I was just telling Megan last night how fall is my favorite season for golf. I haven’t played in the fall for four years, and am really looking forward to it. Apparently I’m not the only one.
As for the unnamed Canadian golf manufacturer … Jazz? Are there any other possibilities?
I finally met Lysa and Simon’s baby Aidan on Saturday. The cat seemed a bit jealous of all the attention he’s getting, but I thought Simon took it really well.
Am I really this old? So old that it’s time for a 30th high-school reunion? So old that cute girls my age are bragging about their grandkids? So old that … well, yes, I’m that old.
The Mount Rainier High School class of 1976 had our 30th reunion this weekend. Megan and I went to the casual event Friday at the Yardarm Pub in Des Moines, although we couldn’t make it to the Saturday event. But it was great to see so many familiar names (and even a few still-familiar faces) — over 100 classmates showed up, and everyone was having a good time. Click the photo to the right to see some of the pictures I took.
That’s Tom O’Brien and JJ Holiday (aka Jeff Poskin) with me in the picture. The leaning sideways is a nod to a prank we did in high school, where we jacked up the back of Mr. Price’s classroom in the dark. Our goal was to get all the desks to slide up against the chalk board and then lower the building back down into place, so that he’d come in to unexplainable chaos in the morning. But we lost our nerve when everything started creaking after the back edge of the building was off the ground, so we left it that way.
We heard Mr. Price is still a regular at the Yardarm, but he didn’t make it Friday night. Too bad, everyone was in a confessional sort of mood, and that portable prank is just the tip of the iceberg.
Once a year, the team I’m on at Microsoft (Developer Platform Evangelism, led by Steve Cellini) has an all-day offsite meeting. I’ve heard some amusing stories of this event in the past, and yesterday was my first chance to witness the festivities firsthand. Now that I’ve seen what goes on, well, it’s hardly surprising that MSFT stock is up today.
Here are a few photos …
I’ve been changing the banner on the top of the blog every weekend for the last month or so. The new one above is a shot of the Seattle skyline from Hamilton Viewpoint Park in West Seattle. For those who don’t know, that’s the Space Needle on the left, Safeco Field on the right, and downtown Seattle in between.
We pulled into the park about 10:30 past night, and I got out the camera and tripod to take a few pictures. It was a clear evening, no wind at all, great conditions for photos.
A cat jumped up on the chain-link fence in front of us, and its body was a dark silhouette against the lights of Seattle. It was spectacular. The cat was slowly creeping right along the top of the fence, so I stopped setting up the tripod and walked quickly to the right to try to get a picture of this cool image.
But there was a couple sitting at a bench eating Kentucky Fried Chicken, and when they saw the cat they leaped up and raced toward it with their leftovers. You’d think they had never seen a cat before. They barged in front of me, and in a matter of seconds they had convinced the cat to leap down and come over to get some greasy chicken from the woman. The man made a point of standing between me and his woman, as if annoyed that I wanted her damn picture or something. I wanted the cat!
Soon they had out their little digital cameras and were taking boring flash pictures of the cat eating chicken, and shaky handheld pictures of the skyline. Well, don’t know for sure their skyline shots were shaky, but I hope they were. Jerks.
Anyway, here’s a blurry shot I took while racing the tourists to the cat. You can see the cat to the right of Safeco Field. Oh, what could have been.
Anybody recognize the lyric “everybody hates a tourist”? Hint: the singer is not Leonard Nimoy. Nor a singer.
I learned from prolific LA-area blogger Blake Handler that the Department of Homeland Security issued a press release this week telling people to keep their copies of Windows updated with the latest security patches. They’re especially eager to see everyone install the MS06-040 security patch.
The DHS is doing something I agree with for a change! Installing the latest Windows patches is a good thing to do for a variety of reasons, and in recent years the option of saying “I’m happy with what I have, screw the updates” is no longer feasible. New viruses are being created all the time to exploit known security issues, so if you don’t install the latest updates you can’t connect to the internet without getting hosed pretty quickly.
This is great, to have some sense of what we’re getting for all the billions we’re spending on homeland security these days. It makes me feel so secure.
I also feel quite thrifty for linking directly to the DHS web site to display the photo above. By linking to a photo in their folder, I’m not using any bandwidth on Mahugh.com toward my monthly limit and instead it’s coming directly out of the budget of the DHS. Given my track record, this is probably as close to my childhood dream of working for the CIA as I’ll ever get. Now if Chertoff would just give me line-item veto power over the rest of the budget, I could stop complaining about the DHS altogether.
I recently posted about the 1-plane vs. 2-plane swing theories of Jim Hardy. I’m embracing the 2-plane concepts right now, because that seems to be working best for me. But I thought I’d show an example of an extreme case of 1-plane swing: Moe Norman.
Moe wasn’t like other pro golfers. He came from a small town in Canada. He was self-taught, quirky, child-like, and in the estimation of many — including Lee Trevino and Sam Snead — simply the best striker of the golf ball that ever lived. And his personality and style led many people to call him “the Rain Man of golf” after that movie came out.
I didn’t realize that Moe had died two years ago, because I’ve been out of touch with golf during that time. So when I learned it today I was a bit sad. What a guy.
Moe’s swing was studied very closely by many people, because they wanted to figure out why he could hit the ball so consistently straight. There’s even a whole school of golf instruction, Natural Golf, that’s based on Moe’s swing. I’ve tried it a bit in the past, and it’s tempting: it’s a much simpler action than the conventional golf swing, and it’s amazing how solidly you can hit the ball with that action sometimes. But I guess until somebody starts winning tournaments with a natural-golf swing, I’m going to assume it’s just something that fit his unique body and mind, and not a swing to emulate but just one to admire.
If you’re interested in learning more about Moe, read “The Feeling of Greatness.”
I was waiting to pick up Megan in front of her building Wednesday, and a Humvee limo pulled up next to me to wait for somebody.
I’ve heard there are some really important bigshots in Megan’s building, but given the current security climate I probably shouldn’t name them. Let’s just say they include a big bald guy who talks real loud and a little geeky guy with a squeaky voice.
Per TSA regulations, I removed the license plate before taking the picture.
I came in to work early this morning, to get a bunch of things done. My first task was going to be to backup my laptop and connect my external USB drive to my desktop server machine, so that I could work there. I have a co-worker whose laptop died yesterday, and I’m loaning him my laptop so he can get some data off his hard drive. No problem, I have a desktop machine too.
But this is what I found on the desktop screen when I walked into my office …
It won’t boot in safe mode, of course, since the registry’s trashed. I did a bit of searching online and found an article on “How to troubleshoot registry corruption issues” which led me to this page with the helpful advice “To restore the registry, use the appropriate method.”
So I guess that’s what I’ll try to do next. So much for the early start on the day.
I just went through my Bloglines RSS feeds while waiting for a huge ZIP file to decompress. Here are a few links to thinks I found interesting. (Mom, this stuff is sort of work-related, so don’t feel like you have to read it all.)
Joel Spolsky has a great post on management styles, covering everything from hit-and-run micromanagement to a nice example of why the best management practices for the military may not work best in other situations.
Niall Kennedy is leaving Microsoft, and everyone’s talking about it today. Harrison over at LiveSide talked to him today, and on a sort of related note, Kip has some good links to info about the Windows Live Spaces mess.
Doug's work blog