Had a very odd weekend. Saturday I went on errands, bought the new Pansonic compact Li-ion tools, which are cool. I also bought a new bedroom TV, a 37" Visio LCD, which so far is not getting a good rating. The color is way too red (correctable), the speakers are horrible (not correctable) and the scaler for SD content is very weak (not correctable). Anyway, it might be going back to Costco.

However, the odd part of the weekend was the amazing vertigo that I experienced from Saturday 11am until Sunday 7am. Pretty much couldn't move without feeling like the room was spinning out of control. All was better Sundary though... probably should see the Dr.

It's been a while since the last update, and in fact i'm behind on even taking pictures. Since September there has been a bunch of progress.

The new stairs got built for our side entrance. The old ones had a rail made out of OSB.

They came and poured all the stamped concrete. If I recall correctly, they poured somewhere around 13 yards of concrete.

The patio is really starting to take shape. The stamped pattern looks great (I think).

Here is the new path on the back side of the house. This area used to be a pretty desolate unfinished weed garden.

Erick and I built new timber rails. Ended up taking us a pretty long time to build, but the finished product is great. Here we are test fitting one of the sections to make sure it's the right size (no, we didn't use bungees in the final assembly). 

The fire pit was the next major element to be finished. Brick fire pit, about 4' in diameter. We had them put holes in the lowest run of bricks to allow for air flow and light to escape. It looks pretty cool when there is a fire in there at night. The masons also did the stone treatment around the base of the columns to match the front.

The landscapers came in and installed our water feature. I love the way they integrated it with the rock wall. The design is to be pond-less, so we have since lowered the water level so there is just a small bit of water above the rocks.

Here is a shot of the completed fire place. Stamped concrete is obviously in place, the masons did stone around it. Of course this was done in November, but the final piece of work - screwing the switch in - just happened last week!

Ahh... the snow of this winter. You can see a bunch of the rail sections (one still isn't complete in this picture).

I'll try to take some more pictures this weekend to capture where we are at today.

2006

 To recap last year... still working on getting our baby. Chinese adoptions are slowing down, but we are in the queue. Book is basically done, just one last big push (final proof review). Used the boat, alot, 2 trips through the locks and 120 hours total run time. Didn't quite hit my dive goal, however I still owe the blog a write up on my Maui trip. Patio is still under construction, but getting close. No new hobbies, mission accomplished. Didn't get much done around the house.

Overall, of my 2006 goals/objectives/resolutions - batting about 50/50. I'm happy with that.

2007

This year I'll get to see my book in print. That will be very cool. It's been a long road, but I think it will be worth it when all is said and done.

Work is going amazing. My new project is very exciting, my team is great, and I think Microsoft overall is just absolutely kicking ass. Vista and Office released this week. I love my XBox 360 (and my Wii). Smartphones are taking off. It's just a great time to be working in the technology industry.

I think the odds are better than 50% that this calendar year we will get our referall for our daughter. I'm super excited about becoming a father, and I can't wait to finally meet her.

The last two years I've talked of balance in my new years post. I'm happy where I am. I leave work at a reasonable time, I'm putting in around 45 hours or so, leaving me a lot of time to spend with friends and family. I like that I've managed to spend some big hours working on projects like the rail for the patio.

Life is good.

07 goals and objectives...

• Use the boat
• Dive
• (new hobby alert) Learn Mandarin
• Blog

I'll think of more later...

Historical

A belated congratulations to Megan for completing her first triathlon!

My wife rocks!

The slow but steady progress of construction work... The roof is mostly done, the concrete strike is over, and some electrical wires have been run... and now for the pictures!

They cut out the holes for the skylights (8 2'x2' skylights) and then papered the roof.

While the roofers where working on the installation of the tile, the siders started puting the shingles on the gable end.

They cut out a really big hole and put a set of french doors in it, and moved all the windows around on that wall to make the symetrical with respect to the structure. 

The fireplace got framed in, facing out. The new fireplace looks nice, should get installed pretty soon (after gas work is done).

The rock wall installation also happened. The water feature isn't scheduled yet, but at least the "bluff" is no longer threatening to collapse.

The finished shingles with the tiled roof looks awesome. The cool thing is that you can just see in this pic that the middle section is open - the shingles you see in the middle are showing through from the back wall. 

Looking out from the structure, you can see the sky light details and the open truss. The skylights still need to get trim applied.

From a distance you can see the finished roof, all tiled with skylights and everything. The patch of light colored material on the main house is all that is left to show that we ever had a chimney. That will get patched with some siding and it will vanish.

Lots of work still left - concrete, gas, electrical, lighting, island, railing, stairs (need to be replaced on the other side of the house), fire pit, etc. 

Construction has been coming along at a slow by steady pace. I've been being slow to update the blog, so i'll batch up the past couple months.

We poured footings and put in some vertical steel. These will become the support columns for the outside of the structure. Next we got the horizontal steel in, and tied it into the house (still needs some adjustments).

While I was at work, the timber was getting installed.

Each truss was assembled on the ground and lifted into place. They are held together with wood joinery and metal fastners. The biggest piece of metal is at the crown of the truss, a very large bolt. 

The coolest looking joints are where the king post connects with the bottom chord of the truss. This is a real through tennon with quarter sawn white oak dowels as pins. Very cool detail.

After the framing was up, we had presentation of the structure to me (where Dustann said some nice things), and then I tried to climb up for posterity. That thing is tall, by the way.

I love the look of this with all the exposed wood. Maybe we shouldn't put a roof on?

The roof is done in three layers - the first layer, which is on in this picture, is 2x6 cardecking tounge and groove. It looks awesome. The next two layer should be installed this coming week - a water proof paper (tar paper? felt? not sure the right name) and then the concrete tiles.

The inside of the roof is effectively done, we won't be painting or finishing it. Dustann said that the last thing we should do is climb up and clean the rafters and do a coat of sander-sealer to ensure that it ages well. It shouldn't make any change to the appearance though.

Also, the new driveway is in (no pics, sorry)

Today I went to the marina around 8:00am. The goal was to spend some time on the lake and work on review feedback for the book. I managed to get about 30 minutes of solid work in, however it was really difficult to read the laptop in the sun.

Anyway, then proceeded the batches of people. Megan, Erick, and I spent several hours out on the lake. Megan swam laps preparing for a triathalon while Erick reviewed my book.

Next came Fred and Mandy, with which I had my first round of aggressive tubing. Painful, but fun.

Finally Mike and Jeannine joined us, where we took his brother and girlfriend out on the lake, and we ended up eating dinner at Rock Salt.

All told, it was a 12 hour marathon session on the boat. What a blast.

Today it looks like the final grade for the patio was put in, and I believe the large grave-like looking things are for the footings of the columns.

Another day of excavation happened yesterday. Today we will get the patio area graded (which should remove most of the material) and then we are on to foundation pouring. The new "road" is for big trucks to get close to the house without getting stuck in the mud.

We are building a new covered deck on our house... construction finally got underway yesterday. We've been planning this very slowly (got plans last year!), but now it should come together pretty quickly. The holes in the foreground are where they dug up the septic system to make sure that the backhoe doesn't destroy it. The logs lying on the ground used to be two big 70'+ trees that where growing right where the backhoe is in the picture.

Went to the zoo today with 100 of Megan's students... No, this isn't one of them.

No, not that kind.

This weekend I went on my innagural trip through the Ballard Locks with my boat. Quite the adventure.

Originally I had planned on going with Mike Neil to a class on how to go through the locks, however the weather was just awesome on Sunday and we had a gorup of friends that had been through the locks before with us, so we thought... why not?!

The weather was great. With the canvas up to block the wind we got pretty warm. There was almost no wind, so the lake and sound was very calm, pretty much perfect conditions for our first time through the locks.

Before we went into the locks we discovered that the boat behind us contained one of Megan's coworkers, Brent Kawaguchi. They were on a Boston Whaler Conquest 28', which is our friend's dream boat.

Just before we got into the big locks (the Ballard Locks has a "small" locks for taking boats with a <12' beam (or something like that) and a "large" locks that can probably take a 40'+ beam boat.) an alarm started on the boat. Initially I thought it was the CO detector so we vented the cabin and kept driving. It was LOUD!

After a few minutes we called the dealer (luckily they where open) and after some debugging identified that I was low on drive lube. Interesting not, it is basically a completely critical fluid to keeping the engine running and has no gauges and the first sign of a problem is a massively loud alarm. On top of that the resevior is labeled "Drive Lube", and you actually need to put "Stern Drive Gear Lube"... i guess the manufactured figured that you should omit every other word when labelling the engine.

The night before going through the locks we met some guys who used to volunteer at the locks and we learned the most important rules: 1) always obey the lock workers, 2) always tie up the stern first, 3) for any other questions refer to rule #1. These three rules helped us greatly when going through the locks. The workers there are great, helpful, and know what they are doing.

After going out to sea, we immediately headed to Shilshole Bay to find the mysterious "drive lube" to silence the incredibly deafing alarm. Luckily there is a West Marine about two blocks from the marina that had everything we needed. Everyone from the fuel dock people to the West Marine folks were super helpful. Made it pretty much an uneventful event.

We then buzzed down to Bell Harbor Marina right on the Seattle waterfront and had a late lunch at Anthony's. At about 4pm we got back on the boat and headed back home.

Coming back through the locks we had a boat try to raft with us that lost engine control and started to spin out of control. In this case we (with our total experience of 1 locking) had to wrestle the boat to us. I was very happy that we have a lot of long lines on our boat.

Pulled back into our home port around 6:30, just about 9 hours after we left that morning. A big trip, but hell-a fun!

Two months with no posts. That's a while. I won't bore you all with the reasons, but I think I'm back.

A quick status report...

1. My machine that runs NewsGator for Outlook lost it's connection (working on it), so I haven't been reading blogs for a while. I think I'm going to try and use the new Outlook features for RSS as my aggregator.

2. The book is still not done. I'm taking a week off of work this month to try and close it down.

3. I haven't done any diving, but I have gotten out on the boat a bit. The house project is ramping up (been to the county offices a couple times now). My HD TiVo is dying and needs to be replaced.

Also, I've moved offices... I now sit right across from Don, and virtually sit next to Sells. I'm still working on technologies related to WinFX and close to Avalon, however I'm focusing more on some longer term investments (more later on this).

I started blogging on December 23, 2002, and have had various levels of success in keeping up with my blog. Because my blog-iversary falls close to the new year, it's nice to use it as a good summary and look forward.

2005

What a great year. Some tough stuff, but overall a great year. I worked with the Eastlake Robotics Club (hardware, what a concept), started writing a book, traveled to Italy and China, got my advanced scuba diver certificate, bought a boat. All fun stuff. We started our adoption paperwork as well as began the IVF process.

I made the resolution for more balance in 2005, and I actually think I hit it. I've spent a lot of time at work, with the family, with friends, and on my own. I've been camping, snowmobiling, boating, diving, and traveling this year, a great balance.

2006

Looking forward, this is going to be an exciting year. We are almost certaintly going to have a child this year. Vista will ship this year. I'll publish a book this year. We are building a big covered dining area on our house.

At work I've already started to look forward at the future of Avalon and WinFX. I think there is some amazing new areas for us to investigate, and great new opportunities to really raise the bar for the platform for building smart client applications.

OK, a few goals, objectives, resolutions, etc:

• Get a baby
• Finish the book on time (well, the new schedule at least)
• Use the boat - goal of 3 trips through the locks, and 50 hours on the lake
• Dive more - lets set a goal of 24 dives in 12 months
• Get the dining area built by July
• No new hobbies (04 I started diving, 05 I started boating, lets have 06 be a neutral year of hobbies)
• Do more work on the house (fix the molding, buy furniture, etc.)

Historical

• 2004 Anniversary
• 2003 Anniversary
• 2002 Initial Post

UPS finally delivered by 360 at 7pm tonight. It was quite frustrating, I took the day off in anticipation of it arriving earlier in the day, but oh well... i've got one!

Got the unit setup, connected to the internet, media extender installed on all my PCs, XBox live configured, and Geometry Wars purchased in about the first 30 minutes. Next I did a tour of all the games I had to buy in the bundle.

• PGR3 - eBay
• Kameo - eBay
• Need for Speed - 3.5
• Tiger Woods - 3.5
• Call of Duty 2 - 4.5
• Tony Hawk - 3.0 (only put about 5 minutes into this one)
• NHL - 3.5
• NBA - 3.5
• Amped - 3.0
• Ridge Racer - 3.0

Overall I'm happy with the bundle, except that I have too many games. I'll never get around to playing so many at the same time. Typically I play a game for ~2 weeks, and then move onto the next thing.

More on the 360... i need to get back to playing.

I managed to get in a small window this morning where Amazon has some 360 bundles available, so tomorrow I should be getting my XBOX. Wahoo!

Of course, I had to buy a ton of extra games that I didn't want... in the end I don't think it will be too bad, I'll eBay the games that I don't want, and hopefully get in for around the right amount. Went over to the company store tonight and picked up 3 extra controllers, so I'll be ready to rock tomorrow.

I'm planning on working from home in the AM tomorrow, then playing games for the rest of the day :)

I still don't have one yet, but I'm getting closer to pulling the trigger and getting one. A blog is an interesting thing, because it serves as a history of what you said when... for example, I have a good recollection now of exactly the last time I posted about boats.

My criteria for a boat have changed since then, but one thing remains - I don't know how to close on the purchase. I can't find any good source of unbiased data on quality, performance, and features of boats. Almost every boat review I read says "this boat is great, you should buy it!".

The top boats on my list right now; SeaRay Sundancer 260, Four Winns 258, and Maxum 2600 SE... or the 24' version of each. I'm concerned that the SeaRay is overpriced for a perception of quality, or that the Maxim is too low of quality?

My goals for the boat is to big enough to "camp" on with Megan and up to two kids, or potentially another couple. It should be trailerable, however we will moor it on Lake Washington, so it doesn't need to be super trailerable. It should be able to take 8 people out for a day cruise comfortably. It doesn't need to be great at water skiing or wakeboarding, however tubing should be doable. Swimming is a must.

There are a bunch of other brands that I need to investigate, Cobalt (however their boats seem to be small for a given length), Regal, Chaparral, and Crowline. Any others I should look at?

The big question I want to figure out - how do you judge quality? I hear lots of "Bayliners suck so don't buy a Maxum" type comments... but I wonder if that is like people complaining about a Ford or Chevy. Is there really a substantial build quality difference between a Maxum vs. Four Winns vs. SeaRay? obviously the resale value of a SeaRay is better than Maxum, but is that a good indication of quality? (i think so)

I upgraded my D30 to a new Rebel XT, so now I'm selling my old equipement.

Mike Harsh may not be updating his blog, but he is helping sell my stuff!

Mike posted this stuff on eBay: D30 Body, Battery Grip, 50mm F/1.8 Lens, and a 28-200mm F3.8-5.6 Lens. It's all in great shape and has served me very well. If you know someone that's looking to get into a digital SLR, this might be a good way to get in cheap.

