Now that Kimberly’s bakery is officially official, I can announce blumabakery.com.

For now, we’re hosting the site at wordpress.com, the same place you’re reading this right now.

Kimberly is currently selling goodies at the Dragonfly Coffee House in northwest Portland, which has been selling her stuff for a quite a while now. She also does special orders, which have recently included breads, cupcakes, and a big carrot cake—all vegan, too.

From Dictionary.com:

–noun Slang.
relevant information, esp. a candid or pertinent factual report; low-down: Send a reporter to get the real poop on that accident.

Wow, what a turn of events since I last wrote anything. Here’s the not very short of it:

• 10/17/07—”Redeployed” from my job in IT. This is Intel’s predominant way of doing layoffs, but it’s actually a pretty good deal. After you’re notified, you get about a month to choose if you want to just leave, or if you want to join the “redeployment pool”—two months to do nothing but find another job at Intel. The timing was great. I was bored to death in my IT job and I decided to make this an opportunity to find my dream job at Intel. What could that be?
• Late October—In my mind, those dream possibilities included social media stuff such as blogs.intel.com, corporate social responsibility (green, health, classmate PC, …), employee wellness, and internal communications. Luckily for me, a job on the team that produces Intel’s central, worldwide intranet news site, opened up. I sent a creative little cover letter to the hiring manager and got an interview.
• The value of blogs—After I received my redeployment notice, I blogged about it on my intranet blog and got a ton of feedback. I’ve been blogging for a few years internally, and I’ve built a network of friends through my blog that wouldn’t be possible through any other mechanism. Because of this, I knew some of the folks in the communications department, but better yet, I had a nice set of writing samples. Plus, the hiring team was looking for someone with social media experience.
• Mid-November—Start the new job! I got the job, and I’ve been having a ball since.

So, what do I do? I’m building a new slash career. My title is communications specialist, and the primary part of my job is writing and editing global news stories on our intranet. The writers on my team split the various business groups within the company, and I cover the support groups—HR, IT and finance—and Intel’s software group. I’m learning the political dances that occur between our group, the business groups, and the communicators embedded within those business groups. Our group is essentially independent, and we cover topics with journalistic honesty as much as we can. The business groups, on the other hand, often see the global intranet site as a recognition tool for their teams. So we’re constantly pressing for what’s really new, as opposed to pushing so much “you should really know this,” Pravda-type of stuff.

But I’m talking about the tough part too much. One fun aspect of my job is the fact that I get to interact with Intel’s best on a continual basis. And I’m constantly learning about new things the company is doing and telling that story to employees. Plus, our beats aren’t so rigid. For instance, I recently interviewed an employee currently delving into cloud computing, simply because I was intrigued by the topic. We have freedom within our roadmap to cover different topics.

The second part of my job is management communications. Intel has nearly 10K managers, and we have various communications for that audience. Content varies from simple tasks to be done (store employee reviews here) to fun stuff like quizzes on recent business news. We’re trying to increase our efforts here, but I’m still trying to find out exactly how we can help managers better do their jobs. I don’t want to just tell them fun stories; I want to help them be better managers. The trouble is, a lot of other groups are trying to do the same thing and we risk creating a bunch of noise.

The next part of my job, informally, is acting as the team’s social media guru. Internally, we have blogs, forums, and a central wiki that are available to all employees. We’re using these tools more and more within the communications team, and it’s working quite well. We’re finding that employees are hungering for more quick, direct interaction with company leaders. So I’m always seeking new ways we can use such tools to better connect employees, while also keeping up some of the external social media activities happening on various intel.com sites. Matter of fact, I may start blogging at blogs.intel.com soon. That could be a lot of fun.

What else is happening? More poop soon. But no promises. In the meantime, I’m playing with twitter and you can find all most of my feeds on friendfeed.

Kimberly and I enjoy trying a variety of beers. As Portland has the highest number of microbreweries in the nation, we are well-positioned to get that variety!

However, we have a bad habit of trying something and then later forgetting if we liked it or not. Although there are sites such as RateBeer.com and a RateBeer Facebook app (piece of junk, links kept failing so I gave up), I’m just going to start keep track here.

Last week, we picked up a pack of New Belgium Trippel. On the sabbatical last year, our “beer tour” included Europe’s finest German (good), Italian (so-so), Belgian (world-class) and Irish (stout = great). The Belgian beers we tried, especially the Trappist variety, were easily our favorite. Any beer that successfully duplicates the smoothness and subtle sweetness of Belgian beers usually work for us.

The NB Trippel does this successfully. It’s already been a week since we had it, so I offer no rambling poem of adjectives for the taste. I’ll just say that I’d buy it again: two thumbs up.

In order to get a little more out of work, I decided to join Toastmasters. Although I’ve felt fairly comfortable giving prepared speeches and presentations, I could definitely use some help in thinking on my feet. Further, I think it’s valuable to be able to both plan and deliver an exceptional speech on just about anything.

