Peace, or something like it

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Sometimes action produces motivation. When I wait for the reverse, I can get caught in a Mexican standoff.
Saturday I grabbed a ride from friends headed out to Rainier to get in a big climb on my bike. I had planned to do the climb to Paradise, but we ended up outside the White River entrance so I hopped out and set off for Sunrise Point instead. I knew the climb would be painful because it was my first major climb of the year, but I shut out all thoughts. Just turned off that high-maintenance part of my mind that requires a perfect confluence of stimuli and moods to leap into action and switched over to robotic autopilot. Executed a series of basic commands. Before I knew what was happening, I had paid my $5 park entrance fee and was in my 39-25 gear, headed uphill.
I stopped at the first bathroom to unload some liquid weight. The bathroom was back in the woods about 25 yards. When I hopped back on my bike, I cut into the parking lot between two parked cars. At that same moment, a huge truck came tearing into that spot. The dude driving wasn't paying attention and nearly hit me. I slammed on my brakes and hit his front bumper and fell onto my side. Ouch. Not a good start. I had a few scratches, but the real damage was that my front wheel was out of alignment. I gave it a spin with my hand and it stopped after a half revolution, catching on the front brakes.
I moved the brake pads back and forth until the tire could spin unhindered. I could true the wheel by eye by adjusting the tension of some of the spokes. Unfortunately, my Mavic wheelset requires a proprietary tool to adjust the tension of its spokes, and I don't own one. Decision time. I had three hours to kill, and my front tire was a bit wobbly. Sit around for three hours, or ascend and risk a somewhat squirrelly descent. I rode a few loops in the parking lot and decided to push on. Not being able to get in a good climb would have dampened my spirit, already a bit shaky in the face of all the Alpine climbs awaiting me in France.
Meanwhile, crazy trucker driver and his buddies had walked off, with a brief mumbled "sorry." I've cycled enough to know that danger number one on the roads is any pack of young males, especially if they're driving a large truck. They drive aggressively, and they enjoy pulling stunts like swerving towards cyclists and blasting their horns to try and cause a wipeout. But on a bike, you just have to shrug it off. You're not going to win a fight armed with an 18 pound road bike when pitted against a 3000 pound car.
I channeled my anger into the early part of the climb. It was a gorgeous day, as clear a sky as I've ever seen over Rainier. Just a mile or two into the climb, my bottle of Cytomax had heated up to the point where it tasted like tea. The anger wore off, and pain moved in. My feet were throbbing. It was by far the longest sustained climb I'd done all year. The pain in my feet became unbearable. I stopped at the side of the road by a pile of snow and pulled off my shoes. I buried my water bottle in the snow to cool it off, and I took off my socks and rested my aching pups on the snow to dull the pain and swelling.
The ten minute break did me good. When I hopped back on my bike I had a spring in my legs. Before I knew what had happened, I rounded a bend and saw the sign for Sunrise Point. I'd finished my 14 mile ride in just over an hour and a half. I wasn't going to win any races at that speed, but the ride didn't kill me, either. A woman in the passenger seat of a passing station wagon leaned out and clapped.
"You made it!" she beamed. Generally, people in station wagons are bike friendly.
I had begun the climb trying to suppress some latent distaste for cycling which had been growing over the past few weeks. I suspect it's a byproduct of the dread I feel about heading to France to climb the Alps without having logged sufficient training. But I knew this would happen as soon as I planned my sabbatical to cover most of the spring training season. So why be such a pessimist? How rough can it be to bike through the sunny countryside of France?
The ride to Sunrise transformed me. The sun, the challenge of gravity...I was smiling on the bike again. I stopped briefly at Sunrise and then pushed on up further, to the actual peak of the road. Then I turned around and headed back towards the base. Given the state of my wheel, I was unusually cautious. On a descent like that a cyclist of my weight can easily hit 45mph without touching the pedals, but I carressed my brakes on the way down and reached a peak of 38mph. Even at that speed, I kept smacking into flying bugs that would prick me with the force of pebbles on a moving windshield. I thought I'd reach the bottom looking like Jim Carrey after his motorcycle ride with Renee Zellwegger in Me, Myself, & Irene, with dead bugs all over my face, chest, and helmet.
My favorite part of descending twisty roads like those in Rainier is being able to chase down and occasionally pass cars. Pacing behind a car at near 40mph is an exhilarating feeling. If the car ahead of you stops, you'll likely die, but you can say that about many aspects of descending. Leaning back and forth in the turns, chasing a car--the happiness I felt must be what dogs feel as they chase cars down the street.
At the bottom, I waited for my ride for twenty minutes near a pack of sportbike enthusiasts, all twenty-something men, cooling off by the side of the road. It was a wolfpack of alpha males, their confidence jacked up by each other's company. I kept my distance but could hear them trading boasts and jests, talking about the women they were going to hook up with that night, cussing each other out over any show of weakness. A pack of girls in an SUV pulled over and asked to snap a photo of them on their bikes. They obliged, and as the car pulled away one of the guys hopped off his bike and thrust his hips a few times in their direction.
I remember the feeling of being in packs like that in grade school. In the company of boys wanting to be men. We must be wary of who our kids consort with, because kids socialize each other as I'm reading about in The Nurture Assumption.
The other big problm I had to solve over the weekend was my job decision. The lack of a decision was twisting me into the ground. I spent time thinking about my options on the bike climb, and I spent time at the golf driving range on Sunday, thinking about it some more. I drew notes on an old whiteboard of mine, and by dinnertime on Sunday I knew what I was going to do. The simple act of making a decision took a huge burden off of my mind.
So mentally, I'm at a place of peace right now. I'm fired up for the Tour de France and fired up for my new job. So Alpe D'Huez will kick my ass. I won't be its first victim. If I smile on the way up, no matter how much pain I'm in, I'll feel happy. Sometimes the smile produces the happiness, not the other way around.

