Category Archive: Life

Random comments about my day to day life, including the process of running this blog.

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January 01, 2009

Another Year

Not a great one by most measures for the world as a whole (although the election of Obama might be considered a bright spot – we’ll know for sure in 4 years).

Ignoring the usual kinds of health issue for people our age, Anne and I are doing well. The two “stand out” stories for the year for us were: first that this was the year our church went on sabbatical as a whole. An interesting experience and it did give me more time to step back and rethink my own views about church. The second big story was our move to San Francisco which will certainly color the next few years of our lives.

For me personally, it was a pretty good year. At work I managed to deliver my main project ahead of schedule with more features than originally promised. Spiritually, I continue to feel God is working in my life and I continue to grow closer to Him. I also managed to make a serious dent in my reading backlog.

So what’s in the work for next year?

First Anne and I need to figure out what God wants to us to do for a church here in the city. There’s one we have found that we are comfortable going to; but both of us are getting a sense that it isn’t where God wants us. I have a short list of other churches for us to check out and remain open to finding out about others. And, of course, there’s the option of starting something new of our own.

My second big goal is to lose weight – in fact that’s one of the factors in our decision to move to the city. You tend to do a lot more walking when you live in the city, so exercise becomes a part of daily life as opposed to something you have to schedule time for. So I have been walking home from work most days that I am in the city (1.7 miles). I walk to the theatre when I go to movies (1 mile). On those days when I don’t need the car when I work out of the Mountain View office, I take CalTrain down and walk from the station to the office (1.2 miles) and back. I also tend to take walks for lunch (1.5-2 miles) to explore the city a bit – I keep a map on my office wall to track where I have been and to plan new routes each day. On the other side of the equation, Anne and I have also been much more careful about how much we are spending on food (both groceries and restaurants), so we are also managing our calorie intake.

The result is that I have already lost 20 pounds since we moved to the city and keep losing at a slow but steady pace (the rate of loss is such that I am confident that it is sustainable and that I will be able to keep it all off in the long run). I’d be quite happy if I lost another 55 pounds over 2009 (I need to lose a bit more than that; but I don’t want to push it).

So that’s my year. How’s yours?

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

December 08, 2008

Alas poor Forry . . .

Alas poor Forry . . .

. . . I knew him, as did most of Science Fiction Fandom.

Last week, at the age of 92, Forrest J. Ackerman (“Forry” (or 4E) to just about everyone) died, and Science Fiction as a genre and as a community is poorer for it.

For those who are not SciFi fans, Forry (among many other things) was the guy who coined the term “SciFi”. He also discovered and encouraged a teenager with a gift for writing that you may have heard of – Ray Bradbury. Actually his contributions to Science Fiction as a writer, publisher, agent, actor, and collector are numerous – the media would often refer to him as “Mr. Science Fiction”- but first and foremost Forry was a fan with a heart for Fandom as a community.

I met him a couple of times at World Science Fiction Conventions, and was always impressed with his openness to talk to anyone who shared his passion for Horror or Science Fiction. He was always willing to lend a hand (or even money) to fellow fans. There are many science fiction writers today who owe their careers to a “leg up” from Forry. His home (the “Ackermansion”) was probably the best science fiction museum in the world with over 300,000 items he had collected over the years; and every Saturday, Forry opened his home to anyone who wanted to tour it (no charge). That’s the kind of man he was.

From 1959 to 1999, Forry was responsible at WorldCon for giving out the “Big Heart Award” to a fan (whether professional or amateur) who has served the community with generosity and magnanimity. I was there at LACon-IV in 2006 when the community not only gave the award to Forry; but renamed it the “Forrest J. Ackerman Big Heart Award.” No one disserved the honor more.

Forry, you will be missed.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

November 28, 2008

500 posts

This is my 500th post on this blog (comments are currently up to 650), and it is a good time to consider the “state of the blog”.

I have to admit I am a bit ambivalent about it right now. Certainly the rate of two new posts a week (excluding the book posts which are a bit artificial) which I have been on for several months (with a few misses) is a comfortable one for me – I seem to have that much to say on an ongoing basis without it feeling like a burden. What’s more, I have a whole collection of posts that are coming together in my mind which should keep me busy for a while.

On the other hand, comments are down, and it does feel sometime like I am talking to no one out there. Some of that, I am sure, is a consequence of the number of posts that have been on fairly mundane topics, like our move to SF. I’ll see if things change if I start posting on weightier matters again. However, there hasn’t been a new commenter in long time, and perhaps we are reaching the point where those few who have been a part of this blog have said everything they have to say to each other.

Nonetheless, I remain committed to maintaining this blog at a slow pace of 2-3 posts a week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday or Tuesday, Friday) at least through the end of the year. I will re-evaluate it again in January.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 26, 2008

A Year of Book Posts

A Year of Book Posts

As noted Monday, this week marks the 52ns and final weekly book post on this blog. It was an interesting experiment (and certainly one I benefited by); but as there seems little interest in it from my meager readership, I will pass on it for the future.

A quick summary of the year:

I started with 167 books waiting for me on my “to be read” shelves. Actually the situation could better be described as their “overflowing from my too be read shelves”, hence my intent to discipline myself on purchasing new books this year and see how far I could drive that number down.

Over the last year I have:
- read 110 books
- punted 11 books
- purchased 25 books
- borrowed 2 books

Leaving me with a count of 73 remaining (and yes, in the last few weeks I did consider making a final push to get that down to 67 so I would have reduced my initial number by an even hundred; but there were too many other things I also wanted to do).

So, what now?

First, as stated, I will discontinue the weekly posts. I will still post reviews of particularly significant books; but no longer list all of the books I have read. However, since I have found the collection of posts quite useful for me at times (being able to go back and figure out what book it was that had something I was remembering), I will maintain on my computer my own little diary of books read, including the running count of my backlog.

I had considered replacing the weekly book posts with a shortened diary post, simply listing books read, TV watched, movies seen, games played, etc.; and may in fact implement that at some point; but my current plan is to not do so immediately.

As to my smaller but still not small backlog of books, my goal remains to get it down to a single row of books on a single shelf (roughly 20-25 books). On the other hand, there are clearly books available now that I am far more interested in reading than the ones I currently have pending. My solution then is that until that goal is reached I will limit myself to purchasing in any month a number of books equal to half the number I read in the previous month. Thus on aggregate, half of the books I will be reading will be newly purchased and half will be from my backlog. At that rate, I should reach my goal sometime late next year.

I had also intended at this point to purchase an Amazon Kindle E-book reader for myself. I still want to buy a kindle; but plan to wait until after the new year to do so.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 12, 2008

Thinking

There's a bunch of ideas for blog posts that have been rolling around in my mind, unfortunately none of them have come to fruition for me to post today. A bunch of them are likely to end up as a long series that will run several months (not unlike the church series I did last year), occasionally interrupted by interesting life events.

While it may change form by the time I start posting it, the basic theme of the series is: "the first ten lessons I would teach if I were starting a new church". Essentially what are the core concepts I would want everyone to be on the same page on if I was starting something new.

Now I have a fairly clear idea of several of the later lessons and could write them now; but the first few are proving to be more challenging that I had expected. Part of the issue is that I am less certain these days of how to explain exactly what Jesus did on The Cross than I once was.

For almost all my Christian walk, I have been part of churches that taught "substitutionary atonement" – essentially that Jesus paid the penalty for our sins when he died on the cross; and I can explain the whole of the Bible based on that theological perspective. In fact, I wasn't even aware that there were other non-heretical points of view.

However, this past year I have come to appreciate that people like C. S. Lewis and the whole of the Eastern/Orthodox church have a different way to explain Jesus' work on The Cross (referred to by some as "Christus Victor" theology). The effect is the same; but the emphasis is different, sometimes in subtle but perhaps important ways.

I am therefore loath to write up a description of the meaning of The Cross (which strikes me to be something I would want to establish early) until I either resolve this or have some way to explain things that provides a bridge between "substitutionary atonement" and "Christus Victor" (which is what I'd really like to do).

Anyway, since I had no post today, I thought I'd at least explain why I have no post today, and thus create a post.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink

October 10, 2008

Whither Church

One of the still-open issues with regard to our move to San Francisco is what will Anne and I be doing to be a part of a community to fellow believers in the city. This is slightly complicated by the fact that we have an outstanding commitment to support our old church at least until the end of the sabbatical in February (including continuing to serve on the leadership team). Our compromise on this is to go to our old church every 2-3 weeks (about a 45 minute drive on Sundays) and investigate other options in the city in between.

Before we signed the lease at the new place we did identify at least one church we thought we would be comfortable at in the city; but that is a long way from having peace that God wants us to get involved there (and in fact our "comfort" is not always what He is interested in). I've since been back to that church a couple of times and continue to like what I see; but have yet to sense anything in my spirit that would indicate we are supposed to go there.

