Looking Down on the World

Room view

Last week my marriage turned 25, which caused me to take a whole new perspective on the world. A 48th-story kind of perspective. And there’s a long (not just high) story behind this, or at least a long-ago story.

It’s like this. My honeymoon was partly wonderful (as they often are), partly functional (because we drove down the west coast, from Seattle to L.A. to move JoAnn south), and partly memorable for the occasional bad moment. In particular, I’m referring to a rather poor choice of a place to stay in San Francisco.

In one of my worst decisions as a then-new husband, I had not arranged a place to stay in San Francisco before we got there. My thinking may have been that there are a lot of hotels to choose from, so we can easily pick something when we get there. That wouldn’t have been so bad, but the actual picking was where the trouble occurred. On arrival, we went to a reasonably nice hotel and one of us decided it was too expensive, and so we ended up at a different place that was much cheaper in all possible respects. (Exercise for the reader: see if you can find the multiple big mistakes made in that previous sentence.)

Well, my story now is creatively expressed as follows: I took all the money we saved from that one questionable decision of mine, invested it wisely, and 25 years later decided to spend it on a wild attempt to make up for that mistake, by picking a hotel room that would be the exact opposite of that first one. And so we ended up on the 48th floor of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, which is as high as you can get in that place unless you are in charge of the two flags on the roof.

I decided that since I was staying in this place, one of the top-ranked hotels in SF, I should pretend to be rich. But I wasn’t particularly good at this. For example, I thought we would just take taxis or limousines anywhere we wanted to go. However, we generally preferred walking around, and I overdid this one morning by deciding to walk to breakfast at the South Beach Cafe. I chose this primarily because it has a cool website, the obvious reason to choose a place to eat. But it was a bit of a hike, maybe a couple miles, not JoAnn’s idea of ducking out to the cafe around the corner. After recovering, we actually took the light rail back (a whopping $1.50 each).

One of the highlights of the hotel was Bellman Tom, who learned our name by reading the luggage tags on while unloading the taxi from the airport, and he never forgot it. That’s why we had to direct most of our pretend-to-be-rich tipping toward him, probably totalling up to almost as much as I spent on that hotel room 25 years ago. Because of him, we also rode the F-Line for another $1.50 each. That one went up the piers, and was nice — even quaint.

Looking Down

A few lessons from the almost top-of-the-world.

• Your ears normally pop multiple times when going between ground floor and the 48th floor.
• When it’s really windy, you can feel the building swaying.
• If you do it right, you can learn to look down on the rest of the world. For example, Question: Why don’t we stay in the Hyatt Regency? Answer: It’s only about 20 stories high.

Sibling Rivalry in the Fast Lane

After the 2005 800m run

My kids have taught me something important about myself that I never knew: I apparently have some dazzling distance running genes that unfortunately have stayed well hidden throughout my life. Or maybe it comes from JoAnn, who knows. In any case, Brian enjoyed a successful high school running career in the 800 and 1600 meters. He broke a 30-something year old Bellevue High School 800m record, registering a 1:53.34. At right he’s looking up in the stands after the 800m district race in 2005, to find that he’s finally broken the school record.

And now Michael, a junior, is following in his brother’s footsteps and at times running right past those footsteps. A week ago he drove himself over the finish line in the 1600m in 4:23.7. That’s a promising time, showing potential to get to the seriously good levels. But more important, it’s about 2 seconds faster than Brian’s best time, giving Michael first place in the family at that distance.

Michael gutting it out in the 1600

Brian still holds the 800m mark, although Michael is putting pressure on that also. On Saturday, on a cool and rainy evening, he ran in an invitational meet against a strong field, crossing the finish at 1:57.03. Less than 4 seconds from the school mark held by Brian, and about a half-second faster than Brian ran during his junior year.

Brian continues to simultaneously root for and against his brother when he gets a chance to attend one of the meets. As for me, I’ll just have to keep looking for that latent speed that’s lurking somewhere deep inside.

Speed reading the Prodigal … Who?

I recently came across a simple-to-learn speed reading recipe and decided to try it. My reading speed is about average, I think. But I quickly found that even without much practice, I can cover reading material about 50% faster with fairly high comprehension.

The speed reading bit I stumbled across is on pages 85-86 of 4HWW, and then I got curious enough to actually buy an Evelyn Wood speed reading book on ebay for $1 (ok, with $4 shipping) and zipped through that. Both recommend similar approaches, but the first one is less than two pages long, so I’d start there!

