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Well, Heather and I survived our first week in Colorado. Things were looking pretty good when we first rolled into town. It was about 5pm on New Year’s Day and we arrived in town just as the sun was setting behind the Rocky Mountains. That was beautiful. What wasn’t beautiful was the side roads that we had to travel to get to our yet unseen apartment. They had about 6 inches of hard packed snow and ice on them, and were very rough. After 10 years of not driving in snow very often, I had forgotten how unpleasant it is…

Our moving truck is scheduled to arrive on the 9th, but that depends on the weather. We’ve had an additional 7 inches of snow since we got here. The moving truck is a full-size semi and has to be able to maneuver the roads in order to drop our things off. If it can’t make it in, they’ll have to load our things into a smaller truck and bring that in (at significant cost to us, of course). Because we don’t have our belongings, we’ve been making do with a futon mattress, a couple of suitcases of clothes, and our computers (with no internet for the first 5 days). To entertain ourselves, we’ve been doing a lot of shopping to replenish the items that we had to sell or throw away when we left Raleigh. This has been fun, exhausting, and expensive. While I do enjoy shopping, I’m getting a bit shell shocked by the amount of money we are having to spend to get back to normal. Luckily, we made about $4,000 on things that we sold before we left (including my 53″ Pioneer Elite TV, Apple Dual G5 computer, and vintage ’60s credenza…sigh). That should help defray the costs.

Except for the side roads and not having any furniture, things have been quite nice. We’ve been running a whole house humidifier to keep from drying out. It’s been pumping over 2 gallons of water into the air each day to keep it at the recommended level! The mountains are gorgeous, especially with all of the snow on them. We can’t see them from our home, but as soon as you get out on the main road (less than a mile away), the vista is amazing. I’ll end with a summary of pros and cons comparing living in Longmont, CO to living in Raleigh, NC:

Pros

• Shopping is as good as Raleigh
• Gorgeous scenery
• Faster service and friendlier people everywhere in Longmont (Boulder is not as good)
• Roads are in a grid, and traffic lights don’t take forever to cycle
• Daylight Donuts in Boulder!!!

Cons

• Side roads don’t get plowed
• It’s cold and dry
• The mall is farther away (maybe this is good; it will be harder to spend as much money now)
• Hippies (in Boulder mainly)
• There are still a lot of medians in the road, although not as many as in Raleigh

I’ve heard this over and over from various sources: TV is bad. I grew up watching way too much TV and pretty much depended on it for 90% of my entertainment even into adulthood. Now that my wife and I sold our TV for our move, we’ve realized how dependent we were on it for taking up our time, and that disturbed us greatly. Not only that, we were paying almost $90/month to DirecTV for (mostly bad) programming and TiVo charges.

We’ve agreed that after the move, we are not going to buy a new TV. We are going to get a TV tuner for the computer that will be in the office. If there is something really special that we want to see on TV, we can watch it on the office computer. The office will hopefully be uncomfortable enough that we won’t want to veg-out and stay there the whole night gawking at the screen.

I will still set up a home theater in the house somewhere since that is my passion, but it will only be there for the occassional movie and video game. Maybe some day, I’ll be strong enough to eliminate those as well…

We’ve been in the process of moving for the past few weeks and it is astonishing, if not appalling, how much “stuff” we have. I talked about having too much stuff a few weeks ago, but I didn’t have any idea how much junk I had until we had to box it all up for the moving company.

During this boxing process, we sold our big screen TV, two computers, a futon frame, a credenza, a TiVo, and various small items throughout the house. We also made about ten trips to Goodwill with carloads of stuff that we just don’t need anymore. Even then, we still have way more boxes of stuff than we think we should have.

My wife and I have agreed that when we are unpacking the boxes at the end of our move that we need to get rid of about 25% more stuff. There is just no need for this rampant consumerism and pack rat mentality.

I’m hoping that with a new home in a new state, and my wife working a new job, that we’ll have enough impetus to completely revamp our living style and spending habits to reduce our over-spending and over-storing habits.

I might be moving for the first time in ten years from Raleigh, NC to Boulder, CO. This is actually the first time I have moved since I came to North Carolina for graduate school. Boy have times changed. When I moved here, I really didn’t have a lot of stuff to move. I rented a small U-Haul trailer and towed everything I owned down here. All of my possessions easily fit into a studio apartment with room to spare. Since then, I’ve graduated, gotten married, and worked full-time for several years. I’ve also gone from being a poor student to living quite comfortably while buying everything I’ve ever dreamed of over the years.

I guess this might just be a natural progression for someone who grew up living a fairly simple life on a farm, to making a good living in the tech sector. While I was always prone to spending when I was a kid, I didn’t have any money to buy anything with. With a decent income, it became too easy to divulge in the consumer lifestyle and fill my home with everything from home theater equipment and computers to furniture and clothes to collectibles and chatzkies. The plain fact of the matter is that the stuff accumulates.

I’ve been spending the past couple of years simplifying my life and weaning down my possessions. I used to have a home office with several computers, networking throughout the house, X10 home automation, PDAs, and everything on uninterruptible power supplies. While it was fun for a while, it was just too much complexity. I spent so much time maintaining everything that I wasn’t able to just relax and enjoy life. So I removed all of the X10 home automation, sold the PDA and UPSs, got down to a laptop and a desktop computer and switched to a simple WiFi setup. I also switched to using Apple computers in the process instead of a mishmash of Linux, Windows, and SGI UNIX machines.

In the process of simplification, I also got rid of tons of books, furniture, useless collections, and lots of other stuff that was just cluttering up the house. I have to say that the more I get rid of the better I feel. It really just boils down to the fact that

the more stuff you have, the more stuff you have to worry about.

I’m really looking forward to my move to Colorado so that I can force myself to eliminate all of the remaining junk around the house and make a clean start.

When people or companies create a product they always aspire (or shoud aspire) to create a “high quality” product. But what does that mean? When I hear “high quality,” I think of good build quality for hardware items and stability for software, or simply conformance to a specification in either case. While this kind of quality is expected of a successful product, it isn’t the only thing I look for. Truly great products are made with exceptional attention to detail.

Build quality and stability are really just one aspect of attention to detail. It’s very possible to create something that fits the definition of “high quality,” but still isn’t enjoyable to use. In the computer world, there is one company that towers over the others in attention to detail: Apple. While not infallible, Apple products have a simple elegance about them that other companies haven’t consistently been able to reproduce. Apple products generally abide by the immortal words of Antoine de Saint-Exupery:

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

This is evident in products from the iPod with its click wheel, down to mundane accessories such as a laptop power adapter with its magnetic connection and flip-up tabs to wrap the power cable around.

While most computer and consumer electronics companies have a long way to go in the “attention to detail” department, they certainly have a lot of company. Car companies (particularly American car companies) are just as big of offenders. While Dodge is obviously spending a lot of time and money on their vehicle exteriors and engines, the interiors are worse than most budget imports. I rented a Mustang recently based on the very cool “new” body design and was very unimpressed with the interior and its cheap, annoyingly reflective, and oddly out of place chrome rings around the gauges. While I like a nice body design, I spend more time looking at the interior of my car than the exterior, so I expect at least as much attention to go into the design of the interior.

I won’t say that there aren’t companies that get the attention to detail concept (Apple, BMW, ORKA, SEBO, and Linn to name a few), but it saddens me that the percentage is as small as it is. I would like to be hopeful about the future, but the fact that so many people simply accept products with no attention to detail as the norm leads me to believe that mediocre product manufacturers have the consumer-at-large right where they want them.