Sure, turning 40 is kind of a big deal. And I even thought we might have a party to celebrate my 40th birthday. But I didn’t know it would involve a surprise ride on a parade float - where I was prominently featured as “The Birthday Boy.”
My 40th birthday was last Sunday, July 5. Thea and I had discussed some general plans for the day - I was going to go fishing in the morning, then we’d have a few people over for a BBQ that afternoon. Plain, simple, mellow. No biggie.
But Thea’s a FANTASTIC liar. I credit her thespian tendencies for her amazing ability to look me in the eye and shovel blatant fiction. While discussing my plans for Sunday, she simply nodded her head and later told me she’d talked to so-and-so, and they would be able to make it.
I should also mention that the Independence Day weekend coincides with the annual Cherry Days celebration here in Paonia. The cherry crop is in high season in the first week of July, thus “Cherry Days.” We have a parade full of floats and cars and clowns and people on bicycles, horses, tractors… you name it. It’s a sweet little event that gets a lot of people to line the streets of downtown Paonia for several blocks.
For weeks Thea had told me she’d been working on a float for her running group. I know how much fun Thea’s had with PEARL - Paonia’s Elegantly Attired Running Ladies - so I didn’t think much of it. (The group gets their name from their tendency to run around town on Friday afternoons in cocktail dresses, feather boas and fancy hats. They naturally end their early evening run at the local brewery, where the members of MEARL - Men Enjoying Admiring Running Ladies - have been waiting for them.) Thea would come home covered in paint, and I naturally chalked it up to the PEARL float.
So, to reiterate, we’d made simple plans for my birthday on Sunday, and I fully believed Thea had spent a lot of time lately working on a float for her running group.
This is why I was caught so completely of guard when Thea sprung her surprise on the morning of July 4th.
We decided to walk downtown since it’s so close, but we were running a bit behind. This is not unusual for us, but that morning Thea seemed to have a bit more anxiety about being late. She’d once again told me she needed to be there to help initiate a “wave” cheer among the parade onlookers as the PEARL float went by. I rolled my eyes and wondered how many people would actually join us in this cheer. But I just hurried along so Thea wouldn’t be too late to help her friends.
So we arrive at the parade, which had not quite begun yet. I had wanted to try viewing the parade from a different part of the parade route, but Thea told me we needed to go to the first block like we always do. She told me she planned to start the wave cheer there, then follow the PEARL float down the route and help keep the “wave” going. “Ugh,” I thought thinking I would not be enjoying this parade nearly as much as I’d thought.
Because we were late, there were not a lot of curb-side spots left to sit and watch the parade. Thea rather strongly suggested we take a spot near some kids we didn’t know. For some reason she chose a spot that we could barely see from. We would have an especially hard time seeing what was coming down the road. At this point I frowned, sat down and tried to enjoy the first few floats. And I did.
Thea kept peering over the shoulder of the woman sitting to her left so she could see what was coming next. Ostensibly, she was preparing for the PEARL float to arrive. I just smiled and watched kids chase after candy.
But then, all of a sudden, there was a float in front of me with people singing. It was strange - the float looked like a giant laptop computer, complete with keyboard and monitor. The computer mouse was on top of the cab of the truck that pulled the float. The monitor section was occupied by many of my local friends, and they were singing “Happy Birthday.” And then so was Thea.
Then I started to grasp the situation - it was a surprise birthday party.
I, of course, stood up smiling and looked to see who all was in on it. There was Ryan and Hilary and Gus and Michelle. But there were also people that didn’t quite belong to my Paonia life:
- My sister, Kara, her husband and baby from Denver
- My old friend JT and his family from Niwot (near Boulder)
- Our good friends David and Laura and their kids from Ft. Collins
- Andrew and Marilyn, who used to live in Paonia but now live in southern California
Just as I began to realize that the scope of this surprise was larger than I expected, Ryan jumped down from the back of the truck (which was pulling the float), grabbed me and hauled me back into the truck. I was quickly and unceremoniously bestowed with a shiny cape, a giant Uncle Sam hat, a pinwheel to hold and wave, and a sign hanging from my neck with the words “Birthday Boy.”
As Thea grabbed our chairs and other belongings from the sidewalk, my friends sat me down on a stool facing backward toward the float. It occurred to me that the last time I’d seen the stool was the day before, sitting in my basement. Then I looked up and all my friends were pointing cameras at me, singing and laughing hysterically. I had a few tears running down my cheeks and was trying to catch up with what was happening. The PEARL float was fiction. All these people were here just for my birthday. It was a surprise party in front of the WHOLE TOWN.