Last week we tried out yet another church, and very quickly both of us got a strong sense that it was not the place for us. Not that there was anything obviously "wrong" with the place (although the message was a bit more political than we like – I'd be interested in visiting again after the election). In some respects it was actually quite nice; but both of us sensed that it wasn't what God had planned for us.

The other question is if God wants us to be involved in an institutional church at all. I have written a lot in this blog about how I believe in the Simple Church movement; but until now God has kept me involved in fairly traditional churches. This move might be when God has us switch to something more house-church-like. Then the question becomes, do we find an existing network of house churches to be a part of, or do we start one on our own.

So far, I am comfortable that we are doing what we are supposed to be doing in the transition; but I have no clear sense yet of what God has planned for us beyond that.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 08, 2008

Why SF

I’ve had a number of people ask me these past few weeks why we are moving to San Francisco. There were even interesting rumors at work that this was part of some re-org that was yet to be announced. The truth is that this was purely a lifestyle choice for Anne and me. We are and have always been “city people” and this was our chance to get back into city living.

This past week provided a number of examples of why we like cities.

Last Friday the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra gave a free lunch concert in at a plaza near my office. Anne came over and joined me for the performance. Sunday we went to a members-only reception at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and toured a couple of the exhibits there. Then, after a short break at home, we spent Sunday evening at a free Bluegrass music festival which was running all weekend in Golden Gate Park. Five stages scattered around the park with new acts every hour and a half at each stage. Big name people too – we saw Earl Scruggs (only surviving member of the Blue Grass Boys who gave the genre its name), Rickey Skaggs, and Emmylou Harris.

All of these events were free (OK, we had to pay for membership in SFMOMA; but we do that anyway). None required us to drive or park anywhere. They were all things we could do on the spur of the moment. Cities tend to provide those opportunities. While there are cultural activities down in the South Bay (as the region where we had been living is know), they tend to require more planning and more cash, not to mention driving and parking.

The only thing we didn't do this weekend that we hope to do more of is go to a play. We made it to a few TheatreWorks productions down in the South Bay; but it was never very convenient. Our hope is that having the San Francisco theatre district a MUNI ride away, we will be able to go to stage productions more often.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 03, 2008

Blogging again (I hope)

So things are settled down enough now that I hope to resume my M-W-F blogging schedule next week. First couple of weeks may be lighter fair; but I should have something to say.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

September 28, 2008

Mostly Moved, Partially Up

Anne and I are not quite where we expected to be at this point; but we are certainly much more in San Francisco than in Mountain View.

The move itself went well. The movers took the bulk of our stuff up on Tuesday with only a couple of minor casualties. My room and the kitchen are largely unpacked, the living room and Anne’s room less so. There’s a bit left in the old place for us to sort through and clean up; but we have a couple of weeks to do that.

The problem has been with AT&T – we ordered our phone, internet, and television service from AT&T (the only option in this building) on September 9 to be installed on September 20 (before the actual move). We have only today (September 27) have cable and internet access and we still don’t have a home phone number. What’s more, I just discovered that I am unable to send Emails via this internet connection.

By the way, for those of you who know us outside of this blog, we do plan to send out new contact information as soon as we have the phone issues resolved.

I have other things to blog on; but at this point getting caught up with my web surfing is the priority.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

September 03, 2008

Busy Packing

As may be obvious from my missed posting dates, I am busy (and expect to continue to be busy) for the rest of the month getting ready for the move - on top of the fact that I am still deeply engaged with my project at work. I will try and post at least once a week; but beyond that, no promises.

My weekly book posts will certainly be one of the casualties this month – given everything else I have to do, I will be happy if I finish reading two books this month: the one I am currently reading, and Neal Stephenson's new (900 page) book which comes out in the middle of this crunch. The move has however forced a decision on culling my to-be-read books – no reason to transport to San Francisco books I may not ever get around to reading.

Another inconvenience of the timing of this move is that Spore, Will Wright's new game also comes out in a week, and I won't have the desired time to play it. Ah well.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 27, 2008

San Francisco Bound

So, barring all unforeseen, Anne and I will be moving to San Francisco by the end of September. We found an apartment in the South Beach area (a recently gentrified part of town near AT&T Baseball Park). Within a block of the apartment is a CalTrain (commuter rail) station, a MUNI (SF subway) station, a Safeway grocery store, a Borders book store, a branch of the public library, and numerous eateries.

I know the neighborhood fairly well since I spent a year commuting from Mountain View to my employer’s San Francisco office and often took CalTrain to MUNI to work and so spent time in the area (sometimes stopping to shop or eat on the way home). The plan is to work 3-4 days a week out of the San Francisco office (it will take me about 15 minutes to get to the office from the new apartment), and 1-2 days at the Mountain View office (about a 45 minutes to drive, although if I can get back into bicycling shape, I might take CalTrain down and bike from the train station to work – a little over 2 miles).

With this post I have also inaugurated a new category of posts on this blog: “San Francisco” which I will use to post comments on things that Anne and I discover in the city – shops, restaurants, odd museums, parks and the like – as well as observations on city life. Not sure how often I’ll post on things like that; but I expect there will be some things worth saying. Certainly exploring the city is going to be one of the things consuming my attention and I have always intended this blog to reflect what I am thinking about.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 20, 2008

Discarding the Roads Not Taken

As Janbergs has noted in one of his comments on this blog, Anne and I have been on a "getting rid of STUFF" crusade for a couple of years. In that cause, I spent a part of this passed Saturday at the storage locker going through my boxes (I still have one more trip to finish that project).

What I noticed is that much of what I kept in the locker were things I was holding on to with the expectation of needing them whenever I "got back to doing" one thing or another. There were the notes I had on leadership training that I'd want if I ever got back into motivational speaking. There were blank maps and game pieces I'd want if I ever got back into board game design. There were books on various topics I kept in case I ever got back into doing whatever they were about.

This is significant because I put a lot of mental energy this year into thinking about what things I realistically might "get back to doing" and which I would not. This was mostly an exercise in prioritization. If I had time, I'd like to do all these things; but some were clearly more important to me than others. By taking the time to think through what I most wanted to accomplish, I was able to prune off some branches of my life to make it more likely that other branches would be successful.

That was the theory.

Sorting through the boxes in the locker was when it came down to practice – actually getting rid (one way or another) of the things I would no longer need given my earlier decisions on roads I not longer planned to travel with my life. It was tough in many cases - once you have hung on to something for many years, getting rid of it can be difficult. Nonetheless, I persevered and stuck with my earlier decisions; and as a result I got rid of over ten boxes of stuff from the locker. Not bad.

I still have a lot there – mostly books I want to re-read and games I have no room to play right now but which I'd love to play in the future. I still have a couple small boxes of mementos from my life – silly stuff that beings back deep memories for me. However, I am quite satisfied with my progress.

There's another 6 medium boxes to go through and one large box that contains (with lots of padding) various commemorative glasses I have accumulated over my life. Still not sure what to do with the glasses – all of them represent memories for me; but they take up a lot of space and I really don't have anyplace to display them. Is the memory-content sufficiently high to justify the cost of keeping them? I won't know until I actually look at them again.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

August 15, 2008

Moving on?

Anne and I have been at our current address for several years and we are both thinking that the time has come to move someplace else in the area. There are many aspects of our situation we believe we are in a position to improve – in fact the problem is that there are too many different ways we could improve upon our living situation and it isn't clear which ones we should focus on.

First, there is the fact that we are still renting. Between the high cost of housing here in Silicon Valley (at its peak, a small 2 bedroom house could easily cost more than a million) and our investing our monies in things other than accumulating a down payment (travel, etc), we have never gotten around to buying a place of our own. However with the housing credit crisis, prices in the area are in near free fall (houses are selling for half of what people originally paid for them and two-thirds of the real estate listings are foreclosures) and our ability to set aside some money the past few years, buying is now a very serious option if we go to one of the bedroom communities in the area. It may mean a bit more of a commute to for me; but getting into the housing market near a low has a lot of advantages. We could also move closer to our church which would open up more social opportunities.

On the other hand, as I have explained before, Anne and I are really more city people. We like being able to walk to places. We like the abundance of cultural activities. We like the energy of city life. For the year I worked out of our San Francisco office, I hated my commute; but I loved the access I had to the benefits of the city. So the other clear option is to move up to the city. Prices are, of course, still higher up there and while we can afford the rent for a nice apartment in the city, it is not at all clear we could afford to buy a place there (at least not in a neighborhood we'd want to live in). My company would love me to work out of the home office in San Francisco, so that isn't an issue.

