Back intact

My family returned to me last night, ending (once again) my bachelor days.  It wasn't a bad week without them - I worked all five weekdays (including the holiday), went to a cookout, had fun at the NASCAR race up in New Hampshire, and cleaned the house pretty well (considering).

With them back, we spent the day doing Family Stuff.  Breakfast together at IHOP, and then after we spent an hour or so together with the Globe, we went for a walk into town and even took time to go to the movies together (we saw Wall•E, which was terrific).  That represents two movies in one year for me (last month Jane and I went to see "You Don't Mess With The Zohan", also enjoyable, though not brilliant like Wall•E was).  It's a modern-day record.

Work is lined up to be slightly slow the next few days, but between iPhone 2.0 and a bunch of customer projects starting next week we're going to be really busy from here on in.

It's gonna be a long season...

Swept by the Rays. Ouch.

More seriously, this years' Sox are an odd case. Definitely a team in transition. There's a very good crop of starters coming aboard from the minors (Buchholz and Masterson), Beckett isn't quite up to his '07 form but still the best starter on the staff, and both Matsuzaka and Lester have made huge strides. Plus Wakefield is still Wakefield. They've upgraded at their backup catcher position, have the same infield as last year (for a change), and still have arguably the best closer in the game today. Plus this year we're finally getting a taste of what JD Drew can do - he was just player of the month for June.

Why are they in trouble, then? Well, first of all the injury bug. Dice-K missed a few starts, Bartolo Colon is on the DL now with back problems, and Beckett missed the first couple of weeks and isn't quite back to form. Combine that with Mike Lowell's stint on the injured list and the 6+ weeks that Ortiz will have missed by the time he comes back, and that's a lot of consistency gone. But there's more.

First of all, Lugo is a huge weak spot. He is hitting better right now than he did at this point last year, but at this point last year he was below the Mendoza Line. You can't suck more than that. Combine mediocre offense with horrid defense and he's a huge liability. You can take a weak-hitting shortstop if he is a vacuum in the field, but not when he just sucks.

The biggest problem this year though is the combination of a slumping Varitek (every year he has a longer offensive slump - this year he looks more overmatched than ever) and a middle relief group that has just been awful as a whole. Each one has had a good streak, but as a group they've been horrid. The best thing I can say about Mike Timlin is that he's rehabbing in the minors. Manny Delcarmen seemed like he was going to make The Leap this year, but he's regressed. Craig Hansen just may never quite get there. And Hideki Okajima seems to not have the command he did last year - he used to be able to hit spots with his fastball and use it to set up his offspeed stuff. He isn't doing it this time around.

The Sox have so much offensive firepower that they can't help but stay in the race (even assuming 0-for-3 perfomances every night from Varitek and Lugo), but I don't think we'll be spoiled with another Series this year. I hope to be proven wrong, though.

This is my life

I'm home working this week while Jane and David are off at the beach.  So that said, here's my swinging bachelor life today:

Leave my last work stop just about 5 in a raging thunderstorm.  Dash to the car, soaked through (in only about 50 meters' distance).  Drive to the market and buy some fish.  Cook dinner.  Do some remote work and catch up on e-mails.  Read paper, watch some TV.

I noticed a pesky fly that got into the house and was buzzing around.  But I didn't see him for a while.  I also noticed that the floor in my home office is kind of dirty.  As I sit down to check the news before bed, the fly zips by me a couple of times.

So I decide to multitask.  I have a Dyson vacuum, legendary for its power.  I go and get the vacuum, plug it in, and start cleaning my floor.  Right up until the fly settles for a moment on the outside of my wall lamp.

That hose pulled him in just like that.  Bang.  And I have a clean floor.  This is bachelor multitasking.

How did I do?

So WWDC has begun, the keynote is over, and we've got a slew of stuff. How did I do on my guesses?

iPhone 2.0 - yep, nailed that. It'll be called the iPhone 3g, and the pricing plans will change a little - along with more traditional carrier subsidies coming along. No more activation at home? Epic Fail. Simultaneous voice and data? Win.

iPhone software 2.0 - Win. Got that.

Mobile Me? - Got it, upgrade done, same price as .Mac.

10.6? Say hello to "Snow Leopard", due in "about a year". Minor improvements to Leopard (hence the name as a derivative), but smaller size, better performance, and more stability. Haven't seen yet if it's x86-only or not.

No new hardware, no new surprises.

The only place I seriously missed was timing - I expected the iPhone 2 to be available this week, but it will be in-stores on 7/11. And I wouldn't be surprised to see a minor hardware tweak or two tomorrow (Tuesday is traditionally New Hardware Day at Apple). The other alternative is that they may do weekly updates of products from now until the week of 7/11 in order to keep the drums beating.