As the truck started moving again I looked around at the people on the sidewalks. They were as surprised as I was, some of them wondering who the hell these people were, others clapping or singing along to the repeated “Happy Birthday” song. I found it equally gratifying to see people join in on the singing, or to sit there with a confused look on their face. Both amused me greatly.
After a few minutes I noticed that my friends and family were passing out white water bottles with orange tops. I think I asked Ryan or Marilyn what that was and I was told that Thea had some promotional water bottles made up with the logo of my computer repair business on them. Later on I would learn that the float had a big sign on the back, advertising my business. So, not only did Thea pull of a huge birthday surprise, she also managed to incorporate a PR campaign for me.
So there I sat on the barstool from my basement, with a funny hat and a pinwheel scepter and great friends and family singing Happy Birthday to me every 3 or 4 minutes. Eventually it occurred to me that someone must be driving the truck I was riding in. I couldn’t see from where I was sitting, so I asked. It was our good friend, Allison!
At one point a woman watching us go by yelled, “I want that for MY birthday! You are LOVED, dude!”
We eventually made it to the town park, where the parade route terminates. We all jumped out and got out of the way. I was still in shock as I greeted all of the people from out of town for the first time.
As it turns out, Thea had a LOT of help from some of our local friends. The list is too long to add here, but it was quite a production. It involved people going WAY out of their way to help Thea with the float, make arrangements, make signs and otherwise organize this feat. I’ve already said thanks, but I am more grateful than I can express.
While Gus, Ryan, Kara, Nathan and the baby kept me company in the park, Thea, Hilary and Michelle went back to our place to decorate. Thea had arranged for pizza from Louie’s and beer from the local brewery, Revolution Brewing. Even this required people to go out of their way.
Many thanks to all for being there and/or helping with the arrangements!
Google recently announced Google Wave. It has only been released as a developer preview, but it should be open to the public later (as an open-source project) in 2009.
Imagine a dozen people editing the same document over the Internet at the same time. No big deal, right? We can do that now.
Now imagine that everyone can SEE all the changes occurring in REAL TIME.
NOW imagine that none of the people editing the document speak the same language, yet they can read and edit it in their native language.
Google Wave is a highly collaborative tool for communication and other good things. If adopted by the mainstream it could replace email, text messaging and social networking sites.
Of course, much remains to be seen. There will be questions about security, etc. But Google Wave’s paradigm will probably change how we think about the Internet in general.
This weekend we had the opportunity to help some friends setup a yurt on their property. Back when we were shopping for land, we considered yurts very seriously as potential cheap, temporary housing while we built our permanent home.
The modern yurt is a remarkable chunk of engineering. The two biggest U.S. manufacturers - Pacific Yurts and Colorado Yurts - offer products that can be setup by just a few people in a few days. They have optional packages that allow for nearly any climate, including those that experience a lot of wind and snow. Our friends - James and Carol - chose Pacific Yurts for their place.
We did all these steps in about 8 or 9 hours. The weather was perfect for it, too, as there was very little wind. Trying to put the roof on in high wind would be very challenging indeed.
The whole thing made me appreciate the quality of the product, and gave me a chance to see the construction process for myself. I wouldn’t be surprised if we have our own yurt one of these days.
Since last year’s anniversary was pretty much a bust (Thea got the flu), we wanted to make up for it a bit this year. We both enjoy hot springs quite a bit, so we decided to stay at the Wiesbaden Hot Springs spa in Ouray.
We rented their “Hilltop Cottage,” which is really just a little cabin up the hill from the rest of the place. It was very small, but there was a good deal of privacy. Part of our plan in renting the cottage was that it had its own kitchen. We planned to save some money by making our own meal, instead of paying someone else to cook for us. So, Thea developed the menu:
- Elk medallions garnished with sauteed mushrooms in a red wine reduction
- Potato boats filled with leek mousse
- Asparagus with cabernet dressing
- Field greens with goat cheese, candied pecans and dried cherries
- Vanilla bean ice cream with raspberries jubilee
Yum, right?
Unfortunately, when we checked in and went up to the cottage we learned that the electric range was broken.
UH OH.
But instead of getting pissy about it, we talked to the desk person and asked about options. They offered to give us the little house across the street from the spa instead. But we looked it over and decided we liked the cute little cabin better. So we could either just give up on making our own dinner, or use the wood burning stove in the cottage.
