Looking up at the chandelier in the rotunda inside Jamestowne Settlement. I’ve spent a lot of time there of late.

The second time is just as awesome, but a lot less nerve-wracking. It’s just plain exciting.

Merrystar and I are expecting a baby girl sometime around July 28th. T is very excited about his new little sister.

As are we all.

I, along with much of my family, had the flu down there. But really - there are worse places to have the flu.

The first few days were foggy. That’s okay. I like foggy beaches.

And then it was windy, and then it was calm. Very, very calm.

More photos are on Flickr.

So I used most of my vacation to take most December off and do a whole lot of nuthin’. And that meant a whole lot of not doing stuff on the internet, which was a surprising relief.

Instead, I picked up a video game. World of Warcraft, to be exact.

You know what? Tons of fun. Love it. It’s gorgeous, immersive, and exciting to explore. But I’m also glad that I’m trying it out now, in my mid-thirties with a family and job, and not in my single early twenties. I totally see why people spend to much time on it.

But best of all, even though I was online, I didn’t feel any stress about it.

The stress of being online is the stress of wanting to do quality work for you to see. Is a post well-written and interesting, is this tweet funny, is this picture any good? All small questions that aren’t a big deal unless you’re really ready to set it all aside.

The only stress I felt in World of Warcraft was how to kite some mobs, or apply my DoTs in the best order. I mean, c’mon — the worst that can happen is that you die and have to spend a few minutes running back to your corpse. It’s not a high pressure situation.

Anyhow. I spent a lot of time on my vacation running around with my wife and kid. I twittered about it, a little. I played some video games and took a few pictures, some of which will be making their way online.

Eventually.

There just seems to be less of a rush now.

I came back from my two-week vacation this week, ignored my overflowing inbox for two days, and then demolished it in under two hours. No stress, just 800 email messages gone and me getting back to work.

Here’s how I did it.

• Archive everything into a single folder and use search. In Outlook, I create a rule that puts a copy of everything that comes into my Inbox into a folder called Archive. I always have a copy filed away without ever having to think about it.
• Don’t manage tasks out of your inbox. Read each email and ask: do I need to do something here? Put it on your task list and then delete the message.
• Delete ruthlessly. Once you’ve extracted whatever information or tasks you have from a message, delete it. Don’t leave it hanging around in your Inbox taking up mental space — it’s already filed in your Archive!
• Read in Conversation view. Most Outlook users top-post (it’s the default), so any given message will contain the entire thread in it. Conversation view (or Threaded view) lets you delete the entire thread once you’re done.
• Work in chunks. Spending all day in your email is a good way to not get any real work done; process it twice a day and then get back to work.

I’m really a big fan of deleting my email. Deleting is satisfying. It says: I have extracted what I need out of this message, and it no longer serves any purpose. Deleting is also quick. It is a single button to push, a single action to take. There is no thought about where to file a message — just remove it from the queue.

My strategy is directly influenced from two places: The Best Outlook Tip in the World, and Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero series. I used to be a compulsive Ctrl-Shift-V email filer, but watching Merlin’s Inbox Zero video really changed how I thought about email.

This system may not be right for you. It’s not even always right for me.

But this week, it worked pretty well.

The kids got an early start this year, but the 7-8 hour was pretty quiet. Only had 85 total, down from last year’s record of 91.

Trip wanted to be Sock Man this year, so Merrystar made a great costume for him. He even wore it!

But aside from one house in his grandparents’ neighborhood, he was still more interested in handing out candy than going out and collecting it.

Ah well. Marches to the beat of his own drummer, and all that.

But it’s also kinda sad.

I have been politically Independent since I was old enough to vote. I have never come out and told people who I was voting for, let alone who I think you should vote for. Why should I? Make up your own damn mind. That’s what it’s there for.

But by not speaking out, however, I’ve been a passive recipient of the Bush Administration’s steady assault on the rule of law over the past eight years. Habeas corpus? Gone. Fourth amendment? Gone for the 75% of the population living with 100 miles of a border. Legalized torture, willful disregard of the Geneva Conventions, illegal wiretapping, unprecedented expansion of executive powers, massive federal debt, and a shattered economy? We have them. (And that’s just the short list!)

Not this time.

I am voting for Barack Obama and Joe Biden next Tuesday. And I think you should, too.

