Basketball, Board Games, Spam Greylisting

Lost our basketball game last week, bringing us down to 3-3. We beat this team before, and we should have won this time, but we just weren't shooting well (IMO).

I was re-gifted a board game called Evolution for Christmas, and I took it to a "game night" hosted by some friends last weekend. A couple people said it was their new favorite game, and it was enthusiastically called, "Game of the Night." Perfect re-gift!

After hearing a friend singing the praises of greylisting, I implemented it on my mail server. I've had great results so far. I've only received a handful of spam in the last few days, and spam assassin has caught most of those. The downside is that the first email you get from every legitimate sender is delayed for a while, but once the source re-sends it, the sending address is whitelisted and not delayed again. It was definitely worth the 5-10 minutes it took to set up.

Your Kung Fu Is Good

Kung Fu Grindhouse is their name, and watching bad kung fu movies is their (drinking) game. I was late in meeting up with T and M, so I missed the beginning of Eight Diagram Pole Fighter. I did catch all of Avenging Eagle, though. If I had to pick a favorite (bad kung fu movies aren't really my thing -- I was there for the social value), I suppose it would have been E.D.P.F. Part of the drinking game involved someone playing a gong every time you were supposed to drink, which got annoying after about the first ten *gongs*. Those playing the game were apparently supposed to drink, among other times, whenever someone died, which, in a non-kung fu movie, might be the equivalent of having to drink every time someone on screen completed a sentence.

Poverty Prevention Proselytizing

For Christmas, my family likes to avoid the typical conspicuous consumption that overtakes so many people that time of year. Instead, we either re-gift, make something, or donate to good causes in each other's name. I chose to make donations this year and thought I'd take the time to write about the organization I donated to, a Seattle-area non-profit called Unitus. I heard about them through Guy Kawasaki's post titled, "The Gift of Giving." Unitus is involved in the microfinance industry, but not in the way that most microfinance institutions (MFIs) are. Realizing that there were already many overlapping MFIs and wanting to maximize their own impact, the Unitus founders opted to help fund existing MFIs and help them grow into self-sustaining organizations, not reliant solely on donor funding as so many MFIs are. They estimate that their MFI partners were spending 80 percent of their time fundraising (!), and as a result of partnering with Unitus, they claim their MFI partners are growing (in terms of clients served) about eight times faster than the microfinance industry as a whole.

There's a lot more information about them on their site. If you're interested in getting involved in microfinance, you should check them out.

"Five Things About Me" Meme

I've apparently been "called out" by K to participate in some sort of "list 5 things most people don't know about you" meme. I'm not normally a meme sort of person, but I'll do half of this one. That is, I'll try to come up with a list of five things, but I won't call out anyone else =)

1. I have a perfectly good (albeit cheap and antique-looking) bookshelf that can hold all of my books, but it's been sitting there mostly empty for 6-12 months. All of my books are piled in stacks on the floor a few feet away.
2. I've been told that I'm related to Mother Goose, but Wikipedia says, "no specific writer has ever been identified with such a name." I'll have to ask the genealogists in my family what the deal is there.
3. I've never owned a television. I stopped watching it regularly when a teacher challenged our class to stop watching it for a week. I did, and the non-watching habit largely stuck. I don't normally participate in phone-based polls, but someone called me one time to poll me on my television watching habits, and I was oddly excited to participate and (legitimately) skew the numbers. To my dismay, none of the available answers even took into consideration that I might not watch TV. I tried answering all their questions with, "I don't have a TV, so I don't watch TV," but they kept saying I had to respond with one of their pre-set answers, so I was stuck having to say things like, "I watch 1-2 hours of TV a day" and "I have 1-13 TV channels available to me."
4. Growing up, I watched two of my friends get into a car accident that involved their car rolling a couple times and skidding upside down into a ditch. I stopped, ran up to the car (and it was dark out, so I couldn't see into the car), and kept yelling their names, but they didn't answer. For what felt like an eternity (but was probably only 30 seconds or so), before I heard movement in the car, I thought they were dead. They later said they heard me yelling but that it sounded like I was really far away.
5. This very minute, I'm tired and am going to bed. You probably could have guessed that, but you didn't know it, so my obligation has been fulfilled.

working from home, basketball, relaxing

Being able to work from home, where there are few distractions, and nearly finish a project I only started yesterday for work: good.

My team winning today's league basketball game with a shot as time expired: great.

A leisurely-paced walk home in the snow, after dark, on quiet side-streets; picking up two new books from the library; taking a warm shower, further warming up with a cup of hot chocolate, and generally relaxing: priceless.

As an side to my statement above about work, I started to see the potential benefit of having multiple monitors. I always thought virtual desktops were good enough, and I guess I still think they are when one's job consists of doing many small projects. But when you're coding, testing your code, referencing web pages, and manually querying databases as part of a single project, having to jump around to different virtual desktops (or worse, having all those windows on a single desktop) kind of stinks. I read an article recently about what the best bang for the buck is with respect to monitors, and it said three 21" monitors for around $1,000 was probably the best bet, as opposed to one bigger monitor (or even a 37" HDTV) for around the same price. I don't have the link handy, though, or I'd give it to you.

