Today after work I ran around Discovery Park – just about 3 miles door-to-door, but the magic is all within a quarter-mile stretch along the bluff, where you can look out 180 degrees, from West Seattle to Indianola.  There must have been about a dozen people just standing and staring out to Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains, watching the sun about to set and letting the beauty soak in.

A metaphor for my day?  I had a good Monday by any reckoning.  I guess I’m getting much better at compartmentalizing and/or taking conscious control over my perspective and thoughts, because I felt good today.  The great weekend was part of it – I had a really good weekend – but the day just seemed to slip in, all stealthy, and infect me with feel-good vibes.

This is even though I didn’t win the Super Bowl pool at work.  I ended up getting crappy numbers in the draw – twos and sixes and such.  Who can win with numbers like that???

For the second time in the last week, I’ve been approached out of the blue to have a meeting re: Crowdify.  Strange, but very welcome.  If I can find some time I’m going to release version 2 of the website any day now.  Then – sales.  Sell, sell, sell.   Position the service as something that will solve tangible problems that brand managers and marketers have.  Emphasize the uniqueness of the data, and back it up with case studies from representative brands.  I think 2010 is going to be a big year.

What else?  Looking forward to a couple meetups and tech/networking events.  Tomorrow and Wednesday is the Agile Open Northwest conference, this time held at the Seattle Center, and I’ll be able to attend about half the sessions.  I’m going to present – on what, I’m not sure, but I have until tomorrow morning to text one of my team with the topic so they can put it up on the board tomorrow.  Tomorrow night is Founder Dating, but I’m definitely sure I won’t be able to attend.  I’m not even sure I’ll be able to get away for soccer tomorrow night.

Had a nice lunch today with an old friend and savored some delicious sushi.  I tried some fatty amberjack that was OMG-melt-in-your-mouth wonderful.  Catching up is always nice, and I always come away from a good lunch like that thinking I need to do a better job of keeping up with people.

Not sure if I’ll be able to attend this weeks’ Seattle Tech Startups meeting.  The topic – TechStars – is one that is probably going to draw a big crowd, and I’m sure the conversations at the Big Time after the meeting will continue late.  I’m meeting a friend in Bellevue earlier that evening and am not sure if I’ll be back in time.

Here’s to good friends; old, new, and yet-to-be.

Hope you’re having a good evening.

From an article about a Katie Couric photo shoot for Harper’s Bazaar:

Couric calls herself a joyful person. "I mean, hello? Yes. I am. I am! And unashamed that I’m not cynical or dark or ironic."

I’ve never been the world’s biggest Couric fan, but her Sarah Palin interview from late 2008 cracked the ice, and now I find she’s an irrepressibly joyful person and I’m all agog and giggly and aw-shucks and toe-twistingly blushing over The Perky One.

I still won’t watch CBS Evening News, or any other network news show for that matter, because I loathe lowest-common-denominator sensationalism that deals almost exclusively with violence or hate or pain or anger or catastrophe or extremism, but the producers have the control over that stuff.

It’s been a good couple days.  My team completed the iteration in style, finishing all our commitments and making headway on some important analysis that put us in a good place during upcoming iterations.  I have a good team, and I am very lucky to work with them.

Gratitude is back on my mind again today – a random blog post elsewhere talked about it.  I ask myself am I expressing gratitude as much as I could? I don’t know, I guess that’s a never-ending question.  Plenty of people are deserving of my gratitude.  Thinking about it, I can think of times each day for the past few days where I’ve made special mention of someone who has done something nice or what have you.  Is it becoming second nature?  Would a friend describe me as someone who expresses well-deserved gratitude?  I hope so.

I’ve been doing some deep-dive exploration of PowerShell’s WMI provider and am thinking about adding yet more to my plate by doing a short series of blog posts for the smart-but-new-to-PowerShell developer about how to use WMI.  It’s powerful stuff.  And I’m guessing that those kind of posts will be hugely popular for the right search engine terms, because the current documentation is pretty thin.

Two people have told me that they felt “stalker-ish” by going to my blog to find out more about me.  I have to laugh – I put so much out there, that if I had any stalkers, they’d basically be able to find out anything they want, and know exactly where I go, almost all the time.  There is however, a part of me that occasionally wishes I could be even MORE open, MORE transparent, MORE clear – but there are some topics that are still taboo in this era where we expose almost everything.  Not to mention that if I write about it, it becomes more real, and sometimes I just want to forget, to move on, to seek out new worlds, to boldly go where no man has gone before…sorry, I digressed into a Star Trek moment there.  But writing-as-catharsis has a counterargument, writing-as-disguising-reality, and I don’t want to breathe life into something that’s bothering me by worrying it to death on these pages.  Maybe I’m bothered for no good reason, or I’m properly bothered and the appropriate response is just to ignore it and move on.  Blogging about it would just give it legs.

Which brings me to another recently reoccurring topic, Other People’s Comments.  I’m on much better terms today with a couple things that were said that hurt my feelings than I was, say, a week ago.  Stuff gets said.  Deal.  It helps when you realize that no malice was intended.

Big night of coding tomorrow night – wonder what coffee shop I’ll be at.  Probably Zoka, unless a better idea presents itself.  Then more work this weekend, intermixed with some time with the kids and (maybe) watching the Super Bowl.  Maybe I’ll look around for a Super Bowl party that a friend is already throwing and bring some chips and beer and Drew Brees jokes.

Wow, another novel!  Yay me. Thank you for reading.