ThinkGeek rocks

I just had one of those customer service experiences with ThinkGeek that put a smile on my face and made me want to share how awesome they are. I’d purchased a t-shirt for a Christmas gift, and the one they sent to me isn’t what I ordered. I jumped on their online chat tool and had the following conversation:

Janna W: Thank you for contacting ThinkGeek! How can I help you today?
Jeff S: Hi Janna. I just received my order, and the t-shirt I ordered is incorrect.
Janna W: Can I have the order number please?
Jeff S: It’s order #4fba87cc1.
Jeff S: I received a shirt that says “I have my reasons” in XL size, which isn’t what I ordered.
Janna W: I have setup a replacement order 514aeb4f3.
Janna W: Is there anything else I can help you with?
Jeff S: Do you want me to ship this shirt back?
Janna W: No please keep it
Jeff S: Thank you
Jeff S: Is there anything else I need to do?
Janna W: Nope! Just have a Merry Christmas!
Jeff S: Thanks– you too!

Thanks, Janna and ThinkGeek. That totally rocks.

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Hot grits

I’m listening to an 80’s rock Shoutcast stream today while I work, and Loverboy’s “Hot Girls in Love” just came on.  For some reason, as kids we made fun of it by calling it “Hot Grits in Love”.  On a whim I checked the internet to see if “hot grits” has some kind of deep meaning.  According to the Urban Dictionary:

Hot Grits
A term used on slashdot.org often referring to Natalie Portman.  “It’s Natalie Portman, man! Have you no sense of history? That, Hot Grits, and Beowulf clusters are the only things that matter!”

Since Natalie Portman probably wasn’t even born back in the days my friends and I used that term, I guess we were way ahead of the hipster curve.

Bonus points if you know what a Beowulf cluster is. Yes, I built one many years ago.

Hello, winter

At 11:00 today it was sunny and 55 degrees outside.  Gorgeous, especially for December.

I had lunch with a friend, then a meeting with a client.  At 1:00 it was overcast, windy, and the temperature had dropped 20 degrees.  Tonight they’re expecting wind chills well below zero, six inches of snow, and for the next few days the high is in the teens or less.

Wow, Colorado weather.

Parachute spiders

For the past few days, as I sit at my desk in the basement, little baby spiders have been parachuting down from the ceiling right in front of me. I’ll be watching the monitor and suddenly notice a little black dot slowly descending in front of it, or I’ll feel a little tickle on my arm and notice a spider crawling on it. They’re really tiny– probably a couple of millimeters across at most– so it’s not like Arachnophobia where giant deadly spiders are attacking me. But it’s still a little disconcerting.

The only thing I can figure is there’s a nest or something in the air vent directly above my desk, and they’re jumping out of there in hopes of finding a new home. Unfortunately for them, the ones that land on me are meeting an untimely demise. After all, I can’t let them live because they’ll scurry into a corner of the basement and grow to become giant deadly spiders.

More money than I knew what to do with

Today I’m cleaning out the crawlspace, and I found a box full of my pay stubs from the distant past.  I have no idea why I even kept all of that stuff, but it was interesting to look through the stacks and think about those golden days.

After graduating from UMR in the spring of 1995, I started my first “real” job at Hughes Information Technology Corporation. At the time, my salary was $759/week– almost $40k/year. Wow. It was more money than I knew what to do with.  I still remember opening the offer letter in college and being floored by the prospect of that kind of money.  When you’re used to a weekly budget of $20 to buy pizza, it’s a big change.

paycheck03

Giddy with the prospect of being a bachelor with so much money, I immediately bought a new bigscreen TV. Well, it was 32″ but back in 1995 that was huge.  Of course with a new TV I needed a new VCR.  That led to a new entertainment center.  Oh, and since my trusty 1982 Nissan 300SX had died the day after I moved to Colorado, I bought a new car.  The expenses kept mounting because, hey, I had money!

Four years later, I left Hughes (then Raytheon) for a consulting job in Boulder.  My salary had ballooned in those four years, and after three promotions I was doing pretty well.  The funny thing is how no matter how much you make (or don’t make), your expenses tend to fit your income.  By then I was married with two kids, and didn’t seem to be putting any more money into savings or whatnot.  In fact, it seemed like money was always tight.  We had a mortgage, car loans, student loans, credit card bills, baby stuff to buy, and on and on.

Now it’s fourteen years later, and every month we look at our credit card statement and ask ourselves, “We spent how much?”  To be clear, we have a good lifestyle and don’t have to worry about whether we’ll be able to afford food next month, but we’re hardly extravagant.  We don’t go on international trips, we don’t drive fancy cars, and we live in a nice but modest house.  I still find it baffling that our expenses have risen right alongside our income.  How does that happen?

