A while back I bought the domain frankmcpherson.com although I never associated it with its own web site, instead I had it configured to redirect to this blog. Ever since I have owned this domain I have used it as my primary address on the web. If someone asks for my web site, I provide frankmcpherson.com.

It made sense when I was frequently posting new stuff to this blog to direct people here, after all it contains my latest and greatest content. However, with the emergence of the multitude of social networks I find that I am writing less here, so I began to wonder whether it still made sense to have frankmcpherson.com redirect to this site.

I’ve recently started using Google+ a lot, and one day I looked at my Google profile and realized that it looked very much like a blog. Google+ is where I have started to share the things I find interesting on the Internet, along with a few comments about why I find it interesting.

Consequently, I asked myself, shouldn’t I be directing people to my Google profile to find me and see what I have to share on the Internet? So I decided to change where frankmcpherson.com points to and you will now see it points to my posts to my Google profile that I enter using Google+.

If you aren’t logged in to Google+, or you are but are not in my circles, then all you see are my public posts. The beauty of Google+ is that it is very easy to use it to share things publicly and privately, as opposed to having one place that is private and another that is public.

At the same time, I decided to create a couple of subdomains to frankmcpherson.com to provide more direct access to my profile (about.frankmcpherson.com) and this blog (blog.frankmcpherson.com).

Here is my current strategy for writing online. Short posts to share interesting things or make a short statement will be published on Google+. Longer essays and material that I want to retain stronger control over will be published here on Notes From The Cave. I think this strategy matches what I have basically been doing for the last several months.

Prior to these recent trips, I felt that the only real twin cities in the Upper Peninsula were Houghton & Hancock, and I still think that if I had my choice of places to live in the U.P. it would be in Houghton. That being said, Menominee and Marinette is a very, very nice place and definitely worthy consideration for relocation or visiting.

Marinette, WI is right across the state border from Menominee and both cities are on the shore of Lake Michigan. (Technically the shore is part of Green Bay, but that is part of Lake Michigan.) There is plenty of water and coastline to enjoy, and one of my favorite things to do is go to Hennes Park, which is a very nice city-owned and maintained park on the shore of Lake Michigan. The road through the park is in a circle, about a mile long, and makes for a nice walk. I like to sit on one of the many benches in the park that is near the lake, enjoy the cool breeze coming off the lake, and read a good book. The park features several picnic areas, volleyball and basketball courts, playground, and beach, and it is entirely free to use.

My preferred hotel when staying in Menominee & Marinette is the Country Inn & Suites in Marinette. I really like this hotel chain and generally seek them out. When I visit Norway, I stay at the Country Inn & Suites in Iron Mountain. The Country Inn & Suites is a newer hotel chain, so they have nicely appointed rooms with comfortable beds. If I have to stay here for a week and work, I prefer a bedroom suite, which provides a lot space to work and provides a homey feel. If the weather is nice you can find me out on the patio in the front of the hotel reading a book, or I could be relaxing in the hot tub.

A bonus to staying at the Country Inn & Suites in Marinette is the Rail House Restaurant & Brewpub that is across the parking lot from the hotel. The Rail House has good food and good beers, brewed on site. The Silver Creme is probably their signature beer, but I have tried and like them all.

Not too far from the hotel is a rather famous hamburger joint called Mickey Lu’s. Today I finally made it a point to head over there for lunch and picked up two cheeseburgers. We aren’t talking sliders like White Castle, they are full size burgers made over a charcole grill, and they are definitely worth a stop to pick up. Turns out that in 2010 USA Today featured Mickey Lu’s as in a list of ten Great American burger joints across the entire country.

Finally, if I am going to stay more than a couple of days, I like to stop at Seguin’s Cheese Shop just south of Marinette on U.S. 41 and pick up a snack of cheese and sausage and a bottle of wine. You will find plenty of cheeses, plus ice creame, local wine, and plenty of tourist items.

Today, for some reason, I was more conscious of my surroundings even as it went whizzing by as I traveled along the freeway. Big green trees adorn the sides of the roads along much of I-75, and then few places can top the view of the Lake Michigan shoreline along U.S. 2, just west of St. Ignace.

My final destination for this trip is Menominee, MI, and I will complete the journey tomorrow morning. In my younger days I would have pushed to get all the way to my destination, until one day I realized, I am just going to be staying in a hotel room anyway, so why push it. For the last several years I have stopped the first night at Manistique.

When I am in Manistique I stay at the Comfort Inn. Amongst the amenities is a Big Boy restaurant across the parking lot and Lake Michigan across the road. I love unwinding after a long drive with a stroll along the lake front via the boardwalk. If you travel through Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, I highly recommend stopping in Manistique if for nothing else than to take a walk along the boardwalk.

As you stroll along the boardwalk, listen to the waves lapping along the shore. Gulls fly overhead, and occasionally make their presence known with a loud screech. Towards the west you will see the Manistique light house, one of hundreds of lighthouses that appear along the shores of Michigan. A long break wall exists from the shore to the lighthouse, which you can walk along the top, at your own risk.

This evening I took my walk around 9 PM and enjoyed the sunset. Manistique is along the southeastern coast of the U.P., so you don’t see the same sunset as say at the Breakers near Houghton, MI, but it was still enjoyable.

