Molly goes to College

The Journey is the Reward

I got a bike. Not the one I was thinking of getting, but this one. My goal, setting out was to incorporate bike travel in my day to day errands.

Today's errand was to help Molly set up the company picnic. She's been working at Jeanine's office and was in charge of organizing the kid zone at the picnic, which was held at Elk Grove park, a mere 8 miles away. I thought I'd bike over and give her a hand.

Below you can see the route I took. Notice Elk Grove Blvd? It's a friggin 50 mph death trap. WHAT WAS I THINKING? And this is the flaw in my plan to integrate bike riding. My little suburban enclave is surrounded by high speed connector roads and no one on the planning commission gave a rats tail (Hi Heather) about pedestrian or bike way use. There is no sane way to get through major intersections and the west bound over crossing over HWY99 is a few square feet of dodge'em car. Yeesh.

So, I survived and I'm glad I did it, but I'm also glad I have health insurance. And boy is my family glad I have life insurance.

On a side note, the yellow dots on the map are where I had to take Google Maps off of its suggested routing. I'm impressed that I only had to get it to the park (the last yellow dot) and it was fine taking it from there. This stuff is just magic to me.


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The Boom Box

Very Short Introductions is a series of books (well over a hundred) from the Oxford University Press that offer a brief introduction to some topic. Philosophy, Maths, History, Politics, etc.

Each book is abut 10 bucks a pop.

They offer boxed sets that give you a discount on a group of books on a similar topic. The Brain Box, for instance, has Evolution, Consciousness, Intelligence, Cosmology and Quantum Theory. The Thought Box has Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard.

My two favorite titles of the boxed sets are The Ballot Box (Politics, etc.) and The Boom Box (Ancient Warfare, Cold War, etc.)

Keeping up with Lilah

Lilah is a Donut and Molly is a hiker

Lilah has safely arrived in Berlin. She arrived in Europe in Amsterdam, where, she says, everyone is taller and speaks a different language. She needs sleep.

Molly's made it to Santa Barbara and went hiking.

I'm glad someone in the family has wanderlust.

Time to put on those traveling shoes

Well, not me, but the daughters.

Lilah is off to Germany. She was supposed to leave a week ago, but her passport didn't show up in time. Several hundred dollars later to reschedule her flight and she will be on her way tomorrow in the very early morning, returning on Sept. 11.

Molly is off to L.A., via Monterey and Santa Barbara with a very good friend. Fear and Loathing teenage girl style. The Aquarium, UCLA and general hanging out.

Be Careful What You Ask For

I'm trying to figure out how to self-impose structure now that I've yanked what structure I've had out from under myself. Giving oneself over to an employer delegates structure to them.

I've never thought about when I should get up, when I should work and does it need to be a discrete block of time? A lot of the value I've added over the years has come from ideas that show up while I'm doing something else.

Go ahead and imagine a blank slate.

News From the Front, Social Networking, Navel Gazing

Hi. It's been a while. Things have been a bit hectic.

In the category of things I want to blog about, there's my quitting the day job this Friday. I'm resuming my consulting career and am looking forward to making things that people use again. I think I have about a month's work lined up. That gives me time to hustle the next thing and so the pattern starts.

I'm really really really looking forward to this.

I'm working at home this time; that's new. I think last time we did good things and the income was good, but I lost control of expenses. This time, I'll be more tight fisted with the money, while still having fun with the toys. :-) It's one thing to blow $300 on a Treo. It's fatal to be spending $50K a year on office lease.

The emphasis is data base design and development using tools I'm familiar with and tools that I hope to get better at. My name is on the door this time; that's a bit more incentive on my part to do a good job. Geography is no concern; let me know if you know someone that needs a database.

I'm playing quite a bit with the social networking apps. I'm signed up with:

• LinkedIn - a business contact directory. It's mostly sport for me now (this is true for all of them actually, but this one has the pretense of a business purpose.) I have a friend who claims to have leveraged this for business purposes. I'm eager to hear how.
• FaceBook - originally a college network site, it's slightly more 'mature' than MySpace, but it's in the same space. Sort of. The idea is you can see what your buds are up to. You get updates on all the people you marked as friends. I don't think you can see my profile unless you're a member.
• Twitter - Blogging for those with short attention spans. This is fun. You're limited 160 characters and you're supposed to answer the question "What Are You Doing". Using desktop apps like Twitterific, you can be interrupted all day by the smart remarks of your friends. It has programming hooks, so folks have written add-ons that let you 'chat' with your calendar, for example, and set an appointment by using Twitter.
• Pownce - Like Twitter it encourages short posts to a select group of friends. Unlike Twitter it has built in support for file transfer, links and calendar postings in addition to text posts. I'm unsure on this one; it's too close to Twitter and I've not had much use for the additional feature set. I am enamored of the technology it's built on, however.
• Plaxo - The newest and coolest, imho. Address Book, Calendar and Tasks/Notes all on the web, all synchronized with your desktop. Really handy if you're going back and forth from home to work and want the info in both places (yes, less of an issue starting on Monday....) As of Monday, this week, it also supports developing a friends network. All God's Children want to be in the Social Networking space... :-)