WWDC predictions

Although Blogger lets me change times, this is actually being posted at about 10:30 EDT on June 9th - 2.5 hours before the Jobs keynote at WWDC. I wrote this for a client last week and I figured now I'd share it:

Here's what I'm expecting to see announced in order of likelihood:

iPhone hardware 2.0: 100%. New phone, with 3g and GPS support, maybe video calling as well. I think they will add AT&T's OTA TV service as well.

iPhone software 2.0: 100%. Same software as on new phone, but minus the features that depend on new hardware (like video, GPS, and 3g radio stuff).

.Mac goes away, replaced with "Mobile Me" service: 98%. It'll support Exchange-like features for regular users and have new stuff over .Mac. It'll probably be announced and then live in a week or so, when 10.5.4 is released.

Preannounce Mac OS 10.6, shipping sometime next year: 75%. I think they'll announce it since Leopard's now about 9 months old. They'll try and ship it in January, and it'll be Intel-only.

New hardware of any sort: 50%. I don't think there's any major stuff from Intel that warrants an announcement next week. Maybe the mini will get an update, but I think that isn't worth announcing at the conference.

"One more thing..." - 50%. Steve likes to pull surprises out of his sleeve. But he does it more often at MacWorld than at WWDC.

iPhone 2 expectations

I'm really amused by all the breathless predictions and anticipation regarding iPhone 2.0, which will be announced and ship in the next couple of weeks.  It's not like the first one, where all we had was a Jobs demo, with details trickling out over the last few weeks to release in a controlled fashion.  This one will have very few surprises at all, and if there are any I expect them to be at the margins.

We already know almost all the details of the software - betas have been coming out fast and furious and they all get dissected as they hit.  We know that ActiveSync support is included.  We also know that .Mac services will be souped up (and maybe renamed) to support OTA sync as well.  GPS support is built into the software now, geotagging is now an option for pictures, and we can do a selective search for contacts.  I assume that notes will now sync to the Mac as well - this was a "left-out" feature in 1.0.

The hardware is almost as well-known.  The form factor will be similar to the existing model.  It may support video in from the screen side (for videoconferencing), we don't know that for sure yet.  We know it'll support AT&T's 3G network in the US, and it'll work overseas as well.  Apple is now doing lots of low-key announcements.  The new iPhone will be available pretty much worldwide (except for Russia and China at this writing).  Since GPS support is built into the new software, expect it in the new hardware.  And the look will change some, even though the form factor stays the same - maybe a plastic shell on a steel frame to save weight (the battery will probably be a little bigger).

The only real question extends to the pricing model.  Will the device be sold the same way the old one was, or will we get carrier subsidies?  Unfortunately, that's not the kind of question that get the hearts of Mac fanbois racing.

Another batch o' randomness

Quick thoughts:

David turned 6 last weekend. We took him to the same Mexican restaurant we've been spending all the birthdays at lately and made him wear the sombrero. He didn't like that. But we gave him a Nintendo DS Lite as a birthday gift, which made it all cool.

Work is a little more manageable right now. I still haven't hired a new person yet, but I've talked to a couple of possibilities. We'll see where that takes us.

I really wish I could vote for John McCain. Unfortunately, I just want to see the religious wing of the Republican party crushed so badly that I can't even think too hard about it. So I went with Obama - I decided on him about 2 days before the Mass. primary and I'm willing to overlook the areas where I differ with him. Why? Because he's not a Republican. Once the religious right collapses and we return to the days of a relatively moderate, secular Republican party I could come back someday. I'd rather be a conservative than a liberal, but I'd rather be a liberal than what passes for conservative nowadays.

I put a clear 3M skin on my MacBook Pro's wristrest. Nice. Now I don't have to worry so much about the wristwatch scuffing effect.

Over the last two months I have lost seven pounds.

Which doesn't make much of a dent in the basic problem. But if I can make that pace for a few more months, I'll be in a good place by the end of the year. We'll see.

The problem I had with a mail server in mid-April is now solved forever. I worked a few hours on Monday and deployed a permanent server (4 cores of Xeon goodness) to handle the system. It isn't even breaking a sweat now. Meanwhile, I got to build my first high-end system in several years to do the temporary fix, and now I'm going to stick a decent video card in it, bring it back home, and play games on it. A win-win.

Leopard 10.5.3 was released yesterday. Which means it's now finally pretty much ready for prime time.

