DarkTortoise

Great Names in Customer Service

2009-03-24T17:41:00.001-04:00

OK, only one that I saw today.

Randy Friend is the Product Manager and VP of Customer Care for ProphetLine.

A more inviting name for a Customer Service guy I can't imagine.

WordPress as a Content Management Tool

2007-06-27T19:43:00.000-04:00

I've been using WordPress as my blog tool everywhere but here. I've experimented with modifying the themes used. On ZeroIntelligence.net and on Never Another Job, I simply used themes I found on the Internet with some minor modifications to things like graphics and exactly what appears where in the sidebars.

More recently, I added a blog in a subdirectory for my BNI chapter. At the time of this writing, though, it's not live yet because nobody but me has actually written anything, which would then seem very silly. Nonetheless, by starting with this alternate home page, you could see that working. All the core pages, though, use basic HTML except for a couple of PHP calls to list articles. It's only a partial integration.

Tonight, though, for the first time I took a layout I'd done for a client and chopped it into a theme for WordPress. Applying this theme lets me set up WordPress and a full-fledged content management tool, one that's easy enough that there's hope my clients (this one and others) will be able to update things on their own. I expect to do this several more times, for other clients and for my own Heatherstone site.

Mucking about in PHP code and lots of CSS has been fascinating. You don't run into PHP at Microsoft!

Jericho

2007-05-16T13:03:00.000-04:00

This is the first time I've run into the potential disappointment with network television. I've never really watched much television, but now that iTunes offers TV shows, there have been a few shows I've been getting from there. The convenience makes all the difference.

One of the shows Olympia and I have enjoyed this year is Jericho. We just watched the season one finale Monday night. Today, I learned that CBS has cancelled the show, so we won't get to find out what happens. I guess a lot more bombs go off and the storyline so far ceases to be relevant.

Ah, well. So sad.

Children of Rock

2007-04-15T14:53:00.000-04:00

I'm writing this from Union Jack's, a restaurant/bar in Bethesda, Maryland. I'm (mostly) working on my laptop and listening to several bands that are playing a Sunday afternoon concert. All the bands are made of kids from about ten years old to their late teens and they take their lessons at the same music school I attend for my guitar lessons.

The crowd here is really large and these kids are doing a great job. Listening to a bunch of ten-year-olds rock their way through "I'm a Believer" in front of about two hundred people is quite an experience.

I need to find some other people my age and experience level who want to practice as a band. Maybe when Union Jack's hosts another concert, I can get on stage instead of just watching.

Scrabble

2007-01-14T18:22:00.000-05:00

The last few weeks we've pulled out the Scrabble board several times. This is a game that I'm pretty good at, although I have no idea how I'd do if I was to enter one of the tournaments. I don't really use the crazy words you only ever see in Scrabble very often. In our last game, I did use "ibex" though. The "x" was on a triple letter score next to a free letter "o", so I got 48 points off that one letter.

It turns out that at eight years old, Katerina's pretty good at it. I showed her how she can make a word that also adds a letter to another word, thereby getting points for both words. She got it after it being explained only once and dropped "re" onto the beginning of "fixed" (same "x" as in "ibex") with the "e" also making "me" on the vertical for 26 points.

For a while, I used to write the word and points gained for spectacular scores on the backs of the letter holders. I had several in the 90+ points range, although never one with more than 100 on one word.

I actually don't remember the last time I lost a game of Scrabble. Ever time I play, though, I have a particular Scrabble game come to mind. I don't remember how old I was, but I was definitely in my late teens, as it took place at my parents' house. I sat down to play a game with my dad and my brother, Adam. We set up the board, drew tiles, and I got to take the first turn. I had a pretty decent seven-letter word, which gets you the double word score for the center spot, a double letter score for one of the letters, and a fifty point bonus for using all your tiles. My score on that one word was 98 points, better than any written on the letter holders.

Very pleased with myself, I started drawing seven new tiles, but my dad and my brother just looked at the score I'd just pulled and left the table. It was a long time ago, so I don't remember precisely, but my memory is of one of them saying, "Well, this is pointless." Neither one of them has ever played a game of Scrabble with me since.

Of course, Adam has played an uncountable number of other games with me and is a very challenging opponent at most of them, beating me many, many times. I've also played Scrabble with other people many times since. Olympia and I used to play it reasonably often after we got married but before we had children. It's interesting, though, how something like that can stick with you so persistently for so very long.

Two Memorable Conversations

2007-01-07T17:31:00.000-05:00

First, I spoke with my friend Barry. In November and December, he was dealing with his father being sick, heart trouble in particular. The prognosis seemed worse each time I spoke to him. I didn't hear from him for a couple of weeks, so when I did:

Aaron: So, how's your dad?
Barry: Not so good. He arrives tomorrow in the
mail.

A couple days later, a conversation with Elizabeth about what she was doing:

Aaron: What are you up to?
Elizabeth: Studying for exams.
Aaron: When are your exams?
Elizabeth: Next week.
Aaron: You know what I don't have next week that makes me happy?
Elizabeth: Exams? And Ebola?

Morbid, but somehow funny.

The Short List

2006-12-27T09:04:00.000-05:00

I was getting gas at an Exxon station yesterday and it had a very short list of instructions.

Pump Operation
1. Follow instructions on screen

Done Gone and Moved

2006-12-20T20:22:00.000-05:00

I mentioned just two posts back that we had no heat in our house. About two weeks later, we had a particularly chilly night where the temperature dropped down into the upper forties or so. The next morning, the house was really, really cold and my mother-in-law was developing a nasty sounding cough. We decided this just wasn't going to do and there was an expected cold snap coming in that first week in December.

Olympia and I tackled some immediate house-hunting. That's way easier when you're seeking a rental because getting into a rental doesn't involve the reams of paperwork that buying a house requires. The first house we found that might work was owned by some people that had had to evict their last tenants. Despite looking for a long-term lease (three-and-a-half years, so we won't be faced with moving again until Elizabeth is done with high school,) which normally thrills landlords, these people wanted the rent to be paid by certified check every month, an "escape clause" that would allow them to turn us out after eighteen months if they decided to move back in, and on and on. Our realtor told us she wouldn't let us rent from them after all even if we wanted to.

Another round of looking at options found us another house, this one a single-family home only a mile from where we living, in all the same school districts and a landlord that was smart enough to employ a property management company. Three days after seeing the house, we had a signed 43-month lease. The next day, moving began.

We got out of the other house just in time. Two days after our first night sleeping in the new house, the old one's temperature was below 45 degrees - how far below, I don't know because the thermostat's thermometer didn't go any lower than that.

Moving is an absolute help and I found myself wishing for a version of The Matrix, but without the oppression by machines. I couldn't be happier that it's done.

My WarEngine Wiki

2006-11-22T18:22:00.000-05:00

I've tackled a new project. I'm taking my WarEngine wargaming system and putting it in the hands of the community of wargamers in the form of a WarEngine Wiki. I signed up for a cheap hosting account that supports PHP5 and MySQL and installed the latest version of the free MediaWiki, the same software used to run Wikipedia. I've added some built-in Google AdSense banners and a donation page as a way to try making the service at least pay for itself and perhaps even generate some passive income.

I've also seeded the site with some content, including the Shock Force setting I developed when I was publishing wargames as DemonBlade Games. By putting all this in a wiki, I'm hoping that the community will then add to it. I've dropped $25 on a month's worth of ads on The Miniatures Page to drive some traffic to the site, too.

This has some similarity to writing to a "monetized" blog site, but I think it has some nice potential from the perspective that I don't necessarily have to (and if it works, shouldn't) provide all the content. I only launched it last week, so it's too early to tell, but if nothing else, it will be a good experiment in whether hosting and building an online community of this sort can be a profitable commercial endeavor, too.

The Miracle of Heating

2006-11-12T11:57:00.000-05:00

My office is cold. It's not yet numbingly cold, and maybe it won't be, but I'm a bit worried about it.

My office is a room off the kitchen in the house we rent in Rockville, Maryland. It's nice because it has windows on three sides that look out onto the backyard, which is quite large and very pleasant. Here's a picture of the view straight back:

The problem is that the house is aging, and not well. Since we've moved in, the pipes in the basement have sprung leaks half-a-dozen times. The landlord sends out a guy to fix them, he repeatedly tells her that she needs to replace the whole pipe system, but she insists he simply patch it.

A couple of months ago, the furnace broke down. Again, our landlord went to discount labor sources, in this case, a tenant at one of her other properties. That guy took awhile to show up, then didn't fix it. The landlord got another guy to come out, who finally replaced the oil pump, but when the furnace started shutting itself down again a few days later, he came back and found that some other part of the furnace was also busted. Basically, the whole thing needs to be replaced.

In the last couple of weeks, we've learned that the landlord doesn't intend to continue renting the house out once we move out, something we are thinking of doing next spring anyway. She intends sell it to a developer who will subdivide the property, tear down this house, and put up four million-dollar-plus homes. Under the circumstances, it seems she doesn't really want to fix stuff.

Instead, she promised us a couple of big free-standing electric heaters. Having seen the one the my friend, Ben, uses at his house, I was willing to give that a try. Yesterday, I got home from taking Gregory to a Cub Scout event to find two small, electric, parabolic space heaters on the front doorstep - one of them very dusty and missing a knob. I'm very skeptical that these (plus the two other heaters we bought ourselves do handle the cold days while they futzed around with fixing the furnace) will replace the normal heating capabilities of the built-in heating system.

We will have to see how this works out, but since the next place we live will also be a rental, you can bet that it will be in a commercially run operation where you don't have to worry about adequate heating being high enough on the landlord's priority list.

Contrast

2006-11-05T18:42:00.000-05:00

I've been doing some thinking lately about the value of contrast, primarily about how it is an important tool in developing or marketing a new product. Contrast adds interest, so contrast is common in things to which we find ourselves drawn.

I'm using contrast here in a very broad sense, where it means that there are any two attributes of a single thing that are significantly different. Consider some examples, beginning with what we eat. Almost every meal we eat includes two or more foods. There really isn't any reason beyond getting a wide variety of nutrients not available in a single food for us to prepare multiple foods when we eat. However, even if it covered every element of nutrition you needed, you would be unlikely to feel particular satisfied by eating the same single item with every meal.

Another very basic example is that we tend not to design objects to be of a single color. My laptop, on which I'm typing this now, has a number of buttons that when they are in the "on" position light up with a blue glow. The blue contrasts with the black of the plastic and is therefore pleasing.

Not every example is so trivial, though. While it may not have such a firm grip on its market as it once did, Monster was remarkable in the job listing website business because of the contrast between the generally serious matter of browsing through jobs and the more whimsical nature of cartoon monsters adorning the pages. Similarly, "Amazon" (at least to me) conjures up images of a rain forest where the only inhabitants have little if anything in the way of a written language, which contrasts heavily with the concept of an online bookstore. I've noticed Elizabeth regularly browsing a make-up site called "Beauty Whore." Whatever you might feel about the name itself, it is certainly striking and memorable.

Even the name I picked for my online alter-ego, Dark Tortoise, was picked in part because of the contrast between "dark" and "tortoise." If asked to name a bunch of things that are dark, especially if given the "sinister" definition of the word, it's unlikely that "tortoise" would show up on your list anywhere in the top thousand.

I've been talking to my realtor friend, Ben, about ideas for a real estate website. Most such sites are, in my opinion, largely forgettable. They also tend to highlight the realtor, leaving the houses listed for sale as pretty much a set of photos and some basic attributes, like number of bedrooms and bathrooms. Buying a home, though, is largely an emotional decision with the house itself at the center of that decision. Thinking about contrast and that emotional factor suggests new ideas of how to present homes in an appealing, remarkable, and memorable way.

For example, we could present the homes almost as though they were people themselves so that the website visitor has the opportunity to be introduced to the homes and find one with a pleasing personality. We could include things like video testimonials about the houses given by either the developer or architect for new houses or the previous owners for resales. The presentation could even be made to look much like a typical (but well-designed) customized profile page on social networking sites like MySpace or FaceBook. The contrast between an inanimate object and the anthropomorphizing of that object would be unusual and notable.

Contrast, while not the only tool for creating distinction, seems a critical one. How could you apply new contrast to make something in your life more interesting, either to yourself or others as appropriate?

Halloween Costumes

2006-11-01T17:21:00.000-05:00

Last night, like so many others, we walked around begging for candy from neighbors. We did so well bringing home the loot that I suspect we live in a development full of ruthless dentists.

When I say we, I mean me and the little guys, Gregory and Katerina. Gregory was dressed up as the recently quite popular pirate, looking for all the world what I'd picture a young Wesley in The Princess Bride may have looked, but judge for yourself:

Katerina, meanwhile was a rag doll, but had no idea why people were asking her if she was Raggedy Ann. I guess she'd never been introduced to the doll after which her costume was modelled. Here she is:

We were also joined by Katerina's friend, Muye, but I don't have a picture of her because I only took a couple of photos at home. She looked quite good as the Queen of Camelot. She told Gregory who she was dressed as, and he exclaimed, "The Queen of Camels! Ha!" A piratical view of things, indeed.

Elizabeth spent the evening at a friend's house, disinclined to have a costume, but happy to have a good reason to further indulge her make-up obsession to create spiderweb eyes. She sent me this picture of her with friends:

Rockville Volunteer Fire Department

2006-10-29T18:28:00.000-05:00

Today was also a trip to the Rockville Volunteer Fire Department with Gregory's Tiger Cub den. Here's my artsy take on one of the trucks.

The boys got a chance to look over all the gear a fireman uses when going out on a call. It was kind of like watching a knight prepare his armor for battle. They were looking at the fire truck when there was an alarm, the boys were quickly moved out of the way, and the firemen and truck roared out to answer a house fire call.

A member of the second team gamely took over and showed the boys all the equipment on the medical rescue truck until a further call for assistance came and the second team roared out of there with the other trucks.

A guy from another station that was filling in for someone off on vacation was just suggesting we wait in the firefighters' common room when the alarms went off for the third time and he had to go, too. At this point, we figured the boys had seen enough and we should probably head out before they got drafted to go on yet another call, and headed home.

What part did Gregory like the best, as evidenced by being the first thing he told Olympia about when we got home? The foosball table.

Call of Duty 2

2006-10-29T17:50:00.000-05:00

This afternoon, I completed the last of the missions in Call of Duty 2 on the Xbox 360 and on the hardest level, Veteran. That makes me a true Call of Duty bad-ass. It's amazing what a little free time on your hands can help you achieve!

Next week: Call of Duty 3 hits stores and my copy is already reserved and paid for. Look out, Jerries!

Fright Fest at Six Flags

2006-10-29T09:26:00.000-05:00

Last night, I took "the little guys" to Fright Fest at Six Flags. I'm really feeling pretty good about getting season passes!

Despite it being chilly and windy, we got out there with (most of) another family, Kevin and his two kids, Preston and McKenna. It was dark, so I didn't really get much in the way of good pictures, but here's one of the four of them lounging around one of the Halloween displays.

We went into the haunted house as the first thing we did there, and it scared the bejeezus out of the three younger ones. Katerina was quite as scared, but it started to get to her by the end, too. Particularly scary for them was being chased out of the final room by a madwoman swinging an actual, running chainsaw (sans chain.)

There weren't many rides to go on, but there was some trick-or-treating, a really bad Monster Mash show, and the Prop Room was open. That's a big room with thousands of little Nerf-like balls and stuff like air-burst ball launchers. I was standing there watching the kids run around and throw balls around when I got hit in the back of the head with a ball. It didn't hurt, it was just startling, so I didn't really care. Then a moment later, I got hit in the back of the head again. It was too directed to not be intentional. I waited about ten seconds, then whipped around and caught some little kid trying to look innocent, about to throw another ball at me.

Trying to be a good sport, I spent the next ten minutes following him around and trying to pelt him with balls, too, apparently to his great amusement. I thought I had him cornered on a platform up a few ramps near the top of the big room, but he flung himself down a slide I hadn't even realized was up there. I tagged him a couple times, though mostly, he was pretty good at eluding me by going in areas not really conducive to adults. And then he left with his mother, who probably would have been none too pleased with him (or perhaps with me) and also probably has no idea that she's raised a hellion.

Leaving after 9pm, there was the usual whining about not wanting to leave, but the park was going to close anyway, so apparently the trip was a winner for the kids.

Google Docs & Spreadsheets

2006-10-27T16:25:00.000-04:00

Google sure is doing some interesting things designed to directly compete with Microsoft. I'm writing this using their beta of Google Docs & Spreadsheets, which seems to have been largely acquired from Writely. The part about which I'm particularly curious is the blog publishing. Of course, if you're reading this on my blog, I guess it works.

(Update: I didn't get a title in my first attempt at publishing this direct from D&S to my blog. I have to see if there's a way to define the title without revising the post.)

Gregory Goes Camping

2006-10-25T09:46:00.000-04:00

This past weekend, I took Gregory camping for the first time. We went with his Cub Scout pack to Greenbelt Park. My first job in Maryland was about a mile away and I had no idea that there was a park this size that supported overnight camping. That area is very urban otherwise. As the website says, it's only twelve miles from the White House.

