View From the Bushes

Big Sandy Lodge

2009-07-08T22:41:00.002-06:00

Well I'm back. I missed some really exciting tour stages. Columbia managed to open up a split in the peleton, Armstrong made the split, but Contador didn't, and lost 40 seconds. Then the next day after the team time trial, Cancellara managed to keep yellow by 22/100th of a second... Oh well so it goes. I'll catch all the exciting bits on the rest day recap.

So the vacation... We drove up right after church on Sunday and got in around 5 pm. We had dinner at the lodge. That's one thing about the Big Sandy Lodge, they make incredible meals. The next day we started off with a two hour horse-ride. I'm glad it wasn't any longer, riding a horse puts pressure on parts of my body that aren't used to it. My hip was particularly sore after the ride. The rest of the day was spent napping, reading and playing board games with the family.

Yesterday was the hike. I've been really happy with how cool and wet the summer has been thus far. What I didn't realize was that a wet June meant that the mosquitoes would be particularly bad. I've been to the Wind Rivers quite a bit, and I don't believe I've ever seen mosquitoes even half as bad as they were Tuesday morning when we started the hike. I kid you not, an hour and a half into the hike I wasn't sure I could make it. While you're moving they have at least a little difficulty keeping up, but the minute you sit down, suddenly there's literally hundreds of them. I wasn't sure how we were going to eat.

Fortunately we gained a little bit of altitude which helped thin them out and then, shortly before we were going to stop for lunch we got some wind and that really helped out. Without that, I may have lost my mind... In any case I don't want to go too overboard it was still a really nice hike. I figure we ended up doing 9 miles total, which when you consider that my youngest is 6, is pretty impressive. All told we were out for just over seven hours.

Absent the mosquitoes it was really just about the perfect vacation and even with the mosquitoes it was a really good vacation. Still, as always, it's nice to be back.

I would genocide those little devils in a heartbeat

Tour de France

2009-07-04T17:09:00.002-06:00

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Well people have been bugging me about blogging, and I confess that I really dropped the ball. I could say things have been crazy, I could say that I don't have any time, but that's always the case. I'm not sure what exactly caused my long hiatus nor do I make any promises that I will start blogging regularly again, but how could I let the Tour pass without my normal commentary? (Thanks Dismas!)

I should mention that I leave tomorrow for a four-day three-night trip to a place without electricity, to say nothing of internet. So even if I wanted to there's no way I will be posting any updates on Sunday, Monday or Tuesday. Anyway, with that caveat I'll dive in.

Today was stage one of the Tour de France, this would normally be called the prologue, but I guess that organizers felt that it was too long to be a prologue. Fabian Cancellara won the stage, which shouldn't really surprise anyone. Alberto Contador came in 2nd. I don't think many people are surprised by this result, but they should be. As you may recall Contador started as just a really promising climber. Initially his time trialing was not that great. For him to get into a form where he comes in second, on a short time trial is pretty impressive. I mean look at the time trial specialists he beat: Levi Leipheimer, Cadel Evans, Kloden, Zabriski, Millar, and of course Armstrong.

So what about Armstrong? Well from what I saw at the Giro, he was coming into form near the end. I expect him to do well, but he's 37, and even if he comes into this tour better prepared than ever he just doesn't have the same engine. So other than Contador who do I think will do well? Okay here's my list:

1- Alberto Contador
2- Cadel Evans
3- Andy Schleck
4- Levi Leipheimer
5- Lance Armstrong

I should probably include Carlos Sastre, but for some reason I've never liked him. Anyway there you go. I'll try and post about the team time trial (even though I'll miss it live) on Wednesday.

Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!

Cold Fusion on 60 Minutes

2009-04-20T13:35:00.002-06:00

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Long time readers may know that I have a soft spot for "Cold Fusion" (though I think they prefer the term "Low Energy Nuclear Reactions") these days. In fact if you look on the right hand side you'll see a link to one of the main Cold Fusion websites (along with some other links that are probably woefully out of date). In any case I've long felt that there was something to the whole idea. And that while it may have been horribly wounded by mistakes that were made early on, that it would end up being a great example of truth eventually prevailing over doubt by dint of massive amounts of experimental evidence.

Anyway it's the 20th anniversary of the (disastrous) initial press conference and people are taking another look (of course some people haven't stopped looking). Including 60 minutes which did a piece on it. I would urge you to watch it, it's about 12 minutes long and they do a really good job of examining the issue, going so far as to ask the American Physical Society, the top physics organization in America, to recommend an independent scientist. They recommended Rob Duncan, vice chancellor of research at the University of Missouri and an expert in measuring energy. Who went from a skeptic to a believer after spending two days at a Cold Fusion laboratory.

There is still the problem that it only works about 70% of the time, and it's not quite ready to give the world unlimited clean energy yet, but the whole thing is tremendously fascinating and exciting.

Coldfusion doesn't work I should know I have had to migrate a lot of sites from it to php.

Parkinson's Law for Hiring

2009-04-16T17:19:00.002-06:00

Cover of Parkinson's Law

I read a fair number of business books, particularly as a percentage of pages. One thing you'll notice when you do read a lot of them is that they don't age well. Which is not to say that they're worthless more that business just changes too fast for anything to be true for very long. The notable exception to this rule is "Parkinson's Law" by C. Northcote Parkinson. My dad recommended it to me many years ago. He had noticed the "not aging gracefully" problem as well and so he decided to start with the business book with the oldest copyright, which was "Parkinson's Law".

"Parkinson's Law" is actually grouped with humor books, but like a lot of jokes there's more truth in the jest than in a thousand serious statements. Parkinson makes a lot of points, the best know of which is that "Work expands to fill the time available for it's completion." But there are many others, and it's fascinating to see how true they still are. One of my favorites is that when an organization builds a nice new headquarters the end is nigh. We have a great example of that right here in Salt Lake. American Stores built the tallest skyscraper in downtown (the church office building aside) and six weeks after the opening ceremony they were bought by Albertson's...

Anyway I digress. We were looking to hire an new software developer recently and in the past the methodology which had been used involved giving them a little test project first, getting to know them over the subsequent six months as we gave them increasingly larger project before eventually offering them a full time position. It worked well enough except for the fact that it took SIX MONTHS FROM START TO FINISH!!

Well we didn't have six months, so when it was apparent that we needed to hire someone I suggested using the hiring methodology from Parkinson's Law. What he basically says is that the advertisement should balance the risks and the rewards of the job to such a precise degree that only one person will answer the ad, and they will be the perfect candidate. Here are a couple of examples from the book:

Wanted – Acrobat capable of crossing a slack wire 200 feet above raging furnace. Twice nightly, three times on Saturday. Salary offered $70 per week. No pension and no compensation in the event of injury. Apply in person at Wildcat Circus between the hours of 9 AM and 10 AM.

Wanted – An archaeologist with high academic qualifications willing to spend fifteen years in excavating the Inca tombs at Helsdump on the Alligator River. Knighthood or equivalent honor guaranteed. Pension payable but never yet claimed. Salary of $6000 per year. Apply in triplicate to the Director of the Grubbenburrow Institute, Sickdale, Ill., USA.

He points out that there is no need (in the case of the first article) to insist that the candidates be skilled at wire walking, or that they be sober or free from dizzyness, because the ad has automatically excluded anyone how isn't. And in the case of the second you need not say that the person needs to be mad for archeology, because no one would apply who isn't. The point being that the salary and other benefits should be exactly balanced against the bad parts of the job (of which every job has legion) so that you attract only someone who really fits the position. So here was our posting on Craigslist:

Wanted -- full-time web programmer eager to prove himself as a software hero with mad programming skills. Intelligence, teamwork, and sacrifice will be required. Ideal applicant has read enough programming books to have a publisher preference, has had more computers than girlfriends, and can confidently use closures. Work hours are long but flexible. Starting salary is $40k per year.

