Where I'm At

After traveling non-stop for the past few months, I'm home next week for my first full week in a long time. It's always a weird change to go from lots of travel to a break. I get in one rhythm of things when I travel just like I do when I'm at home for extended periods of time. It's a weird change in either direction.

When I'm traveling, I tend to let my friendships slide. I'm moving so fast and working such long days I don't take the time to call up friends. When I get home, I've been gone from my family for so long that I pour my free time into being with them. When I do have time in between, I try and fit in time around either breakfasts or lunches with my friends so I don't take away from what I'm doing with my family.

I've also been slacking in my exercise. I pack my jump-rope with me and I try and hit the treadmill, but I'll often leave my hotel at 7am get back to my room at 9 or 10 at night. When I do get back, I've often got a days worth of e-mails waiting for me and time to make calls home to the family. Exercise is the one thing that can give, so it does. I also eat like crap when I'm traveling. When I'm entertaining customers I never do a good job of choosing the healthiest plate on the menu and passing up desserts so unless I'm careful, it's easy for me to pack weight on. After getting down to a low of 180 this summer with running, I'm trying to stay within ten pounds of that during the winter. We'll see how that works.

Short of the retreat, I haven't been to our bi-weekly Chaos youth group meetings in a while. I'm looking forward to going on Monday.

I'm back the week of the 16th in New York/New Jersey, traveling again. My wife is being awesome and patient with all of my travel, knowing that the first couple of months for me in this new role is going to be a bit chaotic. I'm hoping after February to have things dialed back a bit.

My Theme Song

On the Winterblast Retreat last weekend, the band stayed up until about 3AM and wrote me my very own theme song to the tune of All the Things I have done by the Killers. I've got it as my ring-tone and I'm going to start using this music when I speak and as I enter a conference call. It's a catchy tune that gets stuck in your head easily.

Greatest Picture Ever

I got this from Eli. Possibly the greatest poster in the world.

Facebook Friends?

I've got a pretty diverse group of friends on Facebook. In terms of work related stuff, I am friends with customers, employees of mine, co-workers and different bosses, past and present. In terms of customers, it's been a good way to get to know them and have touch points. This is an interesting article that I got from Cyndi looking at the topic of Should your boss be your Facebook friend?

"If you work for a forward-thinking company whose entire staff is on Facebook, then your participation is the online equivalent of lunching with co-workers or a water cooler chat," says Patrice-Anne Rutledge, a social networking expert and author of "The Truth About Profiting from Social Networking."

"The advantage to connecting with a current or former boss on Facebook is the opportunity for more personalized networking. When you connect online, you get to know someone better," Rutledge says.

"You could discover a common interest in marathon running, foreign films or yoga, for example, that could help your boss get to know you better as a person. These personal connections can become a major asset when you're looking to move forward in your career or find a new job."

"If you use Facebook to air political rants, document your wild weekend escapades, post wacky photos or vent about your job, you should obviously have some concerns about letting your boss view this aspect of your life," Rutledge cautions. "But what's important to remember is that no online content is truly private, even if your intention is to share this information only with your Facebook friends. Facebook makes your profile viewable to anyone in the networks you belong to, even if you're not directly connected with or even know all the network members," Rutledge says.

You should be monitoring your online content as though your current and future boss can see it, even if they aren't on your buddy list.

Emily

Emily to Cathie this morning:

How can a groundhog determine the weather. I mean it's not like it went to school for weatherology.

Happy Birthday Nate!

Today is Nate's 12th birthday! It's the first day since he was born that he hasn't woken up in his own house. The normal birthday tradition is to wake up in a room full of balloons and then get breakfast in bed. Nate work up this morning on the retreat after going to bed at 5:30 AM to a nasty breakfast. Almost the same. His sisters made him the giant card and used their own money to buy him Xbox 360 points. They were also kind enough to make him the sweet balloon hat, which he was gracious enough to wear.

