Thither and Yon

What has a middle-aged (ouch!), upper middle class, techno-geek father of two young daughters been up to, you might ask? Well, hold on to your keyboards, because whether you like it or not, I'm gonna tell you:

Mostly, I've been working, like most of us. Luckily, I love my job, and I say that even though I know no one in my company reads this blog (heck, practically no one reads it period). I always counted myself as blessed to have stumbled (literally) upon a career choice, computer programming, that I would do for free. I do it in my spare time, I did it when I had no job, and I will be doing it until they pry the keyboard from my cold, dead hands. And, even better, I get paid a pretty good chunk of money for doing it.

I've been programming now since I dropped out of RPI in 1979. I was working for a friend of ours, doing roofing, on the roof of another friend who knew I was interested in computers. My main qualifications for the job was that I knew what a keyboard looked like. I had tinkered some with hand made computers in high school (built a counting 8008 "computer"), and was in the middle of a FORTRAN course in my sophomore year when I dropped out. And that's it. But he took me in for an interview, and this being the height of demand for programmers, I somehow got the job. I'll never forget riding home with Gary and him being embarrassed to offer me a job for what he thought was the paltry sum of US$12,000 a year, while to me, making minimum wage luggin 80lb packs of roofing shingles up tall ladders, it sounded like more money than I could ever spend. And I got to hack around with one of the earliest 32 bit computers with another neophyte and it's been a bonanza ever since.

My current job is for inSORS Integrated Communications. We do "high end" video conferencing and collaboration software. By "high end" I mean we sell only to Fortune 1000 companies, concentrating our efforts as a small privately held company on the most profitable sources. So I get to work on some cool video and audio technologies, with some great people, from home - how neat is that? I've been working from home for ten years or so, and I don't think I could ever go back to commuting. I work on lots of different projects, which is good for someone with my personality, as I don't get stuck on one thing and, being easily bored, get into trouble. I'm constantly jumping from task to task, keeping me hopping, which I also love.

The other major effort this time of year is soccer. I coach the co-ed Under-6 Stars and my daughter Adrienne, while I'm assistant coach for the girls Under-8 Galaxy and my daughter Rhiannon. Soccer was my sport in high school and, although I haven't played it competitively in years, I love to coach these kids. But it does use up four days a week - Saturday morning game for the Galaxy, Sunday afternoon "practice" for the Stars, Monday evening practice for the Galaxy and Wednesday evening games for the Stars. I figure I'm going to be at all of these anyway, so I might as well be involved with the coaching.

Working outside around the house is also a big thing this time of year. Cleaning up from winter, getting the lawn back into shape and putting in flowers is a major effort in the spring. While I don't use any pesticides on the lawn, I do put down fertilizer and seed it; I'm not one of the "natural" types, as we like to use our lawn too much. I think I might get one of those push rotary mowers this year, for the economy, ecology and exercise.

I've been reading before bed at a pretty good rate. I will be posting a reading update soon. Nothing too special so far though.

Another favorite activity is watching movies. I have a blog called Incredible Brightness of Seeing that is supposed to report on my movie watching, but it's been pretty quiet there. I have been watching some movies and will report on those too. Some recent viewings include Stray Dog(a little boring, but the commentary track is great), Little Black Book (okay, with an amazingly cute Brittany Murphy), and Crash (the recent one - okay, but I felt too manipulated).

I've also been busy writing two new biographies for the next project by the Boston SABR chapter. I did a short one on Juan Beniquez for the 75: The Red Sox Team that Saved Baseball book. It wasn't a stellar effort really, so I was glad to get another chance. The new book will be on the '67 Impossible Dream Red Sox team, in time for the 40^th anniversary. I was originally going to do the Dick Williams bio, but I think they ended up giving this important bio to someone more experienced. So my main bio is on Don Demeter and for this one I think I did a pretty good job. I worked much harder at it and did more research. I think it came out pretty well, although I still have a couple more things I'd like to do on it: a phone interview with Mr. Demeter (we've played telephone tag for a couple of weeks now) and some research at the Boston Public Library, as the online archives for both Boston papers are completely lacking for the '67 season.

I also took on the task of finishing up the Ken Brett biography. Someone else did most of the early work, including writing up a few pages on it. So I'm going to try and finish it up. He was the youngest pitcher at that time to appear in a World Series (19 years old) and also holds the record for most consecutive games with a home run for a pitcher at four (he said it should have been five, but an ump blew a call and said an HR was just a double).

And finally, I play computer games. More than just our usual Wednesday evening cocktails and computer games. I'm just an inveterate player of computer games. Mostly, I played Day of Defeat, an online first person shooter set in World War II. I'm a member of the 95th Rifles Clan, which is a first for me. It's a good group of players, who run a clean, safe and hack-free set of servers. It's nice because you can just pop in, play for 10 minutes or 10 hours, and it doesn't take any real thought. I like to play a few rounds at lunch time. I even wrote a poem for it for The Game Chair, a computer game review and notes site I do the odd bit of writing. You can find this masterpiece here: Ode To Online Mayhem. I'm supposed to be writing a followup Progressive Review on Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, but I'm far behind on that commitment - gee, I wonder why?

I've also been playing the hottest new game in a while, The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. It is a single player CRPG, in a vast world with spectacular graphics. I've played for a number of hours. Heck, I even have a blog where I'm writing up my adventures : From Here To Oblivion. It's been kinda quiet there, although I have been playing it some. I've run out of steam a little, which often happens with me in computer games. I'll play for a bit, have a great time, but get a little bored and move on to the next game. That's why Comcast Games on Demand is so cool for me - a pretty big library of computer games I can play whenever I want. Admittedly, they are trailing edge games, but it isn't a big drawback to me. I wrote up a short article comparing some of the online game providers for The Game Chair here: Games Without CDs.

In many ways, the preceding paragraphs show my problem - I get spread too thin, and don't concentrate on any one thing. You might say a jack of all trades, master of none, and you wouldn't be too far from the truth.