We had a Level 2 Ultrasound this morning and everything looks good. A Level 2 Ultrasound is a more detailed examination that looks for specific birth defects, and measures the baby's growth. The sizes seemed within expected range. The only potential concern was that the baby was moving around quite a bit so they weren't able to see the heart quite as well as they would have liked. All four chambers were there, as well as the arteries and veins. The doctor said that it's very much a "we'd like to see this better" rather than a "we're seeing something that concerns us". The baby also made it rather apparent that despite many people's (mine own included) gut feelings, the baby is, in fact, a boy. Woo-hoo! So it'll be all baseball and ponies from here instead of ponies and baseball. (Who doesn't like ponies and baseball.)

Goal #33 on my 101 in 1001 list includes making a top 10 list of books, music and movies. I'm going to start with movies. The rules for this is that they're not the 10 best movies I've ever seen, but merely the 10 movies that I consider my most favorite. These are movies that I can watch over and over again. I can quote them, and I just don't get tired of them. So, without further ado:

10) RoninChosing #10 was hard. On Netflix I have 76 movies that I've rated 5 stars. Almost all of them would qualify for this list. Ronin wins out for the most intense car chase I think I've ever seen. Combined with my love of Robert DeNiro and Jean Reno. It's an action movie with a huge amount of brains thrown in.

9) The Princess BrideIt's hard to not love this movie. It's funny, irreverent, touching, romantic, full of action. It's got pirates and princesses and swordfights and true love and Andre the Giant. By the end, you might even not mind the kissing parts so much. Also, I totally had the poster of The Fridge on my wall when I was in 6th Grade.

8) The Fifth ElementIn the future, everything is just a little bit more awsome. Including things like beuracracy, traffic, and your mom. When you're a regular guy who, thanks to a beautiful woman dropping in, has to save the universe (I mean, this happens to you all the time when you're Bruce Willis); you have to suck it up and save the world. And be totally awsome in the process.

7) Leon (aka The Professional)The hitman with the heart of gold. His fundamental rule is "No Women, No Children" anyone else is fair game. Like an eastern European ninja. But when a young girl needs his help, he turns his life upside down to rescue her. Not only from the bad guys, but from her own life.

6) Miracle on 34th Street"I believe. I believe. It's silly, but I believe." No matter what anyone says, there is magic in the world. It's entirely possible that a little old man named Kris Kringle is actually Santa Claus. It's faith in each other that makes magic possible. This would be higher on the list, but since I can only watch it between Thanksgiving and New Year, it doesn't go quite as high.

5) Office SpaceAnyone who's ever had a job that was more about doing time than doing what you love can identify with this movie. Sometimes, it's just not worth it. "Yeah, I just stare at my desk; but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work."

4) Ferris Bueller's Day OffSometime you need to take a day off. This movie is a story of friendship, loyalty, and in the end, it's about Cameron more than it's about Ferris. For Ferris, it's a fun day with is best friends, but for Cameron, it is, in a lot of ways, the begining of his life. It's also a bit of a love letter to the city of Chicago. "The question isn't 'what are we going to do,' the question is 'what aren't we going to do?'"

3) Top Gun"Too close for missles, I'm switching to guns." This was practically our battle cry in college. One of my closest friends (who is an actual pilot) and I watched this every time it was on TV, and even rented it a few times. We still watch this if it's on when we're hanging out together. It's not great film-making by any stretch, but I still tear up ever time when Goose hits the canopy.

2) The Usual SuspectsA line up of criminals that leads to a brilliant setup of corrupt cops. That in turn leads to an assult on boat. Which all turns out to be a setup. When you finally figure out "Who is Keyser Soze" it hits you like a brick to the skull. The first time I saw The Usual Suspects, I had to stop it a half hour before the end. When I came back and finished it, I rewound it and watched it again right away. It's that good.

1) The Wizard of OzWhen I was young, The Wizard of Oz was shown on TV once a year. It was a big occasion in our family. We got to stay up late to watch it. We had a big bowl of popcorn and made a major occasion out of it. Now with Tivo and DVDs, it's not quite the occasion that it used to be, but I still love sitting down and watching The Wizard of Oz. It's a beautiful movie, and it hold memories for me that make it even better.

