As I pull my car out of the garage each weekday morning, careful not to run over any toys, neighbor kids or pets, I look back at the house to see this.
I roll down the window and yell, “I love you guys!”
In unison they yell, “We love you too!”
And then Luca says, “But we’ll love you more if you bring us home candy”
Summers at work are the most hectic and challenging times due to the number of events that are scheduled back to back. These events are also some of the most complex requiring the greatest number of technicians to support.
During the summer I try to attend a few shows to see how things are going and support our technicians and event managers who are the real pros at this work. The group I work for at CompuCom supports most Microsoft related tradeshows, product launches, conferences and internal training events. This amounts to nearly 500 events each year.
It’s a lot of fun to get out of the office and see the amazing work our people do. It’s not uncommon for them to put in over 100 hours a week getting the technical areas of the show setup and ready for the attendees to enjoy. Many of them are coming directly off other events which keep them away from family and friends weeks at a time. I’m always amazed at how efficient and good natured they remain in the face of many late nights, demanding clients and the occasional computer that refuses to cooperate.
This week I’m helping (might be too strong a word) at a show here in Seattle called Tech Ready where we have over 30 technicians onsite to support several thousand attendees. I took this picture last night at around midnight which shows a room stacked full of 150 computers that are used to copy content over to attendee provided hard drives. One of our technicians wrote a cool little application that takes care of the process with very little input needed by the technician.
When I show up onsite, they assign me to an area when I can do the least amount of damage. So last night I worked the 4 pm to Midnight shift where my only company was a couple of very bored security guards and lots of blinking hard drive lights.
Hey, what does this red button do? 🙂
A funny thing happened when my dad bought a new computer this year with a much larger monitor: my mom started spending more time on the internet. She’ll search Google for topics she finds of interest and looks at the pictures and news posted to our family website.
She also started reading my blog.
Although I’ve kept a blog for many years I’ve never given much thought to my mom or dad coming across it till this year. It’s not that I’ve written anything I’d worry about them reading but I didn’t give much thought how it might influence or affect them.
A few months ago my mom read a post I wrote about my divorce and another about leaving a miserable job. I happened to speak with her on the phone that next weekend and I was surprised to hear that she was interested in what I’d written because it provided details she’d not heard before. Which makes sense because I didn’t live close to my family during these two difficult times in my life.
I told my mom during our conversations that “my blog is like a journal” to me and that I hope it lasted long enough for my kids to one day read. I asked my mom if she’d let me read parts of her journal, and I was shocked when she said yes. When my father flew up to visit us a few weeks ago he brought with him a handful of pages from her journal comprising the year 1987. This is the year after I graduated high school and began serving my mission in Germany.
My mom has the most gorgeous penmanship which was not handed down by gene or otherwise. She wrote mostly in dark ink on lined 3-ring binder paper but occasionally tossed in a colored marker to keep things interesting. I began reading her journal that afternoon and couldn’t put it down. I stayed up till 2 am until I’d finished reading every word. It was fascinating, encouraging and humbling. I learned a lot about my mom and our family. My mom is a kind person with a strong will and quick wit and that comes through in her writing style. We also have at least one more trait in common: we both enjoy writing.
Tonight I sealed her journal in a manilla envelope and will mail it back to her tomorrow. My hope is that she’ll continue to send me pages to read. I am not going pressure her, but I’ll be grateful for whatever she’s willing to send me. She’ll continue to read my blog and learn more about her son and I hope I’ll continue to learn more about her life and what it was like raising 5 kids on a teacher’s salary.
My mom is an amazing woman.
In the B.K. (before kids) era I convinced Kim that we should have a dog. It didn’t take much convincing because she grew up with a beagle and a shar pei. Most of her memories of these dogs were positive except the time the shar pei ate a litter of kittens.
We spent weekends at the bookstore researching breeds and asking many owners how they felt about the breed they owned. After a lot of research we decided to get a boxer. Having a boxer puppy around the house was a lot of fun mixed with moments of frustration. She bonded with me during the first few years. I attended the puppy pre-school classes with her and she learned to obey me a little better than she did Kim. Maybe it had something to do with Kim not allowing her to sleep on the couch or beds.
But over the past few years she’s become very attached to Kim. Elka has a puffy bed I place between my computer and Kim’s yet Elka would rather lay on the hard carpet next to Kim’s feet. She’s excited when I come home from work but she prefers to follow Kim around the house watching her every move.
