Congrats to Obama

Listening to: The DJ Z-Trip Obama Mix
I'm excited about Obama as Prez for many reasons... Here's the top 3:

• Restore the international image and peaceful relations of the US with our neighbors (the other 190 or so countries in the world). Rollback the imperialistic greed and cruelty of the Bush Doctrine. I love the US based on our highbrow principles and melting pot characteristics. I hope that we return to being an active and respectful member of the UN like when Bush Sr was President.
• Be a symbol of unity to the 300+ million people living in our great country. Improve race relations of all kinds (decreasing conscious and unconscious racial prejudice) and unify the "red" and "blue". I'm looking forward to being able to proudly say, "I'm an American" again, without having to explain or qualify it.
• Re-open the investigation into 9/11 destruction of the NYC World Trade Center. Been feeling extremely strong about this lately - I actually have been suppressing my thoughts/fears on what we may find for many years, and I don't think I'm the only one. Will compose my thoughts on this in another entry.

Top 3 things I'm worried about

• Since the democrats have grabbed both houses of congress and the executive branch, I'm worried about a swing to the other extreme. We need balance, not a swing between extremes.
• Who will be calling in debts after the inauguration? I believe Barak's campaign raised the most money of any political campaign ever? I just hope there aren't big favors owed back... the worst fear being some kind of morally corrupt shadow organization retaining a high level of control over the government - so that we don't really see change.
• An economic correction casting a shadow on an otherwise strong administration. I really don't think short term economic swings should be the primary concern of the executive branch. I am not an economic expert, but I did get a 5 on both AP economics exams and once created something on the order of 1000% return over approx 5 years in the stock market ;-)
  Capitalism has an innate business cycle which is natural and I feel serves an important function. Unfortunately, while in the recession phase of the cycle, many people tend to over-react - ironically, their attempts to "correct" the natural cycle often prolong the recession :-/
  I am very concerned with the governmental bailout/buyout of a percentage of the US banking industry. This is not capitalism, and I truly believe the government will/would run the banks MUCH worse than the free market. Perhaps this doesn't sound right at the moment, but if you think for a minute, it's very obvious. The banks got in trouble for making bad loans at too low of an interest rate. What is the governments solution? To forgive / continue the bad loans! - which digs the banking system into an even deeper hole! So the government is much less responsive to the business cycle and will therefore create deeper recessions.

To end on a light note, let's give Obama Girl some credit for the election result ;-)

Interesting Article on the demise of Friendster

A friend of mine sent me a fairly well-written article on the demise of Friendster - which at one time was the top social networking website on the internet: http://www.scribd.com/doc/80907/How-to-Kill-a-Great-Idea

The article does a nice job at making the story sound extraordinary. Which is fine, as I'm sure founding Friendster really was an awesome rollercoaster experience. It really was the first big internet hit after the dotcom bust, and it also faded relatively quickly.

However, I will claim that there was nothing extraordinary about the management failures and the loss of users. I would rate a number of managers/execs I have observed as making relatively good decisions, and others as making relatively bad decisions. However, the vast majority of them (> 90%?) seem to embrace the idea that they are "The Decider". I have actually had people tell me, "you are probably right, but I'm the boss and we're doing it my way even if it won't work". I think the #1 tempation of management is to think of it as yourself as a technical expert, best suited for making ALL decisions under you (and even above?) and that the only reason to delegate is that it's too much work for one person to do.

But that isn't really what leadership is about. Leadership really is a different skill than "doing". Something I read a long time ago, explained a good leader as having 3 fundamental characteristics:

• Vision
• Resolve
• Humility

There's nothing in there about brilliant engineering or decision making ability. A leader needs to set specific goals (things like "have more subscribers than myspace" or "implement a solution that meets these requirements on schedule"). Then you can't change your mind randomly, but instead need to have the conviction, resolve, and consistency that it is an achievable goal and the business unit will continue on the path towards that goal until it's achieved. Finally, there is the humility. Initially I had a hard time understanding the part of humility, but after letting it mill around in my head for a number of years, I now believe that humility is the most important of the three:

• Humility is required to admit when you are wrong and correct course - the vast majority of managers I've worked with work under a model where they attempt to never admit they are wrong. But it's really an important skill to recognize early when you are wrong, and how to fix the problem - and the possibilty of undoing should be considered as well.
• Humility is required to listen to underlings, peers, and even superiors suggestions and actually evaluate whether they are good ideas or not - and weigh them objectively against your own. Or even to give people a shot at implementing ideas you initially disagree with and objectively evaluating the results.
• Humility is required to understand that the leader doesn't actually do all the work. Delegation isn't a mechanism for multiplying an excellent worker by their number of subordinates. In order to be most effective, the people actually performing a task, should have input into how that task is accomplished and ownership of the task itself.

The type of leadership that killed Friendster (the same style as the overwhelming majority of business leaders out there) is obviously flawed. The leadership team didn't present a consistent vision, provide conviction that the vision was achievable, and they definitely didn't have any humility or allow technical experts within the organization to do their job. From that perspective, I do agree with Johnathan Abrams that failure was inevitable immediately after the $13 million funding round.

So has he learned a valuable lesson from Friendster and we can expect Socializer to be wildly successful? I wasn't convinced of this from the article. I am sure he learned tons, but (from the article) it didn't sound like humility was one of those lessons.

What is the #1 lesson from Friendster?

Of course, I have the humility to acknowledge this is only my opinion =). However, it is not based on reading the article, but rather from my exerience as an involved Friendster user from very early on, someone who met a girlfriend I dated for more than 3 years on the site, and an interested observer of the sites evolution and it's competition with MySpace.

The Tipping Point from Friendster to MySpace was very quick - I would say the key period was less than 3 months. And from the user perspective it was super easy to explain, predict, etc.

• The site was extremely slow almost from the beginning - this in itself was largely tolerated by the user base - to a point. Although I'm sure, if asked, many MySpace converts would have rated the speed as their top complaint. Sometimes it was ridiculously slow or wouldn't come up at all; however, during the 3 month period when they lost their lead in the US market, I would have to rate the page load speed as acceptable.
• Friendster took a restrictive approach to user profile content, at times blocking customizations as simple as changing the background of a user's profile. MySpace on the other hand allowed almost any technically feasible customization, and spawned hundreds of external site/theme generators which allow users to fully customize their profiles to be extremely unique. (these sites are so widely used that many of them are successful businesses - ex, 17 year old millionaire Ashley Qualls' whateverlife.com). User's have strong bonding feelings with this type of profile customization, and that was probably the biggest reason for the Early Adopters switch from Friendster to MySpace.
• Finally, Friendster quickly lost the elusive cool factor in a largely unfought battle with MySpace. MySpace created a more lively, more hip atmosphere. One of my friends described it way back then as almost like walking through a club where each persons profile is like a new room in the club, they have their favorite music playing, the room is decorated with all kinds of fun pictures and their top friends are featured prominently. Friendster did not capture this experience. MySpace also threw parties at trendy locations in cities around the country (I tried to get into one in LA - at a time when Friendster was still the leading site - and was one of thousands who didn't make it inside). On top of that, they promoted bands, got celebrities to create profiles on the site, etc. They consciously devoted lots of effort into making the site cool and tieing it into existing popular culture, while Friendster did not.

