A look back at our very (very!) memorable engagement weekend. It’s long, so if you are lazy you can go directly to the summary and pictures.

We started our Memorial Weekend hiking trip bright and early Saturday morning. After a quick stop at the information center, we parked, packed up our things and got out on the trail (around 9:30am). A few minutes in I realized I forgot my camera, so I ran back to the parking lot to grab it. I tried to run back up the trail, but that was a bad idea. Starting the hike completely winded wasn’t helpful, especially because we were on the wrong trail1! We kept on wondering why the trail was so steep, and why the lake below was in the wrong place. After pouring over our map (thank you AMC guidebook!) we realized our error, but fortunately we were still going to the right destination (Cannon Mt).

So no biggie, we can handle 2000 ft of vertical in 2 miles, right? That was until we starting seeing snow. At first it was just little patches here and there, but eventually it covered the entire trail2. I was getting worried. The trail is kicking our butts, it’s cold, and we’re trudging through snow (let me tell you, Cindy is not a fan of snow). I started second guessing whether I was going to do this or not.

Eventually we reached the summit. Well, it wasn’t exactly the summit, but it was darn close and had a great view. We took a break, soaked in the surroundings, snapped some pictures, and snacked a bit (anything I could use to stall and wait for the other couple up there to leave). When we were finally by ourselves I started getting really nervous. Cindy asked me if I was ready to get moving again (because she was probably freezing her butt off!), but convinced her to stay just a little bit longer.

So it was now or never. I built up my courage, took her hand, got down on one knee, and started my spiel (sorry, those words are for Cindy only). My heart was racing, but fortunately I had rehearsed it enough that (I think) I didn’t make a complete fool of myself. I had hidden the ring inside the breast pocket of my jacket wrapped in tissues and my glove liners. After what seemed like an eternity of unpacking, I offered her the ring and said, “Will you marry me?” I can’t remember the next minute very well, I think I was too wrapped up in my own excitement to even hear her response. I had to double check with her to make sure she said yes :)

After taking some time to celebrate, we got back on to the trail. It was only a short trip to the true summit, though we skipped the observation tower. We took a different route back down, which was the route that we were supposed to start out on. It was easier than before, but our legs were too wobbly to appreciate it. There was still some snow, but since we were coming down the other face of the mountain there were more puddles pools made from recently melted snow rather than the cold kind.

We had a happy trip down, though I still hadn’t relieved myself of all my worry yet. For a long while I couldn’t stop apologizing. I said I was sorry for the snow, sorry for the cold, sorry taking so long to propose at the summit, etc. It was supposed to be perfect! It took a little while, but she eventually knocked some sense in to me. None of that mattered. All that mattered was that we were now happily engaged! (And little did I know how many more “imperfections” were to come!)

When we reached the bottom of the mountain, we took another well deserved break. Refreshed by some more food and gatorade we set out on the flat and (supposedly) simple trail to go from where we should have parked to where we actually parked. It started off easily enough, but then the trail stopped. The map showed the trail following the left edge of a lake, but all we could see were the remnants of a few small bridges… which were inconveniently floating in the middle of the lake. No biggie, there was a bike road we intersected with a few minutes back, we’ll just follow that back to the parking lot instead of the trail.

Full of pride from our showing of dexterity on the earlier pools of melted snow, I figured we could shortcut things by crossing a creek and plowing through a bit of forest — instead of walking a few minutes. That wasn’t a good idea3. I was looking very fleet and nimble, until I lost my footing on a rock. I only ended up soaking one foot (I’d say a pretty good recovery), but we still had about another mile to go. Squish. Squish.

Wearily we made it back to the car (and a got to finally take those wet socks off!). Earlier I had let Cindy in on another secret I had for the weekend. Instead of camping Saturday night, we had a room at the Woodstock Inn Station & Brewery. And it was no simple room either. We had a King bed, sofa, whirlpool jacuzzi, fireplace, and a refridgerator to cool the champagne I bought. So we had so time to relax (aka nap), sip champagne, and sooth our muscles before dinner.

We ate at the Clement Room Grille and boy, what a meal. I had a filet with scallops, crabmeat, and hollandaise sauce and Cindy had smoke grilled salmon glazed with butter and New Hampshire maple syrup. Fantastic. We topped it off with Mouse Tracks pie for desert which was also excellent, but stuffed ourselves so much that we couldn’t stop by the bar afterward and try our their microbrew. Bummer, we’ll have to go back someday :).

When I woke up in the morning, I had completely forgotten to dry my hiking boots out. So as we were getting ready and using the last of the champagne for mimosa, I stuffed the shoes with paper towels and set up an apparatus with the shoes and a clothes hanger to keep them nice and close to the fire. We headed off to breakfast, casting a wary glance at the fireplace, but pretty confident that leaving the fire on for a hour or so would be fine (it was a gas fireplace after all). But when we got back from yummy waffles and french toast, something was definitely wrong. The room smelled awful and it didn’t take long to notice the malformed shoes by the fire4.