Personally, I'm somewhat ambivalent between these options. There are advantages of both but they are very different advantages. While I am not interested in moving just for the sake of moving (or for minor advantages – moving is too much of a pain for that); as long as we gain some significant advantages in the move, I am up for either option (or anything else). Anne and I are spending significant time praying about this to see if God has any preference in the matter, and in the mean time we are seriously investigating both options. Our current lease runs out at the end of October (although we have the option of going month to month after that), so we are looking to take action this Fall or Winter.

I should note that what Anne and I really want is to end up in London or back in Boston/Cambridge and we keep investigating opportunities that come up in those directions. So far, nothing has panned out. My company even has an office in London; but so far all of the openings for me there have been undesirable.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

August 06, 2008

My own words

I’ve been struggling writing the next essay in my “The Mission of the Church” series. I intend it to be an explanation of the differences between The Kingdom of This World and the Kingdom of God. The problem isn’t actually producing an essay – I can generate pages of text on the subject with ease. The problem is that whenever I step back and look at what I have written I realize that I am just repeating things that I have heard or read from other people. I’m not explaining the ideas; I am repeating how other people have explained the ideas.

Now this might not seem like a problem – it would not be unusual for a blogger to simply repeat explanations heard elsewhere – but I have some deep-seated issue with doing that. Sure, I might quote a phrase that I think is particularly well turned; but it is psychologically important to me that my explanations of things be my own. I get very unsettled when I am put into a position of using someone else’s verbiage to explain something.

Having realized the source of my blockage, I started to look into myself to figure out where that little personality quirk came from, and quickly found the answer.

When I was 13, my mother took me to Bill Gothard’s “Institute for Basic Youth Conflicts” (now call the “Institute in Basic Life Principles”) – a week-long seminar on the practical application of Christian principles to real-world situations. That week had a far more profound influence on who I am than any other single week of my life. I’ve even returned to the seminar twice (one of the perquisites of having graduated from the seminar is that you are allowed to attend again for free as many times as you want.)

Not that I agreed with everything Gothard taught. Even at the age of 13, having only been a Christian for 3 years, there were points he made that I didn’t quite buy. Now, with many more years of growing in Christ, the list of issues I have with the specifics of Gothard’s teaching has grown substantially. However, underneath the specific applications which he presents in the seminar, there is a foundational layer of attitudes about things like authority, responsibility, respect, honor, and the like which remain true and very central to my identity.

Which leads me to some of what Gothard said on the last day of the seminar the first time I attended (I noticed this was not repeated when I returned to the seminar as an alumnus years later). There was no book we were given as part of the course – just a binder with pages to takes notes on. Gothard explained that what he was teaching was based on a “life notebook” he kept – his notes on all the things he had learned about life and Christianity; edited and re-edited as his understandings of things changed and grew. He told the crowd that he did not publish it in book form (which, by the way, he does now) because it was just his understanding of things, and that it was important that everyone develop their own understanding. He said that we would be tempted to immediately go tell other people about what we learned; but that we should resist doing that. He said we should all take the time to apply what we learned to our own lives, and only after we had seen these principles at work for ourselves, should we go and find our own way to express them to others – not repeating information second hand; but communicating our own first-hand experience.

Like I said – that week had more influence on who I am than any other week of my life. Even now, the idea that I should not teach something unless I have processed it through my own life first and found my own way to express it drives how I blog.

Of course, what this means is that someplace deep down I know that I really haven’t put my intellectual understanding of what it means to spread the Good News of the Kingdom of God into practice, and therefore have no way of my own to express what it means. That is perhaps the point God has been trying to get through to me. I need to go out and start doing what I know before I start to tell other people about it.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

July 16, 2008

Busy and Introspective

As of this week I’m switching back to making only three posts a week again – the book post on Monday and (I hope) new essays on Wednesday and Friday. The reason is twofold.

First, this past week I started leading the architecture development for the next phase of my project at work. This is consuming a great deal of my mindshare and what free time I will have is likely to be focused on getting mentally prepared for the next day. Not a great environment for thinking deep thoughts and writing them up for the blog.

Second, I sense a bout of introspection coming on. There are some things that God is challenging me on and I expect to be using yet more of my limited mindshare processing how God is leading me. In the long run, this may provide to be a subject for many blog posts; but in the short term I need to understand things better before I can articulate them. I will make a quick attempt in Friday's post; but what I say now may bear little resemblance to the understanding I have at the end of this process.

Between the two issues, blog posts may be a bit unreliable for the next couple of months. I will try to stick to my (reduces) schedule, but no guarantees.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

July 07, 2008

A nice little vacation

Last Thursday and Friday were company holidays, so by using only three vacation days I could get nine straight days off – an obvious choice. What’s more, I seem to have made good decisions about how to spend that time.

On Monday and Tuesday, Anne and I took a little mini-vacation up in San Francisco (about 45 minutes North of where we live). We went to a nighttime Cubs/Giants baseball game at AT&T Park and had a great time. I previously had been to a RedSox/Athletics game over at Cisco Park in Oakland (my only other Major League game) and was nonplused; but this was a much more enjoyable experience - a nicer park with better announcing and tastier food. On the way to the game we did some photography, and after it we spent a night in a hotel near fisherman’s wharf. The next day we saw an exhibit of Chihuly glass at the de Young Museum. The whole experience was a wonderful break that felt like a much longer vacation.

Thursday I spent a fair chunk of the day starting to sort through all of the stuff in my storage locker. While Anne had managed to whittle down her stored stuff over the last couple of years, I haven’t spent much time on it until now. My main goal was to reduce the size of my board game collection – identifying a significant subset to sell off; but those boxes were in the back and I spent almost all of my time going through the boxes in front. Managed to empty five boxes into the trash, identified a half box of books to give to the library, and three boxes of games to sell; although I only just started to work on the games when my energy gave out (I own a LOT of games).

The rest of the week was spent doing your basic resting – reading, playing games, watching DVDs, etc. The net effect of it all was that I feel like I had a vacation, I’m rested, and I also got something useful done. A nice little vacation, all in all.

Now today we start the architecture phase of my next big project at work – it’s a good thing I am ready for this.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

June 29, 2008

Wordle, Reprise

A "bonus post" this week - I found a way to get the text for my whole blog, including even people's comments and my replies, and ran it thourgh wordle.net .

Even when considering all of my posts, God and People still loom large, although Anne has dropped off the radar (she has her own blogs - I let her speak for herself).

Posted by Steven at 03:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

June 25, 2008

Wordle me

I've always loved word-clouds (tag-clouds, whatever) – the diagrams that some web sites use that display the common tags/words used on the site where the more common the word is, the larger it appears in the diagram. By providing a quick visual gestalt, they sometimes can provide real insight in what going on beyond what the author is trying to say.

I used wordle.net to produce a couple of these diagrams for the larger subsets of this blog. Wordle provide some nice options for how to format the diagram (although I am not thrilled with the choices of color palettes).

Here's what you get when you feed all of my "faith" posts into Wordle. Click though to get a full sized version (so you can read some of the smaller words).

I'm reasonably pleased with that – a big GOD in the middle with people being second, followed by words like church, Christian, relationship. The only odd thing is how small Jesus comes out. For a Christian I actually don't seem to talk about Jesus by name much. Hmmm.

Here's all of my "Life" posts. Again, click through to get the full-sized version.

Time, People, and Blog seem to be the big words. I also note that time related words like week, day, year also come in strong, which I guess makes sense since I am often talking about what happened last month, next year, etc. The word "interesting" also comes out strong. Interesting.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

June 09, 2008

Blogging, increased

Two real posts each week is turning out to be too few, so I am increasing my schedule. Starting next week, I will be doing three “real” posts each week – on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. My weekly book post will be done over the weekend whenever I finish the last book of the week. BTW – how interested are people in my book posts? Regardless of the feedback I get, I will continue to do them until the end of November (so I will have done it for a full year), but I’d like to know if there is value in my continuing them after that.

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May 09, 2008

Six Word Memior

I've been tagged by Barry to participate in the Six Word Memoir meme:

1. Write the title to your own memoir using 6 words.
2. Post it on your blog.
3. Link to the person that tagged you.
4. Tag five more blogs.

Here's mine:

A life exploring transitions between concepts

subtitled

How does this result in that?

I will however descline step 4, although I would welcome Melissa trying this (or Ro in a comment).

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May 07, 2008

Maker Faire

This passed Saturday Anne and I went to the annual "Maker Faire", sponsored by Make magazine (and its sibling publication Craft). This is a gathering of people who, well, like to make stuff. Everything from people who knit (Anne's focus) to people who build their own musical instruments from scratch, to people who do model rocketry, to people who build robots and even folks who build custom Victorian-style cases for computers. The common theme of the whole show is the value of hand crafted goods and the knowledge of how to do things for yourself.

