A Queer Mobile

Hanging out in California

John and I are laying low tonight in California. This is my last trip as a regular employee before I start my gig as a consultant in January. I wanted John to come with me and see folks - I'm hoping I won't be traveling out here quite as much in the future - but who knows?

I've been running around in meetings all day, so when we had an evening to ourselves we went to Max's Opera Cafe at Stanford Shopping Center and did a little light shopping tonight. We both love Max's, and we had a table in the very back of the place where we could watch shoppers stream by outside while we gorged on roasted chicken. I was a bit surprised that the crowds weren't more frenzied than they were, and I actually escaped without doing any damage to my wallet. John did his first round of bookstore hunting while I worked, and he got me a simply wonderful reference guide: What Would Wonder Woman Do?

We're off to Aptos (near Santa Cruz) to see Diane and John tomorrow - and maybe I'll get the chance to do a little photography.

Gourmet eating from your compost pile

John pointed this one out to me. From our very own redoubtable local newspaper - but it's not really their fault. This is from an AP story:

...The 10-foot high, 50-foot long heap that he's examining is a compost pile. Its hummus [sic] is dark, rich, and virtually odor-free...

The hummus [sic], which is rich in nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium, someday will be spread as fertilizer on 3,00 acres of corn, soybeans, and alfalfa fields...

Sounds lip-smackin' good.

And journalists wonder why no one pays attention to the them any more.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday

I love Thanksgiving more than any other major holiday. There's no commercial exploitation - other than buying things to eat - and it's about inviting folks to come together and just be peaceable with one another. This was the second year running that John and I hosted some of his sibs and some of our friends for Thanksgiving lunch.

Don't expect pictures of the gathering! I'm not one for pulling out a camera and stifling conversation. I did, however, do a video of how I do turkey. Whenever I tell folks about doing Thanksgiving turkey they always want to know how I do it - so this year I decided to tape exactly how I approach things. I follow Julia Child's recipe for disassembling a turkey breast and roasting it reassembled with stuffing all around. I'm currently editing down the footage and I'll post it in the next day or so.

And in protest to the excessive commercialization of Christmas, both John and I stayed home today. No crowded malls, no crazy lines. In past years we've been too extravagant with gifts. This year we've both agreed to limit our exchange to a single gift - mostly because we're always buying stuff all year long.

John's last show of the year

We were at the Waterloo Center for the Arts last weekend for John's last show of the year. I took this shot of the booth just before things opened last Sunday morning. As he usually does, John pumped out a ton of new work for the show. Sales were slow, but he got new gallery connections and some commission leads. That's often how shows work for him: he's selling large, relatively expensive items that tend to do better in galleries where folks can come back to look at an item more than once.

We had a super time - at least I did. The folks in Waterloo are incredibly helpful to the artists. We were set up on Saturday and we had time for a transcendent evening at the Galleria de Paco, a remarkable Mediterranean restaurant just about a block from our hotel. I had possibly the best grilled lamb I've ever had - lovely in every way.

John's always 'on' during the show, and I took the opportunity to do lots of reading and more than a little bit of software coding on my trusty MacBook. Just behind the screen next to the wall John set me up in a comfortable little nest where I could snoop on the show while being mostly unobserved and blissfully quiet.

Changing gigs

Having not thought about changing jobs at all, it’s been weird to have one appear almost by magic. I’ve been in my current gig for about five years. I make a point never to discuss real business on this blog, so I’ve been pretty vague about what I’ve been doing. But most of you know that I’ve been telecommuting to California from Iowa about one week each month, and this is the eleventh year that I’ve been doing it. In 2001 the startup where I’d been closed its doors. I sold my condo out west and prepared to start a job search here in Iowa. Then an old friend offered me a great gig, and I continued the telecommuting arrangement for another five years.

When I first came to Iowa in 1997 I did some moonlighting for a small (now defunct) company. I met two engineers - really great guys - and we’ve kept in touch. Every now and again we’d get together to talk about possibly starting a new company, but nothing ever gelled.

About two weeks ago I got a call from one of these guys offering me a full-time gig at his software engineering consultancy here in Iowa. I’d met his partners several times and we’d talked informally about maybe doing some new product development work. I’ve been doing back-end web software development, while their emphasis has been on embedded systems. (For those not in the know, an embedded system is a computer that doesn’t look like one. Think about the package tracking hand-held devices that UPS and FedEx drivers carry. That’s an embedded system.) Again, nothing went past that informal stage - until now. The consultancy had been getting more offers for back-end web software development - stuff that’s right up my alley - and they decided to take on the work. And that means that they offered me a job to make this new line of business grow. And I took them up on it.

My current gig has always been scheduled to end at the end of 2007. I’d had verbal commitments that the current job would continue past that time, but nothing formal had ever appeared. So I told my current employer that I wasn’t planning to renew with them at year’s end - and that I’m available as a consultant if the need arises.

What about all the travel? I’m hoping to do a good deal less of it. Most of our new clients are in the Midwest, but we have several Bay Area clients and prospects, too - so I suspect there’ll be continued need to run cross-country from time to time. 

PhotoReading

No, it's not a book about photography. I followed a link from one of my favorite bloggers (stevepavlina.com) to learn more about a very different sort of speed reading course. Steve Pavlina related how he'd used the techniques in the course to plow through material and to organize it with ease and good comprehension. So I picked up the discount coupon on the site and ordered the course.

In a nutshell: the course made an incredible difference in how I read non-fiction - even in reading complex material. Rather than attempt to gain excellent comprehension in a single pass through written material, PhotoReading encourages a multiple pass approach, with a most unusual step in the middle:

1. List the keywords of interest to you, and define why you're reading the book. Now I've been reading the index of books for a long time to understand what the book focuses on, but I've learned some tricks. I keep note cards by my side and I list words that trigger something in me. After scouring the index and table of contents, I leaf through the book - maybe sampling every twenty pages or so - to find other words that trigger me. Then I write my understanding of the book's purpose, and I note what I expect to get out of the book.
   
2. PhotoRead the book - and let it rest 24 hours. This is the weird part. Rather than read the book, the course shows techniques for forming a mental image of each page. I'll flip and image each page - at about two seconds a page. Then I'll sleep on it. If this sounds too strange to be real, the course opens with a convincing test of imaging pages from a dictionary, and then recalling the physical location of words on a page. It works.
3. Begin rapidly reviewing sections of interest. After my overnight stewing about the content, I'll begin skimming through sections of interest to me - at very high speeds. I'll make several passes, staying relaxed as I do so.
4. Build a mind map of the material. I've loved using mind mapping as my primary note-taking approach for more than a decade. The course gave me ideas for new ways of using mind mapping while I skim to outline the book's content.

Result: I've been reading with excellent comprehension, greater ease, and with a lot more fun. At first I didn't think I'd really been understanding what I'd been plowing through at a break-neck pace. Then one evening John asked me what I'd been looking at. I'd just finished part three of the approach above on The Stillborn God. Without even thinking about the book I rattled off a pithy summary of the book, and detailed my issues with it. After I finished, I thought, "I usually can't summarize stuff like that. Maybe there's something here..."

Check it out!

Ki seized today...

I had a real scare this morning. I was kicking off an installation of Leopard on John's iMac when I heard tons of scuffling downstairs. I rushed down to find Ki on the middle of a seizure, unable to breathe. John and I held him until he finally relaxed - an eternity, seemingly. Our vet said not to do anything other than monitor him unless the seizure lasts more than five minutes. Ki had one of these about a year ago; the vet said that it's not worth trying meds unless the spells are pretty frequent.

Poor old kid! It's tough being sixteen when you're a dog...