How can a fix for all these problems be summed up in a single lesson? Actually, very easily, and I feel it's the #1 key lesson for ALL online (and many offline) businesses with large numbers of users. This lesson is to listen to the users. It's almost too simple (and therefore almost always overlooked by "decider" style managers who don't have much humility). Anyone in a position to serve more customers than they can talk to in a single day, really should read the Cluetrain Manifesto - this is the #1 topic of the book. They do an excellent job of explaining why this is so important, and how our current online world enables companies to relate to their users in a way that was not nearly as possible before.

Friendster obviously did very little listening to their users. Instead of solving the user's compliants, or even focusing on positive user feedback they internally generated all their work. And unfortunately, I really do think this is the prevalent mode of business operations in the US right now. Hahaha - although it sounds like something out of the twilight zone in the article when it is mentioned, I have no difficultly envisioning the meeting of the execs when they are dismayed to learn that over half the users are from the Philippines (something I'm positive I knew before that meeting occurred - through anecdotal data), and they consider the idea of blocking Filipinos from using the site! ROTFL! It's disgraceful, but once again, super common... Even the site which the Friendster article is on (Scribd.com) has a fatal flaw for article content - their flash based reader is a much worse reading experience than reading a typical web page. I've worked at a company whose first assumption about their customers is that they are too stupid to use a competitor's "superior" product. If that isn't a backwards vision, I don't know what is.

Personal happiness vs world events

Maybe I've hit a string of luck lately, or I really enjoyed my recent vacation, or maybe some recent events keep reiterating that life is short, or maybe I've been getting just enough exercise to keep the endorphins pumping...   Maybe the 40 hour/week gig isn't putting mood altering stress on me at the moment...

Whatever the explanation, despite news of economic turmoil, a plumetting DJIA, and a high-stakes election hanging in the blanance, my mental state has been very positive lately.  Feels like I've got an excess of love to give.   I love my family, friends, cat, software, basketball, nature, teaching, and many other things.

Have to classify it as a love of life in general.

Really only have 2 major concerns at the monent...    cleaning my condo and making it into a sweet place to live & a bit of concern over the election.  In the grand scheme of things, a little cleaning isn't very major and Obama gives me hope that the US can correct course and stop abusing it's "lone superpower" status for a bit.  With any luck we can make a return toward role model status in international relations.  Granted, we've never been perfect, but I'm old enough to remember a time when rumors of the US pre-emptively invading a soverign nation (such as Iran or North Korea) would have been laughable.  I strongly believe that such actions are the equivalent to mortgaging our future for short term "wins".

In fact if I was a terrorist circa 2000 bent on the seemingly impossible task of the destruction of the US, dragging the nearly unchallenged leader of the world down to the level of an international thug would be the first order of business.  I was convinced for years that didn't make any sense for a motivation to attack the World Trade Center; however, the events of the past 7 years have played out much differently than I would have predicted.

I'm sure to a supporter of the Bush administration, this sentiment sounds blasphemous or at least anti-patriotic...    Perhaps a well known allegory has the best chance of getting the point across - and I'll present it in the form of a question from a galaxy far far away:

What would the Rebels in Star Wars (Leia, Luke, Han, etc) be if the Empire was merely a successful economic power who promoted human rights, a fight against starvation on the poorest planets, and whose most threatening "weapon" was economic sanctions?

Thinking about Snowboarding again

There was one cold night here in sunny San Diego - Sunday night - right when we returned from Michigan (where it was warm for early October - ironically), and it got me thinking of winter.

And when I think of winter, I start thinking of snowboarding...

It's 75 degrees again now, but I had to watch this snowboarding subaru video again, it's awesome:

And now I wish I was on the slopes - just like 7 months back to the day when we were in Mammoth for the weekend and it snowed the entire weekend - perfect snow!

Instead I've got taxes to work on today - blah - that's what I get for filing a 6 month extension - lol

African American - European American Implicit Association Test

Middle of the night, I should be asleep, but instead I am reading blink, by Malcolm Gladwell. Since understanding how the brain works is one of the most interesting topics I've encountered in life, I am finding it a fascinating read.

Just finished a section on unconscious preference of one race versus another. They reference a Harvard study which claims to be able to measure this type of preference, so I had to check it out. I took the African American - European American Implicit Association demo test and actually wasn't overly surprised that I registered a Moderate automatic preference for European Americans over African Americans.

Like many/most people I know, I don't consider myself a racist... However, I definitely will agree that I have been influenced by some racial programming. As I first learned in Sociology 1A as a college freshman, it is impossible to completely separate the thoughts of the individual from the the thoughts of society. So it's natural for me to hypothesize that this test measures reveals this unconscious programming - instilled by society. The aggregate results (a bell curve) shifted drastically in one direction fit this hypothesis perfectly. Predicting an individual's actions is another story - much more tricky... Perhaps with an understanding of how much that individual rely's on the sub-conscious for certain types of decisions, and the results from the IAT, then some determination could be made. I've been realizing more and more lately that I'm more of a conscious person than most. It's not (at this moment) meant as bragging, but I suppose that's why the results don't bother me too much. I feel that my actions on important topics such as whether or not to hire someone, wouldn't be significantly adversely impacted by this unconscious preference. And unfortunately, although I don't have a strong feel for the numbers, I do often feel in the minority as far as a preference for conscious thought goes. It impacts me in interesting ways - for instance, I have been told by coworkers that there is an impression that I am slow, even though there are many important tasks that I can accomplish in a small fraction of the time of anyone else in the group. I bet that the reason that this isn't a glaring contradiction to them is that they are probably picking up my preference for conscious thought. So, perhaps with more reliance on unconscious thought, it is possible to achieve much faster average responses on a set of decisions, but with the price that the decisions can be swayed by possibly unrelated "automatic preferences". And these preferences aren't nearly as abstract as race - for instance, colleagues often have interesting preferences for things like starting from scratch over extending an existing system, or using new technology over old, and definitely there are unconscious preferences for particular technologies. I need to figure out a better way to bill my strengths though, because "slow" is just not cutting it... Perhaps "thinking out of the box" will work =)

Even if one does not act on this type of unconscious prompting, it definitely has influence... I was amazed at another study, referenced in blink, which found that when quizzing black college students with 20 questions from the GRE, that their scores were cut in half (on average) by asking them first to indicate what race they are. That is intensely disturbing! And they had no understanding of what happened... My emphasis for myself is at least to realize some of the unconscious influences as they impact my decisions. Lately, I have had exposure to a larger number of African Americans, and I actually have noticed a number of interesting unconscious thoughts/impressions bubbling to the surface that I had sort of assumed I didn't have. I don't think they are adversely affecting my actions, but I assume that given the right set of circumstances, they probably could...

Even more interesting than just identifying these types of subconscious society influenced preferences would be research into how this programming could be changed - society wide...

For instance, my impression is that in the US, there is a bias against Polish people as less intelligent than average. Since I am 1/4 Polish, I have read up on the topic a bit, and actually Poland has produced many brilliant scientists - probably more than their share worldwide. I'm sure I'm blood biased, but I really didn't form too much confidence around the idea of polish intelligence until a fair amount of research - including reading James A Mitcher's Poland, studying the discoveries of Polish academics, and meeting people from Poland. My impression of the Polish people, based on this moderate amount of reading is that they are above average on both peacefulness and intelligence. However, I bet that an IAT to determine associations of US society towards Polish intelligence, would show that the predominant opinion is much more in line with the jokes from popular culture.