I’ve been attending meetings and dipping my feet in table topics here and there, but on Tuesday I delivered my first speech. To achieve the first level of the communication track, you deliver 10 speeches. Each speech has a specific goal. The first speech, the Ice Breaker, simply gives you the opportunity to get started with a speech and you talk about yourself, however you choose. In my speech, I spoke about my career path, or in reality, my lack of one. Or at least until this past year. The speech went really well, and I was completely invigorated by it for the rest of the day. I think that was the clearest sign yet that I’m building a strength here, rather than fixing weakness. If you’ve got some time on your hands and want to learn a little of my history, here’s the Kerouac-written essay that shaped my speech:

(I’M HANGING OUT ON THE SWINGSET WITH A FRIEND)
ME: What do you want to be when you grow up?
FRIEND: I don’t know. As long as I get to 2nd base before high school, I’ll be happy.
ME: (LAUGHS.) Come on, really.
F: Well, it would be cool to play guitar for Pat Benatar or some rocking lady singer like that. You?
ME: I want to be Lee Iacocca.
F: Who?
ME: LEE IACOCCA! He’s this billionaire business man.
F: Oh, ok, cool.

What do you want to be when you grow up? We ask ourselves this question from surprisingly early stages in our lives, but the funny thing is that we’re usually not taught how to make this decision. We’re not given the tools to look inside ourselves and to not only determine our natural talents and strengths but also to recognize the activities and situations that really light us up. This pretty well explains how I got to be standing here in front of you.

Going back a couple years, I was a mostly average student through grade school. There were however, some flashes of excellence along the way. In second grade, I remember doing those 3 minute, 100 question timed math quizzes forced on us seemingly daily. I feared these tests when we first encountered them, and I typically finished about 60 problems when the bell rung. But before long, I was finishing the tests with time to spare. I found I actually enjoyed them! Into third grade, my teacher posted my handwriting for the entire class to view as the example of good penmanship. Mrs. Stapley would be disappointed to see my scratch now! Maybe if she saw me wield a keyboard, she’d feel a bit different. Moving along to fourth and fifth, my math skills evolved and my ability to write well began to emerge as well. I hated to read. I think I felt slow. But I still had to do it.

During those years, there was a group of students, “gifted” students, who left class one day per week to participate in ELP – Extended Learning Program. These students were the crème-de-la-crème, and many of them were my friends. But I was an outsider, an underdog. Each and every time I topped them in a math score or another grade, I relished it. It motivated me. In 6th grade, however, I broke through. Late in 5th grade, I absolutely crushed the standardized test we took at the time, the Iowa Test, scoring in the 99th-something percentile in the math portion. After summer, just after the start of classes in sixth grade, I got a visit from Mrs. Lloyd, the ELP teacher, asking me if I’d like to join. Of course I would! I can handle the extra work, bring it on, baby! ELP was absolute bliss. We did mind-bending math problems and puzzles, had open discussions about things we were learning, and played “Where in the World is Carmen San Diego” on 5 1/4″ truly floppy disk. And during this time, I came to believe that I had the ability to do absolutely anything I wanted, and with hard work, I could be among the best.

This philosophy carried me successfully for a long time. I raced through junior high and high school, learned to enjoy reading, and found myself shunning team sports. I wanted to stand on my own accomplishments. I didn’t want to be dragged down by any single slacker. I earned a tuition waiver for college and for the first time, encountered THE BIG QUESTION head on: what do you want to major in? How about, everything! The Industrial Engineering department sent me a packet explaining, at a high level, what IE’s do. And of course, it pointed out the fact that they were the highest paid engineers out of college. Sweet! I took the bait and started this way, but I quickly found myself tormented with other possibilities. My diverse interests and thirst for learning pulled me in all directions, considering everything from mechanical engineering to English to physical education to anthropology. Somehow, after speaking to counselors and professors across the university, I convinced myself that I needed to learn how to do something, to solve problems, rather than get a degree I could receive by simply going to the library. So back to Industrial Engineering, the broadest of the engineering disciplines, I landed.

My scholastic excellence continued through college, and I eventually landed a couple of different internships, the latter being here at Intel. In school I had taken an Information Systems course where we used Powerbuilder, a rapid-application-development tool that has now almost faded away. The Intel recruiter mentioned there was one job that was “IE related” and another that was “IE related and also used programming.” So I took the latter. And I used that work ethic to succeed in fairly short order. Although I had little software development training in school (or at work for that matter), I learned the way of developer quality and excellence, and over the years, had numerous great successes.

Despite those successes, I noticed an increasing dissatisfaction to my job. Programming began to feel tedious; I was solving the same problem, over and over, and was just using different tools to do it. Worse, a lot of time was spent fixing badly written and/or designed software by folks who probably shouldn’t have been developers in the first place! We have a joke here that asks, why is it that bad developers get to write new code and get promoted, and good developers are then brought in to fix and maintain it? This unfortunately gets an agreed laugh as most folks here have seen it.

