I spent the month of July up at our place in Granby, CO (just outside of Winter Park). My partner Brad has been a longtime fan of taking a month to work somewhere else, not travel and clear your head, but I’d never given it a try. And while I understand that not all jobs allow for this, I suspect that more people could do it (at least for a week or two) if they really wanted to. Let me be clear that this wasn’t vacation. While I didn’t get on a plane for a month (which in and of itself felt like vacation), I was working full time – completely connected via email and phone. I actually intended to…
Category
Life
How I lost my 1K status
If you followed this blog last year, you know that my quest to hit United 1K status ended with a December 26th trip from Denver to Washington DC. I left the house around 7:00am that morning and returned home that evening at 6:00pm, happily tweeting about the 30 miles I had to spare. And while I never want to make 1K again (that’s just too many miles to fly – especially back and forth from Denver to the east and west coasts, and in particular considering that I probably had another 20k miles on other airlines last year as well) I was pretty pleased with my achievement. Fast forward about two weeks. I’m on my way to CES in early…
Customer Loyalty
I travel a lot. It’s mostly to relatively fun places (New York, San Francisco, Seattle, etc), but it’s pretty much all within the US. Living in Denver and traveling to the coasts makes it pretty difficult to rack up frequent flier miles (a round trip to New York is barely 3k miles). So while I feel like I’m constantly on the road (trying to change this habit for this year – more on that in a different post), I’m perennially falling just a little short of reaching 1K status (100,000 flight miles) on United. So when I checked my account balance after my last scheduled business trip in December and found that I was only a few thousand miles short…
AT&T reminds you not to use your phone
My wife received an email this morning from AT&T that said in part: Our systems have detected that you are transmitting a substantial amount of data while roaming in areas not directly served by AT&T. The Terms and Conditions of our data plans (including unlimited plans) provide an "off-net usage" allowance that is equal to the lesser of 24 megabytes or 20% of the megabytes included in your plan. I was surprised by this, not only because I hadn’t completely read the terms and conditions (I subsequently did and it’s in there – they can go so far as to cancel my account if they don’t like my network usage – on net or off, voice or data) but mostly…
Denver to the top of Mt. Evans take II
Last year was my first joining Walker on his annual “Colorado Hajj” trip riding from the state capital building in Downtown Denver to the top of Mt. Evans (a 14,000ft mountain west of town) and back. It’s a pretty insane ride, but extremely fun and the kind of challenge that once you’ve tried it, it’s hard not to crave doing it again. This year’s ride came significantly earlier in the season’s than last year, meaning that legs and lungs were that much less prepared for the massive undertaking. Last year, Walker and I did the ride alone, but this year we had a gang of 8 to make things more interesting (and provide better drafting during the early ride). To…
meeting overload
The last couple of months have been tuff ones for me. I’ve felt constantly behind (thus the lack of blogging consistency) and most days consisted of running from one meeting to the next (typically 10 minutes behind). This has contributed to my feeling both burned out and feeling that I was letting too many things fall through the cracks. This was evidenced by 1) my inbox growing most days, not shrinking; 2) waking up at 5am to try to work on #1; 3) an over-reliance on multitasking (walking to a meeting, on the phone while responding to email); 4) my wife never being able to reach me during the day; and 5) generally feeling stressed and off-balance. My week off…
Colorado Bloggers Challenge
Micah has recruited a number of Colorado bloggers to promote the 2008 DonorsChoose Bloggers Challenge. There are some great (and well deserving) projects up – you can take a look at them by checking out the widget on my blog (scroll down a bit to find it) or head directly to the DonorsChoose website. Be generous!
Denver to the top of Mt. Evans (and back)
Long overdue, but here’s an account of my recent bike ride from Denver to the top of Mt. Evans (elevation 14,264 ft) and back. First some quick technical and summary data in case you’ve found this post looking to do a similar ride. I ride a lightspeed titanium bike with a standard front crankset (39/53) and a slightly climbing friendly rear cassette (13/27). The ride up took us 7 1/2 hour (ride time) and covered some 10,000 feet of climbing over 72 miles. While that’s a lot of climbing, the gradient actually didn’t kick up much past about 8% (and for most of the climb from Idaho Springs was more like 6%). My training had been pretty modest – I…
Leave your ego at the door
My wife took me to kick-boxing class yesterday and if I was to be honest with you, I’d have to admit that I pretty much got my ass handed to me. Kickboxing is HARD. This isn’t athletic club kick-boxing. This is Muay Thai kick-boxing at the local Thai dojo. My wife’s been going for months and is really good (and before you ask – yes, she can clearly kick my ass any time she feels like it). She’s been asking me to go for a while but I’ve resisted. Not because I didn’t think it would be fun (and as it turned out it was even more fun than I thought it would be), but because I didn’t know how…
Life without email?
For most technology professionals (really most professionals of any kind) email is so integrated into our work that we can hardly imagine life without it. Sure, it can be a distraction at times and – especially if you carry a wireless device – hard to escape from. But it also greatly enhances productivity, allows us to communicate quickly and effectively and to have asynchronous interactions with a great number of people. I know in my own work life I send and receive between 200 and 300 emails a day. And since I’m already tied up on the phone or in meetings for at least 5 or 6 hours in any given day, email allows me to be significantly more productive…