The Death of a Friend

I did not know Marc Orchant well. We worked together on a couple of projects and even met at a meeting not too long ago. I liked him, respected him, and even envied his ability to chatter on about the latest gadgets in geekdom. He was active, slim, and about the last person I'd expect to die of a massive coronary, which is what happened last week.

At the same time, I've had a number of male friends and acquaintances of about my age recently diagnosed with hardened arteries after complaining of chest pains or simply showing up for their blood tests. My friend, Dikran at Stanford, a life-long skinny person, swimmer and healthful eater, underwent triple-bypass surgery some months back. Laurent, who's been not married to our friend Jane for a number of years, had the same this month, and blamed it on too much imported camembert. (He's French.) Juliann's husband, Alan, complained of chest pains when exercising and ended up suddenly in the hospital for a bypass. It's anecdotal, but there's something real going on, and I hear the warnings.

For my part, I was discovered to have a triglyceride count over 700 (in whatever unit of measure is used). This was about two years ago. At the time I weighed 215 pounds, my heaviest ever, and at 5' 9", was definitely on the obese side by any measure. I've weighed between 180-185 for the past year, we exercise most days (vigorous long walks and visits to the Taft gym), and I have been taking Tricor, a fibrate medication that lowers triglyceride levels. It's a combination that by all measures (blood tests) seems to be working.

But what of Marc? I deleted his name from my address book the other day and it felt like an important gesture of recognition. He's the first person I've deleted in such a permanent fashion and the thought of what I was doing caused me to hesitate over the delete key. And yet, it is an act of acknowledgement, and in this sense a healthy act. So I acknowledge Marc's death, my own mortality, and, this shouldn't sound dismissive, I go on. I'm reminded of the importance of attempting to live my life in a healthful, vigorous way.

Why I am not a Team Player

Several times and by several people I have been told that I am not a team player. This was meant as a negative assessment of my performance, but every time it felt like confirmation of what I wanted to be; which is not a team player. I don't understand why being a team player is the desired behavior unless you're really on a team; the kind of team with a coach who tells you what to do and you do it because you're a team player.

Somehow the team metaphor has become corrupted in its migration to business. The problem is that bosses don't want to be seen as bosses even when they act as bosses. They want to be a member of the team just like me. The team vision in business is more of a socialist equality, which is very far from the reality of any business I've worked for or with. It's more of an Animal Farm socialism where some animals are more equal than others. Unfortunately, the irony is lost in the stultifying dishonesty of bland sincerity that pervades business behavior.

I can remember my first day on the job at the Allstate Research and Planning Center in Menlo Park, CA. Everyone, without exception, said "welcome to the team." This was the most hierarchical company I ever worked for: supervisors, managers, Directors, VPs. It's pretty standard practice in old-style companies and not so different from the military. It's easy to see that there's a certain necessity for following orders as a combat team member in the heat of battle, but we were just running statistical summaries on millions of insurance policies.

Most of the work I've done for the past twenty years has involved quite a bit more thought than action. I've been paid for taking responsibility, not needing supervision, working independently, all things that are pretty much the opposite of anything having to do with team membership. To be sure, there is much collaboration, but collaboration and following the boss's orders are really different things. Yet bosses, even the ones who say they really welcome your honest opinion, seldom want to hear what you have to say if it doesn't agree with what they think you should be doing. You might as well be a traitor as suggest an alternative to "the way we've always done things."

What it all boils down to is a metaphor gone amok. Team playing is supposed to be good, but I never want to work for a company that values blind, stupid, lock-step agreement. I am no sycophant. I do not play for a football team. I am not valued for my physical prowess or my ability to block when told to block or run when told to run. No suicide missions for me, no unquestioned obedience or respect when respect is not due. I can do many things, I can even be a leader when called upon to lead, but I cannot and will not be a team player.

Next time, it's "welcome to the cooperative," for me!

