I heard a radio ad this morning proclaiming a new great benefit for Delta customers who get a Delta Premier American Express something-or-other card. Ooh, a great new benefit…I like the sound of that. Ready for this great new benefit:

“If you sign up for the credit card and become a member, your 1st piece of luggage is free!”

Impressive. This is a head-scratcher for me. I haven’t traveled via airplane much recently but I know that everyone is charging for luggage and everything else. I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before I’m required to bring my Fastlane transponder with me on the plane so that when they fly through the new floating air tollbooths I can get charged appropriately.

It’s one thing to raise prices and charge for everything and give me some reason. At least you are pretending to be “honest” with me. It’s another thing to pretend that you are actually going out of your way for the customer while treating us like we’re complete idiots.

It would sort of be like Apple saying that they’ve invented this new great feature for their iPhone OS called “Multi-tasking”.

Look, run your business. Do what you need to do. Don’t treat me like an idiot and pretend like you’re doing me any favors with your faux-addon-benefits which were part of the “ah, yeah, obviously that’s included” category not too long ago.

By the way, I’d rather pay $250 for my ticket and have my luggage travel for free than $200 and then have to pay $50 for my luggage. Then I don’t feel like I’m being nickel and dimed.

I had been using a Blackberry Storm prior to last night’s purchase of HTC’s Droid Incredible. This was my first experience with the phone:

My wife and I were on our way to see a community theater production in Concord, MA. We were at the Verizon store and were going to finish there and head right to the theater. The salesperson at the store handed me the Incredible after she had tranferred my contacts.

I found the search “fixed” button and typed the name of the theater company. I got the Google search results, touched the Map link and then the Navigation link. Just like that, I had turn-by-turn navigation to the theater. This whole process for me took less time than it took to type this paragraph. I had no documentation and had not used the phone.

It was intuitive and fun and cool.

2 phones ago I had an iPhone. I never really fell in love with it. That was at the beginning of it’s run. I know it’s much better now. The Storm was great for email but lacked the coolness or application support that I know the iPhone has. I wanted something in the middle and I think it has arrived.

It’s a geeky-fun phone that doesn’t feel like it’s meant for geeks. The Android Marketplace has all the apps I need, for free…I feel like I have a phone that will literally do everything I need it to do and I don’t feel dirty because I’m not supporting Apple’s closed “We know better than you” platform (I am writing this on my iPad so I still feel a little dirty).

Love it.

The name is awful. I actually felt embarrassed when I showed people today and they asked what it was called. The phone is the best out there for me. Until it isn’t.

I think I’ll change my name to Matt Awesome.

99% of the time, if you have to ask me to be your fan, I’m probably not. Thanks to Facebook’s awesome fan mechanism, I can now be annoyed almost constantly by people who think I should become a fan of theirs.

I especially appreciate the following paraphrased Facebook interaction:

“Hey, I think you should become a fan of my sprocket company.”

“No.”

[next day]

“Hey, not sure if you accidentally answered last time but I think you should become a fan of my sprockets company.”

“Ignore.”

[next day]

“I can’t remember if I asked you to be a fan of my sprockets company, so you should, ok?”

[unfriend]

You: leave us alone. We all know you just invite all your “friends” so there is no way you forgot to ask me. If I show up again, that means I said no. No means no. You don’t want me to be your fan anyway. You just want my “friends” to see that I’m a fan so they might become a fan too. Leave us alone.

Facebook: learn. How about an option to ignore invitations from someone who is abusing the spirit of the site.

If I have something I think is important to share, it goes here, or in my status on Facebook, or on Twitter. You can consume it if you want and if not, well that’s your loss.

Now, Noa watches Sesame Street so we had that going for us. She also dislikes loud and chaotic “situations” so we didn’t have that going for us. The show was at 10:30am and we knew there would be a large number of kids so we had that going for us. She also really dislikes loud and chaotic “situations” so…

We arrived at the arena and got to our seats with about 10 minutes to spare. So far, so good. I don’t know it the whole thing was just confusing or if she recognized the Sesame Street sign or if the amount of other kids around made her feel comfortable but she was calm, cool, and collected. We had been explaining to her for about a week what we would be doing but I don’t think that it really clicked. Then again, maybe it did.

Then…the voice of Big Bird started talking to us and told us the show would be beginning in 3 minutes. That caught her attention. It seemed like she wasn’t sure what was gonna happen. She is sitting in her very own chair, feet barely making it to the edge of the seat. Her weight barely enough to hold the seat down.

The house lights go down.

She looks a little on edge/confused.

Big Bird hits the stage.

She throws a finger (pointer, not middle) towards the stage and shouts, “BIG BIRD!” with an ear-to-ear grin. One at a time the other characters make their way out and she is announcing them all. She is having the time of her life. My wife and I are elated but neither of us can figure out why. I suspect it has something to do with us both realizing that we have a bonafied little girl.

The show was great. We all had a great time. We get in the car to come home and ask her what her favorite part was. She said matter-of-factly, “the chipmunks.”

I don’t know what show she was watching but I suppose it doesn’t really matter does it?

My older daughter had just turned 1 when my younger daughter was born. She had not learned to walk yet, was barely talking yet, and really didn’t have much independence. I’m sure that it wasn’t always easy competing for mommy and daddy’s attention for either girl.

The good news is that neither girl will remember a time when they didn’t have each other. They won’t know a time when they didn’t have someone to accidentally cuddle with or learn to share with. The good news is that even though being the 2nd sister has initially been a lot of “stuff the 1st sister does,” their interests and personalities seem to be different and that’s been really cool to watch.

We’ve made it through our 2nd 1st year.

They have both made it through their 1st years.

Happy 1st Birthday Sasha.

It seemed we were nearing the conclusion of the story and then blammo!

I woke up. Well how does it end? I kept trying to fall asleep again to find out how but it seemed to be a futile effort. Then I realized I was the screenwriter, director, and producer. I should already know how it ends.

But I don’t.

And that sucks.

And then…

Hey, if people haven’t taken down their Christmas lights yet, I can only imagine they are just leaving them up in preparation for next Christmas. If we’re going to plan ahead, I might as well make my resolutions in advance too.

Relationship to the patient: Father.

That’s gonna take some getting used to.

I am at the hospital with my wife, awaiting the arrival of our first child. The only sound in the room is that of the fetal monitor. It’s very quiet and calm right now as we wait to see what happens next, and believe me, we understand that we have no idea. Within the next zero to, well, who knows, hours, we will finally learn whether we have a son or a daughter. The nurse (of which we’ve had 3 so far today) thinks girl, I think boy. My wife thinks boy 1 minute, girl the next. My grandfather thinks boy. My mother thinks boy now, but girl before. My sister has no idea. Everyone has different opinions. None of them based on science.

I come from a pretty large family. Either today or tomorrow, a baby will born with the last name Brand. This will be the first time in 27 years that this has happened in my family. Apparently, my uncle Jeff is the closest-without-going-over winner of the pool. Of course, nobody told us.

So we’ll see what happens…I am sure of two things: We are in for a wild adventure and we can’t wait.

Three things: My wife just had a contraction…