The remains of this day

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  • The Industrial Design Excellence Awards of 2003. Click on that dark square graphic to see the actual award winners. Among the items which caught my eye were the Zinio Reader and the Bombardier EMBRIO/2025. The Zinio Reader allows you to download individual issues of magazines to read on a Tablet PC. I've never played with a Tablet PC, and I know there's a ton of debate as to whether they're revolutionary or the next MS Bob, but the appeal of reading magazines on a Tablet PC is the option of searching through them or archiving particular articles for the future. I still resort to tearing out pages of interesting articles, leaving piles of paper lying all around my room. Searching through those paper clippings is a pain in the ass. Inevitably I end up throwing all of it out later. The Bombardier EMBRIO/2025 looks like what the Segway would look like if designed by Japanese mecha anime artists. Steve Jobs is right, though...the Segway would be much more of an item of desire if it looked cooler, even if the functionality remained exactly the same. One other thing caught my eye, and that's the IDEO Methods Deck, mostly because IDEO always walks away with a ton of medals in this competition. At $49, that's nearly $1 for each of the 51 cards (one card short of a full deck, representing an incomplete collection). There are four suits: learn, watch, ask, try. Maybe someone will post them online as was done for Brian Eno's oblique strategies.

  • Star Wars, Episode III, began shooting today.

  • After another half hour on the phone with AT&T customer service last night, a trouble ticket was filed. This morning I had to set up my voicemail box yet again. And this afternoon? I'm finally receiving voicemail indicators on my phone.

  • I wanted to rent a Nikon D1H digital camera body for my trip to France, but there isn't one to be found in Seattle. I was both surprised and disappointed. If you know of one, please let me know. The D1H has just 2.6 megapixels which most people would find to be surprisingly low resolution for a $3000 camera body. But many wildlife photographers and journalists among the Nikon faithful use it as their primary camera body. Why? It's the fastest Nikon digital camera body available, and more megapixels don't do you much good if you missed the decisive moment or are simply printing a the photo in a magazine or newspaper, or posting it to the web.

  • Battleground God is a good, mindless way to kill a few minutes. It's a test of the consistency of your personal philosophy about God. I managed to survive without any direct hits, though I received several danger warnings. My answers can be found in the text of this insanely long URL.

  • The Herman Miller Mirra, a lower-cost cousin to the most famous piece of office furniture in my lifetime, the Herman Miller Aeron. The Mirra's already gaining lots of praise and winning gold medals. I've never been important enough to get a company to spring for an Aeron for me. They are spendy, though skimping when it comes to ergonomics if you're in pain is a bad idea. I'm a big fan of the mesh seatback--keeps you cooler in the summertime.

  • The Illustrated Catalog of ACME Products is mildy amusing; the Ian Frazier essay Coyote vs. Acme is very funny.