Ah. Just got back from China. I spent last week visiting the Microsoft office in Beijing. The Avalon team is partnering with a group in China to produce some of the control and features in Avalon. It was great to get to meet all the folks over there. So, over the past 3 weeks I've spent 1 in LA, 1 in Seattle, and 1 in Beijing. It's nice not to have anything on the radar.

except...

The deadline for the book is fast approaching. I have due dates every couple weeks for the rest of the year. I've decided to declare October to be "The Month of the Book". I'm planning on spending 5am-7am each day, 7pm-10pm three times a week, and Sundays on the book. Hopefully this will give me enough time to push through finishing up. The first chapter is due this week (which I've already written, just have to finalize it).

So my phone is destroyed. I dug out my last GSM phone and popped my SIM chip in, and it's OK. I remember the various things that are broken on this one (like when it stopped accepting calls). Megan also wants a new phone - one that integrates into her car's Bluetooth controls. Unfortunately she signed up for a two-year commitment when she picked up her last phone, so we are slightly in a bind.

I'm starting a new view - I don't want to buy anymore locked phones. It's ridiculous that I owned a Audiovox 5600 and couldn't get Megan and I on a family plan, because my Audiovox was an AT&T Audiovox and she had a Cingular phone. Very frustrating as a consumer.

OK, so I'm willing to pay the high price for an unlocked phone, but I can't seem to find the right phone for Megan. She needs a Motorola v551. At first glance it looks like the model number is different for the different cariers... does anyone know the "generic" model number for the v551? Secondly, I found "TechCypher" has the phone - but is this a legit online store?

I really want to get an iMate SP5 when they are available, but the plan right now is to get an unlocked v551 which I'll use for the next month, then I'll pickup an unlocked SP5 (smartphone, wahoo!) and give Megan the v551.

Ah... what a hectic week.

Every day was busy. I become completely adicted to the track lounge, and spent probably 6 or 8 hours a day in the lounge. In the evenings there were conference events, dinners, and (one) party to go to. I find the PDC to be so energizing - getting to see customers, talk about what they are doing, and answer questions about our technology. It really gets me juiced about shipping.

I ended up heading over to Vegas right after my session on Friday. We flew in, hoped in a limo (cheaper than a couple cabs when you have too many people), and stayed at the Paris for one night. It was a blast. I love Vegas - but only in short bursts.

We had dinner at a fabulous steak place called "Craft Steak". We did the dinner Hillel-style, which amounts to everything being family style; soups, steaks, deserts, etc. It was absolutely awesome. The most expensive meal I've ever eaten, but really great.

I kept a somewhat reasonable schedule, turning in around 1:30am, and then we headed to the airport around 11:30. Of course there was a mandatory stop at In-N-Out Burgers before we got to the airport.

The checkin line was long, but when I checked in I figure I'd try to get on Alaska's last minute first class upgrade ($50 bucks to get a first class seat on these short runs like Vegas to Seattle!). Happily there was 1 seat in first left, so I snatched it up. Here are McCarran Airport they have a special security line for first class passengers, so I'm already finding my $50 well spent! McCarran has free wireless also, so even though I don't have a cell phone, I can still communicate.

You know your in trouble when your wife complains about you on her blog :)

Yes, I did "fall" in a pool. Yes, I did destroy my phone. No, I didn't do it on purpose.

The laptop arrived, as promised, the next day. HP's online ordering was pretty slick. They have some nice services, like sending you a mail when the order gets *processed*, not just when it ships.

First piece of good news - the SD port reads my SD card with no errors. Looks like I just managed to get two bum machines with SD cards from Fry's. Teaches me to buy a reburb model.

Second, these machines are everywhere. The dv1000 is a great machine, and given that Costco carried them for a while, I see tons of friends that have the machine.

Megan is totally loving the new machine.

Tonight I went to Fry's to exchange my dv1000.

First, I should have read my comments first... Ian says:

"My toshiba m200 has the same problem although from what I've read it needs a certain type of SD card, my bog standard ones apparently aren't good enough.."

Which would have been good to know...

Anyway, net result - I go to Fry's and after a bit over an hour I had attempted to use a second refurbished machine and got the same failure on the SD card, and the second machine was actually missing parts. I returned the machine and decided to order a new one online.

Costco's price was a bit higher than HP's direct price, and HP could get the machine here faster. I ended up getting not my exact specifications, because the preconfigured machines ship about 1 week faster. Basically I had to buy an extra 20GB of storage (up to 100GB) and get a 1 year warranty.

My wife really wants the replacement by the weekend (given that we are now having to re-order), so we sprung for next day shipping. We missed the deadline for today's orders by 3 hours, so it should ship Tuesday and be here Wednesday morning. Kinda cool.

Tonight I went to the local Fry's and bought Megan a new laptop. We had been down there before and I knew she wanted the HP dv1000. They had two models in stock, the 512MB 1.6Ghz version and a 512MB 1.7Ghz model that was refurbished. I've never bought refurb before, but at $200 less that the slower machine, I felt I should give it a shot. The sales droid at Fry's was a bit of a jerk - he really strong armed me to try and get the extended warrenty. I've been using laptops for a long time, and yet to be in a situation where I'd want an extended warrenty. *And* the warrenty cost 20% the price of the laptop. ugh.

Oh, and the sales guy told me the laptop came with 1 512MB stick, so I bought a second. Of course it actually came with 2 256MB sticks, so now I have to go and return the memory or buy more or... ugh.

Anyway, we've had the machine for less than 3 hours now, but so far it seems nice. The physical build quality of the machine is adaquate. The keys clack a little bit, the lid doesn't quite close firmly, and the body has a lot of flex in it. However, the industrial design is nice, it's light, and the screen looks very nice.

The amount of pre-installed software is very reasonable, especially compared with the Toshiba M4's kitchen sink approach. The dv1000 boots with only about 191MB allocated, which is nice.

Anyway, Megan seems to like the machine, should be interesting to see how it holds up.

Oh, and as a side note, the Intel 915GM is DX9 capable, but i'm guessing won't be able to run glass in Vista...

Reading through Brian's writeup on his new camera makes me want to get better with mine. When I first got my D30 I worked a bunch on learning to use it, but then fell in the trap of just playing around. While on vacation I had to relearn to do things like exposure compensation, manual focus point control, and AEB (exposure bracketing)... of course if I actually learned how to do manual focusing and light metering I could do a lot better. I think I need to spend some quality time getting back into photography. In the mean time, here are two images from my trip:

First, a simple picture of a church in Rome (I believe):

2304x3456, 24mm, F/8, ISO-100. full resolution (6MB)

Second, a composite picture that I took. Stitched using Canon's PhotoStitch software. I need to do some color correction, but this is the raw image:

8891x3222. full resolution (16MB)

Got back late last night (around 11pm), after 24 hours of travel. Left the hotel at 8am Italy time, and got to our front door right around 11pm local time. What a day.

This morning got up around 6:30 am (before the alarm went off) and went into work. I need to upgrade to the latest build of Avalon so I can update my book with the breaking changes. We have a lot of new stuff in the daily builds and I want to make this draft have all the latest stuff. Right now I have about 48% of the book written, around 140 pages (goal is a bit over 300 pages).

My lawn is dead - I left the sprinkler system off while out, so needless to say it's a little yellow.

Driving the truck is awesome, I realized how much I like the truck while on vacation.

Drooling over new toys, but alas I think it will be several years before I can acquire.

As Megan has been reporting, i've done battle with a jellyfish in Monteroso (one of the Cinqu Terra towns) and lived to tell the tale. We are now in Rome (hot, hot, hot), and getting ready to head out of town soon.

I'm way behind on pictures - I had planned on taking around 3000 pictures (which oddly enough would have come close to maxing out my laptop hard drive), however right now I'm probably only going to have around 1800 raw images, and ~500 "acceptable" images... quality is better than quantity :)

Megan is writing about our adventures in Italy... Venice rocks so far.

[Links updated]

Recently I bought my wife, Megan, a Canon SD400 Elph. Super compact 5Mp point and shoot. I was pretty jealous, not only because of how amazingly small it was, but also because it had almost twice the number of pixels as my current digital SLR - a Canon D30. I really like my D30, it takes great pictures, has a solid prosumer body. However the lust for new gadgets can't be quenched with logic.

I waffled a great deal between the D20 and 350D (Rebel XT). They both have the same sensor, really the D20 is just a prosumer version of the consumer Rebel XT. The D20 is faster, more heavy duty, and larger. I loved the feel of the D20, but alas I let logic creep in a little and the $500 price difference got me to go with the Rebel. Now I can spend the extra $500 on a big lense :)

We are heading for a vacation in Italy, so I hope to put the camera to a lot of good use. Of course, that also means my blog postings will even be more sparse then they have been.

Just finished watching (literally) City of God. Disturbing, especially considering it is based on a true story. I really enjoyed the gritty quality, reminded me a lot of Black Hawk Down... also of Traffic. I know those movies have little in common, but the effect of the quick camera movements and high contrast just works for me... feels much more realistic than most films...

Overall City got a **** (out of *****), however be warned that it is very violent in a real and graphic fashion.

Waiting to watch Troy and Grave of the Fireflies. I'm going to try a bit of anime kick and see if I still dig it. Grave is the first, and my next 4 in my queue are Lain 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Today was kinda a cleanup day...

• Solid progress on dev work I'm doing
• Upgraded my machine to a build of the upcoming CTP build
• Converted my XamlPad application over to that (lots of breaking changes)
• Updated my book to be in sync with that build
• Cleared the backlog of 300+ "tagged for follow-up" blog posts
• Kept my email below 18 (i managed to get to zero the other day!)
• Got my expense reports cleared up
• Had a great lunch with Ernie Booth

I didn't get any big task checked off my list, but it feels good to have a solidly productive day.

This is chris talking about megan talking about chris talking about megan... And for the record, I am not going back to the stone age...

Today I went on a bit of a spending spree... again. I bought a new HD TiVo for my theater. So far it's great. I need to run another sat line to the room and terminate one of the CAT-5 cables for a phone line. The over-the-air is great, the guide is great, and the 250 GB of storage is great.

First question; why not media center? Put simply, media center still doesn't have the wife acceptance factor, and media center doesn't work with DirectTV (not the way TiVo does!).

hmm... no more questions. Got to go watch some TV.

After configuring Megan's iPod I caved. I couldn't resist anymore. The industrial design on the iPod is absolutely amazing. The usability of the device is light years beyond anything else I've seen. The accessories are fabulous (RF broadcast, car adapters, docking stations with speakers, etc.). iTunes is a great music player, the "browse" feature is very slick and easy to use.

In addition, since Megan buys music through iTunes, I can only listen to them on an iPod.

Today (well, actually yesterday), I went back to the Apple store and picked up a 40GB iPod for myself. We both loaded up on accessories. Case for Megan. JBL on stage speaker dock for each of us at work. Car adapter to share for long trips. The great thing is that since we now have two full sets of the default accessories, we can have a dock permanently placed in my audio system for party playback.

I've written a proposal to a major publishing house. I've talked with several people that have written books. I've considered co-authoring with people. At this point a lot is up in the air (I still haven't gotten an offer from the publishing house), but I think things are moving forward. I've started writing and I have about 12 pages of real material. I'm going to try to set some rules - at least 1 page a day, at least 25 pages a week. Both are aggressive goals, from what I hear.

Probably the most terrifying thing - breaking changes. I know how many changes we are making right now, and the idea of processing breaking changes through a 500+ page book scares the begeezus out of me...

I bought a 40GB iPod for Megan for her birthday. She has become addicted to iTunes lately, and the 40GB Creative Zen wasn't cutting it. Plus, she thinks they are cute.

I picked it up two days ago, and since have been in process of converting our 3000+ songs from WMA to MP3. I decided that I wasn't going to ever again rip to a proprietary format. I want my music where I want it, not where Microsoft or Apple dictates. I want to share my music between my iPod and my Zen. I own every album I have ripped. They are sitting in a really big pile behind me right now.

I had a little debate about this point - I've configured the iPod for Megan. I figured that what she really wants is the device, working, with her music. I know that I geek out on opening the box, configuring the settings, and converting music... but for her, she just wants it to work. My goal is to get everything done, so I can leave the iPod on her bathroom sink for her to discover in the morning.

Unfortunately she told me to get her the iPod, so it won't really be a suprise. Oh well.

Went to the boat show today... scary. I've always dug boats, but generally I felt they were a hole in the water that you threw money into. I've often said - "I will rent a boat everytime I have the remotest desire to go out"... the theory being that renting a boat, even a dozen times in a year, will be far cheaper than owning. Last summer was the first time that I actually did rent a boat on a whim. I determined a couple things; 1) rental boats suck, 2) renting a boat sucks. The whole process of renting is frustrating, and the quality of the boat you get (at least in the powerboat range) was pretty mediocre. Since that incident, I've been thinking a lot about getting a boat.

Today I went to the boat show... I had done some boat research already, in fact I thought I had found "the" boat. After the boat show... wow! A lot of boats that fit my needs. Which brings me to the real point about this post... professional shopping.

I've heard terms like "Prosumer" before, typically refering to that anal retentive friend who does amazingly detailed analysis of purchases. I like "professional shopper" better. Or, at least "high end shopper". I believe most people are amatuer shoppers. Pros start with the basics (just like a product plan!):

1. What do you want the product to do? (scenarios)
2. What do you want in the product to accomplish this? (features)
3. What are you willing to spend? (resource allocation)
4. Does the product being considered meet 1-3 (quality assurance)
5. When do you want it? (schedule)

Most people skip basically all of these phases. I know I have way too often skipped right to #5 and purchased the thing. A lot of these steps require some brutal honesty, or to quote "Good to Great", you must face the brutal facts of your situation. People like to lie to themselves - "I want a house in Seattle because I want to be close the bars"... but it turns out they actually stay in every night watching reruns of Bewitched. I know that I lie to myself - "I really need a high performance sports car because I want to go to the track"... but I actually drive 10 miles to and from work in rush hour traffic.

I have a group of friends that practice professional shopping. When I purchased my truck recently, I was "encouraged" to do all of this analysis. By the time I was done, I can tell you the exact reasons why I wanted a truck (scenarios and features) and what I did and didn't like (QA) about the truck I bought. I feel better now, because I'm completely confident in my decision.

I'm finding it harder with my boat purchase. Their are so many variables, and so many possibilities. I'm really having trouble even figuring out the scenarios - will I water ski behind the boat? what about cruising? will I want to spend the night on the boat? how about scuba diving? I've decided to do the "hundred dollar" excercise - pretend you have a hundred dollars to spend on scenarios, and then you list them and allocate your money. It's not perfect, but at least it will help get me some clarity.

Last year I talked at MDC (Mobile Developers Conference) and managed to get a free phone out of the deal... on friday that phone stopped ringing, today I can't answer calls, or get any indication that I have voicemail. I think it's time for a new phone.

Now the quandary... do I get the ever popular Scoble endorsed Audiovox, or the super cutting edge Brian Pepin endorsed iMate?