About US:

This is a full-time position with an proven company.

We're extremely technical. Even our sales people are programmers.

We are NOT a temp-agency. This position includes health benefits.

Our current platform is built with Perl and MySQL. We use Ajax and HTML extensively.

We don't have old-fashioned time-cards, cubicles or strict dress codes

Employees may listen to music, play games, and surf the web as long as they get their shit done

If the word "shit" offends you, you probably won't work out. You don't have to be vulgar, but you have to have a thick skin and good people skills.

About the Job:

When you get here you will be the new guy. You will have to prove your programming kung-fu to everyone on the team. You will have to answer your phone after hours. It will be tough. It will require you to be extremely bright, optimistic, and a rapid learner.

After working for us for 12 months you'll be qualified to be a senior software developer at just about any company. You'll know more than most people do after a four year CS degree. You will discover tremendous new confidence in yourself and your programming abilities. In short, you'll be a bona fide software badass. Salary increase after you have proven yourself to be an equal on the team (realistically this will take you 9 to 12 months, at a minimum.)

You know all those movies that glorify honor, sacrifice and humility, and show people taking a bullet for their buddy? That's us. Only you probably won't die and we'll give you all the Rockstar you can drink.

If you feel you have what it takes, email a brief resume with references to Ross. If you're young and you don't have a lot of references yet, be prepared to impress us with all the software you have written in your spare time.

In the end we got 10 applications, about half obviously hadn't read the posting so they were immediately disqualified. We ended up interviewing three, one of the three was obviously out of his depth, the remaining two got the PERL Camel book and were told to come back in 3 days and show how much they'd picked up. We hired one of those two and we couldn't be happier with how it's worked out. And what's even more interesting is that the one guy we did hire is the one who really responded to the ad. In other words in his initial e-mail he mentioned that his favorite publisher was Addison-Wesley and that he HAD had more computers than girlfriends etc. In other words the idea that if you craft the ad carefully enough you'll get one perfect applicant has basically been born out in this (admittedly) tiny sample.

Another point to make. We had more than one person e-mail and say, I'm not at the stage where I can work for 40k anymore, but if I was young and out to prove myself I would totally have applied for that job, as one of them said it was "absolutely the best job listing/description I have ever seen".

Parkinson for the WIN

Trip to St. George

2009-04-05T16:16:00.005-06:00

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On of my wife's cousins (the last in that branch of the family) was getting married on Friday down in St. George (about a four and a half hour drive for us), so we decided to arrange babysitter's for the kids and head down. One of the first questions was whether to take one of our cars or to rent a car. I ruled out the van pretty quickly. It's old and tired, get's pretty crappy gas mileage and is kind of overkill for just two people. My car, the 91 Nissa Sentra gets great gas mileage, but always feels kind of fragile on the freeway. So we decided to rent a car, particularly since there's an Enterprise location right near our house and they have a great weekend rate.

So we ended up with a Nissan Altima. Before the trip I'd tweaked my back pretty bad while playing Squash, so I decided to take a muscle relaxant the night before and make my wife drive down, while it wore off. I took the muscle relaxant but it didn't seem to work very well. I didn't fall asleep very fast and I had no problem waking up the next morning and I didn't feel very groggy, but just to be on the safe side I had the wife drive anyway. I did fall asleep without too much trouble about an hour into the drive, but that's just me being normal, I don't need drugs for that.

I woke up and conditions were a lot different than when I had fallen asleep, the rain had changed to snow and the visibility was pretty poor. I believe I said "whoah" (possibly startling my wife...) less than two seconds later the back end started to slip a little. My wife tried putting on the brakes and suddenly we were in a full on spin. At that point there was nothing left to do but hang on and ride it out. I think we did a full 360, maybe more. We missed a nearby car by only a few feet ended, plowed off the road into the shoulder. Down the side, through a barbed wire fence and almost on to the frontage road.

Two cars stopped to see if we were okay, including the one we almost hit, which is how I knew since we couldn't see anything during the spin. He was understandably pretty upset, since if we had hit him the whole thing would have been orders of magnitude worse. Some people drove by on the frontage road and said there was a highway patrol car a little farther down (next to another car that had also gone off the road). The UHP car showed up in a little bit, and the officer was entirely humorless, though I can't really blame him. He wrote my wife a ticket for improper lane travel or something like that and called a tow truck.

The tow truck showed up pretty fast, we were fortunately within site of the town of Scipio. The barbed wire had scratched the hood, punctured one tire, ripped off some plastic under the bumper and taken one of the two mufflers and bent it 90 degrees so that it was within a few inches of the other muffler. Fortunately my wife had gotten the full damage waiver so we called Enterprise and basically said "We broke that one give us another one." Someone had to drive all the way from Salt Lake, so that ended up being a pretty long wait, but within a few hours we were back on the road.

Some additional points:

-We were going somewhere between 75 and 80 when the crash started.
-We discovered, once the car was up on the lift, that one of the rear tires was almost completely bald.
-The barbed wire fence belonged to UDOT, if it had belonged to a farmer I would have tried to replace it, but as it is I'm already paying for it.
-Enterprise was very cool about everything they definitely are getting more business from me.
-We missed the wedding, but made the dinner afterwards.
-I already didn't like Scipio, and this just solidified that, though the mechanic/tow truck driver was definitely a good guy.

Still a little bit shaken up

You Can Always Blog About the Bad stuff

2009-03-26T11:44:00.004-06:00

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Someone commented a while back that the robbers had apparently also stolen my will to blog. That may be true. What I can say is that the final robbery combined with my travel and then my wife leaving town, plus more than the usual level of chaos combined to make March really, really busy, and I feel like I'm only just now starting to see daylight. Busy is good. Business is going really well there are some deals on the table which could be potentially worth millions, the key is that word "potentially". It's in that journey from the potential to the actual that so many good things get beset by cannibals, devoured and made into drums.

In part I had nothing to blog about because, on the whole, things were going well. Fortunately for my loyal readers that couldn't last forever and just this morning I encountered a bunch of annoyances both small and large which served to give me ample reason to vent. A month or so ago I bought this booklet of deals for Midas, a local auto-repair chain. For $40 I got safety and emissions, an oil change and then like 10 more oil changes half of which were free and half of which were 50% off. I figured if all I did was use the inspections and the first oil change I'd be money ahead, so I bought two (one for each car).

Today I finally got around to using one. The big catch to them is that you have to have an appointment. So I showed up for my 9:00 appointment figuring that in the 30 or so minutes it would take I could read my book. Well they said that it was actually going to take an hour and a half. Well I didn't have that much left to read and it seemed like that was a lot of time to sit around. So I decided to walk back to work (where my other car was). It was about 12 blocks (mapquest says it's 1.89 miles) and it took me about 32 minutes to make the walk. Overall not too bad, I like walking, except for the part where this was the one morning I had forgotten my jacket, the temperature was in the 30's and it was pretty windy. My ears did not fall off, but it was a close run thing.

So that got me into a bad mood, then they called and told me that the rear cylinder's were leaking, and one of the bearings was bad and *blah* *blah* in order to pass safety it would be ~$700 in repairs. At this point I told them, hold off on that, I don't have time to do that today, and what I was really thinking is this is what I get for not going to the family mechanic. Well I guess I'll rectify that now and let him make the repairs, even if he can't do them for less at least I'll be giving money to someone I like.

