This is Life

I’ve started and stopped dozens of blog posts. Ideas. Ram­blings. Mus­ings. None of them being fin­ished. Well here is an over­due update.

My job is a dream. Where as for the past two jobs I have been a cog in the machine with peeks at influ­ence, I’m now truly at the top and I am able to have a say and directly influ­ence the direc­tion for a com­pany and its prop­er­ties. This is the ful­fill­ment I seek for my pro­fes­sional life.

K and I are doing quite well. We hosted our first Thanks­giv­ing, com­plete with fam­ily from both sides and plumb­ing prob­lems. We chose to remove Turkey and replace it with Steak. A choice which is ques­tioned by many, but I highly rec­om­mend for all. Steak > turkey. Though admit­tedly also in cost.

And so life goes on. In a few short weeks we’ll be head­ing to Atlanta for Christmas.

My Kryptonite

It’s not a secret, and yet when it comes up I am met with any vari­ety between shock and amuse­ment. It’s true: I don’t watch scary movies. Almost ever. I walked out on the Scream movies. I avoid haunted houses. And gen­er­ally I find no desire to see what I’m missing.

blair witch project
Creative Commons License photo credit: DanielaNob

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When the Smoke Clears…

Row boat
Creative Commons License photo credit: wsil­ver

Life has a funny way of rock­ing the boat at the most inop­por­tune times. To lose my job two days after propos­ing to my fiancee is some­thing out of a TV show. How­ever, what it turned out to be was a won­der­ful oppor­tu­nity to pur­sue a job damn close to the job of my dreams. No, it is not per­fect, but it is awesome.

Katie and I had hardly real­ized that we have been engaged for a month. We’ve been so dis­tracted with the new life and adjust­ing to it, that we both real­ized late in the evening while we were check­ing out at a Publix.

Dis­trac­tion is a frus­trat­ing thing. So often I get dis­tracted and for­get what I was doing or say­ing. I have been so dis­tracted by my new life that I didn’t real­ize just how long it had been since I took a leap and snagged the love of my life. And, when the smoke cleared, from it, from the lost job, from the pro­posal, from the new job and the travel — I real­ize that I’m extremely happy.

Love is know­ing that you can’t live with­out the other per­son. And I can’t live with­out Katie.

Two Days on the Road

For the last two days I’ve been on the road with two of my bosses at the new job. We’re on the way to Indi­anapo­lis for Gen­Con, but the biggest value for me com­ing on this trip is that I am being immersed in the busi­ness. We’ve had nearly 24 hours on the road, of which the vast major­ity of it has been spent dis­cussing the busi­ness, how and why things are done, and for me to ques­tion, explore and poke around in the process to learn as much as I can.

We’ve dis­cussed it from the top down and from the left to the right. It feels like what I imag­ine an inten­sive for­eign lan­guage course feels like. I catch myself let­ting my mind wan­der and los­ing track of what is being said only to snap my mind back to focus and fran­ti­cally try to fill in the blanks of what I missed. By the end of the day my mind is exhausted and I go to my hotel room with it swim­ming with terms, processes, ideas and questions.

One of the great­est things is that they actively encour­age me to ques­tion them on processes or choices they make. They explain why they chose to do some­thing, or if it is an idea they hadn’t con­sid­ered they are quite will­ing to explore it and pos­si­bly test it.

I’m the sec­ond “real” devel­oper they’ve brought on, and so Dave (the CTO for Cool Stuff) is already get­ting excited about hav­ing some help on man­ag­ing the web­site. We hashed out a road­block he’d been fac­ing with an idea that I came up with, and so that will make it eas­ier to do a new process that has been needed but not imple­mented due to the roadblocks.

I had a rest­less night last night and so I decided to begin set­ting myself up for some orga­ni­za­tion frame­work I knew I needed. I setup a Google Cal­en­dar to list out the Man­a­Na­tion episode sched­ule, the Magic event sched­ule, and my travel sched­ule. I have a few other things I’m going to be putting on there as time goes by, but this is an excel­lent start­ing place for keep­ing myself focused and aware of what is com­ing down the pipe.

Like, right now, Octo­ber is going to be a busy busy month. That’s def­i­nitely going to be interesting.

New Media Director

money money money!
Creative Commons License photo credit: ineffable_pulchritude

I am the New Media Direc­tor for Cool Stuff Inc. Cool Stuff has been the spon­sor of Man­a­Na­tion since 2008 and I am now work­ing for them! I will be work­ing on Man­a­Na­tion for them, as well as other video and pod­casts, and putting my skills to use to help them develop their busi­ness using some new dig­i­tal avenues. I’m very excited about this opportunity.

