. 

Accommodations
This is where my SXSW experience will be dramatically different than the norm.  We made the trip down as a family, folding in the conference after a visit to my parents in South Texas.  Between being more of the camping sort than hotel-staying sort, and wanting a bit of distance from party scene that goes with the conference, we booked a fully-equipped cabin at the Austin Lone Star RV Park. 

The advantage of this was largely economical - the cabin was about 1/2 the cost of a downtown hotel room.  It also allowed my family to be in more of a camping setting when I was at SXSW events - we had bikes along for the kids, there was a pool and playground, etc. 

Disadvantages?  A change in ownership between booking and visiting meant the wi-fi that was promoted as free was now an additional cost.  $15/week wasn’t bad, but the service was neither fast or reliable.  The last two nights it was totally down, and the park offered no after-hours support for it.  Also - what the park doesn’t make clear is their location, Look at their site - see that picture of people using the pool? They are swimming about 20 feet from a frontage road that runs alongside IH-35 in Austin.  The traffic on that road clips along at about 70MPH, so it wasn’t as idyllic of a setting as we had expected.  Also, the park is located right next to an adult movie theater.  They have lots of bushes and fences and all, but still - these two things meant the playground was out of bounds for our kids as it was also right next to the frontage road, on the movie theater side, and outside the campground’s main gate.

Other than that the cabin worked as well as can be expected with four bodies in a relatively small space.

Transportation
The campground ended up being about 1/4 mile from the southern terminus of the city bus line, so on the first day in town we walked to the station, bought our $1 ticket and rode downtown to register for SXSW.  This was a good experience for us, as we’re pretty typical suburban dwellers and don’t use public transportation much.  Once we had the route figured out it was a pretty easy ride, and that $1 ticket is good for 24 hours so it’s quite the deal.

After the first day, however, it was just easier to have MsBoyink drop me downtown.  The bus ride was at least 30 minutes, and she could get me there in half that.  She and the kids would then go on to do other things around Austin - visiting local parks, etc.

I did have one night where it was too late to get her (and the kids) to come get me, so I gave in and got a cab back to the campground.  At $22, it was a one-time experience.  The driver acted like he didn’t have the right change so I kinda felt like he was trying to get a $8 tip out of the deal.  Sorry bud, you just met a Dutchman…

All in all accommodations and transportation were good for us - but in the future I’d really like to be right downtown.  Not that I need to be that close to all the action, but less time between deciding to call it a night and actually putting my head to a pillow would be nice.  It’d also be nice to have a spot for during the day downtimes - so I could grab a nap or shower.  I’m just not sure how busy/noisy the hotels are with all the other SXSW attendees.

Registering
We got to the convention center around 10:00, and there was no waiting to register.  The whole process was very efficient and I have to commend both the volunteers and whoever organizes them.  They did seem amused by the fact that we came in as a family - I guess that was a bit of a novelty.

EllisLab Events
Meeting and hanging out with the EL folks was really my primary goal for the trip.  We started Friday night with supper where most of the “meeting face to face for the first time” stuff took place.  This virtual world is interesting - on the one hand with blogs, email, forums and IM I felt like I knew them but nothing can replace actually meeting in person.  According to Rick I “looked like my picture only taller”....  After supper I left them to fine-tune the presentation for the next day. 

Saturday was a long one - while not directly involved in the presentation or open panel I tried to help out where I could.  I took a bunch of pics with Rick’s camera (hope some of them turned out), manned the room lights, tweaked the sound board, ran the mic around to people wanting to ask questions, and talked to people.  It was really nice to meet a continual stream of EE users, and have so many people mention the tutorials.  Thanks again folks - your comments are most gratifying.

Saturday night was the EllisLab party.  I had my family show up a bit early as I wanted them to meet the EllisLab folks as well before things got too busy.  After about an hour things were too busy so after getting some food down they returned to the cabin.  I stuck around for the rest of the EL party, then continued on to the Solspace event.  Along the way we were the attempted targets of some egg-throwers, and after getting to the bar we learned that they had successfully nailed Rick Ellis. One of those moments where having no hair and a leather coat came in handy. 

I was pretty whipped by this point - so didn’t move around much at this event. I did however have some good conversations with some local EE guys - crazy to drive so far to do, but there you go.

Sunday was the EL brunch, then we took in the trade show, and then had some lunch downtown.  It was mid afternoon by this point so the group was going to break up for a few hours before supper.  The planned supper conflicted with my plans for the http://sxsw.geekslovebowling.com/ event later that evening, so we said our goodbyes on the sidewalk and I returned to the convention center for a bit of catching up on email and feeding the introvert side of me.  I know there were panels I could have attended but I just needed some down time.

Photos of the EL events can be found on Flickr in both this group and this one - with more coming as there was a photographer hired to cover the party.

Bowling
Nathan Smith of http://sonspring.com/ and http://www.godbit.com had invited me to be on his bowling team.  I didn’t know in advance what a big deal this event was - but soon after I joined Nathan’s team the event filled up with 52 teams.  On the bus ride to the bowling alley I ended up sitting next Alex of http://nclud.com/about/ - one of the organizers of the event.

The bowling alley was just chaos.  They were running out of shoes - although I was lucky to get a pair about 1.5 sizes too big.  Lots of folks ended up bowling in socks.  I hadn’t eaten because I had heard there would be food there - but I never was able to get any.  The bag of peanuts in my backpack saved the day.