This was a problem. I was up for attempting to wear the something-boot-esqe things, but Cindy would have none of it (she was definitely right). When we checked out, we got directions to a few local places where we might find hiking shoes. Thankfully, a ski shop nearby did the trick. The boots were a bit expensive, but they fit.

We eventually got to the trail head around 10:30am. We were a bit frazzled, but confident that our weekend was back on track. This time we were doing the Franconia Ridge Loop, which leads you over two 4000 footers (Lincoln and Lafayette ). This hike wasn’t quite as exciting as the previous one (you can only propose once, I guess) , but it had some absolutely stunning views from the ridge. It was such a beautiful, clear day! We even had a great view of the cliff I proposed from. Cindy is pointing at it in the picture :).

The hike up to, and across the ridge was a good workout, but not too bad. The way down was another story. There was more snow. Lots more snow. We thought treking up a steep snowy incline was hard — going down is much harder! We spent 45 minutes attempting to walk sliding down from the top of the Falling Waters trail. Next time we’ll bring hiking poles5 — boy would they have helped (instead of trying to make our own).

It wasn’t just the snow. The Falling Waters trail has that name for a reason, and not from the snow we slipped and fell on. The name comes from the several creeks and waterfalls that criss-cross the trail. As you know, I already had some trouble fording a creek the day before, but this time it was Cindy’s turn. She did it in grand style, practically face-planting into the water. For better or worse, a couple rocks prevented her from getting soaked — though they gave her some pretty good bruises3. That last leg of the loop did us in (definitely harder than yesterday), but we made it down and it was so worth it!

We were worried about it getting cold, but decided camp for the night anyway. After some McGyver problem solving6, fun with fire, yummy campfire food, and Cindy’s bout with the wet wipes7 we called it a night. The next morning we heading back to town, leaving NH with some great memories8 and looking forward to spending the rest of our lives together :).

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In the beginning of October, Cindy and I flew across the Atlantic to soak in the sights of middle/eastern Europe (and satisfy Cindy’s annual “I must leave the country” requirement). I wasn’t super keen on the idea originally, but she warmed me up to it and I figured I’d give this traveling thing a try.

Oggie had already picked up our rental car so we hit the road toward Munich on Saturday morning. We stopped along the way at a few small towns (Durnstein, Krems, Melk, Salzburg, Friesing … no pics up yet of those). The towns were nice, Krems had some kind of political festival going on where people were carrying around colored balloons representing their favored candidate (Bush probably would be yellow, right?). Salzburg had some nice views and a human-sized chess board (that people were actually playing). We also swung by the oldest brewery in the world (11th century!)… they even had a Weihenstephaner das boot.

We got to Munich in the evening and parked in a garage outside the gates of Oktoberfest. It didn’t take long for us see where the party was going on since there were thousands of people out and having a good time. It seemed like most of them had been partying all day long, but fortunately not too many people were doing stupid things :)

All of the beer tents (and by tent I mean 5000 person wooden structure) were packed to the gills, but we got lucky and squeezed ourselves into the Löwenbräu beer hall (pic). There is no doubt, we were the only sober people in there. The inside was lined with people standing on tables, singing and dancing (and drinking) their hearts out. The funny thing (if thousands of drunken dancing people isn’t funny enough) was that Löwenbräu was the “rock” beer tent — meaning that pretty much all the music was english and stuff we could sing along to. Unfortunately I can’t remember the exact songs, but I do know there was some good ol’ John Bovi (I’ve given in to my incessant mumbling of his name). Unfortunately we were only starting to really get into full swing (after two liters of beer) when the hall started to close at 11:30. Bummer.

The carnival atmosphere continued to live on after the tents closed. Particularly we were drawn to the a mob of guys staring into the fun house. We learned that Drunken men + women in Bavarian dresses + an unexpected floor updraft in the funhouse = a really enjoyable 15 mins.

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I disagree with his assessments on the stock and weather widgets. Yes, you could change them to present more data on the screen. But that has several consequences. The biggest thing is that more information requires more cognitive load. More is complex. More is slower. Wouldn’t you be pissed if you just wanted to know what the temperature is tomorrow — but you had to move the iphone close to you and squint to see it?

Please, let’s not teach people to optimize interfaces by one single metric. Design is the art of balancing. You are not designing if you ignore the other end of the see-saw.

ps: If you are into this stuff I highly recommend reading and listing to Aza Raskin. IMHO, he’d win the “Sharpest, yet still practical” designer award. I was really wowed when I heard him say “the content is the interface” at the AJAX Experience. Watch and learn.

