Many thanks to Chris Winters for mentioning bivio in a post last December. It was hard to ignore this quote:
Superhero Rob Nagler presented his company's XP practices to a college class last year and has the slides online. (If I lived in Boulder bivio would be my dream company to work for.).
Thanks to Chris, I was paying extra attention when I met Rob at frameworks-boulder a few months back. After several interviews, bivio offered me a job last week. I'm pretty excited about it. First I need to put some finishing touches on my current project and see it into production. In the meantime I'll be dusting off my collection of perl books.
I started blogging after I was laid off from PlanetCAD. Fourteen months later there's clear professional benefits even if I'm not on the A-list. I'm convinced my blog helped me land the current contract with Microcomputer Training Specialists and the City and County of Denver. John is a blogger too. He no doubt appreciated getting a deeper glimpse into my interests and character. During my interview process, Rob mentioned that there was some good stuff on my blog.
It's not that my blog got me hired for either of these jobs. But it does give prospective clients or employers a lot more material on which to base their decisions. They can get a much better sense of how I'll fit in with their team.
A fun anecdote from the interview process. Rob never asked me for my resume. I pair programmed with him for several hours and learned some new tricks immediately. I had more traditional interviews with several other people on the team. When he sent me the offer letter it had my old address on it. "How'd he get that?" I wondered. Then I realized that I hadn't updated my resume since January and Sarah and I moved in July. It more or less worked exactly like it should. I didn't have to tell Rob where to find my resume. He found my contact info there on his own. If I'd been keeping my resume up-to-date he would have gotten the correct contact info. :-)
Sarah says Love Actually was a pretty sloppy romantic movie and now everyone will know that I'm a romantic mush slob.
So be it. Go see it. Really.
I boarded the northbound number thirty bus at Forth and Federal. The bus was crowded as usual. Though my eyes remained safely directed at the ground, my attention was immediately drawn to an older man sitting a couple seats behind the driver in the section of the bus reserved for the elderly and handicapped. I chose a seat two places further down on the same side of the bus. My attention was so divided between this man and the ground that I didn't notice the beautiful young latina sitting across the isle from me. For the sake of this story, I'll call her Lucia. As I un-shouldered my backpack and sat down I made contact with his glazed-over and bloodshot eyes. His face was very weathered as was his leather jacket and his blue, U.S. Army baseball cap. I couldn't guess his age, but the glassy eyes and lazy, persistent stare betrayed drunkenness. We nodded at each other and I looked away.
An the older woman was sitting right next to the door. She tried to look busy with her purse, but her body language betrayed that her attention was as focused on him as mine was. She and the woman sitting immediately behind the driver exchanged occasional glances. He commanded everyone's nervous attention though no one looked him.
There's an unspoken rule on crowded buses: avoid eye contact to preserve a sense of personal space when the space itself has been compromised. He was oblivious to that rule, or just didn't care. Everyone shrank from his stare.
At the next stop another young latina boarded and sat directly across from him. I'll call her Maria. He muttered, shifted his weight, shook his head a little, and smiled at her. She was unmistakably afraid. Searching the front of the bus for a safe face, she found Lucia and they exchanged a knowing glance. They shared similar outfits and the same fear. Maria feebly tried to adjust her very tight clothes into a more modest arrangement. She clearly wasn't planning to be seated across from this guy when she got dressed that morning.
I imagined my dad there looking over his glasses at Maria asking "Do you like older men?" Dad still flirts like he did when he was young and handsome. Whereas in the past she might have been flattered, these days his missing front teeth and unkempt clothes would probably evoke similar fear.
" Mutter, mutter, mutter. I tthing mutter seea movvie." A long pause. "I seen tthat one ... wha was it? With Freddie Kruger an ... oh I know ... man, wha was it? You know, Freddie Kruger and --"
"Jason?" I asked, overcoming my own nervousness.
"Yeah," he replied with a somewhat toothless grin. "It was preddycool. Heh heh." Long pause. "In th end when mutter, mutter? Heh heh ... itwas cool." I didn't see the movie and I couldn't make out the spoiler he was sharing. I nodded along as if I'd understood. Judging by his grin and chuckle he must have really enjoyed it. His joy contrasted starkly with the fearful tension in the air.
A number of people got off the bus at the stop in front of Social Services. Maria escaped to one of the vacated seats somewhere behind me. His eyes followed her as she went, stopping to make contact with Lucia. He wasn't so drunk as to miss the rejection in Maria's escape and Lucia's reaction to his gaze. It hurt. That moment of joy quickly submerged, replaced with anger.
" mutter need thiss!" he announced to everyone and no one in particular, gesturing to Lucia. "I was in tharmy ," he said as he swayed forward and pointed with both hands to the logo on his cap. He grabbed the lapels of his leather jacket and sat up more straight, said "I'm retired," and swayed back into a slouch.