Nothing Civil in a Civil Suit

Got served with papers on Saturday. I was cleaning gutters and turning compost, an apt activity for such an occasion. I was about as dirty as I've been in a long time and was up to my elbows in wet, decomposing leaf litter when I heard a car in the driveway. I thought it was the postman with a package too big for the box. Instead, it was an obese gentleman with a FedEx envelope that he had opened. Strange, I thought.

He had been hired to serve the papers to me. He does this for a living. I think lawyers pay him and that he has some sort of official status that can't be ignored. So when I said I didn't want them, he explained the federal and state laws that gave me no choice in the matter. He liked Hoover, told me about his dead dog and dead cat and how they were going to co-mingle their ashes and save them so that their own children could add their ashes at the appropriate time and throw the blend off the dock of their house in Florida. How is one supposed to respond to such a story?

A man finds happiness remembering his animals. Another man is angry and seeks revenge. A third is deeply involved with compost and leaf litter. I like to think that I'm easily contented, but I need to find a way to detect underlying anger before I become mired in more legal mudslinging. On the other hand, we are all angry at times. It's a necessary personality component. But there are those people whose lives seem to be ruled by their anger and others for whom anger is a temporary state rather than the foundation of their being. I don't think there are any angry babies, so this must be something one acquires with age.

Music Review: Richard Goode in Newtown, CT

Seen and Heard (MusicWeb International)

Richard Goode, Piano
Newtown Friends of Music
Edmond Town Hall, Newtown, Connecticut
September 16, 2007

J S Bach

Prelude and Fugue in G minor, BWV 885 (Book II)
Four Sinfonias

E major, BWV 792

E minor, BWV 793

G minor, BWV 797

E-flat major, BWV 791
Prelude and Fugue in B major, BWV 892 (Book II)

Haydn, Sonata in D major, Hoboken XVI:24


Beethoven, Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 27, No. 2

‘Sonata quasi una fantasia’


Debussy, Three Preludes

La cathédrale engloutie (Book I)

Ondine (Book II)

General Lavine - Eccentric (Book II)


Chopin
Impromptu in F-sharp major, Op. 36

Three Mazurkas

G major, Op. 50 No. 1

C major, Op. 24, No. 2

C-sharp minor, Op. 50, No. 3

Nocturne in B major, Opus 62, No. 1

Polonaise in F-sharp minor, Opus 44

So many pianists try to be flamboyant in their playing or exaggerated in their interpretations often to the point of affectation. Thus it is a particular pleasure to listen Richard Goode’s playing, which is all about the music—capturing the mood, transmitting a feeling without extraneous fanfare—it seems so reserved, but in a good way. I suspect it’s harder to be interestingly thoughtful and subtle than to come out with all barrels blazing. And what a treat to hear Richard Goode in the rather intimate setting of Newtown Connecticut’s Town Hall.

I never tire of hearing Goode’s intelligent rendering of Beethoven sonatas, this time, the so-called Moonlight. There’s nothing melodramatic or sappy about Goode’s articulation, and instead of the usual Chopin-like romanticism one hears in the first movement so often, Goode emphasized the dark melody in the base and the brooding quality of C-sharp minor was more redolent of a moldering grave than anything light or frilly. It was remarkably and rivetingly effective.

Goode began his recital with a selection of Bach put together like a baroque suite. The clarity of his articulation and the beautiful subtlety in his phrasing seemed so natural and unforced that it was easy to forget one's reviewing duties and simply enjoy the music. How utterly pleasant.

Similarly, Goode’s Haydn was immaculate, and moving from baroque to classical brought a fierceness and urgency to the playing that ripped along at a great rate of many notes per second—delightful.

The Beethoven followed, and you could feel the expressive range growing with the chronology. Lots of sforsandos, great dynamic range. And then after intermission, a leap across all of romanticism directly to three Debussy preludes. I wondered how Goode’s clean lines and elegant phrasing would match up with the slowly emerging images Debussy painted in the preludes. I needn’t have worried. Clarity and precision, Goode’s hallmarks, combined with his intellectual understanding of the works, created what felt like newly cleaned artwork glowing in freshly polished frames.