I need a hobby

I need a hobby.

Since it’s Thanksgiving break, I’ve had the opportunity over the past few days to sort of hang around the house a bit. Of course there’s always some work to do for my clients, but I decided to (surprise!) take a vacation. I took care of a few minor things that needed doing, then sat down to figure out what I could do “for fun”.

I worked on our family Christmas cards– always an exciting annual tradition– and they’re off to the printer as of this afternoon. In a few weeks we’ll get the final cards back and can spend an evening stuffing envelopes and slapping labels and stamps on them. After ordering the cards, I organized a few things, read some blogs, came up with a new backup/archive scheme for my data files, and then sort of ran out of ideas. What next?

For the past few years I’ve repeatedly had the resolution that I would scale back the hours that I work. For over a decade I’d put in 50+ hours a week, including every Saturday. Although I enjoy my job and generally like the challenges I tackle, after ten years it does get a bit tiring. This year, I accomplished the first of these goals: I stopped working on Saturdays. It was kind of cool to have a bit more of a weekend than I’d been accustomed to for many years. I’ve even had some success in not working so much in the evenings for the past few months. Before long, I may only be working 40 hours a week!

Now, as 2014 looms, I wonder if I can take the next step: not working on Fridays. At Zing we always work at home on Fridays, and for a few years I’ve thought it would be great to take off on Fridays during the summer so I’d have time to bike or hike or just hang around outside with the kids. As it turns out, they tend to spend their summer vacations with friends. I discovered that I didn’t really have much to do on Fridays, so I would inevitably head downstairs to my office and knock out some work projects.

Interestingly, things are finally in place so I may actually be able to accomplish that goal. Brent has taken over many of the day-to-day scheduling and project management tasks I’d been doing for many years. He’s also taking on more responsibility with new business, estimates, and proposals. Brian has decided he’d like to step into a role as a technical architect, leading many of the larger development decisions we make as a team. In theory, as the two of them continue expanding their roles in these areas, there’s less for me to do in the day-to-day business of the company. Of course I’ll still go into the office and handle the various questions and crises that seem to pop up every day. I’ll probably continue doing some programming work here and there (since I enjoy it). But if things go according to plan, it may be possible for me to truly walk away from my desk on Fridays.

As the last couple of days have shown, that means I’m going to need to find something to do. Unlike Laralee and Kyra, I can’t sit on the couch for hours reading a book. I enjoy reading but find that I can only do it for perhaps an hour a day. I also get bored of watching movies or TV shows. It’s nice now and then, but certainly not a noble pursuit. In the winter months it’s harder to get outside and do things. I don’t have (or want, really) a gym membership; I don’t enjoy exercising just for the sake of exercising.

One thought: I could get back into writing. The last time I did any writing was around the time Alex was born: I started working on a full novel. After about a chapter, the project sort of fizzled and I kept telling myself that I’d get back into it someday. Perhaps this is someday. I still have some ideas bouncing around my head.

Alex told me I should write a computer game that’s like Minecraft in that it’s pretty simplistic, immensely popular, and ends up producing a fortune. I’m not much of a gamer, and I think most people would agree that Minecraft is one of those things that surprised everyone, including its author. So despite Alex’s ambitions to inherit a multi-million-dollar game empire from me, I don’t think that’s going to be a direction I take.

I enjoy photography, although I don’t have half the talent of Thom or my friend Jason. I find that I’m just not “artistic” in that way. My photos tend to end up as desktop backgrounds on my computer from time to time, or a poster-sized print in my office, but little more than that. I certainly couldn’t do commercial photography.

I enjoy hacking on Linux systems and messing with servers (as long as I don’t inadvertently bring down one of my clients’ web sites). But that’s pretty close to what I do at work, and I feel like a hobby should be very different from work. It wouldn’t be very exciting if I spent my Fridays in my basement office sitting at the computer.

I’ve thought about re-learning calculus. I always enjoyed math, and three-dimensional calculus (integrations of solid functions) was my favorite. I also had a good time messing with fractals and chaos theory back in high school and early college. Having math as a hobby would certainly let me keep my status as a first-class geek.

A few years ago Laralee and I taught a science class to second-graders in the local elementary school. I really enjoyed that, particularly because the kids were so excited to learn about lasers and magnetism and rocketry and the solar system. If I had Fridays off, I could volunteer at the school and teach some science. Maybe Laralee would be my “assistant” again.

Anyway, there are a ton of possibilities– I just need to figure out which ones are right for me. And of course I have to actually stop working so much…

Calvin kapow

I was skimming one of our old Calvin and Hobbes books yesterday and found a comic that I thought would make a great desktop background for my computer. So I scanned the page, did some color cleanup and other manipulation to the image, and ended up with this:

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