Team Espinoza

I have been thinking a lot lately about Facebook and about what I share online. I used to think that what I shared on Facebook was at least somewhat private with only those I am friends with on Facebook. This is not true anymore. Reality is that Facebook is not private.

Facebook  recently started a project called “Facebook Open Graph” which allows users to connect socially with participating websites. Basically you will be seeing more “Like” buttons around the web. When you come to a site it will personalize your experience on that site based on your information in your Facebook account.

PC World explains Open Graph this way,

For example, a visitor to a participating news site or a music-sharing site could be served up content upon arrival based on previously stated preferences on Facebook or participating sites. The visitor could also see a list of Facebook friends who are already registered on the other site, and even what comments they have posted there.

Sure this can be great, especially if I really love that music artist’s site I am visiting. This also scares me a little bit. Do I really want all these companies to have access to my personal information?

Facebook is growing and they are pushing an “everyone” button that makes your updates public. (Source: this blog post)

Most websites are defaulted to publicly share what you upload. Flickr, Twitter, and many other sites have already been doing it for a long time. It isn’t a bad thing, but we do need to be aware of this. With sites like Gowalla and Four Square becoming more popular it is becoming ingrained in our culture.

All of this brings up two important realizations for me:

1. Facebook is becoming public and it can do whatever it wants with my information. It is their site – they can share it!  It isn’t their fault either, because I put my information there in the first place. Although, I do wish that they would have told me all that upfront. Mashable did a great article on this called, “In defense of Facebook.”

My defense: Start putting less information on Facebook. I am putting my information on their servers when I update my Facebook status and upload my photos. Instead, Daniel and I will be updating our blog here more often. We own this domain and rent the server it is hosted on. We technically own whatever information we put on it. Yes, it is still public, but it will be harder for companies and websites to have access to our information.

2. Nothing I say online is private. My twitter stream is searchable. Any of my FB friends can copy & paste my statuses and my photos. Almost anyone can tag you in a photo.

My defense: If there is something I truly want to stay private – then I just don’t say it online! I have recently started a letter writing project with a friend and I am loving this old school way of keeping things a little more private and personal. This doesn’t mean I won’t ever say anything personal online. I will still share my struggles and thoughts. I loved my post about Jealousy and I will continue to write posts like those. I just have to know that what I say will be out there forever. My hope is that I will never publish anything that I will be ashamed of in the future. Because really, if I am going to be embarrassed over something I said, then I shouldn’t say it in the first place!

I do love connecting with friends on Facebook. I have had many friends quitting Facebook, because it is a distraction for them. If I really wanted to quit a distraction then I should give up playing my Scrabble games with friends on my iPhone. I don’t think reading statuses is a distraction for myself. Although sometimes I read things that rile me up and I have to choose to ignore them. But really, I do want to see your vacation pics and know where you are eating. I will still be reading statuses and commenting, but you won’t see my statuses in your news feeds.  Instead, they will be over here at my site and I am okay if that means fewer people reading them.
Resources:

“In Defense of Facebook” on Mashable.com

FB’s Open Graph Project

“Privacy is dead, and social media hold smoking gun”on CNN.com

“Facebook Wants the Webs Default to Be Social” on PCWorld.com

A little weekend fun.

I LOVE my 5 Dollars Dinners cookbook. A lot of the recipes use basic ingredients that I usually have on hand. The author, Erin Chase, believes that eating healthier means eating fewer processed foods.

The book has many bread recipes. One way she suggests saving money is by baking your own bread. A hot French loaf at my store costs almost $3. My homemade loaf costs around $ .50. It can save money, but not time. A loaf of French bread can be made in an hour in the shortest amount of time. Today it took me about 1 hour and fifteen minutes.

The first photo is my FIRST attempt at bread ever. It tasted okay, but it wasn’t pretty. In my second attempt I wasn’t afraid to really knead the bread and make it soft. It was so good to eat with olive oil. It also made my house smell heavenly!

Watching my girl play in the backyard by herself for the first time. She wanted “to go play!” She even put her strappy sandals on all by herself.

Little Brother wants to go out and play too but he might eat a lizard or something so I can’t let him out there without my eagle eye. This moment is a little surreal for me.

Here she is coming back inside with all her dolls.

I started thinking that I’d like to blog about Lifestyle Design, but when I thought about where to start I realized that I needed to lay some ground work.  It helps to have a few terms and know where this all began.

The Questions

In 2007 when my daughter was born and Amanda became a stay-at-home mom, the prospect of leaving them each day before 8:00 a.m. and returning home after 6:00 p.m. (depending on traffic) for five out of seven days a week and having some of the left over hours interrupted by “on call” duties started becoming less and less attractive.  I didn’t want to miss so much time with my family to provide for them, working at a job that I didn’t really like, with co-workers that were superficial friends at best.  I started asking questions like “Why am I doing this?”, “Is there another way to provide for the family?”, “Where is my career going?” and “What do I want to do with my life?”

