Been sort of out this whole blogging thing for the past few days. We’re right in the middle of PDC crunch time, so I’ve been doing a lot of prep work for my talk on ‘hosting services’. Hasn’t left much time for reading blogs, let alone writing them.

Ok, I’ll be honest. It hasn’t been completely work for the last couple of week. I did spend last week in Vegas with the usual suspects. That part was (extremely) fun, as usual. Came at a much needed time, too…I was really ready for a break.

But now I’m back.

I went to see Sound Tribe Sector Nine last Thursday night at the Showbox. I haven’t seen them live since I moved out here from Chicago. I’d almost forgotten how much I enjoy seeing this band live.

Why is it most of my favorite bands seem to stick around the Midwest and rarely make it out my direction any more?

Went to go see Constantine this afternoon. I didn’t have extremely high expectations for it, and it actually turned out to be better than I thought. It’s about on par with The Prophecy, but with better effects and without Christopher Walken. Same general war-in-heaven-being-fought-on-the-streets-of-earth thing going on plot-wise. Say what you want about the plot, but you can’t get around the fact that this movie looks pretty damn bad-ass on the screen (the huge screen at Cinerama certainly helped).

Good trailers in front of it too – Episode III, Hitchhikers Guide, Ring Two, Batman Begins. I was hoping for a preview of Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly, but alas it was not to be.

Overall: yeah, it was worth the $7.50.

Been itching to read some non-computing-related material lately. Here’s what I’ve recently picked up at the bookstore:

• Everything and More: a Compact History of Infinity by David Foster Wallace. D.F.W. is a guy whose writing you either really like or really hate -- I happen to be squarely in the first category. Watching him take his standard hyperkinetic approach to writing and apply that to transfinite math is really quite an experience. It’s like sitting down with an exceptionally brilliant friend who has just discovered something new that he’s really excited about and wants to tell you about it after consuming far too much coffee. I’m about halfway through this one.
• Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami. I just finished this. I was discussing Phillip K. Dick with a friend of a friend a while back and he suggested that I pick this book up. He suggestion was dead-on; I loved it. This is a great high-concept book that is wonderfully written, quite funny and very thought-provoking. It plays in some very interesting spaces – cognition, consciousness, and theory of mind – and does so in a unusually different narrative style. Coming across this book was a real treat.

There was a little anecdote in Hardboiled Wonderland that sort of tied these two books together in an interesting way. The puzzle in the book was slightly different, but it can be paraphrased as “how do you engrave the entire contents of the Library of Congress on a toothpick?” A clue to the answer comes from the observation that there are exactly as many real numbers between 0 and 1 as there are between 0 and any other finite number you can think of (which makes sense in retrospect, but hadn’t really dawned on me until I read it about it in Everything and More).

I’m feeling impish, so I’ll post the answer over the weekend.

Warning: this post might be considered by some to be somewhat off-color, so if you’re unprepared to read about some of the more unpleasant realities of modern urban living, I would suggest that you point your browser here instead.

Last night, at about 1:30 AM, I was awakened by the sounds of my upstairs neighbors having particularly loud sex.

At least, I’m pretty sure that’s what they were doing. It’s entirely possible that these fine people were simply conducting repeated load testing of their new inner spring mattress. But somehow I doubt that. What I heard was a metallic “EEE-ert” noise that went something like this:

EEE-ert.
EEE-ert.

EEE-ert. EEE-ert. EEE-ert.

EEE-ert. EEEert. EEEert.
EEEertEEEertEEEertEEEertEEEert
EEEertEEEerEEEeertEEE-ERT!
</silence>

I dunno; sounds like sex to me. For the Jean-Pierre Jeunet fans in house, it was straight out of Delicatessen.

I’m a little bit disturbed, because I’m not quite sure how to handle the situation if it persists. Keep in mind that I just moved in to this building and do not actually know these people. In fact, I’ve never even seen them before and would be completely unable to pick them out of a lineup if such an opportunity were to be afforded to me. So I’m going to pose an open question to the readers of this blog: what do we think we should do here?

Hard to say, but I’m pretty sure I don’t want my first words to these people to be “Hey, I’m Steve and I can hear you when you’re f*cking.”

