joygantic

Fleeing the Scene

Ah!  The jet set glamour of business travel!  I'm back at it and have yet to have a flight that wasn't delayed, except of course the on time connection I missed in Denver which delays my arrival in New York to the wee hours of tomorrow.

The last 24 hours have been more surreal than usual.  My (delayed) flight to Las Vegas had me finishing dinner at midnight, talking to a colleague in London at 1:30am, and then up early to give a brief talk at the big annual TV industry conference, after which I bolted for the airport and my (delayed) flight.  Upon arriving in Denver, Google News alerts me that a trade  mag has already published a piece on my talk.  I feel a bit like a bank robber who fled the scene.

Sometime, over a year ago, I began putting signs on my office door indicating my whereabouts when I was on the road.  Everyone is different and it's a tiny little bit of creative expression which makes being away a little more fun.  If you were our office in Seattle, you'd see this:

Sociology . . . Now with More Zombies!

Years ago, when he was toiling in grad school, my dear brother Brian expressed frustration about teaching.  It's something that most budding academics do since teaching time takes away from research time and the later is the key to career advancement at top flight universities.

But somewhere along the way he started to like teaching and became really good at it.  Really good.  As in they-give-him-awards-for-it good.  And he's a stellar researcher so, in the end, he found a way to thread that needle, which too few academics manage to do.

This term he's teaching a massive lecture course on the "Elements of Sociology."  Some might be daunted by the size of the class which--I'm not totally sure--but I think is north of 500, closing in on 1,000 students but when I talked to him about this before class started he was practically salivating at the opportunity.

With such a large class merely showing up and droning at students for 50 minutes at a go is a failed strategy, so among other tricks he's rolled out a blog that you can read and follow along with.  If you're going to read only one post, then read about the link between Shaun of the Dead and sociology.

Word Press?

This is a geeky post, so Mom, you can skip it.

My home work space is shaping up nicely--hugely excited about that--and so I can actually turn attention to my project queue.  Near the top is renovating Joygantic and specifically:

• Adding a link blog
• Merging my 1.0 (flat HTML) archive with my 2.0 (Typepad archive)
• Tagging
• Proper DNS mapping to joygantic.net
• Various other widget-like nonsense to tie together my various online streams

And in considering this, it looks like Word Press is the way to go and it's conveniently fully supported by Laughing Squid, which hosts my domain.

So . . . I'm soliciting advice on Word Press in general and specifically the ins and out of migration from Typepad (Googling shows me that dealing with Typepad link structure is something I need to pay attention to.)  Any comments or email would be most appreciated, even if you're just steering me to (or away from) online resources you've had experience with.

File Under: Carpe Diem

Well Ms. Dia is back in Seattle and so our household is once more complete until I start my Q1 travel binge next Sunday.  She was in Atlanta for a business conference and was supposed to return on Monday until a great opportunity fell from the sky thanks to a colleague at work.

Long story short, she changed her flight and ended up spending most of Monday sitting in a pew at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, arguably the homebase of the US Civil Rights Movement.  Martin Luther King, Jr. was co-pastor there with his father who--and I didn't know this--remained pastor of the church up until 1970.  The church is the center point for Atlanta's annual celebration of the life of Dr. King and attending the Monday service was the highlight of my honey's trip.

That's about all I know since her plane didn't land until nearly 1am this morning and while I'd liek to believe my love for her is bottomless, the actual bottom is apparently a 1:30am airport pickup on a worknight.  So I don't have the details other than the observation that Bil Clinton is looking and sounding great.  No word on what Bernice King's rapping was like, but I did confirm that she did not see Bill fall asleep on stage.

Jason Takes a Bite of the Big Apple

Our dear friend Jason just pulled up stakes and moved to New York City.  Odds are this will mean I'm more likely to see him in 2008 than I did in 2007.  The going away party organized by Elaine was fantastic--a tremendous troupe of people came out of the woodwork to send this boy off.  Our memory lane photo collection is here, my pictures of the night are here, and a few of my favorites are below.