Since we hadn't spent much time together as a family, we decided to forego our annual Superbowl tradition with the Rays and hang out at home. We celebrated Nate's birthday dinner by picking him up all of his favorite foods - take out style: BW3's Wings, Hungry Howie's Pizza and Cinnamon Bread, Aleko's bread sticks, General Tzo's chicken from China House and ice Cream drumsticks for dessert.

Winterblast 2009

Our middle school youth group had our junior high retreat this weekend, Friday - Sunday. This is the third year in a row we've done this with Calvary Baptist Church and Heritage Church. Our churches have done stuff with each other for years and as Spring Hill has gotten more and more expensive, doing this together has been a better and better option. We had the prestigious and illustrious Jason Shinn as our speaker, talking on the Holy Spirit, with our theme being "Dare I say... En Fuego?" Calvary's youth worship band did a great job on the music. The picture on the right is one of the guys in the band playing guitar with a hacked Wii-based Guitar Hero Guitar.

It's a cool thing for me as a Dad to have my son go and watch him have fun, hang out and grow. We had lots of snow, which made it even more fun.

We had a group of around 20, with Rodney, Katie, Tiffany, Kasey, Michael and I helping as leaders, with Jess and Jay hanging with us as well.

The guys were loaded up on Red Bull, Amp, Rock Star and Dew. The picture on the left is what I saw under Nate's bed and this was the trash can in their room: energy drinks and beef jerky.

This is a cool picture. Mark, Jason and Tim all went to the same church and now are youth pastors at three different churches. Kasey was in my youth group a long time ago and now is married to our youth pastor.

The facilities weren't bad. Our rooms were around the upper level of this gym, which worked out pretty well.

One of the coolest activities was the cardboard/duct tape sled building contest. They built their sleds and then raced them. I was amazed at the sleds that the kids made. Forget buying a sled from now on. I'm going to get some duct tape.

This is our group of leaders (Yep, I count Jay and Jess in there. Once a Crossroads leader, always a Crossroads leader). Amazing. What can I say.

Interesting Stories

I got to hear a fascinating story from a co-worker last night around how he escaped from Cuba. Back in 1961 (around the time of the Bay of Pigs) he was 15 and living with his brother and parents in Cuba. His brother and he were able to get out of the country and into a refugee camp in Miami. Two days after they arrived in the US, Castro declared that all professional workers in Cuba were national treasures and could not leave the country, hence their parents couldn't follow them.

The two brothers took jobs to earn enough money to try and pay for the bribes to get their parents out of Cuba. The one brother took a job as a valet, and made money on the side by renting out the high end cars he was parking. After two years, they earned $25k and they were able to send it over to his parents through a friend in Canada. Their parents were able to use the money to bribe their way out of the country shortly before the Cuban Missile crisis.

The other guy I talked to was the head of operations for the White House for four years. He was responsible for the entire facility in terms of management, up keep, staffing, etc. He had some very interesting stories in terms of things he'd seen and his interactions with the President and other staffers.

PMS Buddy

I'd been trying out how to create a system like this for myself via my iPhone and then my brother Dan shared this site with me. It's called PMS Buddy and it lets you track the cycles of that someone special in your life. I can't be the only guy in the world that figures it out after a given altercation, and then when I do connect the dots, I'm so proud that I announce that I understand it's the reason for her mood. That never goes over well.

PMSBuddy.com is a free service created with a single goal in mind: to keep you aware of when your wife, girlfriend, mother, sister, daughter, or any other women in your life are closing in on “that time of the month” - when things can get intense for what may seem to be no reason at all.

I've had worse days...

We packed a lot in yesterday after our meetings closed out. We went to The Gun Store - a gun shop that allows you to shoot an amazing assortment of automatic weapons. We went with the Coalition package which allowed us to shoot an M249 SAW, an M16 Riffle and an M9 Pistal.

They gave you a series of targets and let you go to town on these things with full automatic. Amazing.