So I hopped into my car, and went to pick up my wife so we could pick up the car. That's when I saw that some (pardon my french...) ASS-DOUCHE had plowed into my parking strip and had completely taken out one of my trees. There's a 3 inch stub sticking out of the ground and no evidence where the other 6 feet went and a gigantic rut through the landscaping rocks... Walking I can handle and should probably do more anyway; Money I can handle and should probably make more anyway; But having some careless assclown blow through the one piece of my yard that I actually liked... In the words of Homer Simpson... "URGE TO KILL RISING!"

Anyway I have some other blogs I'd like to do, so I thought I'd list them here in the vain hope that it will serve as an external commitment to write those blogs.

-Parkinson's Law for Hiring
-Our Vacation Procedure
-Persistent Web Games and Motivation

At the rate I'm going that should keep me busy until Summer.

Tell you what: we come back and everyone's slaughtered, I owe you a Coke.

Robbery

2009-03-04T20:42:00.002-07:00

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Okay... so here it goes. A few weeks back one of my business partners moved back to Salt Lake from Washington. In the process he forgot to bring back his key to the office. So the other partner lent him his key. So that evening he called me to tell me that he was locked out of the office. So I decided to just drive over and let him in. While there I decided that this had gone on long enough and I was going to drive to Wal-mart and get a copy right then. As I was leaving I went to lock the door, but my partner had already mentioned that he might end up having to leave, and that if so he would just leave the door open, plus some other people were coming for a meeting that night and they didn't have keys. So I didn't...

On my way out of the building I passed a tall skinny guy with a closely shaved head of blond hair and a backpack. Something felt wrong about the guy, but what can you do? Tackle everyone that doesn't seem cool? Of course I should have followed him, particularly when he went up the stairs towards our office. But the front door is open till 8:00 because we have a youth counseling center downstairs... Anyway I didn't stop him, or follow him and our best guess is that he was the thief. He (or some other person) walked into the office through the open door, walked over to a desk with a laptop, grabbed the laptop, the laptop case, a checkbook and walked back out. People were in our office at the time, just around the corner.

So I guess that was Wednesday, the next Tuesday when I came into work first thing that morning, things seemed weird. When I got back to my office, some files from my filing cabinet were on the floor and my monitor was gone (I have a laptop and I just plug it into an external monitor when I'm in the office). So then I walked back into the main area of the office and that's when I realized a brand new iMac we'd just bought was gone and another, older, imac was gone. That said a lot of stuff was still there, some of it was cable-tied, but it was apparent that they had gotten spooked. In the final accounting the things mentioned were gone, plus a credit card, a camcorder, an old mac desktop, and the checkbook of the guy who'd lost his check book the last time around...

We had an outside door that led directly into our office. For awhile it had not shut properly, you had to lift up on the door when closing it for it to latch (we're pretty sure we told the landlord about it he claimed we didn't, in any case we didn't tell him strongly enough). In general we told people not to use it, but we didn't really stop them from using it. One guy in particular used it just about every day to go to lunch. So when it was obvious that's how they had gotten in, it seemed equally obvious that this guy had not closed it tightly. (For the curious he was one of the people who's computer had gotten stolen.)

So we sat down and had a big meeting with the landlord and he agreed to implement bunch of new security features, fixing the door being pretty high on the list, but just as important putting a lock on the door between the outside door and the main work area. We also wanted him to have a horn right next to that outside door that went off the second it was opened, and a couple of other minor things as well. To his credit, with the exception of the horn, everything went in pretty fast, and I was personally feeling pretty good about security.

We were leaving for LA on Sunday and I really had to scramble to be ready. In the course of the scramble I missed getting my long-awaited watch. I finally decided on a model (MTG-1500-9AJF) assembled the necessary funds and ordered it from Japan. USPS claimed that they tried to deliver it on Saturday and left a notice (which is a lie) and by the time I discovered this it was too late to just go to the post office and get it. I was pretty disappointed that I was going to have to wait until I got back to get it.

On Monday I considered trying to arrange for a redelivery by calling the post office and calling my guys back at the office, but I didn't get around to it. On Tuesday I checked and the site said that it had been successfully delivered the day before. So I called on of my guys and he said, oh yeah that came yesterday. And a thrill of joy coursed through me, and even though I was eyeball deep in a bunch of work for the client I was in LA for, everything seemed like it was going to be okay. Well he wasn't in the office at the time I talked to him, but I told him to give me a call when he was just because I had some things I needed him to do.

Well when he got into the office he couldn't find the box with the watch. I figured it had just been misplaced, but after several minutes I started wondering how hard it could be to find a box in the midst of our fairly tiny office. That's when he told me that he was sure that it wasn't misplaced, that it was gone. And of course I couldn't understand how it could just be gone, and then he mentioned that the cops had been called. Initially I honestly thought he was joking, but no. There had been yet a third break in (and I'm not even counting the incident between break-ins one and two where someone shut off our power from the outside). And basically the new security measures had worked, except that when the watch had arrived rather than going to the guy who had the key and putting it in my office the same guy who might have left the door open on break-in two had just left it outside my door, in the hallway that the outside door opened on.

This time it was obvious that they had a crowbar and with that info it's unclear if the door had been left open the 2nd time or if they had just jimmied it in the same way they did the third time. It was also apparent that they had tried to bust open the door between the hallway and the main area. So basically things worked, but unfortunately there was a really nice watch there for their effort. Plus as I found out later our payroll packet was also placed in the hall next to the box. So that included my paycheck and the payroll report, which had everyone's social security number.

Anyway... so that's basically it. Most of our employees are feeling pretty freaked out and for the near term we've decided to just work from home. We'll see what happens from there. I sort of feel like if I had blogged about the first two robberies that the third one wouldn't have happened. That by leaving the subject open from the blog, it was left unfinished in reality. But I probably am ascribing too much power to myself...

Sign of the times?

Nostalgia

2009-02-26T21:17:00.002-07:00

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So last week was my birthday and this year is my 20th reunion. As a result of the two I ended up getting into this loop or rut or something where I spent a lot of time last week thinking about high school. So Saturday night I'm out at a play (Romeo and Juliet, not bad, I think the actress playing Juliet really nailed the 14 year old girl vibe) and when it's over I leave out a door I don't normally take. And there standing next to the water fountain is the first girl I ever dated. Because of all the time I'd spent thinking about high school I wasn't sure if I'd summoned her by force of will, or (more likely) seeing someone who resembled her and because of my state of mind I'd mistaken that person for this girl from high school.

Just on the off chance it was the first I walked up to her and sure enough that's who it was. You have to understand that I don't believe I've bumped into a single person from my high school (that I'm not still in contact with) in 10 years (since the last reunion) even though my high school is only an hour away from here. So after spending the week thinking about it to bump into someone in that fashion seemed like an amazing coincidence.

We talked which was a little awkward as you might imagine. Partially because it took a lot of brain power to even remember the threads of a relationship which had ended nearly 20 years ago (I had seen her at my 5 year reunion, but that hardly counts), but overall pleasant. One bonus to the whole event is that (all modesty aside) I looked good. I had on my nice Nordstrom sport's coat (which hides my gut...) with a turtle neck. My beard had just been trimmed earlier in the day, and overall I think if I was going to bump into someone you once dated I couldn't have dressed nicer if I had known in advance.