As the sun slowly descended, with the waves crashing, and the breeze flowing, I gave thanks for this day. For my safe travel thus far, and for the gift of nature that I was able to enjoy.

I expect the RIAA will go after Amazon and Google for something similar. The question will be whether storage service providers (include Dropbox and Sugarsync in this discussion) can be held accountable for the legality of the files stored on their servers. Common sense suggests they cannot, but that hasn’t stopped anyone before.

Many years of writing weblogs has taught me that while it is nice to publish content to blogs within a web browser, browsers can be unstable. Since they don’t create a file, it is very easy to lose what you write by just accidentally hitting the back button. I write my blog posts for SocialTimes.com in Evernote for that reason, plus the fact that I have a copy of Evernote on every device that I use and therefore have access to all of my writing everywhere.

Using MarsEdit constrains my writing for this blog to my Macbook Air, and therefore I might use Evernote to originally draft my content and then use MarsEdit to edit, markup, and publish that content. That is still to be decided.

So, having to start somewhere, I start today through the purchasing of MarsEdit from the Mac App store, and the writing of this post. This is just a beginning, and this is just a test.

In the old NHL system, both teams earn a point only if the game actually ends in a tie, in the new system both teams earn a point when regulation ends, regardless of a winner. My problem is that teams are artificially earning points during the regular season that enables them to make the playoffs, and it is possible that a team that gets in wouldn’t under the old format, while a team that doesn’t get in might.

The NFL’s approach to overtime is one of the more controversial aspects of the game because it often comes down to a coin toss. Overtime consists of a regular period of time of sudden death football. The result is that the team that wins the coin toss can win the game by getting the ball first and kicking a field goal, and the opposing team never gets a chance to score. In my opinion, the NFL’s approach worked in a time when field goal kickers couldn’t reliably kick field goals at distances of 40 yards or more, but field goal kickers have gotten so much better from long distances that it doesn’t take much for a team to win a game in overtime.

What exposes the NFL’s overtime approach is that it is significantly different than how college and high school football decides overtime. In college, each team is guaranteed at least one possession of the ball at the opposing team’s 20 yard line. The coin toss is simply for who goes on offense first. If the team that goes on defense first scores more points in the overtime session than the opposing team, it wins the game. They continue playing overtime “periods” until there is a winner, but after the first period both teams must go for a two point conversion after scoring a touchdown. The college approach adds an element of fairness because it gives both teams a chance, and it adds intrigue because of the number of different decisions a coach has to make. If your team goes on offense first, you want to score a touchdown first to insure you cannot lose, yet want to score at least a field goal so that your defense doesn’t have to completely shut out the opposing team. If the team that goes on defense first can score a touchdown with the potential to tie the game with a one point kick, or they could try a 2 point conversion to win the game.

In my opinion the NFL should just decide all of its overtime games, regular season and playoffs, like college does, and I don’t understand why they don’t. A second option that would work, in my opinion, is that they don’t allow any field goals in over time; make the teams score touchdowns to win in overtime. Instead, what the NFL has done is keep the old rule in place during the regular season, but change the rules in the playoffs. This year for the playoffs in overtime both teams are guaranteed a possession in overtime. So if the team that wins the coin toss kicks a field goal, the game is not over, the opposing team will get the ball and can again tie it with a field goal, or win with a touchdown, and if they don’t score the game is over.

The NFL’s new approach to overtime isn’t as bad as the NHL’s, but I don’t like the trend towards altering rules between the regular season and playoffs. In my opinion the integrity of a sport is diminished when the rules are altered within a season. The problem isn’t as bad for the NFL because the number of overtime games is much fewer than for the NHL, but still, I don’t think it is right. Who is to say that teams that make it to the playoffs in the NHL under it’s current overtime rules would make it to the playoffs if the playoff overtime rules were used all year? There are that many overtimes and standings are that close in the NHL that it can, and I think does, make a difference.

Rules for sports should only be altered between seasons so that the game is the same for all teams within a season. The NHL goes too far in my opinion in altering the rules of the game between regular season and playoffs, and the NFL, which is the best professional sport in the U.S., would be smart to not follow the NHL’s lead. The best outcome after this year is that the NFL adopts the new “playoff” overtime rules for the regular season.

A decade ago I was only part of a small group of people who used a smartphone, but now it seems everyone has a Blackberry, Android, or iPhone. The technology is changing how we communicate with and stay connected to people. It helps us maintain relationships between people who are thousands of miles apart, but at the same time adds challenges to our real life relationships. We need to remember to not keep the small screen so close to our faces that it blocks out the real world around us.

Like most things shiny and new, we tend to become compulsive towards that new object. I am confident that eventually mobile technology will fall into its proper perspective and contribute towards making the world better. Many places in the world still cannot connect to the Internet and therefore do not benefit from the wealth of the information and the empowerment through communication that the Internet provides, but mobile technology has the promise of filling that gap.

The reason why I work in Information Technology and the reason why I invest so much of my personal time to mobile technology in particular is because I truly believe in its benefits for society, and in particular how it supports relationships. The more we get to know people from different walks of life in all parts of the world we start to understand how we are so much the same. As a Christian, I have come to believe that what really matters most to God, as shared to us by Jesus, is how we relate to one another. The Kingdom is here and now and that is good news! Happy New Year!