As you can see the menu was rather complicated, so we weren’t sure if we could prepare it on the wood burning stove. But luckily the cottage also came with a microwave, so we decided to go for it. We figured we could cook the food sequentially on the stove, then warm things in the microwave as necessary.
But before we started cooking, we wanted to soak and relax, so we went down and used one of our two hours at the private Lorelei Pool.
It’s a gorgeous pool with a huge private space. The whole time we were in the pool it was snowing. Loved it.
After the soak we spent some time in the Wiesbaden’s vapor cave. We had it all to ourselves for the 20 minutes or so that we could stand the heat. I noticed while we were in there that when I said something, the cave would resonate at a certain pitch. So I played with that for awhile (hoping not to disturb anyone). I could hum very lightly (kind of an “ohmmmmm” thing), and the cave would amplify the sound by a LOT.
Then it was back to the cabin for some champagne! There was a gentle snowfall while we sipped the drinks and relaxed.
When it was time to get to work on dinner, I started a fire in the oven and we began the preparations. First was the potatoes and leek mousse, then the asparagus, then the elk medallions.
Because we could only do so much at once, it took much longer than it would have (like 3 hours), but it TURNED OUT GREAT!
We woke up the next morning to a beautiful mix of sun and snow. We took another soak in the Lorelei, hit the vapor cave again, and checked out. Then it was breakfast downtown before turning around for home.
You can see all the photos here:
http://www.grownbypeople.com/zenphoto/index.php?album=17th-Anniversary-in-Ouray
My local "tech support" business is now officially two months old. During this time I’ve learned a great deal and had many experiences, both positive and negative.
Terror and Unhappiness
Let’s get the bad ones out of the way. The biggest challenge I face is my own fear that I will screw something up, and it will cost someone (and/or myself) greatly. I find myself tensing up when the phone rings, and depending on the caller, getting quite nervous on the phone. My inner critic gets really loud when I describe what I can do for a potential client because, of course, my inner critic knows my sales pitch is just a sales pitch and has no REAL weight behind it.
So I’ve worked for free a lot. In a situation where I don’t feel very knowledgable, I’ll spend a lot of time working on the problem without charging the customer for it. Some people may think this is a mistake, and I guess it might be. But my conscience just won’t feel comfortable with charging for all my time until I can be more efficient with it.
Most of my clients receive my policy quite well. I’m sure it depends, though, on the outcome. One recent client, for example, came to me with a trashed hard disk. I ran a utility to recover as much data as I could, but the disk is seriously F’d. Though I spent at least 3 hours working to get his data of his disk I only charged him for half. Part of that was because I did a lot of research into options for recovering data in such a scenario. But I know deep down that part of it was guilt for not being able to resolve his problem.
When I ran into this guy at the grocery store a week later, I asked if he was able to get any further with his data recovery. It could have been a bad day or something, but he seemed disturbed that I even approached him. He complained that basically he hadn’t gotten anywhere except to learn it’ll just cost him more money. This is when I realized that some customers will not see me as a person after I work for them. They’ll see me as someone who serves them, and if my service doesn’t achieve what they hope, I can expect a few to treat me like I disappointed them.
So as I go forward I realize I need to find the balance between how much of the problem I own, and how much of the problem the customer owns. I’ll also need some thicker skin!
Praise and Success Stories
I’ve received a lot of praise for my work, which is absolutely required for me to do this work. I wouldn’t be able to do it for the money alone. If I didn’t see people genuinely pleased with the outcome it just wouldn’t be worth it to me.
Just yesterday I helped a client learn how to burn photos to CDs, and I installed a webcam and installed Skype for him so he could have video chats with his family (some of which are overseas). This customer is a retiree, and readily admits his simultaneous amazement and frustration with technology. But after a few minutes of instruction and testing he seemed to have a real handle on everything. He told me, "Well if anyone asks I’ll be real happy to recommend you Mike. It’s just like your card says - friendly and patient!"
Another client has said the same thing after I helped her migrate from her PC to her Mac. So far she loves it and is enjoying her Mexican vacation, apparently Skyping and emailing her friends and colleagues with ease from her palapa near the beach.
I gotta say, it’s pretty gratifying to have some successes to brag about!
This week I learned that my favorite part of this job is the tutoring. Chalk it up to my crazy childhood with a brain injured father, or my dedication to making sure people understand information they want to know, I have a facility for helping people with technical stuff. That’s how I got into this business in the first place - I was doing it anyway (for free) for friends and family. So, I may end up focusing the business more on tutoring and resolving minor or moderate configuration problems (like network issues or OS upgrades), and do less of the hardware work. I imagine the best scenario is for me to just be of assistance on whatever comes up, and be willing to be careful and fair as I do it.
