That's a Duran Duran song, right? Meh, if I have to explain it, it's not funny.

I had a breakthrough at work today (actually, I was at home, but whatever) around this integration project that has been kicking my ass on and off for the last two weeks, when it would come back and stuff would be broken. It was starting to suck my will to live. I suppose there are some obvious take-aways from the experience, namely to bother people more until you have what you need. I'm still trying to feel that out at work. It's like, I don't wanna be the guy who bitches and moans all of the time, but I also have to accept that there are things I'm just not going to get done without help whilst swimming around in 80,000 lines of code.

Integration stuff is either really cool or a pain in the ass. I got to do several integration projects while at ICOM, which is not surprising since the business runs on collaborating with a metric-assload of third parties and internal systems. I liked all but one of those projects. The big wins all shared some very obvious characteristics:

• They had well-defined, well-documented interfaces. That seems obvious, right? Some of those systems we owned, but the third parties would tend to have such a huge customer base that they had to get it right. It's like magic when you call out and get something back.
• Each had a series of excellent environments to test with. Dev, test, QA... all able to bubble up through the chain pretty quickly.
• Minimal configuration issues. Things that are not fragile tend to not get bogged down in setting them up. With Web services, it's not hard to roll an integration project because you just point your junk there and go. It's a lot trickier when you have black box code libraries or some weird and proprietary thing to hit.

I was always amazed at how easy it was to integrate pretty much anything with Amazon, for example. That was the first time I really "got it" when it came to using services, before "SOA" became a trendy acronym. Fast forward to today, and I still scratch my head when I look at Facebook. It's not well thought out at all.

On a side note, you may have seen that we (well, people in the same division) released an RC for Visual Studio 2010 out in the MSDN downloads today. Everyone else will get it Wednesday. People are really excited about it from what I gather on the Twitter. I honestly haven't used it yet, because I just haven't been able to jump into early adopter mode. But I'm downloading now (10 mbits, finally!) and will play with it this week.

They better be coming to the Emerald City!

http://www.blueman.com/nationaltour

Shirley Manson posted on Facebook that she recently spent a week with the other members of Garbage. If they managed to actually put out a new album at some point, that would pretty much make my life. Of course, the expectations would be so high that I worry it might be impossible to like it.

I'm still very willing to take that chance. You can never have too much Garbage in your life.

After a lot of bad days for Diana, today was finally something like normal. She wouldn't describer herself as comfortable exactly, but for once she wasn't plagued with the bathroom issues and gases and pressure on organs she didn't know she had.

With another beautiful day here, we realized it was pretty critical that we get out of the house. I was in dire need of some distractions as well, feeling constantly anxious (more on that in a minute). I wasn't really able to make the decision to go out, so Diana made it for me. She said we'd get a quick bite and go out to a park to do some photo experimentation, since I've been talking about it for awhile.

First stop, a quick burrito at Chipotle. Having decent enough food at work, I rarely go out anymore, and I haven't had a burrito since the week of Christmas I believe. Sadly, I've been an addict since 2004 or so. It's the cilantro-lime rice and the hot salsa. It's delicious.

Next we figured we'd hit a park that wasn't too far away, and not toward the city. The park down the street is fairly bland, so we decided to go to Snoqualmie Falls nearby. That's a pretty spectacular valley, and you get an appreciation for how amazing the Cascades are from there, compared to, say, Redmond or Bellevue. You could see Mt. Baker today pretty clearly, which is "almost Canada" as Joe likes to say. It's something like 70 or 80 miles away, eyeballing it on the map. The idea was that I wanted a green background for some photo experimentation.

The 7D has a built-in flash, which means that it can fire off another Canon flash not on the camera. The built-in flash is kind of useless with my big lenses (they cast a shadow from it), but controlling one off-camera is sweet because I don't have to settle for crappy flat lighting. Getting the exposure right and the correct ratio (plus sun) was a bit of a challenge, but I did get a few that I really liked. Next time I need to bust out the 50mm and see how that goes.

Driving down there means passing all kinds of houses that have those wonderful views, which combined with the houses I pass on the way to work with wonderful views, makes me very anxious to be living in a house. That's really the thing that has been the hardest thing to adjust to. I don't hate our apartment, but I don't like living in it either. It just feels so transient. The problem is that I just don't see being able to buy a house until, at best, the end of next year, and even that assumes we can sell both of our Cleveland houses yesterday.

