Each morning I take the train into Seattle. I get off the train at King Station which is located right next Qwest Field where the Seahawks play the Dallas Cowboys this Saturday in the playoffs. (Go Hawks!)

I take a steep set of stairs to the street level and then walk four blocks where I catch a 10 minute bus that takes me near the Space Needle in a neat neighborhood in Seattle called Belltown. But over the past few months I’ve decided to walk the 2 miles from the train station to my office. With the many traffic lights, cross streets and crowded sidewalks it takes me about 40 minutes walking at a brisk pace.

It reminds me a bit of being in Germany and having to walk most places. There’s something about walking through a city that you don’t get by driving. I like to listen to the hustle and bustle of the city. I like to listen to the many local musicians playing music on the busy corners, hat on the sidewalk, full of dollar bills. I like to smell the cinnamon rolls coming out of the oven at the local bakeries. I enjoy walking by the various ethnic restaurants and seeing the families preparing for the day. I even walk by a dry cleaners that’s run by a Korean family and I like the scent that’s coming off the pipes on the roof.

The busiest intersection I pass leads to the ferry terminal going to Vashon Island. Thousands of commuters come off the ferries every morning. It’s a mix of ages, nationalities and economic levels and it’s fascinating to watch. A huge sea of people. But what I find the most interesting is a single, middle aged man who stands at the corner every morning. He stands there, holding a sign, with a big smile on his face. He doesn’t ask for money and he won’t accept money. He’s not selling anything either.

His simple cardboard sign says, “SMILE”. When I pass him each morning, I can’t help but do just that.

I’ve read several books detailing the fall of Enron including The Smartest Guys in the Room, Conspiracy of Fools, and Power Failure. I’m fascinated by the personalities involved in the collapse of what used to be a universally admired company. A good friend of mine worked for Enron right out of business school and I recall how he described going into work one morning only to find the company he worked for no longer existed. A few personal items stuffed in a box were all he took home.

I was thrilled to find this article in the New Yorker from one of my favorite authors, Malcolm Gladwell, where he questions the theory that more information could have helped us see the trouble at Enron before it was too late.

“There have been scandals in corporate history where people are really making stuff up, but this wasn’t a criminal enterprise of that kind,” Macey says. “Enron was vanishingly close, in my view, to having complied with the accounting rules. They were going over the edge, just a little bit. And this kind of financial fraud—where people are simply stretching the truth—falls into the area that analysts and short-sellers are supposed to ferret out. The truth wasn’t hidden. But you’d have to look at their financial statements, and you would have to say to yourself, What’s that about? It’s almost as if they were saying, ‘We’re doing some really sleazy stuff in footnote 42, and if you want to know more about it ask us.’ And that’s the thing. Nobody did.”

–Link to full article

Our family already has two Nintendo DS Lite. But our youngest child has began playing Nintendogs for the DS. I’ve been looking to pickup another DS but haven’t been able to find one. They are sold out at the Target, Fred Meyer, Amazon and even New Egg stores I’ve checked. I’ve heard it was a popular gift for Christmas, but didn’t realize it would be this difficult to locate.

I started a MyFamily website back in 1999. Over the years it’s become the central hub of news, pictures and communication among my many family members. The site has made very few changes over the years and the look and feel is quite outdated. But it has enough features and is easy enough to use that it’s been worth paying $109 annually to continue the site. My family has posted more than 1000 pictures and 500 news articles so far. Everyone in the family really enjoyed the site.

A couple of weeks ago I received an email invitation to sign up for the latest version of the MyFamily website which is still in beta. But here’s the big problem: In order to use the beta site I’d have to start an entirely separate website from the one we all already use. Why on earth would I want to do that? It would be confusing to maintain two different websites. I’d really like to try out the updated version of MyFamily but they need to find a way to port my existing site over to the new version rather than telling everyone to create an entirely new site. Sure, I can sign-up and preview the new features, but the whole point of the site is the communication with other family members.

I went to Beta MyFamily tonight and found the contact form asking if it was possible to move content from an existing site over to the beta version and here’s the message I received after I hit the submit button:

“Contact Us. We’d like to hear from you. Let us know what you think, or if you’re having trouble with our service. While we can’t respond to every message, we read each one”

I sure feel better knowing they may not respond to my inquiry but they will at least read it!

You’d think MyFamily would want to gather feedback from their most loyal customers. But this new beta program only seems to court those who are not existing users of their service which is a mistake. Someone who has used the service for over 7 years is most likely going to provide better feedback compared to a new user.

Having setup the Nintendo Wii for our kids ages, 2, 4 and 5, I was excited for Christmas morning to arrive. My 4 year old son loves the Zelda games (Ocarina, Windwaker) so I figured he’d love Twilight Princess. Well, Christmas morning arrived and so did the frustration of learning the new Wii controller. The included Wii Sports was fun, especially the bowling, but not very deep.

If our kids were a few years older I think they’d really enjoy the Wii. But getting used to the new controls provided more frustration than fun over the next three days so I decided to put everything up for sale on Craigslist. Maybe when the kids are a little older it will be worth trying again. But for now, they really like the Nintendo DS Lite as well as the Gamecube and even the N64 for Ocarina and Yoshi.

I did buy Zelda:Twilight Princess for the Gamecube which looks exactly like the Wii version. I like pushing the buttons to swing Link’s sword a whole lot better than swinging the Wii remote too. The game is much easier for my kids to play compared to the Wii version.

A few weeks ago I wrote about keeping my grandma in the loop with the HP Printing Mailbox. Well, it arrived this past week and my father got it setup for my grandma this afternoon. I setup the Presto service online so it was ready to go by the time my dad plugged in the printer.

The sign-up process was very easy to understand and took about 15 minutes. I spent a few more minutes yesterday adding approved users to her friends list so she can receive email from them. Any email address first has to be approved so that her mailbox doesn’t fill up with spam. It’s a very basic “whitelist” that will be easy to manage.

I haven’t seen the printer itself but my dad said it’s nice looking and very quiet. It’s set to dial in three times a day, download and print whatever it finds. I tested sending an email with an attached picture of my kids and it worked flawlessly.

So far so good. The real test will be to see if she’s still excited about it a few months from now. But the out of box experience thus far has been very positive. The only confusion arose when, during the sign-up process, I was told that the printer unit wouldn’t work until it was plugged in and printed out a “security code” which I then would enter into the account information on the website. My dad plugged in the printer and a security code never printed. But it’s printing properly so I guess nothing else is needed.

I finally got around to watching “The Lake House” over the holiday break. Kim and I weren’t expecting much although the reviews I’d read were very positive like this one from Roger Ebert. But we enjoyed the movie quite a bit.

At the very beginning of the movie this song is played. I looked on iTunes to find the name of the group is The Clientele and the name of the song is “I Can’t Seem to Make you Mine”. I quite like it.

[audio:clientele.mp3]