Real Joe

Everything’s coming together nicely on the site. More graphical finetuning from my son Collin over the weekend. I got a CGI script for a “recommend this page to a friend” feature. Got HTML email working. And I began opening up topics in the discussion boards today.
There will still be tons of stuff not completed but unless something really goes haywire, I plan to open it up the doors this Wed, Nov 1…. a so-called ’soft launch’ which means, I’m not going to promote it yet but the URL www.realjoe.com will actually bring up the site instead of a “coming soon” page as it does now. I added a ‘take a peek’ link to the page tonight.
More family medical problems hit this week, only this time extended family instead of immediate. Both my dad and my sister are in the hospital. I wonder if there’s a way these crises could bring us together a little more? I’ll try to keep that frame of mind.
I was thrilled to see the announcement that the Blogger folks now have a wireless site for posting to individual blogs. I’ll try it out in the morning after I visit my dad in the hospital up in St. Paul… because, alas, I can’t get a wireless connection from my house or office here in Northfield.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd titled her Oct 25 column Boys Going Batty. She noted the “testosterone moment” in the World Series when Yankee pitcher Roger Clemens threw a piece of Mets catcher Mike Piazza’s broken bat at him (sorta). It reminded her of Al Gore’s and George W. Bush’s attempts to be more manly in the waning days of this presidential campaign. Funny stuff.
Plenty of women talk or write disparagingly of men who act this way, including my wife. But just as many (including Robbie) make snide remarks about men acting like wimps for one reason or another. I started to write that it’s a tricky balancing act… and then realized that saying that conveys the crux of the dilemma. The more I try to be acceptably manly–not too wimpy, not too macho–the more likely I get into trouble because I’m trying to please or fit in or project an image. As Susan Faludi noted in her book “Stiffed,” this has been pretty much a women’s disease in our culture, but since World War II, men have contracted it bigtime. Lots more to say on this, since my dad was a bully and I’ve spent much of my lifetime trying not to be a wimp is his eyes. But that’ll have to wait for a full-blown article.

Essay: Scoring Points. Cashing in.

The art of scoring points with a woman escaped me for much of my marriage. My dad’s philosophy seemed to be that a guy was just supposed to be his own man and if the partners were a good match, it’d work out. Any extra effort to be ‘nice’ or ‘kind’ could be seen as pandering to a woman, edging too close to that dangerous moment when—if you weren’t careful—your wife would “have ya by the balls.” … MORE—>>

My son Collin whipped up a new RJ logo and banner last night. In about five minutes. I like it a lot.

It’s amazing to me that someone could do something like that so quick. My design skills are zilch. He gets it from his mother. So today I’ll take his color scheme and spread it throughout the site. It’ll be great to finally have something that looks cool. I can now order new business cards, and can start thinking about merchandise, like shirts, mugs, mousepads, etc. I’d like to have something to give to the guys who help me launch the message boards and other interactive areas of the site.

Last night I installed a mailing list software package called Subscribe Me Pro on the Real Joe server. It initially seemed foolish to spend $300 on this when there are plenty of list packages out there for free that do a decent job, not to mention the fancy ad-supported and hosted packages like eWayDirect.
But I wanted one that had powerful browser-based admin capabilities, one that would allow people to easily subscribe and unsubscribe to several lists at once (choosing HTML or text versions), and lastly, one that would allow me to track the effectiveness of the links that I include in the outgoing emails. Fellow Minnesotan entrepreneur Matt Noah of NetSuds recommended it.

I had to haul out some dusty old unix commands to get the thing installed. Old friends, from back at my McGraw-Hill days in the late eighties: chmod, and ls -l, mainly. I tried vi, just for old-time sake, but then switched to pico. Whew.
I got it all installed and working after a couple hours, just enough time to head back home and catch the last few innings of Game 3 of the Subway Series. I pumped my fist in a small gesture of satisfaction as I walked out the door. This morning, it occurred to me that I’m a tool guy, of sorts. And I sat down to crank out this week’s article on the subject.