When I got to thinking about that, I realized that my anxiety was only half coming from the birthing issues. Much of my behavior lately revolves around making a better living to get us back to home ownership. At work I'm thinking about what I might be doing there in two or three years (though that's something the company wants you to think about, it's just distracting when you haven't even hit a stride in your current position). At home I'm thinking about getting that next Web site up to generate a little more cash. I find myself obsessing about how the future graph looks in my budget and how much of a tax refund I might get. It's all rooted in wanting a house.

So that's the trade I had to make. I finally work for a company that actually has career potential, something I haven't experienced ever in my professional life, plus I get a mild winter and killer views. What I've had to give up is home ownership (though that's tricky when you can't find work anyway), real estate hell and no place to put a hot tub. The trade is definitely worth it, and there's no question that my life is infinitely better. I just want to make sure that I'm providing for Diana, Little Puzzoni and myself. Listen to me, it's like I'm nesting or something!

Here's a few shots...

I finally shot a little video of the Lego Carousel. I gotta tell you, as much as it felt like a frivolous purchase, it was a joy to build.

Growing up, I had several medium sized Lego sets. The two I remember the most were a police station and a series of space sets (rocket launcher, command center, Galaxy Explorer and another one I can't find a link for). I could never build those enough, and I was always meticulous about keeping track of the parts and getting them back to the right places in their boxes. Even when I'd build something by combining the sets, like my own home-roller Transformer, I'd still manage to be very careful about how I took care of it. I'd never let my brother touch the stuff either. Yeah, I was that kid. :)

Over the years, I've bought little sets, mostly as stocking stuffers. The little sets during the Star Wars prequels were fun. I'm not sure what exactly happened to them. I know those I had at work, circa 2000, were in a box in the garage, but I don't know how much of that junk got here and how much got tossed.

In early 2008, when me and Walt headed out to Disney World on a photo expedition, I hit the Lego store in Downtown Disney and was blown away at the stuff they had. And to this day, I'm particularly impressed with the giant Millennium Falcon set. It would be hard to justify buying that, but the Grand Carousel was actually in a sweet spot with a ton of pieces.

It was a pretty easy build, with a lot of repetition. There's something very satisfying about building stuff with your hands, especially when you spend most of your time building software with code. It's neat that something as square as Lego makes something round like a carousel. The way the drive motor engages is pretty smart, as are the crank shafts that move the horses. There is a ton of decorative detail in it too.

Having a Lego store locally is gonna be dangerous. :)

Gonna play a little blog tag here. Carrie made a post about embracing regret. Gonch made a post about how he doesn't regret stuff. Both are interesting and valid points of view. I tend to agree more with Gonch though, and maybe not for the reasons you'd expect.

Yes, there's the point about how things today may be radically different if you could change the things you regret. For example, if I had not built up such a strong desire for an uber-serious relationship in college, I may not have had the series of epic love stories I've had in my life, and that would suck.

But the bigger point is that despite all of the hindsight and negative impacts of things I might otherwise regret, the truth is that I would've never learned anything if it weren't for those failures. I'm not sure if everyone rolls like that, but I'm pretty sure most people do.

I'm fond of giving younger friends advice about careers and relationships. Most of the time, they imply that I can go fuck myself by doing exactly the opposite of what I suggest, which is precisely what I would've done at the time. When you're vetting life, you have to see for yourself. That means you have to make a lot of poor decisions, like taking a shitty job for the money or getting into a relationship with extremely toxic elements, because you don't believe you're wrong. You have no data to indicate otherwise. You have to learn that for yourself.

One might argue that you live a life of suffering this way, but I think that's a little dramatic. I've had so much failure in my life that the successes are that much better. Failing spectacularly seems to lead to spectacular success.

I suppose the point is that I firmly believe the positives in life are born out of the regrets, so if that's the case, what point is there in regretting negative past events? You sure can't change them anyway. Three cheers for spectacular failure!

We went to a breastfeeding class tonight. It kinda filled in the gaps in terms of what I understood about the process, most notably the part about how exactly the baby is supposed to attach. Not that I have to know that in particular, but still, interesting stuff.

However, there was one girl there who clearly was going to screw up her child. She asked a million questions, many of them common sense, but she was also looking for a concrete, black and white answer to everything. She could not operate in shades of gray. The instructor said a hundred times that every baby and parents are different. She also suggested that laboring over what the "right" thing to do in every parenting situation would make you miserable (and kinda implied it's not good for the kid).

