• 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…

  • Crap, the frost we had wasn’t hard enough.

    The house behind us has a large “shade” tree. It has an enormous quantity of fern like foliage that does a good job cutting the sun that beats down on our back yard. All good right? Except that when it loses its foliage, it dumps an incredible amount into our pool. How much? I have…