The Bills flag has returned, but the heister is still unknown. Mysteriously it showed up on my neighbor’s flag pole across the street on Saturday morning. I went out to confront him, and he said he didn’t do it. Someone else in our ‘hood framed him. I think I know who. Better watch out. Revenge is sweet – but unfortunately, not sanctioned by the Catholic church (see below).

Tricia and I are starting a new undertaking over the next couple of years. Every other Sunday during the school year, we’re going to have High School kids over to our place to learn about getting closer to Jesus, getting closer to Confirmation, and getting closer to eating us out of house and home. We start off this adventure (called “Quest”) with Freshmen. The class of 2006 will never be the same without the coolest Quest leaders in their lives.

Step 1 of becoming someone who can actually teach kids about church stuff is actually learning a thing or two about our religion. I’ve got all of the enthusiasm but none of the book smarts to really help these kids learn something. Thus, my latest reading listed in my ultra-cool new sidebar.

Just 2 games into the Buffalo Bills young 2002 campaign and already I’m in love with Drew Bledsoe as the next coming of Jim Kelly. As a result of their 45-39 overtime victory over the Vikings, I’m officially going to be the 1,000,000th Bills fan to declare that “We’re going to the Bowl!”. Ridiculous? Yes. Uncommon? No. And far more benign than one of the idiot Bears fans in my neighborhood that took down my beautiful Bills Flag and put up a tattered pillowcase with “BEARS 2-0!” on it. Amateurs.

IHaveAComplex–As I wrote in my one and only Manifesto my parents didn’t help me in the naming department. So when a coworker sent me this image – thinking I would get a kick out of seeing “Zippy” on the cover of a book, I was shocked. Dumbfounded. My mind was spinning. Can it be that my nickname ALSO suffers the same gender bending fate? Ugh. I suppose I now have to buy the damn book…

The other day I overheard someone say that Home Depot is a “Man Mall”. That women go there all the time to find hot men. Ya know like shopping at a mall where all that’s on sale is men…tee hee. And men go there and shop til they drop like they’re a chick at the mall…tee hee. And I admit that I have been spending an amazing amount of hours at Home Depot while I’ve been finishing my basement. I have to ask though, what motivated a guy to sit in a Home Depot for a 2 day dare in which the penalty was a faceload of peanut butter and fluffernutter? Find out more by reading his journal about it.

Last year we bought our 2001 Dodge Durango from the local Dodge dealer. We were greeted by a weird little guy who barely spoke English, who was kind of your typical car salesman. We ended up doing the deal with the owner and just using this salesman as the not-so-helpful let me screw-you-on-this-deal guy. Turns out this salesman killed a buyer at the dealership the other day by mistakenly backing his new truck into him. The poor father who was killed was probably saving his 2 year old son. This really freaked me out. What a terrible course of events for everyone involved. I’m going to resume trying not to think about it now…

I don’t get to the blog too much…when I do, it’s quality. Memorial Day was a week ago, and I still can’t believe how strange the final hour of it was. We put together our new firepit and stacked it high with the usual kindling and logs, then lit ‘er up on our back porch. Soon the fire was crackling. The air was full of that campfire smell, and Trish and I were chatting about the weekend. We put the cover on thinking that it would be better for the house if it weren’t quite so hot. After about a minute I start to hear sizzling…. sizzling…. sizzzleFOOM! All of the sudden the outside of the cover spontaneously combusted!

I hate to admit it, but I froze. I stood there thinking, “Wow, that’s a really big fire.” Me, the Boy Scout who is supposed to Be Prepared. My wife, the practical one who didn’t want the house to catch fire went for the fire extinguisher. By the way, fire extinguishers work! We put the cover out, then had a hearty chuckle as we thought of the friends who declined to come over that night. They’ll have to wait for another time to come “wind down the weekend with us.”

We took the boy to Rochester this weekend to visit his grandparents for the first time. There was a lot of spoil-the-baby going on. Aah, Baby Love. By the way, is there a way to stop him from getting any bigger? If any one has a solution that doesn’t border on the freakish Michael Jackson cryogenic chamber, please let me know. Side note: 60 degrees and sunny in Rochester – the capital of dreary. Back to Chicago where it is 30 degrees and snowing. What gives?

We checked out A Beautiful Mind today at a real movie theater. I’m no film snob. It doesn’t need to be “indie”. It doesn’t need to be artsy, nor French. It just has to be good. Mainstream, least common denominator, watered-down-for-the-ticket-sales good. Russel Crowe is great. Just like my sicko fascination with Tom Cruise and Mel Gibson movies. All this was to distract Tricia and I from the fact that we took our 8 week old to day care today. ugh! Oh yeah we saw Fast and the Furious on DVD too. nice ride!

Tricia and I ventured out to the 2002 Chicago Autoshow yesterday. Whereas last year, finding the CTA bus back to Union Station (no signs anywhere!) and sprinting after the friendly bus driver were our greatest adventures, this year involved taking our brand new son Mason on the trip. The competent McCormick place staff directed us to 3 different floors for entry into the show. And thinking we were smarter than 1 million other Chicagoans we bought our tickets on the Internet so we could go to the special “Fast Line”. You know, the one that ended up having 1 million other Chicagoans in it.

OK, about the cars…You can tell the economy has been horrible by how few concept cars there were. The 2002 Concepts didn’t seem to have nearly the imagination as last year’s either. I really think the car companies are all played out on the cross-over SUV and were just out of ideas for this year. My favorite trend however is the retro-new vehicles. My favorite is the Chevy SSR. This thing is part truck, part convertible, part hot-rod. It is bad ass! I like that the car companies are digging into the past – a time when people didn’t have to please all the demographics to get a car produced. Funny that I found a classic 1950’s Chrysler 300 to be best in show.