Here's Gregory in his Cub Scout uniform in front of our tent:

Gregory Goes Camping

The big white and black plastic attachment on the right side of his uniform is his Tiger Cub "instant achievement" badge. He gets beads to attach to it as he completes different activities, fifteen of them in three categories, plus a large selection of electives. He's earned two of his fifteen. His left pocket is where his rank badges will go. He's actually earned the first one, his Bobcat badge, but he only received the badge two nights previous, so it didn't get sewed on his uniform until after this trip.

I was in Cub Scouts, then Boy Scouts for most of my childhood and I think it was the best part of growing up. I didn't quite make it to Eagle Scout, mostly because my troop sort of disbanded when the long-time Scoutmaster left, but didn't shut down entirely. I had plenty of time to complete Eagle, but needed a good troop and didn't switch to the other really strong troop in Fairbanks. So I left with the rank of Life and lots of great experiences.

Getting back into Scouting with Gregory has only just begun, but I'm finding myself deeply drawn to the involvement. I met a Scout leader named Joe this past weekend who reminded me very much of the late Mr. J, the Scoutmaster of Troop 92 when I was a boy. He has patience, respect for the boys, and takes the time to talk to them about the why of things, not just giving commands (except for "Step away from the fire!") He's invited me to join the Boy Scout troop on their camping and hiking trips as an adult chaperone. We were talking about hiking and I'd mentioned how I go alone on some hikes when I want to go on one too long or difficult for Olympia or the kids. I think I'll go.

Back to this camping trip with Gregory: He mixed with the other boys as much as he ever does, which is sometimes distressing less than I might hope, but he had a fantastic time. I'd forgotten to bring a flashlight, but I had a headlamp and a couple of those green glowsticks. I used the headlamp and gave Gregory a glowstick. He was fascinated by it and held onto it that night even when he was sleeping. It also had the advantage of being distinctive and visible from some distance, so I could spot where he was out in the dark pretty easily.

There was a capture-the-flag game that was almost pure chaos, egg races that were a little better, a short walk through the woods, hamburgers and hot dogs cooked on a huge grill that Joe brought, and a campfire with s'mores and skits by the various dens in the evening. It brought back very positive memories and helped build some new ones.

The next Cub Scout activity? This Sunday we take the Tiger Cub den to visit the Rockville Fire Station.

Trip to Seattle & Victoria

2006-10-18T16:52:00.000-04:00

I mentioned in my last post that I had taken a trip to Seattle and Victoria. I've finally managed to get the pictures off my phone, find the best ones, and get them up here.

The main reason for the trip, my first significant batch of time off since January's well-documented cross-country drive, was to visit friends and family. I pretty much found myself hanging out with other folks every lunch-time and every evening except for the trip to Victoria. That was great, as I've not really had enough time to make many friends in Maryland, and those I have tend to have a different set of interests and backgrounds than those people I know from Microsoft.

I didn't take a lot of pictures of people, but here's one of Trevor (now a Google guy,) thinking hard during a game of Goa we played with Adam and Ally. It's good he did so, since he won.

Trevor Thinking Hard About Goa

The side trip to Victoria resulted in a lot more pictures. I took a seaplane out and back, operated by Kenmore Air. Taking off and landing on water was a new experience for me, although I'd been on small planes before. Both directions, the plane I was on seated about eight passengers, plus a co-pilot seat that was available for a passenger both times. Here's a photo of the plane:

The Seaplane to Victoria

I sat in the co-pilot's seat on the flight back, so I got a great picture of the approach to Lake Union, in Seattle. If you look very closely in the upper middle of the photograph, you can see the Space Needle.

Seaplane Approach to Lake Union

Victoria is a nice little town that is very friendly to the large number of tourists that visit. I'd gone there to go hiking in the area and generally relax, and only had two full days to spend, but I could see spending a week there some time. I pulled a U-turn at one point while driving in town and sort of cut off someone coming out of a side street. He pulled up along side me at the next light and I could see he was trying to get my attention. I thought I was about to get cursed out or something, but once I looked over at him, he said, "Your headlights are off! Have a nice evening!" New York, it ain't!

This guy playing violin on a street corner was very odd, but also not a typical Victoria resident.

Darth Vader Playing Violin in Victoria

I took two hikes while I was there. The first was to Thetis Lake, intended as a kind of warm-up, since I hadn't been hiking in awhile. I bought a book of hikes on Vancouver Island, so I had what I thought would be a pretty good map of the various trails around Thetis Lake, but it proved to be just awful. At one point, I was basically lost, or would have been if I hadn't known which direction was south and after heading that direction for a bit could hear the highway. There was another lake north of Thetis Lake that I'd wanted to find, but I never did.

Here are a couple of pictures of the lake:

Thetis Lake

Thetis Lake

The second hike I took was to the top of Mount Finlayson, generally touted as a fairly difficult one in the area. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I didn't really have any trouble climbing it. So far, no hike I've done has really compared to the one I took up Mt. Dickerson north of Seattle in 2004. It was steep, but not terribly long, so the steepness was very manageable. I snapped a photo of the marker at the top. I also got a pretty good picture of the distant Mt. Baker from the summit of Finlayson.

Mt. Finlayson Marker

Mt. Baker from Mt. Finlayson

Coming down the back of the mountain was much less steep, but the down side was you end up walking some two miles down a winding, narrow blacktop road, which is less than pleasant. I did pass a farm with llamas and a goat, though, so I got a great up-close picture of a friendly llama. He did have two ears, his right one just happened to be folded back.

Hello, Llama

So finally, I'll leave you with this self-portrait I took while on the seaplane. I believe it is fine expression of me having a good time.

A Self Portrait

A Volatile Life

2006-10-18T13:52:00.000-04:00

Last night, Adam and I were talking about some stuff that's going in my life, and he described my life as highly volatile. After my initial protest against such a term, another ten minutes or so of discussion had me admitting that, yes, he's right. While a little less volatility would be nice, I don't think I really want to change that.

By volatile, he meant that I tend towards activities that have greater risks, more change, but greater opportunity for reward, as well. It's kind of a, "Bet big, win big" point of view. I do try to mitigate risk and I've become much better at mitigating risk over time, but I'm also much less risk-averse than he is, or perhaps than most people are.

This discussion is a direct result of my recent and abrupt departure from Columbia Books. I can't really go into details here yet, as there are now lawyers involved, but that further illustrates the volatility point.

As an aside, I haven't posted much over the last several months because I've been very busy in my role of President and many of the things I was thinking about involved staff or other internal-only work that I could really discuss. In fact, I found that the work was about all I'd spent any significant time thinking about. Certainly the last ten days or so have had some elements of thinking about much wider subjects.

I'd taken a trip to Seattle with a side trip to Victoria, in Canada, just a couple of weeks ago. Partly because of the expense of travel for a lot of people and partly because I'm the only one that was interested in such a thing at the moment, I made this trip without Olympia and the kids. It seems I need to do that sometimes anyway because I need introspection time. It's very hard to introspect when you are in a house full of people.

As it stood, I didn't really get the usual amount of introspection time I might otherwise have had because I spent most of my time visiting with friends and family. That's also incredibly valuable, but different. What introspection I had time to do had revealed to me that I was actually working too hard and was ignoring too many other things I care about doing. I'd decided to change that when I came back, then a week later I wasn't working there anymore. Not quite what I had in mind, but I suppose it works.

What I'd had in mind was to do more hiking or other exercise, take up my guitar lessons again, get actively involved in Gregory's Cub Scouting, and spend some of the time I was spending in the evenings and on weekends working on Columbia Books stuff on some of the small projects that interest me, too, like developing a new edition of my WarEngine miniature gaming system. I'm starting to do those things, although there is a little short-term distraction as I figure out what form my future income will take. I've read a lot of articles by Steve Pavlina, and I think "a job" is out of the question. I may have to take employment with a company I don't own for shorter-term financial reasons, but if I do, there will have to be some form of profit-sharing involved, because a straight salary just doesn't cut it.

There's a lot to think about, but in a volatile life, there always is. I think that's one of the things I like about it.

Lunch was Surreal

2006-08-03T15:23:00.000-04:00

I went to a Johnny Rockets burger joint for lunch today, but it's kind of surreal at this location. Almost the entire staff are eastern European. They were talking to one another in Polish.

It felt like a Russian 1950s "learn to be American" spy camp.

Billy Goat Trail Hike

2006-07-24T09:59:00.000-04:00

It's been awhile since I went hiking, but I managed to pull one off this past Saturday. I went with Olympia, Gregory, Katerina, and Buck to the Billy Goat Trail, Section A in particular. The trail runs along the Great Falls section of the Potomac River and starts at a trailhead that's only a twenty minute drive from my house.

The Maryland bank has huge rock piles along the edge of Mather Gorge.

Mather Gorge

While the complete circuit is only about 3.8 miles, I ended up as exhausted as on the eight mile hikes I did last year. Some of that is probably from being a bit of a slacker when it comes to exercise lately, but the difficulty of clambering over boulders also had a lot to do with it. However, unlike Cunningham Falls, where I went with Gregory earlier in the year, this hike raised my liking for the Maryland outdoors.

Potomac River

Olympia (with some occasional help from me or Buck) spent a fair amount of the hike helping Gregory up or down the most rugged terrain, although the following picture certainly suggests it wasn't so hard she couldn't get a glamorous smile in at the same time.

Olympia, Helpin' and Grinnin'

It was also nice to have a chance to hang out with Buck outside of the office.

Buck on a Rock

About two thirds of the way through the hike, there's an "emergency exit" that takes hikers that are too tired back to the towpath that leads back to the trailhead along the canal. Olympia took the kids that way, while Buck and I pushed on to what ended up being the much rougher last third. I slipped at one point and came down really hard on my shin on a rock outcropping, turning a hunk of it into a nasty hamburger looking wound that required a stop to clean off some blood and use (for the first time since I bought it) the first aid kit I always carry on hikes. I don't have a picture of that, although Buck took one I probably won't share once I get a copy.

Oh, no activity involving photography and Katerina would be complete without her getting her chance to pose, so here's one of her:

Katerina and the Muddy Creek Bed

All in all, this was a good time, about four hours out in the hot, summer sun. It's a strenuous hike and probably was a bit much for Gregory, but I recommend this one to anyone that can go.

Agreeing to Stupid Things

2006-07-05T16:54:00.002-04:00

Buck just left the office, headed to pick up a directory that's being returned to us by a customer that doesn't want it. They asked if someone could pick it up, probably just to save themselves the shipping cost to return it, and since it was over on Capitol Hill, near Buck's home, he agreed. Of course, just two minutes later, he realized that was not a very cost-effective way to handle the problem. Telling them to throw it away (or better, keep it with our compliments) would have been better. But Buck said that since he agreed to go pick it up he feels obligated to do so.

Sometimes we agree to do stupid things. Following through anyway is what shows character.

The Reason for Employment Law

2006-06-19T15:27:00.000-04:00

We have had the unfortunate need of late to engage the services of an employment attorney, in this case to resolve a dispute with a disgruntled employee. This led, among other things, to this exchange:

Me: Is all employment law about covering your ass?
Attorney: Much of it is, I fear.

Incentives

2006-06-16T15:47:00.000-04:00

Buck and I have been having a lot of discussions about incentives in the workplace, such as bonuses, awards, and the like. It started from an article by Joel Spolsky on his Joel on Software website in the midst of a lot of changes in the company, include attrition of most of the staff.

My first reaction was "Bah!" Spolsky has lots of internal motivation, so the idea that he is not motivated by stuff like bonuses or awards. My recollection is that in addition to being a hotshot programmer, including at Microsoft for awhile, he's been an Israeli paratrooper or some such thing. His view of what motivates people has to be skewed from the majority.

Buck's pushing came in handy. He went on to read some of the references Spolsky listed. The main guy behind the "rewards are bad" movement is a research named Alfred "Alfie" Kohn. He's written plenty on the subject, including the fairly good synopsis, "For Best Results, Forget the Bonus."

I won't go into all the nitty-gritty detail here, but the essence of where we've settled is this:

The average base pay is significantly higher than it was six months ago.
There is no annual performance review. Instead, we have weekly one-on-one's and make sure that performance, good and bad, is addressed no less frequently than that. Usually, it doesn't have to even come up, but that assures there's a forum for it when needed.
There is an annual salary adjustment discussion where cost-of-living, changes in responsibilities, and changes in skills, training, and experience are addressed and a new salary is set for the next year.
There are no bonuses or awards.
Celebrations, like a company-wide party for the shipping of a new book, make a lot of sense, as they are not tied to individual performance.
An employee dividend will be proposed to shareholders (and I believe there is substantial support for it,) but again not tied to individual performance, but instead to company performance. A share of profits will be set aside to distribute to all (salaried) employees. Since salary already addresses varying individual contributions, this is split equally.

What's cool is that the salaried staff met (without me) to discuss and refine this plan such that they support it. It's much easier to deal with short-term dissatisfaction with removing things such as bonuses if the staff is already bought in, but it's apparently not necessary.

I like where this is going. A year or two from now, we'll see if Kohn is right.

Jon Braman at Columbia Books

2006-06-02T14:57:00.000-04:00

Jon Braman at Columbia Books

I saw this guy at a Potbelly's sandwich shop near work a week or so ago and asked him to come in to our office on a Friday afternoon and play a few numbers. Buck was kind enough to share this photo with me. Everybody in the office was grinning in the first minute.

Jon Braman plays an old ukulele he found in the trash many years ago and his original tunes are incredibly intelligent hip hop, which, when combined with the ukulele, is pretty darn unique. You can find him at http://www.myspace.com/jonbraman.

Getting to Yes

2006-05-07T16:46:00.000-04:00

I've just finished a much-recommended book, Getting to Yes, by Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton of the Harvard Negotiation Project. It turns out to be as good as expected, which is fantastic, since expectations were suitably high. I've previously read Difficult Conversations, another HNP book, and found it similarly valuable.

For those that haven't read the book, it lays out a method of what they call "principled negotiation." This is an alternative to the classic "positional negotiation" that's little more than starting at two extremes and haggling to some center point with little regard for what makes sense. They also point out that positional negotiation can also be less adverserial, although possibly just as destructive, when one or both negotiators are falling over each other to make concessions in the interests of protecting the relationship, such as when a boyfriend "gives in" to his girlfriend, despite what he really wants.

The authors cover four basic aspects to the method then relate how to use the method even if others in the negotiation aren't. As with Difficult Conversations, they include plenty of examples and one of the impressive aspects is that those examples range from a husband and a wife figuring out a floor plan for a custom home to the Camp David Accords.

Like many of the best books in the self-improvement and business categories, much of what's in the book will be familiar. ("I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have gone ourselves." - E M Forster)

We've all negotiated with others many, many times and had varying levels of success. The successful negotiations often included inadvertent or instinctive reliance on some aspects of these methods. But the complete method described in Getting to Yes brings it all together, explaining why some negotiations have failed and how others could have gone better.

In just the last few days, I've already had several opportunities to start practicing the techniques from figuring out what to have for dinner to improving the possibilities for two deals that my company is seeking to make with other companies - one as a vendor, one as a customer. As such, I can't help but pile on the bandwagon and recommend this book as what ought to be required reading. If you haven't read it, you need to, and not just for work. If you have kids, you need to get them to read it, too, as I think it will be one of those things that prepares them for adulthood more than anything they will learn in school.

Wikis

2006-05-01T15:14:00.000-04:00

Trevor clued me in to using a wiki for managing things like specifications at work. That's the collaborative software behind sites like Wikipedia. His team at work uses one (and it he talks about it a bit on his blog.) I'd pushed for one for specifications on my team at Microsoft and met with enormous resistance. We'd been using FlexWiki, a system built on ASP.NET by some Microsoft people, but open source. It was amazing to me that my team at Microsoft, intent on designing a website designed for community building, was resistant to a wiki and preferred Word documents posted on a SharePoint server.

I've been toying with the idea of taking my miniature wargaming system (The WarEngine) and putting it into an open source environment via a wiki. I'd tried starting on that using FlexWiki, but wasn't really all that satisfied with the experience. The reason for doing this is that there are fans of the system still actively playing it some five to six years after I'd left the business who want a new edition, but I've finally confessed to myself that it's unlikely I'll ever do it. This would put it in their hands. If I host it and include some advertising, perhaps I can even generate a little revenue while still doing right by the fans.

In a kind of trial of this concept, I've set up a wiki site (that I will leave undisclosed for the moment, since I want to get the very basics fleshed out before I make it too public) using MediaWiki, which is the same software behind Wikipedia. It's probably total overkill for the WarEngine and I do feel a little weird using software based on PHP and MySQL, but then it seems like the best tool for the job, and after all, I still use a Palm-based Treo rather than a Smartphone.

The site for it is coming together really nicely and I'm finding the experience of contributing to the wiki rather compelling in and of itself. I'm looking forward to sharing the site with the fans within a week or so. And in the meantime, I've contributed my first edits to Wikipedia, too.

