Asay: Offline and Off-topic

Older, wiser, still fragile

2011-12-20T10:45:00.001-07:00

When I was in high school I assumed life would get easier when I got older. No more acne! No need to get permission for anything! Unbounded self-confidence! And the ability to eat whatever I wanted.

That last one was the first to go. While I can afford to eat most anything I want, if I actually do I gain weight at a torrid pace. So I eat in moderation (sometimes) and exercise without moderation (often).

But that wasn't the only bubble to burst. I still get zits, I ask permission more than I ever did before (though of different people), and I find that I still can have my self-confidence sent skidding on a regular basis.

In fact, I find that age doesn't change our essential character. At least, it hasn't mine.

I'm 38 and an insult from a six-year old still hurts. I spend a lot of time with the youth in my neighborhood and am particularly sensitive to their slights. Just like when I was younger, I want to fit in.

No matter how old I get, I suppose I'll remain human. I never really thought that would be the case. I thought I'd grow out of my challenges or become impervious to them. But that hasn't happened.

Which, hopefully, will change how I treat others.

On several occasions I've made disparaging remarks about the opinions held by public figures, only to find out later when I've met them that they had found my words hurtful. I thought they wouldn't care because, well, why would someone important care what I thought? But now I realize that for all the importance we may assign to someone, they're still a person. With feelings. That bleeds.

We are so fragile. We need to remember that in our dealings with others. I especially need to do so.

A friend in need

2011-12-07T08:15:00.001-07:00

This past year has been wonderful for many reasons, but one that I get to enjoy three times each week is my weightlifting time with Mickey (senior - Mickey Jr. must be scraped out of bed with a chisel and a spatula, and neither Mickey Sr. nor I is yet strong enough to do that). I'm not sure that it would be fair to say Mickey and I are opposites, but we're perhaps more different than similar.

Maybe that's why I love sharing a sweaty workbench with him early Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings. Given that I'm a bit of a germ-o-phobe, that's saying something.

Mickey gives me a different perspective on life. We talk a lot about church, but also about teenagers (since we both have one or two), work, sports, etc. I used to think it was the NeuroCore that popped me out of bed in the morning, anxious to lift. But now I realize it's the chance to be me, unvarnished and sometimes unpleasant, and not be judged.

I get a similar experience when I go riding with friends like Chris, Harland, or Marty. I've sometimes convinced myself that I'm fine on my own; that I don't need the support of others around me. In 2011 this myth exploded for me, and I've been much happier to recognize how much I need the friendship and support of good men around me.

Recently Jen started joining Mickey and me for our early-morning workouts, and I worried this would change the discussions somewhat (and, frankly, slow down the lifting routine). But it, too, has proved to be time to talk with Jen in a social setting, and has been a blessing.

This year has been very hard in several respects, but it has been doable because three times a week I get to drop any pretense and lift with Mickey (and now Jen, too). Life is good. Even when it's not.

Decisions

2011-10-25T08:46:00.003-06:00

This morning I was reviewing my school and work life to date, trying to better understand the trajectory that got me to this point. As I lived through it, nothing seemed to make much sense: I could never see more than a step into the black. But looking back, there is a pattern to things that should have been blindingly obvious at times.

BYU (1991-1996, with a two-year LDS mission interrupting my studies from 1992-94). My decision to go to BYU was actually made quite easy by my father. I had been planning to attend Brown. A good friend of mine, Mandy (Pead) Green, had a brother who went there, and I was pushing forward on the process to get admitted. But then my ever-practical dad asked, "Who is going to pay for that?" Suddenly my scholarship to already cheap BYU seemed like a great deal. :-)

As for why I studied English there, that was easy. I loved literature and writing. I can't remember who told me this, but someone once told me to focus on the subjects I love in school, and a career will emerge from that. And so it has been.
While at BYU, I somehow ended up minoring in Political Science. Well, almost. I was one class shy of a minor (the entry-level class, 110 or whatever it was). I had always been interested in politics and assume that was what drove me there. The only reason this is interesting is that I ended up being a research assistant for Professor Stan Taylor, who became a good friend, mentor, and the spur to the next step in my schooling.

University of Kent at Canterbury (1996-97). Stan had been a visiting professor at UKC, and suggested it would be a good place for me, with a strong program in International Conflict Analysis. I had also been accepted to Columbia and Stanford, as well as Cambridge (though there was a snafu in my admissions procedure that I would have had to clear to get in), but Stan's recommendation (and perhaps the potential bother with Cambridge) nudged us toward UKC.