Next... The Robberies!!!

I'll be good...

Birthday

2009-02-18T13:16:00.002-07:00

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Well it's my birthday today. I'm 38. That sounds pretty old. I don't feel that old. I still feel kind of young, but I know I'm not anymore. I don't think I'm having a midlife crisis, possibly because I already had one, possibly because I'm too busy to get that introspective (yesterday I said that work feels like being eaten by ants, but I added that the last week or so when I've dared to open my eye, I've liked the scenery). I graduated from high school nearly 20 years ago. And yes high school does seem like a long time ago, but not 20 years long. I've been married for 13 going on 14 years and that seems like it's flown by. I guess the sobering thing is that if the last 13-20 years went by so fast it means that the next 13-20 years are going to go by as fast if not faster. To put some numbers out there.

In 13 years I'll be 51, all of my kids will have graduated from high school. I've always hoped that I'd be semi-retired by that point, but really? In 13 years?

In 20 years I'll be pushing 60, It's entirely possible that all of my kids will be married. My parents will be in their 80's. My time in the 21st century will be equal to the time I spent in the 20th...

So what freaks me out is how soon all of that is going to happen based on how soon all the last stuff happened...

Anyway whatever, it will happen when it happens and I imagine I won't be any more prepared for the future than I was for the past or present, so I guess I'll continue to play it by ear and hope to keep from screwing up too much. On a more celebratory note I went out for a various nice dinner with my wife and my two business partners. I ended up having a $70+ piece of Kobe Beef. I spent so long savoring it, that when I got near the end it was no longer warm, and I was getting too full to fully appreciate it, but there were some bites in the middle which may have been the best bites I've ever had. So even if nothing else fun/exciting happens for my birthday I think I'll have done pretty well.

If youth only knew: if age only could

Book Reading Update

2009-02-12T20:58:00.002-07:00

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I'm doing pretty good on my book reading. I started the month off by reading "Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't" by Jim Collins, a business book about how businesses made the transition from merely doing as well as the rest of the market to beating it by more than 3 times. Very few business books age well (except for "Parkinson's Law") and there are already companies featured in the book who have not turned out very well (Circuit City and Fannie Mae being the two chief examples.) But I think this one does as well as any of them. It's short and if you're interested in books like that you could do a lot worse.

The second book I read already this month was "The Looking Glass Wars" by Frank Beddor. My #1 daughter wanted me to read it and I was interested in seeing what he had done with the world. In case you're not familiar with the book, the conceit is that it wasn't Lewis Carroll making up the stories of Alice, but rather Alice telling them to Lewis Carroll, and that he got them all wrong. Let me start out with the good points. It kept me engaged, I was never bored and I definitely wanted to see how it ended. Also, where a typical fantasy author might spend an entire trilogy covering the amount of time and narrative ground he does, but he covers each scene pretty fast, sometimes too fast, which brings us to the negatives.

For someone who's work would not really exist without him, and who wouldn't have achieved nearly the success even if somehow it did, he's really unkind to Carroll. Also one of the pleasures of this sort of book is taking something from the original and explaining it in a clever new light, there's almost none of that going on here. Every connection is really done in a very cursory fashion only a very tenuous link to the original story. Finally as I mentioned one some levels I liked the pacing, but I really could have used more detail, at some points it felt like he was just trying to through the scene as quickly as possible.

Audio book wise I'm working through "The Lives of the Kings and Queens of England, Revised and Updated." I'm finding that history books don't go done quite as easy as novels in the audio format. I'm having the urge to flip back to re-acquaint myself with the various people. I think I'll still get plenty out of it, but this time I don't think I'm actually going to experience an increase in comprehension with the audiobook.

Also I've been watching "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist" while composing this entry, and it's actually quite good. If you're into quirky teen movies I'd definitely recommend it.

Lame, Literally

Broken Toe

2009-02-11T12:56:00.002-07:00

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Yesterday we had initially agreed to play squash at 9:30 that morning. But one of the guys I was going to play with decided that because he had an important project he was trying to finish up that night that 9:30 was too early. So I took it off the calendar. By later in the day it looked like we might be able to play at around 4:30. Unfortunately the other guy I was going to play with ended up being on a call he couldn't get out of and we missed that window (all six courts were booked solid starting at 5:00). Fortunately things opened up again around 7:00 and we headed down then.

I was playing with my two business partners, one of whom had just moved back into town, and hadn't played squash in many years. I myself had only played a few times since picking it up again, and this guy is younger and in overall better shape. The first game I played with him he was still getting the hang of it and I beat him pretty handily, but by the second game with him it was apparent I was really going to have to play hard to keep up with him. As a result I ended up going for some shots that I might otherwise not have. Including one soft shot that dropped really close to the front wall. I did manage to get that shot, but I had to sprint to the front of the court to get to it, and I wasn't quite able to stop in time and I ended up essentially kicking the front wall with my right foot.

I could tell I'd slammed it pretty good, but I initially I just chalked it up as another minor bump in the course of playing. And I played out the rest of the game. I'm pretty sure I didn't exacerbate the injury by doing that, but who knows. The point was that initially it didn't seem that bad. Once I got off the court I could start to sense that it was hurt pretty bad. I considered the idea that it might be broken, but I thought I'd wait and see how I did. My two partners played another game, and then we went and grabbed a bite to eat. I ended up getting home around 10:30. As soon as I told my wife what had happened she started looking up stuff on the internet and quickly assembled a mountain of evidence indicating that I should go get it looked at. Faced with that, and my wife's concern I decided to go to the emergency room.

Overall the ER wasn't too bad. I was out by around 1:30 or maybe even a little bit earlier. The X-Rays confirmed (or revealed) that it was in fact broken, A fracture down the center of the first bone from the tip down to the joint. That latter fact means that there's some risk of developing arthritis later, so they want to send me to a podiatrist, because I guess there's some things that can be done to mitigate the risk. I took me quite a while of tossing and turning before finding a position I could sleep in without making my toe hurt, and overall, while my toe feels better than last night, I'm definitely feeling out of sorts. Supposedly it should take about three weeks to heal, I'm optimistic that it won't be a huge inconvenience, but who knows, I've never broken a toe.

I'm older than I've ever been and now I'm even older...

PS I'm trying this blog add on called zemanta which suggests links and images. So far it's pretty cool.

The General

2009-02-05T21:40:00.002-07:00

I donate platelets today. This time, rather than watching one of their movies I brought my own. I've had "The General", the well-regarded 1927 Buster Keaton movie, out from Netflix for a couple of weeks, but I hadn't found time to watch it because, as a silent movie I figured I would need to give it my full attention (as opposed to a "talkie" where the sound can help you keep up with the story). So I figured watching it while donating platelets was perfect.

It wasn't quite what I expected. I expected it to be funnier, with more really outrageous physical comedy. It did have quite a bit, but I guess I'm so used to the really over the top physical comedy of more recent fair that the more restrained and realistic physical stunts of "The General" took awhile to get into. But once I got over that and started to really enjoy Keaton's amazing expressiveness I really enjoyed it. My suggestion if you happen to decide to watch it go into it with the attitude that it's a classic, and not a comedy.