If not programming, then what do I do? At various points during the last couple years, I explored other possibilities within Intel. I conducted informational interviews, attended innumerable “planning your career” seminars, and got mostly nowhere. Finally, last fall, I decided to hire a career coach to help me find my way. I had been reading this coach’s blog for a couple years before I contacted him, and always liked his approach. We began meeting regularly and we examined all the things I’ve ever done that I enjoyed and/or succeeded at. We dug deeply into these things, and from this we generated what he would call my “passion profile.” This profile is now a framework that I can use, for the rest of my life, to evaluate and generate career moves and project decisions. For the next step, that’s exactly what we did. I generated, to his surprise, over 300 remote possibilities, and began chunking down the list. I narrowed it to 30, and then devised a way to score and rank those. This gave me a top 5 to really dig into. For each one, I did a lot of reading and a battery of informational interviews. I met a lot of great people!

And now, I have it down to one. It’s going to be a big change, and it’s going to take a while to get there. But I’m dreaming of work where my talents AND desires are in alignment – imagine the productivity and energy! And I have an awful lot of career left. Why not make it the career that kids dream about? Somebody has to do it, and I choose me.

In the speech I also mentioned that my fifth grade teacher, Mr. Barilar (buh-LAR), told my mom that I’d end up either a mass-murderer or a genius. Don’t let your fifth-grader watch R-rated horror movies, you never know what kind of stories they will write! Luckily, I landed somewhere closer to Mr. Barilar’s latter prediction, or at least I’d like to think so.

A year ago today, I was climbing Alpe d’Huez. It was unbelievably hot. In all my years of cycling in Arizona, including the legendary Wednesday night Tortilla Flats series, I’ve never been that hot on the bike. The bottom of the climb was pretty difficult, but the hardest part of the ordeal was navigating the other traffic going up the mountain: team cars/buses(!), fan cars, motorcycles, and a blinding array of cyclists. There were folks like me, attempting to look PRO, all the way down to folks in cut-offs on mountain bikes chugging along at 3 or 4 MPH. I made my way almost to the top (the gendarmes wouldn’t allow riders to go all the way by the time I got there), and hoped to descend to Le Bourg-d’Oisans to watch the race. When I reached approximately the 3K from the top sign, a gendarme pulled me off the road. So here I stay! Luckily for me, it turned out to be a great place to stand (I’ll be uploading more pics soon), and there was a food/drink tent set up a few steps away. Further, I met a couple from England who were staying in their son’s apartment atop Alpe for the week. What a place to stay!

I’ve got more to say, but for now I’ll say it was cycling bliss. Much unlike today, when one of my all-time favorite riders has tested positive for blood doping. Say it ain’t so, VINO! I’m at such a loss over this, I just don’t know what to say. More big cheers for the clean riders out there is all I can muster.

Kimberly and I celebrated our 7-year dating anniversary last Saturday. Yes, time flies! We had dinner at Lucy’s Table, and the meal was fantastic. The real date is July 4th, but I was sick that week, unfortunately. I woke up on the 3rd with a terrible stomach ache, and spent the rest of week sipping juice and eating toast and crackers. My naturopath told me it was likely a stomach virus and gave me a good acidophilus formula and EHB. By Saturday, I was feeling better.

But I’m getting away from myself! We actually met on July 3rd, 2000. My friends Andy and Mike new this girl who they said was healthy and athletic, and that we’d really hit it off. Apparently, this fine lady was Mike’s girlfriend’s roommate. So I agreed and we all headed over to MGF’s apartment for drinks. I didn’t know anyone at this little party aside from Andy and Mike, and really don’t tend to be much of a big-group kind of a guy. There were, however, some big group folks there who pretty well dominated the conversation. So, we didn’t get to chat much, but I did find out that every one was invited to MGF’s mom’s house for a 4th of July celebration. Pool, BBQ, fireworks, count me in!

I rolled up to the house, knocked on the door, and WOW! Hello! Kimberly’s hair was down and she looked f-a-n-tastic. See right. We chatted it up while we chopped some veggies for the BBQ, and ended up mostly hip-to-hip for the entire night. Seven years later, we still chat it up and make dinner together, and it seems like that day was yesterday. Cheers to 7 years and innumerable more!

This week, Jonathan Maus of BikePortland.org reported that the Mayor of Portland had left out continued funding of the city’s Bicycle Master Plan Update process. As a citizen who prefers to get around town by bike, I care about this issue. Up to this point, the process has been rolling since last year and would go a long way to enable efforts to come up with new, creative solutions to some of Portland’s transportation problems.

To help get this policy changed and keep the update alive, I accepted Jonathan and the Bicycle Transportation Alliance’s calls to action: I wrote an e-mail to the Mayor and some of the city commissioners. Rather than state the obvious benefits of more people on bikes (cleaner air, less congestion, fitter citizens, less land/infrastructure needed for cars, …), I took a different angle. I brought up the statement that the Portland area is likely to grow by one million people in the next 25 years and posed the question, “What kind of people do we want to attract?”