Then back to romanticism for a bookend collection of Chopin movements to balance the synthesized Bach suite at the opening. It was a long concert and, surprisingly, the Chopin felt murky by comparison to the rest of the performances. I’ve heard Goode play Chopin with the ferocity of a middle Beethoven sonata, and it works beautifully, but this was more of a relaxed finish to the afternoon.

Goode is a transporting performer, an intellectual with plenty of technique to communicate his thoughts about the music. Nothing is ill-considered or dashed off without careful consideration. It’s as though he has considered just how every note in the piece should be played. He is intense without being showy, correct without being stuffy, original without outlandishness. Goode allows us to hear new things and it’s a treat. He sets a standard of excellence that few can match.

CA

Fired, Again!

I was fired from my job as an account manager one week ago today. It was remarkably like being fired three-and-a-half years ago from my job as an acquisitions editor. This time, though, I felt like an old pro at being fired, which probably isn't something I should be proud of. There are some striking similarities in the two situations.

In both cases, I had grown to hate my job to the point of not wanting to get out of bed in the morning. It depressed me to work for people who seemed to take such pleasure in criticizing my work. I continued to do my job, not even perfunctorily, but well, but it was no use. I became withdrawn, uncommunicative, and argumentative even as I was trying my best (admittedly not great) to do as I was told. Once again, I find that I do not have the constitution of a good little girl.

In addition to being fired twice, I have been laid off and once I got offered a severance to leave when my boss went unnecessarily ballistic and cursed at me. But I've also had managers who I liked and who liked me. Interestingly, a couple of them have gotten fired along the way, as well

Is there a lesson to be gained from my experiences? Probably not, but I do think that a certain worldly caution is inevitable after such earth-stopping events. Or perhaps the lesson is simply that I'm slow to learn my lessons. No wonder I spent so much time in the "Thinking Chair" in second grade.

Tomato Confit

I’ve been making batches of Tomato Confit. Timo found the recipe in the Zuni Café cookbook, exclaimed with satisfied glee, and passed it along. I’ve picked a lot of plum tomatoes at Waldingfield, washed, sliced, salted, added garlic and basil, covered all with too much olive oil, and roasted half-a-dozen batches at 300° for two hours or so. Almost every night we have a fresh batch to eat with bread and salad, and I’ve been piling up the left overs in a covered glass dish, which was almost full.

There’s enough oil in each batch that it’s easy to leave most of it in the baking dish and just layer in the next batch of tomatoes, garlic, and herbs. The oil becomes remarkably flavorful, almost rich with the concentrated flavors baked into it. The tomatoes themselves are baked long enough to remove almost all the water from them, and the effect is essentially sun-dried tomatoes packed in olive oil. 

Which brings up the question of what percentage of tomatoes sold as sun-dried are sun-dried? I suspect it’s very low. But oven-dried tomato isn’t a particularly appealing name. It brings up images of limp stewed tomatoes. So confit, which I’ve only known as various forms of meat packed in their own fat, seems like an apt name for the result of the long, slow roasting.

Today, I reheated the accumulated confit in the oven and canned it all in pint-size jars. It looks quite beautiful and the jars sealed nicely. I think that we have at last found a way to store tomatoes for use through the winter. I want to make much more, and I have another batch in the oven right now.

Book Review: "The Tipping Point," by Malcolm Gladwell

I read about 100 pages of The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell, a best-seller from 2000 and an inspiration for Make it Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath, a current best-selling business book published last year. The connection is only significant because all my colleagues have read Make it Stick, and the book has become something of a bible at work (or more like a false god, perhaps). I’m not happy about this, but first, The Tipping Point.