I considered John McCain’s candidacy for a long time. I was impressed by his campaign in 2000, and that favorable impression lasted for a long time. But the last eight years have left us with a very, very different America, and a very different John McCain.

• We need someone who can run their campaign based on people’s hopes, instead of people’s fears. I am tired of being afraid of my government.

• We need someone who is articulate, intelligent, and open to new ways, instead of experienced with the old ways of getting things done. I have had enough of the old ways.

• We need to have someone who is careful, considerate, and who listens to other people’s advice before acting.

After watching Barack Obama for the last year and a half, I think he is the man for the job. His speech on race, A More Perfect Union, is a gutsy yet thoughtful look at race in America. While his speech to the Democratic National Convention shows that the man can talk the birds out of the trees, it was A More Perfect Union that first made me go, I want this man to succeed. Listening to any political figure talk about a complicated, messy issue and acknowledge that there are many shades of gray in between black and white gave me great hope for how he’ll address other issues.

And I have not been disappointed.

I know that many of you do not live in a state where you think your vote will matter. But it does. Don’t throw it away. Even in Texas, don’t throw it away. I live in a swing state that was never supposed to be a swing state. But with the belief and hard work from a lot of people, that’s changed.

It can change where you are, too.

Listen: I haven’t forgotten Barack Obama is a politician, with all the fallibility that goes with that job. I don’t believe that he’ll deliver on every single campaign promise. I don’t even expect that he’ll deliver on most of them.

But he’ll deliver on one of the biggest — hope for a better future — and on another — that with hard work we will get there.

So get out there and vote for Barack Obama on November 4th.

I got the Eye-Fi Share this week. It is generally great, but has some quirks.

Pros:

• Uploads to local folder/iPhoto and Flickr
• Easy to set up
• Dead simple to use
• Does just what it says

Cons:

• Slower writes than other SD cards
• Can’t do burst photography
• Movies are limited in length
• Only works on one wifi network
• Burns out batteries pretty quickly
• Photo uploads hammer network
• Camera is yet another thing to check

Overall, I’m happy with it. The burst mode thing got me at a birthday party, but I got over it. It’s really simple to use, and making me consider Flickr as a primary photo repository.

Amazon rolled out a Universal Wish List feature, which lets you add anything from any online store and add it to your Amazon Wish List.

Ten years ago at Trilogy we rolled out something very similar — a single site designed to centralize your wishlist with items from all over the web. It worked well technically, but not financially.

I’m glad to see the idea reappear and be so well executed.

Mostly, it’s Twitter’s fault; the volume of posts overwhelms the non-follower. Archiving them to LiveJournal didn’t help, mostly because no one knew I even had it! And reading the different flows via the badges on the front page is disjointed and lacks flow.

I’m taking Banjocat up on her suggestion that a quick summary of keeping track of me online is in order, and then doing something about the scattered pieces.

The short version: non-internet-obsessed friends go here, maybe here, and if you don’t know where my son’s site is, email me. Zen Masta Steve and Iron Chef Meat might find this interesting, too. And this is good if you’re pressed for time and need a laugh.

You don’t have to follow anything else. Not even this site.

The long version:

First, I post things from me to only six sites:

• Nobody Wants a Stylus, where I talk about iPhones and other technical babble,
• Brett’s Logjam, which has turned almost entirely into a personal log, and I haven’t been sure of where it’s going for about eight years now,
• Twitter, which is a 140-character stream of chatter from my cell phone. The bits that other people like wind up on Favrd or Favotter,
• Flickr, for my photographs,
• My son’s site, which is both the most active and the cutest of all my blogs,
• And, the latest, I just started a blog for Yahzie, my MkIV turbo Jetta.

(As an aside: frankly, this is crazy. It’s not as insane as my elsewhere page is, but it’s still insane.)

Second, I post things from other sites to only one place: Appendix A.

The last time I was in a consolidating mood, I dumped everything into this feed. That didn’t work: normal posts got overwhelmed by little trivial updates. People should be able to choose what they want in addition to getting it all in one place. Some folks are happy reading these infrequent updates. Others try to follow the Twitter firehose, while others just like the pictures.

So.

With all this in mind, I went ahead and created Brettbot-147, an automated site that pulls from my two main weblogs, Twitter, and Flickr. You can read it on the web, follow it in an RSS reader, or even subscribe to daily emails.

