Goodbye and hello, as always

The sky is not falling

2009-03-13T12:04:00.002-06:00

Peggy Noonan’s universe is coming to an end. Well, that’s what we’re led to believe if we take her latest WSJ column at face value. The column is 1200 words of anecdotes from people she knows, in and out of the halls of power in New York and Washington, telling her that Something is Wrong. People are buying guns and antidepressants and withdrawing all their money from the bank and looking for rural real estate on which to “grow things.” It feels like 1930.

I respectfully disagree. Not that Something is Wrong; there is definitely something wrong, but it’s with the media, not the people. I know I’m using a broad brush by referring to the media, which includes everyone from the hysterical Jim Cramer to the phlegmatic Ms. Noonan. But the thread they have in common is to insinuate that there is some fundamental change in the way Americans view life, six months into the financial crisis and over a year into the recession.

The facts don’t come out in the media’s favor. Their own reports are at odds with the gloomy way they are presented. 8% unemployment! Ford workers losing their Easter Monday holiday in labor concessions! 401K matches being suspended! Help! The sky is falling! 8% unemployment (and even 10+% in Michigan and California) is no picnic, but that still means 90-92% of Americans who want a job have one. Easter Monday? For crying out loud. I didn’t even know this was a holiday anywhere, and I work at a bank.

On the subject of banks, I can state confidently that populist congressional representatives grilling bank executives about “failures” to disperse TARP funds is all politicking. Banks are lending; people are taking their money out of risky investment vehicles and placing it in FDIC-insured savings accounts, not under the mattress as Ms. Noonan would lead us to believe. The reason constituents are complaining to congress is because non-bank lenders are out in the cold, and banks and non-banks alike are now somewhat more selective to whom they extend credit (i.e., something more than a name and a pulse is now required, as opposed to, say, mid-2005). Personal savings rates are up. This is good stuff. Would these mournful journalists have us leap back into the Madoff-esque investments and 80:20 piggyback mortgages they’ve been decrying for the past year?

I didn’t think so.

Of course, the “media” is also mourning the failures of daily newspapers across the nation, and zeroing in on TV and cable executives who are fighting the migration to the Internet (and subsequent reduced revenue) of their broadcast cash cows. From a consumer perspective, innovation is working its magic. Printed papers will eventually go the way of the telegraph, and TV content will eventually be on-demand and consumer-driven. Innovate or die, folks.

All of this makes little difference to the 90+% of American workers who get up and go to the job every day. Most people are worried about retirement, healthcare, college for the kids, and so forth, but that’s not new. One of my colleagues got it about right the other day when he said that the “recovery” will take place when we stop complaining how bad things are, dust ourselves off and get to work fixing the problems. Journalists take note.

An update on social networking futility

2009-03-11T16:05:00.002-06:00

About a year ago, I posted about how I was being bombarded with invitations from people on one social networking site (the only one I use) to connect with them on other social networking sites. I still get these invitations to new communities on a regular basis, which astounds me. Perhaps some entrepreneur is making bank building social networking platforms that entrepreneurs will use to attract people who want to build social networks. I would have predicted a sooner arrival at social networking entropy outside the big 3-4 sites, but I guess there’s always another sucker. Except in the current residential real estate market.

In addition to these “Join me on [community name]!” messages, I’m seeing a few new types of messages that have increased in frequency as the economy has worsened. One of these is the “Status Update” message from someone in the far reaches of my network; a friend of a friend, or a former prospect (who never bought anything), or someone else I dimly remember (maybe) from a business lunch in 2005. The “Status Update” is typically a long, rambling affair that begins cheerily with a couple of anecdotes about ice fishing, the Longhorns, or some other equally useless topic, then gets down to business:

“The past few months have been a tremendously challenging time. Like many of you, I’ve recently had to readjust my priorities and my approach to success.”

Translation: “I’ve lost my job.”

The “Update” continues with more Tony Robbins-esque euphemisms, such as:

“Of course, the Chinese terms for ‘crisis’ and ‘opportunity’ are the same, and we need to look at this time as a true opportunity to grow and develop what matters to us most. For me, this has been a great chance to connect with what matters to me most as I seek the most effective way to prepare for the future.”

Translation: “I’ve really been enjoying the ice fishing this winter.”

After a few more motivational cliches, the “Update” turns into the “Appeal for Help” – but only in such an oblique way as to protect the author’s dignity:

“As many of you know, I’ve dedicated the last two decades of my career to delivering the highest levels of client service in hip replacement prosthetics sales in the Pacific Northwest region. With the recent unfortunate events in the financial sector, my former employer, Sawbones Inc, has been unable to secure 27th-round venture capital funding, which would of have put us on the road to profitability well before our target of FY2017. This being the case, I have seized the bull by the horns and started my own direct-sales business in the emerging field of nutritional supplements. Being my own boss is tremendously rewarding, but it also takes A LOT of work, which is why I need your help.”

…And here comes the pitch:

“You have a HUGE network of potential clients, sitting right in your inbox! If, like me, you see the sign for opportunity in this economy, to fire your boss and make thousands along the way, give me a call! We can combine our networks to become even stronger in this crazy economy. Together we can take the nutritional supplements business by storm!”

Translation: “Send me your contacts list so I can grow my downlines.” -or- “Together we will rule the universe as father and son!”

The ending of the “Status Update” varies, of course; they’re not all deceptive pyramid schemes. Some of them just ask outright for a job. Don’t get me wrong on this issue: I’ve recently been helping a number of friends and neighbors in their job search efforts, as I’ve been working as an employment specialist at Church. I’m a firm believer in the power of personal networking in finding the right job. But the power of personal networking is in the “personal” aspect; these spams from characters who offer nothing in return for their petitions don’t grasp the essential, reciprocal nature of an effective network.

So, should social networking sites be used for job networking? Absolutely. Is a form letter to a zillion people the right way to go about it? Absolutely not. In a job search, you will most definitely be sending unsolicited messages to former colleagues or clients, but to really get their attention, you should offer something in return: lunch, a discussion about product development, perspective from one of your recent consulting gigs in the field, etc. If you don’t have anything to offer, keep your message succinct and to the point. Nobody appreciates wading through paragraphs of drivel to find a poorly-worded pitch buried at the end. Even the rabid ice fishermen in our midst.

No Smoker? No Problem!

2009-02-07T19:28:00.003-07:00

Tonight we fired up the charcoal grill to cook ribs, the first time in a long while. Ribs is the journeyman dish of barbecue; just enough challenge to be rewarding, but not so difficult that you need professional training to get it right. It's also time-consuming, but well worth it.

Some day (after we make our first million, I routinely joke to Karla), I'll get a dedicated meat smoker. These wonderful devices make ribs, pork loin, and many other smoked meats a cinch. For now, though, we use our Swiss Army Knife of grilldom, the 20" Weber Charcoal Grill. What's so great about the Weber? For starters, it's round, which I believe facilitates convection; it's cheap, simple, has few moving parts, and is weather-resistant. It's also almost always possible to squeeze "just one more" piece of meat on the round grill when you're grilling direct over the coals. For ribs, though, we use indirect grilling and let the convection carry the smoke through the meat. It's a bit of a juggling act to do this with the Weber, but it's not too hard if you have an extra set of hands.

We've found the best approach is to heap a bunch of coals on one side, almost to grill level, and place a disposable foil pie tin with about 3/4" of water on the opposite side. Once the coals are good and hot, we place 2-3 aluminum foil packets filled with soaked mesquite chips on the coals, give them 5 minutes or so to start producing smoke, and then place the ribs on the opposite side over the pie tin.

The trickiest part is controlling the temperature, which should be around 250 degrees if you want to be done in 3-4 hours. Our grill actually runs hot (275-300) for the first hour or so, but we've found that if we let it do this, we still have enough heat left during the third hour to finish the ribs without replenishing the coals. The trick comes if you find yourself below 200-215 degrees, or if your smoke packets run out (as they usually do during the second hour). You need a second person to lift the rack out with oven mitts while you replenish the smoking packets and/or the coals. The easiest way I've found to monitor the temperature is to drop an instant-read meat thermometer down through one of the vent holes. I like to micromanage all my grill adventures, but with ribs I have to content myself with checking the temperature every once in a while, since opening the lid too often (more than 3-4 times overall) to check on the meat can cause problems.

We mop our ribs with a vinegar-Worcestershire-spice blend every hour or so to help them stay moist. Then a quick brush with barbecue sauce once they hit 180 internally, and they're ready to serve.

Karla and I put away a full rack this evening (Spencer, as yet lacking molars, isn't really a big fan of meat in general at this point), along with some homemade fries. Certainly worth the effort!

Job Seekers 101

2009-02-05T14:57:00.001-07:00

Lately I've seen many things that remind me how grateful I am to be employed in a good job. To the general employment malaise we learn of with every news report on the economy, I can add my own experience: I currently serve as the employment specialist in my ward, and there are a lot of people in the neighborhood who are looking for work. I'm also on one of the few teams in my company that is actually still hiring, so we are seeing many applicants. This past week in particular I have reviewed a large quantity of resumes and sat through numerous interviews. I hope nobody reading this is currently on the job market, but I'm sure you know someone who is. As a hiring manager, let me share some helpful tips in hopes they will filter through the population of job seekers. I'm in the IT field, but I think this is generally applicable stuff.

First, the resume. Unless you're a C-level executive or college professor, limit your resume to two pages. Use a clear font and avoid fancy formatting that may not translate on everyone's computer. If you are experienced, include a brief summary (five lines or less) of your background and abilities. If you are new to the job market or field, use this space to describe your objective instead. Include full dates (months and years) for each position you have held. Explain any gap longer than 90 days with a brief, accurate statement. Be completely honest. Do not claim titles, roles, responsibilities, education or skills you don't have. For IT or other niche fields, list all your technical skills or technologies in a separate section so that they will be caught by database keyword searches, but not distract from human readability.

Next, the application. Apply only for positions for which you are qualified. Screeners and hiring managers don't appreciate wading through stacks of irrelevant resumes any more than job seekers appreciate spam from the job sites for positions that are completely unrelated to their searches. Just as important, don't apply for a job you don't want to do; even if you're qualified, you will have a tough job convincing the hiring team of your sincerity. If you are compelled to take a position at a lower pay grade than you had previously, be sure to find something that you will enjoy. If you can convince the hiring manager of your passion for the role, they may be less inclined to fear you will bolt to a better position once conditions improve. Include a cover letter that is customized to the position and that makes a case for your value to the organization.

Finally, the interview. This is really what set me off to write this post. I have been amazed with this batch of applicants to find how few of them actually listen to the interviewer. Yes, the interview is the opportunity to sell yourself to the organization, but every good salesperson knows that listening is just as important as talking. Yet time and again, almost every applicant has launched into a rapid-fire delivery of their answer even before the questions is out of my mouth. Even if you have a good sense of what the hiring manager is asking, stop and take a breath before launching into your dazzling riposte. It's often helpful to restate the question to be sure that you understand and are answering what is being asked. The hiring team has two objectives in questioning the applicant. The first is to assess knowledge, skills and experience (the content of the applicant's answer). The second is to assess the applicant's personality and approach, which is revealed in the way they interact with the questioner and the care they take in answering the question. This metadata is at least as important as the content; it shows the depth of perception, interpersonal communication skill, adaptability, and host of other soft skills (a term I have never really liked, since there is nothing "soft" about these skills, especially in senior positions where decisions are made that can have a significant affect on the business). As a small-town motivational speaker once said, "Listening is key!" (This guy was hauled in to an annual meeting at one of my former employers, and however cheesy he was, he did have a point; just not one I'd pay an honorarium to hear.)

I've got six more interviews lined up in the next ten days. Here's hoping the folks in that queue have some of these interview concepts down.

People Unclear on the Concept

2009-01-13T11:06:00.000-07:00

At various times in my career I’ve sold IT stuff. Sometimes it was hardware, sometimes software. I always liked selling hardware best. It is what it is. There’s less propensity for weaseling. A SAN disk array, for instance, either has a raw capacity of 20 terabytes, or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, you whip out the brochure for the next biggest model and commence your upsell. (Perhaps this explains why I no longer sell stuff; I like straightforward, honest communication, and sometimes I’d have to choke something back when a member of my sales team made some outrageous claim of the product we were pitching.)

Software, on the other hand, can be anything to anyone, via the golden ticket of Professional Services. “Does it do this?” “Uh, yeah, our consulting guys can add some code to do that.” Translation: “Multiply the price you see on this quote by four.”

My company is currently looking to buy some software. Maybe. Personally I’m skeptical that the deal can be done in the current business climate, but this isn’t stopping our management from looking at the issue. Which means that I, along with other folks, have the pleasure of sitting through several hours-long presentations and demos. I’ve been favorably impressed with some of the vendors and their options, but one in particular just doesn’t seem to understand what we’re looking for in the way of pre-sales.

For instance, last month they invited all our technical people to a briefing where the ostensible purpose was to demo and discuss the functionality of the software. Instead, we were treated to a death-by-PowerPoint presentation that explained:

1. How great the company was
2. A list of all their products, 27 of which were of zero interest to us
3. A list of 362 business challenges their software meets
4. A hardware product briefing

In short, their client executive took a canned overview briefing and tried to pawn it off as a demo and technical discussion. Our management team was not amused, and sent them packing after the first 90 minutes. (Well, the hardware guys stayed on for another hour, but most of us bailed). So the vendor calls us up after Christmas and says, yes, they are sorry, they learned their lesson, they will have a product demo and technical session ready to roll, just tell them when.

Yesterday was when. The team shows up and the first thing they bring up is a PowerPoint presentation. Three slides in, it’s clear we are getting:

1. How great the company is
2. A list of all their products, 27 of which are of zero interest to us
3. A list of 362 business challenges their software meets

At least this time they left off the hardware briefing. Actually, they did in fact have a demo as well. This lasted for about 30 minutes, after which they hurriedly shut it down, as if it was going to crash and cause shame and disgrace to the whole contingent. As soon as the demo was shut down, we returned to PowerPoint purgatory for another two hours, complete with animated graphics and sliding boxes. (Whatever happened to the bulleted list? Instead we have these sentences in colored boxes that slide around the screen like flying saucers over Roswell. Enough, already; just put the info in a bulleted list, please!)

The sad thing is that, from what little I saw in the demo, this product actually looks like a contender. It seems to have most of what we need, and there seemed to be a relatively small amount of weaseling present in the salesguy’s answers. If the marketing people and their PowerPoint decks would ever get out of the way, we might actually go with this vendor. They just need to realize that we are an informed audience. It’s like showing up at a new car lot and having the salesperson show you the wonders of the automatic transmission. And that occurs only after you’ve talked him into showing you the right vehicle. First you have to spend an hour convincing him that you need a minivan, not a Hummer.

I have to admit a preference for the vendor who sent an engineer to do a demo last month. The first words out of her mouth: “I don’t have any PowerPoints today. We’ll spend the entire time working with the product.” Maybe she worked for a hardware vendor in a past life.

The absurdity of Best/Worst lists

2009-01-06T14:43:00.002-07:00

I’m sure I’m not the only person to believe that “Best of” lists are a marketing gimmick. The respected food or movie critic, of course, proffers a list of his or her favorite restaurants or films; that’s the stated purpose of the column or article. It’s also intuitive that an editorial staff can select the “best” stories of the year under the same clearly defined auspices of their vocation. Consumer advocates can safely maintain objectivity by publishing and adhering to the criteria used to evaluate products. Where we go off track is with the pseudoscientific crowd that purports to insert some objectivity into the subjective process of ranking the non-quantifiable.

Take, for instance, an article in today’s WSJ purporting to describe the “best and worst jobs in the U.S.” The article is based on a study that measures “five criteria inherent to every job: environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands, and stress.” The study doesn’t divulge how they’re measured, but from a quantitative standpoint, I don’t see any reasonable way to objectively measure environment, physical demands, or stress. Income (of course) and outlook are readily quantifiable, but when 60% of your criteria are subjective, how can you make any kind of objective claim?

I’m just sayin’.

The error of these types of stories is not that they exist, but that they are presented as scientific. They’ve got one guy, author of a book entitled “Jobs Rated Almanac” and some Bureau of Labor stats. From this we are led to assign some validity, as though we were perusing a peer-reviewed article in Nature. In reality we have one man’s opinion on a bunch of subjective stuff. For example, the study’s website lists 21 “stress” factors that combine to give each rated job a stress rating, but these too are subjective: “Working the public eye” may be a negative for some but a strong positive for others; ditto Competitiveness, Advocacy, Outdoor work, and many others.

