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 in the $150K price range was easy. However, it wasn’t as simple as that. First, it is pretty clear...
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 nice sub-division (Dobson Place), with (mostly) good neighbors. But on one side of us, there is a college aged kid who lives with...
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 a Holiday Inn Express last night), and this means that I get to read a lot of different things...
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” factor, late 1960’s movie. It starts with Jane Fonda getting out of a “space suit” in zero grav...
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 modern, high energy, or particle physics that were evolving rapidly, but mechanics, field...
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 out the window of their moving car, and then who inevitably toss the butt out the window as well...
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 save all my work, and reboot, and then wait. I have learned to open up the resource monitor and watch the disk get hammered. For about 15 minutes...
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 circle of 5ths, intervals, etc. But it really didn’t stick. I was too impatient to...
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 bicycling to school (I remember my cherry Schwinn Stingray being stolen, and being distraught over it)...
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 urgent request to do a competitive analysis of one of our products with a down market competitor (clearly inferior, and...