I've been slowly going paperless over the past decade. The first step on my journey started in 2000 when I signed up to use a payment service, PayTrust , to receive my incoming bills, scan them, and put them online for me to pay. The next major step was probably when I got a digital camera to replace my traditional film cameras. It might not be considered a "paperless" use case, but it has lead to very little hardcopies over the years as monitors and HDTV with screensavers and AppleTV s have become so beautiful.  Back to the paperless office, my next big step was eFileing my taxes but that didn't come until about 5 years later. Then suddenly about two years ago, I hit a real shift in my desire to go completely paperless when I got my iPad and installed Evernote . digital notes... If you aren't familiar with Evernote its an excellent app, available on all the major desktop and mobile OSes, that makes note-taking and organizing really simple. The killer fe...

Today is a significant marker in my life, the first anniversary of the passing of my mother-in-law. Her death was sudden and I was unprepared for it. While shocked and sad, after the week of mourning was over, I expected life to return to normal quickly. In many ways it did, but in retrospect I'm amazed at how much flux there was throughout the following year. In hindsight, I now see how depressed I was for several months after her death. It feels silly to say that, since I'm generally a happy person. The idea of me being depressed for a day let alone a month feels very out of character. But I was and it affected the decisions I made and blurred my focus, both personally and professionally. I've been searching during most of the past twelve months and it took a while to find myself again, as my wife has so patiently endured. My productivity at work took a nose dive for a while, partially because I became extremely disinterested in what I was working on. My disinterest ...

I've done something that I swore I'd never do, I've set ratings limits on my TV. As a kid/teen/young adult I swore I'd never use the V-chip on my kids. My thought was, how can you not be around to see what your kids are watching that you need to lock down your TV!? Now with the wisdom of 5 years as a parent, I can't watch my kids every second of the day, and for that 30 seconds I leave them to go to the bathroom, they somehow always turn on Wanted or 300 or Zombieland or _____(fill in the blank with a rated R movie I own). My 20 year old self would be very disappointed, but my 33 year old self says "You don't know what you're talking about." (P.S. He'd totally be geeking out our setup at my house though with our iMac-based home media server with 150 GB of movies played via a settop box (AppleTV) on an HDTV. 1998 Brian thinks that's AWESOME!)

"Daddy, what happened?" "It blew up, honey." My sister was five and she was the first to speak. I was seven and knew I was going to be an astronaut. We were in Florida on vacation and the shuttle was supposed to launch while we were there. My awesome parents drove us from our condo in North Palm Beach to the Cape, not once, not twice but three days in a row as the launch continued to get scrubbed due to cold weather. I remember the instant the shuttle blew up, watching it from the side of a nearby roadway, and I knew exactly what happened. I remember the crowd gasp. And I remember my sister pulling at my father's arm and being the first in the crowd to say anything. I remember being annoyed, as most typical seven-year old brothers tend to get, when she asked a question I knew the answer to. I remember the look on my parents' face. I remember feeling sad. But most importantly, I remember how proud I felt and how much more I wanted to be an astronaut...

So I hope you don't think I'm a complete loon, but I've always been interested in the paranormal, cryptozoology and lights in the sky. I think it is driven by my need to try to answer all those unanswered questions in life. Lately I've been watching various 'reality' shows on these topics like MonsterQuest, Paranormal State and Ghosthunters. Don't get me wrong, I'm not gullible enough to believe these shows are finding evidence of anything, its just some good ol' fashioned mind-numbing popcorn TV for me to fall asleep to. Watching them has reminded me of a few unexplained incidents I've had in my life and I wonder if you've experienced anything similar? I've got three that all happened to me over a decade ago but were so unnerving that I remember them vividly. So here are my campfire ghost stories, feel free to share yours! Incident #1: The Mysterious Flash I don't remember the exact date or even the season of this first incident,...

So Sunday night (Sept 20), I realized my three year old daughter Penelope is either extremely manipulative or extremely sweet. We were doing bedtime, reading a book and bedtime was over. She was supposed to lay down and go to sleep. I went to get a drink before heading up for the night and as I walk past her room again I see her standing at the foot of her bed in the dark. She calls out "Daddy, daddy! Poopies are coming!". Now I've learned this is a common stall tactic with her. So I said, "No! Poopies are not coming. Go to sleep". But she insisted and so I threatened, that if she didn't really have to go to the bathroom I was going to take away her favorite bunny, which has become her security blanket. So she agrees and gets out of bed and goes to the bathroom. So she's sitting there and nothing's coming out. And I'm like "Penelope, I told you what would happen right?" So I give her some more time and then come back. I open the door an...

I saw Geni.com now allows you to embed your family tree in other sites so I decided to try it here. Check out my family tree which we traced back 18 generations for one line! View more of Brian's tree | Get your own family tree at Geni.com

EXTRA! EXTRA! Read all about it!! Brian Jackson engaged to wed Meridith Taylor! Yes it's true! January 9, 1999, I asked Meridith to marry me. We plan to wed in May of 2001.