Best jobs for whom? From the looks of this list, it’s someone who likes numbers (Mathematician is #1, Actuary is #2, Statistician is #3). The Left-brain set, apparently, has it made. I can think of any number of folks (myself included) who would place these types of positions near the bottom of their lists of preferred jobs. In my case, it’s not because I hate math (although there certainly was a fair amount of innumeracy in the first 16 of my 18 years of formal education). It’s rather what I discovered in graduate school about quantitative science: apply it, and things come alive. I’m sure that many of us use numbers in our work, but few of us really dig the numbers for themselves. (My dad the engineering professor is an exception; I really do think he has a tremendous admiration for numerical systems, whereas so many of us merely benefit from them.)

But it’s not just numerophobes that are left out in the cold by this study. I once had a very successful sales colleague who pulled down well over $150,000 a year. He loved his job, had great work-life balance, and is now making even more money working for one of the biggest technology companies in the country; he’s exceeded quota every quarter he’s been there and will likely continue to be successful and satisfied. Yet his job is not high on the list. My friend once confided to me that he could never go back to “sitting behind a desk”, which seems to describe the majority of the top 20 jobs listed. Granted, we can contrast my friend with a somewhat less successful counterpart in another state, who was so lost as to his role as a salesman that he literally drove around town looking for big office buildings on which to cold call before his employer finally quit giving him advances on his commissions.

The point of these examples is, of course, that different people have different criteria to match their requirements and abilities. To somehow mold the whole working populace into a single expression of priorities, capacities and desires is absurd. But it catches the eye; so long as it’s couched plausibly, the readership will ascribe some validity (“leading expert in the field…government statistics” sounds better than “some guy who wrote a book…subjective measurements”). Job satisfaction is a fairly minor issue in an economy where most of us are merely glad to have a job, but I have no doubt that this type of pseudoscience will continue to make inroads into more substantial issues, so long as there are gullible readers to be found, even among the financial geeks in the WSJ readership. Thanks, Rupert! I can already see the improvement since the Journal joined the News Corp fold.

'Tis the season... for the chiropractor

2008-12-29T12:38:00.007-07:00

It’s been a week of sore muscles.

Well, it’s also been a week of celebration, gratitude, generosity, family fun and good food. But the sore muscles really do stand out.

First, the hit to the pocketbook as well as the back: On Monday, we joined the 23% of Americans purchasing televisions this season. This necessitated a trip to Sears to get our plasma. A cheerful Sears minion loaded it into my pickup; Karla and I had to carry it into the house and lift it, above shoulder level, to the TV nook above our fireplace. But that TV is only 87 lbs. The big job was getting the old 32” tube TV (142 lbs, according to Google) out of the nook and then up the stairs to our bedroom armoire. This old beast has been with me for nine years, in and out of at least seven residences. I’m tired of moving it; I think when it finally breaks down, I’ll just toss it out the bedroom window onto the pavement, though knowing the Japanese Victor Company’s tendency to overbuild things, it will probably just bounce a bit.

Our next sore-muscle adventure occurred Christmas morning. My brother and his family had arrived the previous evening at the start of a blizzard that continued for the next eighteen hours. Christmas morning there was a 2-foot snowdrift in front of our house:

After digging out enough to get the garage door open, we scouted the territory and surmised that if we could get Tony’s crossover SUV off the driveway and into the one-lane section of the street that had been plowed, we would probably be okay to make the 40-minute drive to my parents’ place, where family, meals and my niece’s Christmas presents awaited. So we loaded up two toddlers, their gear, several presents and a homemade cheesecake into the car and started down the driveway. We made it about five feet off the driveway before we were stuck. There followed 45 minutes of hilarity, where we would dig the wheels out, only to have the car fishtail back into the mire. Here’s a tip: The 2WD Mazda CX-9 with sun-belt tires is a lousy snow vehicle.

With the snow still coming down (or sideways, as it were, with the wind), we had to throw in the towel. We unloaded the crowd and goodies; after breakfast, we set out to get the Mazda back on the driveway lest it have an unfortunate encounter with a plow or other vehicle. The result was another fun adventure of dig-push-dig-push, chipping through the ice down to the pavement one or two feet at a time, until we cleared the driveway threshold. By this time both Tony and I were soaked and freezing, but I felt better after a hot shower, a hot mug of cider, and a nice nap in front of the fire. Watching the snow continue to come down, I felt awfully glad to be the beneficiary of central heating, R-45 insulation, and Karla’s cooking, rather than being stuck in the snow by the side of the road with two unhappy toddlers. Homemade ham and potato soup isn’t the traditional Christmas feast, but I can’t think of a Christmas meal that tasted better.

The final chapter in the back-breaking week was a voluntary exercise: the transportation and installation of two enormous cabinets my dad made for our family as a Christmas present. Ever since we saw the floor plan for our family room three years ago, we knew we wanted built-in cabinets on either side of the fireplace. The builder wanted to charge us $4000 to put them in, so we decided to add them later. Dad offered to put them together for us this year. I don’t think any of us realized quite how big they would be: eight feet tall, five feet wide and 20 inches deep, each. Doesn’t sound too bad on paper, but when we saw them in my dad’s wood shop, they looked truly imposing. With Dad’s truck snowed in, the only option was my smaller pickup. This required carting them across my parents’ front yard (on a slope), through a foot of snow, to the driveway on the opposite side of the lot.

The snow and ice meant using a hand truck, or most any other back-saving device invented in the past 4000 years, was out of the question. As it turned out, though, the snow was actually more of a benefit than a hindrance. Because these cabinets would be enclosed on three sides by the walls, we didn’t need to keep the sides pretty; it was important to preserve only the front (and interior) of each unit for public consumption. This allowed us to slide the cabinets on their sides for a fair amount of the distance. It was still a chore, since the trail led uphill for several yards, but ultimately it was easier than it would have been on dry ground. We hoisted them into the pickup and made the trip to our home with no incident, though a gust of wind as we came down the hill into the valley caused them to sway a bit (and just about made my heart stop). Karla devised a way to slide the cabinets across our tile and wood flooring by placing bathroom mats face-down on the floor. The rubberized backs of the mats stuck to the cabinets and they slid, carpet-side down, across the flooring easily. There was some lifting and pushing to get them installed in their nooks, but they fit perfectly. Thanks, and nice job, Dad!

So, one week and half a bottle of Advil later, we have a new family room, with high-definition TV and loads of storage space for books, toys, and anything else you can think of. Let’s just hope there’s nothing else to move or shovel for a couple of days. In the meantime, I'll be keeping my eye on snow blower prices.

If programming languages were religions

2008-12-17T08:02:00.003-07:00

I saw this on Slashdot this morning and had to laugh. Some guy has compared computer programming languages to world religions.

OK, it may be a little obscure, but anyone with an IT background will definitely find it amusing. The author sums up 40 years of ideological wars in the computer industry in a few paragraphs. And having just been in a meeting yesterday where our CTO mentioned that developing in Perl is "not encouraged" in our organization (we're a bank, after all), I saw the comments on Perl particularly apt. I even chuckled at the comparison of the LDS Church to Microsoft, which makes sense from an ecumenical perspective, if nothing else. ;-)

Much to the iPod's Delight

2008-12-01T14:47:00.003-07:00

I face a conundrum every Christmas season, specifically about the music.

On the one hand, there is the music I like: The Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the Cambridge Singers, Elvis, Buble, and Sinatra. And of course my wife's favorite, Josh Groban's rendition of "Oh Holy Night".

On the other hand is everything else. There are two kinds of bad Christmas music: Those songs that are bad outright, no matter how they are arranged or performed; and songs that are good, or at least decent, that have been tortuously adapted by misguided souls.

In the former category, those responsible for "Jingle Bell Rock" (and "Jingle Bells" itself, for that matter), "The Man With the Bag", "Merry Christmas, Baby" and "Winter Wonderland", among many others, have much to answer for. Whatever form they take, these songs trap the listener in a horrible alternate dimension of over-commercialized false cheer that is so divorced from any semblance of Christianity that one wonders how they ever entered the canon of Christmas music to begin with.

But in addition to this, a truly bad Christmas song also has to be really, really annoying. While children's songs such as "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" are also annoying, their utter banality is couched in pre-adolescent yearnings for, as Calvin & Hobbes author Bill Watterson would say, "more loot." At a certain point, most of us cross a threshold where Christmas means more than a pile of loot. The faux Christmas embodied by these pop hits from decades of yore never transcends the materialism. Not to say that the 40s and 50s have a monopoly on bad Christmas music: a collection we bought a few years ago has an original song by some starlet or other who reminds us at each repetition of the chorus that "this season only comes once every year." (This is opposed to other seasons, which in her world do occur multiple times a year; perhaps she's using some sort of pre-Gregorian calendar?)

The other category of bad Christmas music, abusing perfectly good Christmas carols, has no musical or cultural boundaries. We are just as likely to hear the embarrassment of "Silent Night" stretched to rock ballad as we are to hear it fed through a new age synthesizer. Then of course there is the countrification of everything from "Away in a Manger" to "Carol of the Bells", cheerfully led by that first disciple of Christmas Country, Kenny Rogers himself. (In morbid curiosity, I looked up our friend Kenny on Amazon.com, to see no fewer than 14 distinct Christmas albums. What a business model! No wonder the local FM station plays a Christmas song by Kenny every 15 minutes.)

This is not to say that Christmas music performed by popular artists does not have its place. Coldplay's rendition of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" is one of my favorites. And I still enjoy picking out the "cool" 80s acts (e.g., U2, Duran Duran, Sting) from "Do They Know It's Christmas?" even though this means I also have to put up with Boy George. Overall, though, my Christmas tastes trend strongly toward the traditional, to match my view of Christmas as a religious holiday. Anything crafted with the ultimate goal of wafting through shopping mall loudspeakers necessarily conflicts with my view of the holiday as a religious one.

At least the iPod is happy. Its hankering for Christmas tunes (about which I have previously written) is doubtless satisfied, at least for this month.

Mealtime Fun

2008-11-07T12:00:00.008-07:00

Meals have been very interesting at our house ever since Spencer came along. First there was the spew phase, where he launched pureed carrots around the dining room with the precision and frequency of an artillery commander at the Meuse-Argonne. This was followed by the gravity phase, epitomized by the consistent and successful effort to drop his drink, bowl, and utensils over the side of the high chair onto the floor. Not to mention green beans, corn, potatoes, and anything else that won't stick to his fingers. More recently these bombing runs have been accompanied by an exclamation of "uh-oh", with, shall we say, somewhat tepid conviction and sincerity. Throughout these there has also been the sharing phase, where he will cheerfully remove some half-chewed item from his mouth and offer it to you. (This one is actually very sincere, and the sentiment is nice. We just need to work on the particulars of the delivery so it occurs before anything is ingested.)

Over the past few months he has been more eager to feed himself, and this has also coincided with his more active use of sign language. He actually has a pretty good spoken vocabulary for his age, but he has been very excited to learn signs, particularly those pertaining to food and meals. He knows the signs for food, juice, milk, apple, cracker, and cookie (among others). He also has his own version of "finished", which he uses whenever we put something in front of him that he doesn't
like (or even something he does like, but apparently is not on his own internal menu for the day). Usually, "finished" will be followed immediately by "cookie" so that there is no doubt as to his expectations: "I'm not full; just take this away and give me a cookie." Thus we now have the demanding-diner phase. Another aspect of demanding-diner is his tendency to overload his mouth with food that he can't chew; lacking molars, he does a pretty good job, but occasionally he will literally bite off more than he can chew, and this results in an unhappy moment. He simply looks at me with sad eyes and moans, his cheeks loaded like a chipmunk's. It is then that I brave the incisors of death (they're really sharp) to fish out the offending, half-chewed piece of chicken or whatever that is the bottleneck. His mom is better at it than I am, but so far I've managed to avoid getting chewed/bitten along the way.

If all this makes any of you prospective parents lose your appetite, take heart; it seems that as a parent, one is able to build an immunity to this (among many other things) over time. Speaking of which, I'm off
to get lunch.

Golden What?

2008-11-03T12:44:00.002-07:00

So I’m munching this golden delicious apple that was part of my balanced lunch (read: it offset, in microscopic terms, the LDL being piled on by the two slices of leftover Pizza Hut that I ate today). I know it’s a golden delicious because of the friendly sticker. And I’m wondering, who gets away with categorizing an entire fruit type as “delicious” anyway? One bad apple (ha, ha!) could ruin the whole reputation. I’m sure we’ve all had a golden delicious (or its friend the red delicious) that was somewhat less than delicious, strictly speaking. But then, who would buy a “golden pretty good” apple anyway? Accurate, true, but with all the charm of a planned economy.

It turns out that those folksy West Virginians have no scruples when it comes to imposing performance anxiety on thousands of apples every day. Per our friends at Wikipedia (who also supply the lovely stock photo), the golden delicious spontaneously appeared as a volunteer tree in the middle of a West Virginia farm in the 1890s. (You should read the whole account; all that’s missing is an aphorism at the end: “and that, boys and girls, is why you never pull up an apple sapling; you may be saving an entirely new cultivar.”) Objectively delicious (is there such as thing?) or not, West Virginia immortalized the golden delicious in 1955 by making it the official state fruit.

And thus ends the lunchtime musing. For the record: mine was delicious.

More on Oil Prices

2008-10-28T14:56:00.007-06:00

Back in June, I referred to a WSJ article that pointed out the silver lining in high oil prices: consumers willing to pay a premium for more expensive vehicles such as hybrids that helped to offset the ongoing expense of $4 gasoline. If you can trim your fill-up costs by 30% over the life of the vehicle, you may be willing to pay a premium, upfront or over a few years of loan payments. (Unless you’re the type of person who budgets car payments in perpetuity, trading in every 24-36 months to drive the new hotness, in which case hybrids make zero financial sense. Of course, if you fall into this category, your gilded goose is cooked anyway; it’s increasingly unlikely you’ll get the 0% financing or lease deals that have sustained your auto choices up to 2008, the year of the auto industry collective aneurism.)

What a difference in four short months. Oil prices have plummeted, and even in my state, which apparently is among the more expensive places to buy gas, prices at the pump are way down (my last fill-up was under $3/gallon for 88 octane). Our family has a small surplus in our transportation budget, since we planned on $4 gasoline for the 800 miles I drive every month to get to and from work.

Today I offer a link to an article in contrast to the WSJ link I put up last June: The Motley Fool has a nice analysis of what the drop in oil means for the economy, at least in the immediate future. It’s good stuff, likely to be overlooked as we collectively fixate on the percentage drops in our retirement portfolios, but its effects are real, both on the pocketbook and the trade deficit.

Too bad it won’t last.

I don’t think anyone can predict where we’re headed in the equities and commodities markets, and that includes oil. That being said, there are some fundamental principles to remember: Energy consumption per capita is increasing . So is the capita; people keep having babies, especially in certain parts of the world. Those kids will have dramatically longer lifespans, educational opportunities, income, and commensurate energy needs compared to their parents’ generation. So the long-term need for energy is not going to diminish, short of some apocalyptic event (which the prudent among us plan for, but of course are unable to predict). We may be in a brief trough of energy demand, but it will pop back up once the credit markets have a chance to thaw and home inventories drain.

As for me, I’m planning on making it to 2011 in my current commute pattern. By then the local transit authority is planning on opening a light rail line on our side of the valley, and I can afford to drive the 3 miles to the station even if gas is $10 a gallon. In the original computer game Civilization (circa 1991), players got a fairly decent bonus for building mass transit systems in cities. Let’s hope that our local officials are big fans of the game, and keep the funding coming.

Then you got the flows*

2008-10-24T15:45:00.004-06:00

Air flows, that is. All around my office. (Not that I’m complaining; I’m glad to have a job, and glad to finally be in my office as opposed to Cubicle A1, which was really just a corner of a conference room with one of those cubicle panels bolted to the wall; in case you were wondering, a 5 foot cube panel doesn’t block the sound from the conference room, even a little. But I digress.)

My building was probably constructed around the time I was born. It has that 70’s vibe: brown-tinted windows on the ground floor, narrow corridors, flickering fluorescent lights (think the early scenes of “Joe vs. the Volcano”), and, of course, terribly inefficient climate control. To wit: the building is always freezing. The other morning, I walked in at 6:35 and passed the air conditioning compressor merrily whirring along. Never mind that there was frost on the door handle; discounting the report from the radio that said it was 37 degrees downtown, and that you can always shave a few degrees from that for where we are. So why on earth would we need the air conditioning running?