Tags: Business, customer service, tech support
This is the story of how one simple setting can waste valuable time. I was working on a project that involves some basic PHP and MySQL modifications. In order to do the development work and the testing, I used my local WAMP server installation.
I downloaded the files and nailed down the most obvious environmental variables before even trying to run the client’s script in my local environment. No biggie - create a dupe of the database and the db user, make sure the script connects to my local instance of MySQL, etc. I knew the script should run since it worked well already in the client’s production environment.
Once the tweaking was done I gave it a try and immediately saw this error:
Warning: mysql_fetch_array(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result
My first thought was that I’d missed something with the local variables because the actual line of code that PHP puked on looked fine. I tested the SQL query, ran through the code a few times and began to seriously worry about my competence.
But then I realized all of the PHP open tags were written in short form:
—
<?
// various PHP code
?>
—
By default, WAMP does not support the short open tag. All I had to do was enable that particular setting in WAMP’s PHP settings, and PRESTO: instant functionality.
I’ve read several forums where this error appeared for other developers, but none of the forums said anything that connected the PHP setting of short open tag support. Hopefully this will help somebody someday.
Tags: development, mysql, php
OK, well I learned a lot this afternoon. I just finished a bunch of rough cuts on some video we shot for a client’s website. I need to post the video for the client’s review, but didn’t know how to properly configure the exported video for Internet viewing. My first attempt produce files in the 100MB range - clearly not very useful for streaming purposes.
So - I did a little research and came across the following settings which appear to produce a decent 640X480 video that streams comfortable and looks halfway decent. I’m using iMovie 8 as my editor and exporter.
- Under the "Share" menu, I chose "Export using QuickTime…"
- Under QuickTime settings I used:
- Size: 640X480
- Codec:H.264
- Frame rate: 29.97 fps
- Data rate restricted to 1,000kbs
- Optimized for streaming
- Best quality compression (multi-pass)
- Fast start with compressed header
- Audio: 16bit Apple lossless
- No filters
Unsurprisingly, Apple has a decent writeup on the subject of QuickTime settings.
Keep in mind my end objective was to simply show rough edits to a client so they’d have an idea of the work I’d done. The final edits, audio tweaking, fine-tuning and cover shots will come later, so we’ll want to spend more energy on finding the optimal settings. For this I’m relying on a local expert.
Tags: QuickTime, streaming video
So we finally got to meet our nephew, Revin. Here are a few photos:
That’s me holding him for the first time.
My mom’s an old hand at baby-holding.
Tiny feet.
Crashed.
You can find more photos here:
http://www.grownbypeople.com/zenphoto/index.php?album=Revin-November-2008
Tags: Family, i'm an uncle, revin
For some reason two of my MySQL databases required repair this week. Both were backing Joomla 1.5 installations - our corporate site (grownbypeople.com) and our old news website (informify.com), which we’ve left running.
When browsing to the sites they both produced the same MySQL error #145. And it was the session table that was corrupted on both DBs.
The first thing I thought of was some hack-bot going around exploiting some little-known Joomla vulnerability. But I haven’t been able to find anything about that on the Joomla site. Or elsewhere.
I then wondered if it was perhaps my hosting company, Hostmonster.com. The company president has a blog that sometimes explains strange new behavior in my hosting account. Sure enough there was an entry about changes they’ve been making that may well have had an impact. Turns out they’re switching their storage to Solid State Drives (SSDs).
But then I found a couple old Joomla threads indicating that Joomla has long suffered from periodically corrupted session tables.
Even if it does turn out to be a Joomla issue, why would they both happen pretty much on the same day? I’ve never seen it before.
If anyone has any ideas, feel free to let me know.
Today we head east for a long visit with family & friends for Thanksgiving and beyond. We’ll spend the most time with my mom in Red Feather Lakes, but also see people in Fort Collins and Boulder. We’ve been back in Colorado for a couple years now, but have never taken the time to catch up with our old friends in Boulder County. So we’ll take several days after Thanksgiving to do just that.
The two big family highlights will be spending Thanksgiving with my sister and her new baby, and my grandmother’s 90th birthday party. We rented out a little room at the Moot House for the frivolity. Should be fun.
Tags: boulder, Family, ft. collins
