Great Albums

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

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?

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

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

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

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

Exception: Cat with No Legs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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?

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

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.