Quantified Chris.

Last month I bought a Jawbone UP24, a bracelet that collects data on your movements. It's part of the whole Quantified Self idea, which I've steadfastly ignored, but now the hardware and software have progressed to a point where I find it acceptably simple and unobtrusive. I actually bought it just because I read it would track your sleep (apparently through a sorcerous art called actigraphy), and that's worthwhile data to have, which I am far too lazy to write down myself. Instead I press the bracelet's button when I go to bed and when I wake up, and it figures out pretty well when I've fallen asleep, and I can look at the data in the iPhone app (and apparently download it from somewhere as well).

It also acts as a pedometer, which is vaguely interesting (on a recent overnight trip I walked 8 miles in the course of the day), but mostly I'm enjoying that the UP24 app integrates with a bunch of other apps. The ones I use are Strava, to record walking/running/cycling, and MyFitnessPal to record what I eat, so I can eat less and drop some weight.

The first thing I notice is that I don't eat as many calories as I thought I did. The app says that to lose 1 pound per week, I should eat 1,720 calories a day, which to my surprise requires just a bare minimum of austerity on my part. Then the 7-mile bike ride to work is about 375 calories one way (40 minutes or less), so with that or some other cycling on my shiny new bike that Anna made me buy, I'm not feeling deprived. I'm not sure I'm actually losing weight, either, but it's hard to tell since our trip to Cape Cod messed things up. We don't own a scale that can reliably measure a 1-pound difference, so I'm really looking at a sort of tendency over time.

There's no illuminating data about my sleep, except that when I have a few bad nights in a row, I often forget, and the app will both show me and occasionally alert me that I should sleep more. (No shit, Sherlock. Sleeping more hadn't occurred to me. Not their fault, really.) I still can't stretch my sleep out, nor do I have a lot of flexibility in the hours I'll sleep. Still, I'm functional and occasionally rested, so it's hard to complain too much.

Strava is a great app for tracking rides and runs and things, but it's really aimed at competitive people, like my friends who enjoy going out and riding up and down Mount Tamalpais twice in  day. That was about 4 hours; another guy with them did it 3 times, for a ride of over 7 hours.

Strava shows you where you are on various road segments compared to everyone else, which is how I know that on various stretches, people are going twice as fast as me. I've never quite understood the hypercompetitive thing. Super-competitive people often don't seem very happy.

Anyway. Fun toys.

eponymous.

The boy was sad at the end of the day: bored with all his books, bored with the iPad, annoyed at his admittedly near-useless unreliable laptop. After forcing him to go back outside the bedroom and knock, I dragged him down on the bed where Anna and I were talking, for a hopefully quieting snuggle.

"I just knew it was going to turn out this way. Nothing you can do will change anything."

"Now, if I were a better parent, I would make you laugh."

Giggling commences.

"Unfortunately, you have the worst Chris ever. Possibly the worst Chris in the history of Chrises."

Smiling, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world: "There's only one Chris."

 That is a nice feeling.

field trip: Béla Fleck and Abigail Washburn

I occasionally tell Anna we're going somewhere, but I won't tell her where, or what we're doing. So a month ago I planned last night, and we went to see Béla Fleck perform alongside his wife, Abigail Washburn. Abigail is a well-known old-time banjo player and bandleader, and seemed like most of the audience was there to see her; they got a bit of a surprise when Béla was unleashed a couple times, because he is almost certainly the greatest living banjo player, and possibly the greatest ever.

Just to give you a sense of the difference, this is Abigail with her band, playing a typical one of her songs:

She's a great songwriter and singer. But Béla plays like this, when he's just jamming and improvising by himself:

And then this is his band:

So that's interesting, to see a very comfortable rapport between two people with unequal gifts on the same instrument (they focused on Abigail's music). And they are completely adorable--actually reminded us a lot of us.

There was jumping up and down with joy. It was satisfying.

parenting by annoyance.

"Hey, monkey. How was your weekend?"
"Good."
"What'd you do?"
"Stuff."
"Did you go for a hike?"
"Yeah."
"Did you play basketball?"
"Um...no..."
"Did you go water-skiing?"
"No. You know I don't play basketball."
"You're not giving me any information, so I'm going to ask you about every possible thing you could have done this weekend until I find out."
"Oh, okay, fine. I did a bunch of stuff without screens. We went for a couple walks, and we played some non-video games. I read a bunch of books. There, are you satisfied now?"
"Yes!"

you can hear the gears turning

It's common for adults to enjoy kids around age 8-11. Their consciousness expands to more and more include the world beyond themselves, and they start thinking in more sophisticated ways. They become more like adults, in other words. We're just biased, because it gets to be less work to relate to them. (This obviously ends with adolescence and picks up again sometime later.)

