No one likes to make coffee in our office and I think I know why. Today I set the coffee maker to brew enough for ten cups. I go back ten minutes later to get a cup and there’s one cup left. If there are 6-7 people who regularly drink coffee and each of them knows that someone will eventually blink and make coffee, the ideal strategy is to wait. In most situations in life, the person who acts first benefits first, but not so in the world of office coffee. The person who starts the coffee is guaranteed nothing. So, if you’re a coffee drinker and you’re running your life in the most efficient way possible, you will get your coffee at the optimal time, later in the morning, when it is most likely that someone will have given in.
Personal
18
Apr 07
Some jobs get in your head
Even though it’s been six years since I worked there I still dream about being a courier at Fedex. Some jobs get in your head. I don’t know if I still dream because I worked there for five years or because of the repetitive, routinized, physical nature of the work. The dreams are absurd. The most common theme is that even though I haven’t been around, my route has been waiting for me and no one really noticed that I wasn’t doing it. I’ll walk into the warehouse and there’s a truck waiting with my clipboard and crates, ready to hit the road. Everyone else is bustling around the warehouse as usual. Last night, there was a new wrinkle, my file in the check-in room was full of uncashed checks.
Even when I worked there I dreamt about it. My most common dreams involved entering an intersection and seeing Fedex packages all over the road as if spilled out of the back. Other times, I would move in my sleep as if I were picking up boxes.
Maybe our brains are designed to adapt to such situations, slowly shaping our minds to meet the physical, mental demands of our day to day activities until we become optimized for our work, in my case, as a courier. When you do physical labor and grow familiar with it, you can achieve a zen-like state of mindlessness where your subconscious mind operates your body. Maybe dreams are just the residue of these orphaned mental routines.
3
Apr 07
Good pizza, good people
My mom was in town yesterday and Jody and I had a chance to take her to dinner. I didn’t know any good places to eat near her hotel, so we drove down the road to one of our favorite places in Dallas, Sal’s Pizza. We end up eating Sal’s pizza once or twice a week because it’s very good and inexpensive and we can get it delivered to the house quickly. It’s perfect for those nights when you don’t feel like cooking or going out. Anyway, we had a good conversation with Sal and talked about travel to Italy and our respective family backgrounds. As we were finishing up the waitress came over and said everything was on the house per Sal. Sal is a class act. He’s one of those people who knows that business, like life, is all about people and relationships. If you’re ever in Dallas, I highly recommend the food there.
2
Apr 07
Milestones on a brief journey
I just turned thirty years old. For those who have preceded me to this point, I am honored to join your company. For those headed this way, we’ll see you soon enough. Having achieved three decades, I can honestly say it doesn’t feel right, but I’m nonetheless resigned to it. I can’t shake the feeling that I wasted too much time; either through indolence or simple carelessness. However, what’s done is done. I must now close the books on my youth.
I know that in many ways age is an arbitrary measure of little importance. But, since our lives are finite, these milestones are important measures of progress. If we were immortal we could live without responsibility, but mortality holds us to account for the preciousness of Time and lends significance to our decisions. This is true even if we live as if life has no deadline.
On the anniversary of our birth, it is good to weigh in and tally up the balance. It is also a good time to think and ask big questions of ourselves. Are we happy with our lives? Are we on our way to where we want to be? What have we learned? What do we want to become?
3
Apr 06
Three little goats
Warning: Hearing about someone else’s dreams is notoriously uninteresting…
…but I wanted to jot this one down before I forget it. When I woke up this morning I was in the middle of a dream about this little man who was going hunting, ostensibly for bison or some similar large ungulate. He was wearing animal skins and furs and was riding on a sleigh or cart pulled by three little goats. As they made their way through the shadowed forest, a giant white goat appeared and started fighting with the three little goats, butting them and trying to force them into a nearby pond. The big goat’s name was Boaz or Boez. Once all the goats were in the pond, they continued struggling under water as indicated by the roiling surface of the pond. At this point I quit being a spectator and appeared in the dream. I was about to dive into the water to separate the fighting goats when a woman appeared out of nowhere and told me not to interfere.