The point of tipping points, a term not coined by Gladwell, is that there is an observed phenomenon that crosses disciplines such as epedemiology, population growth, advertising/marketing/fashion, and, by association, business. So while it’s important to figure out how the 1918 flu epidemic tipped from garden-variety influenza to the fierce killer of the 20th century, we’re also supposed to believe that the great Hush Puppy phenomenon of the late 90’s, when fashionably counterculture lower east-sider males of the late ‘90s caused a nearly-forgotten shoe brand to become a must-have, was equally important in the annals of tippiness. 

Is it just me or do other people find the codification of anecdote as scientific fact bothersome? I suspect that the popularity of this practice puts my sort in the minority. Gladwell is guilty of this sin of elision, as are the Heath brothers, as is every so-called business book I’ve ever attempted to read through. Some, like Good to Great, required reading at my previous job, attempt to hide the anecdotal reality of their evidence in a sea of statistical observation, failing to recognize the first lesson of statistics (at least for me), that a correlation is not a proof. More often, it is simply the diet-book effect—it worked for me and my friends, so it’s obviously a good diet—the proof is in the pudding. 

Perhaps it all boils down to The Power of Suggestion. And with this aphoristic beginning, I could write my own solution-to-all-ills business/diet/self-help book, but though a powerful temptation, I shall endeavor to resist. I will not write about connectors or disseminators or agents of stickiness. I will eschew type-A personalities and carbohydrate loading and all things karmic. I feel no urge to simplify what is necessarily a richly complicated world.

At the same time, I feel compelled to say more about tippiness and stickiness. The Heath brothers mention the tippy book as one of the inspirations for their sticky book. In fact, they pretty much re-branded the whole tippy idea as the sticky bible. Their book is an unabashed guide to making your business sticky, as if a few key thoughts could take any good idea and make it great. Essentially, they’ve homogenized the range of anecdote from Gladwell’s book, pasteurized the idea of the straw that broke the camel’s back, added an unhealthy dose of does and don’ts, and created a guide to ruining any spark of imagination or creative thought.

On the other hand, this is really want most people seem to want—a sort of pabulum for the narrow mind. I bridle and become peevish when forced to digest such revolting stuff. At least Gladwell is a good writer, and I probably could have finished the book if I hadn’t started with the Heath’s. Their book is a model of excess and repetition, and it’s not even very long. 

I wish that Gladwell had talked about the study of tipping points more and spent less time trying to define the sort of people who can cause tipping points. Perhaps this came up later in the book, but I didn’t have the patience to find out. However, I thought that this definition from Wikipedia was as interesting as anything I read in the book.

“In sociology, a tipping point or angle of repose is the event of a previously rare phenomenon becoming rapidly and dramatically more common. The phrase was coined in its sociological use by Morton Grodzins, by analogy with the fact in physics that when a small amount of weight is added to a balanced object, it can cause it to suddenly and completely topple.

“Grodzins studied integrating American neighborhoods in the early 1960s. He discovered that most of the white families would remain in the neighborhood so long as the comparative number of black families remained very small. But, at a certain point, when "one too many" black families arrived, the remaining white families would move out en masse in a process known as white flight. He called that moment the "tipping point." The idea was expanded and built upon by Nobel Prize-winner Thomas Schelling in 1972. A similar idea underlies Mark Granovetter's threshold model of collective behavior.”

I’ve moved on to Walter Isaacson’s recent biography of Einstein. What a relief! It’s nice to be able to use words like brilliant and genius and have them applied appropriately. There’s no need for exaggeration and no attempt to say that you, too, can be an Einstein. It’s pretty much statement of fact, elegantly presented, written in a lucid, readable style, full of worthwhile detail, and entirely fascinating.

You can't be careful enough

Today was a day of two scams, one for me and one for Timo. Timo's was the more egregious, but mine was likely the more bothersome.

