It has been a crazy couple of months for me personally. We decided it was time to move. We had been in the previous house for 12 years and with my oldest daughter starting school this year and me doing more work in Portland, we decided the time was right.

We put the house on the market the end of April, sold it the end of May, found another house to purchase the following week. Getting a mortgage was interesting as Fannie Mae (and thus the banks since none think for themselves anymore) are really hostile toward people who own large percentages of companies, even if said company is a C corporation. We had a long close cycle as we didn’t know how long it would take us to find someplace new and finally closed and moved in this past weekend.

In the process I came up with four rules for how to handle a house move, depending on your wealth (whether actual or frame of mind). I’m an expert on this topic since I’ve moved over 16 times in my 38 years. You can figure out which category you fit into:

1. Poor: pack all the boxes, rent a truck and/or get friends with trucks, load said truck yourself, move and unpack yourself.
2. Moderate: pack all the boxes yourself but hire a moving company to move them and your furniture to the new location, unpack the boxes yourself.
3. Wealthy: leave everything in the house, have the moving company pack up the house, move it and unpack it in the new location.
4. Uber-Wealthy: give away everything in the old house, buy new stuff for the new house.

Some times the right message comes across at exactly the right time. There have been many occasions over the years where I have been struggling with an issue or an approach, whether business or personal, and suddenly I will read something or watch something or the right person will call.

Twice this week this has happened. The first time I was thinking about a friend and thought I should email him. Later that day, without me sending my message, one appeared from him.

I have also been struggling for weeks how to talk about our new product — one I promise to introduce soon. It’s different than anything I have seen before so not easy to describe in words but one that plays well in a video. Of course to get people to invest two minutes in a video I first need to get them to read for 15 seconds on the site. I have been writing descriptions for weeks, sharing it with others, ripping them up.

And then I saw this video posted on someone else’s blog. I have seen this a few times — Steve Jobs talking about brand from 1997 or 1998 — before but suddenly it had impact. I find it funny when that happens.

Mark Suster wrote a post a few weeks ago on what it means to be a start-up entrepreneur. Mark has done both. He started companies and now is a VC so has a unique perspective from both sides of the table.

With this article he did a tremendous job of outlining both “On Being an Entrepreneur” and the roller coaster ride that being an entrepreneur is. Highly worth a read!

It has been 14 years for me now, since I was a senior in college, running Infinity Softworks with probably three to four “start-ups” all in the same company. There have been lots of highs and lots of lows. Mark says it better than most.

His list of what being an entrepeneur is to him is particularly enlightening. I did a lot of head nodding and yeps while reading it:

• Not very status oriented
• Doesn’t follow rules very well and questions authority
• Can handle high degrees of ambiguity or uncertainty
• Can handle rejection, being told “no” often and yet still have the confidence in your idea
• Very decisive.  A bias toward making decisions – even when only right 70% of the time – moving forward & correcting what doesn’t work
• A high level of confidence in your own ideas and ability to execute
• Not highly susceptible to stress
• Have a high risk tolerance
• Not scared or ashamed of failure
• Can handle long hours, travel, lack of sleep and the trade-offs of having less time for hobbies & other stuff

The only major changes in the last few years has been the introduction of children in my life. I don’t do as much travel as I used to and try to take off blocks of time to spend with my girls. For instance, I try to not schedule dinner meetings so I can eat with my wife and kids each night.

I still have no hobbies (besides working). I have gotten better about getting exercise the last year and that has helped a lot. I lost almost 20 pounds last summer and have managed to keep it off this winter (so far!).

All the rest are pretty true, though, including being tone-deaf to “no”, a little anti-authoritarian and high degrees of confidence and decisiveness. As for stress… I do have a lot less hair than I used to but otherwise no big deal.

My dad and uncle run their own businesses; both of my grandfathers ran their own; two of my cousins the same. When one of my cousins was going to start his own business his wife expressed some concern to me. I laughed and said that us Freedman’s just don’t know any different!

It really is a life style.

My wife’s family owns some property in NE California so every Labor Day weekend we pack up the kids and head south. It is a very long drive, about 8 hours with limited stops. For us it was more like 9.5 since the girls need to stop to go to the bathroom, run off a little excess energy and eat.