  • Amazon's reviews build is much faster now. If you write a customer review, it'll show up in no time. Good stuff.

  • Signed up for the DirecTV HD package today. ESPN HD? Not all that impressive thus far. Most of the Sportscenter highlight footage is, of course, not shot in HD and doesn't look all that special. Discovery HD Theater, though, is sweet. As I write, I'm watching this documentary called Alien Insect: Praying Mantis. The picture is stunningly sharp. Most incredible scenes? A female mantis chews the head off of a male mantis on her back while they're mating. The headless male continues to mate, a drop of green fluid forming out of the hole where his head used to be, and when the sexual act is done, the headless male mantis body wanders off by itself until the female runs it down and eats it whole. An apt metaphor, perhaps, for the loss of reasoning of the male in heat. In another scene, a praying mantis catches a 10 inch cow snake and nearly eats it before it squirms free, missing a chunk of flesh. Finally, a mantis snatches a hummingbird out of mid-air while it's feeding and chews its head off. Whoa.


The print version can serve as toilet paper, too

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The NYTimes online archive is not an attractive offering. I wanted to read this old article on how studies of how customers make brand choices might illuminate the affirmative action debate. To read a single article, you have to pay $2.95, and if you buy a 25 article multi-pack it comes to $1.05 per article, but the multi-pack expires after 6 months.
Considering you can buy an entire issue for a buck, $1.05 for a single article seems ridiculous. If their goal is to drive all of us to libraries to use those old microfiche machines, they're doing a good job. More likely is that their online division is clueless.

AT&T Clueless

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AT&T Wireless switched over to their new voicemail system sometime in the past week. I'd heard annoying notifications about it earlier this year when dialing my voicemail, but the notifications were so long and included such convoluted instructions that I never wrote them down. Then, in the past few days, I stopped receiving voicemail messages. You don't know that you're not receiving them--you just feel really ostracized for a few days--until someone asks you why you didn't return their call.
So yesterday I dialed my voicemail box and found 12 unheard messages. I didn't get to hear them until I walked through a the process of setting up my voicemail box again.
So this whole conversion was obviously a huge hassle. What amazing new benefits do I receive for having suffered through this conversion? If you know, please let me know. As far as I can tell, my voicemail works exactly the same. That AT&T didn't work to make the transition transparent to its users is one more example of how badly telecom companies treat their users.
One other footnote. In this new voicemail system, there's a binary flag to turn voicemail indicators on or off. Why would anyone want it off? Well, when my voicemail box was converted, it was reset to off, so my phone wouldn't show an icon to indicate I had messages waiting. I had to sit on the phone with a friendly AT&T customer service rep for 15 minutes last night while he turned the flag back on. How inane.

RSS newsreader update

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Another list of newsreaders.
Adam suggested Newzcrawler for my Windows PC, and I've got that installed. So far, so good. The FeedDemon beta just came out, so I'll put those two head to head on my Windows PC.
On my Mac at home, I've got NetNewsWire running. I've also got Blogstreet sending posts to both my work and personal e-mail accounts.
It's been fun, but after just two days, it's a bit of information overload. I don't think I'll go with the e-mail solution except for a few isolated blogs because you can't surf inside the e-mail client. Having a newsreader on both my Mac and PC is also a bit of overkill. Ultimately, I suspect I'll end up being a FeedDemon guy if the beta is fairly stable.
I foresee a combination RSS newsreader/blog/e-mail/web browsing client that also manages paid RSS content, makes it easier to inserting hyperlinks and Amazon.com Associates and other affiliate links, possesses superior search and cross-threading and topic filtering technology, and is also smart enough to recommend stuff you'd want to read but weren't aware of. Add in chat capabilities, layer in true micropayments, and we have the next Internet super-application. I'd go off and code one but I'm not smart enough.

Will Ferrell's Class Day speech

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Ah, a transcript of it. I'm crying just reading it.
Now I know I blew some of your minds with my depiction of what it's really like out there. But if anyone can handle the ups and downs of this crazy blue marble we call Planet Earth, it's you guys. As I stare out into this vast sea of shining faces, I see the best and brightest. Some of you will be captains of industry and business. Others of you will go on to great careers in medicine, law and public service. Four of you -- and I'm not at liberty to say which four -- will go on to magnificent careers in the porno industry. I'm not trying to be funny. That's just a statistical fact.

A golden-hearted Jobs?