When it was inaugurated, most of the second floor of our building wing was open space. In the intervening decades, they’ve carved that space up a number of different ways, but never rejiggered the HVAC properly to match the rooms. So the thermostat for our wing sits on the opposite side of the building through three of four walls. But why would even those people want their air conditioner running when it is barely above freezing outside? Well… they’re in the kitchen. The kitchen that fries up countless servings of grease-laden bacon, sausage and eggs every morning to feed the IT horde. This is followed by a hearty selection of lunch items, one of which is always “from the grill”. I’ve craned my neck into the kitchen a few times to see if I can spot the thermostat, but I haven’t located it yet; from the way the cold air blows in my office, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the thermostat is located inside the vent hood for the grill.

But that’s only half the airflow story. Like everyone else in this part of the building, I employ an electric space heater to counter the ever present artificial draft. I also have a large picture window in my office, which produces its own natural draft (it looks over the parking lot and the fenced lot beyond, which is currently packed with earth-moving equipment in various stages of decomposition). So I have the cold air coming down and the warm air coming up. And I’m in the middle, enjoying a nice lukewarm swirling breeze; I try to imagine it as the type of ocean breeze you’d get sitting on a beach as a cool front moves in from the Pacific, but I usually fail.

I’m told that I ain’t seen nothin’ yet, that October is pretty tame compared to January. One guy kept a thermometer at his desk last winter and charted the number of times the temperature dipped below fifty; quite a few ticks on that chart. Nice. So folks crank up their space heaters. Every once in a while, I’m told, the combined load pops a circuit or two and we all go dark. I’m considering bringing in some of those handwarmers that you snap to activate, and strapping them to my wrists to work throughout the day. That, and a big old fireman’s ax to store behind the door, in case the space heaters start an electrical fire that blocks my way to the stairs and I have to chop my way out.

*If you don’t recognize the line that titles this post, bring up this youtube link or google "Bubb Rubb".

Some observations of the economic crisis

2008-10-15T14:48:00.003-06:00

Or, rather, some observations on the media’s coverage. For good or ill, I always have a browser up during the day to track the markets and news, and I listen to news radio on both sides of my commute. So here’s what I’ve noticed:

Dejected Traders. Someone’s gunning for a photography Pulitzer, trying to find the stock trader showing the most angst. Common poses include the one-handed eye-rub (pictured; photo from www.talkingproud.us), the exasperated heavenward glance, and head in hands on the desk. Are these people—either the traders or their assiduous photo-documentarians—for real? Why is this news? If it is, I fully expect to see photos of anguished ditch-diggers, farmers, massage therapists and IT managers in similar depressed stances when they encounter trouble at work (perhaps a nice spread of some angry Working Americans).

Working Americans. You didn’t hear this one very often prior to last month, but suddenly, “Working Americans” are coming out of the woodwork. They’re a swing voting bloc. They’re “the heart of America”, and, let’s not forget, they’re angry, so incredibly angry. I know there’s a sizeable portion of the population that is not employed, but the rest of us are not some homogenized blob of rage. Last I checked there was a wide range of income, opinion, outlook and political persuasion at my office, and neither my industry nor my town is known for much diversity. Journalists have a responsibility to use (or define) accurate terms when referring to slices of the population, so they should be clear. Rhetoric-laced campaign dispatches are heavy on stereotypes, and when the media uses the same terms, it shows laziness, ineptitude, or both.

Irritating Campaign Advisors. I know, this is news of the tautological—what do we really expect? But the economic teams from both presidential campaigns are driving me up the wall. To pick just one example, there’s the practice of continuous repetition of the candidates’ full names in every sentence. “Barack Obama will put $500 in every Working American’s pocket. That’s what Barack Obama will do. You can trust that Barack Obama will do what’s best for the American People, because Barack Obama has the vision to lead us out of this crisis.” (Newsflash: 1. It’s okay to use a pronoun every once in a while; give it a try sometime, and 2. Unless you say something incredibly stupid or controversial, you are not important enough to be quoted outside of the interview, so there will be no confusion about a remark taken out of context; really.)

Pandering and Finger-pointing. Again, what can we really expect? I imagine many NPR listeners are just waiting for the journalists to sock it to the conservative Wall Street types who agree to appear on their programs. “But don’t you think that this past month has been a vindication for those who have said all along that trickle-down economics is a flawed concept?” This has to be journalistic objectivity at its finest. Or perhaps it’s this one: “Should Obama have clamped down on Fannie and Freddie, instead of looking the other way, so that we wouldn’t be in this mess?” Yes, blame the guy who first came into office after the high-rise house of cards was already constructed, because he was too clueless to stop the renovation of the penthouse. There’s plenty of blame to go around.

I expect this nonsense to continue for some time to come, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. In a way I feel a lot like the guy pictured at the top of the post, with the DJIA down again today over 700 points. At least when I rub my eyes wearily, the paparazzi aren’t there to preserve it for posterity.

Don't Panic

2008-10-01T16:53:00.002-06:00

"In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the 'Hitchiker's Guide' has already supplanted the great 'Encyclopedia Galactica' as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and second, it has the words 'DON'T PANIC' inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover."
--Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

I claim no originality in quoting Douglas Adams in reference to the current financial crisis, but then, not everyone reads the same sites I do, and you might have missed it. I think the message is a good one: financial decisions made in a mindset of panic are reactive, emotionally charged, and fraught with danger. (I thought of adding some more dire descriptions, but you get the idea.) The markets are ugly right now, and apt to get uglier regardless of the outcome of any bailout plan. But that doesn’t justify a rush to convert your entire retirement plan to Treasurys. So what to do about it?

Keeping the Faith
In our case, we have at least 30 years until retirement, so we really aren’t adjusting our investment strategy in light of current events. Our active 401K is still set to a drop the lion’s share of contributions into a set of no-load index mutual funds. (What this means is that these funds don’t charge sales commissions, just a small maintenance fee; they can do this because the fund is balanced by computer to hold portions of the companies that make up some of the major US and International stock indexes, so there isn’t some brilliant manager being paid millions to move our money in and out of stocks.)

We believe that the companies that comprise the major stock indexes are fundamentally sound. There is likely to be a period of slower growth, since the finance companies in these index funds will no longer be able to borrow so aggressively to swing their earnings, but the industries overall will continue to grow, and the indexes will track that. Unless there is a dramatic calamity that fundamentally alters the way the industrialized world does business, stocks will continue to go up over time. And if there is a dramatic calamity, say, something that devalues the dollar like a 1932 Deutschmark, the 1.5% we get by parking our retirement in a money market account will only result in a few more dollars in the wheelbarrow we cart down to the soup kitchen to pay for dinner.

Diversifying
So, we will keep chugging along with our index funds and hope the 2040 market is better than the 2008 market. I imagine folks like our parents and other boomer types are somewhat more concerned, enduring the equity haircut but lacking the long horizon to grow it back. My heart goes out to people like the widow profiled in the WSJ who had over 50% of her retirement income from Wachovia Bank dividends. We saw this with those at Enron too, who lost their entire retirement, and also those whose portfolios leaned too heavily toward the tech sector pre-2001. I saw one article asserting that the current crisis had shown that diversification as an investment strategy had failed, since everyone is losing. I think they miss the point. You don’t account for the possibility of 700 billion dollars in bad debt weighing down the economy without taking a system-wide shock. No business I’m aware of can function without borrowing. To paraphrase Churchill, diversification is the worst investment strategy, except for all the others that have been tried. We’ve settled on indexing (along with other allocations) as a low-maintenance, hands-off way to diversify our stock holdings, but there are many other ways to keep your portfolio diverse. If you don’t have a head for this kind of stuff, call your 401K administrator and ask to be enrolled in a preset mix of funds determined by your retirement date. They cost a little bit more but they will save you in the long run, since the guys running the funds will automatically balance your holdings as you get closer to retirement. Then if there’s another doozey market swoon like the current one right before you retire, hopefully most of your holdings will be in bonds rather than stocks.

Playing Defense

Stanley and Danko’s excellent Millionaire Next Door throws a nice sports metaphor into the world of personal finance. They write that people spend a lot of time focusing on offense, that is, bringing in as much money as possible, while neglecting defense, that is, controlling expenses. I’ve seen a few chicken-little articles this week highlighting the uncertain economic times and recommending, among other things:

Canceling cable television

Brown-bagging lunch at work

Eating out less

Buying generic groceries and health/beauty items

I wrote about implementing some of these practices last year as our adoption expenses loomed and we were in the wonderful world of dual housing payments. Now that we’re back to one housing payment, we see no reason to change any of the frugal habits we evolved to survive Great Financial Squeeze of 2007. (We did blow a fair amount at a recent dinner to a local seafood joint, but it was our first dinner out, sans one year-old, since April, so we felt entitled.) Consumption will rise to match (or exceed) income unless we fight it, one dollar at a time. The best way to play defense is to track expenses religiously, then run down and cross off anything that does not provide lasting value. I don’t mean to imply that anything not made of cast iron should be discarded. Vacations, dinners out, and flowers for the wife most certainly provide lasting value. It’s the battery-powered lawn gnomes and all that other good stuff you hadn’t planned on buying, yet somehow makes it to the Costco register, that needs to be chased down and eliminated.

In the Hitchhiker’s Guide, the protagonist sees the Earth being destroyed to make way for an intergalactic bypass. We clearly aren’t at that point yet, though the news pundits at times do sound like they’re spouting Vogon poetry; you just wish they’d shut up. Hopefully you’ll remember not to panic, even if you didn’t bring your towel.

This is what we have to look forward to?

2008-09-24T16:09:00.001-06:00

Is it odd to be more excited about the presidential primaries than the general election? During the primaries, I tracked the news closely and followed the debates like boxing matches. With the candidates selected I find myself far less enthusiastic. Like Paul Newman’s Butch Cassidy, I find myself asking, “Who are these guys?” What do they stand for, and how would each of them address the challenges we face?

If their reaction to the current financial crisis is any indication, we’re in for a long dearth of leadership. I subscribe to the “it’s the economy, stupid” school of politics for many reasons. I’m a business geek; I work for bank holding company; and our family is shelling out tens of thousands of dollars for adoptions while still trying to fund our retirement. Any candidate who offers a real possibility of extending social security, repealing the alternative minimum tax, and improving adoption tax credits has my attention. What I’m hearing from the candidates regarding the Wall Street crisis is not encouraging.

John McCain asserts the “foundations of the economy are strong” and then contradicts himself four hours later with the statement that “the economy is at risk.” While technically not mutually exclusive statements, there is enough confusion here to make me uneasy. Inflammatory comments about wanting to fire the head of the SEC are hardly constructive, and the born-again populist attacks on “Wall Street greed” are insincere and vapid. I had to agree with the Obama droid who wondered aloud whether McCain was channeling Dennis Kucinich.

Yet Obama is no better. To listen to him, the entire morass on Wall Street is George W. Bush’s fault. Bush didn’t see it coming, and therefore didn’t impose “regulations” earlier in the decade. (The argument about the efficacy of any regulation that could have made it through the Washington machine is beyond the scope of my words today.) You can’t blame a politician for pointing out the flaws of the incumbent, but the argument has to be legitimate. Would a Gore or Kerry presidency have prevented the financial meltdown? I don’t see how.

Now we have McCain wanting to postpone Friday’s debate with Obama to focus on brokering a solution. At least McCain is trying to do something, though the magnanimity of the effort is dulled by the grandstanding of claiming to “suspend” his campaign. To anyone who believes that the nominee of a major party is “suspending” anything within 40 days of the election, I offer the investment opportunity of some prime Florida real estate (or perhaps a bridge to Ketchikan). Politicians need to be well versed in both salesmanship and leadership, but they must not insult the electorate by pretending we don’t know the difference. Nevertheless, I am intrigued by McCain’s proposal of bringing both nominees to the negotiating table. This puts the winner in the unenviable position of having to eat his own cooking (or dog food, if you prefer). If Obama wins, at least we won’t have yet another “I told you so” moment where he holds forth on what he would have done, had he had any involvement in the process at all. Talk is cheap; whiskey costs money.

At the moment, I tend to agree with one pundit who said recently that the response to the crisis thus far from both campaigns has been “moronic”. Whether the debate goes forward as planned, or we get speeches on the capitol steps extolling how each candidate has “reached across party lines” to broker the bailout agreement, we can at least hope for something more detailed on the subject. We may even get some policy morsels by which to judge these guys prior to putting one of them in the oval office. There’s a cartoon by Gary Larson showing two bears as seen through a rifle scope. The bear that is centered in the cross-hairs is looking right at the gun and pointing at his companion with a foolish expression on his face. Time will tell which bear represents which candidate, but right now they’re both fair game.

Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge

2008-09-06T11:02:00.004-06:00

Now that we're all settled in our new/old house, there is enough time to establish some sort of routine. My work schedule now is longer than it was in Austin, and the commute is slightly longer as well; this makes me treasure weekends all the more (especially when the 1 year-old is napping).

I finished Year Million several weeks ago. I'm not normally one for anthologies, but the premise was too good to resist: ask a bunch of folks, from a variety of fields, what they think will be the state of the human race in a million years. I think the question has an inherit Rorschach quality to it, in the sense that people unavoidably extrapolate from what they regard as the seeds of significance today. Thus, engineers eagerly contemplate nanotechnology and the digital singularity; biologists examine potential evolutionary paths, and the astrophysicists, already accustomed to looking forward and backward in time by the nature of their vocation, take us even beyond year million to the far-distant time when everything (almost) goes dark.

Although the contributors come from many different fields of study, a few common themes emerged as I made my way through the essays. Several writers postulated that the ultimate destiny of the human race lies in transforming our solar system into a vast thinking machine, called a Matrioshka Brain, which captures a very high percentage of the sun's energy in nested layers of material, and converts it to computational power. The fundamental idea here is that we will have transcended organic existence and downloaded ourselves into a supercomputer; instead of living in brick and mortar buildings, we'll create them out of bits and bytes, in a kind of inconceivably advanced version of World of Warcraft or Second Life.

The goal of all this nonsense is immortality and an avoidance of all those unpleasant aspects of life, e.g., the scarcity of resources that causes us to get up every morning and go to work. The most astute of those folks who focused on the M-brain hypothesis, though, pointed out a couple of flaws. First, the scarcity of resources problem does not go away, it merely crystallizes into a singular quest for more computational power, fed by raw energy, as we would seek to make our virtual country club McMansions ever larger and more ornate. In other words, human nature doesn't change when we trade cells for silicon.

The second flaw in the M-brain hypothesis, only partially answered in the ecumenical sphere of the popular audience, is the lack of any philosophical, moral, or theological advancement. If we assume that we're all going to be immortal, perched in virtual worlds of our own making, things would get awfully boring. Most religious people accept the premise (which comes in a variety of specific concepts) that this life we have on Earth is merely one stop on a journey that began before we were born and will continue after we die. Artificially prolonging this phase of existence would be as pointless as an adolescent never wanting to turn 18. (Not that we don't see this elsewhere in our popular culture, of course.) I understand that the panel brought together for this anthology would not delve too deeply into religious or philosophical aspects, but to ignore it altogether is an unfortunate oversight. Science and religion are not mutually exclusive.

Overall, I found much to intrigue me about these futurist essays. Very few of them focused on the dystopian notion that we will nuke ourselves or poison our planet to extinction (though the "gray goo" hypothesis of nanomachines going amok and destroying the entire planet was mentioned more than once). The ideas put forth, from interstellar travel to amazing digital and engineering feats, were very interesting. But reading these ideas made me grateful for my religious and philosophical understanding about the meaning of life. Examining the question of our million year destiny without accounting for God's hand in my life is an interesting mental exercise, but not an existence I'd ever look forward to.

Sometimes life comes at you that way

2008-08-07T15:25:00.002-06:00

I found myself saying these words the other day to a colleague, someone I know only cursorily, who was asking why I am leaving our mutual employer. “A lot of reasons, really; it’s a big change, but sometimes life comes at you that way.” It’s the type of statement made to people we don’t know well, where the rapport is insufficient to elicit much disclosure. Even with closer friends and colleagues, though, I’ve had an interesting time articulating why we are moving (again).

We are quite the transients. In our nearly five years of marriage, we’ve lived in as many different domiciles. Every Christmas newsletter we’ve sent has been mailed from a different address. (Each newsletter has also been laced with all the momentous changes that occurred in our life over the year in question: since 2004 we’ve had four moves, one child, and four job changes/new jobs between us.) It’s a family joke: where will we be reporting from this coming Christmas? New York? London? Kathmandu? As it turns out, none of the above; we’re on track, for the first time, to write our second Christmas letter from the same address, as we’re returning to the house we built in 2006 and left in 2007. It looks like we’re settling down at last. Our future newsletter recipients will no doubt be disappointed by the mundane: no moves or career changes, just postcard-like commentary confirming (as every parent does) the utter brilliance and achievement of our kid(s). Sometimes life comes at you that way.