Perhaps there is a way to shift these impressions... Marketing Hypnosis (ex: coke vs pepsi) does impact us at an unconscious level - perhaps the same approach could be effective for social issues. A problem with existing programs - ex: affirmative action, is that they can be seen as reinforcing the idea that African Americans are not as smart... Getting a black student into college and then having him get 50% of his test questions wrong because of racial priming before the exam doesn't really fix anything...

Related Research that I think would be interesting

• To see how these opinions vary by country. Even though we appear to be moving towards a global society/culture, I bet there would be some interesting findings there. One that I often think about is "entrepreneurial spirit", or the tendency to own one's own business - I know there are significant differences from country to country on that one, and somehow in corporate driven America, I feel like the entrepreneurial spirit is fading. And then comparing that with the stock market and small business performance in that country over a number of years.
• To see how the faces of black celebrities (or look alikes?) fare... Is this effect really race specific, or are there ways to tweak the results? For example, if using scary looking white faces and friendly and/or famous/respected looking black faces skews the results in favor of African Americans, what would that mean? Could it diminish the significance of the "automatic preference"?
• There are also interesting studies that could be done on how individual experiences play into mix. For example, blink references a speed dating study, where people changed what they said they were looking for based on who they met. And I have noticed in friends that a very small set of experiences can reinforce a popular stereotype. Before that experience they can seem totally open-minded, but then one bad experience can cause them to switch entirely. Something along the lines of, "well I gave them a chance, and it didn't work out... the popular opinion must be right about x". Teaching people how to avoid that type of "bad statistics prejudice" might be a useful thing also.
  
• For example, it would be interesting to ask of a person's top 10 friends, how many of them are African American and see how that changes the results.

I will have to finish the book... I imagine he offers some practical suggestions in later sections.

USA Basketball Gold Medal Game

The USA Men's Basketball Olympic Team - nicknamed the Redeem Team (I agree with Kobe, that's a silly name), brought the Olympic gold medal back to the US on August 24th, 2008. The reason the US needed redemption was that Argentina won Olympic gold in 2004 and USA was stuck with bronze. You'd think that would "piss" them off enough to return to dominance in international play, but in 2006 Spain won the FIBA world championship. (The NBA needs to stop calling the NBA champion the "world champion" when there is a tournament that more legitimately awards that title).

Team USA swept through the first 8 games of the tournament with nearly a 30 average margin of victory. This includes a 37 point victory over Spain, who turned out to be the last team left standing and the opponent in the Gold Medal game. That doesn't mean that the international competition is fierce. All the top international teams have 2-3 (sometimes more) NBA players/prospects, and when watching the teams play, one doesn't necessarily spot the NBA players as significantly better than the rest of the team.

The Gold Medal game came on at 11:30pm. My biggest complaint with NBC's Olympic coverage, even though all TV coverage was in HD, and they got special purpose olympic channels, and they posted even more hours online, was that they just didn't focus at all on giving people the tools to find the content that they wanted to see. The schedules were all screwy, the searching online was pathetic. Just a lack of attention to what in my mind is the most important element of Olympic coverage.

Until about 11:50pm, I thought the game would be on at 2:30am... Until finally someone (I think it was Bob Costas) mentioned the 2:30 time was Eastern time zone...
doh! Not even the website, which had many times in Pacific (I'd hope though my time zone preference) had the right time. Luckily I'd inadvertently recorded the first 20 mins, and I did feel happy to watch what turned out to be an awesome Gold Medal game live.

Bill Simmons takes it to next level by claiming that practically no one besides him saw it live. He does capture the game fairly well, so if you missed it, check it out:
http://sports.espn.go.com/espnmag/story?section=magazine&id=3575385
ESPN is ridiculous for not automatically including dates on their articles, but I believe the article was posted today - 9/12/08 - at least that's the first time it's shown up as a highlighted article.

I disagree with him though about not wanting the game to be aired again... and that brings me back to my biggest complaint about the Olympic coverage. Google takes you here, which has an article and highlights, but no link to the actual game: http://www.nbcolympics.com/basketball/news/newsid=254238.html#silencing+critics

The whole game was difficult to find (in that it took me longer than 5 minutes to find and there were indications along the way that it wouldn't be available)... So, although it's not as nice as watching on a big screen TV with a nice sound system, if you potentially might watch any basketball game online, it should be this one:
First link worked for me:
http://www.nbcolympics.com/video/player.html?assetid=0824_hd_bkm_en191&channelcode=sportbk
Second link is the one NBC gives for sharing:
http://www.nbcolympics.com/video/share.html?videoid=0824_HD_BKM_EN191

James got me a Dwyane Wade jersey for my birthday, so I'll have a memento of the game for some time to come =)

----
And what was up with Bob Costas during this Olympics? Was I the only one who thought he was about 100x more irreverent than I've ever seen him while covering a sporting event?

Check off a childhood dream

Ever since I can remember, I've wanted to go skydiving.
I finally went on Monday (Labor Day)! It was awesome! Totally worth the time, effort, $, etc.

I wanted to do the Accelerated Free Fall level 1 as opposed to a tandem jump, because that's always what the dream was - to jump out of a plane by myself.  Well for AFF level 1 there is an instructor who jumps on either side of you.  It turned out to be a good thing that they were there, as I had a bit of hesitation around 5200 feet (we were trained to pull the shoot at 5000 feet).  For some reason I started thinking of the reserve parachute instead of pulling the main chute.  Pat (the instructor I'd spent ~6 hours with in AFF training) pulled the chute for me.

The experience of actually jumping out of a plane somewhere between 12 and 13,000 feet was amazing...  Free fall is a really cool experience, and gliding and controlling the parachute to a soft landing was very cool as well.  All in all it was a very smooth experience, and I'd recommend it to anyone who is interested.  Perris Valley Skydiving has gotta be among the best and safest places in the world to skydive.  The staff was very professional and super safety conscious.

Haha - I'm tempted to go again and pull the chute properly =)

Video is below.

If you want to skip to the interesting part, it starts right around half way through.

Torrey Pines 9th grader passes Computer Science AP Exam, skips high school class

From Carmel Valley News/Del Mar Village Voice August 28, 2008 page 21
Torrey Pines 9th grader passes Computer Science AP Exam, skips high school class

By Vic Wintriss
When Sean Kemper tried to enroll in the Torrey Pines Computer Science Advanced Placement class, he was informed that, as a freshman, he was not eligible to take the course. Torrey Pines High School policy does not permit freshmen to take advanced
placement courses. The Computer Science AP exam is given each year in Java, a popular, Object-Oriented computer programming language that Sean had been learning at Wintriss Technical Schools, in Carmel Valley. He felt confident that since he had
been studying the language for two years, he was prepared to take the exam without taking the formal high school class. Sean signed up for the May exam and recently learned that he had passed with a score of 4 out of 5, sufficient to qualify for college credit. “It was easy,” Sean said.

Sean, along with his brother Ryan and friend Matt Allen, have been attending WTS learning to write fun game programs such as Tic-Tac-Toe, Pong and Asteroids and controlling robots from teacher Stanley Kurdziel, who works as a Java programmer
for Leap Wireless in San Diego and is a volunteer teacher at WTS. “I knew he would pass the test,” Stanley said.

The trio, calling themselves Team Squirrel, recently won second place in the International Autonomous Robot Contest, held at the Del Mar Fair.
They put to use all their classroom learning to program, in Java, a Sun Microsystems SPOT controller to autonomously guide a Roomba vacuum cleaner through a maze and race against other robots through an obstacle course. Sean’s brother Ryan is planning
on taking the Computer Science AP exam this year, in the seventh grade.