I have something similar already in place for my kid’s blog, which if you don’t know the URL just ping me for it. I’ll leave my car’s blog and Appendix A alone for now.

Holy crap. I totally have to redo my home page.

(Hopefully, it won’t hit him as hard as it hit his parents.)

A few odds-and-ends:

• I am both sad to see Cameron Hunt leave professional web design behind, and glad to see him moving on towards things that make him happy. No matter how good you are at something (and Cameron’s got mad skillz, as the kids say today), you’ve got to do what makes you happy. Best of luck with what comes next, Cam.

• A hearty welcome to all the folks coming here from Jason Snell’s Macworld podcast on the MacBook Air. I would like to say that CoolBook fixed my MacBook Air problems, but I’d returned it under the 30-day period and gotten a black MacBook instead. No hard feelings with the Air, though — maybe next time. You may enjoy my iPhone blog, Nobody Wants a Styl.us.

I’ve got some changes coming up with some of my sites, but I’ll leave those in the bag until they’re ready to escape.

It’s been a rough week. I lost my voice early on, but finally started feeling human again on Thursday. Of course I pushed too hard on Friday and paid for it yesterday. Fatigue is the real problem right now.

Having talked to about a half-dozen people who have had this (including Merrystar, who had the exact symptoms before it went into a sinus infection), it pretty much runs 2-3 weeks barring complications. Nearly everyone reports complications, either a sinus infection or bronchitis.

The fatigue reportedly lasts a few weeks after the coughing, aching and fever go away. I’m reading the collected works of David and Leigh Eddings to keep my mind busy while it passes.

Fortunately, Trip seems to have escaped the worst of it; his biggest problem right now is that he’s decided to get up in the middle of the night and talk to his mother, which is not doing either of them any good. Well, that, and also that I’m really short-tempered right now with a voice like a very angry bear. No, really — I could seriously sing lead vocals for Morbid Angel. It’s that deep.

Tip: tired kids don’t take well to being growled at, at any volume. Just sayin’.

So… how’re you doing?

Merrystar’s recovery from her first sinus infection continued apace, and I thought we were out of the woods yesterday.

Sadly, I slept 9 hours last night and woke up with the first-stage symptoms of the virus that took her out 2 weeks ago.

HINT: when you’re paler than your red-haired wife, you’re NOT doing well.

So.

As much as I’d like to write about the iPhone 3G / Mobile Me / iPhone 2.0 OS launch, or even play around with them, I’m going to sleep this weekend and see if I can avoid losing the next two weeks.

Wish me luck.

This weekend I realized that I have a few guitars too many, and resolved to either get them into playable shape or get rid of them. I kept one acoustic and one electric, and put the rest up for consignment at Amory Music in Five Forks.

The Ibanez GSR-200 bass guitar isn’t worth dwelling on too much; it was a serviceable instrument that I never played. Seriously — I got it twelve years ago in the event that I might play bass again, someday, in some theoretical band. I won’t miss it, because there’s no history between us. We’re strangers.

The Jackson JDR-94 Reverse Dinky and I, however — we have history.

Dark blue, with the crazy-aggressive reverse Jackson headstock, it wasn’t a wallflower. I don’t have many concert pictures from the mid-nineties, but I used the Jackson (pictured here, in concert with The Lozenges) the way it was meant to be used: to play grinding, grungy metal and alternative rock. Good times.

(Well… mostly.)

I don’t have any studio-quality tapes from that time to let you hear how the guitar sounded back then. Heck, I don’t even have any good quality tapes from that time. But I dug up an old practice tape of mine from 1994 with a band called Mostly Harmless, which at least preserved the noise from the jam sessions. (“Sound boards? We don’t need no stinkin’ sound boards.” sigh)

You can hear the Jackson on the tracks below:

• Hologram
• Onyx Sun
• Joan of Arc

(I did mention the production quality is non-existent, right? Right.)

On the first track it’s the rhythm guitar, and somehow manages to not cut totally loose until the 5:30 mark. The second track has no such qualms: next to the drums, it’s the loudest instrument in the room. The third track is sadly missing the guitar solo at the end that is present on a few other versions, but the rest of the mix on those takes is so bad that I can’t in any good conscience put it online.

It’s a good guitar, and I hope it finds a good home with someone else. If you’re looking for guitars in the Williamsburg area, please consider stopping by Amory Music and giving it a try.

But it’s time for me to let go, and move on.