Doug’s World

Snoqualmie Falls Golf Course

We tried a new course last night after work: Snoqualmie Falls. It’s a few miles up the Snoqualmie River from Carnation Golf Course, and right across the river from a little par-3 course. That area is like the Palm Springs of the Cascades. And it’s nice to have good old Mount Si in the background on so many shots.

Snoqualmie Falls is a short course, only 5400 yards, with a very low rating: 64.8/102. But there are some narrow holes, and several holes where you can drive the green if you’re willing to take a high-risk shot (water and/or OB nearby). So it was a fun place to play. And whereas nearby Carnation is very dry, this course is very green and lush. No 100-yard bump-and-run shots here!

We didn’t finish before dark, but I was having a pretty good round. I succeeded in not thinking any swing thoughts almost the entire time, just focused on swinging freely to the target. Not coincidentally, I hit more pure shots than I have yet this year, and never came close to an unmentionable. (Starts with S, rhymes with stank.)

Megan’s round was a bit up and down: hitting a few great shots in a row, then the dreaded otherwise a few times in a row. On the 7th, I snap-hooked a drive to the right (I’m a lefty, you know), and while I was over in that fairway struggling to save a bogey Megan was proceeding down our fairway. I heard a strange snapping sound from afar, but I looked over and didn’t see anything unusual. Then we were reunited at the green, and I was surprised to hear her say she got an 11.

On the next hole, a par 3, Megan’s tee shot went into some trees. “That’s not your usual 6-iron,” I said. “Babe,” she said, “the 6-iron has fallen on hard times.”

Thinking she just meant it wasn’t working as well for her as usual, I tried to give her a little pep talk about how well she hits her 6-iron. On the next tee, though, she explained what that snapping sound had been. Hard times indeed. Anyone know where we can get an HM Platinum high-modulus, low-torque, light-flex shaft?

Welcome to golf, Dear. I’m reminded of something I heard a young Native American girl say on the radio years ago: “the USA is like a boyfriend who slaps me around a bit when he gets drunk, but I just love the way he dances.” That’s what people mean when they say “I love this game!”

Postlude: Megan really crushed her 7-iron off the 11th tee. A new favorite in the making?

Open Source Beer

Open source software has become a big deal. The concept is pretty simple: somebody writes some software, makes the source code publicly available, and others can make enhancements or fix bugs. Those “enhanced” versions are also made publicly available, and — in theory — the result is an upward spiral of ever-increasing functionality and reliability, and it’s all free, and everyone lives happily ever after. It’s also sort of cool that programmers can see every line of code, so you can know exactly what your software is really doing during all of those bizarre little pauses with an hourglass on the screen.

The open-source model breaks down sometimes, though. For example, if you’re running your business on some mission-critical pieces of software, you might want a vendor you can call on for urgent support when you need it; maybe even a vendor whom you have some financial leverage over, for more effective negotiation. I’m a bit of an old-timer, and I thought the BIOS for the original IBM PC was a pretty good compromise: it was IBM’s intellectual property, but they provided the complete source code in a handy binder (I wish I had kept mine!) so that anybody could see exactly what IBM’s software did and how it did it.

Anyway, I’m not trying to start a debate about open-source software, since lots of other folks have been doing that for years. Rather, I wanted to point out that this concept has now been applied to beer. Yes, beer. The Free Beer Foundation has come up with a particular beer recipe, made it publicly available (most beer recipes are top-secret, you know), and others can make improvements to the recipe, and those improvements will be publicly available, and so on. Mmm, Linux Lager, my favorite!

Golf Update

I finally caught up on golf-score data entry late last night. It seems that Megan and I have played quite a bit of golf in the two months since we re-started the game: 13 times in eight weeks, according to Golftrak. I think there were two times we didn’t keep score, too.

Megan has improved quite a bit. Her best score is now a 112, and her best nine has been a 51. I haven’t done any better than an 85, which is a bit disappointing after starting with an 88 the first time out. But I feel like I’m on the verge of shooting a good score; it’s the age-old thing, the short game’s hot when the tee shot’s wild, and vice versa. One of these days, by golly, it will all come together.

In terms of equipment, Megan has been hitting 6-iron off most tees, and she hasn’t clicked with her woods or hybrids yet. But she keeps hitting the 6-iron high and straight more and more often. I tried a few different things off the tee for a while, but now I’ve settled into 2-iron most of the time, and driver when I’m swinging well or the hole is wide open. I had a great driving day (and some bizarre scoring swings) at Willows Run a couple weeks ago and only hit 2-iron off the first tee, but I’m usually hitting 2-iron on anything under 400 yards these days. I love hitting 2-iron off the tee and then a 5-wood second shot on par 5s, because it just feels so wrong. Wrongness has always appealed to me.

I’ve changed the clubs in my bag a bit, swapping out the 53-degree Cleveland wedge for the Jmax 3-hybrid. This feels like a better fit for me right now. Before, I was trying to carry the clubs I had carried when I played my best a couple years ago, but I’m not good enough to carry that set. I’m only carrying 3 wedges, and that’s plenty until I get my short game back up to where an extra wedge makes a difference.

