Rand Wacker

PHOTO: When Nerds Protest The RNC.

“I’m not quite dead yet!”

Not sure why that quote came to mind, but it feels appropriate since its been a while since I’ve posted here due to extreme busy-ness, and also a lack there-of. Let me explain.

I’m currently in the middle of a five-week travel stretch. I’ve gone somewhere every week in August and its going to continue on in to September. So I’ve been very very busy with work and fun life, but not a whole lot which reflects around here. For the interested, my itinerary has looked like this:

• IETF 60 in San Diego - Very quick trip to some very technical, very interesting meetings. More on this will develop in the near future. This was my first IETF and I hope to make them a somewhat regular event (not that Sendmail was under-represented with something like five of us there, and countless good friends).
• Seattle - Attended an all-day conference at Microsoft regarding Sender ID. It was my first time at the MSoft campus and they definitely do a good job putting on a meeting. Afterwards we had a reception and the opportunity to run wild in the MSoft store to buy products at deep deep discounts. I was somewhat conflicted because I’ve been looking for a new computer bag and they had some nice ones, but they all said “Microsoft”. I ended up buying one of each of the Mac products that MSoft makes (heh). Got to see Rob and Amy the last night, which was great. I then flew directly to…
• LA (Weekend) - Tchaikosky at the Hollywood bowl (awsome), Garcia family reunion (great fun), random family time, a nice weekend not spent in the back yard.
• Boston/New York - On the plane right now. Heading east to meet with numerous press folks. We’ve got something like 10-12 meetings in three days (not to mention getting from MA to NY), so I’m bummed I once again won’t get a chance to see anything in Boston, but it should be a fun trip with our CEO and one of our PR folk though.
• Yosemite - Going on an extended backpacking trip next week with Sandy as part of our “just schedule the damn trip” camping expeditions for the summer. I fell slightly guilty for leaving Lex behind (she’s doing a two week archaeology dig in the city), but if I cancel this trip I know I’m not going to go backpacking at all for the rest of the summer, and we can’t have that.
• Seattle Redux - Microsoft is having another conference (maybe I’ll get another shot at one of those bags), then I’m staying to work at our Seattle “facility” for a few days of project planning. Lex is flying up on Friday and we’re going to vacation with friends for the long weekend.

Intersperse all of this with every free daylight hour spent continuing the terra-forming project out back (great progress being made), and I’ve been exceedingly busy. The difference though is that I don’t feel like I’m panicked all the time. I’m not behind on anything (in fact I’m ahead on a number of projects), and there have been more than few times in the past couple of weeks where I couldn’t think of anything to do…in effect, I was bored.

A lot of this has to do with a) being done with the wedding and b) realizing that I needed to get better at managing my life after getting back from the wedding. I’ve made a great effort to focus myself on just the things that I need to do, both at work and at home. Where I used to be notorious for keeping a list of little projects to do in my inbox (two screens worth sometime), I’ve taken the new approach “if it’s not important, skip it…if it is important and quick to do, get it done…if its important and will take a while to do, knock whatever else you can off the list and get on with it.” Essentially I was spending so much time managing the list of things I had to do that it was eating up the time I had to get them done!

So at work I’ve focused my responsibilities and I’ve set up boundaries for my tasks. Once I’ve completed a decent amount of stuff that I’m supposed to do I’m free to take on new projects, but not until I’ve actually FINISHED the first things. Same at home. With the wedding being over we’ve had a decent amount of extra time so I’ve used it to finish all those little projects THAT JUST WEIGHED ON MY MIND, and now my personal to-do list is essentially zero (modulo house-based things that I can only do when I’m there).

So I’m left with something that I literally can’t remember experiencing in the past couple of years…time on my hands. It’s unfortunate that these are only coming in drips and dabs…and usually at inconvenient times like late at night or when I’m stuck on a plane (HI!) and unmotivated to do something really fun. I think I’ll be able to organize that this and create some big free-time blocks. Here’s a twist though, I’M NOT GOING TO SCHEDULE ANYTHING TO DO. I’m not even going to think about it. I’m going to make an effort to have a free day here or there and just see where things go. I would like to ride my bike a little more, do some fun construction projects, maybe volunteer a little, and seeing friends is always good, but those are all just general interests. I’m not going to actually say I’m going to do X, Y, and Z, because if I end up not doing them then I’ll just be bummed out about it.

As my favorite birthday present from this year says, “Trying is the first step towards FAILURE” - Homer Simpson.

California’s SUV Ban - The Golden State has outlawed big SUVs on many of its roads but doesn’t seem to know it. By Andy Bowers

The Golden State has outlawed big SUVs on many of its roads but doesn’t seem to know it.

Spamusement!

Poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines!

OK, maybe using the Mac has dropped my Tech IQ some, but I can’t seem to figure out how to copy and paste from Word to a program running in Terminal (like Pine) without the “smart quote” characters (apostrophes and hyphens and what not) causing all kinds of escape-character excitement. Every time I’m trying to paste something with a single ‘ in to a message I’ll get a couple of escape characters on new lines then the text will continue. Any — that Word has converted in to a special single longer - will jump down A COUPLE OF PAGES and then continue pasting. Argh! There’s no paste special command in terminal, and Word doesn’t have a copy-text unformatted feature. Even copying to TextEdit and the converting to plain text won’t work! Any ideas?

The whole month of July and now the beginning of August is bringing some really annoying weather to our corner of the Bay Area (East Bay, Richmond Annex, just north of Berkeley/Albany). Its been cold, overcast, and borderline drizzly every morning for the past month, and half of the time it doesn’t burn off for the entire day.

It’s really annoying…not nice enough to want to be outside, but not yet bad enough to have to stay inside. It’s like being in purgatory during summer!