home again

Hrm. Short updates before I start in on the emocrap. In no particular order:

• Ordered a 500gb HD for my laptop which means I will be able to really start taking photos again. I keep not taking camera places because I’m out of HD space. Not that I’m taking my camera anywhere new. Oh well.
• The siren’s call of Starcraft 2 is strong. I’m lusting after a 15″ Macbook Pro to replace my now-aging Macbook. I can make it another year. Maybe.
• Abbot’s going to doggie daycare. It is pricey. We are slowly learning how to be parents. Talk about kids continues. Confidence improves.
• Managed to bottle what tasted like a pretty awesome Porter. It was in the primary nearly a month and it still has a decent hop flavor. Love it.
• Life lately is Cori, work, Abbot, and play approximately in that order. I like that. Work’s been pretty awesome.
• We are trying to batten down the monetary hatches. We realize that if we want to have a kid in a few years, we will need to avoid adding new monthly expenses. Mentally it’s really fucking hard to live well below our means, especially since ISLN hit fucking 12.95 today.
• I sold 1000 shares (5% of my current allotment) and picked up $10k pretax. We are so fortunate it makes me want to spit at the world. Why would I deserve this more than others? The altruistic side of me wants to give more. The animal side of me wants to keep it all and buy a chocolate factory.
• Desire to go to school is returning. MBA seems so sane and more possible now than it will be later. What’s wrong with me that I can’t just make it happen? Classes online. It’s the modern age.

The Educator’s xmas present to me was a trip to PDX to visit brewpubs. An amazingly thoughtful and generous gift to be sure, but hardly described well in so few words. The first stop in the city proper was Bridgeport’s Brew Pub. A last-minute addition to the agenda, but probably the only place I would feel the need to return to next time. The menu was pub fare with some interesting twists (Cori’s pulled pork sandwich came with hush puppies in honey rather than fries), and even if the only outstanding beer was the porter, Bridgeport shares my love of clean American-style ales. I picked up a six-pack of the Hop Czar (for $7.50!), a bottle of their latest 22oz creation, the Scottish Ambush, and some bumper stickers for the kegerator at work before leaving regretfully. That night we hit up the Deschutes brewpub, which I had hoped would be the star of the trip. It was great for sure — the brewing system was copper and gorgeous, and the beers were amazing (except the Quadrupel). The food was good but not amazing, the menu interesting only for the gluten-intolerant and the pretzel-loving, and the place was packed packed packed. On the way home, we stopped for a set of tasters at Bailey’s Taproom, a simple place that serves nothing but awesome beer. The following day we made a brief trip to Belmont Station, a famous beer store complete with an enviable tap list, where I spent too much on beer and managed to down a pint of a rye ale from The Bruery which would be the end of my sobriety if it were available in bottles. We hit up the Rogue brewpub as well. They have a taplist a mile long of nearly every one of their current offerings, including one beer brewed from barley that they apparently grew themselves. They also sell their own line of hard alcohols, including an award-winning Gin and Whisky. Pretty fantastic place to be sure. We managed to eat at a great Thai place too, and wound up eating breakfast at a hangover-saving place called Gravy, and stopped at Pix Patisserie on the way out of town. It’s a testament to Portland food-loving folk that we did most all of this without the use of any motor vehicles. We also saw at least two smaller brew pubs that I’d never heard of (one incredibly tiny place with a hosted website called Tugboat) and dozens of restaurants. There’s not a lot to do in PDX unless you have 5 stomachs or really, really like theatre, but damned if we didn’t have a great time for the 48 hours we were there.

Brewed today in the presence of DJ Strauss. The man is just going to be an amazing brewer. He attacks it with the same reckless science that he attacks his work with, and it’s admirable to watch. He asked what ever happened to that coffee table “brewpubs of the northwest” book that I had visions of last year. The truth is that we got a dog, we got a house, I got a promotion, and it was more than I was really prepared for. GeekBeer faded, I stopped cooking for a while, I stopped taking photos. I’m slowly getting back into balance. Brewing, Abbot, exercise, and Magic seem to be long-term, relatively inexpensive hobbies that I get a lot of value from and that don’t demand anything of me when I don’t want them to. Photos are slowly coming back as well, though I need to purchase a larger hard drive for my laptop in order to really facilitate that. You might think that my work would just have piles of old hard drives lying around… and, well, you’d be right… but I can’t take them. They aren’t laptop drives anyway. Bah. (Cori’s laptop seems to be on the fritz anyway. Maybe I’ll just pick up a 15″ MBP. OMG stop it I’m drooling.) So back to the book. I really want to write this thing. I think I have all the talents necessary. But I don’t have a good process for writing the thing. I tend to want to do it all at once or in the wrong order. In my head, I feel like I should take the photos first, then do some interviews, then develop a narrative, then research some details, then write the thing. In reality, I feel like it’s more prudent to write first and develop a narrative and then research and whatnot around that text. I know at least a few of you have written things larger than a college essay. Thoughts on how to proceed? Does it matter? I’m sure people do it differently — I’m just looking for a method that doesn’t make my brain freak out that I can’t take pictures of what I want to *right* *now*, and doesn’t leave me floundering for questions during interviews. Little help?

