Whew.  Yesterday was a busy day.  It started before dawn, at Zoka, working on the laptop.  I’m trying to finish this mini-project this weekend and except for pushing the bits out to a server I think that I’m done.  That feels good.

Then a great coffee meetup.  I really enjoy meeting new people and getting to know them in real life, especially tweeps.  Zoka was so busy that the coffee meetup ended up being sans coffee, but I still had a really enjoyable conversation with a potential new friend.

Then, a walk around Greenlake with one of my oldest friends (in duration, not age!) – and even thought we got rained on, it was, as always, a great talk.    Ran into my friends Marina and Nathan, who were walking around the opposite way.  Then a nap.  Then some FA Cup soccer – the Southampton / Portsmouth derby, which was quite the exciting game.  More coding.  Then to the gym, where I erupted in a frenzy of I-haven’t-worked-out-in-four-days energy.  I’m pleasantly sore this morning, which is yet another nice feeling.

Last night I went to a Seattle 2.0 party, ostensibly a going away party for Twilio’s Director of Marketing, Danielle Morrill, even though she’s effectively already left Seattle for San Francisco already.  It was a low-key affair at Vessel, which is a hip and aggressively trendy place that serves extremely good-looking drinks.  I was surprised by two things: 1) They didn’t have any beer on tap.  Is that really “full bar”?  2) They didn’t have any non-alcoholic beers; one of our group asked and was denied.  Apparently I’m not the only one that has had their eyebrows raised by this place.  Anyway, it was nice to hang out for a few hours and meet Jen Cabala of the SMC board, and get to know her a bit.

I’m excited to get back on the blogging wagon at Seattle 2.0 and contribute some new ideas that we can put into place.

Overall?  Feeling a little burnt out.  You know the feeling; like you’d like to prop your feet up in front of the fire, put on a movie, and veg out for a couple days.  Tomorrow’s a holiday, so maybe I’ll try to recover some of that feeling before going back to work on Tuesday.

Happy Valentine’s Day, wherever you are!

I’m sitting at Zoka early on a Saturday morning, doing some coding, drinking some coffee, and enjoying the moment.  It’s been a very odd week, lots of disruptions to my usual rhythms, and it’s nice to get back to a treasured marker, this early morning Zoka time, and reflect.

This week Winnie, my 8-year-old Bouvier, went in for an emergency splenectomy.  The veterinarian removed an 8.8-pound tumor.  Amazing.  She has a long, ugly, 40cm scar on her stomach.  She also has to wear a cone (the “cone of shame”) so she won’t pull out her stitches.  I won’t find out until early next week when the lab results get back whether or not the tumor was malignant or benign, and thus, whether or not my time left with her is measured in weeks or years.  I won’t tell you what the surgery cost to save you from choking.  It was a lot, however.

I’ve been super busy in other areas.  I’ve got a couple projects I’m working on, and truthfully, right now, it helps to be busy.  A new project involving Twilio’s state-of-the-art telephony API may be right around the corner.  And of course I’m always trying to figure out how to find time to push Crowdify forward.  I’ve had a lot of interest recently in Crowdify – a little odd, to maintain the theme of the post – but it’s nice.  My goals is to find and keep a little momentum going.

Terrible news from the Olympics, where the death of the Georgian luge athlete Nodar Kumaritashvili saddened the world even before the games begin.  At least he probably didn’t feel a thing.  The big news from last night’s opening ceremony was probably the pants worn by the small Azerbaijani contingent – spectacular and colorful.  Oh, and there was some sort of snafu with the cauldron.  No big deal IMHO.

This week I attended some of the 2010 Agile Open Northwest conference and forgot to mention one thing: Alan Shalloway, the CEO of Net Objectives, was super helpful and knowledgeable.  In a couple sessions, particularly one on Kanban, he chimed in and really helped me and the rest of the group understand some of the thorny, subtle details.  Thank you Alan.

Also odd is that I haven’t exercised since Monday.  Ye gods!  I’ve been feeling a lot more stressed than usual and, well, that negative streak ends today.  I’m going to the gym come hell or high water or the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Hope you’re having a good day and hope you have a great weekend!

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.

What mushrooms was I eating yesterday when I wrote that the weather would look good today for my planned 50-mile bike ride?  It’s raining and cold.  Brr.  I’ll see if tomorrow looks any better, but today is definitely a gym day.

So for the morning, I’m camped out at Zoka with the laptop and the White Stripes and wishing that they had a fireplace.  I have a feeling today might be very productive, despite last night’s fun at the Seattle Startup Drinks event at the Two Bells Tavern.  I may blog a TON.  Feeling the old itchy fingers that I haven’t felt in a long while.  I just hope I keep the #wahbulance emo to a minimum, while still letting the authentic me shine through.  Because I know you haven’t gotten enough of me yet.

By the way, my blog traffic numbers are seeing record highs lately – what that’s about, I really have no idea, but thanks for reading!

I wonder what an unbiased observer (if such a thing truly exists in our Heisenbergian world) would make of my day.  Feast or famine?  Uplifting story of redemption, or cruel tale of regret and defeat?  Actually, none of the above – just another day of banal desperation masquerading as something else.

