In Search of Clear Focus

Today is not going well.  This week, I’ve been more active on-line, posting more here on my blog and over at Flickr.  The nice thing is people have actually been reading my blog and few were nice enough to leave a comment.  You’d never know, though, because my current theme doesn’t like to show the comments.  Even more nefarious, it simply reports that there aren’t any comments.  Other themes seem to work, so I need to spend a little time debugging the problem.  I actually had a few minutes to do that earlier, but my web host was down.  So, the problem will remain until I have a free moment to address it.

At work, I booted up my machine for the day, only to hear a beautiful clicking sound and see the message “Drive read error” on the screen.  Awesome.  Given that the two backup systems we had recently died unrecoverable deaths, I have now lost a decent amount of work.

This day is getting on my nerves.

Update: At least I fixed the comment problem now.  They should correctly show the number of comments on the main page and the actual comments on the individual post pages. Whew.

It seems that this is not the week for me to just be getting where I’m going without a little bit of effort.  Saturday, I had lots fun trying to get to the Bethesda Photowalk.  Last night getting to the polls and home proved to be a lot more work than normal.

I left work a half-hour earlier than normal, catching the early bus out of Crystal City.  Normally, this bus hits a little bit of traffic on 66 west, but it usually moves along.  Not yesterday.  Like so much of the region, ice was causing major delays.  Over the span of what is normally a 20 minute segment of the bus route, I managed to complete a Sudoku puzzle, write out a task list for the next day, and take a nap. Refreshed after my nap, I settled in for the second half of the bus ride.

This part was no better, as the driver inexplicably choose not to use the express lanes on the Dulles Toll Road, instead opting for the heavily congested toll lanes.  As we sat in traffic while the express lanes screamed by, there were quite a few looks thrown about the bus.  I sent a text to my wife letting her know that I was going to be late.  I only just refrained from calling the bus driver an idiot in the message.

Turns out, that was a good omission, as the express lanes soon came to a complete stop.  An accident on an icy overpass has completely stopped those lane.  With no possible exit, the folks there were trapped for quite a while.  We slowly puttered along and eventually made the bus depot.  My leaving 30 minutes early had landed my less than 10 minutes ahead of my normal schedule.  And that was before seeing my car.

There’s a really cool look to glass when ice has frozen over it.  It gets a nice mottled look that is exceptionally pretty, when you don’t have to look through it and drive.  Unfortunately, that what I had to do, so out came the ice scraper and five to ten minutes later, I was finally heading to vote.

The trip was uneventful (though I passed a few more accidents) and the polling place was fairly efficient.  [Big thanks to the folks who brought the doughnuts for all the voters, by the way!]  With about two hours to go before close there were ~480 votes in the Democratic primary and ~240 in the Republican.  I was somewhat surprised at the 2:1 margin, but that margin held up statewide in Virginia.  Even more impressive to me were the 973,221 voters in the Democratic primary (based on vote totals from the Washington Post, with 99% of precincts reporting).  Almost one million voters in a primary with no local implications has to say something about the frustrations of a large group of people with the status quo.

Update: A little article from the Post on the ice and traffic yesterday.  Just in case anyone thought I was exaggerating.

I really wish people weren’t idiots sometimes.  My neck is sore now, and it’s all because some guy in a Ford Explorer thought that cutting off my bus was a good idea.

A couple facts:

• This a county bus, not some dinky little shuttle
• The SUV and bus were on the same road, heading toward each other
• There was a clear line of sight from bus to SUV for a decent distance; no way the driver should have not seen the bus if they were paying even a slight bit of attention

Irregardless of the above facts, the driver of the SUV decided they were more important than anyone on the bus.  Using this logic, they executed a left-hand turn directly in the path of the bus, forcing our driver to slam on the brakes.  After a collective exhale and unclenching of various body parts, everyone in the front of the bus was saying how amazed they were that the bus driver managed to avoid t-boning the idiot.

During all this, I was sitting along one of the walls of the bus, and got slammed sideways into the back of the forward-facing seat to my left.  This has not done wonders for my back or neck, both of which are currently telling me that my plan to work late today sounds like a miserable idea.  I’m going to go give myself a few paper cuts and close my hand in a safe to start feeling better.

I thank God every day that I don’t have to date anymore. I have been blessed with a wonderful wife and daughter, so hitting the singles scene is long past for me. I never liked hitting the bars to try and find a mate, anyway. It was always too noisy, smoky, and I was never the life of the party who attracted a lot of attention from the opposite sex. If predictions from the tech blogosphere are correct, I’m even more glad that I’m done with that part of my life. There is an post over on TechCrunch which discusses a new mobile social networking system called LimeJuice, but the worrisome (to me) statement is more general to mobile applications:

Using your phone to create or enhance real world interactions is a killer application, but no one has cracked the nut yet. The reason is that the network is useless until it achieves a critical mass of users who are online and using the application via their mobile phone. If no one else is online, there’s little point in you being online, either. And presence detection is another (technical) problem. Even if people have joined the network, how do you know when they are near you?

