How Emily Eats Pancakes

Like Mother, Like Daughter

Maddie and Cathie were hanging out watching the movie A Walk to Remember.  I came and laughed as I saw the two of them cuddling on the couch, each with their phones out, texting.  Even funnier was the fact that Cathie was back on a regular 9 key pay since her blackberry is on the fritz due to a slight "over-moisturization issue".  Maddie's fingers were flying as Cathie struggled.

Hanging with Papa

My Dad came over today to hang out with us.  We had a great time, not doing much of anything special, but just hanging out as a family.  We went to the library, went out for ice cream, stopped at the pretzel shop and then came home and played cards.  My Dad and I even measured everything to hang my new 55" LCD TV.  I'm still gonna need Bob Ray's help....

Nice Hat!

While Cathie and Maddie were at the Taylor Swift concert, Nate, Em and I went to see the movie "How to Train a Dragon".  On our way out, we saw this 50 year old guy wearing this hat.  If you look closely, you'll see that this is a pink Hannah Montana hat.  Brilliant!

The movie was great.  The 3-D wasn't too obtuse, and the story was great.  I kept thinking that it was the story of Emily, if she were a viking.  The boy sees the best in the Dragons, befriends them, loves them, and risks his life for them.  Just like Emily would do in the same situation.

Jerome "The Bus" Bettis

On my flight to LA, I flew through Atlanta and was upgraded to first class.  As I watched the guy in front of me sit down, I swore it was Jerome "The Bus" Bettis.  After the flight attendant called him "Mr. Bettis", I was pretty sure.  If you've never heard of The Bus, he plays for the Steelers, and is #5 in the NFL for all time rushing yards.  He's a Detroit native, one a bunch of super bowls and been to the pro bowl 6+ times.  After we landed, he was kind enough to give me an autograph for Nate, which I got in my handy-dandy Xerox notebook:

When Bettis asked me how to spell Nate's name, my brother Dan's suggestion was the best one, which was to spell it "E-Bay User".  He was a nice guy from my brief conversation with him.  He was very up-front about his hatred of Sidney Crosby, which is how I know he's a true Detroit native.

Em's First Mountain Bike Ride

Paintball with the Youth Group

We had our annual youth group paintball game yesterday.  This was Maddie's first year ever playing and Nate's third year.  We had a huge crew of about 45 kids and leaders go and it was great.  The event was at Killer Paintball's indoor course out in Romulus's.  I decided this year to wear an old suit I had moth-balled in the back of my closet just to change things up.  I figured it would give a whole new meaning to the idea of a road warrior or corporate raider.

Maddie wasn't planning on going right up until the time we got to church, and had a change of heart at the last minute.  Maddie was pretty nervous about getting hit, but she hung with me and did pretty well.  Some of the boys were teasing her, explaining they were going go after her out there.  I think she liked it when I explained that anything they did to Maddie, they did to me, and they knew that I didn't really care about getting hit - not to mention my wearing a suit which likely gave me super powers.

She was great after her first hit in the mask, so I figured she was about ready to venture off on her own after a few games in, and felt like quite the bad Dad after she came back in after getting lit up pretty badly.  She didn't let that stop her and jumped right back in, even playing a few rounds of speedball, one of the more brutal up-close paintball games.

Nate brought a crew of 6 guys with him and they all had a blast.  They were all big Modern Warfare 2 fans, and on the van ride over it was funny hearing them talk about war in that context.

Somehow my suit made me stand out a bit and I ended up getting lit up here and there.  I got to exact my revenge on the kids during a sniper round.

You can see the rest of the pictures here in Picasa.

Emily and Sugar

Seven Things I love about my Job

I was listening to something on NPR today about telecommuting that got me reflecting on how much I like working virtually in my job.  That made me think more about all of the things I like about my job.   My job is not perfect, but sitting back and reflecting on the good parts helps me get through those days where I'm frustrated and want to call it quits.  A lot of people will probably roll their eyes, thinking I'm glossing over the flaws, or sucking up.  Trust me, I could give you a list of what I don't like.  A long list.  My company is far from perfect, but there's a reason I've been here for 13 years, and it's not because I couldn't go somewhere else.  Every company has their flaws, and I just think mine has far less than others.