Funding decisions such as these shape a city’s future significantly. Small, early investments in good planning such as this has measurable long-term payoff in developing a livable city that attracts the kind of folks who prefer bicycles as transportation. These folks are very often progressive, hard-working, civic-minded and choose to help solve the city’s problems and shape it into an inspiring place. They are not just subsisting and hoping for more of the status quo (freeways and cheap gas).

That’s how I put it. Composed in Yahoo! Mail. Write, spell-check, re-read, send. I received the two canned replies and nothing yet from the Mayor. When I received the first reply, I noticed the footer that Yahoo! Mail automatically added to my message:

Ahhh…imagining that irresistible “new car” smell?
Check out new cars at Yahoo! Autos.

Ah, dammit! Stinky free e-mail stole a bit of my thunder. But not too much. The BTA reported today that our comments set a record at the Mayor’s office. Hopefully our avalanche of feedback will lead to action!

Somehow or another, there’s been an increasing theme of brutal reality in movies lately. Have you noticed? Maybe it’s just the movies I’m choosing to watch (OK, I know this is part of it), but I think there’s a bit of shift in movie-making these days. It used to be that you’d have your yearly Se7en or Saving Private Ryan, and the rest of the year was spent laughing at comedies or ooh-ahh-ing at over-done action movies ala Armageddon (by the way, does anyone make comedies besides Will Ferrell anymore? I’m getting sick of this guy.). I used to complain about predictable Hollywood endings and yearned for more realism. But now, movies increasingly have no ending; they are a snapshot of time, after which the camera shuts off and the credits roll. Here’s the growing list of not-so-Hollywood-ending movies I’ve seen in the past few months that fit this bill:

• Tsotsi – story of a young South African gangster who car-jacks the wrong BMW
• Hotel Rwanda – ok, this one’s a true story, but if you haven’t seen it since I last recommended it, you still should
• Babel – keep a close eye on your kids
• The Prestige – as the second of the two-movie magician trend, I think I enjoyed The Illusionist a bit better with it’s unfolding love story and peerless ending
• Hollywoodland – another true story, whoops! The original TV Superman, George Reeves, struggles with his super powers. I actually really liked how they unfolded the story in this one. No happy ending here, my friend.
• Crash – fairly self explanatory
• Junebug – this was just painful, don’t see it
• The Black Dahlia – by the end I was thinking, “did we really just sit through that whole thing?”
• Little Miss Sunshine – award winning and everything, but this was more sad than funny to me. I know it’s supposed to be a “go ahead and laugh at them, that’s the point” kind of thing, but I just don’t go for that.
• Borat – whoa, way too much naked man. I think a couple of the folks that Borat threw water on needed it, but to continue the trend here, this movie became more and more painful by the time it was over.
• The Constant Gardener – just read the IMDB “plot keywords:” AIDS, Diplomat, African, Third World, …. You get the idea, not exactly ingredients for cookies.

Wow, putting this all down, I think I’ve answered the question: quit renting only these types of movies! Maybe I’m selfish; I seem to lean towards movies where I learn something. In most of these stories, the characters learn something: about themselves, their world, or others within it. Maybe I should rent less movies and spend more time reading the eight or so books I have lying around waiting to be read. I know I’ll be learning something then!

A friend of mine at work forwarded me a list of Jack Bauer truths. I was rolling on the floor over some of these:

• When you open a can of whoop-ass, Jack Bauer jumps out.
• The bumper sticker on Jesus’s car reads, “WWJBD?”
• Superman wears Jack Bauer pajamas.

I used to be devout viewer of 24. I never missed an episode during the first three seasons (I think that’s right, this year is the fourth, no?). This year, I’ve stopped watching, for two reasons: 1) we got rid of the Tivo, and I really hate live TV now and 2) the show actually adds stress to your life. I started to watch the first of couple of episodes this year and I realized that I was getting some gray hairs. The show is so action-packed, non-stop, pile-of-rocks-in-a-hard-place that I started to feel like it was a detriment to my health. But now that I’ve heard of the Jack Bauer Dammit drinking game, I might have to rent the season 4 DVD when it comes out and throw a small bash….

During our AZ visit, Kimberly and I took my Mom (or vice versa) to Bodyworlds 3 at the Arizona Science Center. If you haven’t heard of it, Bodyworlds is an exhibition of human bodies and assorted organs that have been preserved through a process called plastination. I highly recommend it if you think you can handle it.

The Skateboarder (courtesy of BodyWorlds.com)

Over the years, I’ve become increasingly aware of the fact that your body is as you make it. In other words, you shape your health and your physical and mental makeup based on your diet and your activity. A lot of folks either don’t take the time to realize this, or simply don’t want to be accountable for it. They don’t ask the question, “how healthy can I be?” “How well can I be?” I used to think I knew the answer, but I now believe that there is no limit. Recently, Kimberly and I took food allergy tests at our naturopathic doctor and for the last few weeks, we’ve eliminated all the foods that came up as reactive from our diets. Since doing this, both of us, especially Kimberly, have felt noticeably better and more energetic. Kimberly has felt like her sleep has been more consistent, and I think I’ve just about shed the extra weight I picked up over the course of the sabbatical. Now when I ask, “how healthy can I be,” I can now answer, “at least as good as I am now but probably better yet!”