So... what are your favorites, and why? Are there movies that you're surprised didn't make my list? Let me know!

Maggie asked how I learned to work on my budget and savings goals. I'm about to give her much more of an answer than I think she bargained for. I talked about this a bit in this post, which was mostly some backstory and where I was at the begining of last year. I didn't really talk about how we got from point A to point B and to where we are now.

There were a few things that helped tremendously in making saving work for me. The biggest was simply the fact that we got the credit cards paid off. The Credit Counseling program we were in was basically a forced Debt Snowball. When we paid that off, it freed up almost $1000 per month, which we determined to put towards other debt and savings. The keys to learning how to do this were largely from a few websites, and a book. The book is The Wealthy Barber. It's a personal finance book that reads like a novel. The advice isn't anything earth-shattering, or even terribly specific, it's just advice presented as if by a close, trusted friend. It didn't so much change how I looked at personal finance, as it changed how I looked at learning personal finance. It no longer felt like math and rules. (Now, I enjoy math and rules for some things. But There has to be an answer at the end, and personal finance isn't like that.) So I began seeking out new resources for learning about finance. Most of what I found was geared at people who were not in my situation. There was a lot of advice about investing, but not as much about getting to the point where you could invest. Much of what was out there focused on finance and finance only. Much of it seemed to only apply if you were in a career field where you worked 9-5, had weekends off, and were making at least $50,000 a year. I saw lots of advice along the lines of "eat out less, go to bars less, go to coffee shops less, go shopping less". While variations of these applied, a lot of it didn't, and it was hard to find information that I felt really applied to me. For the first time though, I not only wanted to make finances work for me, I really needed to make them work for my family.

So I found some blogs. There are several that I like, but two that I identified with and felt spoke directly to me. These are The Simple Dollar and Get Rich Slowly, which has a great forum. The forum on GRS has actually been a huge help. Seeing the successes of others, getting advice, and having an environment to talk about goals with people who are pursuing similar goals adds some serious motivation.

Overall, what I've learned is that reaching the goals (at least for me) requires following the SMART plan (Specific, Measurable, Acheivable, Realistic, Timely) and being accountable to others. That's what the graphs in the sidebar are all about. I've got a lot still to learn, but I'm making progress, and I hope that what I've learned will help others too. I'll try to put up some more specific step-by-step information in the future, and when I figure out how to budget in an effective way, I'll pass that on too. If you have any tips that've helped you deal with money, I'd love to hear about them.

Well... breakfast has been a success. I've had a cup of yogurt with grape-nuts each morning. I'm now starting to switch from the fruit-on-the-bottom to plain yogurt and mixing in frozen fruit. This will remove a lot of ingredients like the infamous high fructose corn syrup. (Considering the ingredients list in the plain yogurt is "milk".) My goal for this week was to assign blocks of time to various tasks. I discovered that my setup was fairly unreallistic. I over-reached in setting up my timeframes. I didn't allow enough downtime, nor did I build enough flexibility into my timeframes. I think I'm going to try to do this one again next week.

When the Constitution of the United States was written, the people writing it were not creating a Democracy. They were creating a Republic. They understood that the bulk of the population lacks the time, the ability, or the motivation to make politics the center of their lives. Without a near-expert level of knowledge of politics, it is difficult to make informed decisions about what laws are best for any community larger than your immediate environment. What's best for Chicago is not always what's best for Detroit. The typical citizen of Chicago isn't going to know enough about Detroit to be able to determine what's best for that city. That's why Chicago doesn't get to vote in the Detroit mayoral election. That makes sense to all of us I think. Even in this age of mass communication, this remains true. This is, in my opinion, the primary benefit to a republic. When you vote, you should be voting for someone you believe has the knowledge (and an outlook that you share) to make those decisions. This is why the Electoral College exists. However, several states, Illinois included, have decided that this isn't the best way to do things. They've decided that the current sound-bite and media driven campaign system is the best option, so rather than reforming the system to make the Electoral College work the way it's supposed to, we'll just abolish it. But, even better, we won't bother to go through the process of amending the Constitiution. That's too much like work I suppose. Rather, we'll just do an end run with the Agreement Among the States to Elect the President by National Popular Vote Act. (That's what's known as the "short title" for the bill.) In which the agreeing states will cast all of their electoral college votes based on the outcome of the popular election. This law will go into effect when it is approved by 2/3 of the states, as is required to amend the Constitution. Wait... no. It will go into effect when more than 50% of the states approve it, demonstrating a majority. Nope. Not that either. It will go into effect when states that control 50% of the electoral votes pass it. (Oh, and by the way, the law includes rules for how other states get to do things. "Any member state may withdraw from this agreement, except that a withdrawal occurring six months or less before the end of a President's term shall not become effective until a President or Vice President shall have been qualified to serve the next term."