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Steve Jobs spoke at Stanford recently. An article about his talk includes this quote:
Jobs, who is known in the Valley as a very hardball manager, shared industry war stories and advised the business students to be, well, nice.
"When I was younger and had to fire someone, I didn't think twice about it," he said. But with a few decades in business and the painful experience of being fired from the company he founded behind him, Jobs now says, "Even if someone has really screwed up and someone else should have fired him last year, you need to remember that he's going to have to go home and tell his wife and kids that he's been fired and no longer has a job."

I don't know why, and it's not appropriate, but that strikes me as incredibly funny.
He also mentions that he'd like to see Pixar get its throughput up to one movie per year. Thinking about the Pixar Disney relationship inspired a haiku:
Jobs says to Eisner
"Pixar makes all your best flicks.
Show me the money."
My current celebrity CEO crush is Steve Jobs. I'm awaiting his biography to arrive on the doorstep. When has someone who creates so little financial value (half of Apple's $7B market cap is cash and cash equivalents) and captures so little market share captured so much mindshare (Ashton Kutcher aside)? Owning the hardware and software may not have proven to be the best financial model (Microsoft has of course been far superior as an investment), but it has led to the most stable platform for creative work (all the iApps, and Final Cut Pro, just plain work; no driver download and IRQ conflicts and all that frustration that comes with Windows). While Jobs is very smart about certain things (design, for example), it's his rock star and mildly ruthless personality that is most intriguing. Other than Warren Buffett, CEO's who are nice and lack megalomaniacal tendencies just don't stick.

What to do?

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As you can tell from the time stamp on this post, I'm up late. The job decision is twisting me in knots, and I can't sleep. I thought I had decided on what to do, but every next person I speak to changes my mind. I'm not sure why I'm so anxious given that nothing in life is permanent. I thought I had realized that during my sabbatical, but the lesson isn't taking today.
But my gut is zeroing in, and my experience is that when I trust my gut and heart I'm usually right, and it's much less painful than entrusting such decisions to my brain. I think my gut factors in everything that my brain does but adds a level of subconscious intuition that dissects problems in a way which my brain is not wired to comprehend. It reminds me of the studies that have shown that most interviewers decide yes/no on a candidate within a few minutes of seeing the candidate walk through the door.
I suspect it's related to our ability to intuit the thoughts and feelings of others by reading their faces and body language, an ability Malcolm Gladwell wrote about in an interesting article last August.
There's just not enough time in the day. That's my biggest problem. I wish I could do all three jobs at the same time. Ever since I returned from my sabbatical, my mental batteries have been overcharged. I've been buying books like they're headed for extinction, and everyday I'm researching some new topic of interest that leads to ten other book purchases. I often spread my mental bandwidth too thin; must must must tighten my focus to be effective.

Free TiVo trial

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Tivo has been struggling for ages now to try and get their adoption rate to hit the hockey stick trajectory of quadractic growth.* They've relied primarily on wacky TV ads. Tivo is something the average Joe can't grok unless he's seen it in action. I'd like to see them try some trial model which gets boxes into more homes, perhaps with a free trial period after which the software locks up until the customer pays for the unit. Every electronics store would have trial units ready for customers to take home with them for a really low fee, say $50 plus a credit card number as a deposit. They'd get it for a month or two, say, with full functionality. If they keep it, they get the $50 back as a discount against the full purchase price, and if they decide not to keep it after the trial period they have to return it to the store to get half their $50 back, and the unit would go back into circulation as a trial unit. Heck, they could pre-load these trial units with some complete seasons of some popular TV shows just to increase the likelihood of adoption. After you've saved a lot of your favorite shows on a trial unit, you'd be loathe to return it. A program like this could be rolled out gradually to minimize capital costs, or perhaps they could convince a well-capitalized but fighting-extinction company like Blockbuster to front some of the costs as a way to drive store traffic in exchange for a rev share on any completed sales.
I've rarely met a person who installed and used a Tivo and said it didn't change their life. Tivo is in danger of seeing their service commoditized to the point where they're driven out of the market by better capitalized competitors who embed Tivo-like functionality in other devices at lower cost. [Aside: In the consumer electronics space, the device which I'd buy in a heartbeat right now is a combo DVD-Recorder PVR device, preferably one that could handle hi-def signals. Pioneer just announced two such units which sound pretty close. Look for one on my Amazon wishlist soon.]
Unfortunately, unless they own a patent on their technology, Tivo might have a difficult time licensing their functionality out broadly in a platform play. ReplayTV tried that, but they didn't have anything so valuable that it couldn' t be reverse engineered cheaply. The Pioneer deal is a good start, and it's still worth a try. Surviving by being simply a box manufacturer is certainly not a winning strategy. Don't get me wrong--I love my hacked Tivo, but my business spider sense foresees a difficult future for TiVo (that capital V thing is too hard to type). They should be trying to solve the adoption problem instead of building random functionality that just makes their device more difficult for Joe Consumer to grok.
What do people think?
*Everyone says exponential growth, but as Kevin Kelly points out in New Rules for the New Economy almost everyone means quadractic growth or polynomial growth, or some number n raised to the power of 2 or some other fixed integer; true exponential growth means some number raised to a growing power n, which is insanely fast growth and rarely occurs in the business world.