"Were you in Viet Nam?" I asked, hoping to distract him from the rejection and anger.
"Yeah." he answered gazing into the distance for quite a while. My mind filled in an educated guess at his age: probably in his late-fifties, maybe sixties. The average age of the U.S. soldier in Viet Nam was nineteen. n- n- n- n- nineteen. nineteen plus thirty-five or so.
"How long were you there?" I asked. The whole bus held its breath. His anger was confirming their worst fears. Something Unpredictable could happen. For me that fleeting chuckle and my daydream of Dad made me want to know his story. I hoped it would relieve some of the pressure.
"Thrddy eight monthss," he said, still gazing into the distance.
"That's a long time." Three years and two months of war, probably up close and personal. "What was your occupation?"
"I'm an engineer ..." he announced almost proudly. " ... a combat engineer." He was definitely up close and personal.
"So you built bridges and stuff?"
"Yeah. An blew'em up after you got across. I did all kinna shit."
"My uncle was an aviator ... a marine ... flew air support in an A6-Intruder," I offered.
"Oh yeah? I shudda done that." He replied, snapping briefly out of his distant gaze and then drifting back into to it. He's probably right. My uncle is in considerably better shape for his time in Viet Nam.
"My dad was in the Navy. But he was in and out of the service before Viet Nam got started." I was kinda surprised at the connections my brain was weaving. Dad was also an aviator -- communications or radar or something -- but never saw any combat. He and his crew did get escorted out of Soviet airspace by a couple of MiGs once when their navigator screwed up.
"My dad was in th Navy too ... World war two," he said nodding, back out of the gaze again. He seemed a little surprised that we had anything in common. "We had his flag and mutter " he said making a triangle shape with his hands.
The bus stopped again. More people got off and more people got on. In my peripheral vision I could see Lucia specifically avoiding eye contact as he looked back her way again. His anger returned.
"I was in thArmy" he said, swaying in her direction and again pointing both hands at the logo on his cap. "Why she mutter look at mutter, mutter ?" he asked me, gesturing to her again. His gesture lingered there oddly. His fingers stretched wide and tense, his arm outstretched straight from his shoulder, pointing at her almost with his palm.
"She's okay," I replied.
"Shlook at me like I'm a dog ... I represented my country."
While he paused again I turned over the image in my mind of the United States personified as a drunken, retired combat engineer rejected by a teenager.
"I wanna ... there a thheater downtown?" He asked the woman sitting between him and me as she tried to ignore him. I moved to the now empty seat right behind the driver thinking he might stop swaying over her.
"I don't know which theater you're looking for but this bus will take you downtown," I answered. "Can you find your way from the Sixteenth Street Mall?"
"Yeah, th ... its two stories? You mutter ?" he asked incomprehensibly.
I didn't understand, but the topic changed before I could clarify. He had looked back at Lucia again.
"I was in the Army ," he said again with the same sway and both hands pointing to his cap again. "I represented my country. ... For her?! Hers."
It may not have been clear to anyone but me that "Hers" meant something special. It was a meta-syntactic variable for any American woman, or probably any American.
"I signedup during Viet Nam." He announced indignantly. His gaze drifted away again.
He knew he would see combat. A young kid imagining the hero his father might have been and wanting to follow in his footsteps. He wanted to represent his country in combat.
"I ... my friends died ... for hers. An she look at me like I'm a dog."
"She doesn't know" I replied. "She doesn't know what you went through. I don't think she has any idea. Probably none of us know. Very few ... almost no one has seen war like you have. I haven't."
"An I pray you never have to," he said looking me steadily in the eye. "I pray to God."
He put his hands together and muttered at the heavens while I choked back the tears welling up in my eyes. Something in the way he looked at me gave me a tiny piece of his pain. I could imagine the feeling: a friend killed right in front of me. I could feel the fear and anger and helplessness and guilt, or at least my imaginary equivalents. Probably nothing I could imagine would ever compare with his real experience. Even so, I could feel the deep resentment for returning home to a country that was too afraid of me to understand my pain. And here it was playing out again thirty years later on this bus. Like nothing had changed in more than three decades.
"There's a theater downtown ... two stories ..." he said again.
"Oh! I know now," I exclaimed. "At the Pavilion. It's right up there. You see the yellow sign going down the building on the right side of the street up there?"
He stood up as the bus stopped at the light at 14th and Glenarm?. "You look at me like I'm a dog," he said to Lucia in a more menacing voice. "You never represented your country."
"This isn't a stop. And quit hassling my riders," said the driver.
I leaned forward and told the driver "he'll get off right here if you'll stop." The thirty bus doesn't usually stop at 15th and Glenarm, but it did this time. The combat engineer turned back to shake my hand as several other people moved past him nervously to get off the bus.