Doing the Math

Thanks to those who called or emailed to see if I was OK since things have been so quiet around here.  I'm fine and in a somewhat cold-hampered groove.  Basically:

Available Time

-

(Bigger than usual workload + Lots of home projects)

X

A nasty cold

=

No Joygantic posts

Winter

 I grew up in Southern California where "winter" means that there are some days that you can't be comfortable in shorts.  I've come to love Seattle over the past 15 years and even love, somewhat, our winters.  They don't dish out the brutal cold of the Midwest or Northeast, but they do have a darkness that you only find at high latitude.

My friend Lisa was in town this weekend from Sacramento, where they can grow tomatoes--I'm guessing here--for ten months out of the year.  Lisa's grew up in the east and her observations of Seattle merged, I expect, with memories of youth led her to nail what it's like in Seattle right now in a gorgeous, poetic voice that I wanted to share:

Seattle's winter palette is metallic. Saturated ancient greens pull their way toward black. Shorelines balance on mirror-silver afternoon water. Pebbles stick in concrete, uncovered ancient bones. Steel gray, brushed aluminum, gunmetal, chrome, earth, the pop of gold lettering on iron black. Winter light is absorbed and reflected in ways I suspect are peculiar to the city. And when the sun came out, both air and people drank in amber glaze: the day star. Water blazed gold. Shadows unlayered. People blinked into blue sky, loosened their coats.

Seattle's winter rules the day in a barbed steel crown, unapologetic. No doubt the way winter always has. No doubt humans are its subjects. Winter holds sway in Seattle. Sacramento seems to disregard seasonal royalty as a quaint relic of another time. Winter in Sacramento makes a diluted, rote statement according to the Julian calendar. Winter in Seattle demands tribute with quiet disregard and traditional patience.

It was deeply satisfying to be in a winter place, even for a short time.

Nights & Flights 2007

George reminded me that last year I'd prompted him to participate in the "my year in cities" meme so it's only right that I pony up.  I actually started the year fastidiously keeping track of my travel, my workouts, my weight--all sorts of stuff--in a master spreadsheet.  I found it a really useful way to get some perspective on a frenetic life.  Unfortunately I never backed up that damn spreadsheet and when my laptop was stolen earlier this year I lost my data.  Grrr.

But an hour with my calendar and the records from my loyalty airlines (United and Alaska) and I've been able to reconstruct the year that was.  I'm not sure how I feel about the data.  On the one hand, I look at George and his many more miles and destinations and think "that wasn't so bad afterall."  On the other hand I remember countless bouts of flights delays, exhaustion, broken suitcases (two), and lonely hotel rooms and think "man, that often sucked."

There's certainly an upside to travel and I'm staring at four trips in the next five weeks, but as 2008 revs up I'm resolved to make sure every trip is worth the time, energy, and hours spent being irradiated.  The stats below are pretty accurate and include both personal travel and business travel, which was by far the bulk of my time spent on the road.

Summary

• Took approximately 30 trips, meaning that in any given week there was a 60% chance I'd be on the road.
• Flew 110,000 flight miles.
• Spent a 101 nights away from home, or roughly 28% of the year which means I actually slept in my own bed more than 2/3 of the time, though many of those nights involved arriving home very late: I was not in Seattle--away or in transit--for about 121 days or 1/3 of the time.
• Spent the night in 21 different cities and six countries outside the US, including Portugal which I hadn’t visited to 20 years.

Countries

• Bahamas
• Canada
• Netherlands
• Portugal
• Spain
• United Kingdom
• USA

Cities (* indicates multiple visits, # indicates multiple nights)

• Amsterdam, Netherlands#
• Barcelona, Spain#
• Black Rock City, NV#
• Dallas, TX#
• Denver, CO*#
• Kansas City, KS#
• Lisbon, Portugal#
• London, UK*#
• Los Angeles, CA*#
• Mt. Baker, WA#
• Nassau, Bahamas
• New York, NY*#
• Northridge, CA#
• Orlando, FL#
• Portland, OR
• Sacramento, CA*#
• San Francisco, CA*#
• Somewhere in the Carribean on a cruise ship
• Toronto, Canada*#
• White Plains, NY#

An apology to the Ayn Rand man

"To begin with, I am sorry that I did not state in simpler words, when you asked why Ayn Rand was shelved in the fiction section instead of the philosophy section, that the Fountainhead is a novel . . ."

via