the golden mean

9:50pm: anyone have quickbooks 2009?
Subject says it all... I have a Quickbooks 2009 "Portable" file that I'd like to convert to a Quickbooks 2006 "Portable" file (or perhaps some *actually portable* file format). This should take about 5 minutes, and I don't feel like spending two hundred bucks to do it. Anyone here have Quickbooks 2009 installed?

1:30pm: data
It won't surprise anyone that I time (most of) my rides to work, nor that I keep them in a Google Spreadsheet. And I've posted here about times and goals. Now that I've been doing this for a month or so I have enough data to show a trend, and a couple of close approaches to the goal I've set. So I thought I'd share ( this ... )

10:59pm: finding my place in the pantheon
Back in high school when I rode with the Montrose Cycle Club, we had some archetypes on the ride. Steve was the leader of the group. Chris was the best climber and often wore a polka-dot jersey. John was the sprinter, and looked it too. And there was one guy whose name I don't recall and may never have known, because in my mind he was only ever called "The guy who sweats".

Now that I'm riding for the workout on a regular basis, I've become that guy. I notice it some when I'm the one on the bikepath without a windbreaker when everyone else is wearing one. It was a little harder to ignore when I forgot my sweatband one morning. But my ride home this evening really drove it home. When I left work at 7pm it was 54 degrees and raining lightly. I was wearing shorts, a summer jersey, summer gloves, and the thinnest short socks I own, which meant I was a little chilly for the first quarter-mile but quite comfy by the time I was out of the office park. By the time I got to the Burlington town line I was sweaty. Someone had left some sprinklers on in the rain and it was when I considered riding through them to cool off that I realized just how absurd this is.

11:01am: homage
I wonder if the folks at Apple were thinking of this when they named the latest model of iPhone.

9:22pm: 49 minutes
I've set myself some goals related to my bike ride to work. One of those was to do the ride in a net average speed (including stops) of 20 mph. Ten years ago when I was making a similar ride to Chelmsford my record time for the summer worked out to just about exactly 20 mph; I'm older now, but the ride's only three-quarters as long so it makes a good goal.

A lot of making good time is handling the hills. The most important thing is to build up speed quickly at the top of the hill instead of taking the opportunity to rest; that makes a huge difference to your average speed and you can rest once you're actually up to speed on the downslope. But the real key on this ride is that none of the hills are very high, so it's possible to sprint over them. I've been sprinting over bigger and bigger hills, and today I sprinted over Clarendon Hill, which at 55 feet elevation gain is the highest hill on my ride home.

Today's time works out to 19.7 mph. One more minute off my time and I'll be there.

9:22pm: pretty
Just thought I'd share a pretty bit of Bedford I get to see twice a day, once in each direction.

7:36pm: faster faster
It's amazing what adding 100 miles to my weekly average cycling distance is doing for my metabolism.

11:46pm: my new job is awesome
I've been having a great time these last couple of days -- good work, good company, good food. I checked in code on my first day, which is a great indicator of agility (I mean on the company's part, though I like to push to see if it's possible because if it is it'll impress my new employer too). And the commute has been Just Fine, because I've mostly been doing it by bike. 16.1 miles, via Springs Rd in Bedford. Springs Road isn't smooth, or flat, or wide, or straight, and for the first mile or so of it there's a fair amount of traffic. But it's a pre-revolutionary road and it's absolutely gorgeous. I haven't bothered to check any of the other possible routes because this one is just so much fun to ride.

11:40pm: Birthday BBQ
It's a BBQ to celebrate my Birthday!
(and also celebrate my new job, the successful completion of SOS, and many other things worth celebrating)


Please join us:
Sunday, May 17
2pm - 8pm
An Undisclosed Location

We'll provide some grillables and snacks and drinks, you can always bring more if you'd like.

RSVPs are quite handy for the laying-in of supplies.
If you have food restrictions sure to mention that in your reply.