We had a great time, although there were only two talks Anne and I went to together. One by a knitting humorist who I also enjoy, and another that was a demonstration of molecular gastronomy where the presenter created carrot juice "caviar" – small beads of carrot juice with a thin outer membrane and liquid inside. I also saw a talk by the creator of the character McGyver (a patron saint to this crowd) and one on the recent re-creations of Babbage's Difference Engine (including one made from children's construction kits). This on top of visiting hundreds of booths with a variety of demonstrations, tools, and goods.

I really respect the people in this movement, and realize how much of what I am today is a result of how my family encouraged me to make things for myself when I was young. I remember playing with "Major Mat Mason" astronaut action figures when I was in 2nd and 3rd grade and how my parents encouraged me to build my own moonscape diorama out of paper machete to play on. I also did model rocketry and fairly quickly transitioned to creating my own designs (some of which worked, all of which were educational). Inspired by my brother, I started taking plastic model car kits and creating my own vehicles using parts from different kits. My parents also made sure my brother and I knew how to cook – we were given responsibility for preparing Thanksgiving dinner for the family (with supervision).

On the other hand, there was a touch of sadness in going to the faire and I really don't do this kind of stuff anymore. Partially this is a reflection of my personal transition of going from atoms to bits – I still create stuff; but my creations are almost entirely made of bits. Partially this is a reflection of the desire of Anne and me to live light – to reduce the amount of stuff we own. One thing all of the people who participate in the faire have in common is that they have lots of stuff – tools, finished projects, projects in process, etc. I've contemplated restarting one of my "maker" hobbies from time to time; but the question always ends up "where would I put it all?" I still want to know how to do all of this kind of stuff for myself (hence my desire to go to the faire); but actually doing it represents a level of baggage on my life that I am unwilling to carry right now.

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May 02, 2008

Web surfing expands . . .

It seems to be one of those maxim's: Web Surfing Expands to Fill the Time Allotted.

A while back I switched to using Google Reader to follow any web sites that have RSS feeds. It significantly reduced the time I needed to go through the sites that I visited regularly. I can scan through the titles of all of the new posts on every site I am interested and quickly pick out those few I want to read in detail. A very efficient mechanism.

Of course, adding new sites for Google Reader to check for me is easy, and the incremental cost for each new site is small, so naturally I have been quite free with adding new sites to my list to surf. The result? I am now spending almost as much time surfing today as I was just before I started using Google Reader. sigh.

To be fair, I am now checking for new content on 48 different sites and reviewing (on average) 200 excerpts (titles, first paragraphs) a day. I probably only read 10-15 articles out of all that; but it still takes time. And this is on top of another couple dozen sites I check which do not have RSS feeds.

Why do labor saving devices never seem to actually save you any labor?

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April 30, 2008

Books and wish-lists

Thinking more about my progress on my reading list (or last week, the lack of progress). As is often the case with these things, I'm really just changing the problem to a different one. In the 22 weeks I have pushed my purchased-but-not-read list down from 167 to 120, my Amazon wish-list has grown from (as I recall) 102 to 169. At least the books on my wish-list haven't cost me any money (yet). As the saying goes: "So many books, so little time."

Also, I don't always purchase everything on my wish list. In fact, keeping them on that list longer tends to give me time to reconsider purchases. Sometimes I see an interview with someone who wrote a book and I'm all excited to get it; but 6 months later is doesn’t sounds quite as interesting. Then there are the occasions when, by the time I end up purchasing the book, a cheaper trade-paperback is available.

I tend to keep a fairly low bar when it comes to adding something to my Amazon wish list (since the incremental cost is only about 10 seconds). When I actually place an order with Amazon, I tend to scan the list for others to purchase (at least enough so that the order qualifies for free shipping), and remove those that don't sound quite so interesting any more.

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April 25, 2008

Party Time

I don't talk about my job much on this blog for both legal and security reasons; but even if you know who I work for this is all public information so it is OK.

Last night we had a big party at the office to celebrate shipping our 100 millionth copy of our product. They even bussed up all of the engineers from our Mountain View office to the main office in San Francisco and invited back key employees who had left the company.

100 Million is pretty good for a software company. I'm not sure how many other companies have sold that many of their product (I'm excluding folks who give away their product). Obviously Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, McAfee, Norton, and the like; but how many others have passed that mark? Not sure; but it feels pretty good.

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April 23, 2008

Or it could be…

…depression. As previously noted on this blog, I deal with chronic recurring depression and always need to evaluate any disinterest or lack of motivation as a warning sign that I am becoming depressed again (wonky brain chemistry and all that). So when I realized that I wasn't writing as much (for this blog or otherwise) I evaluated whether this could be a red flag to signal that I should start managing another cycle of depression (thanks to a good counselor, I have gotten pretty good at handling my depressions without the need for medication).

My current evaluation was (and is) that this is not depression. I continue to be quite productive at work (when not interrupted every few minutes with questions from other parts of the company) and in other contexts. There are only two things I seem to be less interesting in right now: reading and writing (which I have previously established as related functions). My experience is that when I get depressed, I loose interest in things in a specific order, and my current state is not even close to that pattern.

So, I'm looking at this as, perhaps, just temporary burnout and not as an indicator of depression. Nonetheless, I will remain vigilant – my depressions tend to be much harder to manage if I do not catch them early.

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April 16, 2008

Downshifting again

I am definitely running low on ideas for blog posts, and so am going to formally downshift to 3 posts a week – on Monday Wednesday and Friday. Monday will remain my book post, so that means I only need to come up with two original posts a week. I want to stay on a schedule since that has proven to provide an added bit of motivation to write.

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April 14, 2008

This morning's post delayed

Sorry – this morning's book post will be delayed for technical reasons. While it is written, I couldn't get on to schedule the post last night, and forgot to do it this morning before I got into work. Unfortunately, the text of the post is on my computer at home, so I won't be able to do it until lunch today at the soonest. The tally is 2 books read, none purchased with a new count of 119.

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March 28, 2008

Three Years of Blogging

As of today, I have been blogging for three years. I have written 394 posts, and there have been 561 comments in reply to those posts. I’m fairly satisfied with that.

I’ve been keeping to my 5 posts a week schedule so far this year (4 real essays but one book review post); but it is getting harder and harder. The truth is that I have tended to only generate two or three new essays each week. I’ve been able to get by since I was quite prolific over last Christmas vacation and started the year with a couple dozen extra essays; but I have been working though that buffer at a fairly steady pace.

It is also the case that (in my opinion at least), the quality of the recent essays have been somewhat lacking. When I look back and read things I wrote in the first year, I believe I was more eloquent in my observations than I have been of late. This is not necessarily a bad thing (I’m not writing these essays to get published); but it is disappointing.

The net result is that at some point I may have to switch to a 3 post a week schedule (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday). Just a warning in case you see me start missing Tuesdays and Thursdays.

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March 21, 2008

Yes, I read comic books

As can be seen from the list of books I read over the Christmas holidays, I do read “graphic novels” a.k.a. “comic books”, despite being 48 years old. Actually I don’t read a lot of them. I pick up 2-3 issues in a month and perhaps one collection a quarter (the list I read over the vacation had been accumulated over time); but I do read them.

Now as I kid, I used to read comics a lot. I was a fan of the various Marvel titles (as opposed to D. C. – even then I was more interested in character vs. action). I even read some in college where copies were always laying around the Alpha Phi Omega office. But after college I lost interest in the rather repetitive stories of costumed superheroes that dominates the comics industry in the United States.

The seed of my return to comics was planted in 1995 when I read Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics”, an excellent analysis of the art and medium of “sequential art” (as he calls comics). This book (which I strongly recommend to everyone) helped me to appreciate that people can and were doing things with the format that went well beyond the comics of my youth. It made me open to the possibility of looking at graphic novels (as high-end comics are often called); but didn’t provide enough motivation to actually get me to try.

The motivation finally came in 2001 when I heard that J. Michael Straczynski was taking over writing Marvel comic's flagship “Amazing Spiderman” comic series. I knew and respected JMS’s work as a television writer and producer (Babylon 5, Jeremiah, etc.), and the thought that someone of his caliber would write comics was enough to get me to give it a try. The results were interesting – far more literary than the comics I recalled reading in my youth, and certainly enjoyable, although the limits of the Spiderman franchise eventually constrained how far JMS could go. I did however find out that prior to taking over Spiderman, he had written some graphic novels based on his own original ideas, including “Midnight Nation”. Without the limits of working within a predefined franchise, JMS was allowed to take full advantage of the medium.