One scene in particular killed me. (Minor spoiler) He's rescued the girl and he's racing back towards safety and while he operates the engine he has the girl adding wood to the boiler so that they can stay ahead of their pursuers. As she's doing that she notices that the cabin is untidy and she starts sweeping. It takes him a second to notice, so intent is he on the the following train. Obviously he's a little upset and he throws the broom over the side of the train and tells her to keep putting wood in. So she picks up a stick maybe 2 inches in diameter and maybe a couple of feet long, more of a twig, really. Opens up the boiler and tosses it in. At this point he's at a loss and he bends down a picks up a large splinter, the size of couple of toothpicks. She looks at it, like "great idea" and tosses it in as well. At that point he loses it and sort of throttles her, then in the fashion of Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction he realize there's really no point and kisses her. The toothpick part was particularly funny.

#130 on IMDB above "The Sixth Sense" but below "Die Hard"

500th Post

2009-02-03T18:05:00.002-07:00

This is my 500th post on blogspot, so it should be something epic right? Well what could be more epic than discussing that gigantic volume of libertarian thought and objectivist philosophy, "Atlas Shrugged", which I just finished, as an audio book... Yep I listened as someone read the entire thing to me. That was 52 hours and 22 minutes of talking, and it did take awhile, two or three months (I did take a big break around the holidays though).

Before I get into a discussion of the actual book I should take a moment to comment on audio books. I will admit to being anti-audio books for most of my life. It just didn't seem like real reading. That was the elitist front I presented to the rest of the world, but secretly I was also worried that I wouldn't be able to follow an audio book, that I would get distracted and miss some critical piece of information. Once I actually gave one a chance I found the opposite, I think that I probably retained more of the book listening to it then I would have had I read it. Of course Atlas Shrugged is a gigantic polemic where most things are repeated three times so maybe it's not the best test of that particular point. But overall I would say that I'm sold on the idea. In particular I think it's a great way to get through fairly dense classics. I plan on rounding out my Dostoevsky reading once I have powered through some shorter works.

Okay the actual book. Any discussion of a 1200 page book is going to be long, and even though this is the 500th post I feel that I still need to keep it to a size where I can pretend people are going to read it, so I'm going to do some rapid fire bullet points:

-As I mentioned it is a polemic. It is not subtle and I think this fact more than any is what puts people off.

-That said I think there are some really interesting ideas in there, ideas that aren't in wide enough circulation. And I'm not talking about adoption, just comprehension.

-The first half was much better than than latter half.

-The three hour speech at the end was in fact three hours on the audio book, and yeah it was a little long, but probably more bearable split up over several listening sessions than read in one sitting.

-Her theory of love and the romantic episodes in the book are... distracting. And some of the super-human stuff at the end bordered on being silly.

-Given the strong female protagonist at the core of the book I would think that Feminists would be more excited about Rand, but she was never mentioned in any of the feminist literature classes I took as part of my English Major. And most of the references I see online describe the relationship as "conflicted".

-I understand some of the libertarian core beliefs much better now. Some, like the oath to renounce the "Initiation of Violence". Are well worth adopting, others, like the gold standard are more questionable.

-People who casually dismiss this book (and the larger Rand canon) do so at their peril and to their detriment. (Check out the Praise and Influence section on Wikipedia)

-I liked Francisco d'Anconia better than John Galt.

-Her vision of unbridled capitalism is much closer to reality than Marx's view of fully-implemented communism.

I have a hard time recommending the book because it's so long, but if you were leaning that way perhaps this will push you over. I would recommend, however, if you're not going to read it then you should avoid making generalizations (good or bad) about it. A sin I think I was guilty of on more than one occasion. As you might imagine something that is ~1200 pages is going to have lots of nooks and crannies which resist easy categorization

Who is John Galt?

Super Bowl

2009-01-31T22:15:00.002-07:00

I'm on of those people who generally thinks the commercials are the best part of the Super Bowl. I'm particularly interested in seeing this years commercials. I assume that the current economic crisis (what is the official term people are using? Downturn? Gigantic Correction?) will produce a different crop of ads then we're used to seeing. Will they be more subdued? Funnier? Will it be 90% beer companies? I assume the auto companies won't be advertising. Will Go Daddy do it's traditional risque ad?

Last year's Super Bowl was truly one for the ages, I'm not expecting anything as exciting this year. I think part of my apathy stems from the fact that I kind of feel like I've already seen the best football game of the year (Go Utes!)

Mostly I'm trying to avoid getting blamed for a Pittsburgh loss...

The Thirteenth Tale

2009-01-28T21:48:00.002-07:00

As I have mentioned I have a goal to read four books a month. It looks like I'm going to make it this month, though only by using the "counting one book as two" methodology. The first book was "Holidays on Ice" by David Sedaris, which I believe I already talked about. The second book was "The Thirteenth Tale". My wife is reading it for her book club next month and she enjoyed it so much that she wanted me to read it. It was about the right length and looked like a quick read so I took it on.

The basic premise is that an author who has never told the true story of her childhood is about to die and so she decides to finally come clean. Her choice of biographer is unusual. She selects a young girl who works with her father in a rare book store, and has done only a few amateur biographical articles, but something connects the two of them and the young women begins to record her story. Obviously there several twists and turns in the story. I can't say too much more without giving away critical aspects of the story. But it was a good read, if there were a sequel I'd pick it up.

As far as the third (and fourth) book, it's an audio book and I'm about 45 minutes from the end so you'll have to wait until Thursday or Friday for me to talk about it.

I really need to start these earlier

Miscellany

2009-01-26T22:47:00.002-07:00

-First the word "miscellany" is there anyone out there who doesn't think the British pronunciation of this word is 10 or 20 times better than the American?

-I woke up successfully at 6 am this morning and felt pretty good. Part of the reason for waking up at 6 is so that I can be to work by 7:30, unfortunately this morning I spent the first hour I was up shoveling some very heavy snow. It was good to get it taken care of, but hopefully every morning won't be like that.

-I discovered, shortly after arriving at work, that we had gone from using 3 MBPS (MegaBits per Second) at our data center to using over 20, within the last week. We figured out who it was and we're probably just going to pass the costs along, but it was still quite a shock.

-I've decided to just start leaving my car at work, so that I don't have to guess if I'm going to need it and decide whether to drive over in the morning, I can just walk to work every morning and if something comes up, then my car is right there.

-After much deliberation I've decided that I will count some books as more than 1, and in fact I'm going to make it even more complicated than I initially said. Any fiction book over 750 pages counts as two and any non-fiction book over 500 counts double as well (and if it's over 1000 then it would count as 3...)

-The kids are watching "Chuck" and they really like it, even my 5 year old daughter...

Th-Th-Th-Th-Th-Th-Th-Th-Th-That's all folks!

World of Warcraft

2009-01-23T16:10:00.003-07:00

I have never been that big of a WoW player, at least not compared to many of the people I know. The highest level I've ever made it to is 46, which if you're familiar with the game is nothing. (The level cap is 80 and levels 70-80 take as long as the rest of the levels put together, or so they say, obviously I wouldn't know). In fact I canceled my account and went without for five or six months (and should have canceled it six months before that given how I wasn't playing). But a variety of circumstances brought me back...

The first was that one of my business partners moved to Portland (actually a town just across the river from Portland that's actually in Washington.) We used to have an "Executive Meeting" every Saturday Morning, but with him in another state that was no longer possible. Secondly the other business partner had not ceased to bug me about playing together some night (which we had done for quite a while over a year ago). Also I had go essentially without playing any video games except for work (I know a very weird concept but you'll have to trust me on that) for many moons and I was ready to start playing again. Finally "Wrath of the Lich King" had just been released. So the solution to all these problems was to start a Friday night game with the two other partners where we would play WoW in a group and have our "Executive Meeting" at the same time.