Yes, "us." I was married to Jen soon after returning from my LDS mission (to northern France and Brussels, Belgium). Marriage prompted a more pragmatic view of life for me. For example, I had worked political campaigns through my undergrad but when that ran dry and we needed money I worked at a Christmas tree lot (for Fred Parker, who ultimately fired me because I kept giving away trees at big discounts when people told me they couldn't afford full price).
To this day, I don't know why we went to England, except that I felt then (as now) some sort of drive to be there. We met some wonderful people there, and hopefully had some positive influence on them (as they certainly had on us). UPDATE: I'm not sure how I forgot, but Jen reminds me that one of the big reasons for going to the UK was that she had been accepted to an intensive, one-year theatre program. That was the reason we started in London rather than Canterbury, too. When Scout forced her way into our lives, her theatre program refused to let her come and we ended up moving to Canterbury. Not sure how I had forgotten that.
While there, my Uncle Kevin came to visit with a friend from work, who crashed on our couch while I talked with Kevin. (Kevin's colleague was overcome by jetlag, having just flown in from California.) At the end of the visit the Japanese colleague sat up and told me I should come work for Mitsui, his company (and Kevin's). I was in an East Asian Political Economy class in my Masters program, and Mitsui was one of the companies we studied. So it seemed like a good idea. That (April?) while home between terms, and while showing off our newborn, Scout, I flew to California and interviewed with Mitsui Comtek, the Silicon Valley subsidiary of Mitsui & Co., the huge Japanese keiretsu. I got the job.

Mitsui Comtek (1997-1999). Mitsui was my first taste of Silicon Valley, and I fell in love. I didn't love my job (some involvement on the investment side, eventually, but initially it was sales of silicon wafers for Hamada (loved them) and Toshiba (not so much)), but did enjoy the people and lunch-time wiffle ball. But by the end I was so depressed by the work there that I complained to my mom on a trip back through Utah and she said, "Why don't you go to law school? You always wanted to."

She was right, and so I started studying on my flights (I was traveling 100,000-plus miles/year for Mitsui, which was the start of a habit), took the LSAT, did well enough, and got accepted to Columbia, Cornell, and Stanford.
Jen and I were actually out at Columbia when the news came that I'd been accepted to Stanford. That morning someone had been shot crossing the street near the university and so when I called Stanford and found out about my admission the choice was easy: no one gets shot in Palo Alto. Not west Palo Alto, anyway. :-)

Stanford (1999-2002). These were glorious years, and not because of the academics. Stanford Law School was (perhaps still is) very generous to students with children: if you have children, you don't pay tuition. So it was pretty much just the LDS students who went to Stanford for free. Stanford gave me access that I'd never had before: to incredible people (students and professors) and to a network that opened up job opportunities for me.

Within six hours of starting, however, I knew I didn't want to be an attorney. I also knew that I didn't want to come out with debt, so after the first semester ended I started working full-time, initially doing consulting for my old employer, Mitsui, and then for Lineo (more on that in a second).
Along the way, I was fortunate to spend time with some incredible professors like Tom Campbell (former Congressman for California), Joe Grundfest (former SEC commissioner), and Larry Lessig (Intellectual property revolutionary and open source software guru). I fought constantly with Lessig in class, but he ultimately shaped my perspective on software for years to come.

Lineo (2000-2002). As a first-year law student, it's hard to find a summer job, as no firms really want to invest in you as they expect you to go to whichever firm for which you work in your second summer. So the conventional wisdom is that you go to your home market and use your name-brand school to get a job in a lower-tier market. Steve Hill, a friend of my dad's, was advising me on which firms to join and then one day, out of nowhere, he said, "You shouldn't go work for a firm at all. You should go work for my friend, Matt Harris at Lineo." I sent Matt my resume, and kept having to harass him to get a response. Finally he sent me back a note saying he'd hire me as an intern. I had never spoken to him. I was hired.

I started that summer at Lineo, and instantly loved it. Lineo gave me the chance to at least pretend to use my law degree, due to the heavy law influence on open-source software. Matt was an awesome boss, trusting me to take on big tasks and involving me in things for which I had no real background. I learned a great deal, and began to cement my understanding of open source. (Meanwhile, Lessig teaching an open source class at Stanford and became my advisor on a thesis I was writing on open source, which ultimately hit Slashdot when I had completed it. It was my first brush with fame. It lasted 15 seconds.)
Lineo had a meteoric rise, and an equally precipitous fall. By early 2002 it was clearly on the ropes, and I had to lay off a range of employees, including a friend who asked me if I wanted to come work for him at Novell. I had never wanted to work at Novell but it seemed stable and such was the economy that anything with a paycheck sounded good. By this time, after all, I had two children. I accepted the job. (Oh, and I also graduated from law school about that same time.)