Living in close proximity to your office is both a blessing and a curse. I feel that I’m able to speak authoritatively on this subject, because for the last 15 months I’ve been living in an apartment building less than a block away from my office building. Kitty-corner, actually. I’m somewhat hesitant to admit this publicly, but that’s ok because I’m moving so it’s moot now anyway.

On the plus side, the commute I have now absolutely kicks ass. 78 seconds door to door, assuming I don’t have to wait for the light on the one street I have to cross to change. This enables me to do things like roll out of bed a half hour before my daily stand-up meeting. I can also hit “snooze” with almost unlimited abandon (which is great, because I’m a chain-snoozer). On the way home, I can laugh at the people backed up waiting in the traffic to get on the Alaskan Way viaduct. I can leave my office and be home in less time than they’ve spent sitting in the left-turn lane.

However, I’ve noticed over the past few months that living so close to work also has its detractors. The lack of physical separation means that work and life sort of blur into each other – I’m very inclined to come home, sit down in front of the TV, and continue working on the problem I was working on before I left the office. Sometimes, my living room becomes just another office with different decorations. I find that I have very little motivation to leave a two-block radius, because everything I need is right there. It’s very clear that my current living situation has been having an adverse affect on both my social life and my mental state, and something needs to change.

So, today the movers came and took all my furniture to my new place. It’s up in a neighborhood called Capitol Hill – not too far away from where I am now, but far enough. By all accounts, this neighborhood is quite cool. I haven’t spent much time in it, but it feels right. The new place is cool too – same size and a little cheaper to boot. But the best thing about the new place is that I can’t see my office building from the living room window!

I’m optimistic about the new place – I think it will be a welcome change.

Well, I’m back in Seattle after an almost unheard-of two-week vacation. At least, my body is back – my mind is still sort of in the process of returning to work J. Taking two weeks off and not thinking about work did a lot of good for the ‘ol mental state.

I spent the Christmas week in Denver with my parents, which was quite nice. Not a whole lot going on there, which left a lot of time to relax and hang out with the family. Even got some time to hack a bit on my ever-running side project (a Scheme implementation in .NET) – more on that later, though.

On 12/27, I left Denver and went to Chicago for a week to hang out with my friends there. Now that I live in Seattle, I don’t get to see them very much, so having a whole week with everybody was really special. It’s so cool – even though we don’t spend much time together in the same place anymore, we get together and it’s just like old times. Much fun and plenty of tomfoolery all around.

I have to say that this was the best holiday break in recent memory. It was filled with family love and close friends, which is what the season is all about.

I’ve been in a weird funk lately. I’ve got a lot on mind. Winter is really starting to set in, and I’m feeling the effects of the longer nights and rainy days. There’s a lot of stress in my life right now, which I suppose is why I haven’t been writing very much. I feel very drained – empty and out of gas.

Tonight, I pulled Requiem for a Dream off the shelf. It’s one of my favorite movies, but one that I can only watch very rarely, when I’m in a specific mood. I guess tonight was one of those nights; I felt drawn to it. I guess I somehow needed it.

I don’t know exactly why, but that movie has a profound affect on me. As disturbing as it is, it’s a truly beautiful piece of art. Watching it is an almost masochistic experience, because it’s such a traumatic film. It’s like being hit in the stomach with a sledgehammer. But the experience is somehow also cleansing in a way that I have a hard time understanding.

In an odd way, I feel better.

I’m in Denver visiting my parents. We celebrated Dad’s 70^th birthday today, and had brunch with a large number of my Dad’s friends. It was a lot of fun, especially since my coming into town was a big surprise for him.

Happy birthday, Dad. Here’s to many more…

I came across this article today while (ironically) at the office checking in some code changes I made as a result of a fit of inspiration that struck late last night. The title: Balance is Bunk.