Over the past several months I've been edging closer and closer to buying a new vehicle. It started this summer when I was thinking about getting a boat. Our MDX can't tow enough to reasonably tow the boat I wanted, so I figured that if I got the boat I would need to get a truck/SUV. Next came diving. My dive gear would barely fit in my M3, so I always borrowed Megan's MDX, which annoyed her to no end. Finally came winter. Last winter I got the M3 stuck in the snow several times.

Should we really get a third vehicle? I mean, give me a break - does anyone really need 3 cars? I feel a little bit of guilt over the display of opulence, but on the other hand...

I decided to get a F-150 SuperCrew Lariat. Depreciation on Ford trucks is really good, and I test drove almost all the competitors that could tow what I might eventually need. The Dodge RAM 1500 came close to edging out the Ford, but in the end the interior space, shorter exterior dimensions, and external appearance won out over the RAM's awesome HEMI engine.

The sad part, I've already had my first accident!

Driving over to a friend's house this morning I went into a traffic circle (in a retirement community!) too fast (probably 7mph) slid in the snow over the center into the curb.

BAM!

Hit hard on the passenger side front tire. Normally I'm a pretty capable snow driver. I've yet to be in any snow related accident, and understand that 4WD doesn't mean you can stop faster. I just failed to realize that a truck weighing in at 5,600lbs is going to take *a lot* longer to stop than my "light" 3,800lbs M3...

When I got over to my friend Erick's house we inspected the damage. I shaved off a good .5" of rim and cracked (yes, cracked!) the wheel. We decided to swap on the spare tire (full size steel wheel spare, which is nice). Now the truck pulls slightly to the right - or more correctly you have to point the steering wheel to the left to go straight ahead, it doesn't really "pull" the car off the road.

I'm fairly frustrated with myself. I've had the truck for less than 48 hours and I've already caused probably more than $500 damage to it... crap!

Oh well, as Erick said - it was probably better to get a small slap in the face to make me more careful, rather than a much larger future accident. There is a tendency to feel pretty invulnerable in a big 4X4 truck.

For the past almost month I've been on vacation. Probably the longest time I've been off work since I was 15. December 7th was my last day at work, and January 4th will be my first day back. I did a bunch of stuff this month, at a fairly slow pace. Got some house projects done, went to Mexico for a week, watched movies, etc. I'm very suprised - I didn't work, didn't code, didn't really blog. It was a great a really recharging break. Normally by the end of a long-ish break I can't wait to get back to work, this vacation has really felt like a "lifestyle" - sleeping in, watching movies, doing projects, vacationing, etc... I could get used to getting paid to not work :)

• I'm starting to get excited to go back. We are ready to finish up Avalon v1, we have a Beta and a PDC to look forward to in 2005. Later this year I should be able to free myself up to start working on Avalon v2, and I think I'm going to write a book this year.
• Today I had my first meeting on the robotics club at Eastlake High School, I'm going to mentor the software portion of the club.
• I'm 2 dives away from my advanced diver certification, and will probably get my master diver cert sometime this year. Megan is talking about getting certified also!
• Our family planning is kicking into high gear this year, hopefully by the end of the year we will have some announcement to make!
• I've been blogging for a couple years now, and I still enjoy it. Megan Anderson, my wife, is also thinking about starting a blog... she is still debating on what kind of blog she wants it to be though, so no posts yet!
• This year I hope to help Scoble achieve his resolution #2... give me a break, blogs are not the solution to everything!

Overall, I hope that 2005 is a year of balance. I spent a lot of time at work for the past year doing a lot of training and "meta" issues - I want to spend more time doing. I want to ship, write code, blog, play, spend time with family, friends, work on personal projects, etc... all in moderation. I'm a horribly obbsesive person, and having balance is a big challenge. Let's see how it goes.

This last week I went to Playa de Carmen in Mexico (on the Yukatan penninsula near Cozumel) with Megan. We stayed at a great all inclusive resort... I'll post some pics in the next day or so. Needless to say, we drank, I dove, we ate, we toured... it was a blast.

After SellsCon and WinDev, I'm now at a 3 day offsite training conference. We are staying at the Willows Lodge in Woodinville which is really nice, but I can't wait to be back home. Megan and my schedule hasn't lined up very well, so we haven't seen each other much for the past couple weeks.

I completely dig talking with customers and giving presentations, but these three weeks have been tough both at home and work (something about being gone for 8 days in 3 weeks makes it hard to accomplish anything).

Hmm... Charlie goes by Tigger, Chris wants to go by Charlie... Oddly my nickname with a group of friends was Cap'n... like the cereal guy. Eventually they turned it into a verb: "He Cap'n'ed that change into the code base"...

Given the short week, it's felt pretty compact. Had physical therapy twice, swam a bunch (peaked at 800 yards in a session), finished Purple Cow, met with people about creating a team, worked with my team on creating a plan for the rest of the product cycle, played poker, played Tron 2.0/Halo/Doom3 on my new PC, and posted some blog entries.

I got my review numbers back on Tuesday, which is always fun. The part of the review that I enjoy most is getting crtical feedback I know I'm supposed to focus on my strengths, but I can't help it. I did get the feedback of a recent "flip" I made on an opinion - but after some conversation I think it's all good.

Sunday I head out of town for a 2 days conference with some execs... should be interesting...

On June 5, 2004 I ran down some stairs and broken my ankle.

By June 25, 2004 I was already confined to crutches.

By August 29, 2004 I was able to walk around and do chores.

Tomorrow I go and see the orthopedic specialist. This is the guy that told me that I "probably" wouldn't need surgey due to the chip fracture of my talus. I've been doing physical therapy for the past 3 weeks, and I have 5 more to go. I started doing pool therapy this week, however my friend Fred has got me swimming laps (just bought my first pair of swim goggles this morning).

Probably the most interesting thing about this entire thing - I'm really happy about it. I realized how lucky I am that I didn't get in a freak car accident or get cancer or anything really bad. In the end I had a summer of slight discomfort and frustration. Oddly enough I've lost weight and now am doing more physical excercise than before. What a great summer!

I know everyone says this, so I guess I should also, the older I get the faster time goes by. I still consider my Creative Labs Zen music player "new", however I bought it 9 months ago. I happened upon my old post while looking for my blog anniversary date (12/23, for those that care)...

The interesting thing is that last month my wife (Megan, for those of you that remember) wanted to buy a CD online from some place she new she could get to from iTunes. After dealing with some whackiness with installing QuickTime, we got iTunes working. It's a pretty slick program, but unfortunately it can't read WMA files, which is what I ripped a couple hundred CDs to.

Why, oh why, do both Microsoft and Apple insist on creating new formats??? Apple does bizaro "AAC" format and Microsoft does bizaro "WMA". My wife's first question - "how do I burn a CD with a combination of our old music and the new stuff I just purchased?" Uhm...

I actually really do understand some of the technical and political reasons why everyone (Real, Microsoft, Apple, etc.) participate in these format wars, but in the end it is consumers that pay.

I bought a pool cue the other day, and then earlier this week we started talking about getting the guys together for a game of poker - but we needed chips. This prompted us to do a massive violation of company ethics and have an intern do some poker chip research (ok, in full disclosure, apparently the intern barged into someone's office and insisted on doing the research)....

According to the intern: "If God plays poker, these are his chips… http://www.buypokerchips.com/archetype-poker-chips.htm

Birthday gift for the intern anyone?"

They are gorgeous chips... just unfortunately out of my price range...

Regardless of the quality of chips, tonight a group of four of us got together and play a couple rounds of "Texas Hold 'Em", the game made popular by the ESPN 8 (The Ocho) show: World Series of Poker. I ended up winning both rounds (amazingly!), which just makes me want to play more. Maybe the Archetype is really the chip for me?

This is definetly in the category of "what I had for lunch" posts...

1. I've been obsessing over pool since I picked up a new Viking cue last weekend, so I spent around 6 hours this weekend attempting to wrangle some balls into their correct pockets...
   
2. With my leg on the mend, I was able to get to some yard work and few projects around the house...
   
3. Been watching Farscape... I'm evaluating NetFlix and decided to try out the series... so far I'll give it a 3.5 out of 5... the next disk will decide it's fate, I'm not going to watch another 8 disks if the pace doesn't pickup a bit...
   
4. Saw Bourne Supremecy... pretty good. Would have felt better watching it at home (I just like my theater better than a movie theater) or at least paying matine prices (shell ing out $16 for both of our tickets and getting a sub-par experience just doesn't make me happy)... the action was pretty good, plot was enjoyable if not a bit predictable...

I made mention a couple weeks ago about my ankle injury. Basically I was running down some stairs and twisted my ankle to the side as I tried to jump down 4 stairs. Ouch.

Anyway, after 3 rounds of x-rays, 1 MRI, 2 doctors, 2 braces, and 3 weeks I finally have a better understanding of what the issue is. Oh, and I still have to schedule a CAT scan for next week.

I have a "3rd degree ankle sprain" and a "bone bruise" in my talar dome. The bone bruise apparently is the slightly concerning part, as it might indicate a fracture of the bone that is too hard to detect on the x-rays and MRI (hence the CAT scan).

The good news is that I'm officially off of the air-cast - a big boot-like brace that completly immobilizes the ankle, and now i'm on a much smaller brace that limits the ankle motion to 1 plane. So, I get to wear two shoes again!

As for the other points of note - Monday my wife's MDX goes into the shop for repairs after the accident that happened the same weekend as my ankle injury.

I've been on a break from blogging for a while, and I know I should have said something earlier, but such is life.

In the past week I've been in a minor car accident, broken my ankle (maybe, they still aren't sure), and generally been working, playing, and getting on with life.

I've found my large number of blogs that I read to be a impediment to actually blogging, so I think I'm going to cull a lot of people from the list. No offense if you get bumped, I just need to get to a managable feed of information.

This comment spam is really frustrating. I'm going to have to turn off my comments, which is really dissapointing - i like the two way nature of comments. Is there any good technique for filtering out these #@$! spammers?

What an amazing day.

I've been sick for about two weeks, so last night wasn't a restful sleep. I ended up giving up on sleep at around 4:30am and went downstairs. Prep'd some coffee and began watching Master and Commander. Today was scheduled to be a busy day.

4:30am: Wake up
5:15am: Start watching movie
6:45am: Erick and Fred picked me up for errands.
7:00am: Arrive at Microsoft, move couch to my office
7:30am: Arrive at Home Depot to buy new garden trailer (10cu.ft.)
8:00am: Pickup aerator from rental store
8:45am: Finished aerating my lawn, and assemblying trailer, head to Erick's
10:50am: Head back to rental store to return aerator
11:45am: Back at my house, finish watching movie
1:00pm: Head out to Issaquah to get C02 container for kegerator i'm building
1:45pm: Pickup 1/4 barrel keg of MGD at K's Beverage and Deli in Bellevue
3:00pm: Move around 1.5 cu.yd of gravel onto shoulder using the new trailer.
4:30pm: Pour first beer from kegerator
6:00pm: Make dinner with Megan (my wife!)
6:45pm: Watch Mona Lisa Smile with Megan
8:45pm: Sit on deck drinking a beer and admiring the evening star
(soon): Go to sleep

Last night I hung out with friends, watched my brother-in-law's band play in Redmond, tomorrow I fly down to California to talk about Longhorn to a group of developers with Don Box. Sometimes you just have to sit back and really appreciate the life you live. Great friends, great job, amazing wife.

My catch phrase this week has been "I refuse to let being sick affect my actions in any way"... probably not the most healthy thing, but today was way better than sitting on the couch trying to feel better!

What would you do if you had an extra day on the weekend? So far I fertalized my lawn, added 2 more coats of laquer to my table (more later), sprayed weed killer in places that I shouldn't have weeds, paid an amex bill (1 week late), built a big bon fire, watched about 3 hours of TiVo, and drank a few beers... all in all, a great weekend day. And it's only 9:17 ;-)

Tonight I watched the movie "thirteen". Truely disturbing.

Every parent always says "It couldn't happen to my child". Every to be parent (like me & megan) says "We will do it right". I'm not sure today is any worse than in the past. Did parents in the 50's have the same scares that we have today?

If you haven't seen or heard about thirteen, it is the story of a 13 year old girl that befriends a popular girl in the seventh grade. The movie chronicles their sprial down into alcohol, drugs, sex, and theft. The movie is based on the real story of one writers.

I hear parents that want to be "friends" with their child. I hear about children's rights (to privacy, to disagree, etc). Parents are not there to be friends with their children. Parents have a right and obligation to not give their children unconditionaly privacy, to not let their children decide everything in their lives. When you have children, you have a life long obligation to be their parent.

I hear stories from various teachers that parents of their students come in asking the teachers to someone "make" their kids do homework. Guess what?! It's a parent's job to make sure kids do their homework, not the teachers. It's the parent's job to teach kids responsibility. It's the parent's job to teach right and wrong. It's the parent's job to know if their kid is on drugs.

I know that I will make mistakes when I'm a parent. It's almost a requirement of the job. I just hope that I will never be my kid's friend.

When last we left our daring hero he was woried that the drainage was putting water into the crawl space faster than the 1/3HP pump could remove it.

After some experimentation it was determined that most likely the output of the sump pump was going into a drain that was busted and actually had all the pump output going back into the crawl space (turns out this is bad). After talking with my neighbor (who, as luck would have it, is a professional residential general contractor) he suggested that I stop the water from returning to the crawl space.

80' of PVC (well, ABS) pipe later I now have the pump successfully draining down a hill and away from the house.

So, to summarize:

• I have replaced the electrical feed to the pump
• I have replaced the pump itself
• I have rerouted the outflow of the pump
• I have dug the pump 12" deeper into the ground

In the end, I believe the problem is now solved (and all it took is replacing every component of my drainage system!). My only remaining task is to take the temporary ABS pipe and put it underground and pretty it up, but for now, the system is working flawlessly (yes, I am knocking on wood).

Ah, the lessons of too much information... I currently subscribe to Eric Sink's blog, i still managed to miss Career Calculus (maybe he posted it in a sneaky kinda way). It was when reading Rory's parody that I finally read about the calculus.

I can't agree more with Eric. One of my favorite quotes is "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity" (which most of google attributes to Vince Lombardi). While Eric's calculus is: C = G + LT, I would argue that a significant part of "L" is preparation (you could call all learning preparation, or all preparation learning, but, either way...).

I started blogging a little over a year ago. I heard about it and wanted to see what it was about. So I read a little, I posted a little, I wrote a blogging engine. None of this in anyway was related to work (in fact, I made sure that all my blogging only occured on my home machine. I used my personal copy of Visual Studio, etc.). It wasn't until a couple months ago that I even installed an RSS aggregator on my work laptop. At no point did I consider blogging a way to further my "C".

An odd thing happened though. As I started talking to people at work about blogging, and eventually setup an internal blog server, and talked with teams about blogging, and... it seemed that my blogging actually turned into a way to increase my visibility at work.

I've done lots of odd things - rollerblading, blogging, wiki, Photoshop, reading political history, digital photography, etc. - and most of them only result in me learning something new (which I love to do!). Once in a while, they result in some tangible benefit to me - but only because I already had spent time with them. In fact, my desire to play with graphic designer tools got me to play with Illustrator, so that when the PDC rolled around I ended up helping a bunch with the design of the "eye chart" architecture of Longhorn picture.