You are an explorer. Your mission is to document and observe the world around you as if you’ve never seen it before. Take notes. Collect things you find in your travels. Document your findings. Notice patterns. Copy. Trace. Focus on one thing at a time. Record what you are drawn to.

I am at home waiting for the damn plumber to fix what is probably going to end up being nothing. I am limited in what I can do work-wise because he might show up at any time, which makes me feel like it would be silly to start on any project requiring my ongoing attention. Life gradually swings out of balance for me. I like balance. Balance is rewarding. Balance keeps things fresh. But my brain constantly wants to avoid balance. When I find a new thing that I like, I don’t just add it to the pile of things that I like and revisit it occasionally. I immerse myself in it until I have drawn as much from it as I can. Typically this leaves me bored with the item in question and I am then forced to move on to something new. The playcount for some songs in my iTunes playlist is in the hundreds because I was, for a brief period, obsessed with that song. This seems to be a trait that many geeks share. So balance is something I have to make myself do, and I tend to get lazy about it. Lately I’ve been out of whack a bit. Too much time with Magic, too much beer, and too much lazing around with the family. Not enough exercise, not enough quality time for other pursuits, not enough time with other hobbies, not enough active time spent with Cori. So I begin the process of dragging the pendulum back toward the center. Pushing the rock back up the hill. All things in moderation said the famous Greek. All things. The process itself is cyclical, and I have varying levels of success with it. The fantastic weather lately is helping. Last weekend was so crammed with everything that I keep wondering how we fit it all in — fantabulous. More like that please. Explore. It’s been nearly a year in this house and I’ve yet to walk around the neighborhood with my camera.

I hate sitting around sick. It compounds the already useless feeling I have when I’m ill. But you get that “everything makes you tired” feeling and suddenly it’s hard to concentrate on anything, even things you normally find recreational. So I usually end up doing nothing. I’m getting some work done today. It’s slow going but it’s better than nothing. So that’s improvement. Yesterday I went through the photos from the anniversary. I’m trying to take more pictures. It’s about time. No, I mean, it’s about time. Life is. It’s about cramming as much as possible into every second and savoring every moment. So I’m trying to take more pictures because taking pictures is so much awesome crammed into every second where otherwise there was only a moment. This compounds the frustration with sickness — it keeps from the awesome. The anniversary was extabulous. Two days away. Just 5 hours south but it felt like a world. We watched the Goonies and ate taffy and walked on the beach and explored a new place and talked and talked and talked and wandered through our minds and through each other and through and through with wine and brie and love. Every day should be so. A new avenue of exploration opened yesterday: Economics. We sell hardware to these firms that do nothing except Buy and Sell Money (you might have heard of them — Hedge Funds). These places have like 3.5 employees and make more money than HP. Economics is pure fascination at this point. I suppose someday it might be mundane but there’s no reason I couldn’t find out. </brain_dump>

It’s review time at work. Everyone does this but no one seems to talk about it. I’ll tell you a secret: Everyone hates reviews. I have various theories about why, but the one that keeps sticking is that reviews are hard. I think they are hard for a few reasons. A good review requires time, something that most employees don’t have. A good review requires a lot of mental energy, something that most employees are busy spending elsewhere. The review process that most organizations use is inherently flawed — you are encouraged to be honest about yourself, but at the same time what you say about yourself and what others say about you has a direct impact on your compensation increases. Finally, a good review requires a healthy dose of humility and the ability to look objectively at your accomplishments. That’s hard for me. I’d wager it’s hard for others as well. This year, I’m trying to be honest and make time for this process. Reflection is important in my personal life, and I practice it in small doses at work, but I have never made it a singular priority for a sustained period of time in my professional life. It’s an interesting process. The conflict-of-interest portion keeps getting in the way, and I keep having to do all the day-to-day stuff that’s involved in my normal job, but really paying attention to this process has given me a new appreciation for it. You get out of most things what you put in, and this is no exception.