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Yea, I know that IE is in a tough spot. This is (at least) partially deserved but I’m going to try and not hold a grudge.

I personally think that you should really consider making the real IE8 engine (”super standards” as some have called it) the default option. Or at least make it the default option when HTML5 is used.

If you are serious about promoting web standards, its time to start teaching the mom and pop web developers of the world. If the default is IE6/IE7 mode all of their new websites will work fine and they will go on their merry way… still coding incorrectly. Feel free to document the meta tag as the first bullet in your IE FAQ, but don’t let the unknowing masses perpetuate the issue (and just push solving the problem till a later date).

The message I get from your proposal is that Microsoft cares more about its (short term) IE marketshare than the (immense) difficulties that web developers have to deal with today. And really, you can do that if you’d like — but it makes me realize (even more) how bad it is to rely on proprietary software from a very proprietary company.

The web is a great and wonderful thing. I sure hope that it doesn’t die, but moves like this are not helping.

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The Storm Worm is coming to get us all

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pictures and posts will follow…

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In fact, if you look at the way software gets written in most organizations, it’s almost as if they were deliberately trying to do things wrong. In a sense, they are. One of the defining qualities of organizations since there have been such a thing is to treat individuals as interchangeable parts. This works well for more parallelizable tasks, like fighting wars. For most of history a well-drilled army of professional soldiers could be counted on to beat an army of individual warriors, no matter how valorous. But having ideas is not very parallelizable. And that’s what programs are: ideas.

And some interesting thoughts from the comments:

One possible alternative organization pattern is the “band.” …

It would be interesting to see how a band-style organization would apply towards more practical software products. Software so produced would come in boxes with the band’s logo, but more importantly, a _list of credits_, anecdotes about the software’s creation, etc. That is, to make the delivery of the software more _human_.

Back in the day, when credits on software were more commonplace, it was possible to judge the quality of a product (to some extent) based on who was involved with it. Some people became reknowned coders, reknowned technical writers, etc. I think it gave two incentives: first, your name is going on the box of that package — this gave prestige in the community post-sale; second, it allowed the customers to predict the overall feel of the software prior to actually purchasing it, based on their experiences with software written by the same or similar authors.

The only part I don’t really agree with is the implicit condemnation of programming done by large companies. Yes, their methods result in mediocre software, but that’s often what you want. There’s a reason they try to treat programmers as interchangeable cogs, and resist having an entire program in one person’s head.

To use the tired “building a house” metaphor - you can get a renowned architect to design the next landmark in a city, or you can get mediocre, interchangeable architects to design a row of townhouses. Both approaches are valid and have their own place, but there’s no point asking the famous architect to build townhouses.

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A simple outerHtml jQuery plugin

See the code nicely on pastie

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When I was younger, my family was down in Nags Head several times a year. We’d always be there for a few weeks in the summer, many of the holidays (Christmas, Thanksgiving, and maybe Easter), and a stray weekend here and there.

There were plenty of fun things to do down there, but OBX’s biggest asset wasn’t the tourist attractions — it was the atmosphere. Some beaches lure you with glitzy hotels, fancy restaurants, and miles of boardwalk, but Nags Head lures you with cocktails at sunset, walks along wind-swept dunes, and genuine relaxation.

But how would a kid ever adore these things? The truth is that they didn’t. When I was a kid, vacations to Nags Head were fun since the whole family was there. Sure all of the standard things — playing at the beach, movies, mini-golf, etc — were fun, but they were all 10 times better with five other cousins around.

So when I visited a few weeks ago, I got the chance to see why my parents loved going to Nags Head. Maybe I’m being overly dramatic, but it was an awing experience to relive those great childhood memories through new eyes, as an adult.

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The short of it is, I’m moving away from product development toward prototype/research development. Not research in the academic sense (though I did consider that), but research in the sense of experimenting, learning, and innovating.

… intermission

Please remember that I’m not IBM, so these thoughts are 100% owned by Timothy J. Finley and not HAL^h^h^hIBM.

…And for the longer version (which has turned into quite a history lesson (more for my own archival purposes))

At Lotus I’ve been working on the Activities project from the first day I started, but Activities has meant many different things over the past few years. I was originally inspired to join IBM to help work on the productization of the Activity Explorer research project (wahoo a new way to collaborate!). When I started the team was just releasing the preview of Activity Explorer in IBM Workplace.

But it wasn’t very long before momentum started moving away from Activities as a traditional rich client application toward focusing on a web experience. This was great for me since I was one of the few people on the team that already had some web development skills. The period that followed was the best programming experience I’ve had so far in my life. We (me and my tech lead) were pumping out code left and right, righting decent tests, quickly getting a prototype usable, continually responding to feedback from use, and adding features all the time.

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