A few of choice quotes that caught my eye:

“…in real life, success in work is predicated on achievement. In a competitive business environment -- which is to say, every business environment -- leadership requires commitment, passion, and, to be blunt, a lot of time…”

“…building something great, leading change, truly innovating – ‘it's like falling in love. You have to abandon yourself to it…There's the risk of inherent contradiction between wanting to do something entrepreneurial and wanting to have balance.’…”

“…I don't look at balance as an ideal. What I look at is, Am I happy? If the answer is yes, then everything else is inconsequential. If you look at the number of hours I work, it's probably extreme. But those hours talking with an adviser over dinner -- is that work? Well, yeah, but it's also stimulating.’…”

“…Most achievers don't work hard just at work. They think about their work a lot of the time outside the office. Even if they acknowledge the value of paying attention to their families or their health, they're consumed -- and thrilled -- by the task at hand. Stewart Friedman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, and Sharon Lobel of Seattle University have a term for such folks: ‘happy workaholics’…”

The whole article is over at FastCompany here.

Update: Go read haacked's musings on this article, too.

Do yourself a favor and go see Shaun of the Dead. That movie’s destined to become a classic, if not the classic zombie movie. Great stuff.

This morning’s security incident at LAX proved to be a good opportunity to compare the way two major media outlets (CNN.com and FoxNews.com) covered a major breaking story related to terrorism.

CNN.com’s coverage

Around 10am PST, they were leading the front page of CNN.com with a red “Breaking News” banner, indicating that a major story was developing. The headline on this banner was something to the effect of “Security incident shuts down LAX – details soon” (unfortunately, I don’t remember the exact headline but the paraphrase is accurate in terms of tone). This banner remained present on the main page for approximately 20 minutes, before being removed. For a brief period of time, there was no mention of this story on the site’s main page. A few minutes later, a sidebar link appeared to the following story:

Security incidents close Los Angeles airport
(CNN) -- Los Angeles International Airport was closed Saturday after two separate security incidents, an airport spokesman said.
In one incident, airport police were responding to reports of a "suspicious person."
The other involved a flashlight with corroded batteries that exploded in Tom Bradley International Terminal.
Seven people were hurt by that explosion.

Department of Homeland Security had a different account.
The agency said that an explosive detection system machine got a positive reading from a corroded battery in a flashlight.
DHS reported that there was no explosion and that there were no injuries that they were aware of.

The area was evacuated as a precaution.

A LAPD bomb squad remains on the scene.

The major headline on the main CNN.com site was about Hurricane Francis.

FoxNews.com’s coverage

Immediately after I saw CNN’s red-banner announcement, I clicked over to FoxNews.com to see how they were covering the story. They were also leading with their equivalent of a “Breaking News” banner. The text of this banner was something to the effect of “Report: Explosion prompts LAX shutdown” (again this is a paraphrase and not an exact quote, but I do remember the word “explosion” in their headline). Unlike CNN.com, which had only a headline and no story, FoxNews linked to the following story:

Report: Explosion Prompts LAX Shutdown
LOS ANGELES  — An exploding flashlight that injured seven people prompted a shutdown at Los Angeles International Airport (search), an airport worker told FOX News.

Sharon Mayes, parking supervisor at LAX, said two separate security breaches caused airport officials to close off terminals 6,7 and 8, which are connected, and ground all flights. Flights have been allowed to land, but passengers have not been permitted to exit planes

Mayes also said the LAPD bomb squad was en route to the airport.

It was not immediately possible to verify the report of the explosion. One of the incidents occurred at an international terminal security screening station, an airport spokesman said

Airport officials did not provide further information on the incident at Tom Bradley International Terminal (search).
Officials also did not explain the possible security breach that shut down terminals 6, 7 and 8. The terminals are connected.

Flights were not being allowed to depart, but inbound flights were being allowed to land, said Paul Turk, spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration (search). Passengers were not taken off the planes.

They continued to link to this story via “Breaking News” banners off the main page for some time, even after both CNN.com and MSNBC.com had removed theirs. Around 10:15am PST, Fox changed the banner text to read “Some Flights Taking Off From LAX , but did not change the headline on their story until approximately 10:35am when they removed their “Breaking News” banner and replaced it with the following sidebar story from the AP wire:

My thoughts

Both CNN and FoxNews used the “red banner” to indicate that a major story was breaking. However, the text that they used in their respective banners is indicative of the tone of their overall coverage. CNN’s banner was neutral, emotionless – it conveyed that something security-releated had happened at LAX, that the airport was shut down, and (most importantly) we didn’t know all the details. The story that CNN eventually ran was equally short and emotionless. Their story conveyed that the LAPD bomb squad was on the scene as a precautionary measure, but overall the incident was really a non-event. To me, the tone of CNN’s coverage was generally dispassionate and emotionless.