I've had people ask me - "how do I advance?" or "how do I get my next promotion?". The odd thing is, it is often the things we least expect that give us the "luck" to get the advancement. It is that constant learning over time that gives us the preparation to take advantage of the opportunity...

I was having an interesting conversation with a Jeff (Jeff Bogdan of Avalon fame) about critique... Jeff taught inline skating for a period of time, and he made the comment that people are generally more receptive to getting feedback about something they are physically doing wrong then something they are mentally thinking wrong.

I really try to be receptive to feedback. I try a lot of new things, and generally I know I suck at them. I've been spending a lot of time getting feedback from people on my presentation style (ok, mostly feedback from Don). When I do woodworking with my friend Erick, he often gives me lots of advice on how to do things right. I think I do a good job with feedback.

So yesterday Chris Sells sent me feedback on the draft for my next MSDN article. I really wanted his feedback and I want to become a better writer (Chris is a great writer!). Chris gave me a bunch of feedback, some of which I liked some of which I didn't, but I almost immediately had a negative reaction. After about 30 seconds I thought about this more and realized that this was overall great feedback and I sent Chris a "thanks" for all the information.

Chris and I chatted briefly over IM (I neglected to mention my brief negative reaction) and he commented that he thought I wanted to improve as a writer so he tried to give me good feedback. I really appreciated his feedback and him taking time to read my article carefully, however my initial reaction has been troubling me over the last couple days.

Why do people get so attached to things they create, but not things they do physically? The article was something I created, initially I wanted to defend it. Chris is a professional author, of course he writes better than I do. Logically I know this, and I really do like the feedback, but why the initial reaction???

(Note to Chris: I just thought this initial reaction was an interesting phenomenon, please keep the feedback coming! <G>)

Not sure about the validity of the test, but given that I normally consider myself a financial conservative and a social moderate, I'm suprised that President Match says I should vote for Kerry... guess I need to research him more... Although, I'm wondering if it's rigged? <G>

1. Kerry 100%
2. Edwards 93%
3. Clark 92%
4. Kucinich 92%
5. Sharpton 89%
6. Dean 84%
7. Bush 58%

[via Dare]

You have been warned... however, given that so many people love my sump pump stories...

When I got back from London I promptly checked my crawl space - dry, but the pump was running. When I left for work this morning the pump was running, but there was now 2 feet of standing water...

Put on the boots, grabbed the spare pump, "rebooted" the existing pump and started up the back up... slow progress was visible. Left for work happy.

Yes, I said happy. I am joyfull at the situation. You see, in the past 6 weeks I have been >3,000 miles away for 2 of those weeks (1 in NYC, 1 in London). If the pump had failed on day one of either of those weeks it could have been a complete disaster... Failing last night isn't that big of deal.

With this final failure I decided to do some more work in the crawl space. I installed the new pump that I purchased a while ago, and also dug out a bigger trench along the path that water was flowing most rapidly.

Hmm... still have to figure this one out - as I dug the trench large, water moved more rapidly (expected), but then eventually overcame the new pump (unexpected). It appears as though the slow pace of water in the crawlspace was due to poor drainage heading towards the pump... now I'm back to 1 foot of water in the crawlspace, with a wonderfully working pump - and falling behind.

I dropped the backup pump back into the mess to try and help out the new pump. I'm a bit worried now. If my drainage is so bad that a 1/3 HP pump can't keep up, I guess I'll have to install a second one.

Well, both Megan and I had a blast in London - we love this town. Last night we went to see the Jerry Springer Opera and then went to the Cinnamon Club. All in all I hit 5 curry resteraunts, 1 musical, many tourist sites, 1 big presentation, many english pubs, met with dozens of customers/bloggers/local MSFT folks and just had a wonderful time.

Megan is staying on for one more day, and she will be seeing Phantom of the Opera tonight (we've seen it a bunch, but we felt compelled to see it in London <G>) and she will not be having curry tonight (she is very curried-out)...

Anyway, the next post will be back in the good old pacific time zone...

This morning we drove in from London to MS' office in Reading to prep for Monday's presentations. Some bloke noticed that the power supply for the Shuttle machine had a universal auto-sensing power supply, so we jacked the PC directly into the power and booted up - no smoke, so it must have worked.

After booting up I discovered that all the data that I had carefully put into WinFS before leaving the US was toasted (basically we had been reformatting, imaging, etc, the machine... not sure what step we did wrong)... After several paniced email one of the more calm people in the room stepped me through the instructions I got in mail and we eventually got everything working again.

Megan (the wife, remember?) has been out around town while I've been working, she hit the British Museum and other fun stuff. Tonight the three of us will be going to Chutney Mary's for some more curry... ah, english cuisine is so good!

Megan in front of hieroglyphics (sp?):

Got to London today around noon local time - or 2am body time. I managed to get some sleep on the plane, so I was a bit rested, but I ended up crashing for a couple hours before heading out for the first scheduled event that we had - an informal drink/socialize/talk with some UK finance folks. What a blast... my 10 minutes of talking was a bit rough (i'm not used to making up a presentation on the fly), but when we got to Q&A I think we hit our stride.

I had dinner with Don at the Vireswammy (sp?) which is probably the best Indian food I've ever had... Don says that we will hit Chutney Mary's later in the trip which is even better.

For various reasons I ended up getting a small chunk of cash sitting in my savings account. This isn't "big" money by any stretch of the imagination, but enough that I don't think that a 1% savings account is the right place for it. My problem - I've never don't any real financial planning, investing, or anything else like that before. Last night I went to Borders and tried to find a good book.

Wow, talk about bad books - I would say 80% of the books where basically "How to take the change from under your couch and make one million dollars with secrets that Wall Street will never tell you!". Give me a break, I want a book with realistic advice. When I started looking at buying a house I found a bunch of good books, with reasonable advice about interviewing agents, etc.

I ended up getting The Truth About Money, which I'm going to start reading today. Should be interesting to try and get into this a little bit.

From myself :)

"The DaVinci Code - Seems you can't throw a dead cat without hitting this book these days, so I felt I should read it. I got totally enthralled with the story and read straight through it while traveling on Day 9. I'd like to understand how much of the book was fiction, obviously the book is fiction, but it is at least loosely based on some facts (like the Mona Lisa is a real painting!)..."

And Matt says (in comments):

"The beauty of The DaVinci Code was how well Dan Brown authored it. There was a significant amount of fact in it, and I consistently found myself looking at the pictures described in the book, thinking to myself... Wow...

Do a google search on some of the artwork mentioned in the book and see for yourself...

It was so cleverly authored that you could not determine where the fact stopped and the fiction started.

Some things that I got from the beginning of the book... Opus Dei and the Priory of Sion *are* real."

And Rory responds (in comments):

"I was embarrassed when my aunt gave me _The DaVinci Code_ for Christmas. Everything about it, right down to the title, sounded like your typical conspiratorial gobbeldy-gook.

It was with even greater embarrassment that I went tonight to purchase Brown's previous Robert Langdon adventure - _Angels and Demons_.

(Note: I would like to apologize in advance for all the people, including myself, who are about to begin using your blog to post their own impressions of _The DaVinci Code_)

For trash novels, I can't put this stuff down. Brown knows his stuff (some of it), and does a much better job than my friends do of getting me to stay up past my bedtime.

My only issue is all the pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo numerology. I'm waiting to see my local newspaper (The Oregonian) get caught up in the DaVinci Code fever and start printing lotto numbers based on the Fibonacci Sequence and the golden ratio.

But, whatever... Good to relax and get lost in the weirdness for a little while.

Speaking of which, I still have more not sleeping to do with _Angels and Demons_..."

I figure I would just pull out this discussion into a separate post in case more people want to respond without having to read the rather length NYC post...

I might blog about some of the more interesting things later, but for now I wanted to get this into my blog so that I would remember more of the details...

Day 1 (Fri, 12/26)

Arrived early at the airport because of the "Orange Alert" status. Flew through security, ended up having several hours to kill. Watched Pirates of the Caribbean on the DVD player to kill time. The flight into JFK was pleasant. We finished watching Pirates, and watched most of Tommy Boy before we lost power on the DVD player. We got into the hotel around 10pm and checked in. The W in Times Square is a typical W hotel - over styled, funky, and way over priced, but we still liked it. The rooms were amazingly small, and if we leaned out just right we could see a small sliver of Times Square, including the Virgin sign.

Before we headed to NY we had called up our friends, the Gunderson's (John & Sarah), who live in Baltimore. You see, the excuse we were using to head over to the east coast was to visit them before they moved back to the west coast. We called them up to see if we could stop off in Baltimore and visit with them after our trip to New York, and it turns out they were going to be in NY at the same time we were! Weird. So, when we got into town we gave them a ring and setup a meeting time for the next day.

We then decided to head out and get some food, so we figured we would ask the concierge for a recommendation. When we got into the lobby we found that the concierge was otherwise occupied with another couple, so we waited. We got a couple drinks from the bar, our first taste of the cost of NYC, 2 drinks = $23, ouch. After finishing our drinks, and having the couple ahead of us look like they were planning out the next week of adventures, we decided to strike out into Times Square and find some food on our own.

My first reaction to Times Square was "Blech!". Everything was a chain restaurant; Olive Garden, TGI Fridays, McDonald's, Tad's Steak House, etc. We walked around the block, and finally gave us and went to Chevy's since Megan at least hadn't been to one of those before. After a monster margarita and some mediocre southwest food, we headed back to the hotel, it was close to midnight.

You see, I set out a goal of staying out until midnight or later every night we were in New York.

Day 2 (Sat, 12/27)

Saturday we had tickets to The Producers. Unfortunately we found out after we bought the tickets that three days later Mathew Broderick and Nathan Lane were returning, but these things happen. Anyway, we started the day by walking up Seventh Ave, checking out the David Letterman studio, and having breakfast at the Stardust Dinner - mediocre food, but the wait staff sang Broadway songs, so it was lots of fun!

After breakfast (well, more like lunch) we took the subway down to Whitehall and jumped on the Stanton Island Ferry, which is the recommended way to see the Statue of Liberty. It turns out that you can't go up in the statue anymore, so the Stanton Island Ferry gets your close enough for pictures with the added benefit of being free and quicker than going directly to Ellis Island. Once we finished the round trip we walked up through Battery Park, saw ground zero, walked through Tribeca, and finally hit Canal street - the home of design clothing knock-offs.

Here is where we began to experience the weird time effect in New York. Everything seems to be close and should take very little time, but time seems to slip away from you - fast! By the time we had finished at Canal street it was after 5pm. Weird. We jetted back to the hotel, changed into our nicer theater clothes, and went downstairs for a recommendation for dinner.

We ended up going to a Irish pub right off Broadway (on 42nd or 44th?). It was great. I ordered a "Lemon Drop made with Raspberry Stoli" for Megan and the bartenders responded with (in a thick Irish accent) "Don't be starting that crap now". After several attempts we got something that didn't remotely resemble the drink she wanted - however my Guinness came out great!

The Producers first act was OK, the second act was hilarious. I've heard that Nathan Lane and Mathew Broderick make the show much much better - we both enjoyed the show, but it paled in comparison to Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserable - maybe it's unfair to compare comedy to drama in this case?

Day 3 (Sun, 12/28)

John & Sarah were doing a walking tour of Rockefeller center, so we met up with them around 11-ish and I went with them to attempt to ice skate in Central Park while Megan went shopping on 5th Ave. Everything in NY has a line, and the lines are always really really long. The ice skating line was estimated to be 1.5 hours or longer. We bailed. We figured we would head down to the Empire State Building and go up in it. We took a quick subway ride, then walked a few blocks. On the way we stopped and looked at the Bloomingdale's and Lord & Taylor's window displays. By the time we got to the building it had taken us something like 3 hours to get there - more of that NY time-eating-machine.

We figured out a place to eat - a highly recommended place called "Lupa's" in Greenwich, so we headed cross town. After tromping around Greenwich for a while, we got to Lupa's only to find that at 4:45pm there was a line to put your name on the list to get into the restaurant (they wouldn't even let you put your name on the list until 5 or 5:30). We went across the street to another italian joint and had some great food (I think the place was called Rocco's).

Day 4 (Mon, 12/29)

Because we had been thwarted on skating on Sunday, we figured we would hit it first thing in the morning. Of course, everyone else had the same idea. This time we braved the hour wait and finally got on the ice. Fun was had by all. A couple hours later John, Sarah, and I headed uptown to meet up with Megan at the American Museum of Natural History. I felt I was oozing with culture!

That night we had tickets to a comedy show at Caroline's on Broadway near Times Square. The by-now familiar NY time-eating-machine had managed to consume almost all the remaining time until the show, so we rushed back to Times Square, got a quick bite at a pizza joint and went to the show. Aisha Tyler was headline-ing, and the show was pretty funny.

Day 5 (Tue, 12/30)

We woke up early (6am) to rush down to the NBC studio to try and get in the crowd for the Today show (like geeks). The place was packed. We managed to hang around for a while, but quickly lost interest after they did their first exterior shot and we heard it would be 30 minutes before the next (we where way in the back also). We walked over to the NBC studios to get tickets for the tour, walking past the huge line of people for Conan O'Brian tickets, only to discover that the tours where booked until 6pm that night.

Walked around town a bit more, headed back to the hotel.

We finally got some time with the concierge. First a dinner recommendation - the Antique Garage in SoHo. I wanted to go by the B&H Photo store which was at 34th and 9th (which I mistakenly thought was in the Lower East Side, which in fact was in the Lower West Side). Jonathan (the concierge) then proceeded to talk us out of going to Times Square to celebrate the new year. He basically described it something like this: "You show up around 6pm to get a spot, at which point you will not be able to move again until 12:15am. You are stuck elbow to rib, with no bathrooms, food, beer, or beverage of any kind. The beer is prohibited by law, and the beverages are prohibited by the lack of bathrooms."

We started walking to camera store, when I realized that it was actually on the west side instead of the east side. We decided to punt on the camera store and just head into SoHo. We took a cab to what looked like a pretty run down neighborhood at 6pm or so. Walked around a bit, and then finally went to dinner. The place was pretty cool - a converted garage full of antiques. The food was served at a very leisurely pace with an amazingly accommodating waitstaff. Great food, ok wine, great service.

Day 6 (Wed, 12/31)

First thing in the morning we headed down to the Empire State Building. At 8:30am the line was already 90 minutes long. Punt. Walked over to Macy's to discover that it didn't open until 10am, so we walked over to B&H Photo, the mecca of photographic equipment. I bought a great 35 prime lens (F/2) and then we walked back to Macy's. Shopped for clothes for that night.

Yes, that's right - I didn't tell you about the place we were going for New Year's Eve. Jonathan told us about this great club we could go to - "Spirit". This place was going to be awesome, a bottle table (where we would get a bottle of Champagne for the two of us), Dirty Vegas performing live, and an "A-List" celebrity (who he wouldn't name, but we guessed was Madonna). We figured we needed to bump up our wardrobe before going there.