24
Mar 06
James at the Guild Hall
My friend, James, is studying video game development at the Guild Hall Program at SMU. I went over to his house last night and he showed me a lot of the cool video game stuff he’s been working on including this cool planetary game. It’s awesome that he’s working toward something he really wants to do with his life. He’s learned a lot about programming and game development, and I was impressed with the stuff they’ve been teaching at the Guild Hall. He’s mixed up in all kinds of concepts related to game design: 3d animation, physics, graphics programming, etc. I’m confident that with an interview he could get a job tomorrow. He’s done some great stuff. After he graduates I’ll bug everyone I know who works in the game industry to help get interviews. He just needs an opening, and he’ll take off. His dream is to work for a couple years in the field then launch his own game.
It seems like most of my friends are doing really well. Many are getting married (six couples), working on great careers, starting businesses, going back to school, and just living the good life. It’s very satisfying to enjoy the success of people you care about. I have had this feeling lately of being blessed. It’s a spiritual feeling, but it’s also a feeling of luck and appreciation. I’m thankful that things are going as well as they are for others and myself. I have a great family, an awesome woman, and a few cherished friends. It’s important to appreciate what’s good in your life and work on what’s not good. It’s never perfect, but life is up to you and how you decide to live it. You will have mistakes and failures, but in the end all the matters is what you do with those experiences.
22
Mar 06
More enumeration
I’ve been neglecting ye old blog, but there’s a lot going on. That’s life. It somehow manages to stay as full as you want or allow it to be. I keep thinking of all these cool things to talk about but by the time I get back to a computer my mind is onto something else.
The big thing that happened this week is that I finished the new website for my company, which is this nationwide medical startup based in the Dallas area. It’s been a two month process, but it’s quite satisfying to complete something you’ve worked on for that long. As the resident web designer, I was in charge of building everything and making sure all the various pieces work as expected. I am also responsible for managing all the little changes and suggestions every stakeholder wants to make. For example, whose opinion has more weight… the chairman of the board or the COO? Yeah. You spend time some time navigating things like that. Usually, if I get change requests for things like colors and fonts, I’ll just try it out and show them how it looks. A lot of times they’ll go with whatever was there to begin with. In this project, as in other projects I’ve done with my freelance clients, the client likes to make one or two changes to put their mark on the project. So, even if you spend several days implementing a design that was already agreed upon, expect a couple more days of final changes and requests. Don’t take it personally.
In other news, it rained like crazy this weekend for a total of about ten inches of rain. Dallas has some serious weather that Austin can’t touch. I looked out the balcony Saturday and it was raining sideways. The wind was howling. It gets windier here than anywhere else I’ve ever been I guess because it’s so flat. On Sunday while it was still raining, I braved the low water crossings to check out the Dallas central library, so I could get my library card and check it out. Nerd alert.
Up on the eighth floor I discovered a huge genealogy research center funded by the Dallas Genealogical Society. They have census records from 1920 and 1930 as well as ship manifests and other such documentation. I sat there for about an hour and worked on my family tree, which was fascinating. In viewing the 1930 census, I found the record for my grandfather’s family. It shows the street they lived on in Louisville, the neighbors, and the ages of his parents and brothers and sisters as well as all their names. I also found a 1910 directory entry for my great-great-great-grandfather who worked as a property assistant at the Masonic Temple on Center Street in Louisville, Kentucky. On my mom’s side I found the Thornton line that was traced back to the 13th century. It was weird to find the draft records for several men in my family. The draft records show their age, their weight, their height, and their occupation. It is very interesting.
Genealogy is humbling. You see how short the human life really is when compared to history. Eighty years is not a long period of time. Consider how quickly the past ten years have elapsed. You live, you procreate and before you know it, you’re an old-fashioned name listed in some family tree.
16
Mar 06
Macsperience
So, I got our IT department to purchase a refurbished Mac mini for me so I could do some cross-browser testing for the new company website. My boss suggested this because he’s a complete Mac geek. The Mini I ordered ended up being $450, which was a great deal. You can order it from the Apple website. The Mac mini is probably ideal for someone who already has a bunch of PC hardware because all you really need to do is connect a monitor, keyboard, and mouse and you’re ready to go. I have to say, OSX is pretty neat. It’s definitely easy, which is good for people who just want things to work so they can surf the Internet. Everything about it is pretty easy except that you have to figure out the slight differences in how things are supposed to work. It’s the kind of computer I would buy for my grandma. It even looks nice. That being said, as nice as everything else is, Safari sucks.
