Thoughts from Chuck & Brandi
Well everybody, say Happy Birthday to Jake today. He turns 12, and that’s in human years! And no, he doesn’t have a Facebook page. He’s slowed down a little bit, not much, but he still loves to go on walks and play Frisbee, and in general get lots of attention from everybody he meets! We got him when he was about 6 weeks old, shortly after we moved back to the Puget Sound from Wenatchee. What’s the saying — my, how time flies!
Listen to this! I was asked recently by my company, the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT), to create an original recording for use with their phone on-hold system. It was a lot of fun, and when you listen to this first preview see if you can pick out the following themes. In thinking about the project and the types of work that goes on at WSDOT, I created three distinct sections of the song:
Winter — the snow is falling lightly in the Cascade Mountains, the snow-laden firs stand tall and the massive, majestic peaks rise up above you as you pass through them
Summer — it’s workin’ time! Let’s get out there and build some roads. Hammers clang, machinery belches, and we’re driving forward!
Ferries — it’s another beautiful day as you cross Rosario Strait on your way to the San Juan Islands. The sun sparkles off the wave-tops and the brisk wind comes straight at you. The waves lap up against the ferry as it’s underway and creates a natural rhythmic pattern. Seagulls overhead match pace with the boat, and in the distance you see a harbor seal pop its head out of the water to keep an eye on you.
If you’re like me you’ve enjoyed the times this year when a date consists of all ones and zeros, called a binary day, and then if you’re really a geek you figure out what the corresponding decimal value would be. But since there aren’t any more this century, and detractors would point out that it didn’t work if you used the 4-digit year, I’ve had to continue my search (did I mention I work in the Information Technology field? Geek Alert.) Enter ternary days!! You can read all about it on Wikipedia, but it solves both problems: it works great with a 4-digit year like 2011 (or 2012!) and provides many more opportunities for ternary dates in the next two years. Ternary is the base 3 numeral system, where each bit can have three values: 0, 1 and 2. That means that today [11222011] would equal 3622 in decimal! I cheated and used a Base-N Calculator I found online.
So there you go: ternary days. Expect a tweet from me on December 1st…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_numeral_system
http://www.efunda.com/units/base_n.cfm?base_from=3
I was today. I co-lead our company’s tech review team, and it wasn’t my turn to facilitate the meeting. We’ve rebooted the process recently and it’s been going really well. Attendance (largely developers who choose willingly to come) has been growing. All good things. Well today I’m tempted to skip it in lieu of another project I’m working on — that one is a ‘big deal’ and requires a lot of research in a relatively short amount of time. So I think “I can skip tech review and work on my research project”. Well I’m really glad I didn’t, and it was a good reminder for me. After the meeting I had somebody come up to us, the facilitators, and thank us for getting the team going again. The reminder: skipping a meeting when you’re busy is one thing, when you lead something you need to invest in its success and growth at every opportunity. Don’t be overly distracted by the urgent things and not get to what’s important. That’s something I learned from a little (30 page) book I read in college called The Tyranny of the Urgent. It’s a Christian book, which makes sense I suppose because it was a Christian college, so it ties in faith as it makes its point. But the point of taking time to do the important thing, especially as a leader, has stuck with me.
Brandi and I went to France for our 10th wedding anniversary in March 2004. What a fantastic time! I took a photo of us standing in front of the Arc de Triomphe on the Champs Elysees and photoshop’ed it to make it look like an impressionist painting. It now hangs over our fireplace in our home. So this is a picture of the print (of the picture).
I’ve always thought it would be cool to have a Trek road bike, and recently I got my wish! I’m very happy with it, and it’s a considerable upgrade from my 90’s era Costco mountain bike. And about 20 lbs lighter! It’s a FX series hybrid. This shot is from… do you recognize it? …the Chehalis Western Trail in Olympia. That day my father-in-law and I put in a 35 mile ride. I was feeling that for a few days afterwards! Legs and “saddle” both. Like I said, very pleased with the bike. And I got pedals that will accept cleats or ‘regular’ shoes.
[This is repost from my old website. But as it turns out, this was Billy Preston’s last public performance before his tragic and premature passing — which makes it even more meaningful to me that I got to be there. cnd]
On September 4, 2005 I went and saw Billy Preston on the Miller Lite Blues Stage at Bumbershoot 2005 in Seattle. Billy has performed with music’s top acts for 35+ years, but I went primarily because Billy is the honorary “fifth Beatle” — having played on later albums such as the White Album (1968) and Abbey Road (1970). That makes him (along with Paul McCartney) my musical mentor when it comes to my band, Creme Tangerine. Billy’s fun, music-loving style and tremendous talent is a joy to watch and the crowd was really into it, singing along on several of his well-known tunes. We managed to avoid the rain, and apart from the broken keyboard pedal and disconnected pedalboard on the organ (a bad day for feet apparently) we had an awesome time! Billy and his four-piece band (Billy: keyboard [Korg Triton] and organ [Hammond B3-ish], electric guitar, bass, and drums) performed the following:
Note: It was quite dark and although I was only about 20′ from the stage, between the mediocre stage lighting and my light-hungry camera these didn’t turn out terribly well. But you’ll get the idea. Click on a picture for a larger version.
