home again

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.

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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.