We met up with John and Sarah for lunch in Little Italy. Back to the hotel and some time to sleep and rest up for the night of partying.

We ended up in the cab way too early, and we got dropped off in what looked like a tough area - abandoned warehouses, etc. Actually the area was Chelsea, but it still looked pretty beaten up. The club was behind a door with nor markings, just a bouncer outside. Later we found out from a local that the rule in New York is the worse the exterior looks, the more upscale the place is. When we went inside we lined up behind an elderly couple and their grandson - so much for the exclusive party.

After we got in, the place actually was pretty cool. 3 floors, with a dining room, "mind and body therapy room" (with massage, meditation, etc.), dance floor, and VIP level with bottle tables (where you order full bottles of liquor and make the drinks yourself). We got a buffet dinner of excellent food (but only one buffet table for a large number of guests) and where seated at a long bar full of other "couples" (if you had 4+ people you got a table to yourself).

We really enjoyed sitting at the couples bar. We chatted with a bunch of other couples, and met some really interesting people. We ended up hanging out with a young couple from the Isle of Man, she owned a sandwich shop and he was a plumber. We drank, hung out on the dance floor, talked a lot, and generally had a good time.

Day 7 (Thur, 1/1)

After checking out we hopped in a cab to Penn Station (which is right under Madison Square Garden) and waited for our train. The trian ride was enjoyable. I always like train rides, they seem more comfortable and casual than a plane ride. None of this multiple hours waiting in the station, you bring your luggage onto the train yourself, and you don't need a seatbelt to be fastened at all times.

John picked us up at the train station and took up back to their row house in the Locust Point area of Baltimore. Their dog Ginger hates me (well, basically hates everyone that isn't John or Sarah), but eventually calmed down. Their house was great, if not compact. These row houses are pretty cool, many dating back 50+ years they have been remodeled over time and have these odd narrow and tall proportions. Very functional.

We basically vegg'd out on the couch watching crappy TV. Exactly what we needed. Dinner was turkey cooked by John himself.

Day 8 (Fri, 1/2)

Friday we headed out and saw the sites of Baltimore. It's not much of a touristy town, but we got to see Fort McKinley which is what Francis Key Scott watched while he came up with the idea for the Star Spangled Banner, and some other historical stuff. Lunch was at an awesome pizza place - Brick Oven Pizza - in Fells Point. We tried to go to the aquarium, but they sold out (huh!?). Finally we went to Nacho Mama's for dinner. The wait was going to be 90 minutes, so we walked around the square and hit "2129" which is a kitch shop. The woman was running the cash register off an iMac, a first that I had seen. We chatted for a while about why she chose the Mac, and about the business. Nacho Mama's was absolutely fabulous, and they had a bar beer - National Bohemian, or Nati-Boh's for short.

Day 9 (Sat, 1/3)

Day-o-travel. Left the house at 5:45am eastern, arrived at our house 4:00pm pacific... tired. Read mail, read blogs, wrote blogs, sifted through digital pics.

Observations (yeah duh, revelations)...

• New York is huge. We only spent time in Manhattan, and even then we felt Manhattan was huge. The scale of everything was massive. Going to B&H Photo's big store is a great example - almost a quarter city block of photography, video, and audio equipment. Next time we go to New York I think I'll want to stay out of midtown, and instead stay in one of the other areas and explore it more thoroughly.
• There are a lot of people in New York. Everything has a line. Everything has a wait.

Books read...

(more later on these, maybe...)

• Forever: A Novel - A man is granted immortality as long as he stays in Manhattan. Overall a good book, except for the final couple pages. Probably the part I enjoyed most about the book was the notion of the man needing to truly live his live to live forever - he needed to always be learning and challenging himself or he would slip into a kind of stupor.
• The DaVinci Code - Seems you can't throw a dead cat without hitting this book these days, so I felt I should read it. I got totally enthralled with the story and read straight through it while traveling on Day 9. I'd like to understand how much of the book was fiction, obviously the book is fiction, but it is at least loosely based on some facts (like the Mona Lisa is a real painting!)...

Tomorrow I fly off to NYC... I've made the decision to not bring my laptop, which will make traveling a bit easier, but means I'm limited to about 640MB of pics, lets hope I can control myself. Even with the lack of a laptop, we will travel with quite an array of electronic gadgets - portable DVD player, 12 movies, 40GB WMA/MP3 player w/ 16GB of music, 2 digital cameras (1 SLR, 1 point-and-shoot), 768MB of compact flash, and 2 cell phones. I think we will manage to get by.

The latest scares on flying have my wife a little nervous, but overall I don't think things will be too bad. We are giving ourselves a bit over 2 hours at the airport for our departing flight, so hopefully it will be a boring morning of sitting in a lounge.

Most likely won't blog from NYC, unless I happen across a internet cafe... even then, I intend to be primarily vacationing :)

A year or so ago I bought my first hard disk based music player, a Rio Riot 20GB player. The form factor was a little big, but at the time it was great for a WMA capable player. Unfortunately after about 3 months the thing stopped working. Megan called up the company, they confirmed there was a flaw in the battery management and encouraged us to install the latest firmware - of course the player was so fried by that point that the firmware installation wouldn't work. After getting the run around for a while we eventually got a reprint of a reciept from Magnolia Audio Video (one of the best stores for customer service) and once we had written proof we were able to get Sonic Blue to actually agree to give us an RMA to return the Riot. We faxed them the reciept and request for an RMA and we got no response.

OK, so now I'm done with Sonic Blue and Rio products altogether. When a company doesn't stand behind their products they loose in my book.

Jeff, a coworker, recently moved from the Riot to a Creative Xen Xtra. The reviewers all seem to like it, so today I ordered one next day air from Buy.com. I haven't shopped at buy.com before, but they had a pretty reasonable return policy, so I figure I'll give it a shot. I went for the 40GB configuration, primarily because it was the "sweet spot" for cost ($270 for 30GB, $300 for 40GB, $370 for 60GB) - basically we have ripped most the music in our house and we have about 15GB of music... I figure that 40GB is plenty of room.

Provided all goes well, the player should arrive before we leave for New York.

Saturday I went and saw The Familiars in concert at the Sunset Tavern. My brother-in-law is the lead guitar player, and they opened for a secret Mud Honey show. Their music is really good, but as always the lead singer (John Parks) always managed to steal the show - this time completely nude.

Tonight (well, last night) I went and saw the Alkaline Trio at the Showbox. Shawn (dev manager for the WinForms team, and long time friend and coworker) has been arranging punk concerts for a couple of us at the office a a bit now (last time we saw Bad Religion) and he got us hooked up with Alkaline tonight. If you haven't been to the Showbox before, it is a trip. The place is small, but has a massive open space in the center where the moshing always starts. I figured this was my opportunity, so for the first time I headed out into the pit.

I was a tad dissapointed.

First, people where way too nice. I'm reminded of the stories of Japenese punk kids that would be polite to strangers. Basically the "punk" people in the mosh pit where 18-22 year old "kids" that where clearly not really punk.

Second, it wasn't nearly crowded enough. Yes, you could barely move. Yes, I almost got knocked off my feet several times. However, compared to the center of town in Pamplona on the opening day of San Fermin (the running of the bulls!) this was nothing. I never once felt unsafe or scared that I couldn't get out. Oh well, i'm getting old.

The music was great. We had a blast.

People often ask what I use as a rub for my deep fried turkey... I improvise each time, but some of my favorite ingredients are:

• Cavender's All Purpose Greek Seasoning
• Paul Prudhomme's Poultry Magic
• Dark Chili Powder
• Bayou Cajun Seasoning

Paul Prudhomme generall is the base, using almost a whole bottle for a two bird mix. Then I add some Cavender's and Chili powder, etc, for a little most zing.

One piece of advice - rub the turkey lightly with olive oil before you apply the seasoning, it makes the rub stick better.

I've been deep frying turkeys for many years now, after getting hooked on it by a friend (Chad, with no blog...). Now deep frying turkeys seems common, you can buy a the equipment at almost any store (Costco, Fred Meyers, etc.) - but it turns out there are some people that still don't believe it really happens. JFo asked that I document my deep frying this year to prove to some friends in Australia that this really does happen...

The preparation of the bird is critical. The most crucial step is to put the bird into your pot, and fill the pot with water until the bird is submerged. You then remove the bird, and now you can measure the water to determine how much oil to add. After you've measured your largest bird (if you are doing more than one), you can fill the pot to the right level with oil (Peanut is the traditional, but Canola or other vegetable oil works great). Starting heating the oil to 350.

What you put on the bird is up to you. I do a cajun rub on the outside. Some people inject the turkey with spices, others do it bare.

Then you put the bird in.

Submerging a turkey in 350 degree oil makes it cook quick. 3.5 minutes per pound, and your are done. My fryer only handles about 12# birds, which means that I have a max wait of around 45 minutes, yeah!

Then you pull the bird out...

 All thats left is carving the turkey, and finally eating!

DFT (Deep Fried Turkey) is not greasy or higher in fat, etc, than regular turkey. The skin has some oil on it, but overall the turkey really cooks in it's own juices - which get completely sealed into the turkey. It is the most juicy flavourful turkey you have ever had. Cleanup is a bit fun (you poor the oil back into the containers after it is cool, then scrub up everything), but in general it is way faster than roasting a turkey.

A couple hints for those of you thinking of trying this:

• Buy disposable roasting pans. They help with prep and give you a place to put the turkey afterwards, and easy cleanup.
• Use disposable over liners as a place to set the basket when you pull the turkey (or set the spike if you have that kind of fryer).
• Soak the pot immediately with hot soapy water - then put the whole thing in the dishwasher (this is a new hint that my friend Erick gave me this year).

Happy Frying!

I took some pictures today at the opening of Valhalla.Valhalla is a bar that a friend of a friend bought... formerly "Taps and Tabs II". I went over there today for the opening, and to watch the Apple Cup - which is the yearly riverly game between the Huskies (University of Washington) and the Cougars (Washington State University). Oddly enough the audience at the bar was about 95% Cougars, and so me being an ex-Husky was clearly in the minority... however the Huskies won, so all was right with the world. Don't be mistaken - I'm not a footbal fan, I just ocassionally watch.

"the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" - Franklin D. Roosevelt

Fear can run your life. There are good books about this, like the Culture of Fear. There are movies about this, like Bowling for Columbine. Fear comes in many forms and many sizes. Fear can make you anxious, angry, sad, frustrated, or... well, afraid. People fear being late, missing a meeting, loosing an opportunity, having their house be flooded, not having a good party, having people not like them - it all boils down to basic fear.

I went to the skate park on Tuesday night. I stood at the top of a short (less than four feet) tall ramp (less than 45 degrees) and was unable to convince my body to go down the ramp. Eventually, by the end of the night, I had convinced myself to go down a lesser incline, which let me convince myself to go down that incline. I had a blast. It was fun. I managed to conquer my irrational fear.

Tonight I drove home from a friend's house thinking about my sump pump. What happened? Did the sump pump fail and is there 4 feet of water under the house? Of course, I was on my way home from Erick's house - will Randy be upset that I ended up at Erick's even though I was originally planning on going over to Randy's place? (of course, I called Randy at 8pm, but there was no answer)...

The sump pump is still working fine. I sustained no serious injuries at the skate park. I'm sure Randy won't be upset in the morning.

Fear.

What is the worst possible thing that could have happened? There could have been water in the crawlspace (there was over 3 feet of water in there before!). I could have broken an arm at the skate park (I've had two broken at the same time before!). Randy could be angry with me (I'm sure it's not the first or last time!). Fear is not productive. Fear is not helpful.

Respect is the key.

Respect the power of the elements on your house. Water can do damage. I let myself get lax on getting the sump pump inspected after the big rain earlier this year. Respect your body. Taking needless risk is bad, however going down a minor ramp isn't a big deal. Respect your friends. I had already talked with Randy about not showing tonight, I called, I didn't casually blow him off for "something better".

While fear isn't productive, having a healthy respect for the consequence of any action is a good thing. It isn't healthy to be afraid of driving through any neighborhood in Seattle. There just aren't scary enough places to truly be afraid of. At worst you have to give someone your car. That just isn't a big deal. Possessions are not worth your fear.

Live a life free from fear.

This doesn't mean to do stupid things. You must respect the scarce resources that we all get - friends, family, health, life. My friend Erick often talks about "prepaying" for bad things. For example, when you buy an alarm system for your house your are effectively prepaying for someone trying to steal from you. You shouldn't have to set an alarm when you leave the house, and you certaintly shouldn't have to pay a company to monitor the alarm for your house. Assume that people are good. I drive a convertible. I often leave the top down. I have yet to have anyone even take the change out of the cupholder in the car.

People are actually good. The neighborhood you live in is actually safe. Your friends actually like you. Your family actually loves you. You possessions aren't actually important.

Beyond fear is freedom.

I went to Valley Supply in Redmond to pickup a new sump pump - I figured that a new pump would mysteriously fix the problems that I was having. After stumbling around the store for a few minutes I went up to the counter to ask (I wanted to find the exact pump that my contractor-neighbor told me to get). They pointed me at the right pump, then I described my problem.

In about 5 seconds they said - sounds like you need to drill a hole before the backflow valve to avoid getting an air seal (or something like that).

Pump fixed. Hopefully.

This is getting ridiculous...

It's been raining lately. Everyday on the way to and from work I peek into the crawl space and make sure that it is dry. I have the second pump that I borrowed from my neighbor still sitting in the low point of the space incase the water returns, and incase the existing pump still doesn't function right. Terminix has been by and removed the dead rat.

I get a paniced call from Megan today.

It seems that the secondary pump, which I thought was safely unplugged, was in fact not. So, when the existing pump didn't function, which happened today, the secondary pump kicked in. Well, since I figured that the pump was unplugged the output pipe was sitting curled up at the base of the stairs in our garage. Megan came home to a garage that had flood damage, but no flood.

Ugh.

When I got home from skating (more later on that) I discovered that in Megan's panic to fix the pump, where she correctly got the output pipe of the secondary pump moving the water *away* from the house, she had inadvertantly tipped the secondary pump on it's side, rendering it useless.

Tonight I was welcomed to about 14 inches of water in the crawl space. Our poor insulation is clear demolished. The secondary pump is now attempting to evacuate the water, and once it has completed it's job, I will do the "flush and reboot" of the existing pump which should get the last 4 inches of water out.

On the good side, I found a cool tree frog living in the pond in the crawlspace.

I've been meaning to buy some new shoes for playing raquet ball... Last time I played I used my sneakers that I thought were non-marking (they weren't)... I kept delaying and delaying - I hate shopping, and I hate the mall. Tonight on the way home I thought "Hey Chris" (I often talk to myself it turns out) "Why don't you stop at Fred Meyers".

15 minutes in and out. $50 for a pair of sneakers. Just right.

I find that I get trapped into the "you must always go to the shoe store for shoes" and the "you must always go to the video store for videos"... sometimes the one stop shopping is the exact thing you need. Even better when Freddies is on the way home!

I am continually impressed at the service I get at Magnolia Audio Video (formerly Magnolia Hi Fi). I generally get fairly knowledgable help, I have never gotten hassled over a return, and they almost always seem to have what I need in stock. In a time when good customer service is becoming harder to find, it is great to have an example of what customer service should be.