1. This is the big one: I love the people I get to work with.  Some of these guys and I go back 16+ years.  We spend time together outside of work, traveling around the country to meet up a couple of times a year.  There are a group of guys who have each other's back and work to make sure the others are taken care of and promoted within the organization.  I genuinely like a lot of the people I work with.  They are guys who will call me out when I screw up and let me know when I hit a home run.
2. I get to work virtually.  I've worked out of my house for the past 13 years.  My only commute is to the airport and back.  I hate the traffic in the metro-detroit area with a passion.  I hate being stuck in traffic and all of the time I would waste commuting back and forth every day.  I can be 10 times as productive working out of my house.  With the travel schedule I have, I love the flexibility working virtually gives me.  I can schedule around field trips with my kids and lunch with my wife.  I can get my work-out in, cut out of work at dinner time and then work at night if need be.
3. I like working in a diverse company with people who are very different from me for the most part.  Xerox makes diversity a big priority and it's been ingrained into who it is an a corporate entity, and they give people a shot that might not have the opportunity in other companies.    I work with so many companies that are simply "white-men clubs".  Not Xerox.  Xerox has a work-force that looks like America and gives you an interesting view of the world that makes me better, and makes us better as a company.  Now being a white man, I've got to say that I've been passed over for a job because I am a white man and not a minority, and that sucks.  Overall, I like working for a diverse company. 
4. I like that I can be myself and emphasize my strengths.  For whatever reason, I'm given a fair amount of freedom to work from my areas of strength in terms of being innovative, being out in front of customers, leading through challenging situations and building relationships.  Part of the reason I can do those things successfully is because I'm allowed to be myself in terms of my personality.  As a person, I try not to take myself too seriously, but take my job and what I'm doing very seriously.  This gives me the ability to have fun with those people I'm working with and work in the context of relationships, but hammer through the tough stuff when I need to and have the tough conversations from a position of relationship and credibility.
5. I get to travel.  I don't enjoy the part of my job that takes me away from my family, but as much as their are parts of being a road warrior that I dread, I also enjoy having the chance to travel to new cities.  The points I earn and the knowledge of some of the new cities lets me do stuff like this trip with my daughter to New York City.
6. I like my company's leadership.  Since I have bosses and co-workers that read this, I don't want to be too specific here, but I've blogged multiple times about my admiration around Xerox senior management like Ursula and Anne.  For some reason, I have very good relationships upward and I'm  given great access and exposure to senior management in my company that most would not be.  I've had multiple Senior VP's in my company over the years take me under their wing and mentor me, covering for some of my dumber rookie moves.  All I had to do was make the ask.
7. I'm good at what I do and I like doing it.  Oddly enough, this is only one part in seven of the overall equation.  This sounds arrogant, but I believe that in the right role with the right management, I'm one of the best at what I'm doing in this job in my company.  Over time, I've able to find positions in my company that stretch me and push me to make me better.  I get bored every couple of years and I'm able to find a new role or change things up enough to push me to be better.  I need the constant challenge in a job, something that keeps my RPMs up high enough.  When I can do my job in my sleep, I know it's time to move on.

Intention and the Gates

While running yesterday, I  listened to message entitled Fruit by Rob Bell @ Mars Hill Church out in Grand Rapids It's one of the last messages in their series wrapping up a nine month run on the Sermon on the Mount, which I've been digging as this is something I've dug into a lot over the past few years and it's stretched me in a huge way.   He was covering Matthew 7, and the part that struck me related to this chunk about the wide and narrow gates:

 ^13-14"Don't look for shortcuts to God. The market is flooded with surefire, easygoing formulas for a successful life that can be practiced in your spare time. Don't fall for that stuff, even though crowds of people do. The way to life—to God!—is vigorous and requires total attention.