It started out promisingly, with an early trip to Zoka to do some coding and deploying and such.  This noble effort, planned so painstakingly in the mind of our hero – that’s me, btw – ended in looping, giant crop-circles of FAIL, owing to some truly wacky architectural decisions made by a predecessor.  At the moment I’m attempting – for I think the fourth time – to download a 4GB database extract that *should* allow me to circumvent some of the problems and get a working system established completely locally.  Right now, when I hit F5, I connect to a French foreign-ministry database, the mobile phone of a Nigerian 419 scammer, and a penguin-habitat monitor that sends binary-encoded environmental data via dialup modem.  It’s a mess.

Next?  A nice interlude – I introduced myself to, and chatted with, a fellow Zokan, a gardener and former rower, a new transplant from Rhode Island by way of Cincinnati.  I was told that I was “friendly for a native Seattleite,” which I took as a big compliment.  I’ve heard that we Seattleites can be polite but standoffish, so it’s nice to put another (small) crack in that stereotype.  I left a business card and hope to possibly catch up for coffee again.

More work chasing my tail, then I admitted defeat for the afternoon and went for a five-mile run at the gym.  I’m scheduled to race in a 5K next Saturday morning, so it’s nice to know that the distance is easily manageable.

Then, home: a typical crisis and catastrophe and sturm und drang and drama and fecklessness in the face of serious circumstances.  I’m tired.  That’s all I have to say about that.

Dinner out with the kids at Serendipity; now I’m waiting for that huge download to finish so I can continue my efforts on this side project.  I won’t finish until tomorrow, and based on how today went, I’m not that confident about saying that.  I’ll do what I can and give my best and over-communicate and be responsible. In the meantime I read through the most recent New Yorker and learned more about Gaza, Ayn Rand, America’s violent exceptionalism, and a tepid but funny review of “Men Who Stare At Goats” by Anthony Lane.  I’m about to pick up a thin volume by Heidegger called “Poetry, Language, and Thought” and am looking forward to more passages like this:

How could cheerfulness stream through us if we wanted to avoid sadness?
Pain gives of its healing power where we least expect it.

Tomorrow AM, weather permitting, I’m taking the kids out for a play date with a friend and his kids.  I’m looking forward to that.  I hope it doesn’t rain.  I’ll take that last sentence as a metaphor for my life right now.  I hope it doesn’t rain.

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

– Marianne Williamson

Oh. Em. Gee.  That’s how I’d describe this morning’s bike ride – a 56-miler, if MapMyRide.com’s numbers are accurate.  But it wasn’t the distance – it was the wind, the rain, the sleet, the GODDAMN HAILSTONES – that made it an epic.  And I had the time of my life.

Let’s see – planning began Thursday when I started looking at maps.  Online maps suck, so route-planning was a little haphazard, but I knew generally the twists and turns I needed to take to get to my destination. Friday, I went to REI and got a beanie and some booties.  They saved my life today, so a big “thank you” to the REI folks and the Pearl Izumi corporation.

I took off just after the sun broke over the Cascades, heading more or less directly into the teeth of the prevailing wind, and realized that hey, I’m actually pretty goddamn fit!  I was cruising along just great.  The rains started in about 3 or 4 miles into my trip, and they were bursty, short-lived affairs until I got near my destination, at which point the skies opened up and Zeus himself sent down torrential rains that, had I been riding with my mouth open, most assuredly would have drowned me.  Hailstones, traveling horizontally in front of a 25 mph headwind, bounced off my biking glasses.  The wind was so strong that it made music in my spokes, I shit you not.  But I was loving it, eating it up, enjoying myself immensely.

“Fuck me?” I yelled at the sky.  “No, FUCK YOU!!!!” and I mentally shook my fist and laughed.

I was sopping wet, cold, and yet exhilarated.  My legs pounded up and down, piston-like, and my thighs felt like the top two finishers in the Breeder’s Cup – muscled and endlessly enduring.  It is so fun to be fit.  I’m never letting myself get out of shape again in my life.  And what’s even better is I know how much fitter I can get – Marathon? sure.  Adventure race?  Of course.  Ironman?  Why the hell not?

At my turnaround point, I slurped down a hot cup of coffee and a slice of lemon bread (for the energy ) and headed back.  At several points I rode through puddles that were deeper than my crank, and every down-stroke would submerge my foot in water.  Once, I skidded on a rail and crashed, opening a gash on my knee and acquiring a pretty good field of strawberries on my left hip.  No matter.  I’m tough.

Time out: 2:15.  Time back: 1:45, thanks to the wind.  I got home, revived my by-now-frozen toes in a hot bath, tried to nap but couldn’t.  Too much running through my head to sleep right now.  I’m at Zoka, working for the rest of the evening on some Ajax/Javascript/C# code for a project I’ve been working on for a couple weeks.  It’s crowded as hell.  I’m happy, proud, and tired.  This promises to be an adventuresome, unpredictable, potentially game-changing week for me regarding some personal matters, so I’m restless and not a little anxious.  We’ll see how it plays out.  Correction: we’ll see how I play it.  Fortune to the bold, happiness to the brave, peace to the wise: wish me the capability to be all three this week.