Regarding the hybrid, I’ve been up and down on it. It’s nice to have a 190-200 yard club that I can be sure will draw and almost never fades. But it’s too much of a “game improvement” club, meaning the face is offset too far. That whole concept is bogus for me — when I suck, I tend to snap-hook my shots, not slice them. These damn offsets aren’t “improvement” clubs for me, they usually make my mis-hits much worse — they turn gentle draws into screaming hooks. So I need to try another hybrid with a more conventional face. Maybe after next payday. Uh, Megan?

The pictures above and below are from Mount Si Golf Course, where we played Sunday. (I shot 89, good putting early and good 2-iron on the back nine but poor short irons and few greens in regulation.) Here’s a photo of Megan near the top of Mount Si last winter. Next time we’re up there, maybe this weekend, I want to get some good “aerial” shots of the golf course for future golf posts.

Is Greenland the next big thing?

Here’s an example of the Google Analytics “Geo Map Overlay” report: a map of the locations of everyone who visited this blog on Labor Day. The size of the dot corresponds to the number of visits from that location:

Call me picky, but I think it’s weird that they chose to use a Mercator projection for this report. Is there really a case that can be made for devoting as much of that graphic to Greenland as to all of much-larger Africa? Does Google know something we don’t?

Motivated by Mini? Or golf?

Is it just me, or does everyone find it hard to explain why some days you feel lazy, and other days full of energy? I was at my desk at 7:00 this morning, door closed, flying through all the email I didn’t get handled last week. Coincidentally, I read this comment late last night on a post on Mini-Microsoft:

You see, there is a whole contingent of people you’ll see running around at Microsoft - the people screaming at the fry cook in the cafeteria because the hamburger that was just presented to them has a crack in it, the people who can’t figure out how to park their car in a single parking spot on campus, the people who will stampede over people in wheelchairs and elderly women to get a free trinket at the Xbox 360 launch - these are the people reward each other with Microsoft shareholder’s money. These are the people that spend more time plotting how to step on their peers while they should be plotting how to make more money for our shareholders. Yet, there they are with their fat sausage-like fingers wrapped around the pursestrings. Infuriating, isn’t it?

Forget about stock awards and bonuses - if I get one, fine, if I don’t, oh well. Yeah, it’s nice to get that chunk of change but if it means that I have to feign interest in my group manager’s little league team, my dignity is worth more to me. And if my group manager hands out rewards based on the faces he sees in the bleachers watching Timmy awkwardly pitch softballs like a retarded orangutan, well, I’d be willing to bet there’s at least a couple of people on my team disingenous enough to buy a fake little league jersey, put Timmy’s number on it, and wear it around the office. And yes, this is something that actually happened in one of the groups I used to work in.

Such well-articulated motivation! Timmy’s so real, I can almost see him.

Or maybe it’s not Mini-motivation. Maybe it’s golf. I sucked Saturday and felt like a lazy bum Sunday, then played great (by current standards) yesterday and am full of piss and vinegar this morning. Yeah, that’s it … it’s the golf score, stupid. All it takes is a few long straight 2-irons down the middle, a few putts dropping (7 putts in the first 6 holes yesterday!), and life’s good. Back to work …

Tess & David’s Wedding

Our neighbors Tess and David got married on Saturday, at a beachfront park just a few blocks from home. It was a great time — a fun crowd, cool location (I’ve never been to a wedding where I could swim during the reception!), delicious food, and perfect weather.

A few of our friends teased us about our wedding being like a Nikon cult, but I think Tess and David’s wedding had even more high-end SLRs than our wedding did. What’s the world coming to?

Brad’s Birthday Party

We all went bowling at Acme Bowl over by Southcenter for Brad’s birthday party yesterday. Mom started out with two strikes, not bad for someone who has had both knees replaced in the last year. But Ken came on strong at the end and beat everyone. Van, surprisingly enough, has a bowling style all his own.

Moral Confusion and Bad Actors

Rummy really out-did himself this week. He gave a pep talk to the American Legion in Salt Lake City yesterday, and in so doing he pissed off the Democrats so much that some of them are actually going on the offensive for a change.

This line seems to be the one that ruffled many feathers: “Any kind of moral or intellectual confusion about who and what is right or wrong, can weaken the ability of free societies to persevere.”

Speaking of which, here’s a picture of Rummy with his buddy Saddam:

Reminds me of another thing Rummy had to say, which I’ve not seen called out in the media anywhere although you can find it in the complete transcript of yesterday’s speech:

“In every army, there are occasional bad actors, the ones who dominate the headlines today, who don’t live up to the standards of the oath and of our country.”

Indeed.

Google Analytics

If you have a blog or a web site, you should take a look at Google Analytics. It’s a free service for tracking the visitors to your site, and it’s easy to use and works great.

The basic concept is that you add a bit of Javascript to your home page, and that code logs the IP address of each visitor in a database. This data can be viewed through a dashboard-style web console, with many detailed reports available. I added the code yesterday, and in the first few hours I had 30 visitors (dazzling volume, I know) distributed among these locations:

I’ll post some more interesting charts after I collect more data. Not being an A-list blogger, that may take a while. I also want to check out DeepMetrix, a competitor to Google Analytics that was recently acquired by Microsoft.