In contrast, FoxNews seemed excessively sensationalistic and alarmist. Their initial “breaking news” headline was completely unwarranted. Putting the words “explosion” and “LAX” together in the same headline evokes subconscious images of fireballs and 9/11, even though there was no indication that anything of that magnitude had actually happened. Their headline was written to make people assume the worst in the absence of real facts – it’s fearmongering and tabloid journalism at its worst.

It’s true that FoxNews had a story up before CNN, and thus could be considered to have broken the story first. However, the initial story that Fox ran was so bad that it’s almost laughable. Again, they led the story with the sensationalistic headline “Explosion prompts LAX shutdown”, which immediately gets people to assume the worst. Then they attempt to clarify the events by citing a parking attendant as their primary source (to be fair, she was actually a parking supervisor, but still…). Not an airport official, not someone from DHS, but a parking attendant. It’s almost as if Fox took the statement of the first person at LAX that would talk to them and ran with it.

When things calmed down a bit and it became clear that the whole thing was really a non-event, Fox toned its coverage down and ran with the AP story, which was much more toned down. Specficially, the word “explosion” was replaced with “security incident” in the headlines. For that, I give them credit.

I think this story goes a long way to show the difference between CNN and Fox. How they behaved in the first few moments of a major story differentiated (in my mind) a responsible media outlet from a bunch of journalistic hacks looking to get a rise out of the public. CNN.com restrained themselves, led with a calm and dispassionate headline, and held off reporting anything until the details had become clear. FoxNews went for the “big bang” – they led with a sensationalistic and alarmist headline, broke a weak and underreported story and basically hit the panic button until the facts made it impossible for them to continue on that course.

This is why I don’t pay too much attention to FoxNews.

Learned a new word today (thanks Casey!): HIPPOPOTOMONSTROSESQUIPEDALIAN.
Meaning: of or pertaining to very long words. Fitting, isn’t it?

Given some of the ribbing that I take at the office for being rather verbose, this is a good word to know.

Back in Seattle from what has become my semiannual trip to Vegas. I took the day off to ease the transition out of the hyperarticulated Vegas reality, and it’s proving to be a wise decision. Context switches of this magnitude need to be taken slowly.

I went with the same group of old college friends from my February trip. We’re pretty geographically distributed now, so answering the casual “So, where are you guys from” question is a little bit complex. The full answer is “Seattle, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and Madison, Wisconsin” but that usually gets condensed down into a simple “all over”. Given the routes that we’ve all taken since school, we don’t really get to see each other very much – Vegas provides the perfect excuse to get back together again. Seeing all of them again is a good reminder that although we live in different places now, the important stuff doesn’t really change.

Thanks to my friend Meghan, who has what can only be described as “the hook up”, we stayed at Paris this time instead of Bally’s. It’s a great hotel – the rooms are nice, the atmosphere is great, and the staff is wonderful – but the best thing about Paris is the location. It’s right in the middle of the strip, so it’s a great “home base” for various excursions throughout the weekend.

Friday night we had tickets to the new show at Paris, We Will Rock You. This show is what happens when you take Queen’s greatest hits, wrap a loosely constructed quasi-futuristic plotline around it and turn it into a Broadway show – very much Queen’s answer to Abba’s Mamma Mia. I was a little skeptical when Mike suggested this one, but it turned out to be really good! You can’t argue with music, and the show had a great blend of humorous dialogue and fantastic production value that made it a really solid show. If you like Queen’s music, you can’t go wrong with this show.

Of course, we spent some time at the tables too – overall, I did OK. For me, when it comes to Vegas gambling, it’s not so much about actual wins or losses as it is about tracking to plan. I played all weekend and managed to come in under budget, so that’s a win in my book. One minor highlight: I introduced a couple of my friend to craps at the Mirage, and we all managed to walk away from that table up about 200 bucks a piece. Not bad for their first roll! Blackjack, though, was less kind to me – Rhonda, the pagan goddess of Dealing Me 13 On Every Freaking Hand, was looking in my direction most of time and the results were not so good. But it was all in good fun – no harm, no foul.

In short, good times were had by all.

