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Golf Ball Audit

Linda and I moved into our current residence on North Balboa Drive in Maricopa, AZ in March of 2012. The house sits about 200 yards from the silver tee box on the sixth hole of The Duke Golf Course. Our neighbors to our north get most of the golf ball traffic but we get our share. Linda and I did a quick audit of our collection so far and here is what we found.

In the 22 months since we moved in, we have collected 163 balls. That is 7.4 balls per month which works out to roughly one ball every four days. What I found the most interesting is the distribution of brand names. Here is a quick look.

Here is my question. Do errant Titleist balls end up in our yard by far the most because they are the worst balls, or is it as I suspect because they are simply the most popular? Seems nothing, not even shelling out four times the cash for better balls, keeps you in the fairway. Does this albeit anecdotal piece of data give you pause, and cause, to rethink before ponying up for an expensive ball? As for me, I am going to be teeing off soon with one of my new used Titlelists.

Owen

P.S. In the chart above, if we collected five or less of your brand of golf ball, you got lumped as ‘other’ but more than five and you got your own category.

P.S.S. Here is the count by brand:
Titlelist 55
Callaway 23
Pinnacle 10
Nike 14
Top Flight 16
Precept 2
Dixon 2
Srixon 3
Dunlop 4
Noodle 5
Taylormade 5
WIlson 7
Bridgestone 8
(Not worth mentioning as there was only one ball per brand) 9

December 29, 2013
A Blender and a Paperback Book

I had a dream last month that I was back in college. In this dream I was hanging out with Jason Poenitske, my roommate for most of my college career at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green. In the dream, I was having trouble finding our room. Once I did, Jason already had things setup. He had two small tube televisions setup, one mounted on a stand hanging from the wall in a corner over his bed, and a bigger tube set shared more with the room. I came into the room, assessed it, and said to Jason that all I’d need was my desk.

I’m not exactly sure which desk I was referring to. The desk I work on now is much bigger than the room; much bigger than the ones I had in any of the dorm rooms we lived in, be that Barnes-Campbell, or what was then named the New Coed Dorm. However, I also didn’t have all of the computer equipment I have now. No work laptop. No Mac. No monitors. No Printer. Not really even a phone, much less a cell phone. I did have a stereo boom-box with a cd player and a dozen or so CDs. Besides the small stereo boom-box, our room’s tech amounted to Jason’s small television, an original Nintendo game console, and two alarm clocks. In the dream I made the comment that there was a really big difference between technology back then, when we graduated, he in 1996 and me in 1997, as opposed to now. Not even flat screens.

I guess my dream was about how much different life is in 2013. How technology has changed life in certain ways. How little we needed back then as opposed to what we think we can’t live without now. A few days ago my wife and I were talking about how little television either of us watched when we were in school. I remember watching maybe a few hours of tv a week, tops. Most of that was probably Star Trek, Golf, or music videos back when MTV actually played music videos.

Now that I think about it, that scenario is a lot like when we go on vacation. We put our gadgets in the room safe until we’re ready to leave and we never turn on the tv. The most high tech devices we see all week would probably be a blender and a paperback book.

Owen

August 17, 2013
Baby Henrik, Forbes, and The Future of Photo Sharing

I haven’t written in a few weeks. That’s not exactly out of the ordinary, but now that I have a new baby at home I have a new excuse. Anyway, speaking of baby Henrik, I took some time this morning to upload a few new pictures to his Henrik Flickr set.

I then took a few minutes to browse my Flickr View Statistics. I’m up over 53,000 views? Cool. That was fun to see, but what was really cool, blew me away really, was the discovery that Forbes had used some of my work (picture) on there site!

Depending on when you read this, you might still be able to catch the Forbes post here. If not, I just had to take a screenshot of the page, in case for some reason they decided to take it down.

Some of you are asking, how can Forbes use my work and I not even know about it? Allow me to explain. I have just about all of my work under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic. All I ask for is a little something called Attribution. I have had it that way for some time but I recently watched a Chase Jarvis Live episode ‘The Future of Photo Sharing‘ that confirmed that decision. If you share photos anywhere on the internet, this is worth watching; especially if you might ever want to monetize.

One last thing. Here’s another one, posted on http://www.reputation.com. It’s the thumbs up, or Facebook Like picture that’s been viewed almost 12,000 times, but you do have to look closer to the end of the post to see it.

Thanks for indulging me and my ego. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Owen

August 15, 2013
Henrik Gets Swaddled – Video

Linda and I stayed a few extra days at the hospital after Henrik was born. During this time we had nurses coming in at all times during the day and night. We asked each one to show us how to properly swaddle, as most of the videos I ran across on YouTube seemed to focus more on the person doing the swaddling as opposed to the actual swaddle technique itself.

Funny thing was, not a single nurse showed us the same exact swaddle technique. As a result, I wasn’t able to perfectly recreate any of the swaddles. It seemed I was missing a few quick steps that the nurses would just do, without actually mentioning the step, because they’ve done this a thousand times a day for years. I finally asked one of the nurses if she would mind me taking a video so I could watch it over and over again. This is that video.

Note: This was also a test. WordPress wants $60.00 a year to allow me to use their video host a share service. Plus I would likely need to also pay them to rent more space. As a Flickr Pro account holder, I can host and share without limits, at a fraction of the cost. This was a test to see what Flickr Video looks like when posted on a WordPress Blog. The videographer definitely isn’t a pro, but otherwise, not half bad.

Owen

July 9, 2013
The Road to Henrik

Baby Henrik was due to arrive on Saturday, June 22, 2013. In my experience, Swedes are very rarely ever late. That means we can either blame my Irish English roots, or more likely, on the fact that we just haven’t had the opportunity to teach Baby how to keep to a schedule. All in due time.

As a result, we made an appointment at Chandler Regional Hospital for this past Thursday afternoon to induce labor. After a long process, including a lot of walking, Linda was diagnosed as being in ‘active labor’ and was officially admitted at midnight. The epidural was administered, other hoops were jumped, and by 2:00 AM on Friday morning we were able to get some rest. But not much. By 6:00 AM Linda and Baby were ready to take things to the next level.

Fast forward a bit. After about five hours of intense physical toil, the doctor recommended a Cesarian as the safest way to proceed. Linda got to experience it all! Inducement, certain aspects of natural childbirth, and Cesarian. What a lucky gal! All kidding aside, the most important thing is that Baby was born healthy and safe. Mom and Baby are home, recovering, and doing very well.

Stick’em up!

Thinking deeply.

Owen

July 3, 2013