Desire for continuity aside, the move will enable us to avoid the treadmill of double housing payments. Mortgage for the vacant home on the 15th, rent for the current residence on the 30th, month in and month out, sucking the bi-weekly paychecks dry. It’s gotten old. It was old the day we started doing it last year and it’s even older now. I wondered aloud to my wife how many families there are out there like us, moving back after failing to sell their homes. The moving van shows up and the neighbors gather to see who’s moving into the old place, and lo and behold, it’s the same old people! Back from the hinterlands. (Side note: in our neighborhood, doubtless like many others, your house is only known as your house after you leave, and the people in that house assume your last name: “Where do you live? Oh, you mean the old Smith place.” In our case this results in a tautology, one advantage to moving back to the same place.)

To be sure, there are some things I am not looking forward to with the move: the inversion-laden winter months; the supercilious local NPR folks (although I suppose that’s another tautology, wherever you live); traffic on the highway between our home and my new place of employment; a dearth of decent Tex-Mex. One thing I won’t miss: what is apparently the worst water heater ever manufactured, judging by its stubborn refusal to produce its intended product, despite repeated service calls by the plumber and several replaced parts. Sometimes life comes at you that way.

I’ve nearly finished my latest book for the regular book review posting, but it’s taken a back seat to some material I’m cramming in for my new job, not to mention all the loose ends I’m trying to tie up before we leave Austin. But I’ll get it out there; I know you all can’t wait.

Update on the Cable-Free Household

2008-07-14T15:08:00.004-06:00

As Karla wrote earlier this year, we canceled our basic cable service because we found we weren’t watching it. We discovered early in our marriage that we both have a strong—almost irrational—dislike for any kind of wasted money. We established our trash service with Austin City this month, and Karla noticed we could save $4 a month by trading down from our cavern-sized trash bin to smaller receptacle. It took her 15 minutes on hold and some patience explaining to the city folks why we wanted to do this when the larger bin was “such a good deal”, but she persevered, and we’re $4/month the better. That’s my girl. Hence, you can imagine how we felt when we realized that canceling our seldom-used cable could save us over $40/month.

We’ve had a DVR of some flavor for many years, so neither of us has indulged in the channel-hopping ritual in a long time. (When we were in corporate housing, sans TiVo, last summer, I thought I’d turn on the TV, old-school style, “just to see what’s on”, but I quickly fled from the incessant commercials.) So our viewing schedule each year followed the same pattern:

1) Start out recording and watching 6-7 interesting shows as the fall season gets underway

2) Continue watching the 2-3 of them that make it through cancellation after the first three weeks (I seem to have a real knack for liking shows that end up on the chopping block; I guess I’m just out of step)

3) Gradually turn away in dismay as the plot lines for 1-2 of those promising shows devolve into determining which of the lead characters will be shacking up with each other

4) Continue faithfully watching that approximately 1 show per season (e.g., Lost, 24) that is truly exceptional and well worth our time.

Once we realized we were paying $40/month for, at most, four episodes of really good TV per month, it was a no brainer. (It was sad to lose Jeopardy!, but I can’t imagine ever paying anything just for the conceit of correctly answering every geography question in a round, or mocking Alex for chiding the contestants for their lack of trivial depth (“yes, I’m quite surprised that none of you gave the correct response today; everyone knows that Tanzania’s top export in 1987 was cashew nuts.”)

All of this to say that we really haven’t missed cable TV very much. We make very good use of our Netflix account to catch up on past seasons; at least in this fashion I never waste time investing in a show that will be canceled after only 3 episodes, since they need a full season to make the DVD set. We also enjoy films, of course, since we’re unwilling to subject our 1 year-old to the overpowered “THX” monstrosity sound systems in movie theaters. (I could write another blog entry on the damage being done to little hearing systems, to say nothing of the lack of consideration to other theatergoers, but I won’t.) We also enjoy documentaries. For me this is kind of an extension on my fixation with history and biography books, since so many of the documentaries are about historical figures.

In fact, the only real disadvantage to this extended time-shifting of TV and movies is the occasional media blurb that may spoil something for those of us that have to wait for the product to arrive on DVD, many months after its premiere. This results in the type of exchange I had with Karla yesterday, while both of us were sitting at our computers:

K: “Oh no!”

D: “What?”

K: “Yahoo has this thing about Lost! It says—”

D: “I don’t want to know!”

K: “There’s a picture of—”

D: “I’m not listening” [covers ears, shouting] “I can’t hear you! I can’t hear you!”

K: “I’m not going to tell you—”

D: “I can’t hear you!”

[Baby wakes up from all the commotion]

As you can see, we make our own entertainment. Who needs the cable company?

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

2008-06-27T14:26:00.003-06:00

Another biography, and it’s a founding father (again), by the author of a biography I read last year. Am I getting a little narrow of vision in my recreational reading? Perhaps. (For what it’s worth, I received my next book—via gift card—from my wife for Father’s Day, and it’s not a biography; it’s not even historical. What is it? Wait and see.)

Perhaps I’m so interested in folks like Truman, Lincoln and Franklin because I’m so disappointed with our current crop of political leaders. This reminds me of the music played in our office cafeteria, where I’m forced to go when a lack of foresight and a time combine to deprive me of any other lunch option. The music blaring on the radio is abysmal, and I can’t wait to get back to my desk and choose a track—any track—from the 10 gigabytes or so of music on my iPod. I guess our situation could be worse as far as political prospects go. (Post-Civil War, anyone? How about 1929? Though even then, the Congress probably had an approval rating in excess of last week’s all-time low, as measure by Gallup, of 12%.)

But back to Franklin. Everyone who wasn’t completely catatonic through the U.S. school system knows the basics: runaway, printer, scientist, diplomat. Poor Richard and dozens of witticisms. I’d toss them out to Karla as I was reading: Fish and company stink after three days. The two certainties in life are death and taxes. Snug as a bug in a rug. (After a while, I’m sure she tired of this…) Over 84 years, the guy had an astonishing output of observations, maxims and generally neat writings and sayings. But his prodigious contributions live on in more significant ways as well, as the only Colonial figure to have a hand in the four great documents of the time: The Declaration of Independence, The treaties with Britain and France, and finally the Constitution. And he didn’t just sign his name, either: “We hold these truths to be self-evident” is a Franklinism, trumping earlier drafts of the same sentiment with a clear Enlightenment bias.

There have been dozens of serious studies of Franklin over the years (many of them cited by Isaacson in this book). Most of them reflect the academic fads of the times in which they were written: Franklin is variously portrayed as a libertine, conservative, atheist, believer, abolitionist, segregationist, royalist, revolutionary, egotistical, humble, and above all, fascinating historical figure. I think Isaacson’s treatment benefits from his journalistic approach. He lays out the facts as they can be ascertained, and admits when information to make a firm determination is lacking. In this way we see that Franklin, over his long life, had many conflicts. He changed his opinions and positions over the many decades of his life; partly as a reflection of the times, and partly as a result of personal growth. Had the conflict with Britain not occurred, Franklin would doubtlessly have died a happy subject of the Crown. But once convinced of the Colonies’ position, he was their most ardent supporter. His views on slavery evolved along with his own moral sense, to the point of being a strong abolitionist later in life. Even his religious convictions grew as he aged.

I think this examination of Franklin is a good biography. Isaacson’s work on Einstein was more personally compelling to me, but anyone looking for a balanced, accessible story about Franklin could do much worse than this.

The only thing we have to fear... is low oil prices?

2008-06-09T15:37:00.006-06:00

An article in today’s WSJ Autos section describes an interview with Mike Jackson, CEO of AutoNation, which is apparently the largest auto retailer in the country. Mr Jackson has an interesting take on how high gas prices are actually good for the auto industry, and, by interference, for consumers.

Jackson’s thinking goes something like this: The high cost of energy is here to stay. There never was real economic support for driving around a Hummer and not paying a small fortune to fuel it; “fundamentally incoherent national energy strategy” presented a mirage of viability, and now that oil prices are up, demand has suddenly dropped. (See GM, canceling EV-1 in favor of purchasing Hummer, under heading “Business Decisions, Shortsighted.”) He argues that auto makers now have sufficient incentive to develop alternative technologies since consumers will pay more for technology that reduces or eliminates their pain at the pump. Should oil prices drop again for a prolonged period, Hummers and Superdutys would again be in style and the electric and hybrid alternatives would again seem like eclectic fringe products.

I can see his point. Just looking at my own pocketbook, $4 or $5 for a gallon is expensive, but so is a premium at the dealership to buy the new technology. If I knew gas prices were going to stay high or climb to Europe-style heights, it would be a lot easier to justify paying more for a hybrid or electric car. But the penny-pincher in me would wince if gas dropped back down to $2/gallon. Not that we’ll ever see that again; I do think high fuel prices are here to stay, courtesy of the tremendous demand in the developing nations. So here’s to high gas prices! … How paradoxical.

Rental Numbers

2008-05-30T13:10:00.008-06:00

As Karla mentions today on the family blog, we are moving from our rented apartment to a rented house next month. This will, among other things, let me get back to barbecuing, a hobby I’ve been unable to indulge for the past 14 months of apartment living. Before opting for this particular rental, we looked at all our rental options, and it was an interesting exercise.

We started out looking in our current neighborhood. Typical rents for a single family house around here, according to our (extensive but unscientific) survey conducted via Internet/phone/driving by, come out at about a dollar a square foot per month. That seems high by national standards as well as for Austin (it is about what we paid living on South Temple, a block from the Temple in the heart of downtown Salt Lake City). It is also high by our budget standards, since our goal was to pay roughly the same amount in housing as we are now ($0.80 square foot or so).

So what goes into that dollar/sq ft/month? A landlord has to pay taxes and homeowners fees in addition to the mortgage. And taxes around here are significantly influenced by the school district. (This post is not about correlating school taxes with academic performance, an exercise I am completely unqualified to undertake; all I can do is look at the numbers, and the fact is that certain school districts levy higher property taxes than others.) School taxes and HOA are components of the first three rules of real estate (location, location, location) and they result in higher rents when compared to properties that are not maintained to HOA standards and/or properties in school districts with lower tax burdens.

In the end we compromised on the school district, since we won’t have any school-age children for several more years. We found a nice place in clean, safe neighborhood that rents well below a dollar/sq ft per month, larger than our current place but for less per square foot. As an added bonus, the new place is 10 miles closer to work than our current apartment, with the following cost savings in gas (these calculations were made with $4/gallon gas and our aging Nissan, which gets ~20 mpg average city+highway):

30 miles/day = 1.5 gallons = $6 per day, * 20 working days/month = $120 per month commuting cost at our current home

10 miles/day = 0.5 gallons = $2 per day, * 20 working days/month = $40 per month commuting cost at our new home

Pretty cool, huh? Although it wasn’t the goal, it appears this reduces our “carbon footprint” as well—although, now that I can barbecue again, I guess we’ll be offsetting the decreased oil consumption with increased use of charcoal and mesquite smoking chips. So sue me.

Truman

2008-05-21T10:18:00.004-06:00

Yes, it has been a while since I’ve posted a book review. There are several reasons for this: We now have an 11-month-old running (literally) around the house; Karla bought me the hardbound edition of the complete collection of The Far Side, and I entertained myself going through it page by page; and Truman has to be the most densely written book I’ve read since I left school. It’s only 1000 pages, but it felt about twice that long, spanning 84 years and featuring a Tolstoy-sized cast of American and European politicians and notables.

The only other book I’ve read by McCullough was 1776, and I think it took me about three days. In comparison, I turned the first page of this book last January, and I read about thirty pages a week until I was finished. The story is compelling, and certainly had its hooks in me for four months or I would have simply set it aside. What made it such a challenge to finish was the sheer breadth of the story. In my opinion, it should really have been written as three volumes, covering the periods prior to, during, and after World War II, and had much better pacing and flow. Had this been the case I would have been tempted to simply read the middle volume, clearly the most momentous and captivating part of the story. Nevertheless, I would have missed out on some interesting material about Truman’s earlier life, including his decorated military career. I was also drawn to his struggles to follow his moral compass during years of the machine and cronyism that dominated Missouri politics for decades.

Yet it is the WWII period that was, as predicted, the most fascinating part of the story. A handwritten note authorizing the nuclear actions against Hiroshima and Nagasaki is included among the several photos. The portrayal of Truman, having been willfully kept in the dark by a resentful Roosevelt, assuming command so effectively in such a short period, was inspiring. The story of how Truman so unexpectedly charmed Churchill and the British delegation at Potsdam (as he did so many other national and world figures throughout his life) was delightful. McCullough’s account was at its best when it portrayed how Truman’s Midwestern practicalities were key to his success in a variety of endeavors, not the handicap they were widely perceived to be. Truman was consistently underestimated and underappreciated throughout his career, but that did not stop him from accomplishing some truly amazing things.

The account bogged down a bit when it came to Truman’s presidential campaign, second term, and Korea. The “whistle stop” campaign was remarkable as the last great political effort before the dawn of television-centric politics, but it hardly deserved a treatment encompassing 15% of the entire biography. Korea of course was far more significant, and could not be recounted briefly while still doing Truman justice. Since I was born over two decades after the war ended, the whole picture, political and military, was a revelation to me, yet I found familiar echoes in press and personal accounts of “our boys dying for a foreign war” and accounts of military ineptitude being loudly proclaimed by Congress (1952, meet 2007). I think it would profitable for politicians on both sides of the aisle today to review the circumstances of Korea and the way in which the Truman and Eisenhower administrations dealt with the crisis.

Overall, Truman is a compelling portrait of one of America’s most remarkable presidents. Certainly the quality of a biography is dictated by the source material, and McCullough’s treatment does Mr Truman justice. In the future, however, I’ll be more aware of what I’m getting into when I pick up a 1000-page biography.

Seagate: It takes a licking…

2008-05-07T14:31:00.003-06:00

I was amazed to see a post on Slashdot about a disk drive that was on board the space shuttle Columbia when it exploded. Investigators found “a 400 MB Seagate hard drive … in the sort of shape you think it would be in after being in an explosive fire and then hurled to earth from several miles up with a ferocious impact.” In an impressive feat of data recovery, the Kroll Ontrack firm was able to pull 90% of the data off, helping complete a complex scientific experiment. Cool.

First Steps

2008-05-06T12:34:00.002-06:00

iPod Time Travel

2008-04-07T12:22:00.002-06:00

Recently, I dusted off a number of CD’s that I hadn’t listened to for an extended period, and added them to my iPod playlists. I was amazed at how quickly a particular song transported me in time back to when I either first heard the track or had it in heavy rotation. It’s my version of Rob Gordon’s (High Fidelity) arrangement of albums by the experiences of his life. Here are just a few of those moments for me.

Miles Davis’ All Blues transports me to Highway 132 in Sanpete County, at about midnight, going 75 mph with the brights on, driving home from Karla’s place the autumn before we got married.

Black and White Town by Doves puts me on a regional jet, sitting on a runway in Spokane at 10:00pm, waiting 45 minutes after touchdown to get to the gate (how hard is it to get a gate open, for crying out loud.) This was followed by a 4-hour drive to Middle-of-Nowhere, Montana, in heavy fog.

Rainbow’s End by Modern English transports me back to the summer before my freshman year of high school, when I set up a computer bulletin board system (BBS) in my bedroom and discovered that I was not, in fact, the only kid in Provo who enjoyed working with computers.

Yours by Sara Gazarek: Karla and I were sitting in a movie theater waiting for the film to start. For once, they weren’t playing the Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s greatest hits to accompany the ads, but this song instead. We went home and bought the album.

Queensryche’s Silent Lucidity: Closing the computer lab at 10pm on a Friday night in 1998, and setting up every station to play Starcraft in a massive free-for-all game with the other sysadmins. (No, at the time, I didn’t have anything better to do on a Friday night. Thanks for asking.)

Go Your Own Way by Fleetwood Mac sends me to the summer I worked for a medical device company in the period between my missionary service and my return to college. I drove a Dodge Colt with no air conditioning, but I did manage to scrape enough together to put a CD player in. At the time I thought a 30-minute commute was the most horrible thing imaginable. Oh, the innocence…

New Order: Waiting for the Sirens’ Call: June 2005, sitting in a bus, crossing the Austria-Germany border and missing my wife. I still want to take her to Vienna someday.