We then headed over to the stratosphere where we did some of the rides at the top of the 1000 foot tower. They've got a series of ridiculous thrill rides that hang you out over the building, spin you on top of it and then shoot you off of the building. At one point as we went up the Big Shot, we were level with two F-16s flying nearby. Cool.

We then headed downtown to Fremont Street. We checked out the Golden Nuggest in the Golden Nugget. It's the largest nugget of gold on display. It ended up changing my luck at the tables. We then went and got some $1.99 shrimp and then played a lot of craps at the $3 table and ended up doing pretty well.

We headed back to the main strip and hit some of the other casinos to close out the night. My brother Jon loves slot machines and I found the ideal slot machine for him with this Dukes of Hazzard machine. He would like this even more than the eBay machine.


I've had my fill of Vegas. I'm done for another couple of years here.

Best Slot Machine Ever

Vegas

I've been out at Vegas this week for kick off meetings. We stayed at the MGM Grand, which is a great hotel, but huge and requires you to walk a mile inside the hotel to go anywhere. Vegas is pretty dead. The hotel rate was $61/night and there just weren't a lot of people around. The $61 got me a great view on the 27th floor.

I had the wonderful opportunity to dress exactly the same as a couple of co-workers during the event. Ron and I both had on the same shirt and pants here, and on a different day, Kohne and another had the same shirt as me

We went to see the Cirque de Soleil show Ka. The Cirque franchise is normally an amazing show to see. This was a $100 nap for just about all of us. It was huge and visually stunning, and it had potential, but just not much sizzle.

It's been a lot of very late days. Our sessions go until 6 followed by team dinners and more meetings and then getting up early and doing it again. I've been running on 3-4 hours a night all week. It's gonna catch up at some point.

Got a little captain in ya?

My friend John always travels in sweats and turtlenecks. When we get
to the airport he magically appears in these clothes. My guess is that
he wears these under his clothes at all times, kind of like superman.
John as a scientist at PARC (Xerox's famous research center) and we
joke that he was the guy who let the inventions of the mouse, the GUI
and Ethernet slip through our fingers.

Oddest slot machine concept

This would be me...iPhone Addict

Headline should read: ""Wow, this is amazing. I'm bearing witness to a truly historical moment. Hmmm...seems like the perfect time to play a game of Bejeweled on my iPhone."

Bedtime Stories

I was laying down with Emily, trying to pick out a book to read. The conversation went something like this:

Me:"How about 'Wocket in my Pocket?'"
Emily:"No way, Dad. That book creeps me out. What if there really is stuff hiding all over. The one that scares me the most is the one under the bed."

We finally settled on a book, "The Lorax" by Dr. Suess. As we were reading it, Lola (our dog) jumped up on the bed. Emily started joking with her about how she wished she had "disposable" thumbs and could read a book like we can.

Daddy/Daughter Bowling

Em and I went to a Daddy/Daughter Bowling event today with her Girl Scout troop. The Mom's put this whole deal together, including flowers for the Dad's to give to the girls, stationary for the Dad's to write letters to their daughters and pizza. It took me a few frames to bowl better than most of the 2nd graders there, and luckily I pulled it out with a few strikes at the end. Em's best game was a 74.

After bowling, Em and I headed over to the pet store across the way and spent about a half hour holding and playing with pretty much every dog in the shop. She wanted to take each and every one of them home.

Em after eating a chocoate drumstick

Hotel for Dogs

I took Em and her friend to see the movie Hotel for Dogs todaoy. The woman who sat behind us talked non-stop to her four year old son. There was one scene where the brother and sister were going to be separated into different foster homes and the brother started tearing up. I then overheard this conversation:

4-year old: "Mom, why is that boy crying?"
Mom: "Because he's a crybaby."

New York, New York @ the Russian Samovar

I was in New York this week and had dinner in the City. One of the guys with us introduced us to this Russian Samovar, a very old-school, traditional Vodka bar. The walls were lined with these giant vats filled with vodka and various fruits and vegetables. They served straight flavored vodka, which was great, but potent.