Category: just thinking out loud

This blog post is 7 days late. It all started when I got sick, fell behind, and I’ve been playing catch up ever since. Some of these catch up blog posts are relevant to the day. Others are just random musings.

I’m reading Founders at Work, and I’ve just had my mind blown. Like… ka-phow! The book is a series of 10 page interviews with founders and early employees of all of the companies we all know and take for granted today. I’m about 1/3 of the way through, and THE interview of the first third of the book was Dan Bricklin’s (founder of Visicalc).

Dan Bricklin is the father of the spreadsheet. Which is in and of itself an amazing task. The story of Visicalc is actually quite a sad one. Visicalc created the PC industry (the hardware existed, but it lacked a killer app. Visicalc was that killer app). But he also was a major player in the development of the first word processor as developed by DEC.

Think about that… this guy was on the ground floor of the word processor and the spreadsheet.

The line that blew my mind was how he described how his experience at DEC building the first word processor gave him visibility into how hard it is to teach people to use software. And that allowed him to create a more compelling mental model for the spreadsheet which people had to learn to use from scratch (not spreadsheets period, but spreadsheets as software).

Just think about that. He invented A1 being the upper left hand cell in a spreadsheet. The conventions we use today in word processors may have started in the version that he built. His design decisions define how we use two of the most core pieces of software.

Mind blown.

This blog post is 10 days late. It all started on this date when I got sick, fell behind, and I’ve been playing catch up ever since. Some of these catch up blog posts are relevant to the day. Others are just random musings.

I’m falling sick today. I can feel it in my nose (I hate that feeling of a running nose. It’s absolutely awful). I can feel it in my bones (They creak. That never happened when I was kid, but now when I get sick my bones creak).

I went through swimming. Babies are in bed. It’s only 9pm, but I’ve got my tea/honey/cinnamon drink down, and I’m passing out.

Today is Micky’s 39.5 birthday!

I don’t think we stop to celebrate ourselves enough. I think this is especially true when there’s the chaos of kids, work, keeping up with the few friends who have stuck around, and what have you. Celebration takes time; it takes effort; and who has either of those?

So, as a combined house warming and celebration, I threw a party for Micky today. It was so much fun!

I spent the day in the garden pulling up every damn weed. I mowed the patch of lawn we have. I even found a worm (and this time put him in a much safer place. He lives in one of our planters, and I hope to find him again soon!).

I found a caterer named Nicole through Betsy and decided that that was the way to go after seeing it work so well for Randa at Christmas. That was a genius idea on my part 🙂

Food was killer; kitchen was clean; it was epic!

Then I made a book of all the folks who showed up with photos of Micky, and they all signed it as a guest book.

We even sang happy birthday around a cake.

It was a good day to celebrate a lovely lady. Happy 39.5 Micky!

There was an election in Turkey over the weekend.

My Facebook news feed is full of folks who are predicting the beginning of the end for AKP. The change in the vote results is quite noticeable. Unfortunately, it’s mainly the right switching from the religious freaks to the nationalist freaks. This past summer folks updated their photos and their names. They virtually joined protests. The folks who did it had a huge sense of pride and community.

But it’s all fake.

You can’t change the world on Facebook. You can’t leave a country when you’re 18, never vote, and enact change.

And yet we all do it.

We sign online petitions as if anything will change as a result. We ask politicians to pay attention. Governments to change their ways. All because we hit the “Connect with Facebook” button, and share our email address.

I genuinely have no idea what has happened with any of the online petitions that I’ve signed. And I’m no longer going to sign a petition unless I’m willing to put money or action behind the signature.

Because it needs to feel sincere.

Tonight, after work, I headed over to Justine & Vander’s place for drinks with the gang. I inherited a group of gals from Micky who over time have expanded to be a group of gals and guys. Marriages, babies, and time have come and gone. Getting together is really tough to do, and so when we get to do it (and hell, we’re going to do it twice this weekend) it’s a really great chance to just let loose and relax.

