Three Thoughts for a Tuesday

Darn it all, I really should write this on Thursday. The alliteration would be much nicer! ...three thoughts for a Thursday...

I really don't like doing this, but I've had such a hard time finding time to blog over the past few weeks between work at work and work at home, I now feel the need to combine three completely unrelated topics into one post. Here we go, and in no particular order:

1. As a Browns fan, I am quite happy to see that the new GM, George Kokinis, is NOT making very many trades or free-agent pickups in the current player market. Let me repeat: NOT making player personnel moves in the days immediately following when veterans become free agents in the NFL can be a good thing. All too often, teams adopt a "Try to win it all this season" approach, and it only hurts their long-term prospects. The Browns tried that last year, after going 10-6 but missing the playoffs the previous season.

Perhaps the previous GM, Phil Savage, thought he only needed a few key free agent pickups to go far in the playoffs in 2008. He made two key trades, for former GB DL Corey Williams and former DET DL Shaun Rogers, which when combined with the previous trade of a draft pick to move up in 2007 to grab QB Brady Quinn, meant the Brownies had ZERO draft picks in the first four rounds of the 2008 draft. Talk about sacrificing the future for a win-now mentality!

Smart NFL GMs tend to put their money on younger players who later grow into top-notch free agents. The important thing (some would say the most important thing!) is to not overpay for previous performance. Think the Patriots really wanted to pay Matt Cassel over $14M after slapping the franchise tag on him at the end of last year? They might have not gotten enough value in return (a second round draft pick from the Chiefs) for Cassel and soon-to-be 34 year old Mike Vrabel... ...but then again, maybe they did.

2. I was saddened to see that the Rocky Mountain News went under after its last published edition last Friday. While I was a freshman (AKA Doolie, Smack, 4 smoke, etc.) at USAFA, we all had to subscribe to a newspaper in order to have three news stories memorized for the breakfast table. Woe to the 4 smokes who all subscribed to USA Today! I actually subscribed to the C. Springs Gazette-Telegraph as a freshman, and then switched to the RMN as an upperclassman. Not many cadets continued to subscribe to any newspaper after the freshman year, which was just indicative of the broader societal trend towards other sources of news and away from print media. And this was six years before the first GUI-based browser made surfing the Internet practical!

At any rate, I feel sad for the loss of the RMN, which was a great paper for two reasons: it was published in tabloid format (which made it easier to flip through), and they had a terrific comics section! Hardly anyone still reads the comics these days, I've noticed. I went out of my way to place a subscription with Comics.com, which delivers 36 different daily comic strips to my Google Reader account. Who does that?!

Other, much more well-established pundits already covered the loss of the RMN, of course. Joe Posnanski had his own thoughts on its demise, made more poignant by the fact he wanted to work there way back when. I was more shocked to hear that San Francisco might be the first major U.S. city to be completely without a major daily newspaper if a buyer for the Chronicle cannot be found.

On the one hand, I fully understand and support the move away from traditional broadcast print media like newspapers. People can and do get their news from other sources these days, right? All too often, small daily papers like the one in our town become news aggregators for sources like the AP; if I've already read those stories online, then why pay for something I have to deal with and recycle later?

On the other hand, I do wonder just where all these newly unemployed reporters will go. Think about it: without the fine investigative reporters being paid by the SF Chronicle, we wouldn't have the BALCO investigation and what we know of the story on Barry Bonds. How many reporters can the AP really absorb, anyway? And don't we want independent views of local news? There should be a way to make local reporting work outside the printed newspaper, but no one has invented it yet. The invariably poor quality of local newspaper and TV station websites is so darn depressing, they aren't worth mentioning.

3. Am I the last person on Earth without a smart phone? My sister dropped their landline and went strictly CrackBerry and cell phone. I see them everywhere, and it really is amazing to see all the things the different apps on the iPhone can do. We were driving back from The Beef House in Indiana two weekends ago, and the person driving let me check out his iPhone. While driving on the highway, I was able to check out the GPS application, put in the path for our route, and even pulled up live weather reporting (including a live radar picture!) for the local area. It's phenomenal! Even the college student working a minimum-wage job "guarding" the lobby for the building where I work has an iPhone.

And yet, I can't really see paying all that money for the monthly service plan for voice, data, Internet access, text, etc., etc. It has to be over $100 per month once you add in all the service charges and network fees, right? Plus, to get the iPhone, you either have to be happy with AT&T (NOT!), or you have to perform delicate and unsanctioned geek surgery to break it loose from the AT&T network. Not gonna happen.

Maybe we're just old-fashioned. We're contemplating swapping our landline at home (still a traditional, hard-wired landline) and two cell phones for one iPhone. The payments would roughly equal each other, since we do pay about $50 per month for our landline and $50 per month for our portion of the family cell phone plan we share with Amy's family. But then I would be without a cell phone, and we still would buy something like an Xlink BT Bluetooth cell phone gateway in order to transfer the phone calls throughout the house.

I just hate the idea of paying additional monthly service fees above and beyond what we already pay. We don't pay for cable TV service, primarily because I don't want to pay over $100 per month for high-definition TV. We do pay for the cable broadband Internet access -- the $42 we pay per month is well worth the cost to not be stuck on dial-up! We don't have an Xbox 360, primarily because I know I would want to also subscribe to the Xbox Live online community, if for no other reason than to be able to play Grifball! Tell me that doesn't look like fun! But I can't really stomach the thought of another monthly service fee. We pay for Netflix every month, but that subscription provides a great value for the price. We don't pay for a TiVO box, since that would be another monthly subscription fee. I feel like I've reached my limit when it comes to monthly subscription fees.

Even with drawing the line where I do, I know that Henry David Thoreau would be aghast at our daily lives these days. There's something to be said for the thought: "Simplify, simplify, simplify."