If I could summarize the experience of conception up through eight months, it would be that none of the generalizations are true, except perhaps that there's a baby at the end. But all of the stuff about what you'll feel or do or whatever, it's never the same from one person to the next. That only validates what I've been saying about all of the generalizations about raising a child as well. Your mileage will vary.

Meanwhile, Diana just keeps getting more and more miserable. We've got four weeks to go, but they're very much looking like they're going to suck. I've seen her put up with allergies without a complaint. She's battled vertigo. In the time I've known her, she just rolls with stuff like this. But this pregnancy is really testing the limits of what she can endure, and that's probably made worse by the wacky hormones. If the lad isn't pressing on some vital organ, he's trapping gas. It really does suck, and there isn't much I can do. At least for the moment, we've pretty much decided that if there's a baby #2, it'll be an adoption.

This is all kinds of awesome...

I forget now how it came up, but the other day, some dudes at work were talking about geeky comprooder shit, when I indicated that my Web server was now about six years old. They looked at me in horror and couldn't believe I didn't have a hard drive failure or something by now. So now I live in fear that it's going to happen. (Thanks, guys.)

It's true that I've been considering an upgrade for awhile now, especially with the forthcoming new site adding to the mix. I've been putting it off in part because the new site wasn't even a Visual Studio project (it is now, about 70% functional but entirely style free), and also because I had some legacy "customers" on there. I use the quotes because I wasn't actually charging them anything. They're off now, so I can in earnest consider pulling the plug on the old box once I settle on a new one.

And that's the real big question, the where and what. I'm still paying December 2003 dollars for the set up I have, which is awesome. I won't be getting that kind of deal going forward, and will probably pay nearly twice what I used to. The upside is that I'll also get about four times the hardware, so I suppose it all balances out. I'm currently with The Planet, and I guess I'm mostly satisfied with them. I'm also considering SoftLayer, as someone recently suggested them to me.

While I don't think anything will break tomorrow, I'm not sure how much longer I can really tempt fate. I just don't want to spend more on a box. I don't feel like the return on investment is very good when the current one is working just fine (for now).

This lyric from the Pearl Jam song always sticks with me...

"I'm a lucky man, to count on both hands the ones I love 
Some folks just have one, yeah others, they've got none"

That always brings me comfort when I question the quality of my life so far. I think it has been pretty remarkable.

I love this. Particularly the part where he drools and gets the glazed-over look. I admit it, I've been there.

http://www.tarboy.com/rcj.html

I've been accused of being immature, sure, but this little nugget from Beth really has me scratching my head...

"I haven’t talked to this dude since I was oh say 16 and 1/2. He asked about the 'club' scene and if I was cool or 'lame' because I was married... I was trying to be helpful, but he keep dropping phrases like 'that’s sick' and 'fucking sweet.' Yeah, well let me try and come up with something we have in common. I’m all for reminiscing, but I really don’t plan on going back to the way I was at 16."

Seriously, don't people generally grow out of that after college?

It was all about getting real this weekend, as we did an infant care class on Saturday and hospital tour on Sunday.

The care class was a whole lot of common sense mostly, and some general stuff about what to expect on the birthday. As it turns out, I'm finding that babies aren't all that hard to take care of. I think more and more that the biggest challenges are supporting each other and working to maintain a high level of quality in your relationship as your priorities become massively realigned.

Of particular interest though is the guy who seems to have packaged together all of the things that make a cranky baby not cranky. Watching his video is like watching magic, and a lot of it just involves holding the baby in positions you wouldn't otherwise think of. That's pretty neat stuff.

The hospital tour brought mixed feelings. On one hand, it's good to see what the place looks like, but I also feel really uncomfortable in any medical facility. I spent too much time with doctors as a kid, and even though my mom was a nurse in a hospital, I generally only think of it for when she was in it for gall bladder removal, or for seeing my stepdad in there for heart surgery. That it's a place for the start of life is still foreign to me.

I have a great deal of anxiety about the big day. Routine as it might be, a C-section is still surgery, and I'm not looking forward to that. That I'll be in the room during the surgery also disturbs me, but obviously there's no choice since it's also when junior will arrive. Part of the anxiety is that it's not the doctor in Cleveland, because I found it so easy to trust her. I look forward to that time an hour after Diana is all closed up in recovery that we can just peacefully enjoy the baby.

Have I mentioned that the intensity of the last 12 months has been completely off the charts?