So that's what I'm doing right now (I'm on follow) and it's actually worked out surprisingly well. A long time ago I read this chess book by, I want to say Alekhine, I only remember one thing from the book, but it's stuck with me, he mentioned that everytime you move a piece you want to accomplish as much as possible with each move. So ideally you'd want to protect one of your pieces, threaten one of their pieces, firm up your strength in the center of the board, make room for other pieces to develop, etc. Now translating this into non-chess terms this mostly just means multi-tasking, and anything more than that may just be me looking for some weird rationalization. But I've always felt that there was a level to that idea beyond just frenetically multi-tasking. That perhaps there's a way to do things in a way that maximizes the benefit and enjoyment you get out of any activity. It could be combining exercise with watching the program you're never able to catch, or combining exercise with getting the time outdoors you never seem to have time for. I don't know if you get my point, or if I even have a point, but there there it is...

My personal favorite is to combine regret for the past, anxiety about the future, and paralyzation in the present moment.

Fail

2009-01-22T19:00:00.002-07:00

Well, today was going to be my first day on the new schedule (waking up at 6 am as I mentioned yesterday). Unfortunately I came down with something last night and ended up awake at 4:00 hunched over the toilet puking. It's just not my winter. Fortunately it appears that this was just a short term thing and I only threw up the one time and other than a headache I'm feeling pretty good right now. So hopefully tomorrow will be the day.]

On a completely unrelated note, I'm looking forward to watching "The Daily Show" again now that Bush is no longer in office. Perhaps I'm making a hasty generalization, but anytime I tried watching the Daily Show over the last few years it was almost entirely one-sided. I felt like I was watching that episode of "The Simpsons" where Homer gets a job standing in for Krusty the Clown and he's at the opening of a Krustyburger and the Krustyburglar comes by and Home is so enraged by the idea of burgers being stolen that he attacks the Krustyburglar and beats the holy crap out of him, and one of the kids in the crowd comes forward and, in between sobs, begs Homer to "Stop. Stop. He's already dead!" Two years into his second term and that's how "The Daily Show" started to feel.

But I think the long beating is beginning to come to an end. This clip in particular was very encouraging. Not sure what Colbert is going to do, I'm cautiously optimistic there as well, though it's entirely possible that without Bush to galvanize the left that his show won't be a successful. I've heard that conservative media enjoyed a huge boom during the Clinton years and I wonder if Olbermann and the like are going to suffer from a dip in viewership and popularity. Anyway I've probably wandered around aimlessly in the post for long enough.

After about the 40th one saltines start to get old

Sleeping

2009-01-21T15:44:00.002-07:00

One thing the holidays completely screwed up was my sleeping schedule. This is not to say that I'm now staying up until 4 am and sleeping until 2 or anything like that, but I am sleeping later than I want and not napping very often. So I'd like to get back to waking up early and taking naps. Part of the impetus for this is that I'd like to be into the office every day by 7:30. This gives me 30-45 minutes to get settled and get set up before anyone bugs me (there's another guy who comes in right after dropping his wife off for work at 8:00.) And obviously if I'm not waking up until 7:30 that's not going to happen.

I would also like to exercise in the morning as well. One might think that now that I'm playing squash, morning exercise could be done away with, but I think it's even more important to cross train a little bit and to also do some strength training and stretching. When you combine arriving at work at 7:30 with morning exercise and the showering and other stuff I have to do I pretty much have to wake up by 6:00. So that starts tomorrow. Since that's earlier than I'm used to I'm assuming that tomorrow I'll also take a nap, and voila! I'm back on track.

I think one of the big changes I'm going to make this time around is to wake up at 6:00 seven days a week. Which sounds like an awesome idea on Wednesday at 4:00 pm, but will probably sound substantially less cool Saturday morning at 6:00. Oh well, that's future Ross' problem (like so many things) and while I think near-future Ross is going to hate me for it, I think far-future Ross is going to thank me.

Now if I could just do something about past Ross...

Watch

2009-01-19T18:08:00.002-07:00

My birthday is in less than a month, and I think I'm going to angle for a new watch. The problem is that, while I am happy driving a $1000 car, reading used books and wearing thrift store shirts and patched levis, my taste in watches is pretty expensive. My old watch was a monster, but the barometer is broken so it no longer can use pressure to detect an oncoming storm or tell the temperature, and two nights ago the band broke. Obviously none of this really takes away from it's ability to tell time, but I already tried buying a replacement band at a Casio specialty store and was told that they didn't have anything and weren't even sure if they could order it.

So not an iron clad case for getting a new watch, and certainly not an iron clad case for spending a lot of money on a watch, but my birthday is approaching, and if I don't catch this window then the next major opportunity will be next Christmas. Part of the way I justify spending a lot on a watch is the use I get out of it. You've probably never seen anyone in your life who looks at his watch as much as I do. Now normally this trait annoys the hell out of people, as well it should, but it does have the one positive benefit of decreasing the $/use figure of any watch I buy, and so I think I should take advantage of that on the rare occasions when it's germane.

I've spent a little time looking around, and initially I was thinking of getting an ana-digi watch (for example the watch reviewed here) and I still really like the look of a watch with multiple faces. But the current top end model of the watch I'm replacing is also very attractive. Both initially seem out of my price range, but the internet is a wonderful place and great deals abound...

Anyway as I said I have nearly a month to go, so if you want to offer any ideas that'd be great. There are a lot of watches out there and I've only begun to scratch the surface...

Oh crap! I'm late!

Squash

2009-01-16T20:12:00.003-07:00

One of the other partners and I have been talking about renewing our Squash Club memberships. Renew maybe to strong a term since it was probably five years since my partner had a membership and and probably closer to ten since I had a membership. So things were finally going well enough that we decided we had the time and the money (the company is paying for the membership, I'm sure I'll come to regret that come tax time but for now it's nice) Our first stop was at the Nordstrom Rack so I could pick up some white soled shoes, which are surprisingly rare, but because of scuffs they don't allow black soles in the squash courts. After that we had to go back to the office because my partner had forgotten his wallet with the company card. But we eventually made it to the Squash Club.

The two women at the sign-up counter were super nice, though the locker room had suffered some water damage and was being repaired. Anyway, I could tell that I would need to work on my equipment. I don't really have any athletic shorts, so I was using some pretty heavy cargo shorts. My gym bag was a plastic sack from walmart, and I forgot the key thing for someone who's going to exercise, deodorant. Fortunately I do have a squash racquet of my own from back when I used to play. I was pretty worried about how I'd do, from a conditioning standpoint and a cardiovascular standpoint. It wasn't pretty, but I ended up playing for an hour and we got four games in. (the record was 2-2 if you're curious) Overall a very satisfactory experience.

You may think, "Why Squash?" Well the story of how I ended up discovering squash is long and complicated, and I'll have to tell it some other time, but the story of what drew me to it once I started playing may be worth telling. The sport most people use as a comparison for squash is racquetball, and there are similarities. But IMHO, squash is clearly superior (I enjoy racquetball, but hear me out.) With racquetball, the ball is very bouncy as a result it ends up being primarily about strength, hitting the ball as hard as you can, with squash on the other hand, the ball is not very bouncy at all and as a result there's a lot more skill/choice involved in where you put the ball. To give one example hitting the ball backwards and banking it off the back wall is a fairly common shot in racquetball, but a fairly difficult shot in squash.

I realize I'm not explaining myself very well. Fine I'll go to my hole card. Back in 2003 Forbes decided to put together a list of the "10 Healthiest Sports" Squash was #1. The most important thing about exercise is that you enjoy it so that you do it a lot, and I really, really enjoy squash, so there you have it.