Suedehead by Morrissey transports me to the University of Utah Huntsman Center, where a good friend of mine in high school was so excited to see Morrissey in concert that he paid for tickets for me and my brother so he didn’t have to go alone.

U2’s Beautiful Day was on the radio the morning I got the offer for what I thought was my dream job, making a ton of money and living large off expense accounts. (I was laid off eight months later when the dot-com bubble collapsed.)

Another U2 track, The Electric Co., is off the very first CD I bought (the album was Boy), back in 1987, at Crandall Audio on 800 North in Orem. Since it was the only CD I owned, it got rather heavy rotation.

A Fictional Conversation?

2008-03-26T15:30:00.005-06:00

“Daddy called that man in the car a bonehead.”

“Does that mean he has a bone in his head, or a bone for a head?”

“You’re a bonehead.”

“Am not!”

“Bonehead! Bonehead! Bonehead!”

[Hilarity ensues]

Spencer has started throwing consonants in with the vowels. We’re still at monosyllables, but in several months he’ll start associating those sounds with words, at which point he’ll soak up everything I say. (I’m not flattering myself here; I’m a laggard #2 in terms of folks that might influence his vocabulary in the near term, and it’s a short list.) At the point he starts picking up my words of wisdom, it may be best if I stop talking for a little while.

I’m not talking about salty language here, but the old “family-friendly” standbys I’ve employed over the years. (My sister Kate recently went through this with her son and the innocuous “stupid”, which goes to show that it’s just not the words but the way they’re employed that we need to watch.) As our adoption of Spencer neared, Karla began politely calling my attention to the variety of names I used in my observations of the poor driving habits of others. The fictional dialog at the top of this post came out of a conversation we had several months ago, doubtless after another driver cut me off by driving around me on the shoulder of the road. “Do you really want your children calling each other boneheads? Or calling us names?”

Kids are going to pick up words wherever they find them, and as parents we need to weed out the bad ones, just like any bad habit, but that can’t be done while advocating a double standard. Toddlers simply don’t understand “do as I say, not as I do.” (Nor for that matter do older kids, who seem to take great satisfaction in spotting parental hypocrisy.)

So I am now working to contain my use of scathing epithets. It’s an interesting exercise; I hadn’t realized how dependent I’d become on this mental shorthand to describe my perception of the behavior of others. After a recent slug-fest conference call with a particularly adversarial colleague from another department, I resisted the urge to announce to my team, “That man is a complete idiot” and instead replaced it with the less inflammatory “He’s misinformed.” It’s rough going, because, as we all know, people around us present almost irresistible targets for ridicule. Being in the great and spacious building sure is fun! (Until it’s not.) At least I’ve got a few months to hone this before it dawns on the kid that all those sounds actually mean something.

Is this a fool’s errand? Check back with me when Spencer’s got a vocabulary and we’ll see.

The Land of Made-up Words

2008-03-21T10:50:00.005-06:00

I have to confess not being much into the social networking website scene. Not out of Luddite fears of the interface or (as it turns out, justified) privacy fears regarding who sees the data these sites collect and how long it is stored. Rather, I just simply am not interested. I have plenty of friends in the “real world”, and my interactions at work, home and church are more than enough to keep me happy. (Besides, my lifestyle doesn't really lend itself to this sort of thing; no drinking, no clubbing, no beach parties... a Myspace page featuring me would be snoozeville for sure.)

My one concession to online networking is the professional website, LinkedIn. I signed up about 3 years ago when a Silicon Valley exec was guest-lecturing one of my graduate school courses. It has been interesting to reconnect and stay in touch with former colleagues, but I don’t use it aggressively. Over the past few months, though, I’ve noticed an uptick in emails from folks in my LinkedIn network inviting me to connect with them on other networking sites. The invitation goes something like this:

“Hello Dave! I noticed we’re connected on LinkedIn. I have recently been using [new-fangled website] to keep track of my colleagues and clients. If you sign up today, they’ll send you a free stuffed iguana. Anyway, see you around!”

To add insult to injury, some clever script-kiddie came up with the concept of re-sending invitations that are ignored, over the course of several weeks. (I still haven’t figured out the time to live of some of these; they just. won’t. die.) As Cousin Eddie would say, that’s the gift that keeps on giving the whole year long.

This begs several questions. How many professional networking websites do you need in your life? (At this point, my answer seems to be anything less than one.) If you’re soliciting connections from people on an existing service, aren’t you implying that there is some sort of defect with that service? It’s like calling someone up and insisting they switch to your cell network so your minutes are free.

But the biggest puzzle to me about all these additional networking sites is how they possibly hope to gain any credibility and marketshare with such ridiculous names. Yorz? Xing? Naymz? I suppose we have Google to thank for such absurdity, but to me this falls flat. As a five year-old I recall my father (who has graduate degrees in mathematics and engineering) keeping me occupied by having me write out a “1” with a hundred zeros after it, and explaining that this was a googol. Hence when Google arrived I made the connection immediately. I realize that many people did not have the same geek-formative experience, so Google as a word was meaningless to them before it became a verb and top-ranked brand. But here’s the thing: it really did have significance before its rise to fame, as opposed to the random consonant-vowel knock-offs that are clogging my inbox. To me they sound like a pre-teen attempt to subvert the phonemes of the alphabet (“Z is so much cooler than S!”), which is hardly a way to influence professionals to use your site.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to write a Gmail filter to auto-disintegrate yet another site’s spam…

Top 5 Personal Finance Strategies

2008-03-05T14:42:00.002-07:00

It’s been nearly a year since we put our house on the market. In the interim, we’ve completed an international adoption, and, once our corporate relocation subsidy expired, paid several months of rent for our apartment in addition to the mortgage on our home. Needless to say, this hasn’t been the healthiest year for us financially.

But there have been some definite pluses. Aside from the very real non-financial reasons we moved to Texas, we have also taken advantage of some tangible financial benefits in the past year. For instance, all of my income, and part of Karla’s income, is now exempt from state taxes because the states concerned do not have any income tax. And, despite all the expenses, the arrival of our son resulted in some tax benefits as well.

Aside from those definite credits to the income statement, we have really honed our personal finance skills. We’ve always considered ourselves fairly good in this category, paying cash for things like graduate school and basement remodeling. And we were already doing the textbook things when it comes to personal finance: budgeting, tax-advantaged retirement accounts, avoiding consumer debt, etc. However, I’ve found a few simple things very helpful as we have hunkered down to weather the slow housing market:

5. Online Bill Pay

We signed up for bill pay in 2005 after the apartment we were living in mistakenly tried to transfer $90,000 (instead of 1% of that amount) from our checking account as part of our monthly auto-draft program, resulting in a fee that took months to sort out. We’ve never looked back. We’ve found a number of benefits. First, as our apartment experience shows, it is more secure, since nobody has their fingers in your account; all transactions are initiated by your bank, not the payee. The second benefit for me personally is more involvement in our finances. Several bills such as utilities and telecommunications fluctuate from month to month, so it’s not possible to set them to “auto pay” without risking underpaying. This gives me a chance to review the trend each month, but without having to manually fill out the bill. Finally, we have used bill pay for personal debts as well, sending small amounts to friends or family very conveniently (no writing checks, no stamps).

4. Rewards Credit Cards

This is a new one for me, but Karla has been enjoying rebate checks from her card vendor for many years. My historical criterion for selecting a credit card was the interest rate, which is pointless now since we never carry a balance month-to-month and hence pay no interest. Following Karla’s lead, I switched to a rewards card in 2007, and we’ve earned a modest amount of cash back as we’ve put every purchase we can on our reward cards. There are added benefits for shifting the bulk of our purchasing to credit cards. First, it is more secure than using a debit or ATM card since credit cards are protected from identity theft, whereas a thief has fewer obstacles if he obtains your debit card. There is also consumer protection from overcharges or other merchant practices if the product or service is unsatisfactory. Nearly everyplace from fast food places to gas stations accepts credit cards. Now if we can just get Costco on board…

3. Spending Thresholds

This strategy is really a matter of individual family style and approach to handling finances. It works for us, but every family is different. In our case, we have agreed that any discretionary purchase (e.g., aside from routine items like groceries, auto maintenance, etc) in excess of $100 should be discussed in joint session. Perhaps the limit for different families could be $20, or $2000… But we have found that having the threshold helps keep us both in the loop, and also empowered, if we want, to tap our (ever dwindling, it seems) pile of spare change after all the bills are paid.

2. Leftover Lunches

Prior to getting married to one of the world’s great cooks, I routinely ate out—sometimes twice a day. Lunch was an especially glaring example of a poor return on investment; the time around lunch is one of my most productive, and I rarely want to break away for a leisurely meal, which meant lots of fast food (and indigestion). Then there was the sales “steakhouse power lunch” phase of my career, where I had to strive mightily to fend off the threats to my cholesterol, if not my wallet (subsidized as I was by the all-powerful expense account). Now that I am again behind a desk for 45 or more hours a week, I find leftovers of Karla’s meals are wonderful, both to the taste and the pocketbook. By my back-of-the-envelope calculation, leftovers have saved us about $100 each month since June. Not too shabby.

1. Tithes and Offerings

To Latter-day Saints this one should come as no surprise, but I reiterate how we’ve been blessed by paying our tithing and offerings first. If we take them off the top, we don’t miss the money, but we would certainly miss the blessings. Life could always be easier, but it could also be much, much more difficult, and we’re grateful to have been so blessed, and we know in part that is due to our payment of tithes.

Broadcast Mode

2008-02-22T14:38:00.000-07:00

As I’ve alluded to before, the office where I’ve now worked for nearly a year is a cubicle farm. (I reside at cube 1BC18, which certainly sounds Borg-esque.) I’ve had cubes before, but each time I was in a technical sales role and the cube pretty much collected dust while I met with clients or worked from home. About once a month, I made the pilgrimage to the cube to file expense reports. The other years of my career, I had an office.

Sometimes I really miss my own office.

I’ve been puzzling through internet protocol routing issues all afternoon, so permit me to use this as an analogy. In a grossly simplistic model of computer networking, you can have point-to-point communication and broadcast communication. The whole basis of the Internet—web, email, online banking—is point-to-point communication. Even “broadcasts” on the web are nothing but a massive collection of point-to-point dialogs. In a simpler time (e.g., the Carter Administration), computing networks made more aggressive use of broadcast protocols: everyone got every message, and you simply ignored the stuff that wasn’t addressed to you.

I’ve come to realize that working in a cube farm is like being on one of those old-time networks. Unlike other public places—libraries, banks, your local DMV office—there is no point-to-point communication here. All the coworkers are in broadcast mode, all the time. Conference calls, ad hoc corridor meetings, and the guy two cubes over who won’t shut up about the U-T basketball team—all of them are broadcasting continuously at full volume.

Think of the voice you use when you go to the bank. (If you don’t bank in person anymore, humor me.) Imagine approaching the teller and announcing your intent to withdraw $500 in cash. This is the definition of a point-to-point conversation. Of course, in the modern IT workplace, these types of conversations take place in conference rooms. That leaves all the detritus to float endlessly through the cube farm and drive us all insane. It’s valuable to, at most, three people in earshot; if there were any more of them, they’d book a conference room. Most of the time it’s two guys or gals just spending their time, like Biblical Athenians, telling or hearing “some new thing.” The rest of us have no choice but to receive the broadcast, however useless it is to us, and discard it.

So much for the efficiency of the modern workplace. Telecommute, anyone?

The Joys of Viral Gastroenteritis

2008-02-16T09:51:00.002-07:00

I think that catching a stomach virus must be the nadir of everyday life experience. Cancer and other serious illnesses and injuries are in a separate, life-altering category, but everyone gets "the 24 hour flu" occasionally, and during that time it seems like life can't get much worse. Thursday evening through Saturday morning was most unpleasant. This was undoubtedly occasioned by the take-out we ordered for Valentine's Day. Perhaps it had been sitting under a hot lamp for too long. Whatever the reason, it only took about forty-five minutes after consumption to commence wreaking havoc on my digestive system. I'm not normally an advocate of wiping out an entire type of life form, but if I were, these little viral critters would be at the top of my list.

What made this time particularly bad was my inability to help my wife with our son during the time I was incapacitated. I wasn't sure if it was a contagious bug, so I tried to keep my distance. I think this confused the boy and made him difficult to deal with, since it broke the routine we enjoy of Dad putting him to bed each night. I'm sure all will be well now that I'm on the mend... Right after I get some sleep. Perhaps then I can shake this "run over by a freight train" feeling.

Top 10 Ways to Tell You’re Still Jetlagged…

2008-02-07T10:49:00.000-07:00

…and continuously sleep deprived after bringing your infant son home from eleven time zones away. These are true stories:

10. You wake up multiple times during the night, out of the blue, and mumble, “Where’s the boy?” to your spouse before realizing it’s the dead of night and the boy is sleeping in the next room.

9. Dimming of the lights in a conference room for a presentation sends you into a bizarre waking dream of being on the “Battle Bridge” on board the Star Trek TNG Enterprise.

8. Mid-way through brushing your teeth, you stop in horror to realize you’re brushing with tap water. Then you recall that the city of Austin does, in fact have a potable drinking water system, and that, yes, you are in Austin, not Hanoi.

7. The grapefruit juice bottle mysteriously finds its way onto a pantry shelf instead of the fridge; further, you have no memory of putting it there.

6. An image of Foghorn Leghorn is superimposed on your division director’s face during an all-hands meeting. For a good thirty seconds, you honestly wonder why Foghorn Leghorn is talking about staff reorganization and the company’s stock price, before the image goes away.

5. At an early morning Church meeting, a colleague points out you missed a belt loop on your pants. It takes you at least three minutes during the meeting to figure out how to make the belt go through all the loops without having to stand up.

4. You have a recurring dream of Mitt Romney throwing a cream pie at John McCain.

3. You’re dead sleepy during dinner; by the time you put the boy down and get ready for bed, you’re wide awake.

2. Your handwritten notes from a conference call trail off mid-sentence to a wavy line that drops diagonally down the page, in some sort of graphical representation of the recent change in value of your 401K, off the page and onto your desk.

1. The cry of a hungry infant haunts the corridors of your dreams and strikes terror into your heart, even when you’re awake.

An epic journey in five parts

2008-02-05T11:24:00.000-07:00

Here are a few slices from the journey we took to get our son in Vietnam last month. The trip was long and wonderful in many ways. This account is merely long, and not so wonderful, but perhaps you might find it interesting. Pictures and more details of the journey can be found at my wife’s blog.

1. Anticipation

The only trepidation I have on the outset is the involvement of American Airlines in our journey. (You may remember the Dreaded Mechanical Problem from last fall’s trip to Salt Lake.) We are taking AA from Austin to LAX, and if they screw this up, it could throw the whole trip, like a bowling ball striking a house of cards. This time, however, we’re prepared, with a ten-hour layover in LAX before our flight to Taipei. It turns out that we don’t need such elaborate precautions: We depart on-time and make excellent progress.

LAX is a complete zoo. I was previously unaware of the sheer idiocy of their international terminal being completely decoupled from the rest of the airport; meaning, of course, another heartening trip through security. Actually, we end up going through security multiple times as we canvas the international terminal—in vain—for an establishment that might serve a halfway decent meal. We wile away the hours of the layover with a laptop and some DVD’s of the Lost television show. Finally, we can check in, and, to our delight, we obtain the exit row for the 15-hour flight to Taipei. Score!

I read about 400 pages from the books I’ve brought; the wife snoozes with blankets piled high on her lap (the exit row is drafty). Both of us stretch luxuriously in the six feet of empty space between our seats and the bulkhead. I ask the flight attendant for a drink sans ice, just for practice because I’m positive the ice they loaded at LAX is potable. Finally, we begin our descent into Taipei. It’s foggy and all surfaces are covered in drizzle.

Chiang Kai Shek airport in Taipei is the quietest airport I’ve ever visited, except perhaps the airfield on Sao Nicolau, Cape Verde (one turboprop departure per day). There are lots of people. There are lots of gleaming, duty-free cologne and liquor establishments. But nobody says a word. It’s refreshing after recalling the 10 hours of chaos at LAX. I think TPE is my new favorite airport. It’s also, apparently, Hello Kitty’s favorite airport. She owns gate C3, which is also our departure gate. She has a theme song and a playground and a giant marquee, all right there at C3. We drink in the goodness of Hello Kitty for a while before we board our flight to Ho Chi Minh City.

The three hours to HCMC pass in a blur. I am running on fumes at this point, and being anywhere except in a coach airline seat is tremendously appealing. Finally, we make it to HCMC and plow through customs, immigration and baggage claim. The first baggage miracle occurs: no lost luggage! We pile into a minivan with our bags and brace ourselves for a long ride to the hotel.