Two things finally sold me on putting some effort in reading the “best” of the graphic novels out there. First, there was the “Amazing Spiderman” volume 2, issue 36. This is the “black issue” written by JMS to respond to 9/11. Rather than a typical “comic” story, it is a tone poem about those events with various characters from the marvel universe in the background. It remains, in my opinion, the most eloquent and complete response to that tragedy from any source, including pundits and politicians. Second, there is the final page of issue 4 of JMS’s “Midnight Nation” series that expresses with sad irony how fear hobbles us. Rod Serling quality stuff (as is all of Midnight Nation, in my opinion).

Having been hooked, I now track what is going on in the industry, and particularly what specific writers are doing. I’ll read pretty much anything by Neil Gaiman, Orson Scott Card, and JMS (although my willingness to read costumed superhero stories is limited). I am also making an effort to get caught up on classics – those books that people recognize as the best of the genre. Things like Moore’s “Watchmen” and Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns”. “Watchmen” in particular is a must-read which I have blogged on before.

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March 19, 2008

Twentieth Wedding Anniversary

As of today, Anne and I have been married for 20 years.

We've had good times and bad. We've had times of plenty and times of lack. We've had times of illness and times of health. We've had times of joy and times of sorrow. We've had times of understanding and times of confusion.

But through it all our love for each other has grown, as has our ability to trust each other when things get rough.

A successful marriage requires a lot of work. It requires investments from both parties: patience, forgiveness, time, flexibility; but having made those investments, the benefits far outweighs the costs: having someone you can be yourself with, having someone you rely on, having someone with whom you share memories.

I can honestly say that our marriage today is better and stronger than it has ever been – pretty good for 20 years on.

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March 12, 2008

Sydney Observation

So what did I think of Sydney? First, this is more than a purely abstract question for Anne and me. There is no doubt that if I were to express interest to my employer in living in Sydney, they would be quite happy to relocate us there for whatever period of time we want. So a subtext of our short vacation was to determine if we did in fact have any interest in that regard.

Second, I want to recognize up front that the following are poorly informed opinions based on working for a week and having a week's vacation there. Still, in that time I did get to spend time in two office environments, visited a couple different suburbs, and spent the evening at a co-worker's house (we so got some sense of how "real people" live).

Overall, Sydney reminds me a lot of San Francisco: steep hills rising out of the water, good (but not great) public transportation, tall office buildings next to colorful Victorian structures, active LGBT community, moderate weather thanks to the surrounding water, large parks, endless suburbs. Particularly when walking around the city proper, it was easy to convince myself I was "back home" (or at least 40 miles north of home).

What I liked:

- Australians seems to be sincerely environmentally conscious. Their history has engrained in their culture how easy it is to adversely affect the environment and they are sensitive to those issues.

- Because of strict quarantines (another lesson learned), there is a limit to the amount of foodstuffs which are imported; but that has the side effect that most of ingredients that actually are available are relatively local and fresh. Even the food in the smaller restaurants tasted great because the ingredients were better, and when we ate at someone's home the food was excellent (although, to be fair, our host was a fairly serious foodie). Fish in particular was better than we get even in San Francisco or I remember from Florida.

- Sydney is a picturesque city, and I'd love to have much more time to do photography there. I know that there is even more to see and photograph elsewhere in Australia; but even limiting myself to Sydney I could spend a lot of time behind a camera.

- Public Transportation was good. At no point did I wish I had rented a car while we were in the city. Even getting out to the suburbs was not much of a problem.

- The Christian book store actually had a more diverse selection of books than the one we have near us.

What I didn't like:

- Books are expensive (and it is well established how important books are to me). They generally cost twice as much as they do in the 'States. I have been assured that if I am willing to order in bulk (many books at once) there are ways to get books at reasonable prices; but it is a factor. In general, anything not produced in Australia (which is most things) tends to be 1.5X to 2X the price in the USA.

- While they are environmentally conscious, they are less concerned about issues like fair trade. Almost everything not produced in Australia was produced in China. Anne and I have been trying to be more socially conscious in our own purchases, and that would seem to be difficult in Sydney.

- The overall culture seems to be significantly more "masculine" than in SF or Boston today. There's more of a focus on sports. Men tend to talk more coarsely. Women tend to dress to impress (seduce?) more. There were times that I felt like I was in a time warp back to America in the early 70's.

Right now, my impression is that Sydney is a city I would like to spend more time visiting; but I'm not prepared to move there for a long period of time. I am also quite interested in seeing more of the rest of Australia. Perhaps when my current project goes into deployment I can wrangle a month or two there.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

March 11, 2008

Sydney Travelogue

I’m doing at least two posts about my Sydney trip. This, the first, will be a fairly conventional travelogue while the second will be more subjective observations.

Monday through Thursday of the first week I was busy with work. Anne got to see the city, shop, and make some friends while I got to see the inside of our hotel, our company’s offices, our customer’s offices, and some nice restaurants.

Friday I had some short meetings in the morning and then Anne and I spent the afternoon wandering through the downtown shopping area of Sydney. There are several buildings there that have been converted into malls – the most interesting of which is the Queen Victoria Building, originally built in 1898, which is now a four story shopping mall that retains much of the historic Victorian architecture. It should also be noted that most of these malls are interconnected underground so you can go from building to building without really being aware of it. In terms of shopping, I was able to find a good board game store; but discovered (confirmed) that books are a generally twice as expensive as they are here in the ‘States.

Saturday and Sunday we went to Canberra by bus. This was mostly to see Melissa (having not seen her in over ten years and finding ourselves within a couple hundred miles of her, this was an opportunity we didn’t want to miss). Melissa did a wonderful job of showing us around town. We sent up the Telstra tower to get a wonderful panoramic view of the whole city. We toured Parliament House (Australia’s modern capitol building). We saw the War Memorial and walked down a small part of ANZAC Parade (a wide boulevard with various military monuments and memorials on either side). We want to church with Melissa. Canberra is an absolutely beautiful place. It is a modern, planned city – created in the early 1900’s explicitly to serve as Australia’s capitol - with lots of parkland, wide tree-lined avenues, and modern buildings.

Monday we toured the Botanical Gardens (an enormous open park with diverse plants) walked around the Opera House, and took a short ferry ride over to Manly – a beach/resort suburb of Sydney. Manly kind of reminded me of Santa Cruz California, although without the boardwalk carnival. The local equivalent of the Santa Cruz boardwalk is actually Luna Park just down the hill from the hotel we stayed in. This is also a good point to mention the diversity of modes of transportation in common use in Sydney. There are the standard taxis, busses, and subways/trains; but being built around a harbor, ferries are also an integral part of the public transportation system, and we used them almost every day. In addition there is a small monorail system that runs around the downtown and Darling Harbor sections of town. As we explored the city I found myself wanting to create a new SimCity scenario to see if I could integrate so many transportation systems so well.

Tuesday, we went to the Toronga Zoo (another short ferry ride) and got to see various marsupials (Kangaroos, Koalas, Wombats, etc.) up close. It was a nice zoo, although I think the Miami-Dade Matro-Zoo has really spoiled us.

Wednesday we took the two tourist “explorer” bus rides (numerous stops, with on-off privileges) to get to see some of the other parts of the city we hadn’t been too yet. One took us around Sydney proper (including over to Darling Harbor and “The Rocks” which we hadn’t seen yet) and the other did a larger loop that took us down along the southern beaches of Sydney, including Bondi Beach (the famous surfing beach). The one thing I want to note is how small the beaches are in Sydney. I am used to the beaches in Florida and California which go on for miles. The Australian cost is much more irregular and beaches tend to form in small coves. Manly and Bondi beaches are only about a mile across and many of the others are even smaller.

Thursday we saw the Powerhouse Museum, which is kind of like the Australian equivalent of America’s Smithsonian or London’s Victoria and Albert (although not as large). A rather eclectic collection of crafts and technology. We also went over to Darling Harbor to eat (at a steakhouse called “I’m Angus”) and looked around. Darling Harbor is one of the big nightspots with lots of restaurants, clubs, and the like.

By Friday we were getting pretty tired and just stopped back at a couple of locations we had missed taking of pictures of previously and then rested the afternoon.

So that’s what we did. In the process I took 551 photographs which will eventually end up on the web.
+
Next (or at least soon) I’ll write about what I thought about it all.

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March 08, 2008

Back Home

Jet lagged with a lot of catching up to do (TV, web, etc.); but home again. I have a blog post or two to write about our Australia trip; but I’m not sure when I’ll have a clear enough head to write it.

Posted by Steven at 06:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

March 07, 2008

Thanks Melissa

Just wanted to drop a quick note to thank Melissa for the “Desert Island Media” idea. It was just the inspiration I needed in this busy period to come up with some posts while I was otherwise distracted. I do very much plan to address some of your other suggestions as well – perhaps after this crunch.