Rob goes on to talk about intention in life.  He described this idea of how in life we choose to go with and against crowds of people in a way that reminded me of driving downtown in New York City.  If you've been to NYC, you've seen cars packed like sardines flying down the road.  If you need to make a turn, you really need to be committed to that turn.  Being the are one car that's got to get over across 9 lanes of traffic to turn takes a real commitment to the turn.  It would be way easier to just keeping going straight ahead with the flow of traffic than to go against everyone, cut across the lanes and make the turn.

The message goes on to look at the idea of becoming a person of  intention.  Saying "Yes" to something may also mean saying "No" to thousands of other distractions and temptations that do not line up with the one "Yes".  I know that saying "yes" to working out means saying "no" to extra sleep, "no" to sitting on my butt at the end of a long day.  I'm pretty good at pointing out all of the areas I say "yes" to that are good things, and then being self-righteous, glossing over some of the areas I intentionally say no to.

I've been chewing on this since my run yesterday, and my reading this morning started in the book of James, oddly enough on the same topic.  Guess God's trying to tell me something here... Or that I've already got this figured out and it's all a weird coincidence.

But whoever catches a glimpse of the revealed counsel of God—the free life!—even out of the corner of his eye, and sticks with it, is no distracted scatterbrain but a man or woman of action. That person will find delight and affirmation in the action. James 1:25

I'm re-reading the book for the millionth time called The Holy Longing which looks at the question "What is Spirituality?". The first chapter talks about Soren Kierkegaard's definition of being a saint as someone who can will the one thing. It looks at Janis Joplin's life - a woman who had this amazing energy, but she willed many things, which eventually led to excess, tiredness and death.The author then contrasts it with Mother Teresa, a woman who had the same kind of amazing energy, but channeled it into God and the poor.  I think "willing the one thing" is all about intention and focus, saying "yes" to the one thing and no to virtually everything else.

The book goes onto talking about one of my biggest struggles - the result of having a completely overextended "one thing":

Most of us are quite like Mother Teresa in that we want to will God and the poor. We do will them. The problem is we will everything else as well. Thus, we want to be a saint, but we also want to feel every sensation experienced by sinners; we want to be innocent and pure, but we also want to be experienced and taste all of life; we want to serve the poor and have a simple lifestyle, but we also want all the comforts of the rich; we want to have the depth afforded by solitude, but we also do not want to miss anything; we want to pray, but we also want to watch television, read, talk to friends, and go out. Small wonder life is often a trying enterprise and we are often tired and pathologically overextended. 

How you know you're traveling with a bunch of road warriors

I've traveled pretty heavily for my job over the past ten years.  Hanging with a group of my peers this past week made me realize all of the quirks that we've all developed from so much travel.

Here's how you know you're traveling with a bunch of road warriors:

1. They carry 12 different chargers with them for their cell phones, laptops, kindles, noise-cancelling headphones and blue-tooth ear piece, and all of the cables necessary to connect to a rental car and hotel's sound system with their iPod.
2. If you look in the bathroom, you see their toiletries broken into two bags: one clear plastic bags with bottles of 3oz clear liquids and gels, and another with the rest of their shower kit
3. You'll see guys who in any down second are checking their e-mail on their iPhone/Blackberry and pulling out a laptop out of nowhere to go online, or dialing into a conference call from the middle of a golf course.
4. Exactly 24 hours before their flight's check-in, everything is dropped to check in for their flight to ensure the best possible first class upgrade potential.
5. They travel with $3 cash and know every place possible you can use a corporate card to make sure that all corporate expenses are easily tracked
6. They will go through unnatural acts to stay at their hotel chain of choice in order to get their elite statuses and points.
7. They know every detail of their frequent flyer/hotel/rental-car/credit-card status programs.
8. They can show up in a town without a map or an address of where they're supposed to go, start driving and dialing at the same time to figure out where supposed to be.
9. They can get off the airplane in 30 seconds and be in a rental car, driving off the airport lot 5 minutes later.
10. They can tell you exactly what kinds of food and booze are served in the airport/airline clubs and when they'll get a meal in first class and when they won't.