We are in a sea of scooters. It’s a steel stampede, with the van’s driver applying his horn at every opportunity to make a hole. Intersections are river-like, with trickles of scooters and occasional cars and vans haltingly negotiating their way through the crowd. I whip out the camcorder to capture some vintage HCMC street footage through the van window, but we arrive at the hotel almost immediately.

The Park Royal Hotel is a reasonable oasis. There are clean sheets, a marble shower, and soft towels. We vow to stay awake till sunset to fight the jetlag, and mostly succeed. Someone in an adjoining room is singing karaoke until near bedtime.

2. Meeting

A brief flight to Da Nang (second baggage miracle: no lost luggage again!) and we check into a resort at the edge of town. We can’t properly enjoy the beach because of the weather (rainy) and our fatigue, but we don’t care. We have only a short wait before we drive to the orphanage to meet the boy.

The road to the orphanage is a washboard affair, like you might come across off the beaten path in the U.S., in areas that missed out on the miracle of the Interstate highway system. Half-paved and half packed clay, it is murder on suspensions (and backsides still tender from hours of coach airline seating). Everywhere are signs of old and new: a gleaming, electric billboard advertising computers standing in the middle of a rice field, with farmers and water buffalos in its shade; chickens scurrying out of path of teens on scooters too involved in their cell phone conversations to pay heed; a satellite dish mounted on the roof of a tiny tin shack surrounded by rusted tractors. Bicycles form a higher percentage of traffic as we get closer to the orphanage. The few four-wheeled vehicles are industrial-style trucks with water tanks or other commercial loads.

The orphanage is a nondescript, green-washed building with only a few red crosses painted in the drive to advertise its purpose (at least to me, the American observer). Three large rooms at the front, with an indeterminate number of antechambers closed off. There are babies lying on bamboo and foam mats spread out in the main room. We peer anxiously from baby to baby to spot our son, and at last we find him!

He is the only one crawling and moving substantially on his own. His face is set in that grave expression we later christen “travel mode” because he assumes it when meeting strangers. He warms slightly to us after several minutes on the wife’s lap: a slight curl at the edge of the mouth and a tilt of the eyes. The orphanage director coaxes a full smile out of him when he comes over to where we are sitting. We spend the afternoon getting acquainted. I take some video footage but we must borrow the camera of another visitor to take stills, since we left the media card for our still camera at the hotel. Not for the last time, we vow to buy a newer camera when we get back to the States. The babies go down for naps as we are leaving, and we see our son pulling himself up to a standing position within his rocking crib, observing the world around him interestedly.

The next day is the official ceremony in a different town that appears to be equidistant from the hotel and the orphanage. It’s still cold and rainy and I wonder why I didn’t think to suggest we bring a hat for the boy. We wait in an office until it is our turn to sign the adoption paperwork, which we do in turn while our son slaps the desk with both hands. “He’s a drummer,” our translator observes at one point, in a supreme understatement. We soon learn our son’s favorite activities are: 1) whacking anything and everything, repeatedly, with his open palms, and 2) attempting to put anything and everything in his mouth. Upstairs from the paperwork offices, the provincial officials hold a brief ceremony and there are photos of our family posing next to a flag of Vietnam and a bust of Ho Chi Minh. It’s official, at least as far as Vietnam is concerned: we have a son. The orphanage has supplied very stylish pink hat to keep him warm, and we’re obliged to use it until we can find something more suitable for our son’s sensibilities. Even at seven months, there are proprieties to be observed!

3. Scramble

We have one more night in Da Nang before we begin the next phase of the paperchase. We’re very curious: how will the boy handle his first night outside the orphanage? Will he have a meltdown when he realizes the orphanage nannies are not going to be around? Will he start from a nap and exclaim, in Twilight Zone fashion, “Who are you people?!”

We needn’t have worried. He has a happy bath in the hotel sink, downs a jug of formula like a champ and, after a relatively brief crying spell, he crashes for the night. We breathe a collective sigh of relief. Mingled, of course, with trepidation: was this a honeymoon, and if so, how long would it last?

Nothing but the best for this kid: The next day we fly business class from Da Nang back to HCMC. He hams it up for the camera in the business class lounge at the Da Nang airport, and then promptly falls asleep in mom’s arms for the hour flight. We could get used to this. Collecting all our bags (baggage miracle #3, not one lost yet!) is somewhat more complicated when the baby is strapped in on one parent’s chest. And of course, timing diaper changes, bottles and naps with the flight and airport waiting is a fine art that I believe will challenge even the most seasoned, veteran parents. At this point we are elated to have come this far, but realizing also how fatiguing it is to travel with a baby.

Once we’re back in the Park Royal, the chase begins anew: passport, medical examination, photos… all these stops make for a long day for the boy and his parents. He sleeps in the van as we drive (apparently he’s one of those babies who is lulled by vibrations). We continue to marvel at the craziness of Ho Chi Minh City, with its myriads of scooters, shops and street vendors. The shops all appear to be organized in districts. One street seems to contain nothing but endless, narrow shops displaying cellphones. The next street has computer monitors, and the next, televisions. Then an abrupt change to several blocks of clothing boutiques. By the time the boy has his visa photos taken in an open-air camera shop, he is ready to be done for the day, and so are we. All the paperwork has been submitted, and now we wait for it to be processed.

4. Waiting

It’s a quiet weekend. We reason that, since we have several days to wait for the passport, we might as well relax and get acquainted with the boy over the weekend, then do some sightseeing early in the following week. We are bemused by the wedding receptions taking place in the hotel courtyard outside our room. It is the same music program each evening, and it begins just as we put the boy down for the night. The music, a cheerful mixture of 1980s ballads that has seemingly nothing whatsoever to do with matrimony, does not faze him, though after four consecutive nights, it starts to drive mom and dad insane.

Monday evening we notice that he has a slight cough and a sniffle as he takes his bottle. Hoping it is a minor thing, we bundle him and put him to bed early, but the next day it is clearly a full-on cold virus, complete with gunk in the nose and a rattling cough. I brave crossing the street (which involves walking at a steady pace into the sea of scooters and letting them drive around me) to find a nasal aspirator. Neither model I purchase is up to U.S. standards, but we ultimately are able to keep the worst of the mucus out of his nose.

The cough, on the other hand, is worrisome, and, late Tuesday night, the fever of 103 degrees F sends us scrambling to the 24-hour clinic. It is a surreal experience to cruise through the streets of Ho Chi Minh City at 2:00 in the morning in a taxi, with your fevered baby in your arms, wondering if the driver clearly understood your instructions and whether you’ll end up at the clinic or somewhere else entirely. At last we arrive. Once there we are relieved to see the fever at “only” 101.6 degrees F. It turns out our vaunted ear thermometer is useless in children as young as our son because their ear canals are not sufficiently developed to give an accurate reading. The doctor prescribes Tylenol to bring down the fever, cough medicine, and an antibiotic to combat the opportunist bacteria catching a free ride in the gunk in the boy’s chest. Total cost for the visit and three prescriptions: $31. (No complaints there!)

The cold puts the kibosh on our sightseeing plans and we spend the next four days in the hotel, frequently ordering room service and anxiously monitoring the boy’s hacking cough. The honeymoon is definitely over, as the cold and gunk play havoc with his sleep schedule and the virus, and medications, make him alternately sleepy and fussy. Every so often, the cough reflex catches him too soon after a bottle feeding, and up comes the most recent bottle, typically on the wife’s jeans.

By the end of the following week, he has broken the back on the cold. We finally have the passport in hand and we’re ready to head to Hanoi to get his U.S. visa.

5. Hanoi and Home

Hanoi differs markedly from Ho Chi Minh City. For one thing, it is substantially colder. Our flight (again, business class, again, no lost luggage) ends and cold air roars into the cabin from the gate. I realize I had packed according to HCMC standards, and therefore I have no coat, and only a single clean long-sleeved shirt. Fortunately, there is a small market store with baby clothes just around the corner from our hotel, and we are able to get hats and long sleeved shirts to keep the boy warm during his stay in Hanoi.

The drive from the airport to our hotel is substantially longer than the route to the hotel in HCMC, and we are already tired from the 2-hour flight with the boy. However, we take time to appreciate the French-inspired architecture of the homes and businesses in the North. There is agricultural activity here as well, but also a fair amount of industry on our path into the city. As in the South, there are contrasts between traditional and transitional lifestyles, technology juxtaposed with stunning natural backdrops. The city itself seems more handsome than HCMC. Again, shopping seems to be organized to group like shops together. Our hotel is in the middle of the bathroom fixtures district, with sinks and toilets vying with faucets and tile surrounds for attention.

The Hanoi Horison hotel is not as good a deal as the Park Royal. For one thing, they charge us $35 for five days of wireless internet access. For another, the smaller room, musty bathroom, and threadbare sheets and blankets belie the hotels “five star” reputation. But the breakfast buffet is good and our room is reasonably clean and quiet.

Friday brings our appointment with the consulate to get the U.S. visa for the boy. The interview is brief and expensive ($400 for the visa processing fee, on top of hundreds of dollars we’ve already paid for background checks, fingerprints, and application fees). We are instructed to come back Monday.

Our final weekend in Vietnam is a mixture of anxiousness, impatience and excitement. We fret about the visa, our travel arrangements, and the boy’s health. We are impatient to get home but excited to be in Hanoi, which is, like HCMC, crowded and congested, but also very beautiful. We spend some time doing some minor sightseeing, catching a charming water puppet show and touring the venerable Temple of Literature. At last, Monday afternoon, we receive the boy’s immigrant visa, the final piece of the adoption puzzle. With it, he’ll be a U.S. citizen as soon as he enters the country.

Packing, a scramble to the airport, and, at the ticket counter, then the gut-wrenching realization that we had neglected to purchase a lap fare ticket for the boy. What an omission! And at such a late hour, with the flight boarding momentarily. I hurry to another ticket counter and try to remain calm while the clerk painstakingly fills out two paper tickets, by hand, for the different legs of the trip. I don’t think I have ever seen anyone write more slowly. After three millennia, she’s finished, swipes my card and then, just as slowly, fills out my receipt. At last I rush back to complete the check-in, and we’re on our way.

Hanoi to Taipei is decent, and quick. Once again, TPE welcomes us and we discover that Hello Kitty not only owns a gate, but also a baby lounge complete with sterile hot water, a sink, changing tables, and a couch (in pink, of course).

Taipei to LAX is, unfortunately, the worst part of the trip. Mercifully, the trip is only eleven hours when heading east instead of the fifteen it took when heading west, but that is the only thing we have going for us on this long journey. The boy refuses to be comforted after awakening two hours into the flight, so mom and dad alternate walking him up and down the aisles of the plane for hours at a time—with mom putting in perhaps twice or three times as much time as dad in this respect. The nightmare finally ends as we touch down at LAX. It’s 2:00 in the afternoon, and we’ve been on the move for twenty hours.

There must be some unwritten rule regarding the number of lines in which an international traveler must wait to be processed when entering a new country. Further, there must be a rider on that unwritten rule that quadruples the requirement for new babies coming in on immigrant visas. I find myself growing increasingly impatient as various officials direct us to wait in a variety of lines.

Somewhere along the way we pick up an extra passport that was mistakenly given to us during one of the many exchanges of such documents at windows and desks. We only realize our surplus when we finally make it to the American Airlines domestic counter to check in for our flight to Austin. And there it is, the passport of some hapless kid, folded inside mine. After check-in we deliver the passport to airport security, as there is no way for us to get past them back to customs and hope to reconnect directly with the passport’s owner. We sincerely hope that the security folks do their job and that the passport is thus quickly returned to its owner. But also, and perhaps slightly more sincerely, we are awfully glad that it wasn’t one of our passports that was misplaced in this fashion. Thus is the dog-eat-dog world of international adoption travel.

As we stagger through security once again (thanks again, LAX international terminal!), the wife is searched, my bag is searched, and the boy is searched. By this time both adults are feeling light-headed from exhaustion and the boy is just feeling cranky. Only four hours to go before we board our final flight to Austin…

Or not. Weather in St Louis delays our ride for another three hours. (Curse you, American Airlines! I know it was a weather delay, but it just had to be AA, didn’t it? They never let us win.). This time is spent in dreadful stoicism in a vacant customer service room trying to stay awake while simultaneously attempting to keep the boy from licking every surface in sight. Mercifully, when we finally do board, he sleeps for the entire trip. After our final luggage miracle (no lost pieces, again), we wait briefly for our ride. A kind friend from Church picks us up at the airport (at 3:00 am), and, slightly before 4, we at last make it home.

Book Review: 1421: The Year China Discovered America

2008-01-04T09:10:00.001-07:00

I actually finished this book a while ago, but I’ve been a slacker about posting the review. I came to read the book in a roundabout way. My background in world history is fairly steeped in the conventional wisdom one acquires through the osmosis of twelve years in the

U.S.

public education system, a few general education courses in college, and the odd Jeopardy! clue. So when I saw Gavin Menzies’ 1421 on display at the bookstore, I was fairly dismissive of the claim on the cover. The Chinese discovered America in the 1400’s? If such a thing were true, I’m sure I would have heard of it from more conventional sources.

Thus secure in my knowledge of things, I moved on to other titles, until I was visiting my dad in Provo last year and saw that a copy of the book sitting in his den. One of Dad’s colleagues at the university had served a Church mission in Taiwan, and maintained a running fascination with all things Chinese. Brent had recommended the book to Dad, and so he was reading it. What’s more, he seemed to be drinking the author’s Kool-aid. “Look at these ocean current charts,” he said, flipping to a chart showing Chinese ships rounding the Cape of Good Hope and running across the Atlantic. “He makes a pretty good case.”

Well. If my dad, engineering professor and skeptic of all things speculative, thought there might be something to the book, it was worth a second look. I settled in to read my own copy. From the first page, the author, a retired British submarine captain, assumed an excited, academic tone that was reminiscent of the BBC’s David Attenborough. (You’ve heard Attenborough’s voice if you ever watched one of those BBC nature documentaries that ran on PBS in last half of the twentieth century. You would recognize it instantly.)

Menzies is so excited to share his findings with you that it seems he can’t get the words on the page quickly enough. Though he follows an outline of the journeys of different Chinese admirals, the evidence is his main effort, and this causes him to jump backward and forward through the narrative, across oceans and continents, to paint the most persuasive picture he can of the overall Chinese world presence in the 1420s. His manner may have been annoying if what he was presenting were not so intriguing. He makes some bold hypotheses, but backs them up with a dizzying array of evidence. Among his more interesting claims are Chinese discoveries of North and South America, Antarctica, and several points of Oceania, including permanent settlements that blended with the population extant in those areas.

The evidence for these claims runs the gamut of archeological sites, historical records, biological flora and fauna, DNA, and linguistic analysis. It is a tremendous achievement for an amateur historian unaffiliated with any university or other institution, and he is still actively working on the project and publishing his latest findings at the 1421 website, 1421.tv. (He's also expanded the scope from America to "the World" which you can see from the title graphic I've posted.) I found my skepticism melting away as he made his case. I’m not convinced of the validity of every hypothesis he makes, but there is too much solid evidence to deny his core claim of the Chinese presence in the Americas and elsewhere, long before the Portuguese and Spanish explorers “discovered” these lands.

My biggest takeaway from this book is not the realization of Chinese influence on the New World and the credit they deserve for their contributions, although that is truly significant. Rather, what I found most interesting is how all this evidence was present, an inch under the surface, and yet it was found by an amateur hobbyist, not the thousands of professionally trained, establishment historians and archeologists in the world. It speaks to me of the folly of my initial trust in the conventional wisdom, the accepted story we all believe as we make our way in the world. It was a reminder to me that the channels I have tended to trust most to inform my views of the world are not always the most reliable, and that sometimes it pays to have a more open mind.

Goodbye, AdSense

2007-12-30T16:30:00.000-07:00

There are some things in life that are really, truly, just plain inexplicable. I'm not talking about philosophical ponderables ("Why do bad things happen to good people, and vice-versa?") or manifestations of chaos theory ("How did Ron Paul raise that much money?") . What I'm referring to is something that is just so plain weird that you find yourself scratching your head.

Such as Google advertisements appearing on this blog for, shall we say, alternative lifestyle products and blogs.

Whether or not you've noticed them, I've had two little Google ads quietly sitting on the page since I started the blog earlier this year. I don't think I've ever had anyone click on them, nor was this the point. I was curious to see some of the mystical process of internet advertising at work, based on the blather I slap up here from time to time. Over the past few months I've seen ads on the blog for lots of electronic gear, a cheap tickets to Vietnam, statistical analysis tools, and more electronic gear. And, as of this afternoon, other topics which have no bearing whatsoever on anything written here.

