Seveneves

In Neal Stephenson's new novel, Seveneaves, the moon mysteriously explodes. This conceit drives the rest of the novel, spanning 5000 years and 1100 pages -- first of all with the exodus of some 1500 humans from planet earth into LEO to escape the "hard rain" of the lunar debris, then to the terraforming of the earth after the debris ends.

The book is a fun read, at least the first part near present day. A lot of things are conveniently discarded, like how an even small group of humans could live in space without constant resupply from earth. As is discarded why the moon blew up to begin with.

The future part is pretty meh. Sure, humans have survived and thrived in space, but the massive space "bolos" capable of supporting whole cities and yet not repopulating earth... plus, in five thousand years we won't have exceeded modern computing technology, or propulsion?

A decent, if flawed and finally exhausting read.

San Francisco Trip

We went to San Fran for our 13th anniversary last weekend. We were trying to think of a quick trip we could take that's not too far, and we've been to Vegas a bunch of times... So we decided on San Fran.

We flew down on Friday afternoon. It's a pretty painless 2 - 2.5 hour flight, but unfortunately we got stuck circling the airport for an hour waiting for Obama to land in Air Force One. We got some good views of the bay and the city, though. 

We stayed at the Westin St Francis right downtown next to union square. The location was great, because almost everything is right there. The room they gave us was small and crappy, but after complaining the next morning, they upgraded us to a bigger room with a view.

There was lots of construction everywhere which made it harder to get around, but for the most part we were able to walk around pretty easily. Friday night we went shopping, stopped for drinks at a couple of places, and went for dinner at a small Italian place around the corner. 

The next morning, we stumbled out of bed, hit Starbucks and a diner around the corner for breakfast. After shopping and lunch, we headed to the pier for our Alcatraz tour.

The location sent us by the company was wrong, so we thought we could walk about 30 minutes to the pier at a leisurely rate... but it took us 30 minutes in the wrong direction! We had to sprint to catch a rickshaw, and still made it to the right pier late. Luckily, they still let us on the next boat across.

Alcatraz was awesome. Spooky, epic, moody... full of history. It was a lot more fun than I expected, with beautiful views on the island of the bay, complete with fog rolling in over the Golden Gate bridge. Being able to go into the cells and get a view of how small and cramped they were... and seeing the holes some inmates dug out with spoons and escaped (these tiny little openings!) was amazing.

We caught the boat back, and headed back to the hotel for an amazing dinner. Lobster pot pie -- a full lobster in a pot, with veggies and covered in a pastry topping, was amazing.  We didn't have reservations, so we ended up eating at the bar, which was fun.

Sunday we went to see the "painted ladies," which is a row of classical victorians popularized on the "full house" TV show. Lame. But the park was good, and we walked through some residential areas to get a feel for San Fran.

That night we went to Bourbon & Branch, a prohibition-style speakeasy that you needed to bang on a door and use a password to get in. Drinks were good, very dark inside, and when we exited, they let us out through a secret bookshelf door into an adjoining library! Very fun. We went back to the hotel for dinner (turned out to be one of the best restaurants in town) and crashed.

Monday morning we did some more shopping, and headed home! Missed the kids, and was happy to be home.

The good in San Fran: historic, good walking, good food.

The bad: downtown is a concrete jungle, poor service everywhere, very expensive.

The ugly: aggressive homeless everywhere, and the locals seemed to be very pissed off at tourists all the time.

Jupiter Ascending

Avoid. Very uneven movie with a totally stupid plot.

No amount of fx or stars could save this one. Disappointing. 

Three Kinds Of Days

After being promoted, I've realized that I have three kinds of days.

The first kind of day is the day I know from the start is going to be a shit show.

The second kind of day is the day I think is going to be good, and turns into a shit show.

The third kind of day is the one that I think is going to be a shit show, and turns out to be good.

Today's looking to be the third kind of day.

Regular morning. Up at 6AM, shower, shave, make my morning cappa, and off to work I go. I have an 8AM critical meeting, so I drove in.

Sometimes I'll drive half the way in and then jump on a little used bus I know about to avoid the parking fees and to give myself some email catchup time. But today, no time.

Well, into the meeting madness I go. Regular confusion with process going on, luckily I think I got it all out of the fire. Quick break for lunch, and then back at it for the afternoon meetings.