13
Mar 06
Enumerating the weekend
- Saturday I took Jody’s car to get an oil change and car wash at The Car Spa. I met an older woman in the waiting area with a graceful grey Afghan named, Annie. Afghans have the softest coat I have felt on a dog. Both woman and dog were gentle spirits. It was a welcome treat.
- Saturday evening, Jody and I drove to Oklahoma. Sunday after lunch, we fed the cattle, which I enjoy. Then we went out in the wooded pasture to try to find one of the cows who did not come up to feed. Jody’s mom thought she might be out trying to have her calf, but she wanted to make sure. We split up and walked all around through the trees and brush. I spotted the cow up the side of a hill past the creek and called Jody over. The cow had afterbirth hanging from her which meant she had the calf recently. We looked around for a little while and couldn’t find it. The momma cows normally hide the babies while they go feed, and we split up again just to find it and make sure it was okay. I went back South over an area I had already looked over. I climbed down into a little draw and looked around. I spotted the new calf under scraggly tree in amongst the rocks and leaves. It was so perfectly camouflaged that I completely missed it before. It was sitting there motionless with its eyes closed, and I thought it was dead, being the naive pessimist I am. When I yelled to the others that I had found it, the tiny brown calf opened its black eyes to look at me but didn’t move a muscle. I stood there and looked at it and it looked back at me without concern. It was just doing what it was supposed to do. Waiting quietly for its mother to return. I thought that we creatures of Earth are so perfectly suited to our world.
13
Mar 06
Attention board game geeks: Settlers of Catan
Every month at my apartment complex there is a “game night”. It’s hosted by this couple who work for a group called “Cares”, a non-profit that tries to build community in large apartment complexes. The idea behind Cares is that if you make the complex feel more like home the tenants will want to take better care of things and stay longer. That saves the landlord money.
We have a young married couple on site who run all the events. They’re very nice. My guess is the complex gives them a free or sharply discounted apartment in return for their services. I can see the point behind trying to build community in a 300 unit complex, although every time I go to a Cares event there are usually fewer than eight people and most of them are regulars like me who can only be coaxed from their apartments to play board games. The last couple times I’ve gone it’s been a total sausage party, 4-5 guys and occasionally a couple women playing Scrabble. Out of the three times I’ve gone in the last three months, we’ve played Risk once and Settlers of Catan twice. I’m new to Settlers of Catan, but it’s one of the best games I’ve ever played. It’s Chess meets Risk. Although there is no combat, it is very strategic and competitive. The basic idea is to get to ten victory points before anyone else. You start out building roads and villages and each village gives you one point and helps you to collect resources like ore, wood, sheep, timber, and clay every time the dice are rolled. These resources help you build or buy development cards. Like Chess, there are several ways to win, and as you play you will see the most popular strategic gambits: the race for the longest road (2 victory points), the race for the largest army (2 victory points), etc. Many people go all out for the development cards, which like Chance cards in Monopoly can often throw you some sort of bonus. For example, there is a card called “Monopoly” that allows you to strip all of one resource out of every player’s hand. The game itself is relatively new as board games go, having been created in 1997 by a small publisher, so many people have not heard of it. It will become one of those classic games, if it hasn’t already. It’s that good.
Poking around online, I stumbled across a free knock-off of Settlers of Catan called Sea3D that you can play over the Internet. It’s a direct translation of the game into digital form produced by Jason Fugate, a programmer at EA in Chicago. It even just looks like a board game on your computer since it uses 3D representations of the game pieces complete with wood grain. In addition to a fantastic iteration of Settlers, Fugate created a ladder ranking and online game matching system, so you can actually compete against players from all over the world. The game application allows you to host your own Settlers matches as well as join games hosted by other players. In some ways, I wish I hadn’t found this because I’ve spent several hours playing since last week. Last night I laid awake at two in the morning trying to figure out why my strategy using the sheep port didn’t pan out. I think I’m coming out too strong in the beginning which results in unwanted attention from my opponents who check me with the Robber and slow me down. The Robber is placed on a tile whenever someone rolls a 7 or plays a Soldier card. If the Robber is on one of your tiles he can keep you from producing resources until the piece is moved.
If you’re interested in playing The Settlers of Catan Sea3D is be a good way to start. It’s still more fun to play in person since you can enjoy the petty little rivalries and arguments that inevitably take place as players become frustrated watching their fortunes change.