Should I Keep My Blockbuster Subscription?

2006-04-26T21:52:00.000-04:00

I've decided to write down the thought process behind an example of questioning assumptions. I may do more, but since this is the first time, I figured I'd start with an easy one for the first. I have an account with Blockbuster Video for the mailed service, similar to NetFlix, where I pay a flat monthly rate and have up to three movies out for as long as I want.

Lately, as long as I want has been something along the line of "ages." I asked for "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" over a month ago and it's been sitting there ever since. I'd decided I wanted to have watched all the top 25 movies from IMDB's Top 250, so I have "Rear Window" and "Vertigo" sitting there now, too, both for almost two weeks.

I believe I pay $14.95/month for the service. If I rented movies only when I wanted to really watch one that night, that'd be about three per month, so the rate that I'm watching them seems to be about the same at best. I don't have to go to the store to get them, but that's only a small inconvenience as there's a Blockbuster store directly across from the Dunkin' Donuts where Olympia sometimes likes to get a donut and coffee. Picking a movie while she gets her stuff is no big deal. I've also noticed that there's a new Blockbuster that's opened up a little closer to my house, so even going to that one isn't necessary.

Getting the movies by mail has a down side in that the movies that have arrived may not be the ones I want to watch when they are there. Like right now, if I were to pick a movie to watch tonight and I didn't want it to be something I'll end up watching alone ("Fear and Loathing") or a Hitchcock thriller (the other two) then I'd probably just not bother or end up renting something at the store anyway. I know I've returned movies unwatched because of this.

I just remembered that the mail-order subscription does include two in-store rentals monthly to attack just that last problem. However, I think I've used that only twice in the last year or so I've had this service. It's kind of an extra barrier to a rental to remember to print out coupons before heading to the store. I could fix that by putting it on my calendar to print them on the 1st of each month and keeping the coupons in the car, but I'm generally loath to add additional recurring tasks to my calendar.

The biggest factor I can think of at the moment is that last year I bought quite a few TV show seasons on DVDs. Those are a great deal, I think, because they often work out to about $2/episode or so and if I don't want to keep the season after I've watched it, I could always sell it on eBay and get some or even most of my money back, especially since I picked up many of them with discounts. I have 3 seasons of "X-Files", two of "24", one of "Alias", and several others I still haven't watched. I could probably just stick to those (and maybe a few new ones I don't have yet) for months without ever renting anything.

Finally, I wonder if I don't spend too much time watching stuff like movies and TV DVDs anyway. There are many other things I could do with my time that I'm not doing and sometimes I'm not totally comfortable spending so much of my time in this way.

So, after laying all this out, it seems like a mail-order Blockbuster subscription is not the right idea for me at this time. I will cancel the account today. That's the first result of my questioning assumptions, and I feel confident in the decision. I'm glad I picked a relatively easy one, because now I'm much more excited about the next.

Some Childhood Pictures

2006-04-23T09:45:00.000-04:00

I just scanned these old pictures of myself, so why not share them?

Baby Aaron

Baby Aaron

Child Aaron

Questioning Assumptions

2006-04-21T11:44:00.000-04:00

A big part of my role at Columbia Books, especially during these early days (it's so hard to believe I only started 11 weeks ago!) has been to question assumptions. These have been big things, like whether or not we should continue elements of our existing product line or whether we really need to be located in DC, and little things, like whether we have the right phone service or need to have a stamp machine. It's exciting stuff and whether I look at the assumptions and decide that a particular one is good and leave things at the status quo or decide it's bad and initiate a change, the result produces confidence that we're doing the right thing.

An example: We have a Pitney Bowes stamp machine, but around the time I started, it had broken down. It was brought to my attention as something that we needed to fix, but by questioning the assumption as to whether we needed such a machine and the associated costs, I decided to let it sit for awhile. After a month of the machine sitting there broken and with not one complaint, it seemed likely we didn't really need it. We had a big mailing that we did for renewals on one of our products around then and prepared it with stamps and the help of my daughter, Katerina, and Debra's daughter, Natalie. We only do three or four of those a year. I've cancelled the contract and we're returning the machine, saving the company a small but significant amount of money.

This questioning of assumptions and the accompanying review of a given status quo is something I've always done regularly in my work. The decisions I make today will be questioned again, by me or whoever might be delegated responsibility for the subject matter, at appropriate intervals, whether months or years.

In my personal life, though, I'm not sure I've done enough of this. Obviously, I must have done some questioning, since I've moved from small business to big business and back again, as one of the larger examples. But when I think about other assumptions I have, I realize there are many that have gone unquestioned. For example:

Do I care about whether I own or rent?
What time should I go to sleep?
When should I get up?
Do I have the right hobbies, too many hobbies, too few?
Should I really have a television or an Xbox?
Is my car worth the payments?
Should I plan my future more? How about less?

Those are just a few I've thought of off the top of my head, but I think the entire list is very, very long. As I write this, I'm considering doing a 30-day trial of questioning one personal assumption each day. It seems like a lot, but if it produces a bunch of worthwhile changes or even just confidence in the way I conduct my life, it would be worth it.

Visiting Other Countries

2006-04-20T17:16:00.000-04:00

I visited a bunch of other countries today. It was remarkably easy. My office is in a building on Connecticut Avenue in northwest Washington, DC. The area is sometimes called "Embassy Row" because so many embassies are within a short distance of one another.

I went to lunch with Buck about ten blocks away, so we walked by a bunch of them. As we were doing so, I recalled that embassies are considered foreign soil, part of the countries they represent, so as we passed each I made a point of stepping onto the first step or driveway or whatever of a bunch of them, then quickly stepping back into the United States. That's right, sneaking back and forth across the border with no more documentation than my driver's license and not even showing that.

I visited Bulgaria, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, and Estonia. I would have visited more, but I didn't think of it until we were on our way back from lunch. Too bad I didn't even get stupid T-shirts.

When Do We Get to the News?

2006-04-20T13:54:00.000-04:00

Over at Timberlake's, where I was having my lunch, there are televisions tuned to CNN. Just as I was leaving, a headline that went something like, "High Gas Prices Cause Reductions in Usage."

This is news? Does CNN think this is the first time that the basic market forces of supply and demand have acted? Rising prices are supposed to lower demand to meet supply, by definition. I thought of a few other things CNN could report on in similar dog-bites-man manner:

Sun Rises in East
Katrina Photos Show Counter-clockwise Spin
Howard Dean Declares Bush Bad for America
Thrown Ball Follows Near Perfect Parabolic Arc As It Drops

I'm sure there are readers that could add more, and that's why there's a Post a Comment link.

On Cell Phones

2006-04-19T11:08:00.000-04:00

I found myself wondering today, "How many minutes do people use on cell phones discussing possible reasons for their last call being dropped?"

Can you hear me now?

So Much for Clever

2006-04-18T20:53:00.000-04:00

They seemed so clever. OK, the cleverness was only noticed because my stuff broke and that detracts from the clever part, but still, clever came through.

My Xbox 360 is apparently one of the "rare" ones that was in some way defective. I'm betting it has a bad cooling fan. Whatever it is, it stopped working and after following the suggested steps on the Microsoft support site, it became clear it was going to require repair. I called them, they confirmed it, and a box arrived in the mail so I could send it in.

The clever part is that inside the box was an insert designed just so to hold the Xbox, a UPS label that even has the correct weight pre-printed, and a piece of tape for sealing the box. This isn't the first time I've seen this kind of clever, but it's always kind of cool to me to see such things thought out in advance.

Unfortunately, it was blown by the instructions. I don't have them in front of me, but in essence they went like this:

Open the box
Remove the insert
Put your Xbox 360 in the enclosed bag
Put the Xbox 360 in the insert
Close the insert
Put the insert back in the box
Seal the box with the enclosed tape
Put the label on the outside of the box
Call UPS for pickup

Then, there were a bunch of pictures to illustrate the steps. Then, it all went to hell.

Below the pictures, it read something like, "To expedite processing your repair, please fill out the form below and enclose it with your Xbox 360." Then, there was a form with stuff like name, address, and serial number. Of course, I'd been following the directions from top to bottom and you'll notice that at step 7 above I'd sealed the stupid box already with the tape. I thought about slipping the form in folded, since there was room to do so that wasn't sealed, but the form wants the serial number that's on the back of the unit, inside a bag, inside an insert, inside a box sealed with tape.

They should have put a step 10 that read, "Notice the form below you should return, cut the tape, take everything back out, fill in the form, put it in the box, and do steps 1 through 7 again. You'll need to go find your own tape, because the tape provided should be ruined by now because you've either cut it or torn it back off the box. You should be grateful that where you put the label doesn't require that you somehow put that back on, too. Do this whole step before UPS arrives, since you've already called them."

So much for thinking it through and being clever.

FairTax, Continued

2006-04-06T19:08:00.000-04:00

This evening, I received an update from the FairTax folks, addressing the exact point I mentioned on this blog and emailed to them just six days ago. A quick search of their website via Google shows not one incidence of the word "immigration." Here's the first bit of their update:

Hello FairTax supporters,

Given the current debate on immigration laws, we have been asked repeatedly how the FairTax relates to this issue. The answer is that the FairTax will for the first time tax undocumented workers who now evade U.S. taxes. That is just one more reason to support the FairTax. Under the FairTax all residents contribute to the tax base, whether they are living in the U.S. legally or illegally.

It certainly appears that someone over at FairTax.org actually read my message and was moved by it, although some attribution would have been nice.

Buck mentioned to me all of an hour ago that he woke up to a talk radio show the other morning where the subject was illegal immigration and a caller had mentioned FairTax in passing, but didn't make the connection. Instead, he went on about the economics of building a 700 mile wall. Buck and I agreed that's just a silly point to debate. Neither amnesty nor unenforceable rules are going to fix the problem. The incentives for coming here illegally are just too high.

The wider media doesn't read my blog, but I bet they get the FairTax updates. It'll be interesting to watch and see if something big gets rolling from this.

TV Interview

2006-04-06T17:33:00.000-04:00

Today I was interviewed by Channel 1's Russian TV on the subject of print-on-demand. They came to the office, asked me a couple questions in the conference room, then filmed stuff like bookshelves and people working. My understanding is that it will be in a segment on POD tomorrow broadcast in Moscow. They've told me I'll get an emailed or DVD copy of the spot.

I guess there will be a Russian voice-over of what I say, but I'm not sure.

Thinking Hourly

2006-04-06T09:20:00.000-04:00

One of the things I find the most frustrating in a work environment is when people are paid a salary, yet think hourly. "Thinking hourly" results in work schedules that have all kinds of contortions in them, like short lunches, early arrival, early departure, time out of the office, and the largely ineffective "work from home."

I personally prefer people take normal lunch hours, for example, and take at least some of their lunches with coworkers, especially coworkers that don't do the exact same job. That's the kind of thing that can spark new ideas, new enthusiasm, awareness of a bigger picture, and so on. People thinking hourly often shorten their lunch hour to a lunch half-hour or even less, then eat at their desk, all in an effort to thereafter leave early.

Of course, not everyone cares about their job enough to want to minimize their actual hours. Plenty of people only go to work to get the check and get out. I happen to not be one of those - I love my job and it's an important part of my life. I respect the point of view of those where it's not that way.

The real kicker, though, is when bonus time comes and the hourly thinker is surprised or angry that he doesn't get one. Hourly thinking also results in a clear exchange of labor for money. A person very careful to only give the exact amount of arranged labor should only receive the exact amount of arranged pay. Bonuses should be in recognition of something more from the employee.

I wonder how many people approach their jobs with hourly thinking and how many don't.

Illegal Immigration and FairTax

2006-03-31T17:09:00.000-05:00

I haven't seen anyone else tie these two issues together, so I'm going to jump in there with it myself on my dusty, barely-read blog. That'll make a splash!

Pretty much every way I'm hearing to deal with illegal immigration seems very weak. Amnesty plans simply reward criminal behavior and new rules around deportation seem destined to fail because our government either can't or won't enforce the rules we have already. The biggest problems we face with the massive influx of illegal aliens is the drain they cause on schools, hospitals, and other services that are funded by the law-abiding, tax-paying citizenry.

FairTax, a proposed national sales tax that would eliminate and replace our national income tax, effectively combats that problem. FairTax gets paid by anyone that buys anything, regardless of citizenship status. Illegal aliens pay the FairTax. Only citizens, though, get rebate checks covering subsistence spending. If you haven't played by the rules, you don't get the check. Of course, there will be those that figure out ways to game the system, but for the vast majority of illegal aliens, they will be forced to contribute that something extra by not getting the rebate.

A congressman who jumps out there with a solution to both complicated taxes and illegal immigration stands to attract a heck of a lot of attention, and the FairTax (and the American people) stand to win an awful lot. If the Americans for Fair Taxation organization were to tie FairTax to a workable, believable way to limit illegal immigration, they would have way more muscle behind the effort.

Polar Opposites

2006-03-26T23:49:00.000-05:00

I was in an Indian restaurant at lunch the other day. The kind that have the all-you-can-eat buffets. I ordered a diet Coke with my buffet. When I asked for a refill, I was informed that refills cost extra. I asked the guy if it made any sense that for one price I can go back and take, say, eight whole chickens, but if I'd like another (microscopic!) glass of diet Coke to go with it, that's extra. This just doesn't make any sense to me.

After a minute of thinking about it, he agreed that didn't make sense. Then he went elsewhere to help other customers and I drank water for the rest of the meal - probably just as well for my health, but still. I thought about refilling my glass with sauce from one of the buffet dishes, but then that would be vengeful.

Buck was with me and I asked if he minded that I tried to make my point with the waiter. He said he didn't and that everyone needs a cause where they can pull out their soapbox for a few minutes every once and awhile. That's why it's cool that he's becoming a program manager by day focused on new product development, but is a poet in his spare time. More polar opposites.

Publisher

2006-03-12T21:52:00.000-05:00

I've found out that in addition to my title of "President" I also get listed as "Publisher" on the title pages of the books we publish. The first one under my new tenure goes to the printer on Monday, the State and Regional Associations book. How cool is that?

Cunningham Falls

2006-03-05T17:48:00.000-05:00

Today, I took Gregory and went hiking in the afternoon. Since he's only five and I haven't been hiking in quite some time, we picked something pretty easy, a hike out and back to Cunningham Falls that's just over a mile and only about 300 feet of elevation change. These falls are the highest in Maryland at something like 78 feet, which just doesn't seem like very much after the kinds of scenery I'd see in Washington.

They are in the Catoctin Mountains, part of the Blue Mountains, which are themselves part of the Appalachians. It's hard to believe that these were mountains that had once been similar in size and grandeur to the Himilayas some 200 million years ago as they've been worn down to nubby little hills that hardly count as mountains.

Not that I mean to be down on the Maryland countryside - it's beautiful, too - but I really like the sweeping majesty of high, craggy mountains. I choose to take this as an opportunity, reason to travel more often than I might otherwise.

Cunningham Falls

You can see in the photo above that there was a bit of snow around the falls, although the daytime temperature will in the mid-40s. The left-hand cliff face, doesn't get much sunlight, so there were a couple places where some secondary water trickles had created interesting icicle formations that reminded me of the flowstone formations I saw in the Cave of the Bells in Arizona.

Icicles

Gregory did great. The last trip I took him on was Sugarloaf Mountain, also in Maryland, back in June of last year. Climbing up the rocks along the side of the waterfall was the most challenging part and not part of the 1.2 mile hike. One particular rock started with a jagged step up about at his chest height. I gave him some pointers about where to put his feet and he struggled with that first bit, but after he got past that, he scrambled right up to the top of it before I could even think about following him up. He got to the top and sat down, so I got a picture of his success.

Gregory Conquers a Big Rock

Finally, Gregory seemed to really enjoy it and was telling me even in the parking lot that he wants to go again. I think this shot of him really sums up his excitement. Or maybe it doesn't, and it's just funny.

Gregory's Big Mouth

That's a Seven-Year-Old?

2006-03-04T08:17:00.000-05:00

Elizabeth bought a pair of black platform boots from Hot Topic, wore them once, and decided she didn't like them after all. She's selling them on eBay. She tried taking some photos of herself wearing them, but they didn't come out very well, so Katerina offered to model them. They dressed her in a short skirt, fishnet stockings, and the boots - Elizabeth got three great pictures.

Katerina decided all the poses herself and they came out so cute! You also can't tell it's a seven-year-old modeling the boots. Here's the listing.

New Job, New Home

2006-02-09T11:57:00.000-05:00

Today is my fourth day at my new job. I realize I haven't been very clear about what it is. When I first accepted the position, the staff at the new company hadn't been told yet, so I had to be vague just in case, then never really came back to the topic. I've been asked a few times about it, so thought I'd share it here, too.

I'm now the president of a directory publishing company in Washington, DC called Columbia Books. The company has been around for over forty years, having incorporated in 1966 - two years before I was born. It's currently about ten people and publishes five directories plus two websites. I've spoken individually with every employee already, and I am fortunate in that there are really great people and a massive amount of untapped potential here already on staff.