Gonch recently posted about how much he doesn't care for Ikea, and I think I understand his opinion to be that he doesn't care for the merchandise. I suppose that's a matter of taste, and that's cool. I think they have the same shit that Crate & Barrel or Pottery Barn has, only for a fraction of the price, and made of cheaper materials (which is generally adequate anyway). I love my new desk and bookshelves from there. The cheap ass coffee table will be adequate as well when we get around to buying it.

Where I give credit to Ikea is not so much the look and feel of their merchandise, but rather the experience of shopping there. Think about it... you've got these giant warehouses with mass amounts of people and it looks like holiday shopping at all times. It should be the shittiest experience ever. But generally (at least for me), it's not.

There are several reasons for that. They start you off by offering cheap food (or you defer it to the mid-point in the store). Let's face it, eating makes everything better. Non-hungry, you're more likely to be content. Then they show you where to go, one aisle at a time, but never completely overwhelm you because the path prevents you from seeing too much at once. People aren't browsing and knocking into you because the big furniture boxes come at the end. The general housewares are all there being demonstrated, so you know what that light looks like when it's on, and how those curtains appear when hanging. And when you're all done, you can get some treats to go. If you hate what you got, they'll take it back, and if parts are missing, they probably have those.

They take what could be a miserable experience (i.e., going to Costco) and make it reasonable. I wouldn't consider it a tourist attraction the way some people do (and admittedly, my first experience was just that when Kara took us to the Minneapolis location), but as far as potential cluster-fuck retail goes, it's not horrible.

You know, I'm not even sure where to start with this post. Today is, as visitors would know, the tenth anniversary of the launch of CoasterBuzz. This is important for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that I can't think of anything that I've done for ten continuous years by choice.

The Internet was a very different place back then. We've seen a great inversion between the number of content creators and consumers. Back then, people went out of their way to build Web sites, rich with pictures, stories, communities, etc. Sorry, but posting when you take a crap on Facebook and Twitter is not creating content (it's more like noise). Meanwhile, the users of the Internet went from a tightly connected community to a mass of humanity that doesn't stop long enough to look at anything.

Shortly after CoasterBuzz launched, we had hundreds of sites in our site database that ranged from a site for Cedar Point employee photos to sites about specific parks. There was a real vitality to it all, as the Internet made it relatively easy to publish in great deal content around something you cared about. That's part of the reason that CoasterBuzz was built, to help you find all of that stuff. Later, search engines helped with that, but unfortunately there just isn't as much out there. I finally killed the database in the 2008 relaunch, as there were few sites left.

For me personally, as every year went on, the site provided me with two important outlets. The first is that it gave me a lab where I could develop my programming skills. The second thing it gave me was a place to publish content, which I enjoyed doing given my media background. The second thing got harder over time, particularly in that coaster building boom, and I backed off of doing that. The bigger goal with the site was always to facilitate the aggregation of content, which it still does. Only a few sites ever send in their updates these days, and I do a lot of the news linking myself, but it's still getting a lot of action. In fact, since the news forum syncs with news, it has grown exponentially.

One of the guiding principles of the site has been to do what made sense, not what others do. That took some time to get used to. Remember, in 2000, all that mattered was eyeballs, and that's what you were chasing. You just wanted as many people as possible, and then, profit! Later I'd figure out that it wasn't the quantity of visitors, but the quality (and willingness to give you money for running the site).

I never really planned to make more money with it than to cover the hosting expense, but several interesting things happened on that road. The first was that it got so popular, and bandwidth so expensive, that in the first few years I had to make revenue a priority. Because hosts were measuring bandwidth in the hundreds of megabytes and not thousands of gigabytes, the most cost-effective solution in 2001 was to get a T-1 to my house. At 1.5 mbits both ways, that's hardly impressive (my cable service is that fast upstream), but it was constant and I didn't have to pay by the bi t. But the pipe cost over a grand a month. After 9/11, I had a perfect storm: A one-year contract for the T-1, I lost my job and DoubleClick began its decline and they dropped their representation. I was on the hook for $12k+ that year and no way to pay for it all.

I asked a few people in the forum if they thought it would be worth it to join a club that got them the site ad-free and a membership card. A surprising number of people said yes. The club made up for the shortfall in ad revenue, and helped pay for the T-1, the server and the software. In fact, that was about the time I became a legitimate Photoshop owner! The club still shows strong numbers today, and turned into an institution on top of the institution, so to speak. We've been having great events ever since.