Wintriss Technical Schools offers after school and weekend classes in Java to kids starting in the fifth grade teaching Java in a unique, kid-appropriate, fun-filled way.

For more information, visit http://wintrisstech.org

Over the ex

I didn't expect to be writing another entry on this topic, since I felt like I should have been over my ex long ago; However, for the past few weeks I'd been thinking of her frequently and (once again) wondering what I could have done differently. I even IM'd her and told her I missed her. (don't even recall the response, but it didn't break from the predicted negative reaction)

Today, thankfully, that all changed... in a blink!

While my Dad was living with me last year, he read a book titled Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell. He said it was good, and left it with me - I added it to the "reading queue" section of my bookcase, which unfortunately doesn't get much attention. Today I was reminded of the book through a random IM conversation, actually talking about another book and Blink was mentioned as somehow similar. That was enough to get me to pick it up and take a look.

The book starts off talking about a situation where the Getty museum buys a fake sculpture for almost $10 million dollars. They didn't realize it was a fake through fancy analysis or extended research, which was done before purchasing the sculpture, but instead it was the first impression that a number of experts had when looking at the piece. They couldn't explain it, but the piece didn't "feel right" to them. That reminded me of something my MoM said about seeing the ex and I together almost one year ago. She was visiting San Diego for my birthday and it was her first glimpse of us in about 3 months. It's quite interesting to me that she had that impression, as she was probably 50 feet away at the time and the ex and I were shopping for stuff for my birthday party in a cheerful way. Post breakup (a little over one month after the costco encounter), when my MoM told me about her impression, I didn't really believe her.

I continued reading, and coincidentally, the next section was on relationship analysis. The topic was the research of a fellow named John Gottman who uses extremely analytical techniques to analyze the interaction between newlyweds. He records couples for 15 minutes and asks them to discuss how they met and anything contentious in their relationship. Then he reviews the video using an amazingly rigorous analysis. It turns out that after watching only 15 minutes of the couples talking he can predict with 90% accuracy whether they are together 15 years later.

The analysis is fairly strict and isn't fooled by couples who are very polite and appear fine on the surface. For instance, the example couple in the book is like this, they are joking and laughing while talking; however, some of the actions have deeper implications. When she rolls her eyes, that indicates contempt for him, one of the worst things for a relationship - and when he ignores what she is saying and rephrases his previous point, that indicates defensiveness, also another bad sign. As I was reading this, I realized that despite the idyllic nature of the three and a half year relationship, that it definitely had fundamental problems from the beginning as well. This was an amazingly great realization for me, as I was having a lot of trouble categorizing it as a bad realationship and understanding why it had to end. And even if it was bad, I was having trouble rationalizing how that didn't imply that there was something wrong with me. During the time we were together, no one ever said to me that they saw any problems with our relationship, in fact it was exactly the opposite. She has strong charisma and pretty much everyone I knew loved her immediately upon meeting her. Even after the breakup, only one friend said that they didn't think she was right for me (and she got that impression from a super tiny set of data, as Gladwell calls it "thin-slicing"). Despite this, and the fact that I was extremely happy with the relationship at least 98% of the time, I'm highly confident that at any point during the relationship we would have resoundingly failed Gottman's 15 minute analysis.

Why? To start off, she was never happy with the story of us meeting, so if we had started off with that, she would have been throwing unhappy signals immediately. I thought it was a cute story, and tried to modify in some way that she liked, but never did find a way to do that. Then we could have discussed any simple meaningless thing we disagreed on, and while there were only a handfull of things (ranging from the movie Memento to proper significant other board game behavior), we would have been stuck on that topic until the 15 minutes were up (and probably an hour if they didn't stop us). I don't think we ever once resolved a disagreement, no matter how small, during the entire relationship. We never really escalated disagreements, but we didn't resolve them either. I tried many different ways to get resolution, but pretty much ended up always giving in and just avoiding any future related conflict. She never gave in at the moment, but often apologized later. I thought that was good, but I suppose for a relationship to be healthy that can't be the only possible way to resolve a disagreement.

I had been repeating to myself for a year that there's nothing I could have done to keep her from leaving, but I never quite bought into it. My normal way of thinking about life is that if you want something bad enough then through persistence, creativity, hard work, and luck you can make it happen. So that makes it tough for me to understand that something like the relationship I had thought of as the most important in my life, would be completely outside of my control. However, that's what the truth turned out to be. The relationship wasn't "right" from the beginning.

Of course, when I told some friends about it taking nearly a year to get over her, then they started saying "oh yeah, that's fine - I'm surprised it didn't take longer"... LOL - But I suppose they were just trying to help me before when they said things like "Just get over her. Stop thinking about her"... That's friends for ya =) I think I'll return to my previous opinion of not weighting friend's opinions on people I'm dating higher than my own.

So now, with the weight of the relationship lifted from my shoulders, I feel free to go on living my life. In the end, I can't fault myself for not realizing the relationship was doomed, it was good while it lasted and I now can also believe that it set the foundation for even better relationships in the future. Funny thing, while I was grasping at straws, trying to encourage the ex to give our relationship another chance, I bought a book by John Gottman called The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work - I pretty much had put it into the "I'll never read" category, but now that he's played a key part in me getting over her, I may have to read it one of these days.

the road more traveled by

maybe it's not such a bad thing to have avoided the path more commonly traveled - at least for a bit... not sure exactly where the other path is leading, but certainly I'll look back one day and be glad.


youtube: I guess you'll do

And what's up with all these video posts? Gotta actually write something one of these days... I'm sure I have some comentary on the upcoming election, summer in San Diego, blue cars, silly cats, or something else amazingly entertaining to at least 1/1000th of the people that read it.

And, just cause I really don't have a hell of a lot else on my mind lately, here's a bonus robot video:


youtube: Micromouse - 2005 Expert winning robot

Our contest is significantly less expert... Haha - it should turn out well, but I'm sure the 2nd annual contest will have much more impressive videos =P

Ewok Gospel

Even though I classify myself as an Ewok hater, they did have the cuddly aspect - and I can appreciate cuddliness =)

The reason I am posting it though, is that this video reminds me why I love the internet:

Facebook Gangsta

I prefer myspace, but game recognizes game ;-)

The Key

(flashback to approximately 6 months ago)
She repeated "I gave you the key for a reason"... After hearing that a few times, including from her friends, this phrase stuck in my head as if it was some kind of magic spell that I just needed to figure out how to invoke to end our separation.

Somehow though, if the reason for the key was that I would still be a part of her life and show up at her apartment unannounced, this reason never materialized in my reality. The more I tried to remain close to her, the further away she became. I tried everything I could, including avoiding her for some time, hoping the absence would make her heart grow fonder - and other things that I'm too embarrassed to write about. She never once gave me a glimmer of hope and more often than not was insulting/hurtful in her responses (totally out of character of the first 3.5 years of our relationship).

Unable to unlock it's secret, I placed the key on a Fleur-de-lis belt buckle I had purchased before she moved out, and put it into the glovebox of my car. As I worked through my emotions of being rejected/abandoned; I realized that I couldn't be depressed or thinking of her every single moment of my day-to-day life, and I redirected all thoughts of getting back together into the key.

As I slowly moved on, and perhaps understood some of the reasons why we couldn't be together, the key became a physical block against actually letting her go. No matter how much I told myself that I didn't need her, the key was the proof that I was still holding onto the hope of a return to dating. The key came up one time while talking to her. It was when she gave me back my key and she asked me for her key back. I didn't say too much, and she said something along the lines of, "I figured you would lose it".