If I could have survived a fifth game I think I would have won

Books

2009-01-15T14:30:00.002-07:00

One of my resolutions for 2009 is to read 48 books (4 books a month). As usual with most of my goals this may be too ambitious, but I did make one correction which I hope will lower the ambition and increase the feasibility of this resolution. As I mentioned in a previous blog I have all these heavy tomes sitting on the book shelf behind my desk. Each of these books is a major undertaking and could possibly take all month to get through just by itself. Previously I my (completely unrealistic) goal was to read a book a week and to generally select from that stack. So the change I made was to drop it from one a week to 4 a month (mostly to give myself more flexibility in getting through books, though shaving four books off the total is nice too) and to allow myself to read shorter, fluffier books. Since reading almost any book is better than reading no book at all.

In that vein I picked up David Sedaris' revised "Holidays on Ice" while at the library on Monday. It's only 166 pages with about 25 lines a page as opposed the 40 lines per page in a typical paper back (though I think I've seen as high as 50 lines a page). At 166 pages of 250 words a page (10 words per line seems about average) it comes out to 41,500 words. Which just barely makes it a novel according to the SFWA. No it's not Science Fiction, the SFWA is just the only group of writers nerdy enough to have thought about the dividing line between a Novel and a Novella.

Actually there's enough white space between chapters that it's probably less than 40,000 words, but I'm not going to let myself get hung up on that. It's clearly a book, hardback even, a group of pages bound together between a single cover. The big question I have is should I ever count something as two books? For example the other book I checked out from the library is Ken Follet's Pseudo-Sequel to "Pillars of the Earth", "World Without End" which clocks in at 1024 or 2^10 pages. Which if we assumed even 350 words per page would make it 358,400 words or more than 8 times as long as "Holidays on Ice". While I don't intend to count it as 8 books, counting it as two for the purposes of my goal doesn't seem excessive. But on the other hand it ruins the purity of the system. A book is a book, a collection of pages between the same cover (don't start in on audio books...) And whether it's 166 pages or 1024 it should count the same. What do you think?

The economy can't be all that bad if I'm honesty worried about stuff as petty as this...

Sprinkler Crisis

2009-01-14T21:31:00.003-07:00

So exactly a week ago I was taking a nap (still trying to get over the cold) and my wife came in a told me that the sprinklers had suddenly turned on. I confess that initially the idea was so bizarre, and being still somewhat asleep I couldn't really process the idea that the sprinklers were on. When I finally processed the information and got up shortly thereafter the sprinklers were indeed on. One set in the back yard and one set in the front yard.

Before I get into the comedic, three-stooges-esque, attempts to fix the problem a little history is in order. When I moved into the house the automatic sprinkler system was already there, and I used it for the first year (maybe two) before decided that it was more trouble than it was worth and switching to just using a rain-bird. Now when I decided to stop using the system I should have figured out how to turn it off, but instead I just ignored it. Which brings us to the present day...

So anyway the sprinklers were on. By the time I started looking into the problem the sun was already setting. I wasn't sure exactly what would happen if the sprinklers ran all night, but I couldn't imagine that it would be good. So I started off by looking at the box that controlled the system. It was set in the "Rain(off)" position. Which is where it had been for lo these many years. So I unplugged it. That didn't do anything. So then summoning all the mental power my aged brain still possessed I remembered the box set in the front yard that I thought might have something to do with the water. Sure enough, there was a water meter in there, a big pipe and a valve. So I turned the valve and the sprinklers shut off. Yeah! But then I quickly discovered that I had shut off the water everywhere, including inside the house.

Well the next step was to look around for individual valves for each of the different zones. As it turns out there were several in the back yard and one of them actually did control the back set and so I was able to shut that down, but I still had the problem of the front sprinklers. Unfortunately by this time it was completely dark and my extensive search yielded nothing, and since some of the kids were supposed to shower I had turned the water back on so I was rooting through the bushes through leaves and mud all while being sprayed down by the nearby sprinklers.

After the first big search turned up nothing I went in and tried calling my dad, no answer. So then I called my brother-in-law who always seems to have a knack for these sorts of things. He said there had to be a separate shutoff within about six feet of the water box. So another search ensued without any success. At that point I went next door to see if the neighbor had a similar sprinkler set up to me and could tell me where to look for the shut-off. Unfortunately he did not, and in fact his own shut off had been covered up by sediment.

I think it was a this point that I started calling some friends. One of my friends thought he might be able to get his brother or dad to help me out. His brother wasn't home from work yet, but he was able to get a hold of his dad who ended up giving me some useful things to try out (none of which ended up being the solution, but they made me feel like I was working towards a solution.) The next-door neighbor had suggested I try another neighbor farther down the street who was fairly handy. So that was the next step, and he was very gracious and offered to come down and see if there was anything he could do.

I was sitting out on the lawn waiting for him to arrive and clearing away more of the snow when I noticed something of a divot in grass. After poking it a bit I thought it looked promising. So I started clearing away the grass and pulling at the sod, and after pulling away several large clumps of mud and grass I uncovered a green plastic cover about six inches in diameter. It took getting rid of a couple more clumps of sod before I was able to pull off the cover to reveal a long white pipe with a valve at the very bottom. It was right about then that the other neighbor showed up.

I took the long turner thingie (yeah that's it's actual name) I had and tried to turn it but it wouldn't budge, but since the neighbor had just shown up I decided to bring him up to speed on the situation. He had some ideas and questions, but eventually we came back to the valve I'd just uncovered. I thought that perhaps it was frozen, and he thought that maybe we needed some cheater bars (or pipes in this case) so I decided to boil some water and he went to his house to grab some pipes.

The water didn't seem to do anything, and he and I were both worried that if we put too much torque on the thing that we could break it, but we decided to give it a shot anyway, and with him on one side and me on the other we were eventually able to turn it off. And once we turned the main water back on we discovered that it had in fact fixed the problem. The whole thing took about three and a half hours. Overall, pretty lame, but as usual I assume I have no one to blame but myself...

Yes, the initial message I left for my brother-in-law was pretty pathetic

The Horrible Holiday Illness

2009-01-13T13:15:00.002-07:00

I wasn't too concerned about not getting as much done as I'd wanted while I was on vacation because I figured I'd have the majority of New Years Eve and all of New Year's day available to take care of whatever I couldn't get done while I was up at Bear Lake. Well when last we left our "hero" I had really bad chills. Well I did in fact make it home where I immediately took 800 mg of ibuprofen, cranked the electric blanket up to max and collapsed. Things are hazy but as I recall I was in bed for basically the next 18 hours (really horrible "sick dreams", you ever have those?). New Years day I woke up pretty early but only because my back couldn't take being in bed for any longer. The fever and chills continued for the rest of New Year's Day and I spent most of the day wrapped head to toe in blankets, that is until the fever broke and then I would immediately throw everything off and break out in heavy sweating.

Other than the fever and chills I had body aches, a horrible chest cold, coughing, a runny nose and generally a pretty grumpy disposition. By the 2nd I thought the worst was over. As it turns out I had just reached the "manageable with huge amounts of drugs stage". Which allowed me to actually progress from spending most of my time in bed to spending most of my time in a recliner in front of the TV. The good part was this gave me the opportunity to watch the Sugar Bowl. Where the boys from my Alma Mater made Alabama look like 2nd tier pretenders rather than #1 team in the nation for much of the season. (I was happy to see that Utah ended up at #2 on the final AP poll of the season.)