I think it is time that I get something off my chest in a public forum: I hate sushi. To be fair, I’ve never actually tried real sushi. I’m basing these feeling off of a general dislike for some fish I had once, with the full knowledge and realization that I very possibly may be depriving myself of something wonderful. However, I highly doubt that I would like sushi were I to try it. I’m secure in my sushi hatred, based on nothing more than vague assumptions and general conceptual dislike of raw fish.

Objectively, I recognize that my sushi-hatred is both irrational and unjustified. I will, however, put forth that it is necessary.

I think that bigotry is an unfortunate side effect of the human condition. Unfortunately, it’s within our nature to hate things and although we try we cannot transcend these baser instincts. There’s a certain amount of irrational hatred stored up in each and every one of us, hardwired into our genetic code. While I don’t think we have the ability to entirely eliminate our natural hate, I think we do have some choice as to its target. Thus, I choose to direct mine towards sushi, because hating sushi is much better than hating other people.

If I have to hate something, I might as well hate the most innocuous thing possible. Thus far, it seems to be working.

I’ll be in Atlanta for the next week or so on a business trip. Probably won’t be blogging too much.

In other news, there’s a bunch of people making the trip out to Redmond at the end of July. I don’t have that far to go; Sam and Benjamin are going to get a lot more frequent flier miles than I will out of this J. Nonetheless, it’ll be a good reason to have a blogger dinner at Crossroads…

This caused quite a few chuckles as it made the rounds today:
http://www.rockpapersaddam.com/

TIGER HAND! RAWR!!!!! RAWRR!

ESPN.com has a rather lame list of the Top 25 sports films of the last 25 years. My irritating friend Walker has a much funnier list over on his blog (http://www.irritantnumber4.com).

Any list of sports movies that puts The Big Lebowski at #2 is A-OK in my book.

Back in Seattle after a quick trip to Chicago/Wisconsin. Since I moved to Chicago in 97, seeing Phish play at Alpine Valley has been a summer tradition for me and a group of my friends. Given that this will be their last tour (after 21 years on the road, I guess the band deserves a break), this trip was clearly required.

Both nights were just absolutely killer. I was very pleasantly surprised at the setlists they played – I was not expecting to hear a lot of the songs they played. It ended up being for the best, though -- over the course of two nights, I got to hear Roses Are Free, AC/DC Bag, David Bowie, Golgi Apparatus, a full-on rendition of Mike’s Groove, YEM, 2001, Stash, Divided Sky (by far, my favorite song), Wilson, Character Zero, Ghost, Free, Piper, Harry Hood, and Possum. Holy crap, did they ever lay down a good show.

As far as final shows go, I don’t think I could have asked for anything else.

Update: If anyone's interested, here are my personal tour statistics, courtesy of Phishtistics...

I’m off for a long weekend – going to go hear one of my favorite bands play at one of my favorite venues for what will likely be the last time (farewell tours are a real bummer).

Back in the thick of things on Monday.

Even Rory takes things seriously once in a while. His recent post on marketing and health care got me thinking. I like his point about “medical marketing”:

It seems so bizarre to me that there's this notion that people should be exposed to advertising for medication that addresses conditions which

1) Are never mentioned
2) Almost certainly wouldn't apply to them

This is what happens when you introduce capitalism to the world of medicine. A product’s success in a capital market depends on the creation of a sense of need for that product within a particular consumer base. If that perceived need is not great enough, it is often artificially exacerbated through advertising. As a result, people spend money to acquire things that they desire but do not need, and the market prospers.

In some cases, you can argue that the artificial creation of need offers no net detriment to society. Nobody (except me) really loses if I spend the extra cash to get a cell phone with polyphonic ringtones even though my phone is on “vibrate” most of the time. In the case of medicine, though, artificial need has consequences beyond the single consumer. Going to the doctor when you don’t need to places undue load on the system. Load creates scarcity, and scarcity drives prices higher. The aggregate result of everyone asking their doctor if Zythromaxipam is right for them is that fewer people can afford basic health insurance.

That said, I don’t think moving to a purely socialized European-style health care system is the right answer either. Rory points out that the average hospital in the UK doesn’t have the facilities to do an MRI scan. I, for one, take some comfort in the idea that my local hospital could perform an MRI on me if I were ever to find myself in need of one. I like the idea that I can see a doctor when I need to, and not have to queue up and fight government red tape (of course, this privilege comes with a cost – I work hard at my job, and my company rewards that hard work with good benefits). Is there a happy medium here somewhere?

