Published on August 9, 2010
in Ideas.
As a guy that loves sports, I’ve often been able to relate sports to life and family, so sports analogies resonate with me. But, if you bring in instant replay, it changes the game. It no longer resembles life and some piece of the game goes away.
The SF Giants are in the pennant and wild card race right now. A bad call this week gave a game to the Phillies which could be critical the the Giants making the playoffs. If there was replay, the call would have been overturned and the Phillies would have lost. The umpires would have ultimately made the right call. But, that’s not life.
We don’t get replays for the decision we just made. The benefit we get of a bad call we make in our life is learning to persevere. To progress forward, to overcome, to keep making an effort when the call/decision doesn’t go our way. If you screw a pitch to a client up, you line up another pitch and try again. If you marry the wrong person, you take the lumps and pain and move forward. Sports are about effort, team work, preparation and toughness. They teach us about life beyond the game. And part of sports and life is dealing with bad calls. If you take out the bad call. It all changes. Sports like life shouldn’t be perfect.
As sports are an important part of our culture, changing the game. Perfecting it. Making all the right calls, somehow diminishes what it means to me. The players on the Giants have to battle. They have to dig in and take charge of their own destiny. They may get some breaks and they may gets some lumps, but it’s up to them to succeed. I’d like the game to stay that way for now.
Published on August 5, 2010
in Ideas.
I’ve suspected that there may be some gmail delivery issues. I’ll send an email to someone that knows me and that usually responds quickly, but I won’t here from them for several days. This is more than they are just busy or sick of hearing from me.
With emails a few days is wayyyy too long to wait for delivery. But a mail I received this week takes the cake. The mail was originally sent from our attorney’s assistant on 4/15/2009. It was delivered to my inbox on 8/4/2010. It took about one year and three and a half months for the email to be delivered.
I’m not sure where the issue lies. Is this Gmail with some stuck delivery queue, or the attorney’s internal IT issue? I’m curious how much old mail is just bouncing around the internet waiting to get delivered…
Published on August 4, 2010
in Ideas.
Robin has been making delicious jam. Yesterday she made black velvet apricot and blackberry. She makes it now when fresh fruit is in season (not sure why this matters), and then passes most of it out as gifts around the holidays.
Published on August 3, 2010
in Ideas.
This weekend, the Drake ladies on the Mansac (Beth coined the name) are heading to Vegas. I’ve heard quite a bit of dress talk and really would like to see them all dolled up. The fellas on the street will no doubt be bbqing and drinking some wine….and oh, yeah, watching the kids. Have fun ladies.
Published on August 2, 2010
in Ideas.
This weekend Robin and I headed to Avila Beach, near where we grew up in San Luis Obispo to see my old friend Mike, who is in town for a little over a week. I brought my three daughters to his folks house on Saturday afternoon. They still live in the house Mike grew up in and it was just like old times. We swam in the pool, ate candy (girls loved this) and just hung out with his family.
It’s trips like these that make me really miss SLO.
Back around the year 2000, I was working in operations for a startup called MongoMusic. Mongo was creating a technology/service that helped people discover music that sounds like other music. Mongo was a modern day Pandora and we needed to store a lot of music. This involved ripping, metadata, storage and retrieval. It was terabytes of data, which at the time was difficult to manage.
We started with some Sun machines and attached disk arrays as our initial storage plan. Then we moved to Network Appliance Filers. From there we developed our own cluster of commodity storage devices and then we switched to an early stage storage provider called Scale8. Scale8 provided a caching server that had access to it’s data center storage. The caching device could be mounted like a local drive and essentially provided a limitless file system. It was early days for them and there were bugs, but I loved the solution. Once Mongo was bought by Microsoft, we championed the service internally and I think one other MSN team used them briefly, but Scale8 ultimately went out of business. They were probably a year or two too early, didn’t hunker down quite far enough during the dotcom bust and probably had other things holding them back that wasn’t apparent from the outside. But. They were very early in the cloud storage space. They had a good and improving product. They just didn’t have the timing.
Published on July 16, 2010
in Ideas.
Hitting the Giants game tonight with my old friend Patrick. It’s been way to long since I’ve seen Pat, so I’m really looking forward to it. Pat’s one of those guys that I can pick up with just like I saw him yesterday. I’ve known him since I was two.
My neighbor Sandy pointed out to me that guys do a lot less staying in touch with old friends. It’s certainly true for me. However, I’m going to work on changing that by picking up the phone more often just to say hello.
Published on July 15, 2010
in Ideas.
Robin and I have been working out around 6am while the kids are still asleep. But, we were feeling a little under the weather and decided to sleep in yesterday and workout in the evening. The interesting thing is I felt a lot stronger and more flexible in the evening. I decided to look it up and couldn’t find any conclusive information if your body burns more fat or builds more muscle by working out in the morning vs working out in the evening.
Some theories say that there is less food in your body if you workout before eating in the morning, so you’ll burn more fat. Other theories claim that working out when your body doesn’t have enough food trains it to hold onto your fat stores. There is very little information about building muscle except that some theories say that morning cardio workouts can burn muscle since your body wants to maintain a fat store.
For me, I am definitely stronger and more loose in the evenings, but I feel like I have more energy and go to sleep easier when I work out in the morning.
Published on July 14, 2010
in Ideas.
Robin started Lila (3 yr old daughter) in panties yesterday. She quickly had two accidents. Then had another this morning. I’m super excited to get out of the diaper phase, but just because we have her in panties doesn’t mean she’ll use the toilet. We have a long way to go.
I have to remind Robin of when she wrote this hub on potty training a toddler.
Published on July 14, 2010
in Ideas.
Went to play hoops last night. Didn’t really play a game, but shot around a bit. I’m about 4 inches short of dunking. Maybe if I warm up a little more I can get there. I thought losing 25 lbs would help. Definitely closer, but not quite there.
Back in April I took a month off of drinking, cut my calories back and did Bikram Yoga and lost 15 lbs. I lost the next 10 lbs from doing P90X for six weeks. Still have seven weeks to go on P90X. I made a hub on P90X equipment if you’re interested in learning about getting started. I’ll do a few more P90X hubs over the next seven weeks, but no, I won’t be posting before and after pictures.