Holy freakin' crap. Seriously? Are we, as a people, okay with this? What about the states that don't pass it? Well, their popular vote totals will be figured in, but the whole part about the Constitution being the law of the land is clearly out the window. Yes, the electoral college and the whole election progress needs some serious reform. But this seems like it's a terrible way to start. Our political system is broken. The focus has move off of representatives, who are the backbone of this system, and moved to the executives, who are supposed to merely be the hands. We have people who are choosing their presidential candidate based on 30 second campaign ads who don't know the names of their congressional representatives. We have a primary system that is set up to guarantee that the national governing bodies of the two primary political parties have the authority to decide who's vote counts and who's doesn't while insuring that anyone not in those parties won't be seen by the public.

We need to go back to a system where you can vote for someone you know and trust, rather than expecting everyone to have the knowledge of a political science professor, or to vote in a state of ignorance. But the power that's entrenched in this system knows that if the voting population was truly knowledgeable, they'd expect results. If more people understood that elected officials are our employees, there'd be a lot more firing going on. Rather than removing one avenue of electing representatives, we need to start paying more attention to who is representing us, and holding them responsible for that representation. We need more control of our government, rather than giving our govenrment more control of us. And, as always, we need to vote our hopes rather than our fears.

There is a lot of discussion happening on the Habari mailing list about the design of the Administration interface. And it's the kind of thing that we're going to have to watch carefully to prevent it from getting ugly. With all the progress we've made, this is one of the first major tests of the strenght of the Habari Community. My own experience in theater has shown me that design is complicated, and the more designers you have working on something, the harder that gets. At some point, when working with other designers, someone's concepts are going to have to be subordinate to another's. If you're putting on a production, and the scenic designer is designing a setting in modern New York City, while the costume designer is basing their designs on 1940's Europe, and the sound designer is using 1970's protest music as their base, you're going to get a mess on the stage. This is why, in theater, it's usually the director who provides the over-arching vision, and a production manager is responsible for coordinating the elements and keeping lines of communication open.

But even so, while it's easy to say "We're going to need X amount of lumber to build this platform." Chosing the shade of blue to paint that platform is something that everyone can have a different idea about without anyone being "wrong".

In Habari we face the same issue. We can agree that a particular bit of code works or doesn't work. And it's usually easy to quantify what's "better" in the code. Does it use less memory? Fewer lines? Is it more secure? Easier to use in multiple places? But things like the width of the text entry fields can have a different answer for every user. In the case of Habari, we've also eliminated one of the simplest ways to resolve these issues. We don't have a person who is "in charge" who can simply say "Do it this way." We don't have a "director" and we like it that way. But this is when removing that centralized authority creates difficulty for the project. We must come up with a model that will allow us to come to a community consensus as to what Habari will look like. Because there is no "best" when you're dealing with something that is primarily subjective, a "veto on technical merits" isn't an option. The common element between where we are in Habari, and what I've learned from theater, is that it's an issue of communication. Designers, coders and users speak different languages and there's always the risk of things being lost in translation. Building common vocabulary is where we need to start if we're going to succeed. We have to take a large number of ideas and somehow create something that is visually appealing, user friendly, innovative and comfortable all at the same time, and we must somehow do this without sacrificing our primary principal of community inclusion.

This is our first big test. I don't know how we'll work through this, but I think we will all benefit from the lessons we're going to learn about how to design by community without ending up with something that looks like it was designed by a comittee.