I would ride five hundred miles
and I would ride five hundred more
just to be the man who’d ride a thousand miles
to fall down at your door

– The Proclaimers, paraphrased

About a month ago, Zoka opened a new store in Kirkland, right at the junction of Central Way and Lake Street. The new Zoka in Kirkland shares a name and a coffee heritage with the two Zoka stores in Seattle, but the interior designer obviously has been born with, or acquired, an “Eastside aesthetic” because the store looks nothing like its Seattle counterparts.

Lots of stainless steel, tile, dimmed light fixtures, and black leather.  They have this awesome hardwood table right in the middle of the lobby – it looks like it was cut out of a single huge tree, but it’s actually four pieces, joined together.  I like the communal aspect of the seating – it’s similar to the large wooden table at the University Zoka store.  Not that I’m up on design lingo, but I might say that the interior exhibits a sort of Asian-Northwest fusion.

How is the coffee?  I drink cappuccinos, which tend to be very sensitive to brewing problems, and my palate can’t detect any difference from the excellent stores across the lake. And, unlike some other coffee shops that I frequent, the baristas at Zoka are all very consistent and it’s difficult to tell one’s output from another’s.

They also have this interesting thing called a “pourover bar” – it’s how they make all their drip coffees at this Zoka.  According to the barista, it results in a cleaner, more full-bodied cup.

Their food selection is similar to, but much more limited than, the Seattle stores.  Whether that’s by design or accident, you won’t see all the awesome selection of pastries that you might be used to.  Since I’m off pastries for a while, I wasn’t too put out.

A few notes for the laptop warrior:

• Outlets are few and far between.  Directly beneath the large wooden table are some floor outlets, but I can’t find a single wall outlet anywhere.
• The WiFi network appears to be adequate, even though I laugh that they misspelled “Kirkland” in their network name.

You can see the full set of photos of the interior by viewing my Whrrl story.

From an undated(*) “Best of Seattle” roundup on the Seattle Weekly website comes this shout-out to Zoka:

BEST COFFEEHOUSE: Zoka Five reasons why it’s our favorite: Great espresso drinks, beautifully roasted single-estate coffees, rarely a wait for a table, nonstop free wi-fi, and most important, no fucking attitude. 2200 N. 56th St., 545-4277, and 2901 N.E. Blakeley St., 527-0990; zokacoffee.com.

Of course, this immediately blew the mind of every coffee nut in Seattle, as we all have our own favorites.  Mine just happens to be Zoka, but I wouldn’t have complained too much about any of about a half-dozen worthy candidates.

I found this while researching whether or not the new Zoka store in Kirkland is open yet.  I found this Seattle Times article by Melissa Allison that indicates that Zoka Kirkland opened last Wednesday, the 5th of August, so I’m definitely going to head out there tomorrow morning for a little coffee and coding.  By the way, for coffee lovers, you might consider following Melissa’s Twitter account CoffeeCity; she publishes local coffee-related news on a pretty consistent basis, and from what I’ve seen so far, it’s relevant, interesting, and not spammy.

(*) I mean, come on guys, you’re a FUCKING NEWSPAPER.  Put a dateline on your shit.

My twitterfriend Hans recently asked:

Is it true that “doing the right thing” may not be as good in the short-term but is usually the right decision for the long-term? What about in business?

The answer is unequivocally yes, yes, YES!

Here’s a case in point: I spend a lot of time at Zoka Coffee Roaster & Tea Co. The Greenlake location is my usual haunt, but this morning I came to the University location to meet a coworker. At UZ, there’s this big sign above the dish bucket:

I’m saddened by this. The people at Zoka have been the friendliest coffee-shop crowd I’ve ever known, which is part of the reason why I spend so much time there. (The excellent coffee and free Wi-Fi are the other reasons). But this sign would drive Seth Godin crazy. It’s exactly the wrong thing to do in the long term. The big underlined part brings out the wrong emotional response — it makes me feel like I’m doing something wrong, or that I should consider myself lucky to be a customer.

I know that some jerks occasionally leave half their sandwich in the bucket. Mustard gets on your hands.  Life sucks that way. But don’t damage your goodwill and reputation for friendliness by putting up a scolding sign.

If I were Jeff Babcock I’d get rid of this sign ASAP.

I’m at a new coffee shop today and am experiencing what I think is a proxy error that I’ve never seen before.

Connecting to my SourceGear Vault server via Visual Studio 2005, I get the error:

HTTP Status 417:Expectation Failed

This link at SourceGear seems to tell me that there’s a proxy error here at Tully’s. Bummer. Maybe this network isn’t going to let me do my software dev work. Back to Zoka, which has better coffee anyway.

p.s. Can you believe that the new Tully’s on Nickerson isn’t available in their online store locator? It’s been open a month now. If I was the store manager I’d be sending nastygrams up to corporate or something