I am also thinking of doing a fifth post in the series for Board Games I’d bring; but not now.

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March 04, 2008

Tetsuya’s

For last week’s business trip, I was part of the entourage of my company’s head of marketing, head of sales, and head of engineering; who were meeting with similarly high pay grade folks from 5 of our biggest customers. Definitely up there in the rarefied air, and it was my first experience with world-class “wining and dining”. I ate more excellent food and drank more wine last week than I had all last year.

The climax of this experience was that we ate at Tetsuya’s, which (according to the New York Times) is the fourth best restaurant in the world – an honor I can not dispute based on my experiences last week. We were served a 14 course meal (accompanied by 7 different wines chosen to compliment each dish). It was an amazing culinary experience.

For those who have seen the TV show “Iron Chef” (either the Japanese or American versions), the fourth act is always the judges getting to taste each of the ten or twelve creative, well presented dishes that the two competing chefs managed to cook. Eating at Tetsyua’s is kind like that.

Every dish is innovative both in terms of ingredients, preparation and presentation. Things like “cold corn soup with saffron and a dollop of vanilla ice cream” (trust me – it worked); or “grilled wagyu beef with lime and wasabi.” Most courses are only a two or three of bites; but the flavors are wonderful and varied. There were a couple of dishes (and wines) that didn’t work for me; but most I would love to have again (and again).

This was my first experience with food at this level. Not sure when (if ever) I’ll have the opportunity to do something like this again (at $300 per person, I doubt I’d end up paying for it myself). I do note that the number one restaurant on the ‘Times list is actually not far from where we live.

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March 01, 2008

Greetings from Canberra

I ommitted a few details on my post last Friday about my business trip this past week:

- The business meetings were in Sydney Australia
- Anne (my wife) traveled with me
- We are spending an additional week in Australia to play tourist and...
- We are visiting at least one long-time friend while we are here :)

Posted by Steven at 02:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

February 28, 2008

Games, God, and I

Playing games has always been an important part of my life. At one point I had a collection of over 350 board games and I have no idea how many computer games. For a while it even became a source of stress in my marriage – I was spending too much time playing computer games and not enough with my wife, but that was addressed a while back. Anne also doesn’t approve of some of the game I play; but that’s a different matter.

This past fall, The Lord started to deal with me on my choice of games to play (although, not exactly in ways that Anne would have wanted). I sensed that He was asking me questions as I played various games. What do I like about that game? How do I feel after having played it? Why did I pick that game to play tonight and not another? What did I get out of playing that game? God was working to help me be more conscious of my relationship to the games I played. A similar thing happened a couple years ago when God led me to re-think my TV watching.

The bottom line is that God helped me become aware of what games were beneficial for me to play and which were not. What’s interesting is that despite the amount of hot air generated by pundits on the subject, the issue was rarely a moral one. It was far more about how the games made me feel as I played them. Did they make me think? Did they allow me to be creative? Did they get me interacting with people (board game obviously have a big advantage here)? Or did I tend to get frustrated and stressed as I played them? Did they lead me to isolate myself?

Now a lot of these ideas are obvious; but the fact is I had rarely used principles like this to guide my game purchase decisions. I was more interested in what was “hot” and what had cool new technology than what benefit I derived from the experience (other than a few hours of distraction from life). Which leads me to the other thing I realized – how much I used computer games as a means of escape when I got stressed at work. Now there is value in that to a point; but only to a point; and there are dangers if I use games to avoid dealing with things that need to be dealt with.

So I am in the process of formulating some rules for myself for how I will decide what games to buy and play in the future. I don’t have a sense that I will necessarily be spending less time playing games; but the kinds of games and the venue in which I play them may change significantly.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 22, 2008

Away on a business trip

I will be out of town next week on a business trip, and I don’t know how much time I will have to write things or how good my internet connectivity will be. I have scheduled posts for while I am away, so there should be things for people to read; but I may be unable to reply to comments or to moderate the blog.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 12, 2008

Election 2008

The California primary was last week, so I suppose I should say something about the election. Problem is, as has often been the case, I am so disappointed with the state of affairs that I find it hard to drum up the motivation to say anything.

As reader of this blog will know, I have a strong Libertarian streak, so it should be no surprise that I voted for Ron Paul (while a member of the Republican Party, Paul was the Libertarian Party’s candidate for president in 1988). I had no illusion that he had any chance to win; but I had to vote my convictions.

So when the dust settles, it looks like McCain will get the Republican nomination. I’m OK with that – he would have been my second choice. I would not vote for him in the primary because of his support of the Iraq war; but I respect that fact that he is a true fiscal conservative (his previous campaigns have focused more on the economy); and perhaps more important he has shown the ability to work across the aisle with members of other parties. While I disagree with him on a few decisions, I am comfortable with most of his voting history in the Senate. If he is elected I expect the country will make real progress on real problems.

Now many Republicans don’t like him because first, he is not focused on the social conservative agenda promoted by many Values / Christian voters. While his own beliefs are quite conservative, McCain doesn’t see those issues as a priority and considers those who focus on those issues to be divisive (famously calling Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell “Agents of intolerance” in his 2000 presidential campaign). I have no issue with any part of that. Second, some Republicans dislike him because he has worked so well with Democrats to get important bills passed. To me that means we won’t have four or eight years of gridlock if he is elected, which is a good thing.

Still, he will likely need to pick someone from the social conservative end of the party as a running mate to shore up support from that part of the base. A McCain/Huckabee ticket may prove to be a winning combination.

On the Democratic side, thing are still up n the air. I like neither Clinton nor Obama. Electing either of them will result in no progress on the budget deficit, which I have previously established as one of my main concerns (in fact electing either one of them guarantees substantial increases in the deficit).

However if I had to choose one I would pick Obama. First, I don’t think Clinton is even remotely electable. While she touts her “35 years of experience”, much of that experience has set up ill will towards her from too many people. Having a record can be a bad thing if there are too many skeletons in it. Second, I believe her impact on the deficit is likely to be worse than Obama’s.

On the other hand, as a candidate Obama has an interesting combination of virtues. First, he is a compelling public speaker. He has that rare ability to inspire people with his words. Second, he has almost no record for people to campaign against. The combination of the two means that people can read into him positive ideals without getting distracted by actual policies. Because of that I think he has a better chance of winning that Clinton, and if he wins, he has the skills to make America feel good about itself again. If only his policies would actually improve our lot as opposed to just helping us feel better. For a running mate he needs to pick an experienced technocrat from the Northeast or Southwest (definitely not Hillary, and not Edwards). Bill Richardson might be a good choice, or even Dianne Feinstein.

So that’s how I see things now. More if/when the situation on the Democratic side becomes clearer.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

February 11, 2008

500 comments

Just a quick note – sometime Friday this blog got its 500’th comment posted to it. Yippee!

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

February 08, 2008

Comment Problems

Melissa reported having some problems posting comments on the blog. Now one of the problems was simply that one comment got caught in moderation (and I have been busy today and so I didn't get around to approving it until later).

However, I also had a comment of my own that simply wouldn't post today. It didn't go to moderation - I got an HTTP 406 error (with the cryptic text "Internet Explorer cannot read this webpage format"). I was able to post it by removing the word "s e x". What is frustrating is that this was not sent to moderation; but was refused outright by the server without any opportunity for me to approve it.

I'm going to try and figure out what is causing this (and if I have any control); but the bottom line is that if you have any problems posting comments, post a comment that simply says "placeholder" and Email me the text you want to put there.

Posted by Steven at 03:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

February 06, 2008

The State of the Blog

The next few weeks (until mid-March) are likely to be busy for me at work. There’s a new version of a document that I need to get out, and the current version is already 360+ pages. That’s a tripple problem for this blog. First, I won’t have as much time to write in general. Second, I will have been writing all day, so I won't be as motivated to do more writing. Third, since I tend to write about whatever I am thinking about, but I don’t write about work, therefore the fact that I will be thinking more about work in the next few weeks means that even when I have time and motivation to write I may not have anything to talk about.

As a possible means to ameliorate the third problem, I am open to suggestions from my readers for things to write about. If there is some topic you’d like to see me hold forth on (or otherwise want to know my opinion on), drop a comment and I’ll see what I can do. The only absolutely forbidden topics are my work and personal information about family members. I’ll consider suggestions on any other topic or question.

On another front, the battle between comment spammers and anti-spam technology continues. Every few weeks the spammers seem to discover some new trick to fool the blockers and I end up cleaning up bogus comments until new countermeasures are discovered. While I could probably stop them cold using a CAPTCHA, I am loath to do so. The measure I am contemplating is turning off comments entirely on any post that is more than a month old. Most of the bogus comments I get are on older posts, so that should help. Any thoughts from my readers?