As part of my career research, naturopathy has made it into my top 5 potential new careers. It’s obviously quite a departure from IT programmer, but I’ve always had a built-in interest in healthy living and naturopathy fits my philosophy perfectly. It’s just that 4 years+ of school that’s a problem. Nevertheless, I’m going to explore what avenues within naturopathy I could take. There is certainly a demand out there!

Coming back to Bodyworlds, the exhibition further cemented my feelings that your body is what you make of it. Besides the full body displays such as the Skateboarder shown here, the exhibition also included various organs in both healthy and not-so-healthy states. For instance, they had a set of a non-smoker’s lungs and a set of smoker’s lungs. Talk about a contrast! The healthy lungs were about the color of an egg shell, while the smoker’s lungs were dark charcoal. And not just spots, but the entire lungs were charcoal. And that’s just one of the many organs on display. So, if you’re having trouble making healthier choices in your lifestyle, I’d highly recommend a trip to Bodyworlds if there’s an exhibition in your town.

Hunka Chocolate Cookies

Kimberly and I were in Chandler last weekend, which means indulgence in family visiting, home-cooked food, and some great cycling. It’s now been exactly one year since we moved to Portland. Sorry for those of you still in AZ, but for us, there’s no turning back. The contrast between Phoenix and Portland seems obvious from a weather standpoint, but the incongruity grows increasingly vast with every visit I make. But that’s another long story.

What a great trip. I caught up with old friends, did some great riding, spent Easter hanging out with the core Schultz team, and even got some work done. Kimberly arrived and the indulgence really began. We went back to some of our favorite restaurants, and of course had a hearty batch of Mom’s sausage bread. I should’ve taken a picture of that. But I did take a handful of photos you can check out at this flickr set.

I’m hoping to keep blogging more regularly, I swear! I’ve always got tons of ideas, but I don’t take the time to put things down. I want to finish the sabbatical tales, but I think that’s a big task that’s keeping me from writing quicker blogs. So, hopefully you’ll occasionally see those long stories pop up interspersed with more regular entries.

Ok, take a breath, the trip now continues.

It’s Tuesday, October 3rd. We hop on a mid-day train to Como, Italy. We have 1st class tickets and the train isn’t too shabby. Short moments after we leave the main station we are rolling through open, grassy farmland. The first thing that strikes me is the fact that every little farm building I see has a cluster of solar panels on top. This is one thing that Europe is getting right. I remember home owners’ associations in the Phoenix area that tried to ban solar panels & water heaters because they deemed them an eyesore. Now we’re talking about complacent ignorance! We need to get better about making long-term investments, not only financially, but for the sustainability of our planet. But I’ll save more on that for another post.

We learned another thing shortly into our train ride: our AAA travel agent was not very thorough. When you buy a Eurail pass, you have to specify the countries you will be traveling within, and how many days you will be on the train. Add more to either, and it costs more money. We had 6 days and Germany, Italy, France, and Benelux. The gentleman checking our ticket informed us that this train travels through Switzerland. Arrggh. Twenty-odd euros later, we’re still in our seats.

The train slithers along the landscape, teasing our eyes with majestic towns nestled along the sky islands of the Swiss Alps. I love the Alps. I fell in love in July during the Tour: humid green valleys are the troughs, tight knight communities surf the lower slopes, trees climb near the top, and bare peaks reach 2 miles/3.2 kilometers high. Ah, I’m losing the story again.

We arrive in Como at around 10pm. Travel agent failure number 2: Cernobbio is about 10km from Como, and we have no ride. Lucky for us, there’s a lady in the same predicament, and she speaks both English and Italian. She calls for a taxi and orders another for us! Cheers long lost friend! Ok, this is equally our fault, but it’s the kind of detail you work with a travel agent to figure out. We arrive at the hotel, The Hotel Regina Olga. The agent had picked this one out, and it was pretty nice. It had an old feel to it, almost a bit of a Shining feeling, sort of a tacky elegance. Travel agent failure 3: we check in, and the girl at the desk as for our confirmation papers. Eh? She lets us check in anyway, and I end up being able to get our agent on the phone. Luckily she responds quickly and faxes over everything we need. Time to enjoy Cernobbio.

So where the hell is Cernobbio? When we were planning the trip, we decided that a quiet stay on Lake Como sounded elegant. Comically enough, we had first heard of it while watching Ocean’s 12. I unfortunately didn’t do much research or reading until I cracked open the Lombardia section of Rick Steves’ Italy on the train over. Rick, I came to read, most recommends Varenna among the towns that encircle Lake Como. Rats, but too late for that. We “picked” Cernobbio through the whims of our travel “agent.”