So, remem­ber that roller­coaster week where I pro­posed to Katie and then got fired? Yeah, let’s scroll back a few days before the pro­posal. The Thurs­day prior to propos­ing I went to Cool Stuff and met with them to dis­cuss the pos­si­bil­ity of sell­ing Man­a­Na­tion to them. I wres­tled with this idea, but the bot­tom line was that at the time work had picked up and Man­a­Na­tion was suf­fer­ing for it. So rather than let the show die, I was look­ing to sell it and let a com­pany that was able to — take it over.

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10 days to Employed

I was unem­ployed for just 10 days this time. I was fired from Mind­Comet on a Mon­day, and by that Fri­day I had received a job offer. I sat on the offer decid­ing how to pro­ceed. I had one other inter­view for a posi­tion but I didn’t hear back from them. I con­tem­plated try­ing to go it free­lance but in the end this new job was too good to pass on. I can’t spill the beans yet, but I am indeed employed again and Mon­day is going to be an epic way to start a new job. We fin­ished nego­ti­a­tions and I accepted the posi­tion yes­ter­day, and we’ll make the announce­ment on Monday.

Just wait and see…

The Proposal

I feel like a secret agent who has had his secret iden­tity revealed. As if a weight has been lifted and I am able to finally reveal the Jason Bourne-style secrets to the top secret mis­sion which I have been work­ing on for the past sev­eral weeks. So I apol­o­gize if I’ve been dis­tracted for the past week or so when we’ve inter­acted, I’ve been think­ing about this a great deal. I had to make sure that this went off with­out a hitch, and I think I can say “Mis­sion accomplished.”

success

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Become a Bone-Marrow Donor

My mom was given an extra 9 months on her life through a bone mar­row trans­plant, and with it the poten­tial to con­tinue her life even longer. My mom had a dis­ease called Myelofi­bro­sis where her bone-marrow was slowly being replaced by scar tis­sue and with it other prob­lems were aris­ing with her health. She had been fight­ing it for much of my life, and in 2006 she had her bone-marrow trans­plant. In fact, her trans­plant took place on July 11th, 2006. It gave us another 248 days with her on this earth, which look­ing back was very valu­able time indeed. Through out the final year and for a few months before, my mom kept a blog online. Some­thing I’ve kept up and man­aged for her: http://www.jarrett.ws/dale/

Like donat­ing blood and platelets, peo­ple can donate their bone-marrow. Bone-marrow trans­plants (BMTs) are becom­ing a more rou­tine med­ical treat­ment and so the need for an expan­sive reg­istry is becom­ing more and more impor­tant. I just recently joined the reg­istry, and in doing so I made a five minute video explain­ing the process (all done from home) to get myself added to the National Bone-marrow Registry.

Want to see what bone-marrow looks like? Below is a photo of the bone-marrow mom received in her trans­plant.

My Best Idea

I’ve been read­ing Twyla Tharp’s book, ‘The Cre­ative Habit.’ I bought it a few months ago in the Kin­dle for­mat so that I could test read­ing books on my iPod Touch. I have come to some con­clu­sions, espe­cially about read­ing on the iPod Touch, but those are for another blog post. Twyla Tharp is an Amer­i­can Dancer and Chore­o­g­ra­pher who has won both Emmy’s and Tony’s for her work. Her book explores the cre­ative process.

Twyla’s book is very inter­est­ing and thought pro­vok­ing. I began read­ing it and was really get­ting into it when she posed a series of ques­tions to the reader. The first of which I didn’t have an answer to. She asked “What is your best idea ever?”

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Web Design Primer

This post orig­i­nated with a com­ment I made in a dis­cus­sion about web design on Hacker News con­cern­ing what skills some­one should have to be a good web devel­oper. At the time I wrote a quick five minute response list­ing a few things that I felt were impor­tant skills for new web devel­op­ers to have for web­site design. These are things that I wish I had had a bet­ter grasp on when I entered the world of pro­fes­sional web development.

First I need to clar­ify the dif­fer­ence between web design and web devel­op­ment. Web design tends to lean towards the user inter­face and the actual web­site. Web devel­op­ment refers to the under­ly­ing code, and the inner work­ings of a site. There’s a good amount of over­lap but they often get used as syn­onyms when they’re not; I wanted to clar­ify their mean­ings to those who may be fuzzy on the differences.

