Rand Wacker

At the end of my last day in New York I was coming out of a meeting and I got to see something I have wanted to see in Manhattan for a long time; it had just started to snow. I thought would enjoy this new event (for me) by walking a few blocks to visit an old friend of mine for a drink before I headed to the airport.

Let me just say right now, snow in New York sucks. Walking through snow in New York sucks more. Walking through snow in New York, in a suit, dragging a roller bag behind you sucks even more! It didn’t take long to realize that the building-channeled winds did everything in their power to drive snow flakes right in to your eyes, and that the sidewalks and metal grates in the city very quickly become wet/icy/slick death traps for anyone not wearing full-on hiking boots. After meeting my friend I tried to catch a cab out to the airport, but all the drivers were of course occupied or being complete assholes about taking someone all the way out to JFK in the snow (I know, I know, I should have gotten their number). I ended up walking another number of blocks to Grand Central to hop the airport bus out. By the time we got to JFK there was a pretty blanket of white on the ground, although I didn’t realize how much pain that was going to cause us trying to get in to the air.

Long story short, we were delayed about half an hour waiting for a connecting flight to come in, then queued up for de-icing. After being blasted by the little guys in their hilarious high-pressure cherry pickers we got in the queue for the runway. Just before we got clearance our pilot came out to examine the wings and decided we’d been on line for too long and we needed to get de-iced again…which meant we also needed to get more fuel. So we ended up heading all the way back to the gate we had left more than an hour ago! Total delay getting out of JFK was something like five hours…followed by a five hour flight home.

But, if I had to get stuck on the tarmac for so long, I’m glad it was on JetBlue. Their in-seat TV service was a pretty good distraction and the flight crew was nothing but nice the whole time. By the time we got in the air they announced we would all be getting a small travel voucher as appreciation for our patience. And, overall, I’m happy they chose to be safe rather than eager. I’m very happy with JetBlue for cross-country flights, and they will probably be seeing a lot more of my business considering that United has added a $200 premium on top of what should be a $300 fare, just because they put power outlets at each seat and now call the SFO-JFK flight “Premium Class”.

One thing I find interesting about JetBlue though is that they don’t offer any kind of alcohol on their flights. Is this because of accounting issues, cost cutting, or is it perhaps their CEO is Mormon? Hmmmm…..

Last week I spent a couple of days in New York City for work. I use the term “days” loosely because it was more like 56 hours of non-stop go-go-go. I was lucky enough to be there during the very limited engagement for Christo’s The Gates project strewn all throughout Central Park. I’ve of course heard over peoples opinions through various news reports and blogs and what not, but I wasn’t prepared to take in the fact that IT COVERS THE WHOLE DAMN PARK. That feat of logistics alone made it interesting to my inner geek! As “art” the project is of course interesting and I’m sure there are plenty of sub-texts that I would gloss over if I tried to write anything about its “meaning” or “purpose”. What I will say interested me however is the unexpected attitude of everyone who was there enjoying the display at the same time as me.

As I walked over to the south end of the park from my hotel around 8am on a Thursday morning, the sky was crystal clear but the winds blowing down the concrete canyons of Manhattan were bitingly cold. As soon as I got to the perimeter of the park, the open spaces let the winds abate and I was able to concentrate on the structures themselves and taking a few pictures without wondering why I couldn’t feel my ears anymore. Wandering around and clicking a few snapshots I was greeted with a smile and a kind word by almost everyone I met. This is a first for for me anywhere in New York City. I though maybe these were all tourists come to see the latest pop installation. But there were too many friendly people for them to all be tourists, and there were definitely a number of people too well dressed to be from out of town. What was it that was making so many New Yorkers act so friendly this early in the morning. Maybe it was excitement about seeing new life and color in a city that has had a very difficult few years. Maybe it was pleasure at again being on the forefront of modern art (especially with the recent re-opening of the famed MOMA). Or maybe it was simply an overload of orange color? Whatever it was, any amount of time spent within the living display was worth it for the general good vibe alone.