The teams were organized alphabetically - and we were team “404 - team not found” which is cool on the website but meant that we were left-most in the alley with the wall on one side.  Overall it felt like we were a bit isolated back there - and while bowling itself was fun between our location and the business of bowling I didn’t get quite the experience I was hoping for.  If I return next year I’ll just go as a spectator so I can be a bit freer to mingle.  I rolled a 142 on the first game - not bad - but the second I think was a 110.  Not great - but with ill fitting shoes and balls about what you could expect.

Overall I was surprised at just how, well, just plain sloppy drunk people will get at events like this.  Don’t get me wrong - I like beer and all, but there’s just no way I’d drink that much in a more professional setting around people I really don’t know.  Sitting in the bus waiting to go back downtown I was talking with a guy across the isle - asking him where he worked and what he did. He was an OS programmer for Apple and I thought he had a bit of an accent.  Then he got up to talk to someone further back in the bus, and I realized it wasn’t an accent - he was so tipsy he was slurring his words.  And then he stumbled into me, having to brace himself against my shoulder to avoid completely falling in my lap.  After righting himself he walked away without so much as an “I’m sorry” or “pardon me”.  After that episode I just have a slightly different view of Apple, and would hate it if I ever did something similar and caused someone to have a poorer perception of either Boyink Interactive or EllisLab.

The Other Sessions
By this point it was Monday, and I finally had the chance to take in a couple of the other sessions.  One had Guy Kawasaki moderating, and his intent of being more “entertaining than informative” was certainly met. It was an hour filled with lots of laughs, but if I were building a social network of any sort I’m not sure I would have walked out with any actionable advice.

I was really surprised at the amount of expletives coming from the panel members - maybe I’m a bit sheltered living here in W. MI, but I don’t hear people talking like that in the conversations I have on a day in and day out basis, and frankly I thought it made them sound like a preteenager trying to come off as older and more experienced.

The other panel I went to was DesignEye for SouthBy, where a group of some of the industry’s best talent take on a site and improve it.  This one disappointed me a bit in that they decided to focus more on the outcome rather than the process.  For me, I knew this group could produce some really great-looking stuff.  I was more interested in learning how they got there, and what possible methodologies they used that I could incorporate into my work.

When the Q&A period degenerated into questions like “Why did you use such a big blue banner” it was time to go.  It was starting to sound too much like the post EE 2.0 comments for me—too many people worried about the color scheme rather than focusing on the functionality and architecture.

Godbit Dinner
The other main reason I had for attending SXSW was meeting some of the folks from the http://www.godbit.com site.  Monday night there was a dinner scheduled and it was a great time—meeting some familiar faces and some guys I hadn’t before.  My family came down for this one as well - and I won a prize for driving the furthest.  Lots of good conversation, and we shut the event down.  I left feeling like maybe there is hope yet for the Church online - I think this group has the talent to really change the world.

The End
The Godbit dinner was the last SXSW event I attended.  Tuesday the weather looked nice, so I took the family to San Antonio for a visit to the Alamo and the Riverwalk.  After a long afternoon of playing tourist we returned to the cabin and started to pack for the return trip.  Neither MsBoyink or I could sleep very well, so at 3:30AM we got up and started prepping the van.  At 4:30 we loaded the kids in and started the two-day journey home.

I’m still in recovery/analysis of the whole experience but overall it was really good.  I got to meet a bunch of people I’ve been interacting online on a daily basis with.  I was surprised at how, out of all the conversations I had, only 2 people had never heard of ExpressionEngine and how many of the people who had heard of it had either used it for a project or were evaluating it.  For a product that has never really been actively advertised that kind of mindshare with it’s target audience is pretty amazing.

I’m not much for the party scene, my session experience was a bit iffy, and much of the conference seems like an ego game—so I’m not sure I’d attend SXSW again without any more specific activities or goals.  But if EllisLab, other work partners or clients are planning more specific events I’d definitely go again.  It was nice having the family there, but I think next time I’d either go alone or just with MsBoyink so I could be in work-mode more without feeling like I also had to be in family-mode.

And - I’d fly.

But I just need to say it again—for ExpressionEngine-based projects or not, EngineHosting just rocks.  I’ve been a happy customer of theirs - for client sites, Boyink.com (and now Train-ee) - for a few years now and have had nothing but good experiences every time I’ve contacted them.  It’s so nice to be able to pitch projects and make a recommendation for hosting with 100% confidence that my clients will be happy with the service.

Lately I had an issue that was somewhat “outside of the box” and Nevin responded in a very generous manner.  I don’t know if he’s a drinking man but I am looking forward to buying him a beverage of his choice at the upcoming SXSW conference.

Thanks again EngineHosting!

How would our website’s messaging change if the American Marketing Association had a Message Validator?

How would our site’s architecture change if the Information Architecture Institute offered an Architecture Validator?

How would our site’s content change if the Web Content Professionals offered a Content Validator?

How would our site’s design change if the American Institute of Graphic Arts offered a Design Validator?

How would our lives change if God offered a Life Validator?

Today I got that chance—there was a local show of them where 5 of the cars showed up, and we were suprised to hear the owners were taking turns giving out rides.

Did we want to?  You bet!  I think I was just as excited as my two kids were.

We got a ride in a “Regatta Red” version owned by Marc of Dearborn MI - a super nice guy who patiently answered our questions about the car—which I’m sure were the same basic questions as everyone else had asked. I do have to say - that few seconds of approaching the boat launch in a car and not stopping just plain felt wrong - but also as fun as I ever imagined.

I took a few video clips and put them up on YouTube for your enjoyment:

Oh - I forgot to mention.  On these old boards there are no such niceties as “bindings”...you’re literally just standing on a bunch of large staples set into the top surface of the board.