(back to present time)
I've known for some time that I've needed to return the key in order to recover fully, but only today felt that I was up to doing it.

I wrote a short note to attach (thought of writing on a napkin like her Christmas note to me, but instead hand wrote neatly on a white piece of paper):

Endearest Fleur-de-lis,
I wish you luck with your new life. I'm sure that everything will work out perfectly fine for you, but even so nothing will ever convince me that you are better off without me.

Of course that is not my problem. But I do need to convince myself that I am better off without you. One step along that path is to return your key.
-sek

I tried to keep it as short and to the point as possible (and hopefully not overly desperate). Although I considered leaving the key without a note, I think the note was required in order to get "the last attempt" out of my system. Certainly, I would like for her to experience some emotion and maybe remember our relationship fondly when she sees the key, but really, I just needed to close the door on the past and truly let go.

Approaching her apartment with the key in my hand, feeling the cold, smooth metal of the belt buckle, it began to feel heavy and difficult to carry. The Lord of the Rings came to mind, along with the thought that this was probably the silliest thing I've ever done. Excuses started floating through my mind...

• What if she was thinking about contacting me and this changes her mind? - nah, that's a stupid thought - you are just trying to wimp out
  
• How can I get through the gated entrance? - just wait for a car to go in front
• What if she's there? - unlikely, it's 2:30pm, she'll be at work, and if not, you'll see her car and can turn around

I open the door, see Jesus on the couch, and have a quick flood of emotion. I leave the key and note on the table and start to leave, but realize that it's a deadbolt only lock and there's no way to lock from the inside. Maybe it would add to the dramatic effect if the door was unlocked when she returns, but that's not my style. I quickly came up with a solution of separating the buckle and the key and then slipping the key under the door... Maybe that's good - the key was reduced to it's physical task and no longer emotionally linked with the Fleur-de-lis. Ok, kneeling at her door and thinking these stupid thoughts, this is definitely the silliest thing I've ever done!

Now there is no longer any physical thing in this world that is preventing me from moving on... it's definitely over... a lot less likely I'd take her back even if she did want to get back together.

As I walked back to my car, I felt a sense of relief & a release from the unrealistic expectation that I was holding onto. I think the worst part of letting go is the acknowledgment of failure at something that I put my full 100% effort into. But people who eventually achieve great success fail many times along the way. This was definitely a learning experience for me. And so, in the book of my life, this was the last page of the chapter where she was the #1 guest star.

I am content that I gave it my all, and I'm not listening to any critics, friend, foe, or other, who may say that I could have done anything differently. I've made my peace with it and am moving on with my life.

Common - Drivin’ Me Wild

Why are opposite sex relationships so much of a challenge? Seems whatever the other person really wants is the one thing you’d rather not give (or can’t give) and vise versa...



Common - Drivin’ Me Wild Lyrics

The Break Up

What started off as a pretty great day ended up as a bigger downer than I've had in quite a while. Interestingly (or maybe not), my opinion of how I feel about being single corresponded almost exactly with how I felt over the course of this particular day.

Woke up at about 8:30 this morning with a nice girl in the bed next to me. We had a good time waking each other up - or perhaps I was doing more of the waking, as she's not used to being up quite so early.

After departing the bed, I finished the laudry from the night before, got sheets washed, bed made, and the bathroom cleaned. Ok, so my female companion cleaned the bathroom - which was extremely nice of her (let's just say that my bathroom hasn't been this clean in a VERY long time). Having my room so much cleaner in one day boosted my hope of progressing even more with cleaning the place... At that moment, more so than any other in the last 6 months, I felt that I was beginning to understand why people often claim it's good to be single. Previous to that moment, I've always thought that was just what people said who:

• a) are comforting someone who isn't in a relationship,
• b) aren't in a relationship, but are avoiding being sad about it,
• c) are currently in a relationship, but are putting a grass is greener, devil's advocate spin on their current situation.

To continue with the story of today... I taught the kids at 2pm and had a nice class. I always enjoy teaching them, but today was the first day I had an audience. The observer was another girl I've been dating who requested to watch a class (different from the bathroom cleaning girl). Ok, so some readers may detect a problem here. Or maybe they won't? I don't know what the current prevailing societal views on dating multiple people similtaneously are. Apparently lesbianisn is super trendy, but I'm not sure if that loosening of traditional rules has any impact on other aspects of relationships. Anyway, I think she enjoyed meeting Vic and the kids and had a nice time.

After the class, we went to Marshalls, bought some clothes and trinkets, had a light dinner at Panera Bread, and hung out there until they closed. So far so good... Pretty much all I could ask for from a Sunday - in fact, I'd say it was far above average.

After returning home, the conversation ended up in a bit of a sad place - we were joking around and she ended up hurt over the fact that I wasn't willing to be exclusive with her. It's not like she was being at all unreasonable, all she wanted from me was one very simple request... pretty much the basic requirement for any romantic relationship: to say that I wouldn't date other people at the same time. Although, I'm fairly certain she would have settled for affirmation that it was possible I would be exclusive with her someday. She is a great person: smart, sexy, nurturing, and understanding - she totally deserves to have that simple request and so much more honored. It even would have made me temporarily happy to acquiese. The irony, and perhaps this is the central irony of all "amicable" break-ups is that I didn't want to string her along by being dishonest - so I didn't say it. She, to her credit, decided that it was time for her to go...

Now I'm left to myself, to contemplate that this is the closest I've come to actually breaking up with someone... It doesn't feel good at all, at this moment it seems like I should have just lied. I've always thought it was a positive character trait that I'm not the kind to break up casually. Isn't that the whole point of being commited? But perhaps there is another side to this as well? If you are the type that never breaks up, is that really just pushing 100% of the decision as to whether you are in a good relationship to the other person?

After I walked her to her car, the last thing she said was "I love you Stan"... I wanted to reciprocate, because I really do love her, but I couldn't imagine how that would make her feel any better, and I was silent. As she drove away, I had an eerie feeling - similar to the times in the past when girls have broken up with me. But that's not what just happened here... Then why am I crying? it's pretty good be single huh?

Expectations, insomnia, and defeat

It's 4am, and I'm in bed but not yet asleep...
Some days this happens to me - it's possible it could have to do with the concentrated Vietnamese iced coffee I had at lunch, but as that was well over 12 hours ago, it's definitely not the only reason I'm awake. I'm more than physically able to fall asleep at the moment but my mind won't let go of consciousness. The best way I can describe my current mood / predicament is by referencing the most memorable, recurring situation I encounter in my dreams. It's a situation where I'm in a hurry or trying to get somewhere for some important reason and I'm running. More accurately, I'm attempting to run, because I'm barely moving. It feels like I'm stuck in some type of thick gel and the faster I try to move, the slower I actually move. However, due to the importance of rapid movement, despite the fact that logic would dictate a different course of action, I'm still putting 110% effort into flexing my muscles in an attempt to run.

So, I've been up all night coding, chatting, reading, or doing other random crap on my laptop. Looking back or forward in time tells me that there's nothing significant that I can accomplish in however many minutes I have available tonight. And even if I did accomplish some significant task, it would cost me nearly all my productivity and motivation tomorrow. But somehow, these are the times when that type of logic doesn't prevent the frustration of running at 110% in an unknown direction, where trying harder only makes me go slower, and yet trying harder seems to be the only answer left. Is this what others are experiencing when they say they have insomnia? Being someone who falls asleep easily (usually even if I'm trying to stay awake), I don't have too much of an understanding of what insomnia is.