The outgoing president, Debra, is headed off to culinary school after twenty years in publishing, ready to start her own new career. I've been involved with Columbia Books for about five years as a software consultant. During that time, I've revamped their databases, built a data maintenance application for them, and done most of the development work to launch their two web products, lobbyists.info and associationexecs.com.

The idea of me as Debra's replacement was raised last September or October (my memory on that's a little hazy) but didn't really get rolling as a real prospect until early December. I'd actually already accepted a new position at Microsoft with the team that produces Office Live and was in the process of transitioning to the new team when Debra asked me if I could interview with the Board of Directors over the Christmas break. I did and was offered the job about ten days later. That's what's caused this whirlwind of sudden departure from Microsoft and move across the country.

The job itself is a great opportunity. Olympia and I have been really finding some great new foundation for our relationship, too, and this has made a difficult set of decisions (Microsoft vs. Columbia Books, Seattle vs. Maryland, etc.) a far easier one. I've only been here a week, but reconnecting with Olympia and my children has been wonderful. The home environment has been so different and so much more positive than ever before. It makes the last several years seem like a smelting process, taking iron and making steel.

It's also already very clear to me that I learned a phenomenal amount of stuff at Microsoft. It's not just the company, either. It's been the company I've kept. The discussions I've had with Trevor, and more recently with Kevin, have proven immediately invaluable background for starting to understand this new company's strengths, weaknesses, and potentials. I'm working to figure out ways to still have that peer support network while in this new environment, because I realize that had become a vital part of my life and it's important I don't lose that.

This new experience is exciting to me and I see it as a great new adventure. I'm sure I'll have a lot more to say on the subject in the coming months and years.

Trip Complete!

2006-02-02T12:31:00.000-05:00

Unlike the first twelve days or so of my trip, the last five were about visiting with old friends. From Memphis, I went to Birmingham, Alabama and spent time with my friend Bobby, a guy I've known for many years, since he was sculpting for DemonBlade Games, my miniature wargaming company. We played games, both board games and World of Warcraft, pretty much non-stop for two days. That is at least one flavor of what I consider the essence of a good time.

Next, I went to Atlanta, Georgia and spent about a day and a half with another wargaming friend, Dave. Dave lives in this incredibly cool converted warehouse, a type of living quarters I've always wanted to try that has also been a difficult thing to try while raising kids. That visit meant more games!

Charlotte, North Carolina was next where I visited Ray. Ray's not a game-player, but that doesn't mean he isn't a great guy. (Heh, heh - Ray, I hope you're reading this!) I met Ray's girlfriend, Elaine, and her daughter, Kaitlin, too. It was very relaxing to spend some time with them and I actually pulled out my guitar from the back of my Jeep and gave Kaitlin a lesson while I was there. The whole "we all get up at 5:30am" thing was just awful, but that's what I get for visiting on a weekday.

After Charlotte, I made the last drive of the trip, home to Rockville, Maryland and Olympia and the kids. I was pumped up with adrenalin in anticipation of finally getting there, so I picked up a hitchhiker just a short way north of Charlotte, both to help him out and give me some distraction from just sitting there driving. He gave me the name "Texas" and went on pretty much non-stop with some youthfully idealistic political views of the sort a self-proclaimed anarchist tends to spew. He was clearly a bright kid, so I hope he wakes up to reality one of these days. He also took it well when I poked a little fun at his ownership of a cell phone and the conflict with anarchist principles.

I dropped off Texas in northern Virginia, just half-an-hour from home and then proceeded to surprise Olympia at work, hours before she was expecting me to show up. If you ever want to feel cared for, take a little time away. The coming back is great. If it backfires, though, I hope you'll have learned something else equally important.

I didn't really get to surprise the kids the way I wanted. I'd estimated my arrival for Friday and ended up making it there two days earlier. I wasn't going to tell them, but just show up, but I couldn't so easily keep Olympia in the dark. Unfortunately, she told her mother, Elizabeth overheard her telling her mother, and her mother went and told Katerina and Gregory even though she'd been told not to do so. Some people are just so good at spoiling things. Grrrr!

All-in-all, I was on the road about two-and-a-half weeks and drove 5,265 miles. I am so glad I took this opportunity rather than, say, working an extra two weeks at Microsoft and then flying. I had new experiences, refreshed my love for the country I live in, reconnected with old friends not spoken to for too long, and disconnected from the work setting long enough that I was happy to be going back to it. I highly recommend such things to everyone.

Graceland

2006-01-29T10:54:00.000-05:00

Friday, I went to Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee. I've never been a big Elvis fan. He died when I was only eight years old and my dad was more into classical and folk music. The hype and furor around Elvis to me always seemed pretty crazy, something I couldn't grasp.

Graceland

I still don't grasp the lunatic fringe element, even after a visit to Graceland, so don't expect me to show up with big sideburns and a rhinestone-encrusted jumpsuit. But I do understand better why Elvis was loved by so many. This was a down-to-earth everyman who also happened to have a cutting-edge (for the time) musical talent and awesome stage presence. He was also clearly a dedicated family man and incredibly generous with the fruits of his success.

I went to Graceland curious and expecting kitsch. That was there, but then, it was the '70s after all. I came away with more insight and a new-found respect. Graceland is a must-see on any tour of Americana. You needn't go now, but do go.

St. Louis

2006-01-27T09:36:00.000-05:00

It took me two days to get from Roswell, New Mexico to St. Louis, Missouri. It's a long drive with nothing much I wanted to stop and see along the way, at least that I knew about. I pushed through to Joplin, Missouri the first day of driving, which is almost 700 miles. That gave me an easy day to St. Louis as a follow-up.

That evening, with some time to kill, I ended up first talking to, then wandering around downtown drinking with a fellow named Dan. Here he is:

Dan

He'd come to St. Louis to see the Rolling Stones play. Apparently, he and a friend go to see the Stones whenever they tour, although this time his friend was unable to get a ticket to the show, so didn't show up. Looking at him and hearing him talk, my first guess was that Dan was a musician himself (or perhaps a pirate?), but it turns out he's a retired social worker with an MBA. I love it when people don't look like what you'd expect from their careers. We did quite a bit of drinking and generally had a good time talking about music, the differences between St. Louis and other cities, and career stuff. I guess it pays to be naturally gregarious!

I'd gone to St. Louis because I'd always wanted to see the St. Louis Arch. St. Louis is also where the Lewis & Clark expedition set out from. Talk about an adventure! I would someday like to follow their trek on horseback if I could.

The Arch is an incredible structure and did not disappoint despite my high expectations. I took a lot of pictures, and I'll share below some of the ones I think are particularly interesting, leaving out the obligatory full view, as you can find many pictures of that on the Internet that are likely much better. I think the Arch is more interesting to photograph from odd angles and in parts. The first is the view from the one window in my hotel room where I can see any of it, the rest are from walking around near it, plus one shot of the Old Courthouse across the street from it.

Hotel Arch View

North Base

A More Interesting View

The Old Courthouse

Roswell

2006-01-27T08:57:00.000-05:00

I didn't feel I could very well pass through New Mexico without going to Roswell. I've been a big fan of the X-Files, and before that I used to watch this old show with a name I can't remember where an Air Force officer went around investigating UFO sightings. The subject is fascinating to me, just like the subject of ghosts. These are things I want to know are true but have never seen a shred of evidence proving them to my satisfaction. Like going on the Ghost Tour of Winchester in Virginia last year, I had to go see the UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell.

If you aren't familiar with the Roswell Incident, a purported crash of an extraterrestrial spacecraft subsequently covered up by our government, there's a comprehensive Wikipedia article on the subject.

Regardless of the truth behind what happened, the residents of Roswell seem to both take the international fame of their town with a cheerful attitude and certainly don't mind the extra tourist income it brings in. Note the streetlight in front of the museum in this picture - it wasn't just because it was in front of the museum; a lot of the streetlights had the alien head look.

UFO Museum and Research Center

There were also a lot of alien references in business names, like "Alien Records" that sells used vinyl albums, CDs, and DVDs. Several businesses with signs out in front, including McDonald's, included the words, "Aliens welcome!"

Inside the museum, the curators have done a good job assembling a lot of material about the Roswell Incident, of course, since the founders of the museum were directly involved. The presentation of the materials, in many cases, though are rather cheesy and amateur, so you can tell this is not a museum with large funding grants behind it. I couldn't help but wonder if they couldn't get Paul Allen to help out if they simply asked. Allen funded the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle and it seemed like half the exhibits in the place were out of his own personal collection. They ought to at least ask if they haven't. Here's the display at the entrance when you first come in:

In the UFO Museum

This museum involves a lot of reading, and that's even if you don't go into the library archives that make up the "Research Center" half of the place. There was, however, one thing I found particularly interesting that tied into stuff I'd done a couple days before. This wood panel was on exhibit:

Wood Panel of Early Spaceship?

There was information with this panel that described why there are some that believe it is a carving showing a Native American pilot from hundreds of years ago guiding a spaceship off-planet.

Apparently, this piece was carved shortly before the disappearance of the Mogollon, the people that inhabited the Gila Cliff Dwellings, and other tribes. At least, the original of this carving was from then. There was an unfortunate lack of information about whether this panel was the original or not, but I tried comparing the photograph of it that was in a framed magazine article on the subject and the actual panel on display. There were small but clear differences, which when combined with the lack of any glass protection preventing visitors from touching the panel leads me to suspect this was an unlabeled reproduction.

There are other interpretations of the symbols, but I can't help but wonder if perhaps it's true that these tribal groups went off into space. There are quite a few unexplained things about them and their disappearance that are consistent with the concept. With some extraterrestrial help, it could be.

The museum left me with more questions rather than less, but I'm glad I went. Especially since I also got a couple of cool T-shirts and some guitar picks with alien eyes printed on them, you know, just to help out the museum.

Day of Rest

2006-01-26T23:09:00.000-05:00

Sunday was a day of rest. I flew back to Phoenix to the Legacy Golf Resort, where I had a nearly free night's stay. After all the stuff John and I did over the days prior, this was absolutely necessary before continuing on.

Little Arizona Moon

After my stay, I returned to El Paso, got back to my Jeep and continued to, Roswell, New Mexico.

Truth or Consequences

2006-01-26T22:02:00.000-05:00

Later Saturday, after the Gila Cliff Dwellings, we hiked out to a natural hot springs. It's a fairly short walk across flat ground, but there are a couple of creek crossings. One, you just get wet, the other you can cross on slick logs and big rocks. I was sure John was going to drop himself in, but he got grinning when he was safely on the rocks. Check out the ice on the logs - slick and an idea of how cold the water was:

John Crosses the Creek

We did a little wading, but what you end up with is January cold mud between your toes, near frozen water around your ankles, a band of scorching hot water about four inches deep about mid-calf, and a bit of scummy algae lapping at your knees. Interesting, but not what you'd call appetizing. If you look closely at this picture where the hot water comes out, you can see the steam:

Gila Hot Springs

Since we didn't really get the hot springs opportunity in the wild, we instead went to a nearby town called Truth or Consequences.

Truth or Consequences

Originally called Hot Springs, this town was just one of many with that name. The city has a description of the name change, based on an expressed wish of Ralph Edwards of the radio show of the same name. There's probably a dozen or more hot springs setups in "T or C" (as the locals call it.) I didn't take any pictures of the one we visited except for the display out front, as it was too dark for good pictures.

Old West Display

They had a series of pools with temperatures from 101 to 107. We spent a couple of hours there and got pretty relaxed. Not too relaxed to drive, though, as we rolled down to El Paso that night so we could catch Sunday morning flights from there.

It was so great to spend a couple of packed days with John, a friend I've had since college eighteen years ago. The years between have seen too few get-togethers as he's become a surgeon and I've pursued small business. Those things sure keep you busy, but we've resolved not to let years go by before we get together again.

Gila Cliff Dwellings

2006-01-26T21:51:00.000-05:00

Saturday, as a much less intense experience, John and I travelled into New Mexico and visited the Gila Cliff Dwellings. We got there very early, so there was noone else around and the volunteer ranger on duty spent about an hour passing on every bit of knowledge he had about the place. Here's a shot from inside the large dwellings high on the cliffs.

Inside Gila Cliff Dwellings

There are smaller dwellings, still in the cliffs, but lower in the valley, apparently intended for single families amongst the Mogollons, the tribe from this particular area. The Mogollon disappeared relatively suddenly and no one knows quite where they went. Of course, there are those that think they headed to outer space using technology brought by aliens. I think they all caught colds from a travelling salesman.

Caving

2006-01-25T13:11:00.000-05:00

This past Friday I did one of the most exciting things I've done in a very long, perhaps ever. Thursday, my friend John flew down from Illinois where he lives and on Friday took me caving (also called spelunking) in Cave of the Bells in New Mexico. This was not the kind of caving where you walk down the paved road while a tour guide points out stalactites and they send out a golf cart to pick you up if you feel a little winded from the walking. This was full-blown serious caving where you are traveling as much vertically as horizontally in the pitch black and squeeze through tiny little openings that induce intense claustrophobia.

In short, there were about three times where I was sure I was going to die down there.

Despite my periodic certainty of death, there were also times of exhilaration and I took a bunch of pictures. Many didn't come out very well because of the darkness, but I think the best ones will give you the idea.

We started out very clean and took pictures of each other, looking intrepid. Here's John:

John Being Intrepid

Also before our journey into terror, here's me, blissfully ignorant adventurer decked out in my loaned gear:

Aaron Before Caving

John told me he really prefers caves that have a large drop at the entrance, ones that require ropes and such, because the barrier to entry is higher and it keeps the less serious cavers away. This one had no such drop, just a roughly six or seven foot climb down. This is where I had my first bit of trepidation. I'm not what you'd call thin and agile (no, no, really!) and I did kind of wonder how I'd get back out. But I stepped down the hole, bracing myself on the sides and took one last photo of the sunny sky:

Looking Out From the Entrance

Once in the hole, though, there is a gate that allows the park rangers to restrict access to only those that they know will be there. First thing in the morning, we had driven to Tuscon and retrieved what turned out to be the last available key, as other cavers had been pretty negligent about returning the others. John unlocked the gate so we could get in:

John Unlocks the Entrance Gate

Once past the gate, John relocked the gate behind us and we put the key and my no longer necessary sunglasses about ten feet into the cave. This was probably the only thing that made John nervous, knowing that the only key known to the rangers was now locked into the cave itself, out of reach.

That gate was not the original gate. The original was across a tiny opening that required the first constricted crawl. The gate part was gone, but the opening is still there and a first step. I guess you could consider this a good "weed-out" crawl. If you can't bring yourself to go through this, then you won't get to the more difficult constrictions later. After crawling through, I turned around and took a picture of that opening:

The Tiny Way In

Later, John told me the story of his first passage through a small, constricted space and the panic that he felt at the time. After that, we had this rather entertaining exchange:

Aaron: So, you understand how scary this part is for me, but you've gotten over it
after what, fifteen years of caving?
John: Not fifteen years, I've only been doing this since 1991.
Aaron: Um, that's fifteen years.
John: Son of a bitch!

Inside the cave, it was much warmer than outside. We signed the register that's in there in a white tube with reflective tape on it, and I shed my extra long-sleeved shirt. I guess it's not uncommon for cavers to slowly shed extra equipment as they go deeper. When we got back to my shirt later, I found out I must smell nice to cave crickets, as there were hordes of them on the shirt that I had to shake off.

As we delved into the real reaches of the cave, there were opportunities to see a lot of rock formations unique to the cave environment. For example, here's a shot John took of me next to a large section of flowstone. Don't be fooled by my happy expression - that was simply because this was fairly late in the expedition when I was finally confident I could get out. Also it had been at least ten minutes since one of John's less than helpful comments, such as, "It's best if you try not to think about the millions of tons of rock, pressing down at you, that will inevitably be drawn down by gravity to crush what little space is left."

Me and My Flowstone

We probably descended about 150 feet below ground. The cave is estimated to be about 240 feet deep if you descend to the pool at its base. If I'd been able to go everywhere John could go, we probably could have made it, but we reached a spot where I couldn't continue, although not for lack of trying. Here's a picture of the gap that finally defeated me:

I Couldn't Fit Through Here

You can see John on the other side. He was doing his best to encourage me, but there are some places you just can't fit. I slid my feet into this gap and got about halfway through. I had already taken off my pack. As I look at it, the picture is kind of deceptive and it looks like it should be plenty of room, but it's not. My back was on the rock at the bottom of the picture and my belly was getting caught on the projecting rock in the middle of the rock at the top. My legs were through, largely dangling in midair. The angle of the photo is also a bit deceptive, since there's nothing to really use as a horizon line. The picture was taken at a roughly 45 degree angle downward, so this opening is as much a drop as it is a hole going forward. John was eight to ten feet below me.

The problem was that it was going to be very hard to get through, although perhaps I could have made it, but I didn't feel at all confident I would be able to get back out. We hadn't done any upward climb yet, but it just seemed that if it was this hard getting in, getting out without purchase for my feet would be impossible. As it was, I had to lift myself back out of this gap pretty much just using my arms.

