Open Mind, Insert Thought

Tomorrow, I’m going to do something that I have never done in my adult life: pass up the opportunity to vote.  I’m certain I could find many excuses – seven-month old at home kept so busy I didn’t look into my absentee ballot, I’m crazy busy at work right now, I thought I’d vote in person but my day got booked…  But none of that would be true.  The God’s honest truth is that I do not care which candidate wins the primary.  I’m a Democrat, and I believe that both Clinton and Obama are flawed candidates for our party.

The more I listen to Clinton, the harder a time I have rallying behind her.  She seems to have the depth and experience necessary for the job, but I’m not as passionate about her vision for america as I was for Bill’s.  That’s an unfair comparison, though, because Bill Clinton was the only presidential candidate I actually voted *for* (rather than voting *against* the Republican candidate).

Obama would be a strong candidate, but without knowing who his running mate will be, I’m not voting for him alone.  I assume he’ll do what Kennedy and even Bush II did and bring on an elder statesman for a running mate.  That move would give his campaign the gravitas needed to win while still attracting the young vote.

I actually am fine with just about any of the four front-runners (and this is a wacko liberal speaking).  McCain would probably make Jon Stewart press secretary and we’d all have a ball with a surprisingly socially liberal Republican in the White House (kind of like what we have here in California).  And Romney doesn’t really scare me.  Huckabee, on the other hand, that one would get me right out to the polls.

Add to all of this the fact that I have literally no opinion on the local initiatives (though I can’t tell which set of Indian tribes are flat out lying to me in their point-coutnerpoint advertisements, but one side or the other is clearly fibbing), and I’m just staying out of this one.

So, to those of you who are voting tomorrow, I hope you vote your convictions.  I just don’t feel the love this time around.

The story starts, as so many good stories do, in Vegas.  Through a magnificent turn of events, I found myself in a suite at the Wynn with the cool (and very hospitable) founders of Sling Media and two of my bandmates from Soul Patch (Ryan and Jason, who also happen to be VCs with Foundry Group, formerly of Mobius).  As a band, Ryan, Jason and I had just taken over the Rockband setup in the suite, played over the plasma mounted in front of those insane floor-to-ceiling gold-tinted windows the Wynn is known for.  We rocked Dani California hard (proud to say I scored 100% for my efforts on vocals!), and given how much we seemed to have loved the game, the guys from Sling had us watch the Guitar Queer-o episode of South Park.  While they were setting everything up to watch the show, I heard "I just grabbed the torrent for this last week."  We watched, and after laughing until I cried, I knew I had to have this episode.

Here’s where the confessional part of the post comes in – I had never before used BitTorrent.  Certainly I knew how the technology worked, but I’d never taken the time to make use of it myself.  So, I grab the BitTorrent-brand BitTorrent client and set about searching for South Park torrents.  Find the one I wanted and fire it up.  This probably means I owe someone somewhere the entire cost of creating every South Park ever in existence, so I’m not sure why I’m writing this.  Anyhow, once I have the finished package all pieced together, I pop it open.  Not a video in site, only .rar files.  Not only had the original been broken into torrent pieces, the original original was broken into a multi-volume RAR archive.  So now I’m off to try to find some shareware to combine these.  WinRAR does the trick and has a free trial period (if I use it ever again, I’ll buy it – fine).  Okey doke, now we’re off and running.  Files are combined and I get a single .wmv out the other end.  But it won’t run – I get sound but no video in Media Player.  Back to the original torrent site, and I’m warned that most of the files here are probably encoded with DivX, but then again maybe another codec is used.  They suggest playing all the files with VLC media player to be sure I have all the codecs needed.  OK, so I download that.  Now it’s working great – on my PC.  But I want to play it in the family room from my Mac Mini (here’s where a Slingbox would come in handy, eh?).  I take a look at the stream info through VLC and, sure enough, I need DivX.  I bring the .wmv over to the Mac Mini (good thing I already have Flip4Mac installed there, which allows QuickTime to play .wmv files), and I grab the DivX codec off their site.  Then – success!  It works!!

I play the episode for Jenni and she laughs until she cries, too.  And I feel like a master of the fractured, incredibly non-user-friendly world of torrents.