Yesterday I had to return my Sony Wega that I bought - not only did I get absolutely zero hassle about the exchange (instead of having to get the unit serviced they offered to let me exchange it - I had only had the TV for 6 weeks), but I never got the "inspection" that I have seen happen at other stores. I once returned a wireless network card there, it took 40 minutes to complete the transaction - including a part by part inspection of everything contained in the box... for a $60 network card!?!

I like to reward good customer service with business - voting with my wallet, so to speak. I have been shopping at Magnolia for about 7 years, and I have yet to find a reason to change my vote.

I know that Starbucks is trying to be a "third place", which is exactly the experience I had there on Sunday. I had to return my Sony Wega because of an annoying problem, and on the way back I decided to stop at the Starbucks in Overlake (the one in the Sears plaza, next to Quizno's) and read Presenting to Win while drinking my coffee.

I ran into two people that I work with, and ended up having a great conversation with an ex-Microsoftie that I didn't know, but it turned out we had worked in very close proximity (datagrids, visual studio, etc.) for several years. We talked about work (he was now "taking a break"), audio systems, and home theaters. It was just a very pleasant day.

Brian's fiance is on the board of The Homelessness Project (THP), which is a non-profit organization that helps homeless single parent families find housing while they get back on their feet. Last year Megan and I went to a performance of Nickel and Dimed that THP was the beneficiary of (if I remember right).

Tonight we went to a charity auction. I was pretty suprised when I learned that everything (including the dinner and wine) was donated, such that 100% of everything that was spent that night went directly to the charity. Very cool.

We ended up spending a lot more than I had expected, but at least we can convince ourselves that it wasn't greed, but rather charity, that drove us to spend!

Any gift given has two different values that can be seen. There is the value of the gift as perceived by the giver, and the value that the receiver perceives. The interesting aspect of this micro-economy of giving is that the two values have no requirement to be related in anyway. That is, something of great value to the giver may provide no value to the receiver and vice versa.

Suppose, for example, I give someone five bucks. I have a fair amount of money (not rich, but) and it would be an easy gift to give. This gift exchange probably isn’t a major significance to me. Would I to quit my job so that I could move across the country to help out a family member in trouble, that would be an amazing gift from my perception to give. I would have sacrificed not only my money, but also my home, friends, career, etc. To someone else, maybe without a job, it might be easier to move across the country than come up with five dollars.

On the receiving side, you often don’t know the givers perception of the value of a gift. My father threw my mother a surprise 40th birthday party years ago. He got the money for the party by taking five dollars at a time from the budget so she would never notice. He planned the party for what seemed like a year. The party was a great success, and of course, my mother really did understand the value he placed on the gift he gave her.

A problem arises when the giver’s perceived value doesn’t match that of the receiver. If the giver sees a low value in a gift, but the receiver sees a high value, then the receiver can feel like it was charity. If the reverse is true then the giver feels that they have "wasted" a valuable gift on someone that in unappreciative of it.

The customs of giving gifts is that it is shallow for the giver to somehow indicate the value of the gift, while the receiver must treat all gifts as if they have high value. Because of this, there is always the complex dance when giving and receiving gifts.

One such dance is the "cold war" of gifts. Maybe one person starts by getting some trinket for the other on a birthday or for Christmas. Maybe they didn't mean that much by it; it was just something they saw. The receiver doesn't know what the givers value was of the present, so they feel they must reciprocate, and rather than risk giving a present that would be seen as not valuable enough, they escalate and buy a more expensive thing. They can only escalate via money, because they could never say what value they attach to the gift they are giving... and so on. Eventually you are both spending hundreds of dollars on presents for no other reason that to make sure you never have a perceived imbalance of value or gifts.

The value of gifts rarely is tied to the monetary cost of the gift. Monetary cost just happens to be the easiest way to signal to people about the value of something. Of course, this is often confused because everyone has such varied ideas of what constitutes "expensive" and "cheap". For some people saying "I'm wrong" or "I'm sorry" is a difficult thing to do, and when they say it to someone it has tremendous meaning to them, other people toss these around constantly. Friendship can be easy for some, and a constant battle for others.

In the end, I wish I could live by some simple rules around gifts...

• Gifts are given not with the expectation of a return on investment. When accepting a gift, don't feel the need to reciprocate – when giving a gift, don't expect it.
  
• Honest communication is on the only way to transmit the value behind a gift. False modesty around the value of something can be just as dangerous as inflating the value.
  
• Give as much and as often as you can to those that you care for.
  

I went out with a couple other PDC'ers today for some pool & lunch, kind of a relaxing move back into work. We have all been working pretty hard to get things buttoned up and ready for the PDC. A special shout goes out to the folks that worked so amazingly hard to get the Aero demos that Hillel showed in BillG's keynote together. There was a team of 40+ people that worked probably 80+ hour weeks for well over a month to pull together that technology. Simply amazing.

But now reality. I'm way behind on mail. My new ability to blog about work appears to have the ability to suck away hours and hours of time. In addition, Jeff (another Avalon architect) and I have decided to start a column on MSDN to talk about "stuff".

My mail rule - 20 items max in your inbox - is being severly violated. at 116 right now. Working on getting that down.

The painters are still working on the house, the sump pump still needs to be replaced, and we are planning a trip to New York for christmas... wahoo!

OK, so i'm still mentally 12...

Fluff your sac [no, it's not porn!].

Friday we had a friend of Megan's come over and offer some design advice. In the end we decided that we wanted to do minimal furniture in the theater, most likely hand me down from other rooms, which gave me the green light to pick up some LoveSac bean bag chairs (oh, and on their web site they say clear "LoveSac is not a damn beanbag")... These are pretty high-tech... shredded memory foam... very comfy. The 5' chair came in a tiny tube, which after being unpacked is slowly starting to grow - they say it can take up to a week for it to fully engorge itself with air. Wow!

The sales staff at the local LoveSac store in Redmond Town Center was pretty nice... After getting out of "Lost in Translation" (needed a pre-leave town date with Megan) we saw that they were just starting to close. We knocked on the locked door to ask them a question - at which point they let us in and gladly took our money ;-)

Translation was a very interesting movie... I need more time to digest it before commenting...

As a minor update, the sump pump that my neighbor Tony lent me is working like a champ... for whatever reason my pump is (oddly enough) not sucking... which makes it (yes) suck.

The net result is as of now the water is probably 12" deep, which puts it below the wood line... I figure with the water off the beams, it should be fine for the night. Tomorrow after work I'll venture back into the muck infested water and install the temporary pump at the bottom of the sump pit - that should nix the rest of the water.

Tony suggested that the mediocre pump I got from Home Depot for $180 shouldn't even be opened... there is a supply place "Valley Supply" in Redmond that sells contractor grade stuff, that will give me a much better pump for around $130...

Time to sleep... I have another dry run of my presentation tomorrow...

In August I "fixed" my sump pump. The last several days it has been raining. Hard. I checked my crawlspace. Unhappieness ensued.

While wading in 3.5' (yes, feet) of water in my crawlspace I saw the "evidence" that my Terminex guy warned me about, the body of a rat in a trap floating in the water. Of course, I only noticed this after wading up to mid thigh in the water. Too late now, if i'm going to get anything, I've already got it.

My sump pump "Ol' Reliable" wasn't getting any juice. Upon inspection I determined that the newly installed electrical outlet wasn't working. Megan ran an extra line and we finally got power to the pump. Nothing. That great "you must unhook the outflow pipe" problem was back to bite me - during this huge storm.

Unhook. Remember, in august I buried the pump deeper. Now I'm working 2 feet under water trying to unhook the outflow pipe. Done. Hook it back up. Water doesn't move.

Panic.

Call plumbers. Call Erick. Call neighbor Tony (residential general contractor).

Notice water is slowly (slowly!!) receeding. Head to home depot to pickup second (and replacement) pump. Arrive home. Tony delivers a temporary pump. Water has receeded more.

This weekend I didn't do anything to prep for PDC. After a gruling week of rehearsals, etc, I felt that I really needed to get the batteries charged up. I didn't wake up before 9am on Sat or Sun... I had a couple great meals... I spread 2 yards of bark in the yard...

Tomorrow my first meeting is at 9am... I'm going to try and sleep in until around 8, which will get me to work in plenty of time for that...

Tonight we took our sister (in-law for me) to dinner for her birthday... we decided to try Marrakesh (sp?) in Seattle for Morrocon cuisine - which none of us have ever tried before.

It was amazing. I took a couple completely dark pictures. The food was fantasic. Eating with your hands was a total trip. The wine was very odd, but good. 5 courses of fabulous food. There was techno-middle eastern music playing. A belly dancer appeared at one point. We sat on the floor. Everyone was too close together, and you are practically forced to talk to the people next to you. The place was packed.

Although not cheap, the prices where extremely reasonable - $18 for a 5 course meal, and $18 per bottle of Morrocon wine (the "royal dinner" was around $20 per person, minimum 4 people). I felt the entire meal was a screaming deal - we were there for over 2 hours.

I'm dying to take some more people there.

Costco, the worlds most dangerous store, strikes again. I went to Costco to pick up some oil for deep frying a turkey tonight... I walked out with a new portable DVD player [moblog]. I'm amazed at how much the price on these units have dropped. 16 months ago I shopped for a portable player, and for a 7" screen it was almost $1000... today I got a 7" player for $280. Amazing.

The screen is OK quality, the battery claims 3 hours of play time (haven't tested it yet), and it is relatively small. Overall a pretty good impulse buy... I'll bring it with me to the PDC to watch movies on the plane. I find a laptop is a little unwieldy on a plane.

Ahh, the satisfaction of something finished... sometimes even getting the things done that just require writing a check are good. The guys finished my audio system today. It was so nice to have the doorbell work again... The system is completely unneeded, and I don't think I ever would have bought one if the house didn't already have it. However having it, but working at 80% was just killing me... now that it is working at 98% (still some minor phone issues) I love it.

On top of that, my friend Erick came over and helped finish installing my new screen... that room is still far from being done, but at least it's getting closer.

Tommorow - no playing... PDC prep only...

Tomorrow the audio folks are coming back to the house to (hopefully) finish their work of fixing the old audio system... the phones have started not working at the house since the last time they were here, I'm hoping that will get fixed tomorrow. The more fun part is that I have slide reviews for my PDC talk tomorrow - which means commuting back and forth a couple times...

Today has been a bit busy... I spent the better part of 5 hours today working on a big diagram for the PDC - most of it working in Illustrator doing the all important task of moving a box from one location to another... in the end I think we have a pretty good picture.

In addition we had a big review for my team where we do a check point on all the "feature teams" for the next milestone - basic stuff, what are you doing, how much time will it take, etc. This consumed around 3 hours.

Given that I wanted to get the phone, oh - and I needed to do some screen swaping with a friend (more later), I had to boogie. I went to the local T-Mobile store (not too local though, the one down the street was out) and picked up the Nokia 3650. It is big... and it was expensive (about $80 more than I expected... ugh)... I figure if I don't like it I have something like 15 days to return it.

Anyway, so I have the phone and been playing a little with it (not too much)... unfortunately I haven't been able to suck any pictures off the device to see what they look like, nor have I been able to write any software to download.

... the screen swap. I bought my friend's old (12 month old) Stewart GreyHawk FilmScreen for my theater (100" 16x9)... he was bumping down to a 92" and switching from GreyHawk to FireHawk to move to a more "TV-like" experience... yeah, 92" is a TV :)

The net result is that I have a new screen to install in my "sane-budget" theater. It was funny, when we unpacked the 92" to install at his place we both got a bit worried thinking that it was too small. We put it beside the 100" and it wasn't that much smaller, but it just felt a lot smaller. Once we got it on the wall it looked great, so no worried.

When I unpacked the 100" at my house it looked huge! I mean this thing looked like it would barely fit on the wall, let alone be watchable. I still haven't mounted it (that will be tomorrow), but once I placed it in approximately the same place it will be, it looks great. Size is always relative.

Of course, before I left his house we had to play with his new MS Bluetooth wireless keyboard and mouse. It was pretty cool, installed very easily... the bad news - it wouldn't wake his machine up from sleep (blocking issue) and I couldn't get my new camera to talk with the PC through the adapter (I'm sure that is a user error on my part... given that I spent a total of 10 minutes with the phone and 3 minutes with the bluetooth adapter)...

Now I'm catching up on email, blogs, and starting to read the phone manual. Tomorrow I have to finish the diagram, figure out how to get my phone to sync with Outlook, and sleep... eventually.

I think i'm kinda locked in with T-Mobile for a while (wife just got a new phone +1 year to our contract), so I kinda stuck with what they offer:

• Sony Ericsson T610 ($100 with rebate) [Unofficial site]
• Nokia 3650 ($150 with rebate) [Nokia site]

The T610 has a 352x288 camera, while the 3650 has a 640x480 display... However the 3650 has the wierd "round" configuration of buttons...

I think that the 3650 edges out the T610, mostly because some friends at work have one... I'll give it until tomorrow and see what everyone says...

Since you all responded to the video card challenge I thought maybe you could have a phone recommendation... I want to replace my Motorola v.66 with a camera phone, and I want to do it before PDC so that I can moblog while presenting :)

Suggestions?

(Yes, I know that this short "say nothing" post flies in the face of my previous pledge to stop posting these lame type of entries, but I actually need help, I mean who can really think of writing when you are faced with a critical decision like purchasing a camera phone??)

On thursday we had 3 yards of compost and 2 yards of bark delivered... Today we got 4 teenagers to come over and help weed all our beds and spread the compost and bark... took around 4 hours with 6 of us... we got a bunch of plants moved, we ran out of bark, and boy and I tired...

My friend Erick has been doing yard projects for the bulk of this year (built a 1700 sqft garage, cleared about about .3 arces of land, built 5 retaining walls, etc..)... just recently he said that he had really gotten used to it. He can now put in a good 8 hour day of manual labor and not be wiped out... alas, i'm not there.

Either way, the yard looks nice. Now I just have to do battle with the lawn to get it in shape for the winter... I figure if I get it good for the winter then in the spring I can actually make it look nice...

Apparently I don't have a representation on this plane by 5:10am either... I have been failing miserably on my schedule, although I have been keeping up with my goal of working out at least once a week. I have a bunch of excuses (took 4 days to recover from my 5K, was sick, have a PDC to do, etc.) but in the end I just let it slip... Next week I'm going to try and get back on the bandwagon.

However, there is one problem - I now want 1 hour a day in the morning to blog...

Looking through my blog list I've decided I have far too many Microsoft bloggers in my daily read list... Although some used to not be 'softies, so I don't feel too bad.

Any suggestions are welcome - I'd like to find some good Linux and Java blogs... and maybe some general tech stuff... My problem is that as I surf around the signal to noise ratio is making it increasingly hard to find the great ones... Yes, I have Doc and Joi already on the list ;-)

Tonight was the first round of new prime time television since I got me theater hooked up correctly. During the comercials I even had time to finish programming my Proto with the Inday component video switcher that I bought. Basically the theater is now fully functional... One button (well, 2 actually) and you are watching HD Sat or Over-The-Air... One button for 480p DVD... One button for 480p+ XBox (Due to projector limitations I can't do 480i Xbox display without a lot of work)...