Leff mentioned that you could add feeds to the Blogger sidebar, which I didn't know. I thought about sharing items via Google Reader, but after some thought, I've decided to share things via del.icio.us. So, there's my new del.icio.us feed on the right-hand side.

Book: Softwar

[ Mini-rant: Amazon.com provides members of their Affiliate Program with the ability to create "Product Links," which consist of a picture of and link to an item on Amazon.com, the title, and the current price. Members then get a cut of any revenue generated from sales resulting from someone following that link. I'm not an Amazon affiliate, nor do I care to be. But why, oh why, do they not provide me with the ability to easily create a similar link? Earth to Amazon! Just like one of your affiliates, I want to drive traffic to your site. The only difference is, I want to let you keep the share of revenue you'd normally give to an affiliate. Without a "link to this item" button on all your product pages, you're making it harder for me to send people to your site. I have to manually create a link to a vanilla cover of the book that's the right size and link it back to amazon.com. I know I'm not the only one that does this; fix it! ]



I just finished reading Softwar, which is sort of an unofficial biography of Larry Ellison and Oracle, the software company he founded in 1977. It contained a lot of Larry's perspective on the history of his company (probably around 75-100 combined pages of sizable quotations from him), which I found to be pretty interesting. Larry was able to respond to the author's perspective with footnotes, which added nicely to the experience. He was very straight-forward in his comments about previous decisions he made and whether in retrospect he thinks they were right or wrong. He bet (what was probably) the entire future of his company, usually in the form of a complete re-write of their main product, on his vision of the state of the industry a number of times and came out ahead for it. It also covers some of his sailing experiences, including his involvement in the America's Cup and his experience sailing into the eye of a hurricane in the 1998 Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race.

Larry has a reputation of being a real jerk, but I came away from the book with a lot of respect for him. I think it's easy to confuse uncompromising determination and an almost infinite desire to win with being mean, and in this book, I thought he came off as being the former and not the latter. Overall, a good book.

January Volunteering

As I expected, my party crashing yesterday was acceptible. Not only that, but more of it was encouraged! I volunteered for Seattle Park and Recreation doing restoration work at Colman Park. Here's the back story, as it was told to me:

1. A judge buys a house on a hill overlooking Colman Park.
2. Judge starts draining his sewage down the hill into the park.
3. City figures this out and tells him to fix it.
4. Judge realizes he would have a great view of Lake Washington if only those darned park trees weren't in the way.
5. Judge tells his gardener to cut down the trees.
6. Gardener starts chopping trees down.
7. City comes back to make sure the judge isn't still draining his sewage into the park and sees the gardener out there doing his thing.
8. City sues judge.
9. Judge agrees to pay $500,000 to restore the park.
10. Judge tries to get his homeowners insurance to cover the cost, going as far as suing the insurance company after they rejected his claim. (Not sure how that all played out. Hopefully he didn't win.)

The audacity!

Anyway, it felt good to get out there and help. I plan on doing a lot more volunteering this year.

Party Crashing

Speaking of lists, one thing on my list for tomorrow is to try to crash a crazy party and get drunk off my ass. Whereby "crazy party" I mean "volunteer event," and whereby "get drunk off my ass" I mean "help out." The "try to crash" part is necessary because I didn't contact the organization ahead of time, but I might be able to just show up. We'll see.

Being Productive

Two steps required for "success" from a little story I read a while ago:

1. Every morning, write a list of the things that need to be done that day.
2. Do them.

It's an over-simplification, obviously, but it rang true for me. I always have a list of things I want to accomplish, but I've been a procrastinator for a long time. I have a habit of noticing a year later that I didn't do some of the things I had been wanting to do. For example, it took me years to go skydiving from when I first had the inclination to do so. It wasn't due to lack of time, either. I just wasn't prompt about taking the time to focus on that goal to make it happen. So, I've decided to try out a variation of the two steps above.

I'm not much of a morning person, so leaving myself to come up with a list of tasks while I'm still waking up wouldn't be a good idea. The approach I've recently started using is to come up with a list, before I go to bed, of things to get done the next day. I'm not going to be rigid about getting everything done; I've had days already where last-minute plans came up that consumed my night, leaving me with no time to finish my list. I don't see a problem with that; the raison d’être of this list idea is to not let a bunch of idle time pass where I'm not doing much of anything when there are things I want to be doing.

New Blog For A New Year

Okay, let's see if I can keep up the motivation to write in a blog with any regularity. I've tried a couple times before, but I always ended up dropping it. My experiment in motivation this time will be to use this blog as a barometer of what I'm doing with my life. If I do something I enjoy, I should write about it. If I'm not writing here often enough, that should mean I'm not doing things I enjoy often enough. That should encourage me to do more fun things, which should then provide material to write about. We'll see how this goes =)