[Parking permits not necessary on Sundays. One Kitteh in residence. House really, totally not kid-proofed, but no one who brings their kids has lost one here, yet.]

10:43am: dreams
A friend of mine whom I don't see enough of apparently dreamt last night that this was because I'd been overseas on a secret mission. I feel a little like I've just gotten back from one of those and am going to embark on another in a week. I'm feeling like being social with the intervening time, particularly during the weekday daytime as that's about to vanish. Anyone want to do lunch, or go for a bike ride?

12:06am: done and done
I just faxed a job acceptance to a brand-new legal entity called VoltDB. I'll be employee number 5, working on a very interesting project with some really sharp folks. It's being incubated by (meaning, the work happens in the office space of) a company in Billerica. I start on the 11th and I'm totally psyched.

11:07pm: bike bike bike
Got new tires on the Ciocc (it was somewhat insane of me not to have done this the minute I got it) and took it out for its first spring ride, and my first purely recreational ride of the season. Went to the end of the bike path and back, in about 1:25 (no computer on the Ciocc yet), so averaging something like 16 mph. Tires are fast, and also look sharp! New seat sits lower on the rails than the old one did, so I stopped to raise it 8mm or so; I felt much less cramped on the bike once I did that. I still need a shorter stem, and the more I think about it the more I want 85 mm (+/-) and not 95 like I thought I might. Ebay, here I come.

9:33am: wait, is this how it's supposed to work?
You'd think being unemployed would mean I could take people up on their last-minute ticket offers to afternoon baseball games. Sadly, not this time. On the bright side, I *am* going to the nightcap.

4:16pm: quark favor?
Somerville Open Studios has an advertiser who sent us a Quark file we can't read. I'm on a bus and have a narrow pipe, so I can't download the demo copy of Quark and convert it to PDF or something myself. Would you? I'd owe you big time! I can be reached at coordinator@somervilleopenstudios.org or you could call me at 617 543 9265 and I can set you up to upload it to SOS's hosting.

ETA: Thanks, c1, you're the best! File came though Just Fine.

1:39pm: free stuff?
Anyone want an abacus or some hotel key-cards? ISTR someone on my flist telling me there was a collector's market for the cards -- most of mine are boring but I have one from Hotel Avante and a few other pretty ones. Pictures here.

6:17pm: spring
First good rain of the season was enough to wash the salt and much of the silt off the center of the road to where the street sweepers will get it when they start, which is Wednesday. By the 15th they will have made a full cycle, and the after the next good rain (to get what they miss) it will be time to bring out the Ciocc again. Meanwhile the tulips are up and the daffodils are about to bloom. Here's hoping any more snow we get is minor.

1:33pm: sweet maria's
I'm about to place a Sweet Maria's order. Shipping is flat rate up to 20 lbs and there's no way even we fiends at UDL can drink that much coffee before it goes stale. Anyone want to go in with me?

9:13pm: gluten free science experiment
I've been making bread in a bread-bot lately, and thought I'd go find a recipe for making gluten-free bread. The net was pretty unuseful for this, but I eventually interpolated a recipe, as follows:

0.5 c some kind of flour that has actual fiber in it, such as millet or flaxseed
1.75-2 c random other kinds of non-wheat flour, such as sorghum, potato, rice, tapioca, or corn
2 t xanthan gum
0.5 c dry milk powder
3 eggs
1.66 c water
3 T oil
1 t apple cider vinegar
2 T honey or agave
1.5 t yeast

... and then attempted to acquire any of the ingredients for this at the local supermarket. But the only gluten-free anything they had was a 1-lb box of pancake mix. So I bought that, and substituted it for the flours and xanthan gum. I probably should also have decreased the water and sweetener and/or increased the yeast, but on "rapid bake" it made a passable loaf of something that might have been bread and might have been cake, and went nicely with chili in any event.

Further experimentation is clearly necessary.