Pretend for a minute that you were given the following design problem: develop a moniker, a brand, a descriptor for a one of a kind product. A product that you will cherish your whole life, one that you wish will achieve notoriety, obtain huge profits, and will far surpass your every expectation. A product of your own biology – your child.

Consider now my brand name, Kristinn Richard Rzepkowski. The product of an American born mother, and an American born father. Granted my mother and father were not gifted in the field of user-centered design. In fact the professions of these “branding experts” shouldn’t surprise anyone. My mother is a teacher turned domestic engineer – one who instills creativity and encourages youth to broaden their horizons. My father is an Electrical Engineer turned Corporate VP – a field known for inventing the next best thing to sliced bread, only to brand it with an acronym, or better yet a part number. Thus on a snowy, frigid day in Caledonia, New York, my parents came up with Kristinn Richard Rzepkowski. Interesting, and different to suit my Mom’s fancy while containing a sufficient number of consonants for my Dad’s liking.

So, let’s think first about “Rzepkowski”. My Dad had lived with the name for 20 years prior to naming me, and my Mom foolishly married into it. My parents actually keep at home a list of every uniquely misspelled mailing label they’ve ever received. That list now exceeds 110! They had empirical usability test data right there in front of them when they decided to continue on with the Rzepkowski name. They have plenty of subjective data as well. My mom spells Rzepkowski, “R-Z as in Zebra, E as in Edward, P as in Peter, K-O-W-S-K-I”. Add up the productivity loss over a lifetime in having to use those additional sentences just to spell the last name, and you might be able to retire 2 years early.

How about “Kristinn”. My dad was an exchange student in Iceland, and he and my mother decided that I ought to be named after his “exchange brother”. His name “Kristinn” had a nice ring with Rzepkowski and was very “unique”. OK so they had one thing right, the trend has been for the last 20 years to name children something other than Tom, Steve, or Bill. Just check out www.babynames.com. But Kristinn is the opposite extreme. We’re talking about a name that equates to the female sex in the United States. Of course my parents’ explanation when, in first grade, I had a girl named “Kristin” in my class, was that my name has 2 n’s. Very reassuring. This explanation has been less useful to me later in life when, for instance, I try to get my credit card balance over the phone and the person at the other end doesn’t believe I’m the card holder. My answer is “But it has 2 n’s”, and they say, “Let me go talk to my supervisor”.

My saving grace has always been that I can shorten my first name to Kris, or can answer to nicknames involving my last name, like Zippy, or Zeb. In reality though, my curse is always the first encounter. In college I would sit in a classroom with 30 other individuals listening to the alphabetical listing intently. “Martin, Nielson, Rogers…uhh…Errrzep…Kristin…(as the teacher peruses all of the female faces in the room)…Kristina Errzepski”. Now usually I don’t let it get to that point, I simply cut them off at “uhh…”. It saves the un-introduced the embarrassment of the inadvertent gender-bend. It saves me the explanation time necessary to justify my nomenclature, and provide a pronunciation chart.

It seems like I need not go further with the tortuous stories revolving around my name. Everyone has his or her stories. Just ask any guy named Loren, or Shirley, or Aaron. Ask any girl named Sydney, or Darrell, or Bailey. Think about all those families that have been in the United States for 5 or 6 generations but still have last names with 5 or 6 consonants strung together in an incorrigible row. My goal is to eliminate these stories through a baby centered design process and good quality usability testing.

Step 1 Planning
Simply identify the sex of the child to which you will be attaching the nomenclature. Don’t EVER let the idea cross your mind that a cross-gender name might be cute, or “interesting”.

Step 2 Conceptual Design
Dream up as many ways that you can to torment your child by the name that you give it, and write them down on a piece of paper. Then go over to all your friends’ houses and ask them to do the same. Then publish the same challenge on the Internet and offer a $100 reward for the best one. After this is all done, take these names and paste them to your bathroom walls. This will be a daily reminder of the names that your child could potentially be called if you screw up your job.

Step 3 Physical Design
Do some paper prototyping. Much like sketching the first outlines of a fine sculpture, or figuring out the logical flow of a computer interface, baby naming should be begun with a paper and pencil. Have a child sit down and write out the name. If they can’t spell it with their understanding of the English language, chances are that the teller at the DMV, or the local postmaster can’t spell it either. Have the child pronounce the name too. If little Johnny breaks out into tears after the phonics exercise required to explain the name, throw it out. Once you find a few names that pass these strenuous tests, move on to usability testing.

Step 4 Usability Testing
Sign up for a few credit cards under the name that you are proposing for your child. This will cause the telemarketer flood to begin calling and asking for Rhiannon Denise, or McCambryn Bretlyn, or Brennan Matthew. If you get grunts on the other end of the phone when you pick up, you know you should dump the name. A more interactive and fun way to get the necessary results is to yell the name out in the bus station, or the supermarket, or at a football game. If heads turn around to the call, then it is a good thing. The name is common enough to be understood as a human name and furthermore, might even be attached to someone. Second, verify that the people that turn are of the same sex as said child. This is sure proof that the name is gender appropriate.

With all that I’ve said, I’m glad not to be Bill Smith, or Sally Jones. Kristinn Richard Rzepkowski gives me something to hang my hat on, something to talk about. Being American still isn’t hip after 225 years. I’m still half Polish, and my future offspring will still be Rzepkowski. I’ll let my great great grandkids reminisce about the days when consonants reigned free, and girls and boys had names that couldn’t be told apart.