Watching TV without a TiVo was a big challenge... Watching HDTV on a 100" television was not a challenge. It's really nice to be able to enjoy this stuff... Hopefully next time I won't even have to mess with programming the remote ;-)

Yes, I know I've been saying how busy I am at work, but alas, all work and no play...

Today we got up nice and early and headed to Seattle for the Octoberfest festivities in Fremont. It started with a 5km run/walk (ok, I was mostly on the walking side) which ended with the participants in the beer garden by 10am... nothing like a nice pint well before noon.

I was pretty happy with myself, clocking in at 38:33 for the race - I know this is pathetic for most people, but this was my first run and I am woefully out of shape. The saddest thing - I was in the "Beer Belly" division... basically they took the largest and most out of shape people, put them in the front of the pack, and let everyone in the race run by them as they went... oh well.

Anyway, so drank for quite a while, getting home around 4pm... the plan was to head into work. Erick called looking for an erand to go hit Home Depot, which sounded good - top down, sun out, yeah!

I picked up a new blower and weed eater, both I really needed, got home and did a quick trial run of each. I started the lawn on sprinkler rotation again, and tomorrow I will start fertilizing and mowing... oh, the fun!

Anyway, now it is after 7pm and I still have to get a lot of work done. Happily the review has been postponed until Tuesday, so I get another day to procrastinate.

I didn't bring my camera (sadly), so there will be no pictures...

The class started at 8:00am in Kent (well, actually south of Kent), so I left my house by 6:30am... which worked out with my new schedule and all. I made a slight detour to gas up and over inflate my tires (they recommend racing with tires about 5-10 PSI cold over normal). It was raining the whole way out, but I figured that rain or shine it would be fun. I show up at Pacific Raceways by 7:45am or so.

<rant>The paper work for the class clearly states that you should be on site no later than 8:00am. It is highlighted. There were people that didn't show up until 8:30am. Turns out the instructor planned for this and relaly didn't intend for the class to start until 8:30... this frustrates me to no end. I planned my time to allow for traffic, etc, and make it to the event on time - but I ended up twiddling my thumbs for 30 minutes because some yahoos can't figure out how to get some place on time.</rant>

We went through some basic classroom stuff - where to position your hands, mirrors, seat, etc... we talked about the theory behind driving (ABS, braking, weight distribution, etc.)... and then we were off for the first series of excercises...

First, we started with a basic slalom. Go through the cones at 25 mph, and there is an instructor at the far end of the course (which is elevated) with a yellow flag - when he signals you skip a gate. The idea here is to get you trained to look up, and not at the hood of your car.

As part of this rotation we also did an ABS test. Get the car up to 55+mph, then slam on the brakes. Once we got that down, they added a cone to the middle of the road that you had to steer around while braking.

The third part of the morning excercises was the "moose test". You drive at a line of cones at about 25mph, at the last minute an instructor tells you to veer left (into "traffic") or right ("offroad") to avoid hitting the moose (the cones). This was a pretty intense excercise because of the anticipation waiting for the instructors to tell you which way to go.

Back to the classroom for a little chat, and then we go out for our "2/2" where the instructor drives you around the course twice slowly, then you drive around the course twice slowly. The idea is to udnerstand where your lines are, how the course feels, etc.

Lunch (I drove to Quizno's... tasty...)

Now the real fun - open lap time. The instructor is in the car with you giving you instructions, pretty continuously. I was shocked with how much concentration and continuous movement it took to keep the car going. Given my experience with karting earlier, I should have been more ready, but this was a lot of work (fun, but work).

The class was divided into two groups - 1 and 2 (wow!), and I was in 1. So while I raced around the course the other group watched and got instruction from Don.

We got off the course and group 2 got on.  We walked over to a bluff that overlooked turns 5a and 5b and got more instruction from Don while group 2 raced around. Just as we went to walk back we heard a tremendous sound of tires screetching and then a loud BANG!

Of course we all ran to the end of the bluf to see what happened.

An interuption - there was quite a variety of cars there. I had my M3 Convertible, there was an M3 Coupe, Viper, Carrera, 325i, Miata, Chiraco (sp?), Monte Carlo, and a bunch of rented Neons... and then two SUVs - a Tahoe and something else. I'm sorry, what kind of person brings an SUV to a race track? I could understand bringing one of those new pimped out Lightning SVT trucks, or something lowered, but a stock Tahoe?

Anyway, so the Tahoe had gotten sideways on turn 6 and went offroad (hey, maybe it was trying to go home?) and then went directly into a tree stump - ouch. Luckily everyone was OK, but the car was trashed. The guy did manage to drive it back to the paddock, but it was significantly shorter than when it started.

So we head out for our second run... a little more cautious after what we just witnessed. Racing... mmm.... fun... This time we had the "lappers" with us.

Once you have taken the training class you can signup for a half day "lap only" session. Basically you come in at noon and start lapping, with a break while the new recruits go on their first runs. After that everyone is out there racing, with clear rules about no passing without consent, etc. The lappers where going around 100mph, us newbies where closer to 70mph... there was a lot of passing going on.

After coming out of turn 8 (map) I came around to see a black Subaru WRX wagon spun out in the gravel (this was a lapper that had just passed me)... lots of damage to his car also.

Remember - at this point it had been raining most of the day. I asked the staff if this was a normal accident rate and they said "not really"... it wasn't uncommon for some kind of damage to occur, but the rain was a big contributor.

Personally I completely blame the SUV accident on the driver for bringing the SUV to the track.  The Subaru accident was probably a legitimate driver control issue.

Happily, I never really lost control. Once I got a tire off the track, but I carefully corrected. Several times the instructor encouraged me to throttle up to introduce oversteer so I could see how my traction control worked in the rain (that was super fun at 50+mph!!)

Generally I didn't hit astronomical speeds, the rain just slowed everything down. I think I toped out at 110mph, and that was plenty fast. I had no real desire to try and race outside of my limits, both accidents taught me the cost of that.

I would describe the really fun part (racing around), but words don't work for it. The feel of hitting a corner just right, or passing someone and just dropping the pedal to the floor. Amazingly fun time. I want to go again.

Went to the Puyallup Fair last night... Apparently they are really concerned for everyone's health. About every 14 feet there was another place to buy food - everything is on a stick and deep fried. I'm not complaining, I dug it. But anything can be taken to an extreme... I guess they missed the news that Americans are getting fat...

Anyway, overall I give the fair a C+... We had fun hanging out with our friends, but the rides where insanely expensive (cheapest - $3 per ride, most expensive - $40 per ride). The animals where... well... animals. The sales booths weren't that interesting. There was so many people - the place was absoluetely packed.

It's been probably 5 years since I last went to the fair... I think next time (in 5 years) we will have kids in tow, so I think it will be a lot more fun with the family...

(Oh, and as a side note - I couldn't find a beer garden the entire 5 hours that we were there!)

Last week I started my new schedule... the goal was to workout once a week, however I setup a schedule that gave me room for a workout every day...

Last week I managed 3 week day workouts (Tue, Wed, Thur), and today I did my "monster" Sunday workout. So far I'm still breathing, so I guess it's going ok...

So we bail from work early to make the trip to the great white north on a speaker shopping expedition. Apparently AVU is the place to go to pick up Paradigm speakers. First, since the speakers are manufactured in Canada, NAFTA gives you duty free purchase of them - wahoo! Second, they are cheaper in Canada. Third, the exchange rate from US currency rocks.

So, we start our trip. Turns out that half of I-5 is shut down around Bellingham (standing between us and audio perfection), so we cut over to Highway 9 and decide to take a shortcut. Oddly enough we ended up in Sumas. We didn't think much about this, until the customs officer started asking us lots of questions...

"Where do you live?"

"Redmond"

"Where are you going?"

"Vancouver"

... pause

"Where is Redmond?"

"East of Seattle"

"And you are going where?"

"Vancouver"

The conversation continued something like this for a while, before he let us pass. Much later we realized the issue. Here we were 2 guys in a wagon crossing the canadian border about 20 miles out of where we should be (Blaine) going from somewhere right off I-5 to somewhere right off I-5. Oh, and it is Sept. 11... fun.

Anyway, we made it to the speaker place... auditioned the speakers. Erick bought the speakers he wanted... as a last minute impulse I offered to buy his remaining speakers he had at home (Boston VR-950)...

So in the end, he bought 8 new speakers, and I got 2 of his old ones. For those keeping track at home, that means that my current audio system consists of:

• Fronts: Boston VR-950
• Center: Boston VR-910
• Sub: Boston (mumble)... need to look this up
• Rears: Boston VR-950

I didn't get home until about 12:30am... but I, of course, had to hook up the new speakers. They sound awesome. I also discovered I had my receiver configured relaly poorly, so everything is sounding way better (even without the new speakers)...

Trying to go to Canada today, however I lost my recent passport... i spent an hour digging around the house for either my passport or a birth certificate... neither found... happily it turns out that a current Photo ID + Expired Passport is good enough.

On the good news side... all this digging allowed me to find my Photoshop 7 CDs, which I thought I threw away!

How much time do you spend trying to better yourself? Do you read a book about your career to get the next promotion? Do you read a philosophy book to try and better your mind?

I worked out the other day and I've been thinking about the amount of time I try to improve (or take care of) myself. I didn't have an epiphany or anything, but rather I just spent some time thinking about it. If I found it worth while to adjust my schedule to try and get time reading, why wouldn't I try to improve my body.

First, a caveat - I don't think I can sustain working out. I've tried it before, and I can't seem to find the right motivation. With that, I'm willing to take a shot again.

My goal: Spend 60 minutes per week at the gym

Current plan (done for two days now):

• Leave house by 5:10am
• Workout from 5:30-6:30
• Start work at 7:00am
• "Side" projects at work until 8:00am
• Read email, play for day until 9:00am
• Leave work at 5:00pm (arrive home by 5:30)
• In bed by 10:00pm

This schedule has a couple of interesting aspects... one, it gives me 5 hours at home - which was the same as my old schedule, except that I have shifted it back by 2 hours... meaning that I am in sync with Megan's schedule. Second, the new schedule has effective traded off reading time for workout time... maybe I can combine the two?

I am tyring to motivate myself with a somewhat arbitrary rule - no breakfast sandwich unless I workout. (I normally have this great bacon/egg/cheese/mufin sandwich in the morning... mmm... tasty)...

Lets see how it goes.

My sump pump never quite drainged right. I decided that the right thing to do was re-dig the hole, and put a new valve on it... I did this last weekend, but I figure that you might enjoy my tale of woe...

So, I get into the crawlspace.. which is a pain in the ass because I don't have good stairs to get down there.. after a couple hours I get the hole deep enough (20"), so I start trying to get some of the dirt out of the crawlspace... which involves taking 5 gallon buckets full of dirt out... and given that I don't have someone outside the hole helping, I have to rebuild the stairs to get out of the hole (had to rip them up to allow for digging)...

I started trying to place the bucket in the hole... which was OK, except that I ran out of drain rock (I just used some material that was in the crawl space).. so, instead of doing the right thing, I just pushed on... since I was worried about getting dirt in the drain bucket, I put one of my dirt removable buckets into the drain bucket... I finished filling the hole in, and then tried to remove the dirt bucket... stuck.

I spent about 15 minutes trying to rip the buckets appart, and then the whole thing (drain bucket included) poped out of the hole, and the hole filled in... f@#k!

So, I climb out of the crawlspace and try to separate the buckets... nothing... I ended up sawing, drilling, chisling, and smashing with a hammer to separate them... finally god them apart.

Climbed back into the crawlspace and dug out all the fill material... I placed the bucket in the bottom and filled in the sides... crap - forgot the tape measure... climbed back out of the crawlspace... got my tape measure, saw, pipe, etc... got back in, measured, hooked everything up... forgot the hose (I was going to test the pump)... go get the hose, bring it down in, turn it on... all is good.

So, I think I'm set... the new valve *seems* to have fixed the flow problem, and the new depth should make the water level be a lot more managable...

Went and saw Shakespeare in the Park tonight with Megan and her "core".

First, let me explain about the school Megan teaches at. They are experimenting with something called "small schools". The idea is that at a large school you create a virtual small school inside of it. One way that they do this is with what they call the "Extended Core Program" or ECP. The idea is that you have a group of students - around 150 - that have a common block of 4 classes. The general idea is that the students get to know each other, and their teachers, much better. In addition, you have an "Advisory" class that you have the same teacher for during your entire stay at the school. This isn't a touchy-feely kind of thing, but it is very different than when I went to school.

So, this event was something for the core that Megan taught with last year. They decided (students & teachers) to get together the day before school started and have a picnic and watch Shakespeare in Fall City. The students where hanging out with the teachers... talking... having watermelon. Something I never did with my teachers. Ever.

I had a couple of interesting thoughts:

• Shakespeare is really only good when performed - reading it is hard... watching it is fun
• Shakespeare in the park is really fun
• Small schools are a Good Thing

Tons of good advice on the small camera front... unfortunately I may have moved too quickly... The requirements turned out to be:

• Under $300
• Available at the local camera shop

That was about it... I ended up buying a Canon A70... we have 10 days to return it, so if it really sucks I can still recover. So far this has passed the most critical step - Megan likes it. I think that Michael's suggestions (non-canon) would have been good to investigate - as it was I panic purchased and went with a brand name in the price point that I wanted...

Oh well... I do like the movie feature though...

The Canon D30 is great for taking photographs... sometimes you just want to take some snapshots... Right now the Canon PowerShot S230 is my front runner... my problem - my wife is leaving for a vacation on Thursday so I have to buy the camera tomorrow...

Any advice?

Turned 29 on July 31... My wife decided to get me a gift I've been asking for... A one day racing course with Proformance Racing which should be amazingly fun!

Went to the wine valley this weekend for a spontaneous trip. Spent too much on wine, of course. The good news - I got to write code in the car on the way back. :)

One of the interesting things we did on this road trip was to not plan it. Basically we got in the car with a map and a eventual destination, but no details in between. Get took Highway 101 - a very scenic drive - and have headed down the cost. So far we stayed at Canon Beach, Oregon in an amazing room (jacuzi tub with a view of the ocean!) then we moved down the coast to stay in Bandon, Oregon. Bandon was a pretty small town, but again we found a nice ocean view room (is there any other option?).

Last night we stayed in Fort Bragg, California. Again, third night in a row with an ocean view - i could get used to this! Today we head off to San Francisco, from there we hit Carmel and then get to our final destination of San Ramon.

This unstructured vacation has been amazing. No schedule. We are hungry, find a place to eat. Tired of driving, stay the night. We have seen a bunch of totally goofy sites - like the Drive Thru Tree - and found some great places - like a Winery in Oregon right next to the Devil's Punchbowl.

Interestingly enough there is no cellular coverage for T-Mobile on 101. We have been completely without internet, computers, or phones for several days. It's actually been great. We ended up opting out of TV and any chain restaurants for the vacation also! Quite the change from my normal routine of constant connectivity and almost nothing but chain mass produced food.