The return climb took twice the climb down and there were several times I had to stop and rest for several minutes because my arms and legs were shaking badly with the effort. It was also very intense because some of the dark holes that didn't look so bad on the way down I now knew were openings to fifty-plus foot shafts falling to some unknown bottom. When you are slowly pulling yourself up a rather slick piece of slanted rock and hunting for handfolds and footholds, that gives you incentive to be sure of what you grab, but doesn't make it any easier.

One shaft upward had me very worried in that John went up it first, pushing his pack in front of him, but ended up grunting and cursing most of the way up while I watched him getting his hips wedged between floor and ceiling. After he was through, I took off my pack and my camera dropped off it's strap, although still in its case. All you could hear was, "Thump! Thump! Thump!" as it bounced down into the darkness.

Aaron: Well, that didn't sound good.
John: No, it didn't. What was it?
Aaron: My camera. Too bad, I was liking the pictures I was getting.
John: You can't leave it behind without looking for it.
Aaron: Sure I can. It was hell getting this far back up and I don't really want to do it again. I loved that camera, but it's gone now.
John: It's not the camera, it's the memories.
Aaron: To hell with the memories. I'm not going back down.
John: Fine, look out. I'm coming back down.

Miraculously, he found it and it was unharmed, despite bouncing to some thirty feet below us. Once he came back up and I secured it in a pocket in my pack, John continued back up, but a different way this time. That way, though, was the crazy way, as it went along a ledge over one of those unfathomably deep pits.

I went up the original shaft he'd taken the first time. Since I'd seen how John didn't fit on his side, I went up on my belly. I learned I could brace myself with my feet, reach with my arms, pull myself up, then brace myself by pushing my back against the ceiling. That would free me up to find new footholds. I could even create a foothold by putting my heel on the ceiling and pushing my knee (with kneepad, very important!) against the floor of the shaft. That would wedge my lower leg so it could slip and I could push against it to lift myself further. As it turns out, this was a pretty good way to climb that part and restored some of my earlier confidence.

Eventually, we made it out. (No, Aaron, we thought you had been killed....) I had a great time, but John got a picture of the now filthy me describing how dark and "scawy" it was:

Aaron After Caving - It was Dark and Scawy!

We changed clothes, and drove away from my latest adventure, well satisfied with the experience. I have to say, though, that having lunch where we did gave a view that left me with far more appreciation that I would have had before caving:

Lunch was Blissfully Outside

I don't know if I'll ever go caving again, but I'm glad I did it at least once.

Huge Windmills

2006-01-23T10:35:00.000-05:00

I found one of the power plants from Power Grid! Check out the huge windmills you can see from the highway between San Diego and Phoenix.

Huge Windmills

Disneyland Visit

2006-01-23T10:20:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure there's much I can say about Disneyland that hasn't been said a million times already. I had a great time. I also think I finally get the difference between a "theme park" and an "amusement park." Disneyland's clearly in the first category in that few of the rides are as wild as what you find in places like the Six Flags parks.

I did get a nice picture outside the Haunted Mansion, which had been themed to "The Nightmare Before Christmas," my favorite animated movie.

Disneyland's Haunted Mansion

Right next to Disneyland is Disney's California Adventure, a second theme park focusing on California. That had a very exciting ride of a type I've never tried before, where you end up in freefall. I took a picture of the outside of the ride. See the doors up near the top? Those open while you are sitting in a crazy elevator and you see across the park just before dropping several floors. That one was pretty intense. I saw the picture taken while I was on the ride by the automatic cameras in the ride. I didn't look very happy.

Twilight Zone Tower of Terror

I'd go again, but I think I'd have to have my kids with me to enjoy it fully.

San Francisco

2006-01-23T10:17:00.000-05:00

It’s been a busy week, but now I can catch up on relating details of my trip. After Crescent City, my next stop was San Francisco. It’s a long drive between those two, so I got into Frisco late in the evening, where I stayed in the Hilton at Fisherman’s Wharf (thank you, Priceline!) I walked around the wharf a little that evening and had dinner at one of the nice restaurants there, something like Alioto’s. Seafood seemed obligatory.

The next day, before heading south again, I visited two attractions in the Fisherman’s Wharf area. The first was the Ripley’s Believe or Not! Museum. I’ve been through Ripley’s museums before elsewhere, but this is always good for an interesting hour or two. The best part was a room where there was a rotating tube around a catwalk that made it feel as if the catwalk was moving, not the tube.

Better, that afternoon I visited a museum called the Exploratorium. This is more of a hands-on, interactive museum, where various principle of science are demonstrated through experiments you try yourself. Since this was on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Birthday and school was out, there were a lot of kids there. It was interesting that some of the parents were very good about telling their kids to share with other kids, but would neglect to allow other, older, paying customers to take a turn. By some weird coincidence, several young boys who at various times would park themselves on an exhibit so long I’d move on without an opportunity to participate were named Jacob. Perhaps if I’d named my inner child that way?

Next to the Exploratorium is the Palace of Fine Arts, and eminently photogenic building. I didn’t have time to tour it, but I did take some pictures, such as this one below.

Palace of Fine Arts

Disneyland

2006-01-17T12:37:00.000-05:00

I have some cool pictures from San Francisco I took yesterday, but I'm not going to post them until this evening. I'm going to Disneyland and the park opens in twenty minutes!

"Mr. Overton, you've quit your job at Microsoft. What are you going to do now?"

"I'm going to Disneyland!"

Redwoods and the California Coastline

2006-01-16T12:36:00.000-05:00

I left Crescent City in the morning and headed south through the Redwood National Forest. While US-101 is a much more curving and beautiful drive than I-5, there are side roads off of US-101 that are even more scenic, so I took them. This picture was actually on US-101, though, mere moments out of Crescent City with the early morning sun streaming through the trees. While I'm pleased with the picture, the reality was way better.

Redwood Highway

One of the side roads runs high along the coastline and occasionally breaks out of the trees to afford some really fantastic vistas of the Pacific. I took a lot of pictures, hoping for some good ones. As I was taking them, I couldn't really tell how they might turn out because the sun was very bright, a welcome change from the rain that's been deluging the Seattle area for almost a month.

California Coastline

Occasionally, you'll see crosses along the highway, but this one was huge and made of steel. I couldn't tell why it was really there.

Big Cross

Last night, I pulled into San Francisco in the dark, and got to my hotel, the Hyatt on Fisherman's Wharf as the tripometer clicked onto 900 miles since I started out. That there is a lot of driving!

On My Way

2006-01-15T11:52:00.000-05:00

I'm rollin'!

Yesterday morning, I left Bellevue after a fine Denny's breakfast, and began my long, winding drive to Maryland (via rather out of the way places like San Diego.) I went longer than I plan to do on most days in order to get into California on the first day and have daylight for some things I want to do there. I went about 520 miles to a small town on the very northern coast of California called Crescent City. It has a very photogenic lighthouse.

Lighthouse at Crescent City, California

This gets me to where this morning I'll be able to get to the Redwood National Forest in the morning, drive a long the coast in the afternoon, and get into San Francisco in the early evening.

I went through Oregon on I-5, stopping only for gas and lunch in Portland. For those board game players amongst you, Oregon is made up entirely of pasture and forest hexes from Settlers of Catan. There were incredibly green pastures dotted with sheep, and deep forests where the occasional lumber mill nestled therein. I kept waiting to see a big red number eight painted on a hillside. Because of the distance I needed to cover and the unending rain, I didn't stop for any photos, but today is sunny with no clouds in evidence to the south, so I should manage a few beyond this morning's snapshot of the lighthouse.

I'm so pleased with an opportunity to take this drive. I wish you were here.

Alaska is Really Cold

2006-01-10T22:56:00.000-05:00

I'm in Alaska at the moment, Fairbanks in particular, visiting my parents and grandmother. Visiting Alaska in January is kind of crazy, because IT'S REALLY FRICKIN' COLD. How cold, you say? Check this out:

That's Really, Really Cold!

That's right, 19 degrees below zero. (That's Fahrenheit, so if you're one of those Celsius thinkers, that's about 28 below zero, which sounds even worse.) When I went to take that picture and a few others, I took my gloves off. I was wearing a hat and a coat, but only jeans, no longjohns (since I no longer own any.) Tennis shoes, not boots. In less than five minutes, I was so frozen that I got back in the car, drove to the nearby Pioneers' Home, where my grandmother lives, and had to be inside there for a bit before the chill left me.

My parents have been poking some fun at me because I used to find the cold no big deal and now I'm being a cold-whiner, but this kind of weather is something you have to get used to over a long time, and it's been an even longer time since I experienced it.

Here, though, is another picture of some frozen trees that look awesome. Of course, it took two days before I was outside in the very brief daytime hours such that I could get a picture of them.

Frozen Trees

In an effort to feel warmer, I did pull this photo from my trip to Hawaii last year, where I look very happy and very warm. Both are true. Thanks again to Trevor for asking me to be best man at his wedding so I could have no excuse to not go there.

Aaron in Hawaii, Happily Warm

Riding the Whirlwind

2006-01-09T19:48:00.000-05:00

Life's been keeping me very busy lately. For example, I've quit Microsoft as of last week. I have a new job in the Washington, DC area that I will get into in more detail in a week or so once the decision to hire me has been properly announced there.

At the moment, I'm in Alaska visiting my parents and my grandmother for a few days before I move significantly further away. I get back to Seattle on Wednesday and will be moved out of my apartment by Friday. Then, I'm going to drive to the east coast over a period of about three weeks, taking time to visit some friends and see some sights along the way. Blogging should be way up during that time.

Honestly, some mornings I wake up and I'm not sure quite where I am, what time it is, or even what day it is. Things have been moving so quickly they've been kind of a blur. But generally, it's all moving in a positive direction, so for now, I'm just going to hang on and see where it all goes.

Clever Discounting

2005-12-23T21:42:00.000-05:00

I went into a jewelry store today that had big signs out front reading, "Up to 70% off!" Inside, most of the displays were labeled with "Everything here 50%, plus an additional 20%!" At first blush, that's 70%, right?

Wrong. Since the 20% is taken off after the 50% off has been calculated, the 20% only applies to half the retail price. That is, 10% of retail, which makes the item actually 60% off, a perfectly valid amount in "Up to 70%."

60% off was a perfectly good discount for the item I purchased, and while I'd prefer 70% off, that 10% was in some ways worth observing the cleverness of the discounting scheme. Caveat emptor!

I've Done It (for the next two weeks...)

2005-12-16T21:03:00.000-05:00

In 1994, Scott Adams published what I think was one of the funniest Dilbert comic strips.

For the next two weeks, I have that job! My work with the Connect team is finished, but I don't start with Office Live (my new position, still at Microsoft) until January. Sweet bliss!

Fame

2005-12-13T17:27:00.000-05:00

The absolute value of “infamous” is “famous.”

Next, Build a Great Team

2005-12-01T18:27:00.000-05:00

In a previous post, I wrote about picking the right person for a task. The process scales up for looking at a team and analyzing what the team should do and who the next hire should be. The first step is to take a look at every task the team does or should be doing today. This will be, by necessity, a fairly high level task area. “Update screenshots based on feedback” is too narrow a task. “Write specifications” is about right. If the list is more than about 10-15 tasks, you’re probably defining the tasks too narrowly, dealing with a team larger than what I’m considering here (that is, a workgroup of up to about 10 people,) or your team is way over-committed. I’ll discuss the latter two problems in a moment, but for this first step, you should make sure you have broad categories.

Next, go through the suitability exercise for each member of the team for each task the team does, figuring out what each member likes and how skilled he is at the task. This fills a matrix that allows you to cross-reference tasks and team members and tell at a glance where the strengths and weakness of the team are. I’ve created a fairly simply sample matrix for a team with three people and four general tasks so we have a basis for discussion.

On this chart, “++” represents “Cultivate,” “+” represents “Educate”, “-“ is for Restrict, and Disallow is blank.

When presented this way, the nature of the team practically leaps from the page. Let’s discuss some specifics anyway. The person that should take on a leadership role for each of the first three tasks is clear. Bob should focus on requirements, Joe on specifications, and Mary on presentations. There’s no need to ask Mary to spend much time on requirements, despite her skill in that area, because Bob has it covered and Joe wants to learn. The whole team is well equipped to produce specifications, which is very good, since I based this loosely on a program management team where that’s the top priority.

Asking Bob to present for executives would be a very bad idea. So much better would be to ask Joe to be a presenter, but have him work with Mary to prepare the presentation. Mary gets the opportunity to be a leader and mentor, but Joe gets to grow his skills. With this particular mix, we have a great situation because Joe gets to lead on specification writing, and Mary gets the growth opportunity (along with Bob.)

The team clearly has a problem in the support area, though. There are two skilled individuals, but it’s a part of the job that neither of them really want to do. Asking them to do it, despite all the other good stuff they will get to do, is going to be a source of friction. There’s two ways a manager can handle this. First of all, he can try to shed that responsibility altogether. In a larger organization, this may well be possible, and the example certainly suggests there are other teams around based on the nature of the tasks. Attacking the problem with concerns about team morale and building stronger focus for the team would be good, defensible arguments. In effect, we’re addressing the concern about the team being overcommitted that I mentioned above.

Another solution is to hire the next addition to the team and use the need for a good support person as a way to qualify candidates. In fact, a person with a “Cultivate” level of support suitability and an interest in either presentation or requirements skills would actually be a great addition to the team, even if they hate writing specifications. For a program management team, this would not be obvious without going through an exercise like this.

This process is scalable beyond the workgroup level. If you roll up the overall team into a single team suitability column, you’ll get “Educate” (or maybe “Educate+” if I can slightly mangle my own methodology) for the first three tasks and “Restrict” for last. Also, in the example, the first three items could perhaps be rolled up into “Program Management” with an “Educate” suitability level. If the larger organization that contains this team does the exercise across teams against a task level where the tasks have been rolled up into more general groupings like this, similar analysis at the workgroup level can be done. There’s no reason that the columns can’t represent whole divisions or that the task rows can’t represent lines of business, it just takes more work to do the bottom up accumulation of data.

If any of my readers has an opportunity to try this out with a team, I would be very interested in hearing about what you find out and how this has allowed you to change the team for the better.

Could This Really Be His Name?

2005-12-01T17:07:00.000-05:00

The AP has a "News of the Weird" article (linked here on MSNBC) about a lingerie shop using live models in the window. The last paragraph includes a quote from an investigating officer who says no crime is being committed. His name is supposedly Lt. Peter Couture.

Do you think this could be real? "Peter" is vulgar slang for a penis. "Couture" is high-fashion clothing created by designers (such as lingerie.) I can't help but think this is bogus.

Picking the Right Person for a Task

2005-11-28T12:04:00.000-05:00

In thinking about how you pick the right person for a given task, a good way to figure it out is to consider two axes of suitability. The first is whether the person is any good at the task. The second is whether the person likes the task. These are really pretty obvious, but let’s consider what happens when you take both and map the person’s suitability into one of the four quadrants formed by the options. I’ve given each quadrant a name for easy reference in discussion, where the name defines what you as a manager should do with regard to assigning the work to a person who’s suitability falls in that quadrant.

Cultivate: A manager should do this for a person that both likes the task and is good at it. Not only does this mean that you have a great choice of who should be assigned the task, if you are a manager of this person, you should be looking for opportunities to leverage his skills to do more of this and related work. In conjunction with his individual contribution, you should also be looking for ways he can supply leadership to others, assuming of course that he isn’t someone who shies away from leadership entirely. I think that latter case is fairly rare, as leadership doesn’t have to mean management or public speaking, but can take many forms.

Educate: This is what you do for a person that likes the task but does not yet have competency. I used “educate” rather than “train” because education can be more than just training. Education should include training; apprenticeship, where the person works with a more skilled coworker to learn the skills; guidance, where the manager or a mentor helps him figure out what he needs to do to improve; and opportunity, where he is given a chance to work his skills on the task, but probably off the critical path. The most important thing is to recognize this is where growth happens. An employee not doing anything that falls into this category is going to get bored, frustrated, or angry, depending on temperament and what other categories apply, and will either leave or stay on with negative impact on the larger team.

Restrict: Sometimes, a person is good at a task, but doesn’t like to do it. This is the most dangerous situation with regards to destroying a good manager/employee relationship because it’s easy for the manager to give the person the task and keep him on it. If at all possible, you shouldn’t ask him to do this work. If you do, though, it’s important to do several things: make it clear it’s temporary; explain the need; take immediate and visible steps to relieve him of the work; and find a way to deliver additional rewards for the work. Don’t think that the extra rewards will carry you along indefinitely, though. If he doesn’t like the work, you won’t be able to pay him enough to keep him at it for very long.