Perhaps there has been a glitch in the Adwords logic, or maybe some clever juvenile delinquent figured out how to game the system for fun (if not for profit). Whatever the cause, the result was the instantaneous banishment of AdSense from the blog. I've decided I rather like having absolute control over every pixel here, at least for the time being.

Swift Kids

2007-12-21T10:47:00.000-07:00

I usually don't link to Karla's blog because most of you came here by way of there, or at least you read them both. But on the off chance that you haven't seen it, I invite you to check out the Swift Kids video linked in her recent post; it is by far the most clever political ad we've seen this season (it certainly beats Rudy trying to be funny). Enjoy.

I've seen the future, and it's solid

2007-12-19T08:36:00.001-07:00

Solid State, that is. Wired gives us a blurb about a new a 100 GB solid state disk drive recently released by a company called Buffalo. No moving parts for much greater durability and reliability, like one hundred of those little 1GB USB thumb drives all packed into a box the size of a deck of cards. Of course, for $950, you could probably buy a hundred thumb drives, but that, as Al Sharpton would say, is only a temporary situation; prices will fall, and when they do, these puppies will replace the crummy laptop drives that have been giving me so much grief lately. Not to mention replacing the SATA drive in our home computer, which sounds vaguely like a little sewing machine when accessed. Ah, to have the blessed silence of electrons doing their thing, no spinning platters required.

Time-waster for a good purpose

2007-12-18T12:01:00.001-07:00

We all have our favorite time-wasting websites. The guy who sat the next row over from me throughout two years of business school was a regular patron of mlb.tv, and more than one member of that same class sneaked a quick visit to addictinggames.com when a lecture got particularly bad. (I admit nothing, but I will say that Managerial Accounting in the Winter of 2004 was particularly awful, so who could have blamed me?)

My wife knows of my long-standing relationship with Desktop Tower Defense (still can't get to level 100 on the challenge mode!) but I don't get a chance to indulge the little critters at work; you can't have them breaching your defenses, sending you clicking madly, while simultaneously running a conference call and three instant message sessions with team members in Atlanta. So it was that I was pleased to see a time-waster that you can feel good about: freerice.com. It's a vocabulary builder; each time you select the correct definition, 20 grains of rice are sent by the sponsor to the UN's hunger-alleviation efforts. That's a lot of clicking to donate enough rice for even one meal, but I imagine it scales to quite a bit of rice being donated when you factor in everyone taking part. Plus, the vocabulary exercises are interesting. Certainly yet another example of new and innovative ways that ad-supported websites are changing the world. Long live new media. Now, if they can get that Facebook travel quiz applet to do the same thing, I'd be hooked.

2007 International Adoptions

2007-12-13T12:52:00.000-07:00

The New York Times has a piece up on the United States finally ratifying the Hague Convention on International Adoption. The result should be more regulation and less corruption, though the short-term affect may be longer waits to adopt. The regulations of the convention will be in effect after April 2008, though of course we are already seeing the effects with the new US regulations that have delayed our own adoption process. I thought the graph was very interesting.

Testing the Content Filter Workaround

2007-12-13T09:54:00.000-07:00

Blogger has been blocked by my employer's web filters. Instead of my blog control panel, I am now greeted with a cheerful screen, decked out in company colors, informing me that the requested site is a threat to my security, productivity, and way of life. (Blogs hosted on Blogger are still available for viewing, at least for now; only the editing function is blocked.)

I am in favor of Internet filters; there is nothing quite as nasty as an email or web worm shutting down thousands of an organization's computers. But this seems kind of extreme, and also pointless, since I am still typing this message from the office and sending it to the blog via email.

The argument of lost productivity is a valid one, but I'm sure they lose far more productivity to espn.com and other sites that remain open. Not that I'm rationalizing; I average less than two posts per week on this blog, and I usually make them while I'm sitting on massive, stultifying conference calls ("Thank you for joining the call. You are the… 34^th … participant") or viewing vendor presentations over WebEx. My recent change from selling technology back to buying it has reminded me how little the customer really cares about 99% of what the IT sales team is saying.

So this is the latest post, brought to you via email, right out the company's front door. I'm curious to see how it works.

Computer Counsel

2007-12-10T10:19:00.000-07:00

An inevitable side effect of working in the technology industry is the stream of requests for advice or assistance from non-techie friends and family. I don’t mind this at all; few of my family members or friends ask for anything terribly complex, and I am happy to help should a big problem arise. One topic that frequently comes up is my preferred brands for desktops and laptops. My long-standing recommendation is to buy an Apple Mac (either iMac or Powerbook). I know this doesn’t work for some people, and so I have previously recommended IBM Thinkpads as the most reliable laptops for those who must run Windows. For desktop users who need Windows, I have recommended the PC with the best warranty and support options, typically Dell and (more recently) HP.

The past few months have caused me to revise some of these recommendations, due to recent developments at Microsoft, Apple and Lenovo.

Microsoft’s release of Windows Vista has been a debacle. Not only does the product run more slowly, less secure, and less reliably than XP, but it is also not backward-compatible in many cases. The new camcorder we purchased three weeks ago is not compatible with Vista, nor are many other products people expect to use with their computers. If you must buy a Windows PC, make sure you get XP. (Dell, Lenovo and others now offer XP as alternative to Vista on many of their new computers.)

Meanwhile, Apple continues to churn out beautiful desktop and laptop computers. Ironically, folks at PC World that have tested Vista on Apple’s latest Powerbook laptop found that it runs Vista better than any competing laptop designed specifically for Vista. The fact that Apple pulled this off on a machine designed to run a completely different operating system is a testament to their engineering acumen. The same holds true for their software folks, as the Apple operating system, OS X, is rock solid and easy to use; it also works with my camcorder and just about every other peripheral out there.

But the fun doesn’t stop there for Apple. You can purchase a software product that enables you to run Windows applications on your Apple desktop, seamlessly and without disrupting the Apple operating system in any way. Sure, you have to pay for the Windows software, but there is no reason to purchase a separate Windows PC (or reboot your Mac to run in full Windows mode, which is still supported) if you have a Windows PC primarily for one or two applications that are not available in Windows.

The final development that affects my advice is IBM’s sale of their laptop business to Lenovo. I use a new Lenovo laptop at work, and I assumed it would function like the previous T-series Thinkpads used by me and several members of my family for years. This is not the case. In just six months I have had a complete hard drive failure as well as numerous blue-screens related to the wireless and other issues. This regrettably puts Lenovo Thinkpads in the same bin with Dell and HP, whereas previously they had been exceptional. Too bad.

So how does this affect the advice I give to friends and family? If you can possibly afford it, buy an Apple Mac (either desktop or laptop) – prices are still high (over $1000) but much better than the price you’d pay to run a new PC capable of running Vista. If your budget is still south of $1000, make sure you get an HP or Dell machine with Windows XP.

Gadget Post: Sennheiser HD570 Headphones

2007-11-30T07:44:00.000-07:00

This is not a review of new technology, but rather a comment on how impressed I am with an older product. I purchased these headphones in 2001, for about $70, if memory serves. I don’t think you can find them new anymore, but Sennheiser should offer a comparable product today. I used them rather heavily when I was living with roommates. When I got married (and around the same time, switched to my own office at work), they languished and were mostly used during travel until I broke down and purchased Bose noise-canceling headphones in 2005.

Anyway, the Sennheisers have made a comeback since I switched to a cubicle environment at work. They have very comfortable pads that allow hours of use without fatigue. And of course, they sound truly excellent. Recently, though, I noticed the right channel would occasionally fade out when I repositioned the headphones. Not good. I thought I’d crack it open and just see what I could do… Best case, I thought, would be borrowing a soldering iron from the lab and doing a quick repair, if the wire was frayed near the contact with the driver. Worst case was a kink that was too far away from the driver to spot-fix.

It took me about ten minutes of fiddling with the casing to open it without damaging it, but my persistence was rewarded. There was no solder point at the driver. Instead, I was amazed to see that the wire was connected via jumper. For those who have never worked in electronics or inside a computer, a jumper is a plastic sleeve around the copper contact. Two copper prongs slide into the jumper, much like an electrical plug in a wall socket. In the case of my headphones, heavy use had caused the jumper to slip off the prongs over time. I just slid that puppy back down firmly, snapped the phones back together, and viola—he is clean: perfect sound once again.

This may seem like a rather archaic detail to you, but I was very impressed. A spot-soldered connection would be much cheaper to manufacture than a jumper, perhaps by several cents. A few pennies on every unit shipped is a big deal, more so because it is a detail unlikely to be noted by the customer. Gotta love that German engineering!

A Tale of Two Road Trips

2007-11-27T07:30:00.000-07:00

Our Thanksgiving travel this year was memorable. In many ways, it was really two trips. Trip #1 was the journey to Flagstaff, and it could not have gone better. We were on the road early, hit great weather, and, as George Costanza would say, we made “incredible time,” arriving in Flag a mere 16 hours after pulling out of Austin. (That’s an average of 75 miles per hour, counting stops for gas and meals.) The only negative aspect of the whole trip was terrible service at a Denny’s in New Mexico, where, by all accounts, I channeled a grumpy old man when our food was late (and cold—though, despite my crabbiness, I did leave a tip).

As they say, that was then, this is now. We set out on our return journey on Friday evening. The first leg of the trip was uneventful, although I’m fairly certain the guys hanging around the gas station in Gallup were high on something. By the time we reached Grants (about an hour outside of Albuquerque), it was turning fairly foggy and icy. We took a quick survey of the motels in town (during which we momentarily lost power steering on our rental car—always a fine experience) and settled on the Travelodge.

The next morning we made it most of the way through New Mexico before we saw any bad weather, but it was again turning fairly nasty by the time we hit the Texas border. There was an inch or two of snow on the ground in El Paso and it was still coming down, but the weather report I’d read the previous night led us to believe that things would clear up east of town. This was not the case. We hit heavy snow within 50 miles of El Paso and spent the next three hours averaging 35 miles an hour in a caravan of about 40 cars. Every once in a while some foolish person would pass the caravan and throw heavy showers of slush on each of our windshields, blinding us for several seconds until the wipers could clear it.

Our next scheduled stop was the booming metropolis of Fort Stockton, TX (population: 2900), where we had intended to gas up and move on. By the time we saw the exit, we knew we were going to stay the night; one false move by anyone in the caravan could have resulted in a pile-up. And visibility was getting worse as the sun set. So, we pulled into town, only to find the entire town dark. Plenty of motels and gas stations, but all of them were without electricity. There was about 4 inches of snow on the ground and we didn’t have enough gas to get to the next town. Mercifully, a Chevron station at the east end of town did have the lights on, so I hurriedly put gas in the car while Karla went inside to see about the motels in town. All of them were booked, except for the Rodeway Inn at the far east end of town, and we got one of the last rooms there. It was pretty ugly and the heater didn’t work very well, but we were just happy to have a place to sleep.

The next morning we made the remaining five hours to Austin without incident, but this will definitely go down as one of the more memorable road trips we’ve taken.

Chuck Norris and Huckabee

2007-11-18T17:55:00.001-07:00

OK, this one made me laugh out loud.

(In case you're wondering what in the world Huckabee is talking about, take a quick jump over to Wikipedia for an explanation of the Chuck Norris Facts.)

Amazon Prime Idiocy

2007-11-05T16:49:00.000-07:00

In case you hadn’t noticed from my posts, I am a voracious reader. The nature of working for a large company is that you spend a lot of time on conference calls, most of it waiting. This is my time for reading blogs, news sites, editorials, etc—usually while babysitting some process or other that actually fits my job description. At home, a significant amount of my downtime is spent reading books, and most of those I buy at Amazon.com. Why Amazon? They have a huge selection and they are prompt and accurate in getting the product shipped.

Despite all the books I order, I have no interest in signing up for Amazon Prime, the service where you pay $80 a year for unlimited shipping. Most of the time I take advantage of “free super saver” shipping by ordering two or more titles at once, which means I never pay shipping anyway. So I tend to ignore the pitches from Amazon trying to get me to sign up.

Therefore, it was with tremendous dismay that I found myself enrolled in Amazon Prime after merely browsing through some titles on the Amazon.com website over the weekend. “Congratulations,” I was told, “You have completed your enrollment in Amazon Prime!”

Wha??

I did some poking around my account on the site, and found that I was indeed enrolled, although I was in a “trial” period for 30 days, after which they would happily charge $79.99 to my credit card on file. I have no idea exactly how this happened. When I queried customer service (very politely, I might add), I was told that this was due to a “combination of technical problems and human error.” The implication was the human error was mine, which I resent. But the important thing is that they were able to yank me from their gilded rolls of Prime Members from On High, and I am now once again a lowly bottom-feeder, super-saving my way to lower costs for me and lower margins for them.

Although they assured me this would not happen again, I am definitely re-thinking my book purchasing strategy. At the very least, I’m going to keep an eye on Amazon (and my credit card statement) to make sure no more of this hilarity ensues.

Thanksgiving Odyssey

2007-11-01T06:36:00.000-06:00

Thanks to new requirements set by our dear friends at the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, it is looking like our trip to Vietnam will not occur in November, so we are free make travel plans for the Thanksgiving get-together at my sister's place in Flagstaff. The only problem with this scenario is buying plane tickets from Austin to Phoenix three weeks before Thanksgiving, to the tune of $450 per ticket--far outside our budget. It looked like a no-go.

However, as we drove home last night, Karla suggested we look into driving instead of flying. A few minutes with Google Maps showed the route is fairly benign, even if it is over 1100 miles. We're not keen to put another 2200 miles on the Nissan, so we're looking into a rental car. So long as it has cruise control and a reasonable amount of legroom, I think we're good. We could do the entire trip for less than half of what we were originally budgeting for the plane trip. It will be great to see the parents/brothers/sisters/nephews/niece. Just can't wait for the West Texas part of the trip: so little to see, so much time...

Review: A Long Way Gone

2007-10-23T14:50:00.000-06:00

This one was a quick read for me. It was only about 250 pages long, but I also read it quickly because, as the protagonist’s story became ever darker, I pushed on as fast as I could to see him make it out of the whale and back to some semblance of a life.

Ishmael Beah was a normal kid in rural Sierra Leone in the early 90s. This changed when civil war destroyed his village and sent him on a long, painful journey. I was acquainted with many African refugees during my time in Portugal, but these were mostly from former Portuguese colonies: Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau. They had some war stories, but nothing quite like this one. I vaguely recall some news reports about civil war in Sierra Leone but I had no idea it was this bad. This kid was dragged into a maelstrom of violence. His stories of run-ins and involvement with the militias that ruled the countryside are not for the faint of heart: the account of the violence is almost clinical, like a medical examiner, so that you almost forget that he is an eyewitness and (sometimes) a participant.

Despite the horror of the conflict, I was cheered by Ishmael’s determination to survive, especially when he made it away from the front lines and began the road to rehabilitation. I read the second half of the book in one sitting because I was so anxious to see what happened to him in the end. Ultimately the tone of the book is more sobering and reflective than depressing, and it certainly made me conscious of (and grateful for) the blessings we have in the United States.

When your iPod doesn't know it's not Christmas

2007-10-19T08:20:00.000-06:00

We're big fans of Christmas at our house. Each year, Karla bakes a bunch of delicious treats, and the place abounds in wreaths, lights, and nativity displays. We also like Christmas music. I ripped a few of our Christmas CD's and purchased a few more so we have a nice holiday mix on the iPod. Of the 3000 or so music tracks on the iPod, Christmas music accounts for fewer than a hundred. This ratio has me convinced that the iPod has a hankering for Christmas music.

I know I have a habit of anthropomorphizing technology devices; it's a coping mechanism for dealing with computers all day long. I rant, lecture, or cajole my way through the hundreds of core systems I might touch over the course of a year. (And of course, there is Fisher-Price TiVo—I know that device has it in for me.)

Yet, the iPod’s preference for Christmas music is the clearest evidence thus far of some nascent ghost in the machine. Although I’ve put together some nice playlists, the shuffle feature is what gets me through the workday. I block out the cube-farm when I need to concentrate by slipping on my Sennheisers and setting the iPod to a reasonable level, as Milton Waddams would say. We have some pretty varied music, so a given hour might take me through U2, Johnny Cash, Coldplay, Diana Krall, Maire Brennan, Yo-Yo Ma, and Miles Davis. And, of course, a nice selection of Christmas favorites from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Elvis, Sinatra and/or John Rutter.