Jennifer, Dani and I went to see the Body Worlds 2 exhibit at the San Jose Tech Museum today.  It was every bit as fascinating as we’d hoped, probably a bit more.  I’d read about the plastination process prior to our visit, but was still amazed to see how perfect yet imperfect the preservation and presentation was.  Also surprising (to me) was the strict way that the displays were referred to as "plastinates" rather than "people," "donors," or "bodies."  A few of the many highlights from the show:

• A display where the muscles were removed from and standing next to the skeleton of one donor. The plastination process makes the muscles firm enough to stand on their own.
• The fact that the kneecaps were always with the muscles, never with the skeletons (they’re seriously embedded in the tendons and ligaments of the legs).
• An entire room devoted to embryo and fetal development, including a plastinate opened to reveal an embryo (as well as the black lung from smoking that, apparently, killed the pregnant donor).
• Embryos and fetuses at just about every stage of development
• The Exploded Man, which was a plastinate completely separated (individual organs, systems, etc.) and suspended and expanded to take up twice the normal space of a body.
• The various penises and vaginas (the latter both shaved and natural – don’t ask why I notice these things) on the plastinates.  Jenni, in a moment of humor, covered Dani’s eyes (the girl’s 6 months old – I don’t think I was warping her mind, dear).
• Incredibly thin slices of plastinates that made cross-sections (an entire body was shown in this way).
• And, in the center room, the brain itself.  Healthy brains, brains that had suffered from strokes and had blackened marks on them, and a brain ravaged by Alzheimer’s.

It was a truly stunning experience.  I would recommend that you go, but if you live in the Bay Area you might be out of luck as it’s closing at the Tech on January 26th.  If it comes to your city, take the time to attend.

Also would like it noted that Jenni and I are really pushing the boundaries of new parenthood.  I carried Dani around in a front-carrier the entire show, and she was a perfect angel.  She’s such a flirt, she definitely made a few friends and garnered more than her share of smiles.  Cheers to a fun day out and a grand adventure in having a baby and enjoying the world.

Quick shoutout – for the second time in as many weeks I ran into Geoff Ralston.  He was there with his son to attend the show, guess they were just leaving as we walked in.  Hope you guys enjoyed it as much as we did! 

Photo courtesy of Body Worlds

I attended the 2008 CES, which meant I was in Las Vegas for a full week.  Yes, I did survive.  Barely.  Imagine four six-hour days in a row of standing at a demo station, giving essentially the same pitch every 10-15 minutes.  Follow that up with the requisite Vegas lifestyle each night (the evening STARTS around 11:30), and you might understand why I’m just a bit burnt this weekend.

It was not all bad (actually, it was kinda worth it ;) ).  The highlight of the week undoubtedly was hooking up with my good Colorado friends from Soul Patch, Ryan and Jason.  They’re with Foundry Group, a VC firm in Boulder, and they were in town to see the latest and greatest toys.  We grabbed dinner, then headed to the suite at the Wynn where the guys from Slingbox were staying.  The suite was insane, and they had Rock Band hooked up to the Plasma.  We took our positions, Ryan playing guitar, Jason on the drums, and me on the mic (there was no second guitar controller for playing bass).  The song was Dani California, and if I must say, this tired set of bandmates rocked the Wynn.  I scored 100% on the vocal line, a feat of which I’m quite proud!  After that, of course, there were cocktails, people watching (by which I mean woman watching – good lord, Vegas brings out something in people…), and then a promise to meet again soon.  After parting with those guys, I ended up at LAX at the Luxor to meet my team mates – but that’s another story.

Glad I went, glad to be home, hoping there’s no permanent damage to my sleep patterns. 

The new year has arrived.  It is a year I have been eagerly awaiting, perhaps the year for which I have most prepared in my life.  I start the year as the father of a happy and healthy six-month-old baby girl, a husband of twelve years, and a professional of ten.  That framework combined with a significant amount of work examining where I am and what I’m doing provide the basis for a year of change.  Good change, hard-fought change, but ultimately change that I can accomplish purposefully.