Disallow: For the person who doesn’t like a task and isn’t any good at it anyway, I was really thinking “avoid,” but the word isn’t strong enough. This one sounds obvious when you read it here, but managers assign work to people who don’t like it and aren’t good at it all the time. If you think your employee will grow to like it as he gains skill, think again. Not only will he hate the work, he’ll feel humiliated by his failures, disinterested in the improvement, and resentful of the assignment. If he was going to get better at it, he’d have expressed an interest. If you don’t have anyone else to do this work, then figure out how to get by without it until you have someone who can. If you decide it just can’t wait, then you have a problem on the order of figuring out which employee (or at least which employee relationship) you’re going to sacrifice to get the work done. Put in such terms, it’s likely you’ll reconsider the importance of the work one more time.

A matrix of tasks and the suitability levels for the employee assigned to each provides a pretty clear roadmap about how your employees’ careers can be directed for maximum success.

Haiku Status Report

2005-11-15T18:21:00.000-05:00

Duncan, a developer on my feature team, was one of those I asked to give status in 30 words or less. He responded in haiku:

Many bugs lately!
Querying priority...
Oops, field is empty.

(Our bug database includes a priority field that the team that triages bugs tends to not set as they should.)

I am inspired to try using haiku for my own status reports in the future.

Celebrity Trailer Sale

2005-11-02T18:03:00.000-05:00

The sale of my trailer on eBay has made a kind of "celebrity news" in the apparently news-starved world of miniature gaming.

Great Albums

2005-10-31T19:10:00.000-05:00

This weekend, I started ripping CDs to my hard drive, but skipping over all those songs I never really cared about that were on the CDs with "the good stuff." I'm almost done because I didn't feel very well today, so didn't go to work. Ripping CDs, though, doesn't require much.

Something interesting in this exercise is that I've now gone through just about every CD I've ever bought, since I've never really thrown any out. I think I sold ten or so on eBay once upon a time, and I've certainly misplaced a few that I was expecting to find during this exercise, but haven't. I've also bought a lot less in the last few years than I did before. But I have a pretty comprehensive set of the music I've listened to since I started buying CDs almost 20 years ago, when they first became available and I switched from vinyl.

(Children: they used to put put music on relatively delicate vinyl discs about three times larger than CDs that could only be played where you had a stereo system and read the music using a needle. There were no CDs and no Internet. Really. It's okay, I can see why you wouldn't understand.)

(Even younger children: they used to put music on things called compact discs that you had to put into a player much larger than your iPod and you couldn't get the music off the Internet very easily until there was Napster. No, I mean Napster version 1.)

(Dad: yes, I remember your reel-to-reel. I think I even remember how it was used.)

Back to my point. There were a remarkably small number of albums where I bothered to rip more than a few songs. Plenty of albums only yielded one song and some yielded none. I think I can classify a really great album as one where I decided to rip most or all of the songs. Those albums don't always have songs that I would put on a list of my favorite songs, but just seem consistently good to me.

That being said, here's a list of some that fall into that category (as Artist: Album.) It includes ELO: Time, the first album I ever owned, a gift from Dad when I was 14. I'd like to hear what some of yours might be.

Alice in Chains: Jar of Flies
Blue Man Group: Audio
Blue Man Group: The Complex
The Crystal Method: Legion of Boom
The Crystal Method: Tweekend
The Crystal Method: Vegas
Electric Light Orchestra: Time
Evanescence: Fallen
Fatboy Slim: You've Come a Long Way Baby
Garbage: Garbage
Genesis: Genesis
Gin Blossoms: New Miserable Experience
Live: Throwing Copper
Mike + The Mechanics: Mike + The Mechanics
Oingo Boingo: Boingo Alive
Paul Oakenfold: Perfecto Presents Paul Oakenfold in Ibiza
Pearl Jam: Vs.
Planet P Project: Pink World
The Prodigy: Fat of the Land
Soundgarden: Superunknown
Tweaker: The Attraction to All Things Uncertain
U2: Achtung Baby
ZZ Top: Eliminator

Opus Imitates Life

2005-10-30T18:16:00.000-05:00

Today's Opus comic strip is so on target. I just read it as I sit in a Starbuck's, working on my laptop, which will underscore how funny it is once you read it.

Elizabeth - Future Gamer Chick?

2005-10-29T18:02:00.000-04:00

Recall I talked about going to GenCon in August? Well, Elizabeth was asked if she could have her picture taken while she was there and found out today that she had some nice things said about her on the photographer's website.

Spook, then on to Shamanka

2005-10-26T19:16:00.000-04:00

Mary Roach, author of Stiff and Spook came to the Microsoft campus, saving me a trip to the University bookstore downtown - a great author, and so polite! She didn't come for just me, mind you, but as part of a visiting lecturer series put on by Microsoft Research.

Spook, like Stiff, is a great book. I read my (now signed) copy over the next couple of days, and it's really intriguing. It's all about Mary's research into what science has to say about the afterlife and the existence (or not) thereof. It's witty, engaging, and sounds like it was immensely entertaining to research and write. When she talks about her research into the mediums of the early 1900s and the kinds of things they were doing during seances, including the incredibly weak attempts to pass off cheese-cloth as ectoplasm, you can't help but wonder how people bought into that stuff. We live in a much more skeptical society today.

But let me add something more you won't find in her book: I was talking to my dad about the ectoplasm stuff in Spook and he surprised me by saying, “Oh, yeah I’ve seen that first-hand.” I told him how that stuff seemed to have ended in the early part of the last century, so having been born in 1940, he must be mistaken. His response, “Well, it didn’t end in Russia by 1995.” Dad was unexpectedly forcibly retired by the University of Alaska Fairbanks in his 50s, many years before he wanted to be. There was a bunch of trouble that caused, but the good part was that he was pretty well sick of working anyway, couldn’t stand the politics, and this gave him the opportunity to do some studying in some subjects that interested him with all that free time. That included technical writing, until the university dropped the post-graduate degree program in the subject, trombone, and Russian.

As part of learning Russian, he ended up taking a semester immersion class where the students go and live in Russia for several months. Off he went to Yakutsk. (My dad is pretty darn cool. A couple years ago when we went to a local theme park and me and my kids were going down the big water slides, my dad came along and went down them with us. I didn’t even think about the idea that he wouldn’t. Then I was waiting at the bottom of one of them for him to show up and I’m looking at some elderly couple standing there in polyester slacks and just watching, and I realize my dad’s pretty close in age to them. At 62 years old, he’s on the water slides and it doesn’t even seem weird except by comparison. So a trip to Yakutsk wasn’t all that surprising. But I digress.)

Among the many things that happened to him in Russia, my dad got rather sick. Sick enough that the locals were concerned and wanted him to be visited by the “shamanka.” Dad tells me that’s the female version of “shaman” to the Russians. I take his word for it, but it seems like a cool word and I believe that the people that originated Baba Yaga could still have a shamanka or two hanging around. Dad’s like me, and if I read your book correctly, like you – basically a skeptic that wants to believe, but can’t help but ask for just a bit more proof, proof either way just so long as it’s proof. Applying that kind of stuff to himself, though, didn’t sit so well, and as he put, “I managed to ‘miss’ my appointment with the shamanka three times before they cornered me.”

He said the shamanka laid her hands on him and made some weird noises and then spat up a bunch of stuff into a cup. She showed him (eww!) and said it was the sickness drawn out of his body. He said it sure looked like the soup she’d had for dinner – he’d seen her eating not all that long before. That would be it, except that after having a lingering malaise for some time, he found himself feeling significantly better the very next day. He tells me he can’t help but sorta, kinda believe that there was something to it. He found out more about the profession of shamanka, and apparently these people go through some years of training at the end of which they have to pass some kind of spiritual test. Failing the test means death, and some of them don’t make it. So they take this very, very seriously.

This wouldn't have fit in Spook, but if Mary were to do another one in the same genre on things like faith-healing, she'd have some new material. Personally, I wish I could be the one to write that book, as I'd love to take a year and do the research. In the meantime, I've passed on the idea to her although I think she already has her topic picked for the next one. I may not write that book and Mary may, but that's okay. I'll write something similarly cool someday.

College of Magical Knowledge

2005-10-25T20:22:00.000-04:00

Over the last couple of weeks, I've assembled a new puzzle. I started assembling, gluing, and hanging puzzles last year, then pretty much stopped when I moved into my new apartment because of a lack of space. Since I've switched to a laptop for the most part, I finally decided to just push everything on my desk out of the way and make that a puzzle surface. This is the first time I've photographed the steps.

The puzzle I picked is called "College of Magical Knowledge" and is artwork by James C. Christensen. I did another of his last year, framed it, and gave it to Olympia as an anniversary gift. I like his artwork and his paintings make for great puzzles. This one (like the one last year) is 1500 pieces. I find that I can do a 500 piece puzzle in an afternoon, 1000 pieces with some free time spread out over a week, and 1500 in about three weeks. 1500 is also about as many as I could reasonably fit on my desk unless the pieces themselves were smaller. Even as it was, there were pieces stacked on top of pieces for quite awhile.

So, without further ado, here are the photos, from start to finish.

All Face Up

Getting all the pieces face up is always a great first step. You can see that many of them are stacked on others because of the space restrictions and that I've already pulled out most of the edge pieces. A few always get by, so I'll have to hunt for them later.

Frame Complete

I took the picture above as soon as the frame was fully assembled. I'd also picked up a few other things along the way. I had a couple edge pieces that I couldn't find for a long time, as they were buried under other stuff. Rather than focus on just one piece, I moved on, figuring I'd spot the remaining edges as I worked on other sections, which turned out to be the case.

Some Obvious Stuff

Most puzzles have some things that are fairly obvious. In this case, there were a few people and some particularly brightly color rooftops that came together quickly. Once there are a few sections together, space on the desk becomes more readily available, so it's a big step to get all the unassembled pieces outside the frame, as I've done here. In fact, it's more important than resolving the stacking problem, which I still had.

Buildings Coming Along

The buildings were next because they were distinctively yellow, orange, and yellowish brown. I'll browse through the unassembled pieces and pick up a handful of pieces of the same general color, make a space for them, and lay them out again. Then I can try to assemble chunks that can be dropped into the overall puzzle. You can just such a pre-assembly area just to the lower left of the frame area.

I also end up picking up a lot of "here and there" pieces during this process. I seem to have a knack for seeing some piece and getting an "Aha!" moment where I know just where it's supposed to go.

All Rooftops Complete

I'd made a lot of progress at this point. The rooftops were all blue tiles and the buildings themselves were rather yellowish or orange, so they were (relatively) easy to separate out from, say, trees. Note the largely lacking presence of yellow in the pieces stuck off to the side. This was also a great point because I had just put all the assembled pieces on one side of the puzzle and made sure that none were stacked on another.

Building Pretty Much Complete

As the caption says, the main building was pretty much complete. The rest of this was going to be much harder because it was mostly just leaves and tree-trunks. There were still a couple of very pesky holes that seemed like they should have been easy to find that were really bugging me.

Just Trees Left - Working By Shape

Toward the end of assembling a puzzle, when the colors aren't very helpful because the color of one piece and the color of the one next to it may not match much, I have to work by shape to maintain my momentum. Shape, at that point, is easier. When the number of remaining pieces is getting down to under about 250 or so, I'll sort them, as you can see in the picture above. I put all the pieces with no "outies" together, then the pieces with only one, with two that are perpendicular, with two that are opposite, with three, and with four, each in their own area. I'll sometimes sort those groups further based on other characteristics, ideally down to where no group has more than 10-20 pieces in it. For the pesky holes I mentioned above, this usually means they are filled in a few minutes as I know exactly what shape I need and I only have to search through a few pieces to find it. For the large holes, I can work across in rows where I know two or three characteristics of the piece I want and can use that to narrow my search down to a much smaller number.

Also, in that picture you'll see that I've turned the puzzle upside-down. That was because I can only work from one side of my desk and that let me put the empty hole in the puzzle right next to the pieces. I actually dropped a whole corner off when I was doing it and had to take about fifteen minutes to patch the pieces off the floor back into place.

Assembly Complete - Time to Glue

At last, I'm done (with assembly!) I've slid a piece of butcher-block paper under the completed puzzle and turned it around again, even though I didn't really need to do so. Next up was to glue it together. I've used either the puzzle glue that comes in small bottles with exactly the right consistency or standard white glue (like Elmer's) that's been watered down with equal success. It's really weird the first time you do it because it feels like you're ruining it. The glue is painted on the front of the puzzle. What happens, though, is that it dries clear and fills in the gaps between pieces. You have to have some kind of backer underneath because some of the glue will seep through the cracks and glue the puzzle to the table if you don't. Once it dries, supposedly an hour although I tend to leave it overnight, I trim the back and I have a piece I can pick up. Unless I use a more solid backing, it's usually turned into a rather flexible piece of cardboard. For some puzzles, that's it, it can go on the wall as is. In this case, though, I have more planned.

Framed, On the Wall

And here it is, the finished product, hanging on the wall in my office. I took the finished and glued puzzle to a custom frame shop. It was during Olympia's visit last week, so we picked out a frame together and she finally hit on one that looks truly excellent. I got it back yesterday and hung it, then took my camera with me to work today to get this last picture. It looks great and because it has so much of my labor in it, it means more to me than a much more expensive piece I have hanging in my apartment (on loan from a friend - I can't afford really expensive artwork!)

I'm guessing there's about 20 hours of work in this one and it's totally worth it. Maybe it'll inspire a reader to do one, too?

Mary Roach's New Book

2005-10-03T17:14:00.000-04:00

I got an email from Mary Roach, who wrote "Stiff" - a book I favorably reviewed on my blog some time ago. I had sent her email and had a bit of back and forth discussion on various things dead, like my photos of a Hawaiian cemetery. Her email announces her new book and struck me as very funny:

Hi again -- I wanted to let you know that my second book, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, is about to hit the bookstores. Like Stiff, it’s my usual goofball, attention-deficit hodge-podge. You can check it out at www.spookthebook.com
I apologize in advance: There are no maggots in this one. But there is:
--Vaginally extruded ectoplasm
--An attempt to weigh the soul of a leech
–-A Cambridge University ghost experiment carried out at an X-rated movie house
--Antoni Van Leeuwenhoek’s groundbreaking experiments on tooth scum
--The exact weight of Jesus’s soul
--A 1927 laboratory experiment to produce an outline of a monkey’s astral body
--Cameos by Elizabeth Taylor, Nikola Tesla, Homer Clyde Snook, and the Prince of Wales
I leave this week on a four-week book tour. (Gawp.) The readings schedule is up on the site. Thank you so much for your support.
Bestest,
Mary Roach

Happy Anniversary to Us

2005-10-01T17:50:00.000-04:00

Sixteen years ago today, Olympia and I married at Saint Demetrius Greek Orthodox Church in Corona, New York, which is in Queens. We have been apart for over a year now living on opposite sides of the country, some 3000 miles apart, and yet we remain married, and that is cause for reflection. I think about what it means to have been married for 16 years and in doing so remember that day, October 1, 1989.

It was a fairly hot day, and an exciting one. We had some seventy people at our wedding and it was a time where those people gathered together with a common cause, to celebrate the fact that Olympia and I had decided that this relationship that we had so far was something that was worth committing to the long term, to permanency.

There were a number of things leading up to the wedding that were odd and now seem very funny. My parents were divorced. My father had remarried. My mother had a long-time boyfriend that she has since married. Olympia’s father had died the year before. It was all very complicated. We settled that on our invitations by saying, “Together with our parents, Aaron and Olympia invite you to our wedding…” There was no end to the furor caused by this, especially amongst Olympia’s family who were not yet used to something so modern, unorthodox, and perhaps American.

We also had confusion about the major roles others would play in the wedding. Olympia’s Uncle Nick (now sadly deceased,) was our Koumbaros, and insisted that this meant Best Man rather than Sponsor. When I attempted to have my brother, Adam, named as the Best Man, there were arguments and fights over what this meant. It did not matter that the Koumbaros could also be Koumbara, the female version of the same word, which clearly couldn’t mean Best Man. Still he insisted on being called Best Man, so around him, Adam became the Head Usher. Meanwhile, Olympia’s cousin Elaine was the Maid of Honor. There were some people who said Maid of Honor and their were other people who said Matron of Honor because she was already married.

To me it all just seemed like a lot of bother over nothing. But I realize upon reflection that weddings are pretty important things, and people take them extremely seriously, and what people are called is something that really matters to them. It has become clear that weddings are for the actual couple last; they are really so everyone else can get involved.

We sorted all those things out and managed to actually make it to the wedding day without anybody getting in too big of a fight. I was so excited about getting married that afternoon that all morning, as we were putting on tuxes and stuff like that, Adam and Dad kept saying, “You know, we are kind of hungry,” but I could not eat at all. There was nothing that was going to get me near food. I didn’t even care. We paid for that distraction later.

During the wedding, Olympia and I were at this point where the Priest was going on and on in Greek, and we were not really paying all that much attention. Instead we were just kind of looking at the people that were there standing up for us, the Bridesmaids and the Ushers. As Olympia and I were both looking at Adam, he had a little smile on his face, but then his eyes glazed over and he pitched over, flat on his back, totally unconscious. The combination of the hot candles and the tuxedo and not eating all morning and being very thin all conspired to just knock him out. He was carted out of there by my dad and my mother’s boyfriend and there were several tense moments. The wedding had to continue because it is a religious sacrament, so the Priest just kept going, but if you look closely at wedding pictures you see that there are a few minutes of total horror on the faces of people, especially me and Olympia and Elaine. You’d think when looking at the pictures, I thought this was a happy occasion, what’s up with that?