J is no exception, filtered through his unique brain wiring. The other day he learned what home-schooling actually means--he's heard the word many times, but the reality of it never quite penetrated. Anna is going to be watching a friend's daughter, and I was blessed to witness the discussion.

"So I'm going to have M during the day on Thursday, and I'm volunteering at school, so you might see her."
"During the school day? Doesn't she have to be in school?"
"She's home-schooled. Her mom is her teacher."
There's a pause while he processes this. If he could, he would be raising one eyebrow and giving Anna a hard look.
"But I still have to go to school?"

Yep, kiddo.

This probably won't get easier once he finds out his cousin is being home-schooled too. We've discussed it, and it's the fallback plan for any unresolvable school situation. Anna and I both had traumatic school experiences, and while we work hard not to project our memories too much onto the much safer realities of the modern public school, we're determined that he not have a traumatic school experience, whatever that takes.

His moods are much more fluid these days, and we can often redirect Angry J into Laughing J without much trouble. The other night we got him laughing and after a few minutes he said, "I wish I could stop laughing so I could go back to being angry." Let's call it a success.

One night he was grumbling about not finding a library book, but it was time to call his father. I get to do these all in a cheerful voice.

"I don't know where it was, and my parents won't help me look for it..."
"We will. Now it's time to call Daddy."
He made it about three steps towards the room with the phone when he got distracted and grumbled back to his room again.
"I don't know where that book is, I'm never going to find it--"
"J, go call Daddy, we'll find the book after that."
This time he didn't even make it out of his room.
"And my parents aren't even listening to me..."
"Less grumbling, more calling Daddy!"

That was awesome enough, but then we could hear him ranting on the phone.

"...and then Chris wouldn't let me look for it! He made me come in here and call you!"

Oh, the tyranny!

all the things, all at once.

We're having an extraordinarily busy time here at the Snugglehaus. Anna and I wound up booked for stuff several weekends in a row, enough that we moved our planned trip to Vancouver out to November. We weren't going to Vancouver for any particular reason--I've never been there, and we had 6 hours left to use some frequent flyer miles--but she had the genius idea to go there around our anniversary. This at once gives us a special way to celebrate the end of year 3, and more or less relieves her from having to remember when our anniversary is.

(There is a mosaic plate in our living room with our anniversary date on it.)

I have been fully engaged at work in what we call a "fire drill," which means different things in different contexts, but always involves something important enough to override your previously-most-important work and require your attention until it's resolved. In our case, an unfortunate confluence of organizational failures led to a certain amount of engineering work having to get done within 7 weeks or so, before a certain date.


If you're unfamiliar with the practice of engineering, defining a required set of work and a hard deadline is a terrible idea. It's beyond terrible. It's fundamentally stupid. It produces tired people and crappy code, because there's no time to apply the usual techniques for making sure our code isn't crappy.

It happens anyway, because the world is inconvenient, and the most you can hope for is that the executives truly internalize that this is a corrosive and unsustainable way to operate. They'll do their best to avoid it, and be really apologetic in the future when it happens again, and they'll take your glaring and severe tone of voice seriously.

We're doing stellar work, of course. Tonight I am taking some time to sit back and admire my ability to take a team full of chaos and quickly induce order and organization. The last time I did this I was pleased with the magnitude of the change; this time I am startled by the speed. Once I started facilitating, the fundamental change was almost immediate, within 48 hours. Now it's an actual cohesive team, fluidly communicating, sharing and handing off work, with lots of self-organization. People trust each other, and so there's beautiful, mostly-productive argument. And. And. This happened as we all walked out of our semi-weekly retrospective/planning meeting, which took just under its allotted 2.5 hours.

"This meeting will get shorter, as we find our rhythm and cadence."

This is a true statement.

P is one of my favorite people at work. We argue and debate constantly, which was a little uncertain until a couple weeks ago I made a point of signaling that I understand we disagree continuously and that I really enjoy working with him.

"Lies. I don't believe you."

He was being flippant. It's what we do. And yet. I turned around, grinned, and wagged my finger at him, walking backwards.

"You don't know shit. You don't know that this is my mission in life, and I'm good at it."

I laughed, turned around, and kept walking forward.
He paused for a second.

"Okay. I earned that."

It was just an impulse, to turn his glib moment into something more serious. It's important that they trust me, though. Cynical jokes are funny, but they can also be seeds of doubt, especially in the two new people. The meeting will get shorter, because we will work more smoothly. There is not, in practice, a question about this. They want to perform better, they are more than capable of it, and I am more than capable of guiding them to do that. If we are left to our own devices, it is a certainty.

And now, I think, they have seen some of my certainty.

wife meets binary.

Life with me inevitably means conversations like this.

"How many bytes in a megabyte? A thousand?"
"1024 times 1024."
"Okay, wow, that is so random."
"It's not random. It's two to the tenth."
"Okay, bedtime now."

 She did know what she was in for, at least.