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

February 05, 2008

Of RSS and Other Things

The number of blogs I follow seems to be constantly increasing. While I occasionally do “spring cleaning” – removing those blogs on which I haven’t actually read a post recently (or for which there for which there just haven't been any recent posts ) – the number of new blogs I find to read always seems to be greater than the number I punt. I am now up to nearly 30 blogs I follow.

As a result, I have finally decided to switch to reading blogs via their RSS feeds as opposed to going directly to their sites. I have avoided this until now because you lose context (you only see the post, not the whole page); but opening all of those sites has just gotten too tedious (particularly since some of the site are rather irregular in their posts).

I have therefore decided to try out Google Reader to manage my blog-reading. It provides a nice web-based interface not unlike the net-news readers of old. Yes, I have been on the web long enough to have a lot of experience with news groups (A.K.A “usenet news”); and was even around for the “Great Renaming” (a gold star if you know what the “fa.” prefix stood for). With the Google Reader I can find out at a glance from one web page which blogs have new posts. I just have to paste into Google Reader the URLs for the RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feeds for each blog and it does the rest. This is particularly useful for those blogs that rarely or irregularly have new posts. I can now monitor them for new content without having to visit the page frequently.

The only downside I have identified so far is that the frequency with which Google checks for new content depends on the number of people interested in a feed. For most of the sites I follow, that seems to be OK; but I doubt that Google will ever check my blogs as often as I want to monitor them for comments. Even IE7 will not check feeds any faster than once an hour, which is too slow for me. So for this blog I will keep checking it the old fashioned way.

Now that I am a client of RSS feeds, I also realized I needed to update “Sighs and Musings” to be more RSS-friendly. I improved the RSS template for the feed of all of my posts, and created a second feed that lists the comments on the site. By subscribing to both, people can track all activity on my blog. Links to my two feeds can be found near the top of the right column on every page. I wish more sites has comments feeds as there are a few blog where I am as interested in the comments as I am on the original posts.

I also took the opportunity to clean up some other minor issues with my blog templates. Nothing big – the title of the post is now a link to the individual page and the “recent comments” links in the right column now takes you to the comment section of the page such that the new comment should be visible (if not always at the top of the window).

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 29, 2008

The Current Slave Trade

Anne and I saw a presentation this last Sunday on human slavery – not the enslavement of Africans for American plantations in the 19th century; but the forms of slavery that exist today, some in our own city. The presentation was given by an activist who is passionate about the cause of ending slavery, so I am hesitant to quote their statistics without some additional investigation (my experience is that people who are that passionate about a cause are rarely analyze supporting evidence very carefully); but one fact stuck out that I want to share – according to their statistics there are more people enslaved in America today than there were over the whole period of the Atlantic slave trade in the 18th and 19th centuries.

To be clear, I am not talking about people working in sweatshops for sub-standard wages and under sub-standard conditions (a deplorable situation in its own right). I am talking about real slavery where the workers are kept under constant guard, paid nothing (given only subsistence food and shelter) and locked up at night to prevent them from escaping.

Unfortunately, I have a lot of reason to believe their numbers. I can recall two slavery busts in our local area within the last 5 years. One involving agricultural workers at a farm just south of here, and another involving eastern European sex workers that was actually in the town where we live (on a street that we drive down regularly). In the presentation they talked about two other cases I hadn’t heard about – one involving restaurant workers in Berkley and another involving Asian sex workers in San Francisco. It is assumed that this is a small fraction of what is actually happening in our community. And the US is likely better than in many countries where the government (or at least the police) is corrupt and prosecution of slavery is rare.

One of the points that were made in the talk is that many products we have available to us in the US (or the materials used to make them) are produced by slave labor. Their statistics (again: caveat emptor) are that roughly half of certain key minerals are mined by slave labor. Anne and I had already established a bias in our purchasing in favor of products that have been “fair trade” certified. This cause might raise the importance of that distinction in our future decisions.

The presentation also covered some other interesting aspects of the problem. For instance, some groups have advocated paying to redeem slaves and set them free. The problem is that, as well meaning as this idea is, it actually only has the effect of raising the price of slaves (to buy someone out of slavery you have to pay more) and thus making it more profitable for slave traders. Essentially, such groups just subsidize the industry and have no effect on the availability of slaves.

Again, I want to do some independent investigation of this – see if anyone out there refutes their numbers; but I think this is an issue I might end up investing some of my energy in. It is amazing that that 200 years after William Wilberforce helped end the African slave trade in England, slavery has actually grown around the world and in America.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

January 21, 2008

Church Taking the rest of the year off

My wife posted on her blog about this past Sunday's final meeting of our church before the sabbatical. I couldn't have said it better, so I'll just point folks at what she said.

Posted by Steven at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 15, 2008

Church winding down to sabbatical

This past Sunday, our whole congregation went over to the church that is going to host us while our own gathering is on sabbatical so that we all could check it out. They have two services Sunday morning; but they are not symmetrical. Most churches that run two services essentially do that same thing in both services (the idea being that they only reason to do a second service is because not everyone fits into one meeting, so you want to duplicate the same experience); but that is not the case with our hosts for the next year. Their two services are complete different – even different sermons delivered by different pastors. One service is focused on folks 40 years old and up, and the other for folks 39 down (although Anne and I both preferred the "younger" service and plan to attend it).

We also had the last meeting of our church's leadership team (what other churches might call "elders") before the sabbatical starts. We tied up a few loose ends and met with the representative of our denomination to talk through a few final issues. The denomination's rep doesn’t quite know how to record and report our status for the year (this kind of thing hasn’t been done before); but otherwise things seem under control.

Next week we have the final meeting of our little group as it exists now, and are planning it as a kind of celebration of what has happened over the last 10 years. Former members have been invited back (although I don't have a sense for how many will come). Then the week after that (January 27) we all officially start attending the church that will host us for this year. Our hosts have been very supportive of our move and our plan to re-launch the church in 2009. They will be giving us a place to meet together as a group in between the two services and the founding pastor of the host church has suggested that we reserve a few rows and all sit together so as to maintain our distinct identity.

On the flip side, the Tuesday Bible Study that I have been leading resumed last week after an extended December break. In fact Anne and I seem to be the only two people really "working" over the sabbatical (violating it?) – me teaching the study ( at least until we finish John) and Anne handing the administrative issues that need to be taken care of. Everyone else is taking a break from ministry.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

January 10, 2008

Game Design and I

Game design has always been an important part of my life. I designed my first game when I was about 9 years old, and by the time I was 12 (often in collaboration with my friend Peter) I had developed a dozen or so games of different styles – including one “sport”. As a professional, I worked for several years as a video game developer and later consulted with a couple of other development companies on their projects (look for “additional programming by” credits), and I’ve been a regular beta tester for several companies through the years.

While it has been quite a while since I have done any game work professionally, I have always kept alive the idea that I might eventually get back into the business. As part of that I have maintained a file of various game ideas I have thought about over the years. Some of these are board games, others are computer games, and a few are online/email games. For some I have only managed to produce short concept statements while others I have extensive notes and mathematical models.

These past few months, sorting through the physical and intellectual baggage of my life, I have come to the conclusion that the probability that I will ever get back into game design is fairly small. There are just too many other things I want to do more to believe I will ever have the free time to invest in this. Given that, I can free up some space on my bookshelves by punting several books I have on game development (certainly the computer game books are now obsolete given new technologies) – but what to do about all of my ideas?

The decision I made over the holiday break is that I would start posting the ideas here and making them freely available to anyone who finds something useful. As per the license for this web site, all I ask is that I be given credit in any resulting products. I know the list of regular readers of this blog is small and they are equally unlikely to use the ideas; but someone may stumble here by Google or other search engine. So expect another category of post to be added soon – game ideas. There are a couple of ideas I plan to hold back for now (I’m not yet willing to completely let go of the dream of doing games again); but any of the rest that I still think are worthwhile will get posted here.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

January 04, 2008

Cooking Classes

A few years back there was a cooking store around here called “Home Chef” that sold high end cooking equipment and ingredients. The centerpiece of the store however was their cooking classes which were held several times a day. They had a series of ten classes for all the basics, and the numerous (and often seasonal) classes on various other cuisines and techniques. Most of the classes were demonstrations, although a few were hands-on lessons. All of the classes allowed you to eat what was cooked.

Anne and I took several of these classes together as “dates” and we had a lot of fun. They added a bit of variety to the standard “let’s go out together” activities like movies, concerts, and eating in restaurants. Plus we learned something that we could apply afterwards.

Unfortunately Home Chef eventually closed down and so we’ve been doing without for a while; but tonight we finally tried one of the classes at the local “Whole Foods” grocery store - a chain that focuses on organic, sustainable, and otherwise less-processed foods. They aren’t strictly “health foods” (they serve beer braised lamb shanks in their deli); but tend to sell stuff with fewer chemicals. They do however have nightly classes on a variety of topics, and we’ve been looking for one to try.