Maybe we can look to the legal system as a model for a hybrid socialized/privatized system. In the legal world, if you’re arrested and cannot afford an attorney, the government will provide you with some minimum form of legal representation at no cost through a public defender. If you desire a better lawyer and have the financial means of acquiring one, you are free to purchase alternative representation if you so choose. Why can’t we try the same idea with health care, where the government would guarantee a minimum level of care but still allow the option of utilizing a private system at cost?

 I don’t know what the right answers are, but we’ve got to do something about the health care system in the United States. I do know one thing, though – marketing drugs to people and creating an artificial sense of desire for drugs and medical services they don’t need is ethically irresponsible and not part of the solution.

Back home in Seattle after my Chicago vacation. Being back in Chicago felt really good – it’s been eight months since I moved, with this being the first time I’ve been back. I lived in Chicago for a good chunk of my adult life thus far, and I left a lot of good friends and good memories back there when I left.

I hadn’t intended to go totally off the grid while I was out there, but that’s sort of the way circumstances worked out. My friend Ben just moved into a new condo and didn’t have internet access hooked up yet, so I had only sporadic access to email. Plus, I somehow managed to lose my cell phone in the city on Tuesday, which rendered me pretty much unreachable by the outside world for the duration (by the way, Cingular Wireless is absolutely BRAINDEAD when it comes to running their infrastructure – it shouldn’t be impossible to replace a cell phone outside of it home market…). Everything worked out ok, though – not having a phone didn’t hamper my vacation at all. And now I have an excuse to buy a cooler phone J

Seeing everybody again was such a blast. I still have a good chunk of my best friends sprinkled throughout Chicago, and I got to spend some time with pretty much everybody I wanted to see. Got to see a bunch of Avanade people from my previous project again, too. We had sort of an impromptu Avanade blogger meetup on Wednesday night – Adam Wengert, Mike Wood, Zach Kauble and Brian Jackson were all there (sidenote: BTJ makes a freaking fantastic pork tenderloin). Thanks to Wengert for hosting that one!

I’d love to say that I was looking forward to getting back to work tomorrow, but realistically I think I’d prefer it if I could stay on vacation. I know I have a mountain of email waiting for me, and I think I’d just as soon leave my out-of-office notice on for as long as possible.

I was sitting on a couch in Chicago, glued to the television watching the Columbine tragedy unfold in Denver.

I was born and raised in Denver. For me, Columbine was a high school across town – a football rival, not the scene of a massive tragedy. I remember watching the news that day with my friend Mike, who was also from Denver. He graduated from Columbine in 1995. His mom lived close to the school – we were shocked to see CNN broadcasting live from the cul-de-sac outside her house.

Surreal.

Noam Chomsky has a long interview about the Iraq invasion posted over on GNN. On the long side, but definitely worth reading. Chomsky’s not really one for soundbites, but two quotes stood out to me when I was reading the interview:

After the invasion, it became embarrassingly clear that they were not going to find weapons of mass destruction, so the rhetoric began to shift and bringing democracy became the great achievement.

However, history has shown that when democratization is used as a justification for foreign policy, it’s often just a code word for “installing a government friendly to our interests.” So long as that new democracy toes the line, it’s permitted to exist. However, we’re more likely to support regimes that support our interests over regimes that are freely elected:

The practice shows that yes, democratic forms of government are fine as long as they do exactly as we say, otherwise they are not fine. For example, in the Middle East to where this message is directed, you have to be pretty dumb not to notice that the countries that were praised in the speech for their progress towards democracy are those that are following orders, and the ones that are condemned are the ones that aren't following orders. This is completely independent of any steps towards democracy, human rights and so on.

If you want examples, look at U.S. foreign policy towards Latin America in the latter half of the last century -- specifically in El Salvador and Guatemala.

The case of Guatemala seems particularly interesting in light of the current Iraq situation. There, in 1951, Jacobo Arbenz was freely elected by one of the largest majorities in Guatemalan history. A few years later, he was ousted by a CIA-backed coup which installe