I finally saw the McClain’s place. The remodel was gorgeously done. There are mounts of animal heads all over the place. I guess you can take a boy out of Oklahoma, but you can’t take the Oklahoma out of the boy 🙂

Then a small sub-crew headed over to Zazie’s where we ate too much, and laughed too hard.

It was a good start to a much needed weekend.

We took Byrne out to lunch today across a bunch of product and marketing. He chose Garaje as his send off spot. It was actually the place I took both Byrne and Denis for their welcome to TokBox drinks.

I really like the food there, and they have a great cider which is the one alcoholic drink I really enjoy. The burger is… awesome. The fries are… amazing. But I’ve found the true masterpiece item… their fried chicken sandwich.

Now, let me not go so far as to say that this is a replacement for Chik-fil-a or Bojangles. It definitely has a category of its own though. And it’s definitely better than Popeyes or Wendy’s.

It’s a huge piece of chicken breast with cheese, lettuce, and tomatoes. It’s delicious. I didn’t break my no fries resolution (which was hard when 5 baskets of fries showed up). But man oh man did I gobble up that sandwich. There needs to be more of a sauce. Maybe just a fat chunk of mayo on there or something, but other than it’s delicious!

Gregory Fischer (who came into my life through Micky’s dear friend Stephanie Grand Jacques) passed along one of these “chain letters” that makes the rounds on Facebook. I tend to ignore them, but I really liked the premise behind this one – List 9 books that touched me. I spent way too much time thinking about this, but so it goes. Here is my list. I won’t pass it on so as to prevent spreading the pain 🙂

1) Siddhartha by Herman Hesse – I read this in 4th grade. Hatice gave it to me, and to this day I remember it like I’m still reading it in real time. I don’t know whether it was the father/son relationship, or the introduction to a foreign culture, but I can’t seem to let this one go

2) The Redwall Series by Brian Jacques – We had a program in elementary school where you took quizzes on books, got points, and then went to parties. I had the 2nd highest total at school, and found these books because they were that sweet spot of high points, but not too long to read. LOVED them, and read each one through Brian Jacques passing a few years back.

3) The Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks – Read this during college, and started to realize that computer science was not engineering. This book still tickles me in the back of my head as I think about how to create systems that scale. It’s all about consistency & transparency, and not at all about more.

4) The Pragrammatic Programmer by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt – When I was an engineer, this book shaped how I built software. I was never a good engineer, but I was definitely efficient when I actually focused and thought through the deliverable. Hat tip to Eishay Smith for this one

5) Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein – First book I read to Amelia. We read it in the NICU together, and Tim Bacon and I bonded about storytelling, getting out of the NICU, and getting back to normal. The poetry helped.

6) The Book Thief by Markus Zusak – I read this on our honeymoon, and it brought me back to reading fiction, and not just news, business books, etc.. I’d given up reading after English class 12th grade because the process of over analyzing book after book ruined the hobby for me

7) Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card – My favorite sci-fi book (or maybe I’d put Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson here).

8) The Giver by Lois Lowry – My first dystopian novel. I still don’t know why they would ask us to read this in 4th grade. The themes, the mood, everything about it is too much for a 9 year old’s world view. And yet I loved it.

That’s it. I couldn’t find #9

Good challenge. Great trip down memory lane.

I’m genuinely too tired (no one slept last night), and too busy (the list grows, it never shrinks) to be able to add anything as today’s blog post 🙁

On Tuesday, I was really excited about NC State’s chances in the NCAA tournament.

This is one of my favorite times of year. I used to watch a ton of basketball, and spend hours staring at my brackets as they turned more and more red. Even with all of the crap my family throws at each other, the NCAA tournament was the one thing that kept us together. And, last year or the year before, I finally won!

Not this year.

Not when those kids couldn’t hit a damn free throw to save their lives.

Not when I’m sitting on the West Coast without a single person giving a damn about the games. It’s so hard to get into it on your own. 5 people signed up for the office pool :-/

I swore I wasn’t going to let 18 year old kids bug me this much. College sports is an epic case of exploitation and obsession. But Tuesday left me feeling so damn good, and tonight I can’t even open ESPN to check the scores because I’m so damn depressed.

Oh well, there’s always next year 🙁