I decided to try it on a small book on the bookshelf that doubles as my reading queue. The book has the  intriguing title of The Prodigal God. This is the first book that I can say this about: The most significant thought, to me, came from the short introduction chapter. Fortunately the rest of the book was pretty good, too. That key thought was related to the meaning of prodigal, i.e. recklessly extravagant. In the parable formerly known as The Prodigal Son, you may recall the wasteful spending of the younger brother. Now transform that notion a bit and consider a more prodigal character in this tale, the father. And then take the next step to imagine an extraordinarily well equipped Resource taking part in reckless extravagance … in your direction. If done  correctly, this could send a shiver down your spine. Worth a few seconds of reflection, anyway.

And by the way, if you ever noticed that religious types have a few problems, you might like how this book addresses that, too. And you might discover that you have an ally in that thinking, namely the guy that is the reason for calling this day Good Friday. Good, because if I’ve got it right, it ironically features the most important death in all history.

Because I wanted to make sure I was actually comprehending the book while blazing along at a-bit-faster-than-not-very-fast, I sped read it twice for practice. I rarely read books twice, but in this case it was a good choice.

Like, umm, inspirational music

I have accidentally stumbled across some cutting edge music. It’s from Charles Spearin’s The Happiness Project, which has a genius quality in the way he has built music around spoken words. My favorite is Vittoria, which is like, it’s like umm, it’s umm like, like umm really really … happy? inspirational? funny? The lyrics are composed of a grand total of four different words (depending on if you count interjections), and I didn’t mean to accidentally give most of them away in the previous sentence. Hear it here, and then do your part to end the recession by forking 99 cents or so. Or go for the worldwide instant recovery by splurging for the whole album.

Brain Attacked

Christmas around my siblings can be a hazardous event. There’s always the danger of becoming the object of a “theme,” and this year’s little surgical event of mine seems to have drawn some attention. Here is a set of gifts I gathered to celebrate this occasion. Among the books, I’d probably recommend the Brain in Your Pocket book, though I haven’t made it too far through most of them.

Although it’s tempting to make some brain jello with the mold, I’d rate the USB Brain Mouse, in the lower center of that previous picture, as the top among these gifts. Since my company sold a few zillion USB mouse chips in the past, I was of course obligated to open this one up and see if our chip was in it. No such luck. Looked like the rival HP chip with the integrated LED stuff. Bummer. I’ll try not to hold that against this m0use from the Swiss Pat Says Now company which focuses on visually clever designs.

Given my history with the mouse chips, I’ve tried out a lot of mice over the years. My favorite company continues to be Logitech, another Swiss company. (Historical note: my first reason to get a passport was for a trip to visit them, outside the small town of Morges on Lake Geneva, with JoAnn years ago.) Their VX Revolution is my current favorite; tracks great on any surface and I’m completely addicted to the free-spinning wheel.

Here’s a close up on the Brain Mouse. By the way, the guy happens to be pointing to the approximate location of my scar.

Advanced Couch Design

I’ve been designing chips too long, and need to try something bigger. My daughter has been helpful in pointing out a couch design website, here. It features some cutting edge design work.

It’s hard to pick just one good one here. You might consider the cow design.

cow-sofa

There’s one using ‘patchwork’ that reminds me of a loveseat at our house, which has acquired the name ‘happy couch’ due to its slightly festive look. Ours looks downright subdued compared to that patchwork thing.

My engineering mind, or what’s left of it, can’t help but be tempted by the accordian like couch.  (Additional videos can be seen after you view this.)

A quick calculation indicates that if I covered a typical sofa with a single layer of our most popular chip, it would take about 500,000 of them. Yep, time to move up in the world.

Physical Pheat and some lessons

Some weeks ago, after months of not being too physically active since surgery, I finally decided to try to get into shape. This has turned out to be harder than expected. I set off on a treadmill, at a slow pace. And then slowed it down. And by 0.8 miles at an agonizingly slow pace, I finally had to give up. That was a surprising underachievement; I thought I could make at least a mile.

But I kept at it, and began to get a bit better. There was a goal in mind: my son Michael, a high school junior, is running cross-country. His team, Bellevue High, has an annual invitational where they invite 20+ teams. It has an open race that anyone can run in. A few years ago, while Brian was running, Michael and I both ran. We ended up around 27 minutes for the 5k (3.1 miles), with him beating me by about 15 seconds. Things have changed in my ability to compete with him.

My goal this time was to beat a 10 minute mile pace over the race. It was run at the scenic Lake Sammamish State Park, and here I am about halfway through the pace. Most of the runners were well out of sight by this point, although I’m happy to say there were a few elderly guys actually still behind me. Michael came and joined me on the last mile or so, although it was hard for him to run at my pace. He had to concentrate to go that slowly.