But once it does happen, look out. You could be in a bar and see who’s single, who thinks you’re cute, who wants to talk to you, etc. (if they choose to share that information). Forget meeting via an online dating site and then organizing an awkward in person meeting that usually falls flat. Instead, you can do the online an [sic] real world thing simultaneously.

How much worse would the bar scene have been if I could have looked at my phone and found out that no girls in the place were interested in me? I mean, I already had an idea, but at least without confirmation, I could at least hold out hope that someone found me attractive/interesting/a better catch than my drunk friend who had already passed out.

I love technology more that the average person, but even I feel like there’s an appropriate time and place for its use. Maybe I’m showing may age as I move through the last few months of my late twenties, but once you’re in an environment where you can talk face-to-face, do you really need to hide behind the technology?

I’m old.

It’s been quite a while since I last posted. Work has been busy, holiday shopping, etc. These are the common reasons, but there are several other which are far more interesting to me:

1. I started reading for fun again. After numerous attempts to turn my time on the bus (which I especially love after an easy commute in yesterday’s inclement weather) into more productive time (read about my plans to write blog posts and learn Spanish), I gave up and decided to use the time to read. I sometime print newspaper articles or technical reports, but mostly I read for fun. I raided my wife’s collection of mystery novels and have started plowing through the works of Ngaio Marsh. I have found them to be very enjoyable so far. I’m only on the third of her 32 novels, but early results are promising. I’m also looking forward to The Lying Tongue, which I have on reserve at my local library. It was listed as one of the year’s best in the Post’s Book World this past weekend.

2. I’ve been updating Twitter and my Google Reader Shared Items more and more. I find that it’s quite a bit easier to publish <140 characters of text at a time or share out someone else’s insightful post. Less thought and editing go into it (though you still need some of both). Look to the sidebar to see widgets for both of these things.

3. I’ve been reading and thinking more about social networking (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and collaboration tools for project management and software development. These thoughts are occupying more of my time than blogging as I try to wrap my head around how to mesh the two intelligently.

4. I’ve played a little with the site design. There’s an alternate stylesheet that is currently pretty ugly and incomplete. I’m trying to find a new color scheme that would make the text more legible. Light background/dark text kind of thing, hopefully without being too light in the background, which can also be annoying.

My wife, daughter, and I went car shopping yesterday. Actually, more of information gathering, as we’re just getting started with the process. We currently have two small four door sedans which work just fine for the three of us… Unless, of course, we want to move anything larger than a few grocery bags. By the time you take out room for the car sear, stroller, two adults, and the various supplies we need for our little girl, there isn’t much room left. On top of that, my wife’s little VW Jetta has a lot of hard miles on it and we’re not looking to drop any more money to keep it going. With plans for another child at some point, we need to upgrade.

So, we headed out to a Honda dealership yesterday to poke around at the CRV and Odyssey. It was very clear that this would be primarily my wife’s car. She is the one doing most of the research, asking the questions and directing things at the dealer, and sitting in the driver’s seat. So, when the salesman started asking me for all my information and ignoring my wife, she didn’t like it too much. She informed him that she was the one that would be buying the car, so he needed to deal with her. At which point, the salesman lost himself a potential sale, with the well thought out statement, “You can’t buy the car without your husband’s help, so I wanted to talk to him.”

It really doesn’t matter whether or not what the salesman said is true or not. He certainly isn’t in any position to know who has the money or how much we (or either one of us) have. We didn’t discuss jobs, financing, or anything related to money. So, if my wife could afford the car all on her own, he’s just annoyed her by assuming she can’t. If she can’t, he’s pretty much just rubbed that fact in her face. Neither way does this work out well for him.

A simple appology for making a bad assumption would have potentially helped him. I say ‘potentially’ because he wasn’t exactly rocking the sale before his blunder. In fact, there was a complete lack of salesmanship from this guy. Here are some hints: Maybe you should try to tell me something about the car. We’re a young couple with a one-year-old daughter. Lead with some of the safety features of your vehicle. Maybe mention the reconfigurability of the seating. Gas prices rising? Talk about fuel economy. Planning on long trips? Talk about the comfort of the interior. Now, I don’t really like a hard sell, but some basic information is nice.

I can guarantee we’ll be looking at another Honda dealer entirely in the near future to get a better feel for our options.

It’s always surprising to find a major vendor out there that actually cares about its customers. Symantec–makers of the Norton line of antivirus and system recovery tools–not only has customer service, but it’s very good.

My wife needed to get antivirus software for her computer. When I renewed my Norton Internet Security product several months ago, I sort of recalled seeing that it licensed use on up to three machines in my home. So, last night, I look back at my order and can’t figure out if I really have a 3 seat license or not. I looked online and couldn’t figure it out there, either. [Maybe they should work on their website a little more, but that’s hardly the point of this post.]