I’ve linked to a few pictures I took and a very wide panoramic below

Recently I was looking for a good note-taking solution that was a little more flexible than the venerable pen-and-paper solution for work, home, and school. My goal was to find a lightweight system that I could use to keep all manner of random little scribblings and clippings. I am constantly pruning my notes and moving them out to more fleshed out documents so I wasn’t worried about creating a massive tome of data, but I knew that the organization would need to be rather flexible to match my chaotic thought processes. Robust searching was paramount.

I checked out a raft of the usual suspects:

• VoodooPad - Almost too unstructured. I would have to maintain my own hierarchy index. In general I find this to be a problem with most/all Wiki systems.
• MacJournal - Single level of hierarchy for the index, and limited search capabilities. Seemed more suited to creating content to publish elsewhere.
• Hog Bay Notepad - Nice cross between a journal and an outlining system, but again it had a limited hierarchy.

Then I realized that I really was looking for some type of glorified outlining system. For the past couple of years I have really liked using OmniOutliner for organizing small projects and notes. Its navigation was limited for really large documents though. Most of the stuff I’ve tried out of OmniGroup has been really high quality, its cousin OmniGraffle Professional totally rocks for diagraming.

I guess its been a few weeks now that they’ve released OmniOutliner 3.0 (as well as a Professional version). This thing is fantastic. I can define exactly how many levels of high-level navigation I have in the document overview, jump too and zoom in on any particular section. Drag and drop various clippings, images, even entire files for my notes. It takes audio-recordings right in the outline (must have taken that idea from Microsoft’s Office 2004), and is a lot more configurable in its display to help you visually organize your data better. In general, its a great solution for what I was looking for. The only feature request I’ve filed so far is the ability to open multiple windows to view different places in the same document.

Now, I’ve just got to figure out some type of Bluetooth-enabled drawing stylus that I can use too scratch random hand-drawn pictures and graphs in to my system.

If you’ve got a Mac, check them out. They likely came bundled with the original OS installation.

Well, it looks like the kommute karma got back at me by imposing a 20-minute delay of transit on BART after I scoffed at all the folks stuck on the highways yesterday during our “torrential” downpour.

FWIW, I find it funny that anytime it looks like we’re going to get more than a couple inches of rain in the Bay Area (or especially in LA) it gets primary coverage on the local news. Living in Seattle just conditions you to accept it as normal and get on with your day. This reporting insanity reached its peak though I think when we were flying out of Burbank a couple days after Christmas and the local nightly news started off with ten minutes on the incoming storm then followed with, “In other news, a Tsunami hit the South Asian countries of Indonesia, Thailand, India, and Sri Lanka today” …

I’m sitting here on a BART train rolling past a complete traffic backup on I-280 south, continuing to prefer the hour of predictable/productive time on the train to an unpredictable/unproductive forty minutes of driving. The beginning of this year I started a great new job at IronPort Systems, the leading creator of advanced email security appliances (think easy-to-use hardware firewall for email) and Internet-wide reputation services to help people accept and process their incoming email. I made the switch because with the direction that email is going due to the changes made possible by authentication, being able to determine the historical behavior of a sender will be a most critical part of how email systems work going forward, and IronPort has the people, the footprint, and the resources to make that work.

Starting a demanding new job with a reasonable commute should be enough to keep me busy, but of course that’s not enough; I’ve started a couple of evening course through UC Extension. Nothing too exciting, just a Calculus refresher course and a Statistics intro; which is actually pretty interesting. (These are all part of a larger project which I’m hoping will work out later this year).

Now what I have to figure out is how keep the balance in my life. This was nothing to stress about when my job was ten minutes away and I had very flexible hours, but now I’ve got to plan ahead in order to be able to even just eat properly! Add in the need for time with the wife, regular exercise, and continuing work on the house, its a new juggling act. But really, I thrive on that kind of challenge. Ever since college it always made me really happy to be operating at 120% time-wise, and coming up with creative solutions to fit things in. It may make me extremely tired (I usually end up sleeping about one full day during the weekend then spending the other day getting ready for the next week), and I may have to put aside some activities that I used to enjoy (cooking, home remodeling, some blogging), but if the activities that are keeping you so engrossed are worth it, then you’ll delight in the challenge to make everything work rather than feel overwhelmed by them.

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