"Thank you for what you did back then" I said shaking his hand. He thanked me too and muttered something else at Lucia. Then he got off the bus.
The bus let out a tangible sigh of relief. Several people shook their heads. One commented "he's not all there."
"That's what war does to people," I said, feeling that pain again. "It breaks them. It chews them up and spits them out." The driver nodded. "There's kids in Iraq right now learning the same as he did. In another thirty years ..." I couldn't finish that thought. I just shook my head and felt that pain.
I didn't make this story up, except for the names of the two latinas. This is how I remember what happened on a bus trip home in late August. I wrote most of this story the night it happened, though I tightened it up a little this afternoon. Seemed an appropriate way to remember Veteran's Day. Many vets never recovered from their tours in Viet Nam. I pray the next generation fares better.
Just in case I ever get the urge to do some hacking on the way to skiing...
Doc Searls pointed to a post about iPods dying out at altitude.
Update from Stephen Pierce, a fellow pilot:....Hard drives work by levitating a head a very small distance from the media; unlike floppy or tape, where the media actually touches the head. The distance between the rotating media and the head is regulated using a very small wing on the head. The head literally 'flys' above the media.
When the pressure inside the drive is reduced, the wing will need a higher angle of attack, until finally the wing stalls, and the head impacts the media. The term in the industry for this behavior is called a 'head crash'. Very apropos, no?
I knew the part about the flying disk heads, but hadn't thought about the effects of air pressure on them. According to the post, iPods have a 10,000 foot altitude limit. I know that most of the parking lots for Colorado ski areas are below that. While writing up this post I got distracted hunting for more specific numbers than my memory was producing: Loveland around 12,000 and Vail Pass (not the ski area) a bit over 10,000.
After a number of pokes at google I finally found what I was looking for: a nice table which includes the altitudes of various Colorado ski areas. That page turns out to be part of a pretty thorough bit of coverage about North American ski areas in general. It's fun how the 'Net can still surprise me.
The data isn't perfect. I was specifically interested in Loveland, where I spent many weekends in my childhood trying to keep up with my dad and his buddies on ski patrol. Loveland's stats boast a higher altitude (12,700') than what shows up in the table (12,280'). That particular detail is important for some home-town rivalry.
Arapahoe Basin and Loveland are on opposite sides of the Continental Divide and opposite sides of Loveland Pass. Every year they are the last areas to close at the end of the season, with A-Basin usually winning by closing slightly later. For some years they went back and forth over who had the highest ski lift. Each would move their top lift up a little higher to beat the other. Loveland has been the current leader since they put the top of lift 9 right on the Continental Divide. That lift is often closed because of high winds on the ridge. But when it is open there's an amazing view and some pretty fun skiing.
This whole diversion has been really fun for me. I'm frankly surprised to discover such an interest in altitude.[1] This post was supposed to just be a quick note to self. Yet I've spent a couple hours researching and editing.
Looking more closely, it's clearly a part of Colorado culture. For those of you who aren't third-generation natives of Colorado, here are some examples. Many people know that Denver's nickname is the Mile High city, and that the Bronco's play football at Mile High Stadium, because the city of Denver is one mile above sea-level. Along the same theme, there's a local magazine named 5280 [2]. Seventy-five percent of the terrain in the US that is over 10,000 feet is within Colorado. At the borders of most US towns you'll find a road sign which proudly displays the population. Colorado towns generally display the elevation. I have many memories of how my dad would cuss at drivers from neighboring states: "Gawdamn flatlanders!" Another one of Dad's classic observations, "the lowest point in Colorado is higher than the highest point in Nebraska" (or Oklahoma or Kansas or ...).[3] The boiling point of water is lower than 100 degrees Celsius here in Colorado. My mom spent years refining her recipe for pop-overs so they would pop correctly up here.
Anyway, it's been fun meandering from geeky details about hard drives and air pressure to Colorado trivia.
[1] Surprise? Maybe I'm suffering from lack of oxygen. :-) After all, I did name my blog thinair on purpose.
[2] If you generally work in metric units, you might not know that there are 5280 feet in a mile.
[3] I don't know if that's true. Just something Dad often says.
Mark, my wife, Sarah, who is also not at all demanding, says it's fabulous that you quote Winnie the Pooh, but you loose points for the demanding bit. I've also just been disciplined for my commiseration. In addition to the Pooh references I also love the zork references. My Cube used to be named Grue, until Sarah asked what that was about. She objected to our dog having to sleep in the same room with a grue. I explained how very afraid of light they were, that even the LEDs on the power strip and ethernet hub would keep a grue at bay. Nevertheless she routinely gave me That Stare when the name of my computer came up. I finally renamed it to zork.