The Crew - Tucson 2010

One of the reasons I love my job is the people that I work with.  I count myself lucky that I have a number of close friends at work, guys I've known and worked with for over fifteen years.  These are guys where the relationship goes beyond just talking about job stuff, guys are there for you when things get ugly and have your back at work as well.   For the past nine years, there has been a core group of us at my company who have have gotten together from around the country every year to hang out together.  The first 8 years, we did these in Northern Michigan, last year we met up in Florida and this year we had our first ever gathering out in Tucson, AZ.

It's a really diverse group of guys.  Many of us have worked for the other over the years, and we all do our best to help each other out in any way we can.  Our host, John, used to be one of the mad scientists at Xerox's infamous Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and we credit him with giving away all of the good technology they came up with.

We've got guys who come in from Ohio, Michigan, Florida, Alabama and California.  We meet up, golf, fish, check e-mail, talk about work, faith, family, technology and everything else under the sun.  At any given time, someone is on their laptop checking e-mail or on a conference call, but we have a great time while we're doing it.

We flew in to Phoenix last Thursday and drove into Tucson where John lives, up in the Dove Mountain foothills.  It's a beautiful area, with giant cactus's everywhere.  We headed over to the Ritz Carlton to check out the courses where the Accenture Match Play takes place, a beautiful course in the middle of the desert.  We were even able to go off-roading through the desert on a couple of roads that, as far as any of us can attest to, didn't have any "road closed" signs on them.

John lives on the 6th hole of a golf course - not the kind of golf course that's very friendly to my kind of play.  If you don't hit it on the fairway, you end up either hitting a house or wading through cacti to get your ball back.  Instead of playing, I voted for hanging on John's deck with Mark and Bill and betting incoming golfers shots.

One of the staples of our game, as introduced by Todd is cornhole, a game that comes from Nebraska for a number of reasons. It's one of the few sports that I'm decent at, and Newton and I have decided to try and lobby to have the game in the upcoming Olympics, as a kind of "Summer version of Curling".

We had a chance to go to a Spring training game for the Dodgers and Diamondbacks.  The weather was perfect, in the 80s, but the baseball was boring, as usual.

Newton kept it interesting by getting to know the ladies in front of us and the usher for our section.  If you've met Newton, you'll remember Newton.  He's a good 'ol boy from Alabama who can talk to anyone, and talk just about anyone into anything.  He's got one of the biggest hearts of anyone you'll meet and he thicken his southern drawl on command to the point that you have no idea what he's saying.  He's really an amazing guy.

One of the best parts about John's place is that he had a golf cart.  A fast golf cart.  It wasn't quite as tricked out as some of the residents, but it was a blast to drive around the area none-the-less.  We had a good 'ol time cruising around, trying to find our way back afterwards.

We were all able to get in more than our share of naps during the long weekend.  Which makes for a good trip any way you cut it:

We all headed back on Sunday morning.  We had 6am flights out of Phoenix and figured we'd have to get up around 3am to make the flight.  We all set our cell phones to go off at 3 and that's where it went badly.  We all got up, got ready, only to find that someone between AZ not celebrating day light savings time and the cell phones being set to other time zones, we were up at 2AM on our way out the door.

I made it home by 2pm on Sunday.  It was a great time.  Thanks to all of the wives who held down the fort while we were out having fun in Arizona.  

How Google beat Apple at their own game

This is a great article from the New York Times about 'How Apple's Spat with Google is getting personal' that made me smile.  It talks about how things have gotten ugly between Apple and Google based on the fact that Apple feels that Google came up along-side them, stole their technology and made their own:

At the heart of their dispute is a sense of betrayal: Mr. Jobs believes that Google violated the alliance between the companies by producing cellphones that physically, technologically and spiritually resembled the iPhone. In short, he feels that his former friends at Google picked his pocket.