I gradually improved over the weekend. The aches went away and I slowly weaned myself off the 3200 mg of ibuprofen I'd been taking every day. The rate of improvement slowed down over the course of last week and I still have a cold. Though my chest/lungs are vastly improved. I sneezed five times in quick succession this morning, if my lungs had been in as bad a shape as they were a week ago five sneezes might have ended me. I took until Thursday of last week before I was in the office for any significant amount of time. But as of this week I think I'm back to fighting strength. Of course I've got a ton of stuff to catch up on, which is really the most annoying thing about being sick, but I'm optimistic that I should be caught by April, May at the latest.

The tubes are lovely, dark and deep./But I have promises to keep,/And piles to sort before I sleep,/And piles to sort before I sleep.

Skiing/Snowmobile Vacation

2009-01-12T17:36:00.005-07:00

Well this year like every year for the last 24 (I haven't been to all 24 I've missed at least 3 years that I can think of) my family went on a winter vacation between Christmas and New Years. For most of those 24 years it was the "Snowmobiling Vacation", within the last five or six years I've tried to add skiing to the mix, with some success. Taking a big vacation every year presents all manner of difficulties. One of the biggest is housing, particularly given how big my side of the family is. At this point we're up to 29 people and for many years we had to rent a lot of condo's which ended up being spread over quite a big distance. However as of last year we moved into an inn which has more than enough rooms for everyone, a giant entertainment room and a huge dining area. Last year it was awe inspiring, this year it was nice, but not quite the dramatic change it had been the year before.

Anyway my own vacation was kind of mixed bag. Still 10 times better than not being on vacation, but not quite as nice as in years past. My back had been bothering me since midway through November and I'd desperately needed to take a muscle relaxant, but they knock me out for about 18 hours and I'd never had 18 hours to just check out. In an attempt to fit in all the snowmobiling and kids activities we had ended up scheduling two days of skiing, Saturday and Tuesday. That may seem like a good thing if you like skiing, and if I had the muscle tone and the conditioning it would be, but I don't I'm old and fat and my back was killing me. Fortunately I was able to work out an arrangement where everyone would get all the skiing they wanted on Tuesday (as it turns out when Tuesday actually came I had still scheduled too much skiing for the kids). Which allowed me to take a muscle relaxant on Friday night. Good for my back, bad for getting anything done.

I should pause at this point to mention something that's probably obvious to anyone who knows me. My goals for what I was going to accomplish while on vacation were ridiculously ambitious. Not to get into too much detail, but there was a lot of overdo organization and other stuff I wanted to do on my shiny new laptop. In between movies, meals, muscle relaxants, outdoor activities, exhaustion and e-mail I always have a lot less time than I think. And I should know that. Oh well, it wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't got sick, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Anyway so Saturday was mostly wiped out by the aforementioned medication. Sunday was pretty nice. We went to church but other than that it was a nice day. I think I may have taken a nap... Monday was kids day. That morning we got out the 120cc snowmobile and let all the kids (at least those who weren't too big) drive it around in a circle on the snow covered lawn outside the inn. After spending most of the morning outside I figured Kid's Day was done and I could relax the rest of the afternoon. Unfortunately the kids had other ideas, they wanted to go sledding. Unfortunately the best hill for that was at the top of Logan Canyon, so we piled into the cars and headed up the road.

When we first got up there I wasn't sure if we were going to have snowmobiles. And the kids were eager to get started so I took the first sled ride with one of my kids (my #2 son I think). What I hadn't counted on was that it was warm, and the snow was pretty soft and wet, there was no crust. So walking back up from the bottom of the hill was a ridiculous exercise in wading through snow up to my mid thigh. To say it was "aerobic" would be the understatement of the year, and within 10 minutes of showing up I was already in the red zone. My heart was beating fast enough to be mistaken for a hummingbird and I was breathing in great big gasps. Shortly after that the snowmobiles showed up, but even so I was breathing heavy the whole time. I needed at least 20 minutes of convalescence to get everything under control and instead I spent the next hour and a half in a constant loop on the snowmobile, stopping only to get off and wade through more thigh deep snow to retrieve kids and sleds. Oh and I should mention I had no gators or long johns on, just levis and gore-tex pants. As a result there was nothing to keep those two items from ending up around my knee everytime I took a step exposing my bare lower leg to the snow... Yes, I did a lot of dumb things in a relatively short period of time.

That evening I was pretty tired, but the worst was yet to come. Tuesday we went skiing. We got up there pretty early to make sure the rental shop wasn't a zoo. And that part went pretty well. The morning was dedicated to teaching. We were taking the #2 son up for the first time and me and my youngest brother took on the task of teaching him while the #1 son and daughter went off with two of my sisters. #2 son did really well. But after being accidentally clotheslined by his uncle he was ready to quit after the 2nd time down the hill (not including one trip down the rope tow hill) but after sitting and resting for about an hour I convinced him to take one more run. That run was amazing. He basically skied continuously from the top of the hill to the bottom with only a couple of minor tumbles on some turns. But after that he was completely wasted.

The plan was to have the wife pick him up at noon and then ski from 12-2 with the older kids. As it turns out the older kids had decided they had had enough as well so we sent all three of them home. #2 son was so wasted I was actually a little worried, but unlike old farts such as myself kids bounce back amazingly fast and he was running around later that after noon. For my part my trials were just beginning. I had planned on only two hours of high intensity skiing with my siblings, but since my children left early it ended up being twice that (okay I only made it three hours, but I'll get to that).

So you know how when you exercise to hard, particularly in really chilly air the next couple of days your lungs burn when you take a deep breath? I assume you do since generally I only get through the first half of that sentence when I tell this story in person before people start nodding. Anyway... That's what I was feeling on Tuesday, the whole day I felt short of breath. So my initial hypothesis was that I had overdone it the day before with the sledding and that, in combination with the straining of muscles I didn't even know I had was why I was feeling crappy all afternoon while skiing the blues and the blacks with my siblings.

Right before 3:00 (the ski resort closed at 4:00) I told my youngest brother that I had "two blues or one black left in me". He immediately decided that he would take the one black. So we set off down a black run we'd never tried before. As it turned out it may have been the toughest black at that resort. It was all moguls from the very top all the way to the bottom. The moguls would be broken up by the occasional flat, but each set was longer than the last. Anyway it was pretty brutal, but I made it to the bottom without crashing, so I considered that quite the victory. At that point I hoped into my sisters van and we drove back to the inn.

I think my body was running in survival mode and once it got into rest mode all the lingering fatigue hit. By the time I got back I could barely walk. When I got into my room I collapsed at next to my bed. It took me an hour to take off my winter gear and get into a warm bath. The rest of the night I was completely wiped out. I went to bed early and by the next morning I was feeling a little bit better. But it had begun to occur to me that maybe it wasn't just being old fat and out of shape that maybe I was coming down with something. I managed to get the car loaded and drive to my sister's house. I had left my car there because we had to much to fit in the van and she had taken some stuff up in their suburban. So my wife dropped me off there and I waited for my sister to arrive so I could get the stuff and drive the rest of the way home.

It was while I was waiting that the chills set in. I managed to load the car and set out to make the last 45 minute leg home. I wasn't sure I was going to make it. I was shaking really bad, the heat was on full and I knew then for sure that I was sick, and not just out of shape. This a tiny comfort, in the midst of all my suffering but only a very tiny one. Not to spoil the next leg of this story, but I did make it home okay, and I'll pick up the next leg of the story tomorrow.

Still old, but not as frail as I had feared