I’m happy to say that I beat my target, finishing at 30:59. Assuming the course is exactly 3.1 miles, my average mile time was 9:59.67. Wow — I had some margin; could have gone almost third of a second slower per mile and still made it.

Michael at finish

Earlier in the day, Michael had a nice result. Among the 180 or so varsity runners, he got third. Here he is about 15 yards from the finish, running in (on) the shadow of a competitor. It’s a nice shot of their struggle to outdo each other. That guy on the right beat him by about a half step. Michael’s time was 16:03, or about 5:11 per mile. My secondary goal was to be less than double his time, which I also accomplished. One key lesson: set very low standards for yourself, and then pretend that meeting them is a great accomplishment.

I claimed first in my category: runners who had brain surgery this year. That’s another lesson for success: define groups that only include yourself, and then proclaim a clear victory. I was also willing to use the excuse code that I’m on some kind of beta blocker medicine, which must have inhibited my abilities. So that’s lesson #3: create an excuse that can’t easily be proven wrong, and then make like it was an extraordinary obstacle to overcome.

If you enjoy creating the illusion that you are a hero in ways no one would have guessed, these lessons may come in handy.

This final picture was Michael’s teammate, finishing shortly after Michael. I like the expression on the Issaquah runner’s face.

50 and Flying Away

It’s been several weeks, but I’m back from my blog sabbatical. Last month I turned the big 5-0, and JoAnn got me up early that morning and drove me out for a hot-air balloon ride. I think the idea was to get some altitude corresponding to my age.

The balloon is impressively large when you stand right next to it. This one held about 10 people and flew around a half-mile high.

Balloon, filled with cool then hot air

Take-off

Fly away

One key point about hot air balloon flights: You’re almost completely at the mercy of the winds. Usually those move the ballon 5 – 7 miles away. In our case, we just had some light winds blowing at different directions, so we basically circled around close to our take-off spot, roughly as shown in this map trace.

Route map

The most exciting (as in dangerous) part of the flight is the landing, given that thing about being at the mercy of the wind. Our pilot was hoping to get into the church lot just across the freeway from our take-off location. The wind did different things at different elevations, so we had to hover around the freeway median, maybe 100-200 feet high, before getting the wind to move toward the church. He had to clear a fence and then land before running into the trees, which he did manage. (Although it might have been more interesting if he had hit the trees.)

Here’s the close-up of the take-off and landing sites, unusually close together. The tracking crew on the ground didn’t have much to do on this trip.

The Landing

After the customary glass of survival champagne, JoAnn and I went back up to right near the take-off spot for breakfast at the Maltby Cafe. Excellent place to eat, just make sure you’re really really hungry.

Pi guy — sigh

If you are a careful reader of these posts and have a habit of holding onto goofy facts, you may recall that the first mathematical concept I seriously interacted with, after brain surgery, was pi. As in, testing myself to see if I could still remember the first 30 or 40 decimal places of pi (3.1415…).

An alert cousin of mine (let’s call her “Kim”) recently sent me a link to a Pi-song ring tone. I know, I know — how thoughtful! I checked it out and it does sing nearly the first 90 digits of pi. I decided to turn this into a first ever experience of actually downloading a ringtone to my phone (I didn’t enter the 21st century too quickly, so I need to catch up with the 12 year olds). And on that site it’s free to download, but it requires giving them your phone number, which I was reluctant to do.

So I started wishing for a program that would capture the audio from anything playing on the computer’s sound card. And on the Mac there is one called WireTap Studio that does just that. Just specify one or more applications (such as the web browser), record any sound being played, and then edit that sound bite if desired. Seems nearly ideal, outside of the charge for using it longer than the trial period.

Now I didn’t check for any legal tidbits on the ringtone site, so the rest of this is purely hypothetical, of course. It may have been possible to capture that free ringtone song (without giving a phone number), and then finding out that WireTap can also send it to one’s phone.

Later I asked the kids (in theory) how they would describe someone with a pi-song ringtone. Some answers: geeky, funny, totally nerdy, only-my-dad. One of them even momentarily transitioned through a state of noting that the song was kind of catchy.

If you want the longer version of the song (I’m sure there’s high demand), this nice site runs it out to 190 digits.

Feed the beast

For the last few years I’ve been making a calendar, inspired by the ones at despair.com. The ones I make, with help / support of some colleagues, are based largely on my company’s culture. That culture is mostly set by its somewhat notorious, outspoken CEO, T.J. Rodgers. I always send him a calendar to see if he will fire me, and when he doesn’t, I distribute a few copies to co-workers.

While some of the months are only meaningful if you work at Cypress, others have wider appeal. This month of July, for example, features a theme that I’m sure some of y’all have experienced at one time or another.