This is near and dear to my heart based on how Apple 'borrowed' technology like the mouse and the GUI from Xerox back in the day.  Not to mention that I'm a huge fan of Apple.

Mario Kart Marathon: Race 16 of 32

Thunk this guy's a little bitter about something?

Conversation wtih God, by Name

Reading in Exodus this morning, I came across this conversation between God and Moses I'd never noticed in Exodus 33.  God and Moses are talking "face-to-face, as neighbors speak to one another" in the tent and Moses share the questions on his heart that I ask of God all the time: "Do you really know me? Who am I to you?  Am I special?"

 ¹¹ And God spoke with Moses face-to-face, as neighbors speak to one another. When he would return to the camp, his attendant, the young man Joshua, stayed—he didn't leave the Tent.  ^12-13 Moses said to God, "Look, you tell me, 'Lead this people,' but you don't let me know whom you're going to send with me. You tell me, 'I know you well and you are special to me.' If I am so special to you, let me in on your plans. That way, I will continue being special to you. Don't forget, this is your people, your responsibility."
 ¹⁴ God said, "My presence will go with you. I'll see the journey to the end."
 ^15-16 Moses said, "If your presence doesn't take the lead here, call this trip off right now. How else will it be known that you're with me in this, with me and your people? Are you traveling with us or not? How else will we know that we're special, I and your people, among all other people on this planet Earth?"
 ¹⁷ God said to Moses: "All right. Just as you say; this also I will do, for I know you well and you are special to me. I know you by name." 

I love  the way this conversation ends, with God confirming that not only does he know Moses, but that's special to him and that he knows him by name.  There's a lot to a name.  Many of the best leaders I've seen have an uncanny ability to remember people's names.  It's a cool thing to have the President, CEO or CIO or a company walk down the hallway and know you, and greet you by name. 

I don't pretend for a minute that by knowing my name, they really know who I am.  I love that God combines that he knows Moses, he values him AND knows him by name.  I've got to go back to that all the time, to ask God: "Who am I to you?" and I'm amazed and embarrassed (in a good way) at what he tells me.

Making Matters worse in Haiti

I may not always agree with Tony Campolo, but the guy never ceases to make me check my thinking. When I hear people complain about how the world hates America, watching my countries response to their recent earthquake made me proud of our generosity.

This article of Campolo's entitled Making Matters Worse in Haiti is a pretty interesting read.  On one hand, he lambastes what we've done in giving Haiti a giant handout:

 Altruistic Americans have done to the Haitians what an out-of-control welfare system has done to so many poor people here in the United States. It has made them into people who are socially and psychologically dependent on others to solve their problems and who have lost confidence in their own capabilities.

On the flip side, he sees that out necessity, it's what we've got to do:

Out of the necessities created by the recent earthquake, we Americans have no choice but to respond with a gigantic handout. Children are starving. Medical care is desperately needed and new housing must be constructed. In the short run, we Americans must respond to meet these needs. We have to fear, however, that when the dust from the earthquake clears the Haitians will have fallen into a deeper condition of dependency and will be even less inclined to see themselves as the best hope for their future.

To me, it's about thinking with your head and not just heart.  Welfare seems like a great idea, because in your heart of hearts, you don't want to see a Mom go hungry. On the flip side, when you get over feeling good for helping someone, you have to deal with the dependency you create.  Same goes with Haiti I guess.  I love America's heart to help Haiti, we just can't move on and not deal with the after-effects of our generousity.

My New Project

I think I should quite my job to focus on building a Rube Goldberg machine like this one from OK Go's latest video


Check out this write-up on how they made this... Interesting.

Before and After - The Haircut

Nate wanted to grow his hair out, so we said "go for it". He decided it too much of a pain to keep it this long and that it was time to get it cut. Here are the before and after results: