Posts filed under 'Personal'
Our family welcomed a new member on February 12th as my wife gave birth to Caiden James McCarthy. Everything went smooth and the whole family has been enjoying the past week together playing with him and adjusting to having five of us in the house now.
I can already tell it’s good having some more testosterone in the house, and I’ve already noticed some subtle and not-so-subtle differences between having a baby boy after having two baby girls before. It’s also amazing how quickly you fall in love with your own kids, it’s instant. Such a fascinating thing, but it also makes sense.
One of the most noticeable things to me was that leading up to the birth my wife and I both had the moments where we were a bit sad that our family dynamic would be changing. Comments like “This may be our last day at the park with just our two girls” and things of that nature. It’s actually the same thing we experienced going from one child to two in that you feel like you’re going to have less love or less attention for other children when you add a new one to the mix. However, that quickly goes out the window when you realize that adding another family member just builds the amount of love and fun in the house, and you see how much the other kids enjoy having another one around. One might argue the best gift you can give a child is a sibling.
Anyway, fatherhood continues to be an amazing experience and just makes me want to work even harder for my family while of course spending as much time with them as possible. A fine balance, but one I’ll continue to work to achieve.
February 18th, 2008
Picture:
The Garstkas
December is normally a crazy month due to the holidays, but this may be my busiest ever with the combination of that and various travel. Normally my travel is very work-based, but this month already featured a weekend trip to Laguna Beach for my best friend and coworker Brad Nelson’s wedding. It was a fantastic time with long time friends that will be a great memory to look back on.
I can’t confirm or deny that this is me being forced to dance in the classic wedding “dance circle”. I can confirm though that this is Off The Island.
This next week holds a quick trip to New York on business with a completely packed schedule. I’d like to be a tourist and check out the tree at Rockefeller Center but I doubt I’ll have time.
Then in between Christmas and New Year’s it will be down to Huntington Beach for a relative’s birthday. That should be fun though to take the kids along and do the beach and Disneyland and get hopefully a little warmth in December.
Luckily the travel will HAVE to slow down with our impending baby due in February. It’ll be nice to stick around home with the family while also doing some great work from the local office for an extended period of time. We’ve been pretty quiet at Right Media since the Right Media Open in October, but 2008 should be a very interesting year for the advertising world.
December 14th, 2007
Yesterday was my 31st birthday. As you can see above, my kids decided a great present for me would be to get a new kitten. I’m not sure if the gift was for me or for them, but so far “Jonesy” the kitten has been a fun addition around the house.
Having a birthday around Thanksgiving is both good and bad. It’s bad because Thanksgiving isn’t my favorite holiday because I don’t really like the standard Thanksgiving food, I don’t like eating dinner early in the afternoon, and having Thanksgiving leftovers isn’t a bonus for me since I didn’t like the food in the first place. However, it’s good because there’s usually family and friends in town, it’s a holiday weekend so people have time off from work and school, there’s lots of sports to watch live or on TV, and it’s a good time to reflect on things in which we are thankful.
I must say as I’ve hit 31 I’m extremely thankful for so many things in my life. I’ve reached most of the goals I sort of mentally set for myself in my early 20s both personally, professionally, and financially. My family is just amazing, as every day feels like a gift when I’m with them. I have a great set of friends who constantly make me laugh, and a job that is challenging but also rewarding. I also am just glad to have made it this far on this round rock of life, and am happy to be working in the web industry which I truly believe is changing the world for the better.
So while most people wait for the New Year’s resolutions, I like to set some goals at my birthday since it’s close enough anyway. Here goes for the 31st year of my life:
- Be a supportive husband and father as my wife is due to have our third child in February. That means a good portion of my year will be carrying around a newborn, which is an amazing experience.
- Teach my girls more. It’s hard to realize how fast they’re growing up, and I think they’re ready to try more things and learn more than I sometimes realize. I’ve erred on the side of caution in being pushy and letting them choose the things they’re interested in pursuing.
- Eat healthier. I’ve made strides here, but can continue to get better. Damn that Dr. Pepper addiction.
- Continue to excel professionally. There are constantly new challenges, skills to learn, smart people to learn from, and learning how to be a better manager and coworker.
- Give more time and money to worthy causes. I’ve been doing more of this as I grow older, but I want to do more as I’ve realized giving time, money, and support to the right causes can be a rewarding experience. I’d especially like to give more time, but that seems to be the hardest thing to come by these days.
- Learn to play the guitar. I’ve dabbled on and off in short bursts over the years, but have never truly dedicated myself to “learning” how to play well.
That seems like it’s enough for now. That’s a lot to accomplish, and some of those are hard to measure, but those are the focuses for now. It seems like most bloggers would set some blogging related goal, but I’ve learned to relax about blogging. At one point I felt a lot of internal pressure to constantly post, but now I’ve realized it suits me best to blog on my own time when I have something to say. Maybe I should set a goal to have more to say in the next year? Sure, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of my other goals!
November 27th, 2007
Due to a number of factors my blog post frequency (and quality) has drastically deteriorated over the past few months, but that’s okay. I hope to improve it as things settle down, but I haven’t had the time to dig in and do any high quality posts. In an effort to just let everyone know what’s going on at the moment I’m going to try and increase the frequency by at least doing brief updates on what’s going on around me and the business topics I blog about.