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to join a relatively new social network called Quechup by someone I trust and who is also pretty deeply involved with social networks. So I did the free sign up, looked around the site a bit, connected to my gmail directory, didn't find much of interest, and dropped things there. Today, I started receiving bunches (does email come in bunches?) of automated replies from people who were on vacation. This confused me as I didn't think I had sent any of them email.

Then long-lost acquaintances started writing. It was nice to hear from some of them, but others were mysterious. Then it became clear that these were all responses to invitations sent from Quechup to join my network. Had I hit some send button inadvertently last week that caused a slurry of messages to gush out to everyone in my address book? I started sending apologies. Then a friend wrote to say that Quechup was well-known for "aggressive spamming of mail directories." Not only was everyone I knew being spammed: family, friends, acquaintances, professional contacts, doctor's offices, schools, mailing lists…, but I had been spammed 1000-times over!

Superficially, it appears that this is a non-destructive spam, but how many people will be annoyed to receive email that has appeared to come from me and never wish to hear from me again? And now I'm getting invitations from all sorts of Quechup members who I suspect are being spammed just as I was. I better get online and start deleting my entire profile.

Then there is Timo's eBay spam-of-the-day. He sold his iPod for a price that seemed too-good-to-be true. Then he noticed that the account with the highest bid hadn't been used since 2004. He received a PayPal notification with his name on it, but it wasn't from a PayPal address. The shipping instructions were for a store location in Nigeria, even though the account was American. Finally, he received a message from eBay saying that the winning account had been hijacked and the sale nullified.

eBay has relisted the item, but you'd think they could have made the sale to the runner-up bid. And the sad part is, there's really nothing he could have done to change this outcome. eBay is a dangerous place, and sadly, the entire Web is full of pitfalls. We're still browsing in the 21st century equivalent of the wild west. Browser beware!

Book Review: "Kitchen Confidential," by Anthony Bordain

This is really yesterday's post, but I don't see a way to back date it from when I'm writing it, which is today.

I finished listening to Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bordain's autobiography in the restaurant business. It is profane in the extreme, descriptions are grossly exaggerated to the point of unbelievability, and it doesn't hang together with any sort of theme (does it need to?), but I liked it nonetheless. Partially, I just liked how true-to-character the whole book was, and having Bordain read it in his somewhat lower-class-sounding New Jersey accent, made it seem all the more genuine, despite the exaggerations.

The fact is, Bordain isn't as lower-class as he sounds. He's rather well-educated and well-read and this is evident from his vocabulary, powers of description, and knowledge of his craft. I liken him to the cooking equivalent of Bruce Springsteen—seemingly working class New Jersey on the surface, but completely savvy and talented in reality. Bourdain is proud of his accomplishments, but writes with vivid savageness about his past excesses as a drug addict and general live-for-the-moment type of guy. And while he doesn't seem to regret anything he has done, he speaks kindly of others who came up the ranks with their passion for food as primary motivator and not the love of rank and money as he did.

But if Bourdain had been refined, his book wouldn't be so entertaining. In the end, he really does love food and cooking and he's totally devoted to his faithful staff, which is clearly a big deal in the New York restaurant scene. Most surprisingly, after many descriptions of debauchery in and out of the kitchen, we learn that he's been married to the same woman throughout the book! So I even ended up liking Bordain. I wouldn't mind reading his other books, including a couple of kitchen novels.

New iPods! Are we still excited?

Up in the sky! It's an iPod! It's an iPhone! It's iPod Touch. Huh? Even Apple has their moments of branding clumsiness, but perhaps it's just hard to get excited about a new form-factor iPod that's really just an iPhone with no phone. But like the name, this is either a great moment of marketing savvy, or a fill-in-the-gap product that means more for what it isn't than for what it is. What do I mean by this bit of confusion?

My first impression of the phoneless iPhone had to do with my eldest son, Timothy, whose music library expands to fill any available disk space. Great, I thought, a "cool" new interface for his next iPod. But then one notices that the iPod Touch is only available with 8gb or 16gb, one tenth the capacity of the updated iPod Classic. There are modestly updated Nanos and Shuffles, as well, which is nice, but not really the big news here.