Our children adore Elka and she loves them back with lots of wet kisses. We feel safest when Elka is keeping watch over our kids as they play in our backyard, and Kim likes having a big dog in the house when I’m out of town.
When we picked her up from the breeder just over eight years ago, he told us that if we took care of her properly, we’d receive 10 times the love and companionship in return. I laughed it off at the time, but he he was right.
Except he was off by a factor of 10.
Seth Godin linked to this short video about what might happen if no stop signs existed and a large corporation was given the responsibility to create one.
I’ve worked for a number of companies just like this. Can someone punch the next guy who says, “Call to action”?
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Dave Winer linked to this AP photograph taken of Obama speaking to a group of 200,000 Germans in Berlin this week. Seeing all those American flags causes me to pause in wonder. How do we go about rebuilding the damage we’ve done to our allies over the past eight years? I believe this is a step in the direction but it will take years to repair.
It took a picture of the Democratic nominee speaking to a bunch of Germans to finally give me hope that we can turn things around here in America. I’m still not entirely comfortable casting my vote for Obama but I’m heading that direction. The more I hear him speak the more hope I have for a better America.
Check out the guy holding the MacBook as his camera. 🙂
I snagged a few pictures as Anna finished showing me how well she’s learned to hula hoop. She whips the hoop around her neck, waist and legs like a pro. She sticks her tongue out and can’t stop giggling once she gets started.
I don’t know if she was more excited to show me or tell her older brother who hasn’t learned yet.
Of our four children, Anna is our most active. She’s wants to be involved in any and all activities and doesn’t understand when her older siblings get invited to birthday parties and she can’t tag along. We love her upbeat personality and way of looking at the positive in any situation. She makes us laugh everyday.
One of the few instances where Anna didn’t mind sitting still long enough for me to snap off a few shots.
And it’s my life
And it’s my life
And though I can’t be sure what I want any more It will come to me later
Do you care what operating system runs your Tivo, DVR or cable box?
Do you care what operating system your phone company employs to connect your calls?
What about your mp3 player and car stereo?
Do you care about the system that runs many of today’s cars such as the one found in the Toyota Prius?
If you’ve had an MRI or used any number of medical imaging devices, did you ask your doctor what operating system it runs on?
Do you care which operating system keeps your cell phone running? (or crashing)
What about the systems running many of today’s high tech appliances like washers and refrigerators?
Does it matter what system runs your home security or sprinkler system?
What about your gaming console? Did you ask what OS it runs before you bought it?
Do you care what operating system runs the self checkout station at the grocery store? How about the check-in/check-out stations found in airports and hotels?
Do you care what operating system your ISP uses to connect you to the internet? What about that cable modem/DSL modem and wireless gateway found in many homes?
So why all the fuss over Windows vs. OSX vs. Linux? Why does it matter what operating system my computer runs?
IT SHOULDN’T MATTER
When the system works, as in the case of my Tivo, I don’t care what operating system it runs. It just works. I don’t have to baby-sit it. I don’t have to worry about making updates to it in order to keep it running. No patches, no downloads, no manual rebooting. When it comes time to update, DirecTV takes care of it during the night and it’s up and running by morning.
I hope my kids won’t have to choose between Windows, Linux or whatever. If enough services move to the cloud and broadband is available anywhere, they should be able to use whatever they want without penalty. The operating system should remain in the background and take care of its tasks in silence and stop calling attention to itself.
In short, I want my operating system to act more like my Tivo and my sprinkler system. The idea of getting excited over a new operating system release seems absurd to me. We need to expect more from Apple and Microsoft. Why do people wait in line to pay money for something that’s supposed to fix the product they sold us a few years ago?
Hold me up by my feet and shake me down for a few more bucks.
I’ve wondered what incentive Duracell or Energizer have to sell us a battery that lasts longer than previous models. It would seem that the sweet spot for battery performance would be to figure out how to sell us a battery only a little better than their competitor but no more. Why would they sell us one that lasts 5x as long even if they could?
I wonder if the same idea can be applied to consumer operating systems? What’s the incentive for Microsoft or Apple to provide us with one that doesn’t need to be upgraded for 10 years?
Have you ever come across a song that’s so different from your regular taste in music yet it’s so catching that you can’t stop listening to it?
That’s what happened a couple months ago when Last.fm suggested and played this song from a group called Camera Obscura which I’ve never heard before. I was hooked immediately. The lyrics are so unique and the lead singers voice is so dang smooth.
It now resides as the most listened to song in my iTunes library.
“Just for a while, I will fake a smile”
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