There was a period of time where a vocal minority of people had a real problem with the fact that I was treating the site like a business. Certainly, it started as a hobby, but making money from something you enjoy certainly isn't immoral! The problem (or perk, depending on how you look at it) is that I continuously reinvested all of the revenue back into things that would feed the site. This started in 2000, when I bought a Nikon Coolpix 990, which cost something like $800. It was the first digital camera that was usable enough for prints, had SLR-like features, and at 3 million pixels, was adequate for publishing pho tos to the Internet. I decided to get it for use covering the IAAPA show. It was fairly adequate, and the same-day turn around with no developing was awesome.

I got into a pattern of spending money on equipment like that for years, carrying a balance on the business credit card. In the middle part of the decade I never carried that much, except when I went all out. In 2006 I bought the HVX200 and all kinds of video gear that racked up a $10k bill. I was working full-time again, so it seemed low risk. I actually made up half that amount with a few freelance gigs, and I was grateful to own pro gear. Aside from computers, cameras were the thing that I spent the most money on. In 2008 I finally had a total zero balance, but I've since racked it back up.

Did all of the spending lead to a better site? In a lot of cases, yes, and particularly since the 2008 relaunch, I've had a lot of direct impact. It also helped out PointBuzz a great deal, and as you might expect, I've done a lot more video work over there.

There were some long-term experiments as well. CoasterBuzz Games was a pretty solid sister site that hosted thousands of save games and tracks for Rollercoaster Tycoon 1 through 3 (as well as a small number of No Limits and Hyper Rails files). I was really proud of that app, and it was smoking fast. When the 2008 relaunch rolled around, it would've been hard to modify, and traffic had dried up to almost nothing, so I let it go. It was pretty neat for its time though.

The editorial path was always evolving over the decade. At first I wrote opinion pieces now and then, but eventually stopped because it made just as much sense to post in the forums with those. I also had a rumor section, but I found in the first year that so much of it was bullshit anyway, and what was correct caused a lot of friction with parks. Since I was trying to line up events for the club, that wasn't in our best interest, so I stopped. Getting people to industry news really became the focus after that.

The forum has always been a balancing act. To some degree, you let the community govern itself. To this day, we don't do any real moderation other than move topics to the appropriate forum or delete spam and naughty words. Sometimes we close the repetitive boring topics that no one actually reads, like top ten lists or whatever. But generally speaking, we're very hands-off. By we I mean me and the moderators, all of whom I approached, not vice versa. I learned by watching other forums for other interests that anyone who wanted to be a moderator was probably not who you wanted doing the job.

It still took a lot of trial and error. In the first few years I'd often let myself get pulled into drama and people would make it about me. Eventually I learned how non-productive it was, and just headed off that kind of nonsense and moved on. The forum was better for it. We still struggle with conversation quality issues now and then, especially this time of year, but it's an up and down cycle I've learned to live with. There's a pretty good core group of people in there.

Then there was the period of neglect that I went through. Once my book was done, and the separation occurred, I lost interest in a lot of things. 2005 was a fairly insane year for me, between the separation and first post relationship, complete dissatisfaction from my job and volleyball teams I was very emotionally invested in for both spring and fall. For the next two years, I just let CoasterBuzz kind of decay in terms of content, discussion shaping and especially in the software development sense. The traffic stats made this very obvious. It just didn't seem very important.

Oddly enough, this period of time was also when I started the CoasterBuzz Podcast, and it has been one of my favorite things to come out of this whole endeavor. With my first job out of college being a radio gig, this has been the closest thing to the joy that used to bring me, only without all of the negatives that went along with broadcast radio. Most surprising is the very rich friendships I've gained from doing it since then. I went two years between seeing Mike, for example, and when we hooked up it was like we had just seen each other the week before. Ditto when I see Gonch, and now Carrie is starting to be that friend as well. If only we could get Tyler in. ;)

In 2008, after ICOM let me go, the realization of the decline in the site became obvious to me, and I finally decided to do something about it. I rebuilt everything in two months and had a solid starting point to expand and improve the app as I go. It was liberating and I was excited to be in to it again. Dating Cath and Diana allowed me to let my coaster freak flag fly during those years, but it wasn't until '08 that I embraced it and got back into it.