Unable to figure this out on my own, I used the online chat capability that Symantec offers. I was connected, after a short wait, with a helpful analyst. I explained my question and he proceeded to tell me that, unfortunately, my product did not come with the 3 seat license. I had merely renewed my old version and not upgraded to the latest and greatest at the time. I think it saved my $5 or so, and I hadn’t anticipate needing anything new. Also, as I still run Windows 2000, my system isn’t supported by Norton Internet Security 2008. Thinking this was the end, I prepared for the guy to sign off.

Instead, he offered me a free upgrade to NIS 2008, and a way to activate my older NIS product with a new key, which would power two additional seats of NIS 2008. They could have charged us full price for her machine or at the very least, the incremental cost of the upgrade from what I paid over the summer. By giving us what we needed for free, though, they have guaranteed that we will not look for another vendor and made sure that I will recommend their products to my friends and family (many of whom are not too tech savvy). As my parents are looking to purchase another computer soon, their actions last night will likely result in at least one more full-price sale in the near future.

I don’t think that today is lending itself to coherent though, so here are a few quick hitters on random topics.

1. I’m very disappointed that I didn’t post anything yesterday. Work has been busy this week, forcing me to post at night instead of mid-morning as I prefer. Yesterday was the worst day of the week, due to presentations to our customer, miscommunication about the start time, no lunch, late getting home, etc. It was a long day, and when I realized I still hadn’t written anything I was too tired and just went to bed.
2. I was loving the weather this morning. After a streak of unseasonably warm (and even record setting) days in the low 90’s, we’re finally back to normal - highs in the 70’s. This morning was so nice and crisp, I had to open my windows on my way to catch my bus. Of course, it was a little too cold to do that comfortably, so I was rocking the seat warmer and had the heat blasting on my hands. It reminded me of the year I drove a convertible. Good times.
3. Taking the bus may very well be the best decision I’ve made recently. I’ve been doing it since late August, but having driven to work twice already this week, I’m realizing how much better the bus is. I don’t have to deal with traffic. I can close my eyes when I want. I don’t have to deal with crazy drivers. On top of that, I just fueled my car yesterday for the first time in two weeks. Not too bad for a commute of ~30 miles each way.
4. My daughter’s first birthday is coming up soon. There’s a party this weekend nominally for her. I think it’s more for my wife and I. I plan to take a lot of pictures, though I really need to find out if my wife is expecting my to help out with any specific activities, apart from grilling the food.
5. My wife is a little odd some days. Yesterday, she was really hung up on the happening on Live with Regis and Kelly. The reason: Kelly Ripa’s hair went from curly to straight and back to curly during the show. It was straight for the interview that they did with Joaquin Phoenix. It bugged her enough to keep the show on out DVR and tell me about it at night. Not only that, but she’s planning to e-mail Ripa to get an explanation. I love my wife for silly little things like this.

Riding into work yesterday, I sat next to a man studying Spanish out of a textbook, making notes as he went. I thought that it was a remarkably good use of his time. I mean, I have about 80 minutes on the bus every day to study, so why not? Well, I actually have less, if I’m going to keep writing these posts on the way to work, but I could still dedicate almost 4 hours a week to studying a new language.

Of course, the problem is that I’ve never studied a lick of Spanish in my life. I (foolishly?) chose to learn German in high school. It was a more technical language and think I wanted to be a little different. In reality, it was just short sighted, given the changing demographics in the country.

However, I do still know a little German and a few years back I got myself a set of CDs to help me re-learn some of it. I never got very far with them, but I’m thinking about using next week as a trial run for studying a foreign language on the bus. I can see problems working on the spoken side of the language, but if I can at least learn to read and listen with some understanding, I’m willing to be embarrassed with my pronunciation for a while. Anyway, if I can’t be successful with my German studies, then Spanish will almost definitely be out of the question. If I find it doable, then I’ve helped my German skills ever so slightly and I’ll try to learn some Spanish in the future.

It’s time to start working out again. I think the last three years of intense inactivity (following four years of weekend warrior’ing) have balanced out the eight year of competitive running I did in high school and college.

So, I spent several hours this past Sunday setting up an elliptical trainer we bought from Amazon. I know some of my old teammates would make fun of me for this, just as we used to laugh self-righteously at the workout routines of others while we ran outside in all weather, all seasons. Even so, I need to do something so that I can keep up with my daughter when she starts running around all the time. So, out with the old disdain for working out indoors and in with the Schwinn.

After the setup on Sunday, mowing the lawn on Monday, and a dinner engagement on Tuesday, I finally had the chance to workout last night. Now, I used that term loosely, as I only did 20 minutes at a relatively low level. I have to say, the Schwinn isn’t bad. It’s smooth and quiet operation was in sharp contrast to my body’s wheezing and flailing about. I am happy to report that I can indeed walk today and there don’t seem to be any lingering effects from trying to be a semi-healthy adult.