26 Miles

Joy In Work

// March 15th, 2010 // No Comments » // Life

Finding joy in my work has been hard to come by lately and I think I figured out why — I’ve been delegating too much!

We’ve gone from a staff of 4 developers on the product side to just 2 (myself included) which has forced me to take on more of the day to day software development and problem solving duties, and I’m having a lot more fun!

I never enjoyed the ‘project manager’ role and have always been in the thick of the action for most of my career but with my latest venture I somehow felt to be the most effective I needed to assume more of a strategic management role and do less of the actual software development. I’m finding that wasn’t the best recipe.

Lately I’ve been adjusting my workload so I can personally tackle some of the things I’ve wanted us to get to for a while and with it has come a sense of ‘getting things done’ that I haven’t felt in a while.

So, lesson learned. Fully enjoying my work is directly tied to solving tactical challenges we face every day, and not just the managing the long-term strategic vision. Balance is key, and I’ve been sacrificing one too greatly at the expense of the other.

Approved for MacBook Pro

// March 12th, 2010 // No Comments » // Technology

My company is going to buy me a new laptop. A MacBook Pro (MBP)! WooHoo! I’ve wanted one of these for a while now and it’s finally going to happen.

As luck would have it though, they’re supposed to release a new version of the thing soon-we-dont-know-how-soon-but-soon-we-think so the rumor sites say.

Aaaaaahhh!

Can’t wait though.

Movie Review: Alice In Wonderland

// March 11th, 2010 // No Comments » // Life

Sunshine and I saw Alice In Wonderland this weekend in 3D.

From what I could tell, it seemed to be a hybrid of the Alice stories with some liberties taken in the interest of the medium and time.

The sequence when Alice first gets to Wonderland came off so dark (as in the absence of light) that I almost fell asleep. But once things lightened up (literally), I was able to stay engaged.

Helena Bonham Carter was hilarious as the trigger-happy, animal-loathing queen (kind of a conglomeration of the Red Queen and the Queen of Hearts).

Johnny Depp was the standout performer (as he usually is with these over-the-top characters), although I’ve argued his performance out-shined the muted color of the movie-version-Hatter’s dialogue over the original. I would have loved really turning him lose but then it’s Alice’s story, not his.

Mia Wasikowska’s performance as the late-teen incarnation of Alice was really quite good, although the dialogue and pacing required less of an acting stretch than did the casting a young Anglo waif-ish Brit who looked the part, and on that mark they hit a home run.

Anne Hathaway floated across the screen as the White Queen with her wispy mannerisms. It was intentionally comical, but not overly so.

On the whole, the movie benefited disproportionately to it’s real quality by riding the 3D coattails of Avatar, which took the medium to a new level and set high expectations for whatever 3D movie immediately followed. As such, Alice had an even better opening weekend than Avatar.

I expect that trend to fall off quickly though, since (unlike Avatar) there are no surprises in this story that haven’t been known for almost 150 years.

A Sunny Day

// March 9th, 2010 // No Comments » // Life

Never underestimate the healing power of a sunny day. There’s magic in those rays.

Memories of a thousand days come and gone. Toes buried in the sand. Kids carried piggyback through the neighborhood pool. Sitting in a quiet field watching the dove fly by and holding steady because you’d rather preserve the stillness than anything else. Glinting through the leaves of the forest walking a trail alone knowing you’re the only person for at least a mile. The cool dawn of my grandfather’s funeral, less than a dozen in attendance, his whole world. Spring T-ball practice in the evening in 1st grade so long ago in our little country town. Flying across our college campus on my bike to meet her, slowing down before I turn her corner so she doesn’t see my rush. Dusk on the dock by the lake among friends I just met, but would always have.

Give me a sunny day, any day. Any day.

The Road

// March 8th, 2010 // No Comments » // Life

I’ve always had a preference for non-fiction, in a way. I’ve long held that reading non-fiction was more “useful” as it was filling my head with “facts” and making me smarter. The trouble is my bookcase is rife with barely-started or half-finished non-fiction, my usual adhoc bookmarks perched near the beginning or middle of most every book I own, like a hundred little flags waving at me and reminding me and the world of my inability to finish what I’ve started.

But what I’m finding is that the books I finish are fiction. Good fiction. Because my mind is so occupied by the daily work, it’s the novel that can take me away to somewhere else. Not just more dry facts, but a story, people to connect to and through and to live and be in the world beyond the everyday. The escape that I’ve looked for is right there in those little pages.

I spent a good chunk of my birthday weekend reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. It’s a bleak story with a narrow focus on the journey of an unnamed father and son trekking south on a desolate highway in a post-apocalyptic landscape. A grey world without sun or hope, where the daily struggle for food and life and dry warmth are constant and stark. Little is known of who they are, were, what they’ve been through, or what they hope to achieve other than moving on and “carrying the fire” of “the good people”. The chief threat they face outside of starvation are roving bands of starving cannibals who capture wanderers and store them as barely-living foodstuffs. Throughout, finishing the day alive and in each others company are victories for them both. Despite the uncertainty of their tenuous journey, that they have each other is something, enough, and in many ways everything. Their sparse dialog is not unlike so many fathers and sons: pointed, deliberate, with love painted around the edges of purpose and action.

McCarthy’s dialog is clipped, but his narrative is poetic, and his portrait of the miasmic, desperate existence after nuclear holocaust is unlike anything I’ve ever read and probably as accurate as one could imagine.