Lake Como is shaped like an inverted Y. The city of Como is situated in the lower left corner and Cernobbio is the adjacent town to the north. Cernobbio was pretty quaint, overall. The city is fairly narrow from south to north, and is bordered by the lake in the east and heads steeply up the adjacent hill to the west. Within Cernobbio, we spent most of our time walking around and enjoying the lake, looking for interesting eats and drinks (didn’t make it to Tom & Jerry’s Pizzeria), and hiking up the surrounding hills. We did have some really fantastic pizze (yes, with an E) at just about every restaurant we went to. The pizze there reminds me of sushi in Tokyo: elegantly simple. There are no Mexican or everything or burger pizzes. At the most, a pizze might have two toppings. They use sauce moderately, and the crust is very thin. Altogether, it’s a much lighter bite than even your foldable New York slice. For a light dinner at one point, we ordered a pizza and a huge salad. We saw a table of old folks who each ordered a pizza as their main dish. Whatever happened to that Mediterranean diet? I guess we are in northern Italy.

Speaking of diets, obesity seems to be a rarity around here. On top of that, people are really well dressed. You’d think they all had their clothes tailored. I suppose it was a fairly affluent area, but you couldn’t deny all the well-fitted clothing going around. Speaking of which, my clothes definitely grew tighter over the course of the trip. I made the mistake of not really planning fitness into the trip. As the person who hates to go a day without at least a short workout, this was not smart. To try and get some exercise, why tried to hike a bit in the surrounding hills. I could not believe how steep it was. I can’t imagine those “trails” get used very often. Going up was kinda fun, but coming down most definitely was not. But as you can see, the view was fantastic.

Still with me? Probably not, but in any case, time to wrap it up. Another cool thing we did around Lake Como was to hop on the water taxi over to Bellagio. Nope, not the Vegas hotel, it’s the 2500+ year-old commune that inspired the hotel. Bellagio sits on the joint of the inverted Y, providing a 270-degree view of the lake. We visited an old church, walked among overpriced jewelry and souvenir shops, and had one of the best meals of the entire trip, straight out of the Rick Steves’ book. Don’t travel without it!

Before I go back to the sabbatical, I’ll tell you what’s on my mind of late. For one thing, Kimberly and I have been renting quite a few movies lately. The reasons for this are many: way cheaper (our awesome local video shop lets you buy a block of 10 rentals for $30), convenient (no driving, no gas burned, more money saved!), pause, fridge, and on and on. Some of our recent rentals include:

• Memoirs of a Geisha – much better than I expected, awesome soundtrack, recommended – Japanese culture is fascinating, all they’ve accomplished from that small island, a history to be explored further….
• Equilibrium – kinda Matrix/1984, a bit cheesy filming, but good story, recommended
• An Inconvenient Truth – a little more about Al Gore than I expected (guy would’ve been elected easily if this had been made before the “election“), but this is a must see for everyone on Earth
• Who Killed the Electric Car? – documentary about the death of the GM EV1 electric car, good view into the power of the oil/corporate lobby, very good
• Tsotsi – story of a troubled gangster in South Africa, pretty gripping and a good insight into the juxtaposition of the rich and poor in that country, great stuff
• Hotel Rwanda – story of the uprising that occurred in Rwanda in 1994 where an extremist group of Hutus kills the president and proceeds to kill 1 million Tutsis and others in one of the worst (the worst?) genocides of recent history, barely covered here in the U.S. – gives you an insight into the results of the ravaging endured by Africa from Europe, the US and other powers over the last few centuries – must see

There have definitely been more; we’re on our fourth block of movies! But these are the ones that left some kind of an imprint in my mind.

In any case, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about globalism, sustainability, urban planning and history. As I’m in the middle of my inward career search, it’ll be interesting to see where this goes.

Yikes, I allowed two months to pass since I last posted! Please accept my apologies, riders. I still do intend to continue to chronicle the sabbatical, for no better reason than to relive it again in my own mind. As you might guess, I struggle with repetitive tasks. I need a “straight from the brain” blog editor. Actually, that’d probably be a bad idea. There’s already too much blog-noise out there to be able to manage!

Is this blog just blog noise? That’s debatable. My point with it is simply to capture the goings-on of my life. That might include some tips and how-to’s, maybe a little commentary, but mostly not. How do I make this a habit?

Those last two months have treated me exceptionally well. But more on that later, I swear. Until then, I wish you and yours the best year of existence yet! Cheers to your health and balanced well-being. See your future with new eyes:

Alright, back to topic.

Oktoberfest, first of all, is only what English-speakers call it; Germans refer to it as “die Wiesn,” which translates as “field,” short for Theresienwiese, the field where it all happens. (Side thought: Why does there have to be an english version of things titled originally in other languages? There’s no Munich on a German map: it’s München. Venice? Venezia. Rome? Roma. So, I don’t live in Portland, I live in Hafenland, or Terra di Orificio? This practice stops now.)