I haven’t taken a detailed account, but Christmas is definitely over-represented. There’s just no way a purely random process would select so many tracks from a group representing less than 3% of the total library. My only conclusion is that the iPod likes Christmas music, or at least following the lead of our big-box retailers: this morning as I made a quick stop at Wal-mart before work, I was serenaded by synthesized versions of “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” and “Joy to the World.”

Review: The Omnivore's Dilemma

2007-10-15T09:28:00.000-06:00

I just finished Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, and this rather lengthy review comes with a caveat: Reading this book will change the way you think about what you eat. Pollan pulls back the curtain on the way food is produced and consumed in America, and the level of detail is perhaps more than some people want to know. There is some gore and muck when the author delves into the Confined Animal Feed Operation (CAFO) facilities that provide a huge percentage of the meat sold and served in America. But Pollan is not Upton Sinclair, and his goal is not to expose the grisly so much as the unsustainable. The real head-scratching comes not because animals are suffering in cages—this is nothing new—but because the industrial food chain is so unnatural and unsustainable that it’s a wonder we got on this road at all.

The beginning of the road is the Iowa corn field, which seems innocuous enough until we learn that the relentless cultivation of a single crop is impossible without liberal application of synthetic fertilizer and pesticide. These elements stay with the corn as it wends its complex journey to beef cattle and literally hundreds of derived chemicals present in everything from carbonated soda to breakfast cereal. The animals fed on this corn are given their own chemical cocktails of growth hormones and antibiotics. The whole thing becomes a kind of agricultural Iron Triangle, with the genetic crop and fertilizer producers, pharmaceutical companies, and the USDA replacing the defense contractors and the Pentagon. What would Eisenhower think?

Okay, but this is all old news. Despite this unpleasantness, I’m not about to sign up with PETA or go vegan. The first shift for me in thinking about food occurred when Pollan described the results of a chemical analysis he had performed on a McDonalds combo-meal. Nearly all of the calories of the meal were derived from corn: Corn sweetener in the soda, corn-fed beef and cheese, and potatoes fried in corn oil. To me this was more like a Soylent Green nightmare than a fast-food meal—“Would you like a side of tasty corn with your corn? How ‘bout washing it all down with some refreshing corn?” Fast-food is not the exception, unfortunately: consulting the ingredients of virtually any processed food product in the grocery store reveals a depressing plurality of corn-based ingredients.

My mantra for food and dieting is “moderation in all good things” which comes from personal experience as well as religious teachings. The corn-based industrial food chain is the antithesis of this; what’s worse, this concentrated corn feast is swimming in a synthetic cocktail of industrial additives. I can see dipping my toe in, but when the majority of my meal is thus doused, I lose my appetite.

The second shift was when Pollan looked at the organic food industry. The problem with organics, he writes, is that the term is so loosely defined as to become almost meaningless. A hole cut in the wall of a massive chicken house leading to a narrow run constitutes “free range”; “organically fed” beef are still fed corn, and the controls on that corn are loose and undefined. Thus the consumer at Whole Foods is, in a way, duped into thinking the extra $2/pound he pays goes to a sustainable, humane industry.

Pollan’s solution to this is to investigate the small but growing culture of local “grass farmers” who utilize a heavily-managed, ever rotating cycle of cattle and chickens in their fields. These folks eschew the industrial corn complex, and so avoid the requisite fertilizers, pesticides and antibiotics. Yet this approach has an inherent catch: while it is sustainable, it is not scalable. Until there is a major shift in the way Americans acquire their food, this kind of “grass farming” will remain a niche market.

Overall, Pollan’s book has caused me to hone my instinct for moderation. It’s easy for us to throw a couple of pounds of ground beef in the shopping cart and base three or four meals a week on it. It’s also easy to load up the cart with processed foods (on which I subsisted before I married a wonderful cook). It takes some real thought to form a more balanced diet that is light on processed food and meat. I suspect it will be an ongoing process, but well worth the effort.

Thoughts on the Republican Presidential Debate

2007-10-10T11:09:00.001-06:00

We watched the Republicans duke it out last night in Michigan. The debate focused on economic issues, which left some of the second-tier, single-issue candidates with little to say. This one was moderated by Chris Matthews and Maria Bartiromo. I don't watch CNBC, so this was my introduction to Ms. Bartiromo, and I was not impressed by her moderating skills. Perhaps it was the generally poor acoustics of the auditorium, but none of the candidates seemed to understand her staccato-delivered questions the first time she asked them. Matthews was his usual shrill self, though I prefer his moderation style immensely to the poor attempts of Wolf Blitzer in the earlier debate sponsored by CNN.

The most interesting exchange was between Romney and Giuliani: The Press suggests they were battling about which was more of a tax cutter, but my following of the exchange had Romney attacking Giuliani on the line item veto, while suggesting their positions on taxes are similar.

To us, the biggest non-story of the debate was Fred Thompson. We're used to the Arthur Branch pontifications that made him somewhat endearing on L&O, and none of that spirit was evident in the debate. To me he appeared tired and off-balance as he rambled in and out of focus on the issues. At least he knew who the PM of Canada was.

In relation to my previous post: Perhaps Fisher-Price TiVo reads this blog and is unhappy with my slamming it: Several times when we paused or rewound the debate to catch a missed phrase (the acoustics and microphones really were awful), the screen would go black for a few seconds, then gray, as though FPT was toying with us, before returning the somber political visages to the screen. This is a new thing, so stay tuned.

Attack of the Fisher-Price TiVo

2007-10-08T10:31:00.000-06:00

I purchased my first TiVo digital video recorder in 2001, while I was in the Bay Area living a hedonistic, 20-something-working-for-a-dot-com lifestyle. The job didn't last, but the TiVo did. I was immediately charmed not only by the basic premise of timeshifting, but also the great user interface and intelligence behind the concept. When I moved back to Utah, TiVo moved with me.

When we set up shop in Herriman, we ended up replacing the brand-name TiVo with a Dish Network DVR, mostly because Dish gave us all the channels we needed for less money each month. The DVR did not have all the gee-whiz of TiVo, but it was reliable and easy to use (think Chevrolet instead of Cadillac).

Fast-forward and we are now apartment-dwellers in Texas, waiting for our home in Utah to sell. Because we're in an apartment, we opted against Satellite TV. This meant we couldn't use the TiVo (my original TiVo is a Satellite receiver and does not work with cable). Dish's DVR was also out. We signed up with Time Warner Cable and added the DVR option, reasoning it would provide an approximation of the function of TiVo or, at least, the Dish DVR unit.

We could not have been more wrong. Within seconds of firing the sucker up, it received (and still holds) the title "Fisher Price TiVo" in our household. (In the car analogy above, this wouldn't even make GM's lineup. Maybe a Yugo?) Everything in the user interface, from the colors and fonts to the resolution, remote control and menu scheme, seems dumbed down to the point of absurdity. The manufacturer threw out all the accumulated DVR wisdom since TiVo's inception at the dawn of the decade, and attempted to make the product as similar to a VCR as possible. Because, you know, going back 30 years for user interface and functionality is all the rage now.

Case in point: to access recorded programs, you actually "tune" this DVR to the "DVR channel" on the unit. Nevermind that it's accessing a recorded program on the unit's disk drive; we must maintain the pretense of snagging pixels from the ether. I still haven't figured out how to get back to live TV when a recorded program ends, without fumbling through at least 3-4 buttons; the sucker just says "DVR Channel" until you do something.

Second case in point: Selecting a program to record involves searching a channel guide grid and pressing the record button when you finally find the program. I suppose this maintains the analog paradigm of sifting through grids in TV Guide or the newspaper, except that 1) you only get to see four channels and two hours at a time, and 2) you can only look a day or so ahead. Trying to see programming three days hence results in the cryptic "No Data Found" message, implying to the analog user that all TV broadcasting ceases at that point.

I could go on, but given that our stay in this apartment is temporary, we figured that we could live with Fisher-Price TiVo for a few months (one of the few virtues of the arrangement is that there is no contract).

Yet, last week we discovered another irritation, one that seems to expand the design goal of this product to include not only the interface and functionality of 1977, but the reliability as well. We're following a few new shows this season (which is often the kiss of death for a new show, since about the time I decide I really like it, the network cancels it). We dutifully scrolled through the grids, thumb blisters developing as we pumped the "next" button on the remote, for each program we wanted to record. Then, a couple of days ago, the unit inexplicably dropped all its scheduled recording plans, reminiscent of a 1970's VCR's flashing 12:00. Why, I do not know, since the product allegedly has the afore-mentioned disk drive, which should immunize it from power outages. Yet, for some reason, it chose to lose the schedule.

When I moved from California to Utah, my TiVo not only remembered the programs I had on order, but automatically found them in the new time zone and new local channels, without any input from me. That was in 2001. Why is Time Warner stuck in 1977?

So what's all the fuss about? Lots of people don't even have a DVR.

If you've never used a DVR before, let me explain the paradigm shift. When you are accustomed to watching your chosen programming anytime you want, commercial free, your viewing habits change. You see or hear about a program you would normally not have dedicated any time to, just to see if it's any good. (Our threshold has been anywhere from five minutes to three episodes.) If it doesn't work, you just delete it from your queue. But this depends on having reliable tools that are easy to use. Otherwise you're stuck with the TV Guide way of doing things. And having loved and lost (like Frank has), you are definitely worse off than having never gone down the TiVo rabbit hole.

In sum, Fisher-Price TiVo will not be following us to our new abode. I hear TiVo calling...

How Not to Turn Down a Job Offer

2007-10-04T10:20:00.001-06:00

The IT industry may be slow and cranky when it comes to hiring, but apparently we don't hold a candle to the hiring quirkiness of the legal community. As a couple of family member lawyers have recently changed jobs, I thought this story might be interesting. Note to self: Calling into question your erstwhile future employer's professional credentials is a bad idea. As is doing so in an email message that is then broadcast all over the net. (As an aside, I've been in the same situation as the young lady in the story, of having an employer "revise" the offered salary. My approach was to negotiate, ultimately resulting in my employer meeting me halfway. I have to say, "bla, bla, bla" is a more creative response, however unrewarding.)

Typhoon Hits Vietnam

2007-10-04T08:04:00.000-06:00

The AP reports that Typhoon Lekima came ashore in North-Central Vietnam last night, causing at least two fatalities and destroying hundreds of homes. The provinces affected are north of where our boy is, but I bet the orphanage still got soaked. With our move to Texas, the weather activities in the Gulf of Mexico have been foremost, but we'll have our eyes on another coastal region as well--at least for the next couple of months.

Where the Techies Work

2007-10-02T13:13:00.001-06:00

Apparently, it's map day. This one shows the percentage of the workforce in each metro area working in the information technology field. Of course Silicon Valley wins, but Washington is #2 (and, surprising to me, has a higher number of tech workers total than in the Bay Area). Austin makes the top ten.

Housing Data: Interactive Map

2007-10-02T06:55:00.001-06:00

From the posts I've made so far, you might think the only thing I read online is the Wall Street Journal. I do read other sites (mostly during long conference calls I've been dragged into as an after-thought), but I have to confess the folks at WSJ are always putting up the coolest stuff. Case in point: this interactive map tracking the housing market across the nation. I'm pleased to see the Utah numbers still look pretty good, although this data is only though Q2. Let's hope things stay strong (at least until our place sells)!

Isotopes and the Polynesian Expansion

2007-09-28T11:55:00.000-06:00

Robin Moroney writes in the WSJ's Informed Reader blog of new evidence that confirms Polynesian oral traditions of Hawaii-Tahiti migrations: isotope analysis places prehistoric Hawaiian tools on an atoll near Tahiti. (To those of us accustomed thinking of them as merely islands in the same ocean, we're talking about 2500 mile distances.) The prospect of crossing that stretch of the Pacific in an open, stone-age vessel kind of makes my rant about air travel... pathetic.

The Dreaded "Mechanical Problem"

2007-09-26T11:03:00.000-06:00

[Warning: Long-winded rant ahead]

My sister-in-law got married last weekend in Salt Lake. My wife flew on standby tickets because her work can be done from any location; no big deal if she gets bumped a day or two. I don't have the same luxury, so we bought tickets for my trip to ensure my timely return to work on Monday. Normally we fly Delta, but I had some American frequent flyer miles set to expire at the end of the year. Even though this meant traveling through Dallas, it was worth saving a few bucks by cashing in the miles, or so I thought.

(As any family member who has been within earshot when the letters "DFW" are uttered in my presence will tell you, I have a long and storied history with this airport, including an unplanned stay in what I call, with no exaggeration, a crack motel, courtesy of American when they refused to rebook me until the next day.) I thought this trip would be different.

Foolish person! [Darth Vader] You don't understand the power of American Airlines to ruin your weekend! [/Darth Vader]

The outgoing flight was merely annoying. AUS-DFW was flawless. We touched down a couple of minutes early and the connecting flight was already waiting at the gate for me. I wondered if my DFW woes were a thing of the past. This was short-lived, however. DFW reached out its scaled tentacle of mischief to inflict a "mechanical problem" on the plane, just as we were pulling back from the gate. Gotcha!

We sat on the plane, at the gate, for an hour while the ground crew fixed the problem, which was never really identified to the passengers. At least the door was open and they kept us tethered to the mother-ship, so we had air conditioning. A quick cell call to the family in Utah to inform them of the delay, and off we went. Overall the plane was only about 70 minutes late.

Fast-forward three days to the return trip. This time, we had actually made it a few yards from the gate before we were informed of the mechanical problem. We then sat (this time without A/C) for about 20 minutes while they figured out how serious the problem was before pulling back to the gate to de-plane; this one was being taken out of service. A replacement aircraft was en route to get us to Dallas. Once again, I had a momentary flash of optimism: my original itinerary called for a 3-hour layover at DFW before the connection to Austin. Perhaps they could get the replacement flight in by then?

No. My Austin flight departed from Dallas at 10:40. The replacement flight would arrive from SLC at 10:38. Not even my super-human, Marine-Corps-marathon-running brother-in-law could make that sprint.

Thirty minutes of wrangling with the American ticket folks produced no way of getting to Austin on Sunday night. Ultimately, having checked out every other possible option, I prevailed upon my lovely wife to drive the three hours from Austin to Dallas to pick me up. There was simply no other way to allow me to meet my commitments in Austin on Monday. Ironically enough, she flew standby and arrived in Austin with no hitches, where I, with the guaranteed seat, had the difficulty. She did suffer though, six hours in the car on a Sunday night on the horror that is the I-35 construction zone, because of American Airlines' incompetence. That's real love.

I got to bed at 3:00 AM. By the end of the next day, I realized I had caught one heck of a cold somewhere during the trek. That DFW-AA beast had a voodoo doll of me that they just kept pricking.

I am a lightweight by modern business traveler standards, especially after I got out of the consulting business and re-joined the cubed masses. But I have logged over 100,000 miles in the past two years, according to my frequent flyer account balances. Virtually all of the lousy experiences I've had during that time have involved American Airlines, most of them in Dallas. The media has covered the extensive problems with the entire air travel industry this summer. I'm not disputing that other carriers have problems. That being said, I believe I can improve my odds of avoiding problems by simply never flying on American Airlines again.

(Now, just wait and see... I'll be eating crow when AA has the only itinerary that will work for our Vietnam adoption trip.)

Props to the MSM

2007-09-17T12:12:00.000-06:00

Browsing the WSJ this morning, and lo and behold! BYU's Marriott School is ranked as the top regional MBA program in the Journal's annual recruiter poll (I've landed the chart on our site for your viewing pleasure; the article is posted--temporarily, no doubt--on the WSJ free site here). Granted, Marriott does not have the cachet of, say, Yale or Duke... but it's a great program, if I do say so myself. Congratulations to the school and the program!

Collapse: It's not a foregone conclusion

2007-09-16T16:57:00.001-06:00

Jared Diamond's Collapse continues the same excellent tradition I expected after reading his earlier work, Guns, Germs and Steel. A series of fascinating societal profiles, from Easter Island to Norse Greenland to modern-day Montana, guide us through Diamond's central issues: Why and how do societies collapse, and how can we apply this knowledge to the benefit of our own society today?

The descriptive first half the book was more interesting to me than the later, prescriptive sections. I found myself inferring much of the later chapters' content from the allusions in the historical sections of the book. This doesn't invalidate his conclusions nor his recommendations to deal with them, which I found to be realistic and in some cases intriguing. (Who knew that some of the best nature preserves on the planet are in the middle of oilfields owned by the likes of Chevron?)

Overall, it's a very enjoyable book, with the only caveat being that the data geek in me would have liked to have seen more charts and tables to explore some of the premises he makes.