It was enormous relief when my dad like slipped back into the church and signaled to me, “Hey, Adam’s okay!” Of course, at that point I started to feel my eyes glaze over with the combination of relief and all the other things that had affected Adam, except for the part about being thin. I whispered to Olympia as we were being taken around the altar three times by the Priest, “I don’t feel well, I don’t know if I can make it.” And she said, “Aaron, you will not pass out at my wedding.” That was the one time she referred to it as “my” wedding rather than “our” wedding, but I guess that’s what was needed and I managed to stay up and make it through the rest of the ceremony.

After the ceremony we went to a photography session near a bridge in Queens - for whatever reason I can’t quite remember which one it was, but it was by a huge park, Astoria Park I think. We had a lot of pictures taken, including a really great one of me feeding a hot dog to Olympia – very suggestive! The reception went very well and the amount of comments that we got afterwards about what a great wedding it was and how much fun it was, was really heartening. Olympia and I hardly sat down a second, being dragged from one place to another, having our pictures taken and not getting to eat any food there either. The reception itself ended with those people that were still there at the end gathering in a circle and a DJ putting on a song, “That’s What Friends Are For,” and passing around the microphone, karaoke style, so that people could sing along to it. That’s where we discovered that Russell was a fantastic singer, because he sounded like he should have been on the record with them.

This was all a long time ago and after sixteen years; we no longer have contact with many of the people that were at the wedding. In some cases it’s just that we drifted apart as we have moved several times since then. In some cases, even amongst some relatives, it is because there has been some sort of falling out and it is just no longer pleasant having a relationship with them. But for that one day, the common cause of it all was an excellent one.

In the years that have past since then, Olympia and I have considered divorce on three separate occasions. Each time we have backed away from divorce, the most recent being only months ago. I think we step away from it because there is something about having known each other so long and been together for so long that the attraction and the camaraderie and the companionship and the detailed knowledge of what the other person is like just brings us back. It is something that is pretty much impossible to replace.

We have had our own disasters, our own bouts with seeming insanity, but we have learned that we have loved each other regardless. In fact, what our issue really seems to be is that we have learned to love each other, but we have not learned to love each other peacefully. Maybe that is what is next. Maybe this current trial of being so far apart for long months on end has kind of awakened us each to what it is that life would be like without the other, and neither one of us seems to think that is really what we want. So with that in mind, I say to Olympia, my beautiful bride, “Happy Anniversary!” It has been sixteen years. Not all of them have been easy, but we will find a way to have some more and I think it will just get better.

Exception: Cat with No Legs

2005-10-01T02:36:00.000-04:00

Legless Cat

I said I don't post pictures of my cat, but I figure this is a good exception in that I am making fun of her.

Pleasant Surprise

2005-09-26T23:45:00.000-04:00

My first meeting at work was a one-on-one with Chris. (For those that don't know, that's time where you and your manager, or in this case my "skip-level manager," get together to talk about things like career. With Michael, I meet weekly.) We have one scheduled for a half-hour every three months. That's two whole hours a year! Hmm. Sounds a little light, now that I mention it.

Anyway, Chris was a few minutes late and I was thinking that's kind of, well, lame, considering that we only get two hours a year and five minutes is just over 4% of that time. Yes, I actually did the math in my head while I waited in the hallway, which is why I didn't see his email saying he'd be late.

Then he shows up, we sit down in his office, and he says, "Hey, have you had breakfast? How about we go to the diner, 'cause I'm really hungry." He drove, we stopped at a bank so he could get cash, then we had breakfast. He paid for mine and took the time to talk through the biggest issue I face these days in my current job. The half-hour ended up being a catered hour-and-a-half. So my attribution of "lame" was completely misplaced. What a pleasant surprise. Seriously.

What I've really learned is that I need to make sure not to do that kind of attribution or pre-judgment in the future, but let the aggravation only happen after I know the whole story and determine that aggravation is truly warranted. Then, deal with it like an adult, not a petulant child. Sound like a plan?

New Guitar

2005-09-25T20:23:00.000-04:00

I've started up my guitar lessons again after a hiatus of over a year, and I'm very excited about it. In the first lesson, my instructor, Colt Valenti, started me on some techniques for blues guitar. I can tell the difference in my playing after only one lesson.

I've also bought a new guitar, a Schecter Diamond Series, CSH-1, pictured to the right. The manufacturers website has all the specifications. I already had a very basic Fender acoustic and a Fernades electric. I think it's a Fernandes Revolver. At least after a look at their website, that's what seems to match it closest. It is about 15 years old now, so the minor differences are probably just the evolution of the product. Mine is also a purple color that is apparently no longer available in the new ones.

What's compelling to me about this particular guitar includes price (only $600 on sale at Guitar Center, which makes it on the inexpensive side,) the hollow body with F-cuts, and the lack of a floating tremolo. My Fernandes has the floating tremolo, which means it also has a locking nut. That means that to make more than minor adjustments to the tuning, you have to use an Allen wrench to unlock the strings. Some of the music Colt has tried to teach me involves doing stuff like dropping the bass E string to a D, like when playing music by Soundgarden. That's a five minute operation with a floating tremolo and really cuts into lesson time.

Having a second guitar also means I can have one at home and one at my office. Having a guitar at the office may seem really strange, but by keeping my Fernandes there the last month or so, I've actually practiced more. Sometimes I have ten minutes between finishing a task and an upcoming meeting, and I practice my guitar during that time. I'll also sometimes play when I get to the office early or stay late. All these things happen enough that I was actually getting better even without lessons, but the progress was way too slow.

Lessons, however, are a necessity. If you're thinking of learning to play an instrument, take lessons! You'll waste enormous amount of time trying to figure it out yourself from books or CDs when an instructor-led lesson will accelerate the learning process 100 times.

Attack of the Yellowjackets

2005-09-24T22:25:00.000-04:00

Today, my kids were playing outside the house (this is in Maryland) and managed to kick up a ruckus on the part of some yellowjackets. There was a lot of screaming and stinging and tiny things chasing much bigger things which ran away. Fleeing to the house brought some of the little critters inside, which induced more screaming and flailing about. Paramedics were called, but everyone seems okay.

As usual, Katerina took the worst of it, getting nailed something like ten times. Katerina seems always to be the one getting hurt. She's the one that managed to find out which slats in the porch railing were rotted through by falling through them to the concrete six feet below (lots of screaming that time, too, mostly by people other than Katerina.) Despite nothing more than scrapes that time, Katerina ended up with a broken arm after being pushed to the blacktop in school by a neighborhood boy (that liked her a lot and felt really bad about it afterwards.) She also got so excited about Christmas morning one year that she wouldn't eat and when Olympia and I arrived to announce it was time to open some presents, she passed out, scaring the heck out of everyone else (a bunch more screaming - there's a lot of that around her.)

She takes it well, though. When I called today, she answered the phone and said, "Fine," when I asked her how she was - never mentioning she'd been stung repeatedly. She also cried as much when the doctor took her cast off her arm as when it was broken. She said her cast had become her friend and didn't want to see it go. What a trooper!

I think they've figured out to stay away from the far back corner of the yard now.

How My Shoes Got Wet

2005-09-21T20:48:00.000-04:00

OK, between comments and email, apparently people want to know how I got my shoes so wet last night. Here it goes:

I went to get some dinner fairly late at TGI Friday's in Kirkland. (I actually wanted chicken wings from Wing Dome, but got there just minutes too late.) In front of the restaurant is a fountain and around the fountain are a bunch of bronze statues of people. One is of a little kid, pointing, who's standing right on the edge of the fountain.

I was walking around the fountain and didn't notice the kid statue until I suddenly thought there was someone there. I spun around to see who had snuck up behind me and whacked my side on hand of the statue. That hurt a lot (I have a bruise today) and I jumped back - directly into the fountain.

As I waded my way out, a woman walking by was laughing at me, which was okay, because I thought it was pretty funny, too. I told her, "Did you see that? That statue pushed me in! What a jerk!"

Mess with Their Heads

2005-09-21T18:28:00.000-04:00

I got my sneakers really wet last night, so I needed to wear different shoes today. I wore dress shoes. Since I was going to wear dress shoes and a long-sleeved shirt anyway, I went ahead and wore dressier pants, too, instead of my usual jeans.

That really messes with the heads of your managers. They have to be thinking, "Is he interviewing? Is he planning to leave?" I think it might even make them treat you just a bit better in the hopes that it will distract you from aspects of work that you find less than pleasant.

I also picked up the book "Difficult Conversations" today at Kevin's recommendation. It's subtitled, "How to Discuss What Matters Most." It occurs to me that even if I never read it or read it and learned nothing, just having it conspicuously on my desk could improve the tenor of conversations I have with co-workers because it at least looks like I'm trying to figure out how to work with them better.

I didn't set out to mess with their heads, but it's so easy I can't help but do it without trying.

At Work Today

2005-09-16T02:47:00.000-04:00

Something overheard at work today: "You know, I come in before him and leave after him, and I'm not even working all that hard."

Book Title

2005-09-07T18:31:00.000-04:00

I was talking with Elizabeth about the topic of rewards versus efforts, which is one of the topics I'm thinking to include in a slowly forming book concept. I mentioned to her that I was thinking to put this into a book and she asked what the title might be.

I don't know what it'll be, but I bet it'll follow the formula and be called something like "Thing: A long phrase describing the contents."

Better Attitude About Review

2005-09-03T00:23:00.000-04:00

It took me much less time to get past what I always see as terrible news with my annual review this year. That's surprising, because I was very disappointed with my final score at first. But then, I realized that getting a score that translates as "exceeded expectations" instead of "greatly exceeded expectations" really isn't so bad, especially when I work at one of the top software companies (and arguably one of the top companies period) in the world.

I've also received bonuses this year that exceed the U.S. poverty line for a family of three beyond my base pay, and a larger family than that if you include stock awards. I also received a raise that exceeded the estimated inflation rate for 2004. What is there in that such that complaining about it makes sense?

My manager's feedback on the review boils down to, "Dude, you are the awesome, but you really should learn to play nicer with others even when they annoy you, heck, even if they deserve it." It would be so cool if he just included that as a synopsis. I'm going to ask him to do so.

That's what I'll work on this coming year. Even if I personally produce less, I'll focus on getting less stressed out and making sure that those around me are more successful. An interesting side effect is that if I'm asked to cancel my plans and work some weekend, I'll be able to say, "No, that will make me very cranky and I don't get along with my peers as well when I'm cranky. I think I need to limit stuff like that."

Cough, cough, Dad?

2005-09-01T03:44:00.000-04:00

I just got off the phone with my dad. Just after I hung up, I coughed twice. These two events, talking with Dad and coughing, in such time proximity to one another reminds me of how as an adult, I now cough exactly like my dad does. So does my brother, Adam. In fact, I pointed this out to Adam once and he said, "Yeah, I've noticed, too. When I do cough, it's always, *cough, cough*, Dad? Is that you?"

Eerie. I guess we do all become our parents eventually, in so many ways.

Reviews

2005-09-01T00:24:00.000-04:00

It is currently review time at Microsoft. We're actually at the tail end of that time because as of September 15th, if your manager hasn't given you your review, you'll find out what "your numbers" are anyway, as you'll get a paycheck that reflects the changes. The "numbers" consists of a review score, a stock award, a raise, a bonus, and perhaps a promotion. Review scores run from 2.5 to 5.0: 2.5 if you're about to be fired, 3.0 if you are considered a weak performer (although there are exceptions, like for people who just joined a team and despite HR discouragement of such a policy often get a 3.0,) 3.5 for reasonable good performance, 4.0 for great performance, and 4.5 or 5.0 if you had great performance and get lucky (or something.)

My group is running late. No one on my team knows their numbers yet, and that's kind of exasperating because we're two months into the next review cycle and don't have a clear idea of the rewards for the past review cycle. I should get mine tomorrow, though, and that will be at least one huge relief because I really don't need additional areas of uncertainty in my life right now - I have more than enough of those already.

Reviews also include a sort of essay by your manager about your performance was over the year. This may or may not correspond to the actual review score since usually your manager doesn't have any direct control over the score you get. For example, my last review reads like a 4.0 review, but I actually received a 3.5. In my experience, reviews, even good ones like my "tracking to 4.0" review mid-year (where some groups give a "tracking to" score that may or may not mean anything during the actual yearly review) are basically demoralizing. Such reviews usually include a basic statement of the good things you did, without going very deep on the subject, followed by a detailed and excruciating picking apart of what could have gone better. As such, I generally dislike the review process, despite getting continually better reviews since I started at Microsoft.

If I were to go back to my small business and have employees again, this is not how I would handle reviews. I would fall back on Peter Drucker's suggestions to keep reviews positive and save the negative stuff for coaching sessions along the way. Peter Drucker is one of the world's foremost experts on management and I trust his opinions on things of this nature.

One last thing I'll add is something Trevor said to me and others about writing reviews, gleaned from some study he's done on writing good reviews, something that makes darn good sense: "When writing a review, you should try to include words like 'expectations.' You should avoid using words like 'idiot.'"

43 Things

2005-08-27T21:16:00.000-04:00

http://www.43things.com/person/darktortoise

I've started my own list on 43 Things (and on the companion site, 43 Places.) This website is an incredibly cool idea, just the sort of thing that makes me happy to be living in the age of the Internet.

Call Me Overton?

2005-08-27T17:42:00.000-04:00

I've been toying with the idea of asking people around me to refer to me as "Overton" rather than "Aaron." I like my last name better than my first anyway. I wonder if it would stick? Or just seem ridiculous?

My grandfather was always called Overton, even by my grandmother. She explained to me recently that she had met him at work where everyone was referred to by their last names rather than their first names. Even after they got married, she thought of him as Overton and just kept with it.

Think of the other examples: Wasn't it cool in the movie, "Aliens," that everyone called the heroine Ripley, her last name? On the TV series, "Alias," don't you like that Sid's romantic interest is called Vaughan rather than Michael? How about "The X-Files," with Scully and Mulder? No apparent lack of intimacy, but so much more interesting than "Dana and Fox."

My readers on this list are mostly the people that know me best, mostly. (Another little "Aliens" reference, there.) What do you think?

Car Accident Continues

2005-08-25T15:11:00.000-04:00

When I imagine a car accident, I now picture it differently. Instead of engine oil, metal, and plastic flying around, I picture an enormous explosion of paper that covers the entire neighborhood.

Contributing to this mental image is the delivery of the civil case now filed against me King County Superior Court for unspecified damages covering a host of complaints. The trial date is set for February 12, 2007.

I guess I need to talk again to my insurance company (that's been uncomfortably quiet) and find an attorney that I can't afford but need to have.

GenCon Weekend

2005-08-22T13:20:00.000-04:00

The rest of GenCon was great fun. Elizabeth and I played more games, including a second pass at the True Dungeon game, this time for the other adventure. There was one particular room in there that was worth the entire price of admission. In it, we entered a room with a silence spell over it. In play terms, that meant that anyone who communicated through sound would take damage. A riddle written on the wall indicated that to exit the room, we had to ring a bell that was there, which meant lifting the silence.

Lifting the silence required four different people to put their hands into the mouths of skulls mounted on the wall and "endure" the experience. I went first and it was really freaky. The mouth of the skull was filled with what felt like spiderwebs. Then, as I was standing there with my hand through a hole in the wall, it felt like something started licking my hand with a big, gross, slimy tongue. I almost yanked my hand out, but then settled down and let it happen. Finally, my hand was pushed out and had a letter stamped on it.

I knew Elizabeth was going to freak out at it, and two other members of our group had done it already. She put her hand through it and I moved over behind her and held her arm in place. The rest of the guys with us gathered around and encouraged her (silently) to keep quiet. It was totally obvious when the hand-licking thing started, because Elizabeth stiffened and clapped her other hand over her mouth. So there we are, six guys huddled around a teenage girl who's hand is stuck in the mouth of a skull where something unseen licks at her, all trying to stay totally quiet, the scene lit only by a couple of small green glowing bulbs. That's an incredibly tense situation that was about as entertaining as anything that weekend.

Most of the rest of our time was spent exploring the exhibit hall, although we played a game of Pirates of the Spanish Main with our newly acquired ships and participated in a free session where you get a free miniature and get to paint it using paints and brushes supplied by the sponsors, in this case Reaper Miniatures. It was the first time I'd painted a figure in quite some time, so I wasn't totally happy with it, but it certainly got me thinking about picking up painting again.

I think four days was enough (and Elizabeth agreed) but I'm looking forward to another convention when I can, and GenCon next year at a minimum.