If only

If I could write just a tenth as well as Malcolm Gladwell does, I would be making a fabulous living exploring all the oddities of human behavior. I could dive from subject to subject and write bestselling books about the ability of humans to make snap decisions, and to judge trends. I could do that because even a tenth of Gladwell is still pretty damned good.

But I'm bringing five percent, max. So I settle for fixing computers and running networks. It's not a bad consolation prize, though. Even at five percent I still write fairly well. I just pretty much have to keep it confined to this boring old blog and the occasional tech publication.

Oh well.

Another big day

Jane's parents sent us money to buy David a bicycle for his upcoming birthday - so I took him yesterday to the local bike shop to get one.  Today, he rode it all the way to the park and around it.  With training wheels.  But that won't last long, I suspect.

He named it "Thunder".

Sorry I've left folks hanging

Sunday's as good a time as any to catch up...

So here's what's going on. I had an employee leave on tax day, in the middle of a project. No warning. It left me behind the proverbial 8-ball. So I have been doing extra work to try and catch up, and repair the damage done by all the things that were hanging. It's caused some problems with customers (who have generally been very understanding, though), and it's left me in a position where I have to really think a lot about the direction this company of mine is headed in.

So far, I've been growing fairly organically. As the business has grown, I've added people to help. I start them as part-time for 3 months or so, and then move them to full-time if their skills and the business are a good match. It worked OK, and minimized risk. But here's the problem with it. I am the best employee (overall) I can afford to buy. Each of the people I have here possess skills, and in some cases they can do individual things better than me (good example - Joey is much better than me at Daylite database management). But I'm the best rounded of them, and I also know the most about things like servers and cross-platform integration. I also am the face of the company (it's got my name on it), and so I have to go get most of the business. Besides those, I'm the manager of everyone else's time and resources. Wearing all three of those hats is tough. And I feel like I've lost track of too many of the balls I need to keep in the air of late, especially this last month.

So here's what I'm trying to do for now. First of all, I'm trying to shut the doors as much as I can to new business for a while. I'm overwhelmed with what I have now overall. I am looking for a part-time person to help on the PC side and replace the one I lost. They will need to be fairly advanced in skills. I have to be able to trust them to do a lot of work and it'll take a while for me to get to that level of comfort.

Second, I'm cross-training the people I have as best as I can. I need to make folks better and more interchangable.

Third, I'm now putting more of my time into seeing the projects in-person and doing the work myself. If I'm not out getting business I can spend more of my time taking care of what I already have.

Fourth, I'm getting more aggressive on expenses. I figure if I can cut some of my other costs down internally, I can make my exisisting price structures work better and withstand any slump in business that comes from not recruiting as much new work now. If existing clients slow down I want to be ready for that eventuality.

Fifth, and most importantly, I'm re-evaluating everything. I can't work on my own, because then I get zero time to myself and very finite earnings. I can't grow and run a big organization because I don't have the patience or the skills to do so - and I want to keep doing engineering work myself. But maybe I don't have to be on my own. Maybe I could take on a partner, or join up with another company, or something of the sort. Maybe I could look at my fee structures and raise prices or go to more project-based work. Maybe I could tinker with the business model. I don't know for sure at the moment, and chances are I'll keep on this way but just get things in order. But I'll look at everything. Priority one is to keep the customers happy. If I can do that all else should follow.

Home has been better. David had a birthday party today, at the Beverly Y's Sterling Center where they do swimming and gymnastics. 2 years ago, one of his preschool friends had a party there and David went and had fun, but was nervous about things. This year was a complete 180º from the other party. What a difference 2 years make between a 4-year-old and a 6-year-old. He was experimenting with everything, vaulting, trying equipment, and doing flips on the mat. And almost all the kids were like that. A pleasure to watch (although nerve-wracking at times!). We gave his friend Olivia a ride to the party with us, and she really enjoyed going with us.

After a years' worth of nagging from Jane to get a new camcorder (ours broke a couple of years ago), I went out this morning and bought one. I got a little $170 model from RadioShack that takes 720p video. Pretty spiffy for the money, though it is solid-state only (I put an 8GB SDHC card in it - good for 4.5 hours of record time), uses a CMOS sensor, and has a relatively cheapie lens (digital zoom only). On the other hand, it's tiny, fits in a pocket, and is Good Enough for things like parties and weekend trips. If I shot tons of video I'd want something else, but it's great for what we need. The files are basic QuickTime format, and it mouts as a USB drive on the desktop. They include Windows software for those of you cursed with no Mac.

Final note for now: Kyle Busch is a very talented race car driver. He's also a menace. Little E wasn't the first person he punted and probably won't be the last.