First thing I found out, die Wiesn isn’t exactly obvious to find. The field where it lies is a couple miles from the main city center. As you can kinda see, there’s quite a crowd. We had been to the Hofbräuhaus as part of our impromptu city center tour, and I figured that die Wiesn must be a close walk around. So one of the days, we walked all over the place. I don’t know how, but we didn’t get anywhere. We finally asked somebody, and found we needed to hop on the subway. So, after a long bout of trying to figure how/where to buy a ticket (amazing how some cities make this easy, others, not so easy), we rode one train, transferred, and arrived to one of the two stops that arrives nearby.

We follow the flow of people from the subway exit, through a neighborhood, and finally to the field, er, die Wiesn. On one hand, it looks like your typical state fair. Lots of places to buy munchies, souvenir stands, and a collection of bolted-together-rides-on-a-big-trailer. You can see from the picture above that there are quite a few people there: all ages, families, and groups of teenagers, nobody left out. But that’s just the outside the tents. According to the official website, there are 14 large tents. A friend of mine from work, who we were supposed to meet up with, had done some research and found that there were a couple tents where you could arrive without reservations and have some luck getting seated. Being on the last couple days of the event, and arriving in the early afternoon, I was feeling confident. And as you might guess, I was dead wrong. Every tent we went into was packed, with dozens of people standing around vulturing or waiting in line.

It’s an interesting scene. There really isn’t that much going on. Essentially, each tent is just a giant temporary pub with long tables, 1-liter mugs of beer flying around, big plates of food being served, various types of music filling the air, and a healthy cloud of smoke hovering overhead. But I’d have to say, I was impressed with number of folks who sported their Dirndls and Lederhosen (great Halloween idea, hmmm). In the end, we went to die Wiesn without going to Oktoberfest. We followed another flow of people back to subway, across to the city center to an outdoor bar at Viktualienmarkt, where we enjoyed a couple of modest 1/2-liter beers and one big breze.

Almost forgot, we never hooked up with my friend. I forgot to chat with him before he left and never got his hotel. He had mine. When we check out, the person at the desk hands us a piece a paper, says “You got a message, sorry.” Oh well, I hope he had better luck than we did. And off to Como we go….

Big chain gym membership salespeople are just as sleazy. I’ve belonged to quite a few different gyms over the years, and I’ve always favored the mom-and-pop gym over the big chain. Unfortunately, there isn’t one near us here in Portland. I have a “gym” at work, but it’s really just a handful machines that they call a “fitness center” that the company likely uses to lower their insurance costs. Plus, it’s just not convenient. So, that lead us to a nearby Gold’s Gym. Maybe I was being naive, but we have a couple friends who work out there, and it is Portland, so maybe they’d be a little more open and friendly.

We walk in, and the gym looks pretty nice. They have us fill out an information card, which includes cheesy questions such as “how serious are you about accomplishing your fitness goals?” and “how long have you been thinking about your fitness goals?” In other words, “how hard are our salesmen going to have to lean on you?” We get a quick tour, and then are sat down to the salesman’s desk.

First thing he does is ask a bunch of questions straight from a questionnaire on his desk. When was the last time you were in shape? Would you be happy in 5 years with your current regimen? Uggh. Then, he whips out his spiral notebook and shows us a page entitled something like “Dis-Illusion the Gym Membership,” a cute little laminated pamphlet in Gold’s colors that explains that they are completely honest and open, and won’t charge any hidden costs (aside from the $69 initiation fee imposed by Gold’s, we have no control over that).

Finally, he turns to the rates. First thing I notice is a new column called “processing fee” with a charge of $100. Hmmm, must’ve missed that on the “dis-illusion” page. He explains the overall rates, and how you naturally save with a longer commitment. Then he pauses for like 2 minutes, not sure what has happening there. Made me think of a recent “Scrubs” where Zach Braff says something, then thinks to himself, “pause for effect, pause for effect, pause for effect.” I guess we were supposed to say, “$169 up front, $64/month for a year, GREAT! Sign me up now!” Then he tries the old you-weren’t-expecting-so-now-you’re-gonna-love-me technique by saying, “we had this special, I know we’re not supposed to do it anymore, but you could do $20 down and $44/month for a year.” We explain that we really just wanted to check it out and see what else is out there, and then they really start to belittle us. “When are you thinking of joining? End of this month? Ah, it’s not hot for you right now, I see, we won’t bother with the passes then.”

This just kills me. What is with the “golly gee, I just don’t know how I’ll go on if you don’t join our gym” BS sales attitude?  How does it persist? I felt pity for the people I saw in the gym. Each person sat through that in some form or another, poor souls. In 2006, I’d hope for a no BS, open, friendly kind of human interaction. But I guess that only happens at the mom-and-pops.

I didn’t expect to like Munich as much as I did. We chose it as a destination simply for Oktoberfest. So I really didn’t read about Munich at all as far as food or city attractions. Munich was quite clean, and had the sign of all the truly great cities of the world: thousands of bicycles everywhere. Virtually all the main drags we walked along had a sidewalk and a bikeway that were totally separate from the street. I’ve read that traffic experts differ on whether a separated path is safer or not, but I thought it was nice. Further, Munich has an abundance of public transport, including a subway system, trams and buses. Traffic never *seemed* bad, from a pedestrian’s perspective.