GenCon Friday

2005-08-20T11:54:00.000-04:00

Friday at GenCon started with some aggravation that was happily averted. Late Thursday, my badge fell off somewhere between when I looked at it while crossing a street coming back from dinner and entering the convention center a block away. I noticed it was missing no more than three minutes after it fell off, but after retracing my steps three times, I figure it was just gone. That's bad, because replacement of the badge was both necessary and $70. Fortunately, Zev was able to wrangle me a GM badge under the Z-Man Games name, and I was able to avoid paying for a new one.

I realize I forgot to mention that on Thursday, Elizabeth and I tried out Pirates of the Spanish Main by WizKids. You get these little plastic cards where you can punch out pieces and assemble them into pirate ships. Then, by taking turns moving them and firing with cannons, you fight the other players ships and try to sink them before they sink you. The basics are very simple and the game is very compact, so we bought a few packs of ships.

After some more time poking around the exhibit hall, we went to play the National Security Decision Making Game. Not the most exciting title, but it's a game of role-playing political leaders, military leaders, and so on in a real-world setting with a near infinite number of scenarios to play. Elizabeth found the briefing very confusing, so she instead went to watch some anime and go back to the exhibit hall. I stayed to play and ended up in a dual role of Air Force Chief of Staff and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. There were about 50 people in the game, half playing US roles, half playing Iranian roles. In the game, the Iranians were developing nukes, an Ebola outbreak was spreading through Africa and bounced to continental Europe, and internal intrigue was going on in both countries. The winners are determined by judgement call of the group of facilitators, and I nabbed a very respectable fourth place by being the instrumental player in containing the Ebola outbreak and building some Air Force-controlled bioweapons despite international treaties and without the Secretary of Defense or President knowing that it happened.

We also tracked down my good friend Bobby, who has left his "regular" job to become a full-time miniatures sculptor. I hadn't talked to him in some time, but we picked up right where we left off, which to me is the best indication of true friendship. No matter how long it's been, it's like no time has passed when you get together again. I caught him at his sculpting demonstration table, put my camera in front of my face, and called out, "Mr. Jackson, a picture please?" He looked up, I got the photo below, and he only figured out it was me when I lowered the camera. Warm welcome number two!

Bobby Jackson, Cool Sculptor Guy

Later, Elizabeth and I got into a game of Seafarers of Catan on a "giant" board. It wasn't as large as I expected, but it was still fun to play on a cool board. It was an incredibly close game, as I was prepared to win on my next turn when another player, Carol, picked up her last victory point and won ahead of me. Here's a look at the special board:

Giant Seafarers of Catan Board

We then went to a seminar, where I was the "expert." One of my StormReavers, Steve, helped me set up two seminar sessions where I would discuss the WarEngine rules with experienced players as we try to figure out what a new edition of the game might include. The seminar included only three attendees for this session, Steve, Ray, and David, but that was okay, as we worked through a better movement system, a better way to define weapon characteristics, and a few other smaller fixes. There's another session tonight and Bobby at least will likely join us for that one.

After the seminar, it was back to the Hong Kong Action Movie room, where Elizabeth again fell asleep, but I watched the last hour of a funny movie. I have no idea what it was, though, as I never saw the title.

Now, Elizabeth is ready to go and we're headed for the convention center again, prepared to fight for parking with fans coming to the Colts game in the RCA Dome right next to the convention. More True Dungeon today, too.

GenCon Thursday

2005-08-20T11:33:00.000-04:00

Elizabeth and I have been very busy here at GenCon, doing lots of fun stuff. Thursday, we browsed the exhibit hall for a bit and found my friend Zev, working his booth for his company, Z-Man Games. Elizabeth was amazed at the warm reception I got when I found him. When I was running DemonBlade Games, she was really too young to appreciate the kinds of friendships I established with some other guys in the industry.

Just walking around is interesting in and of itself, not just because of exhibitors, but because of other people attending. These two guys posed for me in mock combat:

Elf Guy Battles a Ghost Buster

We signed up for several events, then we got to play in a True Dungeon adventure. This is really pretty cool, as you walk through these incredibly dark rooms that are tricked out to look like carved dungeon halls. In any given room, there are either traps to puzzle past or monsters to fight. I played the cleric of our group. To make it more interesting than just rolling dice, the power of the spells I cast was dependent on memory. They gave me a set of about 15 prayer beads, all different. Each corresponds to a word, such as piety or fortitude. When I want to cast a spell, I would tell the guy running the room which one and he would ask me to show him a particular one. "Show me your bead of grace," he'd say, and I'd pick out the one that looks like a little melon. The less tries to get the right bead, the better the effect of the spell. I got them on the first try every time, so I was very effective. In the end, out our group of seven characters, two were killed by a failed attempt past a puzzle room and the rest of us died in the last room by not figuring out the final puzzle fast enough. That wasn't all that uncommon, apparently, and it was still lots of fun. There's a second adventure, and Elizabeth and I will play that one later today.

We dropped by the miniatures hall after that to see how some of my old StormReaver demo guys were doing running games of Shock Force and variants, that being one of the games I wrote. There was a Shock Force game, a Stargate variant, a Civil War variant, and a WWII variant all going. It's so cool to see people still playing my games. The WWII game looked particularly well planned out, and I got a picture of one of the battles in progress that came out rather well:

WWII Action Using WarEngine Rules

We had dinner with Zev and Paul (Zev's friend that helps him with Z-Man.) Elizabeth and I then tried out a game of Memoir '44, a much simpler WWII battle game by Days of Wonder. Finally, we headed over to one of the hotels where Zev's company sponsors a Hong Kong Action Movie room that runs movies from 8am to midnight every day of the convention. We started watching Big Trouble in Little China, but by this time it was really getting late and we were both kind of nodding off, so we headed back to the hotel for the night.

Aaron and Elizabeth

2005-08-17T23:03:00.000-04:00

Elizabeth's here now, too! I asked the woman at the hotel front desk to take this picture of us together. Actually, she was so happy to take pictures of us that she practically grabbed the camera out of my hand. She then raved about Elizabeth's hair, which is somehow the same hair Elizabeth herself had just said was so awful. Judge for yourself:

Aaron and Elizabeth

Coming to You Live from Indiana

2005-08-17T20:02:00.000-04:00

I am in Indianapolis, Indiana, at the Courtyard by Marriott Indianapolis South. I arrived a short time ago and figured I'd go ahead and get my rental car and check into the hotel instead of just waiting three hours to get Elizabeth from the airport. She's arriving shortly on her first flight without parental escort.

We're here for GenCon 2005, a huge gaming convention I have attended before, but not in a few years and never with Elizabeth. I've also never been to the Indianapolis location for the convention, as it was still being held in Milwaukee the last time I went. I plan to take a lot of pictures, as there are lots of things to see, and to play a lot of games.

I did have a great conversation with two flight attendants on the flight from Seattle to Chicago. It was really good to get a different and positive experience from a previous one I've described elsewhere in this blog. For now, though, I'm going to go get Elizabeth and begin what should be a really fun extended weekend with my eldest daughter.

Don't Be That Guy

2005-08-17T01:14:00.000-04:00

I went to a lecture today, "Getting Started in Podcasting." There were parts of it that were interesting although it certainly feels like there's a certain amount of much ado about nothing. Podcasting is mostly about recording some audio or video then posting it on the Internet. That's about it.

The thing is, part of the title is "Getting Started." It seems like there were several of "that guy" there, though. You know the one. He comes to the introductory session, but already knows all that stuff. Then, he doesn't just ask questions about advanced topics while the people sitting around him stare at him blankly, he peppers those questions with his own comments. Comments that effectively highjack the presentation so he can show how smart he is.

The first guy like this that I recall distinctly was in a college course in computer science. I forget the exact title of the class, but the examples were all written in Pascal. Almost every class session, and often multiple times in the same class session, he'd start his question or comment with, "Well, I use C and...." (For those that don't know, Pascal and C are two computer programming languages. Pascal was mostly used as an instructional language. C and its descendents are probably the most popular mainstream languages.) You could just hear it in the guy's voice that he thought he was just the coolest guy ever because he was in a college class and already was using C at work.

Eventually, whenever he'd be about to say something, I'd mutter under my breath, "Well, I use C and...." Seconds later he'd say it. When I say mutter, of course I mean "say quietly but not so quietly the half-dozen people around me couldn't hear me." It was all so entertaining for us, and way better than listening to that guy.

Don't be that guy.

Emmons Glacier Hike

2005-08-14T23:39:00.000-04:00

Emmons Glacier

That's right, after several weeks of no wilderness hikes, I was out hiking again on Saturday. This time was to Emmons Glacier Basin in the Mount Rainier National Park, about seven miles. The best picture that I took was the one above, which happened to be only about 1.25 miles in, so someone wanting to get a great view would only have about 2.5 miles of walking. Of course, from Seattle that's about 90 miles of driving each way, so you'd really have to want to see this particular view to only walk 2.5 miles.

Emmons Glacier is the largest glacier in the "lower 48," and the trail to the glacier basin is a commonly used route for climbers headed to the summit of Mount Rainier. The Wikipedia entry for the glacier has some information on that and a good diagram of the area.

Gaurav went with me again, becoming my first two-hike companion. He vowed to quit smoking forever as we were driving back, but by the time I got around to writing this blog entry, he'd started again. What an insidious habit smoking is. I don't get it myself, because while I actually kind of like the smell of a lit cigarette, the couple of times I tried smoking back in college, it just wasn't all that appealing. I don't understand drinking coffee, either, for that matter.

We (and I use "we" to mean "me, while Gaurav listened) did chat a bit with a woman that was headed to the summit. She was going to spend the night at a shelter around 10,000 feet, then strike for the summit at the usual starting time of 1am, when the snow and ice near the top are at their most solid. She said it was her second time climbing Mount Rainier. The first time for her was four years ago and she described it as, "Easy." She started with a basic mountaineering course from The Mountaineers. They have a basic mountaineering course of study that starts in January and prepares you for a climb to the summit by mid-summer. Getting all of this information was my way of researching what it would take for me to climb the mountain myself. I plan to sign up for the course next January, so perhaps this time next year, I'll be headed to the summit.

In the meantime, it was great to be back in the wilderness again. It's a great contrast with my city walks. And today, Sunday, I was all primed to do Walk 5 in Seattle, for a total of some 14 miles of walking/hiking this weekend.

Jack of All Trades

2005-08-11T14:18:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, I finished up some SQL views that will allow our internal customers to create ad hoc reports about beta program participation. This is a task that had been languishing for some time, waiting for a developer to come available who could do the work. But now, I'm doing it.

At Microsoft, there are six general disciplines defined on a team: Program Management (feature design and schedules,) Product Management (requirements and customer interaction,) Development, Test, User Experience (usability, documentation, and interface design,) and Release Management (deployment.)

With the work I just did for these views, it's my first work as a developer at Microsoft. My primary role is as a program manager. We don't have a dedicated product manager, so we're light on representation there, so I've picked up some of that work, too. I've filed as many bugs as anyone on the test team and have even had some days where my bug report total exceeds that of the entire test team combined. And I recently contributed as editor for our administration site's documentation. When we were deploying, I worked with the Passport team to make sure our site met compliance. That means I've now done some work in every discipline. And that is cool.

Something Interesting about Alaska

2005-08-08T02:08:00.000-04:00

One thing that I always liked about Alaska is how it dominates US geography. Through a rather roundabout way, I was reminded of that tonight. I watched "xXx: State of the Union" and it was absolutely horrible. Rather than watch attentively, I ended up looking it up on IMDB while it was still playing. (4.0 out of 10, truly awful.) Then, I submitted a "goof" because they didn't even get the presidential order of succession right in the movie. I had to check my facts somewhere, and ended up on InfoPlease. I clicked around a bit there while I was already on the site and found a page on Extreme Points of the US.

If you check the footnote, you'll see that measuring from the Greenwich Meridian, Alaska is the most western, most eastern, and most northern state. (Maine gets most eastern only if you measure from the geographic center of the US - sure that makes more sense, but I'll stick with the one that makes Alaska even more interesting.) Since Denali, or Mt. McKinley as most people outside of Alaska know it, is the highest mountain in North America, Alaska picks up highest state, too. In fact, the sixteen highest mountains in the US are all in Alaska.

Incidentally, it has the largest land area of any state, more than twice Texas, the second largest (although with only 3% of the population of the Lone Star State.)

And remember, if you find any of these facts about Alaska boring, at least you're not watching "xXx: State of the Union!"

Some Random Thoughts

2005-08-07T20:24:00.000-04:00

I have a bunch of relatively random, surprisingly serious things buzzing around in my head today, so I'm going to just write them down here. Perhaps I'll be mistaken for a big-name columnist.

People with big goals sometimes do stupid things in pursuit of them. Sometimes it works out for the best in the end, sometimes not. My latest was part of my Seattle City Walk, as I pushed for 20 miles in one day on Walk 4. There have been plenty of others.

Our executive branch of government became much stronger than originally intended around a century ago. More recently, over perhaps the last three decades or so, our judicial branch has become similarly overpowered. It seems our legislators are letting the balance of power get away from them at the expense of the American people. They should fix this while they still have the ability to do so.

Marriages that last a lifetime are much more challenging now that people's lives change so significantly in as little as a few years. The same is true for careers, homes, hobbies, and the like.

Racial segregation today is far more by choice than not. Go to, say, a university cafeteria and take a look the groups of students. Whites will be with whites, blacks with blacks, Asians with Asians, and so on. They aren't required to do so, but they feel more comfortable that way. I also don't think it's external pressure.

I'd rather have a member of today's Republican Party as commander-in-chief, but when it comes to spending, both our major political parties are absolutely out of control. Speaking of which, I'm not sure why the President gets all the blame for governmental overspending, since Congress has a say in the budget, too.

One last thing. I'm hungry.

Who's Afraid of an Empty Page?

2005-08-05T05:05:00.000-04:00

Not me, not any more. I started blogging as a way to improve my writing, both in quality and quantity. Quality is much harder to self-judge, but I occasionally ask people like Trevor or Olympia what they think and I've had generally positive feedback.

Quantity, though, I can judge for myself. I always wanted to write when I was younger, but I'd get what many frustrated authors and artists get: fear of the empty page. How do you take the perfectly clean piece of white paper (or its digital equivalent) and dare to mark it with your lines?

A clean sheet of paper has a certain elegance to it. A piece of paper with your markings is changed. It no longer has the basic simplicity of a blank sheet and the complexity added may no longer have elegance. Let's face it, you may well have just ruined it. After a certain age, when quality and a desire to be excellent kicks in, ruining stuff that way is something we avoid. Little kids don't have this problem. Just watch a three year old with a stack of blank paper and a crayon. He'll go through twenty sheets, drawing grotesque and unidentifiable squiggles on each, in under three minutes if you let him. Some of the kids that keep it up become the famous artists of three decades later.

I realize my fear of the empty page is gone. My next post here will be number 250 since I started this blog over a year ago. When I comment on others' blogs, I find my comments are sometimes longer than their posts, but they just flow out of my head and onto the (digital) page. Hopefully, most of that is of value. (OK, I think it is. Setting aside the humility for a moment, I do feel my writing quality has improved significantly over the past year, and I don't think I was so bad to begin with. Now it would be up to you, the reader, to tell me I'm wrong instead of being not-so-subtly encouraged to tell me I'm right. I think it's easier that way.)

Andrew Tobias' Book

2005-08-04T03:40:00.000-04:00

I just finished reading Andrew Tobias' book, "The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need." I think he's right. For anyone who wants the incredibly short version without needing to read the book: Get out of debt, then invest at least 10% of your income in no-load mutual funds.

If somehow that doesn't seem like enough, there's plenty more in the book. Tobias is an entertaining writer, which is hard to do with investment as the topic. I actually laughed out loud a couple of times. (Your mileage will vary. I have an admittedly unusual sense of humor.)

He starts out the book with a bunch of interesting tips on saving money and explains why saving money on your expenses is actually way better than any investment you'll ever find. Well, once I understood how the Microsoft Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP) works out to an 89% or better rate of return, I see that it's right up there, but that's an exception rather than a rule. If I could put 100% of my income into ESPP, I'd do immediately. But when he describes how simply buying your favorite wine by the case every quarter at a 10% discount rather than by the bottle once a week works out to a better than 40% return on investment equivalence, you're hooked. (In an appendix he goes on to describe how "better than 40%" in this particular case works out to 177%, which blows the socks off even ESPP.)

Later in the book, after warning the reader not to bother with playing the stock market in favor of those no-load mutual funds, he describes what all the terminology around stocks mean. If you've ever wondered what puts, shorts, limit orders, or margins are, you'll get it after you read this. In other sections, he describes the differences between 401k, regular IRAs, and Roth IRAs, and other mysterious acronyms related to investment.

I'll just say it one more time: what a good book, a must read for anyone that's trying to get back to zero (unfortunately, that's me) or finally has a positive net worth and has no idea what to do with it to make it grow.

Here's one of the things I thought was really funny, just to give you an idea. His definition of "margin calls": A margin call is what alerts you to the fact that your life is going to hell and that you never should have gotten into the market when you did, let alone on margin.

Get it and read it now.