In years past we have packed the portable DVD player and a handful of DVDs but this solution was not a good one once we had a second child. Last year we rigged up this horrible interface that made it hard for both girls to see and was way to soft for either one to hear.

This year we have… an iPad! So with movies loaded (ripped using HandBrake), I rigged up a string to go across the two front seats, used the case to straddle the rope and another string to make sure it didn’t slip off. It was now close enough to plug it into the auxiliary port on the car stereo system, too, so the girls got surround sound. Another bonus: every time we needed to change a movie we could flip the screen to the front seats without removing it from its hanging position. Because the screen would rotate, we could see the controls right side up!

A couple of grainy pictures for you to see the entire set up (and my two lovely daughters):

Back to our regular programming next week, but thought I would share an innovative use of the iPad this week. Thanks, Apple, for making this trip a lot easier.

I don’t write often about sports, even though I am a fan of the Cleveland teams (baseball, football, basketball in that order). Fred Wilson wrote a post about LeBron James leaving the Cavs and I responded. It is hard for people not raised with the Cleveland sports mentality to understand. So I wanted to include my comment here, mostly for my own history.

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Unless you are from Cleveland (I was born there but moved to Portland, OR in college) and are a sports fan of its teams, there is just no way to understand the emotions of the city right now. (And for those of you critcizing Dan Gilbert, you are absolutely right. It was silly and probably stupid but that letter was not aimed at players; it was aimed at Cleveland fans. And every fan in the city wanted to give Gilbert a ticker-tape parade just for saying it.) Some of this is about LeBron James but most of the reaction is to a lifetime of heartache, of almost wins and our players bringing championships to other teams and teams moved and hopes dashed. It is visceral and emotional and had absolutely nothing to do with LeBron leaving. Well, not totally anyway. It is anything but rational.

It is a long history of this. It is Michael Jordan’s shot over Craig Ehlo when the Cavs were the best team in the league, it is Jose Mesa imploding in the ninth inning of the seventh game of the 1997 World Series to an expansion team that bought a championship. It was about Earnest Byner fumbling on the one yard line that would have sent the Browns to the Super Bowl and John Elway driving 98 yards for a touchdown and the win in another playoff game with one minute left on the clock. It was about Bill Belichek cutting Bernie Kosar and Manny Ramirez winning multiple World Series’ in Boston and Cliff Lee and CC Sabathia facing each other in game one of the World Series last year both playing for different teams. It is about Brian Sipe’s interception in the end zone that cost us the Super Bowl appearance in 1980 and about 30 years of futile owners and managers who traded away championship players for over the hill nobodies. It is a little about LeBron James and the fact that our best hope for a championship in a long-time was unable to do it even when the Cavs surrounded him by five [actually, four as LeBron was the fifth] former All-Stars. And it was, most of all, about Art Modell ripping out the heart of the city and selling it to Baltimore in the back of an airplane (and then that team winning the Super Bowl shortly thereafter).

Rationally you and your commenters are right. The balance of power in the NBA has shifted to the players. There are four major teams in the NBA and the rest are also rans: Boston, LA Lakers, Orlando and Miami. Each team has multiple All-Stars who were brought together in circumvention, you could say, of the intention of the rules of the league. And I don’t think anyone in Cleveland would begrudge LeBron for saying he wants to win championships and he feels his best chance of doing that is in Miami with Wade and Bosh. He happens to be right, in my opinion, given how the NBA works. Even Clevelanders would say we have lost good players before and will in the future, too. Sure, the initial hurt feelings would have been that but that is not what drove fans into the street to burn LeBron jerseys. What drove fans into the street was the way he did it.

What did LeBron do? He signed a three year contract and, one year into it, started courting the media and talking about free agency, giving the impression he was just waiting out his time. He didn’t tell the Cavs until he was on the air, giving Cleveland no chance to sign another top notch free agent (whether they could or not), he did it with an in-your-face style that is completely not Cleveland, and he did it in the most narcistic, self-serving way. It was an embarrassment for the city and an affront to the state.

And given everything else, given all the close calls and stolen dreams, it was completely unexpected from a Cleveland native son.