Year: 2014

Wow, I just opened a new three-pound bag of Wint-o-Green Life Savers and took a big whiff. That’ll clear your nasal passages.

At the beginning of April, Brent declared that we would have a round-robin ping pong challenge. Everyone who wanted to participate had to play against everyone else; standings would be kept and at the end of the month the winner would be awarded a Valuable Mystery Prize!

As it turned out, April was a really busy month for me, so I was pretty focused on getting things done and didn’t play more than a handful of games over the weeks. None of them were “challenge games” so they didn’t count in the standings. But then yesterday Brent reminded me it was the last day of the month and I hadn’t recorded any games in the brackets. Everyone else had, and the standings were pretty close: both Brent and James were 3-1, tied for first.

Keep in mind that it’s pretty serious around here. Everyone but me has their own paddle– Brian, feeling left out by the other guys, just bought a new one for himself this week. I don’t mind the generic Zing paddle we have, but Brent pointed out that using a paddle just because I’m comfortable with it is akin to driving a Fiat in the Indy 500 because I’m “used to” the Fiat. Wise words, Brent.

So I made some time in my schedule yesterday and threw down the gauntlet. I had four challenge matches to play, and I went through them one after the other. Based on previous challenge matches around Christmas, Brent calculated handicaps for everyone– as arguably the worst player in the office I was on the low end of that totem pole. I dispatched Brian and Nick without even needing the handicap; Brent and James proved a bit tougher but I finished them off as well.

Done! I went 4-0 to take the April championship. Clearly Brent will need to adjust my handicap for May’s games.

And the Valuable Mystery Prize? Well, it’s a little rubber ice mold that will create the Death Star in ice.

With a little imagination you can see it’s the Death Star. Pretty cool.

Ahh, how I miss the good old days when I was the undisputed, undefeated ping pong champion…

At Zing we’re always on the lookout for an activity to do as a company. We’ve gone skiing, whitewater rafting, go-karting, and even enjoyed dinner in the Pope Room. So when Josh suggested we go bowling, it seemed like a great idea.

This afternoon five of us left the office a little early. We headed over to Centennial Lanes and played a few games.

Brent had the most consistency of anyone. Unfortunately he consistently put the ball in the right gutter.

Josh looks sad after this shot.

After the first game, Brent decided it was time to get serious. He started surfing bowling sites on the web and found some tips that really improved his game. The tips included things like “do not bowl if you have an arm injury”.

We all agreed that Nick had the best form, including the professional-looking “put your right leg behind your left after release”.

We also agreed that the shoes really made the outfit. Where else does thirteen bucks get you five pairs of hot-pink-and-fluorescent-yellow shoes?

I should point out that, despite not having bowled in well over a decade, I was the champ of the first game with a very impressive score of 140. Honestly I was surprised to break 100.

All in all, I’d consider this another successful Zing outing.

So everyone’s heard of “butt-dialing” where you get a phone call and hear nothing but strange rustling noises. The caller has their phone in their back pocket and accidentally hit speed dial or redial or whatever to call you.

Until the other day, I’d never received a “butt text” before. My friend, who shall remain nameless, started sending me a bunch of cryptic messages.

Until he sent the final one, I was wondering if it was (1) a photo or something that hadn’t been encoded properly, or (2) a secret code that I was supposed to decipher to find a prize. I was a little disappointed to discover it was neither.

When we go to thrift stores, we often look for unusual glasses. We have a set of standard 8oz glasses we bought at Walmart however long ago, but over time they tend to crack and break. Since we’ll never match them anyway, we’ve decided it’s more fun to have a bunch of random completely unmatched glasses. We have shot glasses, tall skinny ones, short fat ones, curvy ones, and on and on.

While in Utah a few weeks ago, we went to a thrift store and Alex, Zack, and I all chose glasses for ourselves. I found a sweet martini glass. We didn’t have any of those, so it seemed like a good fit.

It’s fun to drink my orange juice from a martini glass…

Shaken, not stirred, please.

Kyra’s been struggling a bit with chemistry of late, so we sat down this evening to work together on some problems for her upcoming test.

It’s been a long time since I did any serious chemistry, but I remember being quite fond of it. Balancing chemical reactions is very much like algebra, where you solve for unknowns and figure out ratios and so forth. Plus it’s called “stoichiometry” which is an awesome name.

So we looked at a lot of reactions like this:

We talked about molecular weights, limiting and excess reagents, theoretical yields, carbonates and oxides, moles and grams, and on and on. Fun stuff.

She wasn’t nearly as excited about it as me. I think I was just happy that I remembered how to do it. And hopefully I explained it well enough that she’ll ace the test now…

Does anyone actually like LinkedIn? It seemed like a good idea a decade ago… well, maybe not a good idea, but not the most terrible idea in all of history. But over time it’s morphed into a monstrous network of spammy resumes and irritating invitation emails.

I created a profile years ago because I own a business and, well, people expect business owners to have LinkedIn profiles. But I’ve never really done anything with it, so it’s pretty void of meaningful content. My only real interactions with LinkedIn are the occasional invitations I accept from people I haven’t heard from in years.

This evening, as I clicked to accept another such invitation, I couldn’t help but notice the incredibly useful list of potential contacts that LinkedIn presented to me.

Let’s summarize this stellar group of businesspeople who will certainly help me to grow my “network”:

A health coach… from somewhere in the Denver area.

The outsourcing director of a company in India.

Someone who works at a credit union.

Someone… who lives somewhere in the United States and does non-descript work. This is perhaps the most puzzling of all.

A postdoc in South Africa.

A creative director at a company I’ve actually heard of. This is, by far, the most promising lead of the group… and it’s still horrible.

I must admit, with these pickin’s, maybe I should just roll the dice and hook up with “United States” guy. Or gal? This could be my ticket!

Software development is a tough business when clients want to know how much something will cost. It’s certainly reasonable for our clients to want to understand how much budget they need to allocate for a project, and I always do my best to provide them with estimates to the best of what we know.

However, sometimes it’s hard to convey to them that (1) an estimate is almost never right, and (2) there are certain things where it’s actually impossible to estimate what it’ll take to accomplish their goal. Sometimes this is because we’ve never used the technology; other times it’s because they just don’t know quite what they want.

Just now I got hit with the latter. Here’s part of an actual client email:

This happens to be a fairly major project that will affect an entire product line. My client has managed to collapse the entire thing down to three bullet points, and “probably much more”. And I’m supposed to estimate this…?

Perhaps I should give my standard reply:

One million dollars will certainly cover it.

It’s a good thing Laralee never reads this blog, because I think I’m going to do this on April 1, 2015.

We have a tin can of rice in our pantry. It’s fifteen years old.

Every now and then I break it out and cook some rice, either plain steamed rice or stir-fried with vegetables. It always seems fine, even though the rice is older than at least one of my children. Honestly, I can’t imagine that rice actually “goes bad”… I envision archaeologists uncovering an ancient Buddhist temple in Japan and finding a container of rice, then throwing it into the wok for dinner.

Laralee, on the other hand, thinks it’s ridiculous that I eat food that old. Every time she sees me pull out the can, she reminds me that she buys rice now and then at the store (which she uses). And every time I shrug and use the old stuff.

Anyway, today I had a hankerin’ for rice so I opened the can to find…

Ha! Well played, Laralee.

I used it anyway.