Traffic in terms of visitors has since climbed back up, but it's the quality of the visitors that has been overwhelmingly improved. People come there and do more stuff. Building and satisfying an audience is a totally different skill these days, and I've enjoyed working on that for the last year and a half. It's very different from the days when the site first opened. Back then, the site was easy to grow by simply advertising on GoTo.com (which became Overture, then Yahoo ads).

Looking back, the one thing I did not enjoy was screwing around with server hardware. I remember at one point the box would lock up now and then when I hosted it from home, and that was because I had a bad stick of memory. I've been hosting now in the same place for almost six years non-stop. Although, the guys at work have put the fear of God into me that it's probably about time for a server meltdown, perhaps a hard drive failure. Jerks. :)

The biggest perk of all, as much as I try to separate myself from the site, is the social benefits. I've made best friends and had relationships because of that site that I wouldn't have today without it. What's weird about that is we're mostly friends for reasons that have nothing to do with coasters today. The site only facilitated the initial connection.

The weird thing to understand is that despite the ten year commitment the site has so far required, I don't really identify with it as a key part of myself. I don't really talk about it or think about it except when I'm developing for it or using it. It's rare that I tell Diana, "Today on CoasterBuzz..." or whatever. And yet, after this long, how could it not be a part of my story? I tend to downplay the achievement of longevity, revenue and software development, which is probably a slight to myself. I tend to think of it as unimportant in the grand scope of things, until someone tells me, "Hey, I really value what you provide," and even that makes me uncomfortable for some reason.

In any case, what a ride. Let's see if I can keep it going for another ten years!

I've been way too engaged this week, and the price is that I'm not allowing myself to have stupid fun. And tomorrow is a big day with a reason to celebrate: CoasterBuzz turns ten-years-old. That's a big fucking deal. I haven't done much of anything in life for ten years straight.

You know you're really engaging (or getting beat up by difficult issues) when you find yourself physically tired coming home from a job that doesn't require physical heavy lifting. That's me this week. And at least one of the other guys I work with.

I've always had mixed feelings about pair programming, because my first exposure to it while at Progressive was a shitty experience. That's partly because they were doing it wrong too. Getting paired with the same person, who has virtually no experience, means that really they just watch you, and that sucks. At this gig, we're pretty much in the same neighborhood as far as experience, and that makes a huge difference.

We do it when it makes sense, and largely on our own accord. For example, earlier this week, we had a new guy starting while I was a little frustrated with what I was tasked to do. Working together helped me introduce him to the code while he got around my mental block. Then today, a different developer endeavored to begin refactoring a particular silo of code so we could more easily maintain it, work out the toxicity of negative performance, and overall keep our sanity. I offered to jump in while he was driving, and we made what I think were some good design decisions that will get us to a better place.

Our group is fortunately not dogmatic about pairing. Some things are simple enough that there's little benefit to it, and I think as we get to a better quality code base, it'll probably be necessary even less since we'll have stronger conventions and style.

I've read a great deal about it, and various studies put efficiency at positive increases, 15% the highest I've seen, to a decrease of 20% overall. I don't know how they're measuring it, and you can't really do so in a vacuum, ignoring the quality and long-term impact. I mean, even if you lose 20%, it's still a win if what comes out of it is easier to maintain in the long run.

It certainly helps that I like the people I work with. I imagine it would be harder to do with people you don't particularly get along with.

I've discovered recently, while spinning yarns of college shenanigans, that a surprising number of people at work did not go to college. Of course, keep in mind that Microsoft was founded by a college drop out, so naturally the company culture is not one to close any doors to where it may locate talented people. There are several in our team who didn't go to school, but our lead theorizes that's probably a statistical anomaly compared to the company as a whole.

It occurred to me just now that, given their ages (generally between 28 and 31), they were also coming out of high school at a dramatically different time, when the Internet was taking hold as a part of everyday life. Many of those guys were working in some Internet related business around that time in lieu of college. That makes a lot of sense.

Some lengthy debates have erupted on CoasterBuzz about the value of college (we do talk about roller coasters now and then), and I've typically taken the stance that the value of a college education is enormous. I don't feel that there's some moral or intellectual superiority there, but I think it's a safe generalization that people who do it (and particularly those who live on campus) have a broad "life advantage." There are always exceptions of course, which is why it's so hard to argue the point. I mean, when the world's richest man is a college drop-out, how do you compete with that?

