Lilah is a Donut and Molly is a hiker

Lilah has safely arrived in Berlin. She arrived in Europe in Amsterdam, where, she says, everyone is taller and speaks a different language. She needs sleep.

Molly's made it to Santa Barbara and went hiking.

I'm glad someone in the family has wanderlust.

Time to put on those traveling shoes

Well, not me, but the daughters.

Lilah is off to Germany. She was supposed to leave a week ago, but her passport didn't show up in time. Several hundred dollars later to reschedule her flight and she will be on her way tomorrow in the very early morning, returning on Sept. 11.

Molly is off to L.A., via Monterey and Santa Barbara with a very good friend. Fear and Loathing teenage girl style. The Aquarium, UCLA and general hanging out.

Be Careful What You Ask For

I'm trying to figure out how to self-impose structure now that I've yanked what structure I've had out from under myself. Giving oneself over to an employer delegates structure to them.

I've never thought about when I should get up, when I should work and does it need to be a discrete block of time? A lot of the value I've added over the years has come from ideas that show up while I'm doing something else.

Go ahead and imagine a blank slate.

News From the Front, Social Networking, Navel Gazing

Hi. It's been a while. Things have been a bit hectic.

In the category of things I want to blog about, there's my quitting the day job this Friday. I'm resuming my consulting career and am looking forward to making things that people use again. I think I have about a month's work lined up. That gives me time to hustle the next thing and so the pattern starts.
I'm really really really looking forward to this.
I'm working at home this time; that's new. I think last time we did good things and the income was good, but I lost control of expenses. This time, I'll be more tight fisted with the money, while still having fun with the toys. :-) It's one thing to blow $300 on a Treo. It's fatal to be spending $50K a year on office lease.
The emphasis is data base design and development using tools I'm familiar with and tools that I hope to get better at. My name is on the door this time; that's a bit more incentive on my part to do a good job. Geography is no concern; let me know if you know someone that needs a database.
I'm playing quite a bit with the social networking apps. I'm signed up with:
  • LinkedIn - a business contact directory. It's mostly sport for me now (this is true for all of them actually, but this one has the pretense of a business purpose.) I have a friend who claims to have leveraged this for business purposes. I'm eager to hear how.
  • FaceBook - originally a college network site, it's slightly more 'mature' than MySpace, but it's in the same space. Sort of. The idea is you can see what your buds are up to. You get updates on all the people you marked as friends. I don't think you can see my profile unless you're a member.
  • Twitter - Blogging for those with short attention spans. This is fun. You're limited 160 characters and you're supposed to answer the question "What Are You Doing". Using desktop apps like Twitterific, you can be interrupted all day by the smart remarks of your friends. It has programming hooks, so folks have written add-ons that let you 'chat' with your calendar, for example, and set an appointment by using Twitter.
  • Pownce - Like Twitter it encourages short posts to a select group of friends. Unlike Twitter it has built in support for file transfer, links and calendar postings in addition to text posts. I'm unsure on this one; it's too close to Twitter and I've not had much use for the additional feature set. I am enamored of the technology it's built on, however.
  • Plaxo - The newest and coolest, imho. Address Book, Calendar and Tasks/Notes all on the web, all synchronized with your desktop. Really handy if you're going back and forth from home to work and want the info in both places (yes, less of an issue starting on Monday....) As of Monday, this week, it also supports developing a friends network. All God's Children want to be in the Social Networking space... :-)

Apple hits another one out of the park

Nicely summarized by Graceful Flavor
Apple announced that its third quarter profits jumped 73% to 818 million, or $0.92 PDS, on sales of $5.41 billion. These results compare to revenue of $4.37 billion and net quarterly profit of $472 million, or $.54 PDS, for the same quarter last year. Gross margin was 36.9 percent, up from 30.3 percent in the year-ago quarter.
What else is there? Just another fantastic performance by what might be the best management team in technology. Does this make me a fanboy? Do I see the world through Apple-goggles? Let me put it this way: whether you love or hate or are just indifferent to Apple, if you chose not to recognize the financial performance that’s going on, quarter-after-quarter, then you’re a moron. What we have here is a company at the top of its game, a stock that has a huge emotional/speculative bias towards it and a management team that knows how to trickle the PR/news out just right to keep the engine humming on all twelve.
Apple is, to the best of my limited knowledge, the only company other than my own that I'd want to work for.

Universal Health Care

Thanks to Bro. In Law for the link to this Jane Quinn column in Newsweek:
Prepare to be terrorized, shocked, scared out of your wits. No, not by jihadists or Dementors (you do read "Harry Potter," right?), but by the evil threat of ... universal health insurance! The more the presidential candidates talk it up, the wilder the warnings against it. Cover everyone? Wreck America? Do you know what care would cost?
To summarize, the current state of health care in America is worse than you think in terms of the quality of the care provided and the cost. The state of health care in the countries providing universal coverage is better and cheaper than what we have here.

In California, Sheila Kuehl is proposing a single-payer system. Background here.

Pandering to John

Gore Vidal, on Evelyn Waugh's writing:
[he's] our time's finest satirist... [writing] in a prose so chaste that at times one longs for a violation of syntax to suggest that the creator is fallible, or at least part American.
I've never read Evelyn Waugh, but I'm a huge fan of Gore Vidal.

Social Networking (or navel gazing)

I'm on Twitter. It's fun. Low overhead way to keep in touch with folks. I started off fairly engaged, now posting less than once a day.

Pownce is sort of like Twitter, but not. I'm on there too. Posting way less. I have invitations, if you're interested.

My interest in these things is understanding what people find useful and how The Job might find them useful. I don't have an answer yet.

Happy iCal Day

iCal, for you PC users out there, is the calendar program provided on every Macintosh. The default icon for iCal is to our left. It is a modest pleasure that the date is our birthday. (Sadly, the icon updates to display the current date once you open the program. So, we only check our calendar on 7/17.) Our age can be determined by subtracting 1 from the number of years that Disneyland has been open.

Impeachment

From Bill Moyers Journal
A public opinion poll from the American Research Group recently reported that more than four in ten Americans — 45% — favor impeachment hearings for President Bush and more than half — 54% — favored impeachment for Vice President Cheney.

This is another great show. A discussion between a liberal and a conservative - the conservative drafted one of the articles of impeachment against Bill Clinton - about the failures of Congress and to a lesser extent, the media, to hold our imperial president accountable for his expressed disregard for the constitution.
One of the points made is that impeachment is not a constitutional crisis. It's the cure for a constitutional crisis.