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A Hospital is a Shocking Thing

Pasillo de la Clínica Doctor Moliner
Creative Commons License photo credit: Fer­nando Cuenca Romero

It shocks you into real­iz­ing that some­thing isn’t right. Often this results in fear, uncer­tainty, anx­ious­ness, and even­tu­ally exhaus­tion. That all hit me yes­ter­day when I took my dad to the Emer­gency Room. I had been at work for two hours when he called and said, “Son, I need you. I need to go to the hos­pi­tal.” He had blacked out three sep­a­rate times at home, result­ing in a very large bump on his head, what we learned was a bruised rib, and a hand­ful of scratches and bruises to show for it.

The prob­lem is not the hand­ful of injuries, but that dad blacked out three times. It turned out that his blood pres­sure is drop­ping quite dan­ger­ously when­ever he stands up. So they admit­ted him to the hos­pi­tal to see what is going on.

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StumbleUpon’s Exciting Progress

Link short­en­ers seem to be the whip­ping boy of the Inter­net right now, every­where I turn some­one is grip­ing about their evils, and their faults, and how they are going to be the down­fall of the Inter­net. And yet, Digg, Stum­ble­Upon, Bit.ly, Face­book and oth­ers are all work­ing on this in var­i­ous ways.

Digg and Face­book both use iframe wrap­pers to put a tool­bar at the top of the win­dow, offer­ing the user enhanced func­tion­al­ity but in turn cloak­ing the con­tent owner’s site and gen­er­ally being uncool. Site own­ers, ones who are seri­ous about blog­ging and build­ing their fol­low­ing, usu­ally dis­like this as they feel that they lose credit or value from the links and traf­fic.
Stumble Upon

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Quiet Morning

It’s no secret I’m a morn­ing per­son. I’m usu­ally up at 6am with an outer edge around 8am. It’s some­thing I devel­oped in mid­dle and high school.

The thing is, I love the quiet. My life is bom­barded by noise from the tv, online, in my Twit­ter feed. And in the wee hours the world is silent, allow­ing me to relax and start my day off right.

The fact of the mat­ter is that I get up early the same rea­son a lot of pro­gram­mers work in the wee late hours. It’s undis­tracted time for me to work on tasks, catch up on the DVR, or just relax.

Last night was an exam­ple though of stay­ing up late AND get­ting up early. K and I went to SAK for a hys­ter­i­cal set of shows, and then went out with our good friend Rob to hang out and get a late night meal at IHOP. So right now I’m run­ning on four hours of sleep. And this is when I curse myself for being an early morn­ing per­son, though I am about to head out and spend time with my dad so I turn to my top secret answer to tired­ness: Red Bull.

Arr and Dee

When it comes to web devel­op­ment, or tech­nol­ogy as a whole, I want to be Julian Del­phiki. You may expect me to tell you that Del­phiki was a famous sci­en­tist or some bril­liant engi­neer who cre­ated an enhanced beach ball, but in fact he was just a child when he had his great­est success.

Julian Del­phiki is bet­ter known as Bean, the dimi­nu­itive greek kid who helped Ender Wig­gin save the earth from the bug­gers in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. His spe­cialty was being the prob­lem solver. He thought of the stu­pid ridicu­lous over-the-top ideas and made them work.

I want to be the mad sci­en­tist of web design. Ask me for the impos­si­ble, give me the time and the resources, and I’ll find the way or I’ll blaze my own trail.

There’s a mag­i­cal idea here, the seduc­tive power of the infi­nite. Web design is an infi­nite can­vas with infi­nite can­vases avail­able. But even in the infi­nite bound­less work­space the pos­si­ble can be hard to find. I love web design for that feel­ing, the same feel­ing a sculp­tor has as he digs his fin­gers through clay. The way that Edi­son felt when his light bulb lit and held its burn for longer than the flash so many oth­ers gave off as they went off.

Or when the Pirate Black­beard first spot­ted his prey and then suc­cess­fully over­ran them and began to pil­lage and plun­der. The feel­ing of sat­is­fac­tion and plea­sure bask­ing in vic­tory. He cre­ated a vic­tory where in many cases there should have been none. Now imag­ine if Bean had been a pirate, Soma­lia would have been deeply inter­ested in that.

Inven­tion is a won­der­ful and pow­er­ful thing.

Best Improv Quote

Last night’s improv show was fun, but I think my favorite quote came from a scene about a vampire:

“You want to stake me? I think you look like a steak.”

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