Perhaps the trigger for my current insomnia is from an encounter with a friend's 10 year old nephew earlier today who commented on the asteroid game I was working on in support of the class I'm teaching. He commented on a concurrency bug I was fixing and showed me the BREW game he was playing on his phone. Somehow the comparison of the asteroids game I was working on to the sophistication of the game on the tiny handheld device hit me hard. The game he's playing is an insignificant piece of code, and yet it's sophistication makes the asteroids game look completely pointless - like a toddler's scribbles vs a highly detailed painting of a master.
Occasionally, at moments such as that, I am astounded by the fact that there is good software out there. Self doubt rears it's ugly head and makes me question my own software ability... When I think about it, the facts are in my favor: I am highly productive at work, always have been in every job I've had. It's extremely rare to find someone who's significantly faster than me at any individual task. My focus over the longer term is on process, management, organization, cooperation, etc This agrees with the prevailing opinion of software literature, for example: The Mythical 5%

Having reached some type of plateau at my current job, I have been thinking lately about what my next step is on the path towards running an insanely successful software company is. It's possible that it's just to taste a bit more success on a few larger projects, so that self-doubt is less capable of bothering me. Or perhaps even just observe the development of some software that turns out with such a more visually stunning product than the enterprise middleware I've worked with for most of my career.

I really have enjoyed teaching the kids the asteroids game, and yet I can't get a small saying out of my head: Those who can't do teach. It seems to have some veracity to it.... but, I've often thought that teaching allows one to understand their subject matter at an even deeper level and should help to improve productivity. Beyond teaching coworkers, kids, etc, I spend a high percentage of my free time on the computer coding, reading, planning, etc, so there really isn't much more muscle flexing I can put into becoming a more successful software developer.

I do believe the saying that one can only realize defeat if they admit to that defeat... Perhaps the currently non-functioning answer to the effort dilemma is to realize: I am where I am, I'll eventually get where I'm going, and I will never admit defeat.

Although that bit of wisdom sounds nice, there's nothing there which my mind hadn't already realized or just isn't listening too; however, it seems that writing this entry did the trick. I can feel the blackness of sleep, with it's promise of starting over fresh in the morning, beginning to drift over me...

I wonder if I'll be running in place in my dreams...

Millionaire Matchmaker on The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch

I've gotten hooked on Donny Deutsch's show "The Big Idea" lately. It's cool to see people in various states of elevated financial success. It's like a dose of "It's possible!" once a week =)

Saw the Millionaire Matchmaker on there tonight. I think she's mainly focused on chicas snaring rich dudes, but Donny said "don't be sexist" and they discussed a guy finding a rich girl too. I know when I saw a girl at the mall on Sunday, picking up her Jaguar XK-R from the valet car wash, I was intrigued... And when I see a girl in a SL600 or Maserati Coupe or Lambo Gallardo (all sighted within 5 miles of my place) it definitely catches my attention. I don't think I am so shallow that I would be happy pursuing someone just for money, but there is something exciting about thinking about matching up with someone like that. I suppose it would be a total validation of my own worth to have someone like that interested in me. Plus, I have aspirations of starting multiple businesses and need to start associating with other successful people in order to get mentorship, ideas, etc.
Google found Wiki How / Find a Rich Woman To Date - LOL

I've often thought that one of my gf's responsibilities is to counter balance my natural frugal tendencies and convince me it's ok to spend a little money on myself. Somehow, I have some guilt about spending money on myself... Perhaps it's the midwest upbringing, or the fact that some of my family isn't exactly rolling or just habit - not sure. Certainly some chick driving a 100k plus car would have a counterbalancing effect without even saying a word.

I've gotta get a haircut... and clean/fixup my condo =) and start making more money - LOL

I love being a Teacher

I'm on a teaching high the last couple days. I've always thought I'd make a good teacher, and over the years I've done a lot of unofficial teaching of classmates and coworkers; but since I started volunteering at Wintriss Technical School, I really am officially a teacher. (@see previous entry).
I've been teaching the same class for about 5 months now. It's tons of fun, very rewarding and definitely an ideal way for me to "give back".
I had an idea of having the school do some tutoring for intro programming classes for college students too, and a little over a week ago, got the first bite from a extension student. On Friday, met up with her at Chili's for the 5th-7th hours of tutoring on her final project. Initially she was struggling with the basic syntax a little and didn't really know where to start with creating her final project. What kind of introductory Java class says "build whatever program you want" for the final project? LOL - Deciding what to build is often the hardest part of coding!
I was questioning the decision to do tutoring for the first few hours, as the last thing I want is to get caught up in additional stress trying to get someone's project done on time. There's even an ethical dilemma since there could be situations where it's easiest to just feed answers/code - but that's totally not what I want to do - I want to actually have the student do their own work and just help them understand the concepts. In this case, for the rate that I was charging, I didn't feel obligated to achieve anything if the student can't create the code themselves. Ahh - the advantages of undercharging =P
After Friday's session, drinking at happy hour with coworkers while tutoring, which ended with getting her project (A TicTacToe game) done and seeing her happiness and sense of accomplishment; tutoring seemed like a good idea again. I think I also saw her improve somewhat in her coding confidence.

On Saturday, I taught my normal WTS class and learned that a scheme I came up with to get them coding at home worked even better/faster than anticipated. Two weeks ago, I gave them a code challenge to inspire them to get their home computer setup with the IDE, java, subversion, etc. I figured it would take a few challenges before they got hooked, but the first week one of the kids solved the problem and the next week he and his brother started working on making improvements to their Asteroids Game (the current in class project) at home. So rewarding to have that kind of response! I can see why people become teachers now =)

And then tonight, we had a teacher's meeting at the school. That was cool too. I've been involved in a number of startup business ventures, but this one is coming totally out of the blue. My motivation didn't have anything to do with money or even making the business succeed - I'm not even getting paid at the moment. Right now we just have one 4 pupil classroom, but Vic has a vision of expanding the business to 4 more San Diego locations and then from there creating 5 cluster branches throughout the US. I'm not going to worry too much about all that expansion, cause I'm totally happy just to teach a class or two a week - expand the curriculum, help Vic with programming concepts, etc. Would be ideal to find some contract work for about $125/hour where I can work in between 20-40 flexible hours / week depending on my availability... I am totally worth at least that much for a software development organization looking to improve their quality & development process, a software architect, or even just looking for a coder who will have a positive impact on the overall codebase, group dynamics, etc. If I had a position like that, then I could spend more time on WTS and other ventures/activities.

Email to grand-boss

I felt like I should have gotten high-fives from the Bobs after sending this email to my boss's boss last night ;-)

--------------------------------
From: SEK
To: Grand Boss
Sent: Wed 2/27/2008 8:03 PM
--------------------------------

Hi Michael,

Thanks for discussing the implications of MT’s departure and your ideas on how we can cope with that as a group. As well as the ideas on making the group more efficient (contractor usage, etc)

I love to provide input into these areas – if you haven’t noticed, I have a lot of ideas on how to improve process, reduce costs, and in general make IT Apps more efficient.

Diminishing marginal returns and per project contractor ramp up times are definitely a drain on our project implementation efficiency that we should weight against the cost. Strangely enough, the thing I most hate to hear from “the business” is “cost is no object”. Every time that has happened in the past (not just as Cricket), the work which gets done is non-relevant, non-fun, and in the end against every businesses objective of making money.

