2010 Review

Whew! We're almost at the end. And unless I buy a motorcycle next week I don't expect anything more noteworthy that would qualify for this list so I'm gonna go ahead and write it.

Here's the big stuff that happened to me this year:

• Spoke at high school graduation. (Definitely top of the list)
• Worked the launch of the fan relations area at Bristol. Awesome experience.
  
• My video CMS survived an entire year at the Post and is still running strong as it is being replaced with a 3rd party solution ("sunsetted" in Yahoo! language). I never imagined I would single-handedly build a system in Python for a company as prestigious as the Post that would handle something as mission critical as video. And I estimate that I saved the company ~100k by doing that but I don't know for sure.
  
• I was on call 24/7 all year b/c of said CMS.
• I survived my first year of marriage (Congratulations to Mandy, really. Had to be much worse on her ;)
  
• Moved to Alexandria!
• Started working in downtown DC ~3 blocks from the White House
• Road my bike >20 miles for fun on weekends and commuted ~25 miles to and from work on several occasions. (NEVER saw either of those coming)
• Road trip with Kyle to Hotlanta for Sara's wedding
• Lost ~>25 lbs (as of today compared to 1/1/2010)
• Beach Week Blowout with all my closest college friends. It was WONDERFUL!
  
• Rode a zipline! (without Mom, unfortunately)
• Rode a surfboard! Basically I used it like a giant boogie board but never-the-less I got to feel what it's like to ride a wave.
• Took a concealed weapons class and shot the VA DOJ course of fire with a 295/300.
• Got my motorcycle learner's permit and rode a KLR 650 over US 421- "The Snake"
• Met an amazing group of freelancers / entrepreneurs and got in on the ground of floor of something that is going to be amazing.
• Went camping! Found a gorgeous, quaint campsite Wilderness Canoe
  

And I have absolutely no doubt 2011 is going to be even BIGGER...

Haven't been through this in a while...

When a firefighter passes away one of the symbols is a ladder with a broken rung. The armed forces use a non-symmetrical flight formation with a missing plane. When Rexel Jackson, a friend of my family from our home town and the fire chief passed away I made an image and posted it as my profile pic on facebook. I might not be the greatest designer but I like to do something with my skills as a tribute in my own way.

Jeff Byrd, President and General Manager of Bristol Motor Speedway recently died after a battle with cancer. I decided to alter the SMI logo to make a mourning version.



I don't know the appropriateness of using the SMI logo for that but BMS (and SMI for that fact) will not be the same without Jeff. So I dropped the car from the logo and put his nick name in its place.

I never knew how to act around Jeff (Mr. Byrd always to me as I could never bring myself to call him Jeff) but he was one of those people that commanded respect without ever saying a word.

I will never forget these specific interactions with him:

1. Making everyone in the entire office watch my rope magic trick and then tipping me for doing it, haha :D That was the first time I ever performed that trick in front of a lot of people and I wouldn't have done it without his incessant prodding.

2. Being upset about the performance of the contracted cleaning crew during race weekend, he sent an all staff email alerting employees that they could find him out picking up trash. I don't doubt that he did, in fact, go out and pick up trash and the message was clear that we all needed to pitch in. This memory is one that I recount often. This summer while attending the Monster Truck Madness I took less than 60 seconds out of my life to pick up trash blowing down the back stretch during the autograph session thinking that Jeff would have done the same thing. I guess my point is that I perceived Jeff as the kind of guy that didn't draw lines. It wasn't someone else's job, it was everyone's job.

3. Opening car doors with his wife Claudia at the drag tower and welcoming people inside. I have never had more than a 3 minute conversation with Jeff in my entire life and I certainly didn't know him personally at the time, but around the time I was interning at BMS I saw the couple back at the drag tower during an event opening doors for guests. Whether they were VIP or what, it still shocked me to run into them just opening doors for people. Servant leadership in a shining example.

4. Never being short with me, even at 2 AM when I was trying to get in the office to take a shower on race weekend. He never ignored me and was never terse even during the most stressful weekends. That is really saying something when someone in his position takes the time to not only talk to fans (customers) but to the employees as well. Following the "we hurt the ones we love" philosophy it would have been easy to drop the act in the middle of the night when no one was around. But it wasn't an act. He had developed virtues and character such that his initial reaction was one of patience.

Lots of people have a lot of great things to say about Jeff and that can give you a perfect picture of the kind of person he was.

Claudia, the children, and extended BMS family and employees are in my prayers.

Obama in my Building

Obama is on the 6th floor of my building right now. I'm on the 9th. The living in DC experience is now complete for me. I have had my car bomb-searched and I've been through Secret Service security. Very cool :)

TimeSpace2

It's officially live:





http://timespace.washingtonpost.com

5831

It's after midnight and I'm still at work... TimeSpace2 is close to launching and the whole team is sitting here tapping away on the keyboard. I wrote a nice little script to count all the lines I've written in Python for this project so far... 5831

Here's script to do that if anyone is interested...

find /data/washingtonpost/timespace -path '/data/washingtonpost/timespace/lib' -prune -o -name '*.py' -exec wc -l {} \; | awk '{count+=$1} END {print count}'

That will look in the first directory specified, /data/washingtonpost/timespace in my case and will ignore anything in the second directory, which is my python lib and all code I didn't write. Then we pass the or switch, tell it to match files ending in .py and execute word count to count the lines in the file. That then get's piped over to awk where we grab the first field and keep track of those values in a variable and when the program ends print the count. Probably other ways to do that but this one works for me.

I had every intention of blogging before a week passed by but it didn't happen.

It's been a long time...

I've had no interest in updating my blog in a long time but I've thought about what my motivations to write have been in the past and what they are now.

I'm fasting from Facebook and Twitter for Lent... And I think when Lent is over I am going to focus on Godly, encouraging tweets daily and stop using it for what it has become- everyone's soap box to complain and whine. Thanks Twitter for revolutionizing whining; now to break myself of the habit.

I've been thinking about making separate blogs for the forthcoming experiments in my life but after careful consideration I think it will be better to just throw it all together here and make use of post tagging.

My life is a constant struggle, always has been, always will be. I eat unhealthy food, I work in an unhealthy manner in the hours I keep (too many of them, too), and I am miserably failing to be the person I want to be.

Time to change. Slow as it may be.

So here's the run down of what I am about to embark on...

Weightloss
I started on Jan 5th with an insane goal of losing 40 pounds by March 15. Go big or go home... But I am only 15 pounds down so far with a long road ahead and no chance I'll be down by 3/15. I'm going to start keeping a weekly track here of what I've been doing to lose weight and what I weight is.

God
I'm going to start researching Christian apologetics as much as I can. I'm hoping to combine this with the exercising, reading while on the gym equipment, etc. I'd love to post daily, but I just don't see that happening. I'll at least squeeze in a post on the really interesting things I come across. (Like who Cain's wife is).

Programming
I'm always programming, always working on little projects (Python LCD library for Matrix Orbital displays, Py/Arduino morse code display, iPod apps, etc). So I'm going to start posting snippets, hacks, and frustrations.

But I am not going to post anything about Mandy. I think we need our own blog for the stuff we do together and I want her to write it. We'll see if that ever gets off the ground- she's just as busy as I am.