Important late afternoon meeting with my boss' boss, then home to see a buddy I haven't seen in a year, and then pack for San Fran - leaving tomorrow!

Whew.

Getting Ready for San Fran!

It should be a fun trip. Alcatraz, good food, and see the sights.

Coffee

Zach is amazing.

We found this in Zachs notebook... This is what he wrote when he couldn't sleep one night. 

Productivity Update

I'm always fascinated by ways to get stuff done, particularly at work. 

It's changed quite a bit since I've been in my current role, and moved even further away from 'hands on keyboard' work more to staying in the loop, collaborating, and building future visions.

One major change is ejecting my blackberry from my life. I picked up an iPhone 6, and it has radically changed how I work.

Tasks

Tasks now go 100% into Omnifocus 2. It's a pretty seamless thing with the iPhone, you can have it take over from the built in reminders app.

Omnifocus allows you to structure your tasks from many different perspectives -- there are 'contexts' which is essentially GTD speak for 'what do I have available?' My main contexts are '@Office,' which contains sub-contexts for @1-1 with my boss, @1-1 with my mentor, @my boss' leadership meetings, @my manager meetings, etc.

In this way, I can 'remind' myself to take specific actions at specific locations -- at my next team meeting, for example. Or just (increasingly infrequently) sitting at my desk. 

The point is to only be reminded of things you can do when you can actually do it.

You can also flag things that need to be done a specific date, and for specific projects.

For example, our upcoming San Fran trip is a project. It contains actions for @Office, @Home, and due on specific dates -- pack passports the day before @Home is one of them. Book our seats @Office the day before the flight is another.

You can also do geofencing to remind you when your GPS tells you something is close, but I generally avoid that.

Having these tasks sync seamlessly with my iPad, my macbook pro, and my iMac, and I'm pretty covered however I work.

Notes

I use Evernote religiously for notes. Meeting minutes, ideas for upcoming trips, scanned in insurance receipts, all that kind of stuff that GTD calls 'reference' material.

Works great with the iPhone and everywhere else I work. Got a pile of resumes to review, using scannable on the iPhone, and bam -- they're in Evernote and OCR'd to boot. Now I can review them wherever I happen to be, and search for them once they're filed away.

The great thing about Evernote is it actually works better the more you use it. Tagging gets smarter, searches get smarter, and it autosuggests other notes for you that are like the one you are in right now.

Email

Astoundingly, Microsoft bought a small app company and pumped out the really good Outlook app. It integrates together my work and gmail accounts seamlessly, works well with Siri, and actually does AD lookups on my corporate email so I can find everyone.

Having a 'focused' inbox that filters out spam for me is great, too.

SIRI

Siri is the bomb. Hold down the middle button, dictate your ask, and away she goes. Hands free note taking, adding reminders, sending texts or emails. Even asking what the weather is next week in San Fran, looking up map locations, playing the next song. 

Siri is one of those things that has openned up a whole new world now that I don't have to write complex emails on the little tap-tap touch keyboard. She doesn't always get it right, but she seems to learn, and mostly she works great.

Kobo

I bought Hiyat a kobo e-reader that she never used, gave it to Gabe, and he never used it, either. So I inherited it back. Buying books wirelessly is great, and it's great to be able to read in the dark and not bug Hiyat.

The really great thing is discovering the Kobo iOS app -- being able to read a page or two of my book in the Starbucks line for example, and it remembers your page in every device you're reading on -- and all of a sudden I'm reading a lot more.

Now, if only I could get Siri to dictate my book to me in the car...

Building Gabe's Bedroom

We've been spending a lot of time building out Gabe's bedroom in the basement. Trying to get it to a place where he'd not just be comfortable sleeping in the basement, but actually want to be there.

We painted it a cool grey color, with a feature wall designed by Hiyat with red and grey stripes. I loosely modeled it on Eddy Van Halen's guitar.

Putting our old bedroom tv down there, her old bedroom set. Custom ordered a light with retro edison bulbs... and getting him a Link tri-force bed.

Going to hang is snowboard up for decoration, and have him decorate with cool teen pictures of his own. Thinking video game stuff, basketball stuff, ski stuff.

Hope he enjoys it!