Megan explains why...

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

2005 Anniversary

2004 Anniversary

2003 Anniversary

2002 Initial Post

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.

Megan and I are in process of adopting a baby girl from china, and decided to start our blog about it... So far the process has been slow, but not too painful... We are super excited... if you want to keep up on the news, check out Made in China.

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

 

Cool feature I just discovered on the 360.. you can have it play music as background for any game. On the original XBox several games enabled this, but in the 360 it's a dashboard feature that works in all games. And you can play the music streamed from you PC... so cool.

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)

... or just right. Camera body sold.

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.

I posted some pictures up on my new flickr site...

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).

Oh yes, they are ugly... oh yes, they are mine. Crocks rock.

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.

We've already hit the first bug with the new laptop... looks like the SD port doesn't work. It can read the directory off the card, but any attempt to view the content (generate thumbnails, xcopy, or preview images) causes a hang... guess the machine is going back to Fry's...

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...

Any ideas as to what is happening with me over at Randy's blog?

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.

Some progress on the book - probably around 10 pages. Not quite as much as I should have. Also, massive yard work. Last sunday I borrowed my neighbor's tractor and since then have been tearing my yard apart. This weekend I put several hours into the yard, change the oil in my truck (first time I've ever changed my own oil!), watched some movies, and had dinner work friends. Quite a busy weekend.

SaveOurBluths is a site dedicate to the preservation of one of the best comedies on TV today - Arrested Development. Link to it, support it, make FOX not cancel it. Of course, the fact that they emphatically deny cancelling it makes me believe that they have indeed planned to cancel it. [Link from DoubleHelix, aka my wife <G>]

This weekend involved some big changes on the vehicle front. Earlier this year I bought a pick ol' pickup (Ford F-150 SuperCrew), and since then have been deciding what to do with my M3. The M3 was on a countdown - I didn't want to own it out of warrenty, and that ended in about 16 months. I've been looking at replacement cars (the new Solstice is looking pretty cool), but in the end I decided to trade in my M3 and my wife's MDX and get her a new Lexus RX330. Nothing too exciting, but it is a pretty swanky ride.

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.

The M3 saga continues... after getting my car back, it continued to have problems, prompting me to bring it back to the dealer. After a day they diagnosed that there was an actual problem with the "cylinder ignition coil"... so they replaced all 6 of them and all was well. Until, of course, I drove back into the microsoft parking lot and trashed my air dam by getting too close to a curb. Dude, sometimes the universe is just trying to tell you something.

Just picked up the car... oddly enough the conversation with the dealership started with "have you had your car detailed recently?"... looks like the cleaning got some water or something into the engine... everything looks OK now... hopefully...

For the past month I've basically been heads down preparing for a big customer event. Yesterday on the way to the event my M3 died. Not a good way to start the day. Luckily the event is going better than the car...

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.

I picked up the Audiovox SMT5600 yesterday. Switching from T-Mobile to AT&T (now Cingular) was painless and quick. After about 3 hours all my calls where routed to the new phone. It's really nice to have a full production and supported phone. After using the prototype/demo Orange SPV for a while, i've never had GPRS sync working, web browsing, or a bunch of other features. This new phone is small, light, and very flexible. Now I just need to buy yet-another-memory-format and i'll have a reasonable music player also!

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"...

We hiking up in the North Cascades this weekend, I am amazingly sore. I haven't done much hiking since... well, uhm... yeah, when I was about 11. This was an "easy" 7 mile day hike up through Maple and Heather Pass. Absolutely breath taking. I'll post pics once I get copies from the two guys that brough their cameras.

As part of my recent buying spree, I bought a new monitor from Dell... Using GotApex I got a screaming deal... the monitor arrived on Friday (earlier than expected), but it wasn't until tonight that I could get it from the UPS dudes and get it plugged in... oh my god this thing is amazing! I mean, I know there are a lot cooler monitors out there, but for under $800 it seems pretty nice!

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...

Finally, RSS for my movies... [link from Scripting News]

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 ;-)

Over the past 2 months I've had numerous business trips, offsite meetings, training course, and intense work stuff... Even though I took some time off in December, I did the typical thing and tried to pack too much into it... I decided to make this a four day week with absolutely no schedule. Relaxing... so far this weekend I've done my typical weekend stuff - running around, some yard work, wood working, etc... the nice thing is that I have 2 more days of the weekend left ;-)

"The five-secret-person Department of Education panel that allocates funding for closed-captioning will no longer provide assitive tracks for the deaf to shows that mention witchcraft, including Scooby Doo, Bewitched, and Justice League." [from BoingBoing]

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]

When the power went out a couple times this winter I asked all the neighbors and they seemed to say it was a pretty infrequent occurance... today the power went out again (remember, the crawl space is filling with water)... I'm buying a generator within the next 3 weeks...

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