Lifestyle Design

In his book “The 4-Hour Work Week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich“, Timothy Ferriss explains Lifestyle Design as a technique of the “New Rich” (NR), those that “abandon the deferred-life plan and create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of the New Rich: time and mobility.”   Now when you read “New Rich” don’t assume this is a type off nouveau riche where the goal is to scheme and steal so that one can get rich quick and hob nob at the country club all day.  A main point of the definition is realigning importance and value, or currency, to different things: time and money.  We each have 24 hours in a day, but how many of those hours are truly at your discretion and how many are sold to an employer in order to “pay the bills.”  Lifestyle Design (LD) is the design of one’s ideal lifestyle that aligns to a person’s interests and aptitudes, elimination of the irrelevant, and liberation from any single location.  Our situation is different from the classic LD since we have two kids, but many of the ideas can still be explored and applied.

Deferred-Life Plan

Ask yourself: When do you want to retire?  What do you want to do when you retire?  Does retirement represent a freedom  from work that is somewhere in the distant future?  According to LD’ers the deferred-life plan is one of the biggest modern myths – that you need to work your entire youth away in order to save for a distant future when you’ll be able to afford to sit on a beach, old and wrinkled.   Another definition of the deferred-life plan is putting off what you really want to do for what is expected of you.  College, Job, Marriage, Kids.  Doing what you have to do, in order to get to do what you want to do.  LD’ers embrace the concept that by chucking the old life recipe and re factoring their lives using unconventional methods will provide ample opportunities for personal growth, leisure, adventure, and fulfillment.

An Experiment, Not a Plan

Lifestyle Design means different things to different people, so there is no set plan of execution.  I like to think of this more as an experiment.  The good old scientific method that we all learned in high school:  Hypothesis, experiment, observation, then testing results.  I haven’t come across very many husband-of-one/father-of-two lifestyle designer, as most of the authors and bloggers tend to be single guys.  We’ve been walking down this path for almost three years and we have had some success as well as some crushing failure.  I’ll explain more about that in future posts.  That being said I look forward to discussing how we have applied the ideas of LD so far and where this will take us in the future!

Here is some further reading on LD:

Tim Ferriss’s blog: The Four Hour Workweek

Free Pursuits blog: Are You Putting Off Life Until Later?

Project Mojave’s Lifestyle Design Resources

Update: Two more blogs that are more focused on business and minimalism, but are still good reads:

Untemplater

Far Beyond the Stars

Amanda and I have been enjoying the first season of the sitcom “Community”.  We love it’s witty writing, character development, and obscure pop-culture references.  After the first few episodes of the show, and while The Office was in a writing slump, I formally disavowed the Michael Scott Variety (half) Hour for the funny new kid on the block.

One thing that has added immensely to my enjoyment of the show has been following most (come on Chevy Chase!) of the main actors of the show on Twitter.  Twitter may be a PR rep’s nightmare, but it’s a fan’s best friend.  Magazine articles, entertainment news pieces – these are all filtered through the perspective of the medium’s gatekeepers.  Tweets, as far as I can tell, are the actor’s own words.  Proof of this claim would be some NSFW posts by Mr. Donald Glover and semi-private tidbits added by all.  Although the personalities of the actor’s characters are left on-screen, their humor and joyful banter carries over into their real-life interactions.

Here are some sample tweets along with the accounts of the Community cast:

This level of access has only been available since the advent of the blog, but Twitter definitely took it to another level.  I wonder what it would have been like watching Seinfeld and being able to follow Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer’s Twitter stream?

“The 5 Phases of Caffeine Intake” - This makes me laugh. I think of this comic often.

So does this one, “10 Reasons to Avoid Talking on the Phone.” Warning:  It has some mild crude humor.

I have set a goal to read 36 books this year. That is 3 books a month and completely doable. So far I am on track! I got behind on updating my books list, but it is updated now. If you need a book to read browse through my list if you would like.

I’m having lunch downtown with JD today and he just happens to office in the Weston Center – the site of Amanda and my wedding seven years ago. Riding down the elevator from the parking garage into the lobby where the reception was held I remembered the excitement and nervousness I felt that day. I still remember that night well: seeing Amanda in her dress for the first time (before the ceremony), our first communion as man and wife, our “dance dance revolution” reception, and leaving via river barge. So many GREAT memories!

The second picture shows where the ceremony was held. Their is now a retaining wall on the grass hill making it a little different from how it was for our day.

I wanted to see “Green Zone” with Matt Damon since I saw the first preview a few months back. When I finally had the opportunity to watch it there was only one theater showing it. This made me wonder if the move had made an early exit due to not being very good.

That assumption was far from the truth. The movie is a contemporary war movie set in May of 2003 after the invasion of Iraq. It follows a Chief Warrant Officer (Damon) as he searches for WMD in a chaotic occupied Bagdad. Since the ‘enemy’ is supposedly conquered, the role of antagonist falls to one of the government officials whose role it is to sow the seeds of democracy.

The movie has plenty of action and a complex intertwined plot. I decided to leave the politics of the subject out of my viewing and just enjoy the story.

Although this certainly isn’t Bourne IV, Damon is convincing in the lead action role.

The movie is based on a book written by the Washington Post bureau chief that was stationed in the Green Zone.

Since this movie is not long for theaters, I suggest you grab it when it’s on DVD.