Dad appears to be fine. Nearly a best-case scenario. (I suppose the real “best case” would have been then opening him up and saying, “Oh hell, we’ve made a terrible mistake! There’s nothing wrong with you at all!”) Excellent. I struggled for a while with what word to use to describe what other people might call “resolutions”. I have things I want to focus on this year, but they are not resolutions any more than having coffee in the morning is a resolution. They are ideas, areas of focus. Body I need to take care of myself. It’s been raining here basically since the new year, so I’m starting slowly… Yeah. Exercise is basically a matter of Will vs. Biology, and I generally try to make sure Will wins in that case. Keeping better track of what goes in my mouth is in here as well, though I’m already pretty good at that. I want to hike more. I want this to be the year that I fix my wrists. Mind I would like to read more. I have a half dozen books lying around that I want to read but haven’t. I want to learn more about brewing because the knowledge and techniques are endless. I enjoy spending brain cycles on this game and other games. I have what I think is a pretty fantastic idea for a novel, and I’d like to get a few chapters on paper. Soul I love taking care of the house and the dog. I love spending time with Cori and families and friends. I want to make sure to keep a balance of things. I feel the most alive when there is too much to do, and keeping a balance means there is always too much to do. I want to take more photos, saving memories for a time when my already horrible memory abandons me entirely.

1. Sales people apparently drink a lot. They drink to celebrate big wins, they drink to mourn big losses, they drink to open a sale, they drink to close a sale, they drink with clients at meetings, and they have social calls that double as corporate strategy sessions. This is, apparently, not unique to my company. Not that engineers are any different.
2. I could never, ever be a sales person. There was talk about sales people (at other companies) that work exclusively on commission. The phrase used was “every morning, they wake up unemployed.” I am nervous just imagining it.
3. This is a whole world that I have never known anything about before. More importantly, perhaps, it was driven home to me how important this side of the company is.There is this feeling that engineers have that they should simply be able to build the Best Thing and it will sell itself.
   
   At the level where we sell — in the hundreds-of-thousands-if-not-millions-of-dollars level — purchasing decisions are not made lightly. Nor are they made by just one person. There is politicking and craziness that goes on that would frustrate every engineer I know. The sales guys aren’t truly technical because they don’t have to be. In fact, the same thing that makes it somewhat frustrating to communicate with these guys is the thing that makes them so successful. They can schmooze and network and talk at a high level about all kinds of technology. It’s incredible, it’s valuable, and it was completely foreign to me.
4. Nick is really, really good at his job, in subtle ways that I didn’t understand before yesterday.
5. Sometimes, a little tongue-in-cheek humor and humiliation is way more effective and valuable than charisma.
6. The Bell Street Conference Center caters a great lunch.

This blog, in case you’re wondering, isn’t a New Year’s Resolution. I just wanted somewhere to put thoughts and realized I had no such place since I abandoned LiveJournal to the advertising wolves that seem to be attacking it from all sides. The LiveJournal blog was also originally “just mine,” so the content that went into it was sometimes intimately personal and not always fit for its potential audience. This time around, the content here will be personal as is fitting for a Web Journal, but it will also be less ill-considered given the audience. “As we grow older,” I suppose. (It always seemed to me that girls wrote diaries and boys wrote journals. Odd, perhaps. Now everyone just blogs. I think that doesn’t really convey the type of content that I’ll post here, so I’ll insist on calling this a “journal” as much as I can.) I went to Boise this last weekend to visit the Pa. We ate, drank, laughed, watched movies, shopped, and did all the things one is supposed to do. It was fantastic. It’s interesting to be placed in this position. You keep wondering, “What do I want to say? What is there left to say?” You have this desire to give and to take and to just live as quickly as possible with this person. And even though everything is just as it was, and everything is wonderful, you keep wondering if there should be more; if in five years you will hope there was more. But we talked about life and jobs and children and money, and we talked about pragmatics and dogmatics and automatics and electromatics and all the ‘matics you can think of, and we ate and drank and watched movies, and in all ways it was an excellent end of things if that’s what it ends up being. I am not prepared, but I am ready. I love him. Can one ever be prepared? I have thought about starting in on my book again. I have all of 8 pages, all very bad, but the idea I have in my head is just so incredibly fun and so different from what has been done that I feel I should. There is also, of course, the brewing, the Magic and the Gathering, the Abbot, the Job, and of course, my wonderful wife. If I had the way of the world, it would be only her. She is keeping me centered right now and for that I am grateful.

Geekbeer reborn as… geekbeer? I don’t know. There will be less beer here and more me. Just a journal.