Yeah, if you have really long arms

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Just what about Design Within Reach is within reach?
They win the prize over the Nieman Marcus Christmas book for "paper catalog found on the most coffee tables in homes of people who've never been able to afford anything from the catalog." And by the way, that coffee table that the catalog is sitting on? Not from Design Within Reach.
Well, at least the Design Within Reach catalog, unlike the Neiman Marcus Christmas book, is free. That's the only thing within my reach.

Day with Jose

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Unfortunately, I'm above the 17 year old age limit for this $2500 offer to spend a day at Jose Canseco's house.
Jose is so unintentionally hilarious that I'd love to cobble together the funds to send someone like Bill Simmons posing as a 17 year old to visit the Canseco mansion.
"Jose, so you nailed Madonna. What was like that? You could kick Guy Ritchie's ass, couldn't you? Do you want to?"
"Did you really use jet fuel in your Lamborghini? Does that work? Could I take it for a spin?"
"Dude, who's juicing in baseball. C'mon, just tell me."
"Did you just feel like the biggest idiot when that ball bounced off of your head and over the wall for a home run."
"You still look pretty built. Still hittin' the roids?"
Seriously, what could he offer in a day at his house that would be worth $2500? I'm really curious to see a sample itinerary or something.

Phairities

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Nate's sending me a Liz Phair bootleg disc that he's titled Phairities. Very cool stuff. Here's the playlist:
1. Go, Speed Racer (demo)
2. Hello Sailor (demo)
3. Divorce Song (demo)
4. Wild Thing (demo)
5. Russian Girl (demo)
6. California (Chasing Amy Soundtrack)
7. Wasted (live)
8. Stuck On an Island (What's Up Matador compilation)
9. Six Dick Pimp (demo)
10. Rocket Boy (demo)
11. I'm a Believer (live)
12. Freak of Nature (demo)
13. Firewalker (live)
14. Emotional Rescue (live)
15. Don't Have Time (Higher Learning soundtrack)
16. Mesmerizing (live)
17. Divorce Song (live)
18. Conversation Overheard Between Two Bouncers (live)
19. Bars of the Bed (demo)
20. See the Light (live)
21. If I Ever Pay You Back (demo)
22. Turning Japanese (EP)
23. Ghost Story (live)
24. F*** and Run (live)
Nate is my bootleg source, having previously provided me with some cool Paul Westeberg live gigs. Meanwhile, Liz's new album is getting top billing in my car CD player now. It's a good summer album.

New Google Toolbar kills pop-ups

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The new Google Toolbar is in beta. Key feature is that it kills pop-ups. So, if you're still using Internet Explorer and are jealous of all the Safari and Mozilla users who don't have to deal with pop-ups, don't be. I use IE at work to achieve user empathy, so this is a tasty upgrade to what was already a cool little mini-app.
There's also a BlogThis! feature which is rapidly becoming a ubiquitous add-on to all types of client software.

Not that easy

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I take Amazon and its operations and website for granted, especially working there. But whenever I order from another website, I'm reminded of how hard it is to do what Amazon does so well. I placed two orders two weeks ago, one from The Golf Warehouse, the other from eGolfDirect. One was a father's day gift, the other for myself. After hearing and receiving nothing, I finally called them this week, wondering what had happened. Turns out both sites had run out of stock on the products I ordered.
Geez, thanks for letting me know, guys. Retail is detail. After years in business, it's shocking how many sites still mess up the basics.