Last night we finally tried one – a class on Moroccan cuisine (one of our favorite kinds of food). Frankly it was a mixed bag; but I am hopeful enough to try more. The chef/instructor was good and the food was excellent. The problem was that the class was a late addition to the schedule and the chef was not the one to prepare the menu and recipes and unfortunately both were flawed. One dish would have taken 4-5 hours to prepare (the class was only 2 1/2 hours), and two others had clear errors in the recipe. In the end the chef ended up preparing only two of the four promised dishes – doing substitutes for the other two.

Still we enjoyed it enough that we plan to try another class there.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

January 01, 2008

Resolute

I don’t do New Year’s resolutions in the traditional sense (promising that I will/won’t do specific things in the coming year); but I do often take the opportunity at the start of a new year to think about those things I’d like, The Lord willing, to focus on in the coming days.

This year there are two things I’d like to focus on.

The first is one I have already started – getting my backlog of books cut down to size. That involves both making the time to read more and being more disciplined in how many books I purchase. Neither of these should be difficult most of the time, and I don’t plan to worry about the occasional exceptions. For instance, Anne and I may return to London in the fall of 2008, and I’ll certainly purchase a number of books while there - even though there are several books still on my “to be read” shelf that I purchased on our last London trip – three years ago. There are just too many places in London to find books that are not readily available in the USA to worry about the impact it will have on my count.

The other area of focus is to take a realistic look at the various “dreams” I have had and decide which I am really going to pursue and which I should discard. I no longer think it is feasible to do all the things “I have always wanted to do”, and making a conscious decision to discard some of these is another form of simplification of my life which will increase my chance at getting to the others.

The list of dreams to consider includes:

- Game Development. I have a large file of game ideas (both computer and board games) I have thought up over the years hoping that someday I’d have the chance to develop them. Will I ever get to them? What am I willing to give up to make the time? At a minimum, perhaps I should look through the list and pick out a few that I want to keep and abandon the rest. I have been thinking about posting the ones I discard to my blog in case someone else wants to pick them up.

- Computer Simulations. I have a smaller list of things I have always wanted to program. Some of these started as part of a game idea; but I became more interested in the question of “how would I simulate that” than the game itself. Others have interesting applications which might be profitable if successful. I justify a couple of shelves of programming books I keep in my office under the guise that I’ll need the books if I ever get around to any of these projects; but I haven’t actually written any code for any of them in over 5 years. Hmmm

- Fiction Writing. I deliberately set this aside over a year ago because I didn’t feel I had anything to write that I would actually recommend if it was written by someone else. My ideas were entertaining; but I didn’t feel that entertainment alone was worth the investment it would take to finish one of my ideas. I’m still mulling over this quandary.

- Non-Fiction Writing. In this blog at least, I seem to be able to produce a fair amount of non-fiction content; and as I have been blogging I have started to get some ideas of books I might want to write. Should I set aside the time to work though one of these projects?

There are a few others; but those are the big ones that I want to prioritize and hopefully make some decisions on this year.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 31, 2007

A Very Fine Year

Well, we live in interesting times, and between work and church, that has certainly been true for me this year. I have already posted on events at church, and as per my policy I will say nothing about my work other than what is in the pubic record - we have gone through 3 CEO's this year (I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to guess what that has been like); but on the upside we are now cash-flow positive.

Despite all that change, it has been a good year for Anne and me. Our marriage is stronger than it has ever been. Life in general is going well. I've made some real efforts to focus my life more on the things that are important to me; and that has freed up the time to invest enough in those things to start seeing tangible rewards. I even made some progress losing weight (at least until the Holidays arrived).

And obviously, I am back blogging.

I'm still ahead of the game on posts, and given the variability of my life I'd like to keep it that way. My plan for next year for this blog is to do 5 regular (scheduled) posts a week on Monday-Friday, with additional posts on any day when I have something more to say that can't wait. Furthermore, until my reading list is cut down to a manageable size, Monday's post will always be a "books I have read" post (I may actually keep that up even after I have tamed the list). So that leaves me with 4 new essays to write each week, which I think is a sustainable pace. The regular post should be up at 5:07AM Pacific time.

I also expect to return to a more diverse mix of posts again. My intent has always been that this blog reflect the mix of things I am thinking about, which lately has mostly been about church. I do however have other topics I expect to get to, including some of my game idea files. Several people have suggested that this blog would be more successful if I picked one topic and promoted the site as a go-to place for that subject; but my goal has never been to have a successful blog – I write this to get things out of my system and to engage other folks on topics that interest me. As long as there remain a few people who are willing to comment on what I say, I am content.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

December 29, 2007

Yeah, no post

Last night I looked at the essay I had planned to post this morning and decided that it really needed more work, so I pulled it. There also wasn’t another ready that I would want to put out today (lots for next week and beyond; but none for today), so I just let it go.

In other news, I am preaching again tomorrow – the pastor and I are each taking half the usual sermon slot to share something. As I prepared, I started to realize that this may be the last time I “preach”. With the church going on sabbatical, I am certainly not preaching again for another year; and I don’t know what is going to happen after that.
Given that my heart is towards styles of church where there is no preaching, I may never again be in a context where I do this. I’m fine with that; but it was worth noting.

Posted by Steven at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 24, 2007

Wii are having fun

A while back Anne and I realized we just plain had too much stuff, and started to restructure our lives to both slow down our acquisition of new stuff and to divest ourselves of a lot of things we already had. As part of that we have decided to forego exchanging Christmas presents this year. Instead, back before Thanksgiving, we purchased a Wii game system as our one present to ourselves for the year.

I have often looked at the various other consoles on the market (XBox, Xbox 360, PlayStation, PlayStation 2, etc.) but always decided that getting one would be unwise. Most of the titles available for those systems would only have been of interest to me, and I already had enough forms of entertainment available to me – I didn't need another time and money sink. Now a system that would represent a new thing for Anne and I to do together, that would be a different matter. So when the Wii came out and I had a chance to try it in the stores, I realized that this was the system I had been waiting for, and Anne agreed.

Bottom line is, yes, the Wii really is as fun to play as everyone says it is. Whether playing some of the more aerobic games (I do tend to work up a sweat playing WiiSports Boxing), or one of the more simple games that you can play from your seat, the novel control system makes the experience both new and fun. Anne and I have a great time playing together. She beats me at tennis, I beat her at golf. We're about evenly matched on Mario Party (we both are abysmal at the more platform oriented mini-games; but enjoy most of the others).

Definitely a good purchase for us!

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 22, 2007

Taking it Easy over the Holidays

As of yesterday's post I finished dumping everything I have to say on that nature of Church that has been building up over the last year. I have to say I'm glad I got all of that stuff out of my system now. Once it started to come together in my mind I really felt the need to put it all down. I appreciate everyone’s patience with the rather weighty set of posts.

With the holidays upon us I've decided to stick with lighter stuff from now until the New Year. I'm off work until January 2nd, and Anne and I will be taking it easy around home – no big trips this year. I’m going to do likewise on this blog.

My personal goal for this break is to drive down my pending book count as much as possible, so I am focusing on any books that I think I can get through fast. The goal is quality, not quality, so expect a long list of fluff next Sunday.

Posted by Steven at 05:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 14, 2007

Scheduled Posts

Since I now am ahead of the game writing posts for this blog, I finally got around to setting it up so I can enter posts into the system and schedule them to be published at a later date automatically. So as long as I can stay ahead of the game you’ll be seeing my main post each day show up regularly at 5:07AM Pacific time (when I have the scheduler itself scheduled to run).

Lord willing and barring any last-minute inspiration, I now have posts set up out until Saturday the 22nd (not counting the Sunday “books I have read” posts that obvious need to be written last minute). I also have drafts of 6 other post written; but I am not sure when I’ll use them, as well as ideas for several more. Ah, it is good to be blogging again.

Posted by Steven at 05:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Pub Quiz

Anne and I went to my first Pub Quiz last Tuesday at a local English-style pub (Anne has previously been to one in the UK). Essentially the various tables competed against each other to answer the most of a long list of trivia questions correctly over the course of 4 rounds (we had a table of 8 people, all knitting friends of Anne). The questions posed were quite varied and included:

- In the movie “Back to the Future”, at what speed did the Delorean need to achieve to travel through time?

- What percentage of the universe is made of dark matter?

- What disaster occurred the same year that Fenway Park opened?

- In geography, what do the initials C.B.D. mean?

It was an interesting experience, and I had fun; but I’m not sure I had enough fun to justify spending a whole evening at it. I do however recognize th