Of the many lessons 2007 taught me, one stands out: I can be selfish.  Selfish almost to the point of being childish.  What’s in it for me, how does this make me happier, what can I do to warp this situation to suit my needs of the moment?  Perhaps it’s the only child in me coming to the surface in my adulthood.  Perhaps it’s the "guy" in me who simply wants his way all the time.  2007 was about breaking down a petulant sense of entitlement, a year of examining my motivations and my goals.  It was painful, personal, and honestly not a year I’d care repeat.  While many wonderful things happened in 2007, both personally and professionally, it was also very sad and very scary.  2008 will be about understanding what is truly important, prioritizing those things above others, and following through.  Every day, every week, every month of this year, listening honestly and acting decisively with passion and compassion.

I’m glad you’re here, 2008.  We needed you to come. 

We’re heading to Colorado for the holidays, and even though Dani is fighting a cold (which she graciously shared with Jenni and me), I’m looking forward to it.  I love going back to Colorado.  I’m excited for friends I haven’t seen in a while to meet our little girl.  Also, Jenni and I get to enjoy another overnight – the grandparents get their baby fix and we spend an evening on the town, so everybody wins :).  Even the thought of security lines at San Jose Airport is not dampening my spirits, I’m ready to go!

I like to keep myself busy.  I’ve found I’m happiest when I have a pile of things to do and am working through them, ticking off little achievements to fill the day.  I make to do lists for everything and pretty much run my happiest days by them.  Days when I don’t have something to do are uncomfortable at best.

This is changing, I’m now realizing.  Little ones don’t live their days against a to-do list, they simply are.  Dani, for instance, has been an amazingly good sleeper for months.  Now, she is beginning to have a sleepless night every now and then.  And last night was my night to stay up with her until around 2:30 am.  She wasn’t necessarily fussy, she just wasn’t tired enough to go to sleep.  So we played, we snuggled, I fed her a little bit more formula (hate for an empty tummy to keep her awake), and we enjoyed living moment to moment for several late hours.

Ironically, I had pointed out to Jenni at 9:30 last night that our Saturday evenings used to be just *beginning* at that time rather than winding down.  I guess I got what I asked for!

Shortly after my pre-arranged "shift" ended, Dani fell asleep and stayed asleep until morning.  It may sound strange, but I’m very relieved that all night long I never felt put-upon or exasperated (which I’m likely to do if I spend time without feeling like I’m really *doing* something).  We really had fun being together. It was an evening where the right thing for me to do was to give myself over to being a parent, so I did.  Selflessness doesn’t come naturally to me, and it’s being fun to practice.  And having an adorable little girl who giggles as she’s falling asleep in your arms makes it just that much more fun.

Partly to get the AFF logo off the top of my blog, and partly because there was a time when I did a wicked Rick Astley.  And now you have that damned song in your head, don’t you?

Wow.  Adult FriendFinder, the leading social network dedicated to sex, just sold.  Actually, its parent company, Various, did.  For $500 Million dollars.  To Penthouse Media.

This was a bit of a tricky sale, I’d have to believe.  For a while, it seemed as though AFF would be unable to generate a viable "liquidity event."  The thinking was that a sex-based social networking site could never go public (this is probably still true).  And Google, Yahoo!, and MSN would never buy it.  And the major players in adult media wouldn’t buy it either – it was already too huge and would be too expensive.  I’m honestly not certain why Penthouse bought them.  I’ll take a look, but it’s possible that Penthouse had already tried duplicating AFF’s success and realized just how hard community is to get right.  Or, they negotiated the price on AFF down from what it could have been worth if it had been, say, a dating-based social network ($500 Million for 260 Million registered users and 1.2 Million paying users could seem a bit low, compared to the $1 Billion bandied about for Facebook’s 50 Million users).  Or perhaps the stars just aligned for AFF.

Either way, congrats to the good people at Various on the sale.  Way to go!

I broke down and bought Back to Black over the weekend.  What a strange reaction – I really enjoy the songs, the performances and the instrumentation, but I *hate* the sound.  I have to imagine that what I’m hearing was done on purpose.  The album sounds like you are listening to old 45s through crap speakers.  But, honestly, the attempt to recreate a Mowtown sound is incredibly distracting.  The album is chock full of what we would now consider bad EQ work, clipping, and distortion.  Perhaps one could call it "wall of unpleasant noise."  May I get a properly mastered and engineered version of this album, please?