Yesterday we finally hit Pacific Coast Highway 1 - PCH 1 for the pros. This is the road that my car was designed for. A winding road through cliffs and ocean views. I could spend days driving back and forth on that road. Wow.

Back to technical content in a week or so...

I've been trying to make some progress on all the projects around the house. We got the ants taken care of (we think) with Terminix, but now there are a dozen or so other projects. This weekend I dug into my cabling issues - basically I have a mass of cables that at one time was an audio closet, and another mass that is the coax (sat) and networking/phone closet. I've been digging into the networking and phone... i've manageed to get my network hub moved into the closet and I have 2 jacks wired up so far... what a pain

Today I took the day off of work to accompany my wife to the "Chimposium". Basically we drove over to central washington to visit 4 chimps that have learned sign language.  Their story is documented in "Next Of Kin" (sorry no amazon link) which talks about Washue - the first chimp to be taught sign language, and her family.

I think the most amazing thing about the trip was to see a chimp in person having a conversation with a human. The docent hadn't been there for a couple of weeks, so the chimps where excited to see him. Just an amazing thing to see the communication.

MichaelW is in town this week and dropped by my office to chat. He gave me some grief about not blogging. I said that since loosing my internet connection for 3 weeks i haven't been able to get back into it. I think one reason is the new house. I've been doing a lot of house work, and in addition work has really heated up.

Michael's suggestion - blog about anything, just blog.

I figure i'll give it a try, it might drive people away from my site, but i guess at this point i'll follow his advice. My goal will be to give at least one blog entry a day. My content may be more about my house than technology, but that is my life right now :)

I think one of my problems was that when I started blogging I started by reading lots of blogs, then eventually started posting. Now I have a list of dozens and dozens of sites to read, which means that my "backlog" of blog entries is huge. So, I think I'll start small. I won't try to catch up - i'll just try to read a couple blog entries a night. No aggregator nagging at me to catch up - just the browser.

We are settled... obviously, the internet is finally here...

So far the most interesting thing that has happened to/with the house - we started a lake in the crawl space - I called it "Lake Anderson". The sump pump was working (those underwater pumps designed to remove the water from the crawl space), but the water level wasn't going down. After some trepidation I inspected the pump, changed nothing, and hooked it back up. Mysteriously it started working. Luckily, not much damage was done.

Generally, we are amazingly excited by the new place. Lots of work to do, but also lots to have fun with.

The house move is sucking up all my time lately (as you can tell from the lack of posts)... the worse news is that it will take me 3 weeks to get DSL hooked up in the new house. Which will make it much harder to stay on top of things. I don't even own a modem, but hopefully I can get everything setup and maybe the DSL company will even give me a dial-up line that I can use while I wait...

Anyway, in the immortal words of Arnold - "I'll be back"

Next tuesday is moving day. We sign our paperwork tomorrow, but the escrow company didn't tell us how much money we need to give them... kinda troubling... Finishing up the final preparations to move... will have a long couple of days packing...

Amazingly enough I came back from Vegas with less money than I went with. Stayed at the Treasure Island and spent a lot of time walking the strip, hitting cheap casinos and playing craps. Went to Gallaher's in the New York New York and had a great dinner, followed by the Blue Man Group in the Luxor.

On the way back we did the cheap "at the gate" upgrade to first class... very nice way to end the trip...

I'm bringing no laptop... no camera... the most "scheduled" thing that I have is dinner and a show on Saturday...

Vegas Baby!

Apparently i've been using "I" in a lot of the posts talking about the upcoming house purchase... I spent some time thinking about that...

Obviously the first answer is that i'm just that egotistical. Given that I have a blog, and we know that only ego maniacs have blogs, this is self evident.

So, are their any secondary reasons?

I'll give my philosophy of relationship discovery.

When you talk with people and you want to refer to someone else, you have many choices. Lets say I want to talk about Erick... I can say:

• A friend of mine
• A coworker
• Erick
• Erick Ellis

I will choose which of these based upon the context we are in and what I want to convey. If I say "Erick" then I have to know that either you already know Erick, or that I am willing to make the investment in your and my relationship to teach you about my relationship with Erick, so that you now know who he is.

So, back to Megan... I can do many things when I want to refer to her:

• My best friend
• My wife
• Megan

Again, how I choose to refer to her indicates my relationship with you, at some level. If I say "Megan" than I am making the assumption that you care enough about me (and I about you) that you can be expected to know and remember that Megan is my wife.

At work you can often see this dance happening all the time... It isn't just about significant-others, but also about friends, other people on the team, etc...

And this isn't a simple "if I use 'Megan' then I like you more"... it has to do with do I think that I play a big enough part in your life that you will actually remember my wife's name... I mean hell, I can barely remember my own birthday, let alone everyone that I meet's family ;-)

How does this all fit with the "I vs. We" question.... it's a stretch, but here it goes.

I believe that (subconciously) I treat my blog as a communication from me, to a bunch of people that I kinda know. I don't expect that I have much of an impact on their life, so I feel compelled to always explain my relationships with other people (like with "Megan, my wife, ..."). I think this puts me in a pattern where I am disinsented to refer to Megan.

... nope, this is all BS... I'm just egotistical.

For the past couple weeks I've been working a lot... probably been home for dinner 1 out of 5 days during the week... This Friday I finished up a chunk of the work, and so my wife decided to get me a little present... the new Zelda.

I find this shocking for a couple reasons... First, when we were dating she went with my family (without me) on a trip to Ocean Shores (a beach here in Washington) where my dad and our exchange student proceeded to play Zelda 64 for 4 days straight. Apparently the console was never off for the entire vacation.

Second, given that I have been gone so much, I'm suprised that she wouldn't have slashed my tires in celebration of my insane hours being over for a while... instead she gave me something that will suck up even more of my spare time!

Anyway... on the topic of video games...

I have played video games for as long as I can remember. The first console that was in our house was a Fairchild. I have owned an Atari 2600, 8-bit NES, 16-bit Sega Genesis, 16-bit SNES, 64-bit N64, Playstation 2, Dreamcast, XBOX, Gamecube, GameBoy, GameBoy Advance... I used to work at a video game store, so I also played on 3DO, Jaguar, Saturn, 32X Genesis, etc... So, I like video games.

Don't get me wrong - they are a tremendous waste of time. But, man, are they fun!

So, Megan (my wife, for those of you playing along at home) has a philosophy... it goes something like this... "You have played video games on consoles and computers your whole life. You are now a fairly successful software developer. I'm not gonna mess with the equation."

Which means, that even now I am given "permission" to continue to waste my time playing video games, hanging out with the guys, drinking beer, and talking trash like I was still in high school (or maybe a bit younger).

Life is good.

Michael's post is making me rethink my desire to "catch up" on blogs... maybe I should have something in my life that I don't just drive to completion... ...

Almost back under control... note to self, managing blogs is just like mail... keep on top of it, or it will get on top of you :-)

Made some progress on getting through the backlog today...

Tomorrow my goal will be to actually get the information to John that I promised a couple weeks ago.

I was too busy to realize this was released:

"I picked up my copy of the new zelda last night! I also ate dinner..." - Doubt

I'll have to go pick up a copy... soon... Zelda was the first console based RPG that I played... such a great game.

So I'm slowly starting to dig my way out. This friday was the second of the three big milestones that came up at work... this coming friday will be the final - then I can focus on my "real" job - shipping the product!

On the home front, I finally broke down and just got an accountant to do my taxes... at least I don't have to worry about it. The sale of my house closed, so i'm officially renting on Monday. We've started packing... today we picked 2 rooms and dug in. Tonight we are having our next door neighbors over for a little deep fried turkey.

Scoble's article reminds me how much I loved video games. I grew up playing almost every console from a Fairchild to XBOX, PS/2, and Gamecube. I used the past tense because I find that I don't play video games in the same way I did. Now I play games as a social event. If the game doesn't support network play on the XBOX, then it has a max shelf life of 2 weeks for me. While, I still play Halo on almost a daily basis. Video games used to be an addiction for the isolationists... today they are all about an entire culture and community.

Worked with Erick and Mike (who is the "brains" behind http://www.windowsforms.net <G>) on building this yo-yo display case tonight (pic). OK, the truth... i mostly stood around and made funny jokes.

ok... they weren't that funny.

Forwarded to me by Erick...

From Hillel at work... very cool

TV is happy to be home.

Not sure if this is real, but it is damn funny! [from Dave Barry]

Next thursday our TV is finally coming home. The TV died and we sent it in to get repaired. It was fixed a couple weeks ago, but I didn't bother calling the repair shop, because we actually liked not having the big TV when we showed the house - makes the place look bigger to not have a monster TV.

I haven't mentioned my wife very much on these pages, mostly because she tends not to hang around blogs very much... but, I figure I should at least give her an introduction. She is a teacher (High School biology and horticulture), scrapbooker, violinist (ok, just begining), and a (gasp) SUV driver. I can confirm, that even though she drives an SUV, she is not, in fact, a terrorist.

Megan and I were high school sweethearts. We dated for 5 years before getting married 6 years ago. It's odd, we've know each other for so long that I can remember her brothers and sisters in grade school!

I have been seeing a lot of birth announcements on the blogs that I frequent, and I can say we are still a ways off from having kids - although our timeframe has moved from "5 years from now" (which was our stock answer for about 5 years) to actually having a pretty firm date.

I've been getting some grief lately... as I have been spending way too much time online. With working on BlogX and reading blogs and reading work email and... you get the picture... I have been basically plugged in from the time I get home until after she goes to bed. Turns out "work life balance" doesn't just mean taking the laptop home - eventually you have to unplug. :)

Great article [from Keith]... still need to finish reading it... it's long...

Went and saw this over the weekend. All in all, not a spectacular movie. It was fun, but the overly cheesy dialog in the begining was a bit much. Special effects were OK, but a bit overdone. Overall it was worth watching, but not a "must see".

I'm pretty much the most impatient person that I know. Some of my friends tell me that I'm the most impatient person that they know. The fact that I have to wait another 63 days to move into the new house is killing me.

I got the title and CC&Rs for the property. Nothing too scary.

I sent the sellers my list of requests from the inspection... however I haven't got a response yet. Actually I have until tomorrow for them to "receive" them... then they have 3 days to respond.

My agent went on vacation this week. He brought his laptop and cell phone with him. He also located the Windermere office at this vacation site so that he can keep up with the deal. Not sure I'd like to be in his family, but I like having him as an agent! :)

First the house update - did the inspection today. Went OK... found a bunch of minor issues and a couple not-so minor problems. We'll see how the sellers react to my proposal...

I wonder if they are reading my blog?

After talking about 1421 with some coworkers, Greg (no blog) brought in a copy of this weekend's New York Time book review. John Noble Wilford doesn't seem to convinced by Menzies evidence. Wilford brings up a lot of good points. I wasn't completely convinced of Menzies to begin with, but the review brings up even more questions. I still find the book very interesting, and would recommend it.

Note the review requires a subscription to the NYTimes website.

Inspection is scheduled for Wednesday on the new house. Should take 3 or 4 hours to check out the whole house. I talked to the current owners and apparently they used to own a custom audio/video store and did some pretty hi-tech custom wiring. Should be pretty cool.

At this point we just have 2 inspections (one on our current house by the buyers, and then ours on the new house) and we will be ready for the long wait before the move.

I don't know if I can survive without my DirectTivo (DirectTV with a builtin Tivo - it rocks!)... luckily there is a super simple "movers package"... basically I agree to sign up for another year of service and they give me a new dish and install it... Whatever, I'm going to keep DirectTV for longer than a year anyway, might as well get a free installation out of the deal!

I posted my daily schedule that I was going to try to stick to. It's been 3 weeks so far, and it is going well. I think the biggest thing is that it is forcing some level of moderation in my life. I limit myself to 60 minutes to read, 3-4 hours on the web, and 10 hours at work -- still with time with the wife. I like the schedule. I think I'm going to keep doing it.

We love the house... going to make the offer, just need to write it up. So begins the storm... next steps - write up the offer, escrow money, acquire financing, cleanup our house, put it on the market...

I'm getting ahead of myself, first they have to accept the offer.

This week is shaping up to be a bit much... Started today at least an hour behind. This week I have 20 hours of architecture meetings, a 75 minute presentation to 300 MS field people, a 5 minute demo in someone else's presentation, 60 minutes with our VP to talk about application models, and now the house to go try and make an offer on.

Actually, this is going to be fun!

Oh, and given my early starts for meetings I have to move my schedule up by an hour to get my coffee in... wahoo!

We are begining the slow process of hunting for a house. We have looked at a few places, but nothing serious yet... there are a lot of nice houses out there...

Erick (friend with no blog) described me to another friend as being a "massive media consumer"... I read a ton of books, web sites, watch hours of TV, movies, and listen to all kinds of music... I realize that I really need to pickup a few magazine subscriptions and start reading the newspaper (i get my news from the web right now)... sounds like a good challenge!

Brian was giving me grief at work today asking when I slept (because I've been spending too much time blogging)...

I'm trying something new - a schedule.

• Leave house by 7am... go to coffee shop
• Leave coffee shop by 8am... go to work
• Read email, plan for day until 9am
• Arrive home by 7pm
• Dinner, family time, tv, etc. until 9pm
• Then i have from 9pm until whenever I go to sleep to blog, read, watch more tv, etc... typically I go to bed around 12-1am...

My goal is to keep to this schedule for the month of January, and then decide if I should keep it...

I can't find the original roadfly post, but according to the repost to a quote in public folder at work:

"Just got back from my dealer (Seattle BMW) - anyway, this customer comes in - looks at this '03 SMG - wants a test drive - my salesguy goes with - they go on a regular test route in Seattle with a few twists in the road - anyway, the salesman says this dude goes into a tight corner at over 40, then brakes, tries to correct, DSC cuts in, then they hit wet leaves - driver loses control completely - car goes down a 30 ft decline and rolls. Both, the driver and salesguy came out fine - note the roll bars ejected from the rear headrests..."
[pic 1][pic 2][pic 3]

And then some observations:

• The roll over protection bars are well above the level of the passenger’s head.
• The roll over protection bars feel flimsy to the touch and rattle left to right and fwd to back.
• However, the car rolled over on to them and rested there, so looks are likely deceiving in this case
• The roll over protection bars punched through the soft top, which was of course destroyed in the roll over
• The A pillars are completely intact, straight, and rigid
• Windshield glass was not released in to the cabin
• Side windows were fragmented and the pieces had randomly fallen away. Jean-Marie says the side windows are designed to do this for rescue
• The bumpers appear to be made of a carbon-fiber-esque material
• There was significant damage to the right rear panel. Very odd that side airbags did not deploy even though the impact was rear of the door.
• Some cars’ side airbags deploy automatically in a roll over, not the case here.
• Despite significant impact in the right rear, there was no cockpit intrusion
• Passenger compartment was maintained extremely well
• Jean-Marie says that the seat belt pre-tensioners were activated and were holding the passengers upside down in the car after the car came to a rest