So who is the iPod Touch for? Answer: all the people writing to Apple to say they'd really like an iPhone, but don't like or can't use the AT&T Wireless network that iPhones are wedded to. If I'm right, then this is not a key, long-term market, merely a stepping stone in a mysterious strategy for ubiquitous electronic media branded by Apple.

I choose not to join into this guessing game, but Apple TV, which is not exactly a revolutionary hot potato, and the iPod Touch, want to lead somewhere. The question in my mind is if, like two parallel rails vanishing in the distance, they will come together at some point? I'm in no particular hurry to find out, but I like to think that Apple knows what it's doing and that these pointers, place markers, interim solutions, whatever you want to call them, will all make sense in retrospect.

At the same time, Apple gets to collect huge amounts of genuine market research on everything it sells, and make money at the same time. It doesn't matter that the iPod Touch looks disappointing to me or that it feels like just another new flavor of cereal in the marketplace, it's almost as if Apple can't lose these days. So I'm see today's "big news" as further indication that Apple is staying ahead of all who would copy their success and at the same time plotting moves well ahead of any possible response from its would-be opponents. 

Software Review: Why Scrybe?

Despite my generally skeptical nature, I like Scrybe, or at least I like what I've been able to glean from the iscrybe website and video overview. Like any new product with as-yet-to-be-determined potential (it's intended to help keep life in the Internet age somewhat more cleanly organized) Scrybe feels over-hyped.

Scrybe is a groundbreaking online organizer that caters to today's lifestyle in a cohesive and intuitive way.

It would not be hard to rewrite this sentence to mean something, but you'd need to know what it was meant to mean before you could do it. But somehow I have let me hype-defenses down and wish that I could be a part of the beta ("temporarily closed"). I watched the video overview and liked what I saw, at least partially because I was ready to like what I saw. I am the market for this product. They know what I struggle with every day and their solution appears to work the way I work—at least this is my impression.

This isn't really a full-featured organizer, at least not yet. It includes a calender, todo lists, and "thoughtstreams," but no integration with address book or email functions. Thoughtstreams don't interest me, though it might be that if I knew what they were, I might find them useful. But even though my hype-defenses are down, I've still got buzz-word defenses in tact.

What really appeals to me is the simple ability to integrate todo lists with calendar events in a way that maintains context. In other words, lists have an awareness of the calendar state. So as you look through by month, week, or day, the lists reflect your view. At the same time, the user interface has an elegance I haven't seen before, though I can't really be certain of this perceived quality until I can actually try Scrybe out.

Scrybe also has another big plus in its favor. Adobe has made a major investment in the company. Scrybe is written in Flash and one can only assume that they'll be able to add much more functionality by adopting Adobe's rich Internet Application tools, Flex and AIR, and they'll likely have a lot of help doing this. One futher hopes that the next somewhat more public release will be even more elegant, functional, and innovative, and that there will be a version running in Mac OS X Tiger.

I blog because I am

It is necessary for me to blog. I have resisted the urge long enough. I have no pressing subject on which to blog, but blog I must. In fact, I write this for myself in the hopes that the act of writing will reveal the reason for writing. 

Today's blog is about family and falls on Labor Day, a good time to begin. Katharine and I are home with Hoover (Corgi) and no children. The three boys are away at school, and though this is not the first time we have been home without children in nearly 22 years, it will be our longest stretch without their daily distractions so far. This "opportunity" to look inward, to reflect on one's own lack of productivity, is as much my reason for starting this blog as any. 

Perhaps it is the need for discipline, a vague hope that writing regularly about anything will lead to more purposeful writing. And then assuming that I enjoy writing, that writing brings some sense of accomplishment and self-satisfaction (in a good way), I hope that some writing will lead to more and better reasons to write. Somehow, this will all be magically revealed to me as I wander from reflection to reflection.

Here's to hope!