Month: March 2013

  • Foreclosed Houses

    About 7 months ago, we moved to one of the foreclosure hot spots in the country, Phoenix. When I was first looking for houses, I was thought I would be able to pick up one of the many short sales, or foreclosed properties. Clearly, there was a large inventory, and finding a lot of listings…

  • Neighbor Parties

    One thing I miss about Tucson is the solitude we had. We lived on the edge of town, at the end of a street with a fair amount of open space around us. Behind us was county property, SR zoned, 5 acre minimum lots. Not much noise at night. Here in Chandler, we live in…

  • A cool thing about being a product manager

    Being a product manager is a high stress, diverse job. Every day will certainly be different. However, it also affords some cool moments. Doing strategic planning, I need to read and study what is happening at a macro scale in the world’s economy (I am by no means an economist, but I did stay in…

  • Movie Review: Barbarella

    A couple weeks ago, on a whim, I tossed Barbarella on the Netflix queue. I had seen it when I was 17 or so, and I recalled it being racy and titillating. But that was almost 30 years ago. I wasn’t sure what I expected, but it turned out to be a high – “cheese”…

  • A shout out to Dover Publications

    Dover Publications, also known as dover press. I first became aware of Dover when I was in college. Dover picked up the rights of old text books that had gone out of print, and packaged them as reasonable priced paperbacks. Since I studied physics, and much of the core material was pretty static (not the…

  • Driving Smokers

    As someone who for a long time rode motorcycles on his commute, and who now drives a convertible, I can say that there are some smokers who should be fined and incarcerated. Note, while I am not a smoker (never been one), I don’t think it should be banned. But, people who flick their ashes…

  • Why I hate my Windows PC

    At work, I am blessed with a HP Elitebook 8460p (15 inch wide screen, core i5) laptop. It has OK specs, and I pimped it out to 16 G of ram. But it is dog slow. We probably have 2 – 3 updates a week pushed to us that require a reboot. I have to…

  • Music Theory

    I am a guitar player. Have been for a long time (better than 30 years now). I started with some lessons from a fellow BBS’er Vernon Anderson (He ran the”Rat’s Nest” BBS). I learned a lot very fast. I do remember the basics of music theory. How to build the scales, all the modes, the…

  • Dropping Kids at School

    Since I don’t have kids, I don’t know why this has happened. From a very early age (1st grade) I walked to school. We lived probably a mile, maybe a little less, but a group of us neighbor kids would gather and stroll to classes every day. Probably by the 4th grade, I graduated to…

  • Typical Product Marketing day

    I am often asked what a typical day looks like. It is hard to describe in general, because one of the things about being a product manager is that I get tossed tasks, and crises all the time. So, what does a day in the life look like? 7:30AM – Arrive. Check email, find an…