11:20am: gift giving anti-meme
There's a meme going around whose intent is to encourage crafty gift-giving. I have plenty of things already, mostly think that is also true of most of my friends, and am trying to make there be fewer things in the world, not more. Part of making there be fewer things is to make it so that the things there are are more appropriately distributed. To that end, I'm making an effort to put some of the things that have landed in my life back in the thing-stream. Sometimes that's looking at some object and realizing that it would make some particular friend of mine happy, or would be useful for a nonprofit. Sometimes it's selling something cheaply (so far, at a yard sale or by consigning it to someone that's going to the MIT swapfest, but I'm planning to dive into Craigslist as well). I had an excess of window envelopes a couple of months ago and played inverse-steal-stuff-from-work with them. I give things to Goodwill or Big Brothers/Big Sisters. I know people who have "free stuff" piles in their houses, or who post giveaway items to their livejournals.

I'm posting here mostly to encourage myself to keep doing this, but also in hopes of fostering a larger gift-economy and promote simplification for its environmental impact. Maybe someone reading this can turn it into a meme and get it out there; this post is not quite that.

10:33am: facebook
A while ago I gave up on the idea that I needed to follow a news source in order to find out about important bits of news. Everything that had actually mattered in the previous few months had been mentioned on my LJ flist anyway, so I could reduce newspapers and the like to more of an entertainment/procrastination role rather than counting on them to keep me informed of important goings-on. I still read news sources, but I do so in much the same way that I read, say, IMDB or Wikipedia: it's fun and informative without having a goal of seeking out any particular information.

Yesterday, for the first time, one of those important bits of news came to me through facebook rather than LJ. Huh! I wasn't expecting useful information to come from that direction. I might have to actually start reading my facebook flist a little more regularly.

4:30pm: getting closer
I can tell the Worldcon is getting nearer: I just, for the first time, hit "mute" on a thread on the staff mailing list.

5:32pm: what were they thinking?
$11.2 billion for a replacement for Marine One? You could build a deep-bore tunnel from the White House to Andrews for half a billion. No wonder Obama is reviewing that program.

11:10am: well-organized
wiscon is updating their photography/videography policies. I know this because I'm the clerk of arisia and they asked for copies of ours, for reference.

This is awesome because Wiscon is hands down the best-organized sf convention on the planet. Part of being well-organized is being quick to ask others for advice, but that we were among the people they thought to ask is a nice compliment.

11:52pm: bloodletting
In the two weeks leading up to last Thursday, Vanu Inc fired seven people, all "for cause" though none of the causes with which I am familiar are ones I would normally consider firing offenses. My boss Jim was the first one; I was the last (at least so far).

In my own case, I should have seen it coming: my political capital was mostly with Jim and I was a strong ally of his. I took my most recent position there in order to get to work for Jim and to see if I could put together an effective organization, and it was pretty clear by a week after Jim was fired that I'd have to start from scratch in order to accomplish the second goal. So, I had been planning to speak to another manager there about an internal transfer. Had I not been approved for that -- and I know there are people there who want to move and have not -- then I don't think it would have been long before I quit, recession or no recession. Still, I wasn't expecting it to be so quick, or on these terms.

Vanu, Inc was a great place to work for almost the entire time I was there. I will miss many of my coworkers, and I learned some fun things along the way. I won't soon take another director-level position so many reporting steps away from the CEO in such a small company; the politics in that configuration are just too treacherous.

Tactically, miss_chance and I should be OK; this is actually reasonably good timing for a break. I've had a week to put together a resume and I'm a lot more relaxed now than I was three weeks ago, which I needed. I have an intriguing meeting set up for tomorrow, and I'm hoping for many more -- if you've got any interesting leads, please let me know.

7:51pm: under the bus
There's a Montreal phone call in ten minutes. I'm not going to be on it.

Ultimately, I have to choose between Somerville Open Studios happening at all, or convincing Farah Mendlesohn that using Zambia would make Anticipation's pocket program not get nominated for a Hogu award for best work of fiction. Sorry, Farah, you just got thrown under the bus. If you climb out from under there on your own, more power to you.