I wanted to answer your question on how long it would have taken me to implement the CSP POS project all by myself.
We actually got really lucky with the contractors on the POS project. I rate our efficiency as follows:

Starting with myself at 100%, I’d say Protik comes in at 90% - He’s been a great asset on the team. He’s been on the same page with the project goals since day one and also assisting with much of the management task load. After that I’d rate the 3 most efficient contractors at 50% each, and the 3 less efficient contractors as 25%. That’s 415% total, but Protik and I probably dropped from our individual speeds due to management responsibilities.

In conclusion, I wouldn’t be surprised if I would have been able to complete the development in 3x the time that we took. I’d probably have had to have been whipped a few times to achieve that speed on my own. Since my #1 personal work goal is to learn skills needed to run a software company, I was excited at the challenge of managing the large team and put in a lot of extra effort to keep the team as efficient as possible. Plus there are some benefits of having additional people to bounce ideas off of and pawn off the time consuming tasks like builds and deployments.

And to answer the 2nd question, regarding how to improve our development efficiency and price performance in regards to contractors:

1. We can hire people temp to hire instead of contractors. That way we get the best of both worlds. We can evaluate them before they are locked in, and if we hire them fulltime, they are likely to stay around for a while, accumulate business knowledge, etc.
2. We can hire more Junior developers as opposed to people who are already Senior/Super Senior. Sure they might not bring quite as much to the table, but MVA is a good example of how getting the right type of less-experienced team member can really help the team. If you think of a sports analogy, developing younger talent is the lowest cost way to improve talent on the team.
3. Opposite of #2, we shouldn’t get pessimistic on the talent market because we were unable to land the super stars we we’re looking for. I have personal experience with both John Dinh and Paul Webber. They are both super star developer level and the fact that we didn’t hire them on fulltime is probably just an indication that we were aiming too high. Back to sports: A team full of super stars doesn’t always gel anyway. I mean, you’ve already got me, I’m like the Kobe of programming ;-) Totally kidding of course! (I’m really the Steve Nash of programming)

This email is definitely already long enough, but my improvement push lately is to be as concise as possible. So at any given time I have 3 words which I bring up with Mike at every 1:1 meeting. We often come up with good ways on how to progress on them during those discussions.

• Process
  o Document and follow repeatable processes
• Consolidation
  o Reducing the number of production systems developed and maintained by IT Apps
  o Consolidation within the code – reduce duplicated code within the system – use a consistent coding style and form
• Sustainability
  o Fight Entropy – businesses, systems, or code which isn’t improving, definitely isn’t staying the same!
  o Refinement of systems, processes, over time to increase efficiency (and thereby cut costs)
  o 20% of CSP dev efforts devoted to sustainability, maintenance, consolidation, non-project driven refactoring
  * Management approval for efforts like Kaizen - approval for members to spend at least 5% of their time towards continual improvement.

Thanks (and I can’t believe I stayed late to complete this email),
-Stan

PS: the reason I did stay late leads directly to low cost software development tip #4 and a huge part of the reason why MT had to leave: “Capitalize on Developer Passion”
I’d propose that developer passion, and not whipping, is the reason why previous development efforts, potentially including your antidotes from the meeting were low cost while providing big benefit to the business.

Top 3 Reasons I can never get back together with my ex

We've been broken up for nearly 5 months now, but I have to admit, the number of times I thought about getting back together over that period of time, rivals the number of times I've thought about sex.

I think I'm beginning to think more and more rationally about it though, and today I came up with the top 3 reasons why I can never get back together with her

1. Throughout our 3.5 year relationship, she never once (or at best 1% of the time) let me win even the tiniest, most insignificant, disagreement. I don't think I've encountered her level of stubbornness in anyone else I've gotten to know even moderately well. Even though she often apologized after the fact, I don't think she ever really changed her opinion, or allowed for the validity of my opinion, and it wasn't uncommon for the same disagreement to resurface again. That's not the type of person I want to be with.
   
   
2. I think she's a "pretender". She hides her true feelings the majority of the time - perhaps because she feels that there is something wrong with them, or maybe just that it is best to hide ones feelings. I finally learned that the person I thought she was, kind and considerate of others, is just a facade. She only acts that way in order to cover up that internally she's extremely self-centered. I don't think she even realizes that she is doing it. Not only do I not want to be with someone who is incapable of putting herself in other's shoes, but one of my favorite quotes of all time is from Hamlet "To thine ownself be true". I don't want to be with someone who is so incapable of being true to themselves.
   
   
3. When she broke up, there was very little hesitation or second guessing. She's now at a time of her life where she's not certain of very much in her life (job, where she wants to live, type of person who is a good match for her, relationship with her family, etc), but the one thing that she's been very certain of over the past 5 months is that she doesn't want to be with me. She really doesn't even have a good reason to explain to friends and family, and resorts to vague misleading reasons or outright fabrications. I don't know if I could ever really forgive her for that, and even if I did, how could I trust her to do not repeat the same behavior again?

I'll focus on those three reasons and continue reducing the number of times I think about her, until the relationship is just a faded happy memory, like remembering a childhood pastime. I'm a very considerate, supportive, and loving person and I deserve to date people who share those characteristics.

Blood Diamond

just watched Blood Diamond. Definitely Hollywood, but I agree with a review I read that it is a persuasive presentation. Why is it that I don't think it would change the behavior of anyone I know?

It must be that life in Africa (Hollywoodized or otherwise) is so far away from middle class life in the US that it's outside the realm of things we can think about in a realistic way.

I wish our foreign policy was a bit less supportive of situations in foreign countries that are so abusive to the residents of these countries. It's not our job to go fix all the world's problems, but we should at least try to not make them worse! I saw Nina Hachigianon on Bill Maher and like the title of her book: The Next American Century: How the U.S. Can Thrive as Other Powers Rise. I didn't read any of it or get a feel of whether I agree with her views exactly, but the idea of foreign prosperity not being such a threat to the US is the kind of win-win thinking that seems so lacking in US policy lately.

TV considered harmful?

I like TV quite a bit, but also realize that it can use up a lot of time.
Maybe it's a good idea to set a weekly quota or something... <shrug>
I tend to use my laptop while watching TV and work on things while watching, but maybe that's not a great idea either.

When I was in a relationship, I thought watching "our shows" together was a nice relationship activity. Watching and cuddling, relaxing and spending time together, staying up till wee hours of the night watching shows on DVD if some show catches our fancy. I felt like it was a nice bonding experience, but now that the relationship is over, makes me feel sad to watch those shows now - plus it just doesn't feel right to watch them alone. So, I've given up these shows (probably more, but these are the ones I remember right now):

• Stargate Atlantis
• Painkiller Jane
• Flash Gordon
• Doctor Who
• Eureka
• Inuyasha
• Torchwood
• So You Think You Can Dance
• Dancing with the Stars
• American Idol
• Beauty and the Geek
• My Name is Earl
• One Tree Hill
• Smallville

It's sad to give them all up, but I suppose breakups happen for a reason. I'm not supposed to be the same person anymore - have to change and evolve. That should free at least 6 hours per week for more productive activities. And all those shows are associated with her in my mind, so watching them now wouldn't be the same.