Let’s get it started:
1. I’m in San Francisco at the Web 2.0 Summit. If you’re here and would like to meet, let me know by commenting here or emailing me.
2. I’m violating company policy by making this post from a Flickr reserved cube when I don’t work for Flickr! (See above photo)
3. I think this is the 7th Yahoo!ww office I’ve been to, and yes, the majority of them are purple and yellow.
4. It’s amazing that this is the 4th year of the Web 2.0 conference. 4 years of Web 2.0? You’d think we’d be to the next version by now.
5. I’m taking on a new role with Right Media/Yahoo!, as the head of exchange product strategy. It will be fun, challenging, and probably be more work as the scope grows from focusing on tail web publishers to the entire advertising ecosystem.
6. I’ll be back in the Bay Area early next week for the Right Media Open at the Half Moon Bay Ritz. It’s turning out to look like it will be an amazing event. Not only is Jerry Yang keynoting in a fireside chat format, but we also will be having a lively competitor panel featuring DoubleClick’s CEO David Rosenblatt, DRIVEpm’s president Scott Howe, and Yahoo!/Right Media’s founder and CEO, Michael Walrath. This panel will be moderated by John Battelle.
7. I’m tired of social networking getting so much hype, yet I do still find myself mildly participating in it. I understand the hype, but frankly think that we’re quite a ways off from extracting enough revenue to justify the valuation of Facebook and other sites right now.
8. I love Oregon Duck Football, so I’m enjoying the current season with the Ducks ranked in the top 10.
9. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook is now having his informal chat with John Battelle at Web 2.0, and he’s answering questions extremely honesty. Pretty refreshing, and maybe that’s youth, but it’s fun to watch. He also seems to have quite a bit of that geek genius that some of the best companies have. Although, I must say I still don’t know that the revenue will be there.
10. My kids are growing up fast, and it seems like it’s just getting faster. I’m really enjoying it, but can already tell I’m missing things about when they were younger as well. There’s nothing better than being a parent though.
11. It’s amazing that I almost entirely read my news and educational content in my feed reader. I’m not sure if RSS is going mainstream as fast as people thought it would, but man do I love it.
12. It might be time for me to get a better car. My 94 Accord is wearing down a bit, and now that I’m driving my kids around in my car a bit more, I feel like it might be time for something newer and safer. Any suggestions?
13. 20% of the audience for Zuckerberg’s speech are currently building applications for Facebook. Impressive.
14. It’s fun getting perspectives from people you meet at conferences. People’s world views just aren’t the same.
15. Is the advertising world getting easier for web publishers yet? I think progress is bieng made, but is it enough?
Alright, that’s enough for now. More blogging soon…
October 17th, 2007
A few weeks ago my car window was bashed in during the middle of the night parked in front of my house and my stereo and sunglasses were stolen. Beyond it just being annoying that it’s against the law and to have your stuff stolen, I also had to spend time and money to get the window replaced and get a new stereo.
Then today our other car was left unlocked outside for a little while in front of my wife’s parents house in a decent neighborhood during the middle of the day while they were home, and we arrive and find out to find about 20 kids DVDs were stolen out of the car. Luckily the DVDs were all that were stolen, but it’s still really irritating. I know far greater travesties are occurring all over the world every day, but it was just another close to home reminder that human behavior is not as good as I normally think it is.
September 29th, 2007
While I love the fact that my wife and I have already been so lucky to have two wonderful girls, we found out today that we’ll be having a boy sometime this February. While I would have been very happy with another girl as well, it’s going to be a great experience to raise a boy and have a son. My wife and our girls seem very excited, but let’s just hope he’s not as much of a web nerd as I am.
September 27th, 2007
My wife informed me today that she’s pregnant with our third child! Great news, and I really feel more excited than the previous times we learned she was pregnant. I think I’m just so comfortable as a dad now and understand how great my kids are and I can’t wait to have another one. Now it’s time for the wait to see if it’ll be our third girl, which I’d love, or our first boy, which I’d also love.
Here comes another one of these troublemakers!
June 7th, 2007
I haven’t been posting much over the last week, and that’s mainly because my time at home on the computer is being spent moving from my old machine to a new Dell Dimension Desktop with Vista as the operating system.
First let me say that Vista is nice. It feels smoother, looks better, and has some nice features. However, I’ve still spent five nights moving data, installing new applications, reconfiguring applications, troubleshooting, rebooting, and more. In this day and age can’t we make it any easier to upgrade from one operating system to the other?
May 23rd, 2007
I’ll admit it, I have no system for keeping track of contacts beyond saving and archiving old email so I can look up someone’s contact information. Normally I feel like I’m on top of ways to use your computer for business and organization, but for some reason I’ve never cracked the code on contact management. So why not ask for some advice?
I’m curious as to how people are keeping track of contacts, but also how they organize them. My specific situation is that I have both personal and business contacts to track, and would like to somehow sync them so they are available to Thunderbird at home, on the web from anywhere, Outlook at work, and Outlook on my Blackberry.
Is this possible? I’ve used Yahoo Address Book a few years back, sort of use Outlook’s address book, at one point had everyone I replied to automatically added to Thunderbird’s (what a mess that ended up being), and know that there must be some decent online apps for this. Any help?
April 26th, 2007
Heading to New York in the morning for various meetings and to sync up with the mothership office. Should be a good time and it’s always good to be around the New York coworkers to get more energy and news. Blogging will be light.
February 24th, 2007
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