I got a notice from Kent Nerburn’s email list that he’s got the first chapter of his new book up on his site, tentatively titled, Road Angels: Driving on the Edge of the American Dream. It’s evidently the new version of a book he never published, titled Left Coast Odyssey: Dispatches from America’s Coast of Dreams which I found listed (but not available) on both Amazon.com and Half.com.
I’ve read most of his books and linked to one of them (Make Me An Instrument of Your Peace) in my prayer piece that I wrote in August. I also wrote a review for his book Letters to My Son way back in 1993 when I worked at Utne Reader magazine. A short blurb from that review ultimately ended up on the cover of the paperback edition: “Clear and gentle guidance about the big issues in life… Nerburn delivers an eloquent spiritual philosophy to fathers in a way that men can easily hear.”

A few years later, the book was boiled down into a smaller version, with the title adapted from my review: Simple Truths: Clear & Gentle Guidance on the Big Issues in Life. I got a kick out of that and ultimately met Kent when he did an author’s reading/signing at bookstore in the Twin Cities. He was quite appreciative.
Nerburn’s books are part of what inspired me to start Real Joe. He’s one of the few guys writing about spiritual stuff using plain language and his own life experiences.
I read the chapter (online) last night and am looking forward to the rest of it. I took a solo trip to the mountains in an old pickup truck (‘50 Ford) when I was in college, back in the summer of ‘68 but haven’t done anything like it since. A mid-life one like this one of his would definitely be interesting, though I don’t really feel the itch for it like he evidently did.

Yesterday, Robbie and I had lunch at Pepitos with a bunch of people we worked with thirty years ago at St. Joseph’s Home for Children in south Minneapolis. It was my first job (child care worker) after college… and it was there that she and I met and fell in love.

It’s pretty unusual for a group of people who worked together for only a few years (two, in my case; five for Robbie) to be regularly getting together socially with one another after three decades. It’s a testimony to the culture, the leadership, and the shared commitment that was present.
I’ve only come close to this experience once before, and that was with gofast.net, now part of Agiliti. The gofast web site pages that reflect a bit of the culture we had are still up, I recently discovered… inadvertantly, of course, so shhhhhh. Take a look around starting with the About Us page, especially the party and staff pages.

I spend a good chunk of the weekend redesigning the structure of the website, and getting rid of all the stuff that’s not likely to be ready by the time I ’soft-launch’ the site early in November.
I also tried to adopt the advice of my two web designer sons, Collin and Tyson, who spent about an hour last week telling me what to do. Collin’s working on some color schemes and icons and maybe a new logo.

I purchased a hosted version of Web Crossing for the discussion board platform last week. And I purchased the Enterprise version of Subscribe Me Pro for my mailing list services.
I’m getting closer.

Essay: A Little SOS Goes a Long Way

It’s taken me too long to figure out that a Shot of Solitude (SOS) several times a week is a damn good tool for all things head-related. I’ve known for a while that when I need to get my shit together about something, grabbing a little SOS first somehow makes it easier. More recently, it’s dawned on me… MORE—>>

Robbie and I got back from the New England Gamma Knife Center in Rhode Island two weeks ago where she went for treatment for her non-cancerous brain tumor. Each day (for five days) she had a series of gamma knife treatments where she got 23 shots of radiation. Each one took from 1-4 minutes (depending on the location/dosage), but it took 5-10 minutes for them to set up her head for each dose, so the whole thing took about 3 hours each day. I took some pictures because her head gear was pretty funny looking. The screws that go into her skull to hold it on were a bit gruesome, tho. Definitely Frankensteinish.
The gamma knife radiation machine was very cool looking, right out of Star Wars, and the software that her doctor used to set it all up is really amazing. He’s quite the neat guy, and after he went through the whole plan with us, we were more convinced than ever that she made the right decision to go there.
She’s doing pretty well since we got back. She tires easily and her symptoms are pretty much the same, some days worse than others. They put her on some steroids for a couple of weeks to see if that helps. She’s also going for acupuncture twice per week.
We’re glad to be finished with this phase, so now it’s just wait for 6 months till the next MRI to see if there are signs that the tumor’s dying and shrinking.