We watched all 10 years of Stargate SG-1 together (like 7 years on DVD). That was pretty great.. But, it's not real - it's just a TV show. Maybe if I'd found other activities - maybe outdoor activities like mountain biking or something, then that would have bonded us together better. Although I have to remember that I already did give it my best... the relationship just wasn't meant to be :-/

Reasons to like Stan

kindness, ability to keep up in a conversation (with a non-idiot), genuine interest in figuring things out, smell late at night, and those eyes

Everyday normal guy

I do make a pretty good spaghetti sauce, have a bad back, like hiphop, and have a pet cat... but that's totally all I have in common with this guy.
Everything else about me is totally amazingly uncommon =)

Bastard Breakup

Don't know exactly why, but I like seeing some of these breakup stories lately. Maybe it's cause they make it seem so extreme in a funny way - makes experiencing the real life version not seem as extreme, and perhaps a little humorous also =)



The Boondock's Episode where Usher takes Tom's wife is hilarious too!
This is just a clip of it:

Jonathan Coulton - Baby Got Back

Jonathan Coulton is my new favorite geeky musician (or at least in strong competition with Weird Al). He's the same guy as did the Code Monkey song from a previous post. His version of Baby Got Back (IMHO), is in strong competiton for the best rap remix by a non-hiphop artist. Plus he uses the Creative Commons by-nc License for all the songs he writes, so people are free to remake the songs, make videos, etc of his songs.

Production Deployment

I don't really think my work is that interesting to subject someone to a minute by minute account of my day, but I wrote up a huge sequence of events after production issues today, and figured I'd post on my blog at work (doubt anyone is even interested there? except perhaps to point out how they might have fixed the issue faster - with their super power of hindsight no doubt). Since it was posted there... might as well post it here too. So for any poor saps that would actually subject themselves to reading such drivel, here goes:

A rundown of 2/12 Production Issue Activity that I was involved in:

2/11

• ~4pm - double checking properties and binary build (we really should do these during business hours to save after hours aggravation and cost). The whole Denver office was down (including VOIP phones) due to a network outage.
• 5:30pm - Conclusion of review: Property files weren't updated yet, and we *really* need to fix the property file formatting so that it's possible to use the cool eclipse diffs between environments without spending hours scanning through ordering and formatting changes. Started looking into how to get the production ROC DB properties.
• ~6pm - Todd P was working on the build in San Diego - ran into the properties issue and sent an email. Turns out he was building 1.100 instead of the planned 1.111. But that's because 1.100 was never tested in the QA2 env by front end QA. Ok, we need a staggered code freeze for future deployments
• ~8:30pm - got properties from Jon Bigelow, checked in and
• ~9:30pm - checked with Todd P and build was successful. Sweet - we should be good for the deployment to proceed smoothly now.

2/12

• 5am - woken by Steve Fletcher to get on the testing bridge. The Verisign daily had run long and so testing was just starting - and some calls were failing (esnValidation)
• ~6am - standard deploy troubleshooting step of restarting cluster completed
  having trouble logging into BO - appears the "Enterprise" passwords I've used for every previous usage no longer work. The AD active directory login isn't working either... annoying!
• ~7am - intermittent failures begin to get worse - percentage of failures rise from ~25% to ~90%
• 7:10am - Bigelow says his AD account works in BO - just normal login (ex: jbigelow) and windows password. I try it a few more times, and there's no way I could have misstyped my password so many times, and it finally lets me in!
• 8:20am - After researching in BO, and browsing the code some, while meanwhile answering all kinds of questions from the bridge, finally came up with a theory of what was going on (see the Auth.createSalesCode functional spec page for the 3 issues identified)
• 8:23am - called Zafar - left message - he called me back - still sleepy, he concurred that my theory of what was happening was correct
• 8:40am - called and briefed Cassisa
• 8:40 - 9:20am - discussion on the bridge on what to do.
• 9:20am - decision is reached to have me work the fix ASAP, and also to do a roll-back in parallel
  branch auth-165cvs rtag -r csp-authentication-165 csp-authentication-165_branch_ROOT csp-adapters/authenticationcvs rtag -r csp-authentication-165_branch_ROOT csp-authentication-165_branch csp-adapters/authentication
• 9:26am - cvs up -r csp-authentication-165_branch Seemed like forever to switch the branch - weird
• 9:32am - make the code modification ( no local testing ) - initially thought to modify the GetSalesmanCode operation class, but instead modified SalesmanCodeCache.java - think it's simpler change and has less chance of missing something
• 9:44am - checkin and tag
  validate diff: cvs diff -r csp-authentication-165 -r csp-authentication-165_branch_1
• 10:06am - edit deploy_versions.props create binary build based on 1.100
• 10:29am - first build failed - fixed tag and restartingcvs up -r 1.113 deploy_versions.props./binbuild-csp.sh dev3 deploy-to-repo HEAD
• 10:56am - start deploy to dev server - sancapvmcsptr3./bindeploy-csp.sh dev3 80 1.113 v20080212_3
• 10:58am - deploy complete
• 11:02am - Jboss finished starting up
• 11:18am - completed SOATest validation of createSession, searchByName, getAccount, and auth.getSalesCode. getSalescode returning 000 in ~100ms... searchByName and getAccountInfo ~3-8 seconds
• ~12:30pm - QA2 had to be built 2x, with prod build in between - CSP build had been rolled back to 1.68 and everything was partially functional
• ~2:30pm - Command Center's decision is made to wait until 8pm mountain to deploy this fix

emotions suck?

Until the last 4 months, I never quite understood how difficult it is to recover from a relationship when you really give your heart to someone and then they crush it. My ex has this 'friendly while cruel' thing going that seems to make it even harder on me. I find it hard to believe that she doesn't realize that complaining about things from early in the 3.5 year relationship after the fact is not very nice. Not after she's already ended it, refused a proposal, and decided to date girls. If she would have mentioned any of those things while we were still together, and I would have changed them or at least worked on them... Now it's unfortunately WAY too late =( Which seems to mean to me that they are just silly excuses. Even the dating girls thing (which she has done during this 4 months), is just a silly & cruel excuse. She may date some girls for a while, even a few years; but I predict that she will be married (to a guy) within 5 years (September 2012). I suppose it's possible I'm wrong on this, but I really don't think so. In the 3.5 years with her, the only prediction about her that I've been wrong on was that she would actually leave me, and that her emotions wouldn't tie her tighter to the relationship. Most everything else significant, I've been able to predict, even while she's saying she's going to do the opposite. I still think she wouldn't have moved out if my Dad hadn't been living with us for 8 months and she hadn't gotten a big pay increase at work at just the right moment.

So, if I'm right about her marrying a guy before too long, then what the hell is she doing? Maybe she's just being rebellious. Partially rebellious against her Mom (she told me that she felt wrong about getting married, cause it's what her Mom wants), but partially rebellious against me (she even hates the idea I can predict her for some reason). It's pretty lame to be rebellious against ones parents when you are 28 years old and don't even talk to them all that often, but I'm just not the controlling type, so it's seems even sillier to rebel against me. Well, for a bonus prediction, I bet the guy she ended up marrying is more controlling.

The real issue here is WTF is my problem? If a relationship between the two of us is meant to be, then it will happen somehow. If not, then I'm better off without her. I should be excited to take advantage of my single status. Sucks that it is hard to feel that way =(

Are lingering emotions like these there to tell us something that is important to listen to, or are they just lingering remnants of a lower type of gut level thinking?
Even at a higher level, I've programmed myself to be hooked on her. I thought that all indications were good that I'd never have to reverse this self-hypnosis, but apparently I was way off.

Jonathan Coulton - Code Monkey

Also check Jonathan's website... even has karaoke versions of his songs. Pretty sweet =)