Another pleasant surprise was how nice people were there. The first example occurred minutes after we arrived. The main train station was titanic, which means that each exit takes you to a different street corner. I had a printout of our a hotel’s address and a small map of the area. Our hotel appeared pretty close to the train station so I figured it would be easy to find. After a little eeny, meeny, miny, mo, we picked an exit and got out on the street. I made a futile attempt to ascertain the street name and intersection, and then decided to head, uh, that way. We walk along a bit and stop again to figure out where we are on the map. At this point, a man about our age walks up and asks if we need a hand. I show him our map and he tries to figure it out, then says, “I’ve got a bigger map in my car, let’s go check that out and figure out where you need to go.” Great! I’m guessing his car must be close, but no, it’s probably 150 yards away. He whips out the map, apparently he’s German but is visiting Munich also, and we figure out we needed to in the opposite direction that we started. Thank you, dear citizen! I have no idea what the guy was doing before he helped us, but was damn impressed that he walked way over and spent 10 minutes helping out two completely foreign strangers. Awesome!

But hold on, I’ve got an example that blows that one away. It was either later that same day, or sometime on the next, but we went exploring the Marienplatz area, which is essentially the city center of Munich. Tons of shops, some car-free walking streets, just a fantastic place. (Why don’t have more of these in the states? We have like one per coast, while I think every city I’ve been to in Europe has many. No wonder we’re fatter, we’re too lazy even to walk.) So we’re walking along, and we stop on a street corner to figure out where we are. Moments later, a lady of about 60 years rolls up on her bike and asks if we need help. “Ah, we’re just trying to figure out where we are,” we tell her. She ends up giving us a 3-hour+ private tour of Munich’s city center. She showed us some hidden courtyards in the Residenz, snuck us past the huge line into a side entrance to Hofbräuhaus, down to Maximilianstrasse, and finally led us to a restaurant in the bowels of a building right on Marienplatz. Rick Steves couldn’t have planned it better himself. Oktoberfest, well, that’s another story.

Kimberly and I have been back home for a week now. In her words, the trip was “amazing, beautiful, just unbelievable.” As a reminder, the trip went:

• Munich – 3 nights
• Cernobbio, Italy – 5 nights
• Venice – 3 nights
• Rome – 3 nights
• overnight train to …
• Amsterdam – 3 nights
• Brussels – 2 nights
• Taste of Ireland tour – 4 nights
• Dublin – 3 nights

I’ve got a lot to say about it, and a lot of different thoughts. The trip made more interested in history than ever, gave me some perspective on world power, taught me a helluva lot about what to/not-to do for the next trip, and more. But those are all forth coming posts….

… proportionally with one’s knowledge of it. Wisdom of the day, for ya. I find it interesting how much life I’ve lived to learn who it is I am. It’s one of those things you don’t really ever complete, but I’ve found you have to be able to stand upon your own two feet. It sounds so trivial when I write it now, but it’s a realization I’ve only recently discovered. I have been bored as hell at work for way too long now, and I think the biggest cause is the lack of learning needed in my current job. BizTalk and integration were new to me, but the underlying technologies, .NET and SQL Server, are old hat. In the end, development is a formula to be applied. There’s some room for creativity in tiny details, but overall, there’s a pattern you can apply to solve a lot of problems. Worse, I can’t believe how much time I spend solving problems that were caused by someone else’s lack of the basic, minimum practices required for quality software. Give me a NEW problem to solve so I can LEARN something and DEVELOP a better methodology. Ack.

Funny how my mind went here. The title sprung into my mind when I was thinking back to a television show about albino animals. There was an alligator, monkey, hippo, lion, porcypine, and more if I remember right. The fascinating part of it was the fact the albinism created a pretty serious survival challenge for each animal. In almost all cases, the animal had evolved to it’s “common” color as a step in evolution. For example, the lion is normally colored like golden wheat, allowing it to stalk unseen within tall grasslands of Africa. In most of the cases, the animal learned to atone for the weakness of its color and developed unique talents. The alligator, for instance, learned patience and to approach it’s prey from a deeper angle.

So there you have it. Embrace the obscure, there is much to be learned from it! Bellittle your weaknesses by embracing your strengths!

I was writing a quick how-to for deploying a piece of code today, and along the way I decided I’d throw in some instructions for celebration:

Find nearest bottle of Moët et Chandon, shake well, pop the cork, and spray onto anyone within a 15 foot radius.

To construct this fine piece of teaching, I had to do a little research. I discovered that the champagne spray originated at Le Mans in 1967 in an act of spontaneity by American racing legend Dan Gurney. He had just teamed up with A.J. Foyt in a Ford to smash the highly-advanced Ferrari team. Great story. Within that story, I noted the reference to MOËT ET CHANDON, so of course I had to look that up. That Wikipedia is just filled with good stuff.

Until next time, POP!