Those who contend that you don't need college, and are passionate about it, tend to not have gone. A common theme too is that they perceive it as paying for a piece of paper. While the degree is certainly an outcome of college, you don't get it just because you paid for it, and it sure as hell isn't an easy road. I see it as an achievement and I'm not afraid to say so.

The question becomes more about the value of that achievement. I've worked with, and looked up to, enough non-degree earning people to know that it's not a requirement. Some people are naturally brilliant and have born-with ability to lead. But for every one of them, I've also worked with three or four people who I think were grossly incapable of managing time, engaging coworkers and generally executing in their position.

So this observation may in fact push the differences in people beyond the college choice and to the underlying personalities. Perhaps people who succeed or suck at life or in the workplace do so because that's just who they were in the first place, regardless of whether or not they went to school. Looking at the data I've observed first hand, perhaps that's a better theory.

There are still some strong benefits to college, and it only took me a decade and a half to admit that some of them are the very things I used to bitch about. As it turns out, that "liberal arts" education exposes you to enough diverse subjects that you have a better pulse on how the world operates. I'm still not sold on the foreign language requirement, but intro classes for business, religion, science, math, etc., all provided more value to me than I was willing to admit.

The real majority of learning I still believe comes from the living in the environment though. It comes from having roommates, getting drunk, putting off that research paper, freaking out about how overwhelmed you are, getting your ass out of bed for class, going to parties, interacting with the academics stuck in a bubble... there is just so much that happened in those four years for me.

And much of it was failure. I think that's the most important aspect of it all. College provides a safer environment for failure, and risk is generally lower. The ability to experiment with lesser consequences is very valuable.

So I think I generally still feel that college is a very valuable experience, but it's not a measurement stick for how likely success comes to people. More importantly, I'm starting to think that the quality of a person is more influenced by their underlying personality.

I've always enjoyed watching these big annual speeches, regardless of who the president is. It's a unique opportunity for the president to attempt to set the tone for the year ahead. I remember Reagan being particularly good at this, as was Clinton. Bush Jr. had a couple of excellent post-9/11 speeches, when people badly needed to hear things were going to be OK.

I've already outlined my overall impression of Obama's first year, independent of his speech, so there's no need to go through that again. One of the bigger themes he seemed to pound on was that elected people have a job, and that's to govern, not get re-elected. He was mostly careful to place that responsibility on both parties, though his point to Republicans that voting no for the sake of your party affiliation is not leadership was particularly harsh. Sure, Democrats would do the same thing if the roles were reversed, but that's not justification, that's just the same old shit.

Horrified as they were, I'm glad he blasted the supreme court over their recent decision to overturn the law that says it's OK for corporations to fund political advertising against candidates. That makes the ability to buy candidates worse than ever. I would've liked to have seen McCain's reaction, as that was his bill. But aside from that, Obama's theme there was one of transparency, that elected folks need to get everything out there. He gave the example that White House visitors are all listed online, and that's a pretty good example. I would love to see every Congress Critter do that.

I'm glad he finally had the balls to say "don't ask, don't tell" is done. He should have done that on day one.

His other policy agenda points were really nothing we haven't hear before, though he obviously wants to make jobs the biggest priority. Trying to legislate jobs seems like a recipe for failure, since you have to implement the right combination of tax incentives, government programs and such, but you have to get Congress to do it and hope that the economy will make it work. I sure as hell wouldn't want to do that.

Overall, I think it was a pretty good speech. He's a hell of a great speaker. What bothers me of course is all of the stuffy old white guys with their arms folded every time they didn't agree. I don't know how that's good for them. Who wants to see that?

As I mentioned in that other post, it's the divisiveness that annoys me more than anything. It's not just politicians anymore, it's everyone. People are angry and they don't even know what they're angry about. There is always someone there to say, "[Current President] is ruining the country," but they can never tell you why. I think Bush was the worst president in my lifetime, but I don't think he was ruining the country, nor did I think it was his intention to make everything suck. I do think that his policy and tone, in the aggregate sense, had a tendency to cast a negative direction on our world, and there are bullet points I could point out. But even he had wins, and I can acknowledge those too. What's so fucking hard about that? Why are people so willing to be for or against, and nothing in between? That, to me, is where the failure of us as a nation comes in. Politics are treated like professional sports in terms of picking sides.

If the economic correction continues and stabilizes, as economists believe it will, certainly this president will have a good term by the time it's over. The question for me will still be if he can be the transformative force I hoped he'd be.

That will likely be the start for my work leave. And, you know, something else happens that day. :)