Novell (2002-2005). My first six months at Novell were awesome. I was in the developer relations group and basically did sales/business development to grow the number of accounts Novell had. It was a thankless task, given Novell's market position, but it was my first taste of working with developers. It also gave me the chance to preach the open source gospel learned at Lineo, which I used to attract developers and ended up attracting the attention of Chris Stone, Novell's vice chairman.

I was asked in late 2002 (early 2003?) to join Novell's Linux Business Office. I was also made part of its Open Source Review Board. Effectively, I became an evangelist for the company's open source strategy, and really enjoyed the role...for about a year. Then the speaking at conferences got old. Really old. However, it did also start me blogging, which has become a habit, one that continues to pay dividends.
Somewhere in my last year at Novell, I started looking around for other opportunities. I knew I wanted to do something with open source, and was looking for something big. I happened to be speaking at a conference in London, and had heard of a new open source company, Alfresco, which was founded by heavyweights of enterprise software. I knew there was absolutely no way they'd be interested in me. But I interviewed, seemed to connect with the CEO, John Powell, and was surprised to find out they wanted me to join them.

Alfresco (2005-2010). It turns out that as smart as John Powell and John Newton (Alfresco's co-founders) were about building a software business, they didn't feel quite as secure in their knowledge of open source. They probably should have felt fine, as both are laser sharp and quick studies, but I was glad to join and help them. I was Alfresco's first U.S. employee and I think employee number 13 overall.

I was asked to run the Americas, which mostly meant sales. Given my experience at Mitsui and the Christmas tree lot, I didn't think I'd be very good at this. And I still don't. But I found that I love the earliest stages of a company, when you have to figure everything out as you go along, from product to pricing. The first deal I closed (with Boise Cascade in December 2005) was one of the proudest moments of my life. I still remember the amount, and am still grateful for Myron there, who gave us a chance.
Alfresco was a return to the UK, and I loved it. I went to lots of football (soccer) matches, and came to know London (and its restaurants) quite well.
We started hiring people as we grew, and John Powell kept cracking the whip to drive more and more sales. And we did, mostly because we didn't know any better. Eventually the role outgrew me and I grew bored with the position, anyway, as I'm not very good at the $25M to $100M growth stage. I'm just not that great of an operations person. I started to grow listless, not really sure what I should be doing to help the company, and didn't want to go back to the evangelist sort of job that I had at Novell. So when my friend, Mark Shuttleworth, contacted me in late 2009, I was ready to jump, despite loving Alfresco and its people about as fiercely as I've loved anyone outside my family.

Canonical (2010). I went to Canonical for the title, COO, and for the chance to work with Mark. Neither worked out particularly well. I wanted a narrower business focus than the company was prepared to take. Compounding this professional frustration, I was on the plane to London every other week or so, and I grew to hate it (very quickly). I learned at Canonical that a) I really don't like operations, and a C-level title isn't enough to overcome doing work I don't enjoy and b) while I don't care too much about the particular product I'm selling, it has to be something I believe others should use. I never could get excited about using Linux on my laptop, and my title wasn't enough to cover that up. So I quit.
Strobe (2010-Present). Even before I joined Canonical, my good friend, Bryce Roberts, had been trying to get me to join one of his portfolio companies. When things were clearly not going to work at Canonical, I was pretty open to a change. When he introduced me to Charles Jolley at Strobe, an HTML5/mobile company, I knew I should take it. I had concerns about the company's business model, but I thought highly of Charles and liked the idea of learning mobile and being able to evangelize HTML5. Strobe has had its rocky patches, but I'm so grateful I'm here. It has been a wonderful learning experience and I've made great friends here. Plus I've had the chance to be in San Francisco nearly every week, a city whose food and streets I've come to love.

And so here I am. Along the way I co-founded a conference (Open Source Business Conference, sold to IDG in 2004), blogged for several great publications (like CNET, GigaOm, and now The Register), and have advised a range of open source startups. Looking back, each job has led perfectly into the other, and I feel fortunate to have been led into two of the biggest trends in technology: open source and now HTML5.

I also look back and see how my experiences have shaped me. I've been through three recessions (though maybe it's only two, with the last one enduring from 2007ish until now), and it has made me very pragmatic about the kind of work I do and when I'm ready to move on. I've watched a few of my companies spurn chances to sell, and live to regret it. I've met wonderful people who continue to provide guidance years after I've stopped working with them.

Whatever I do, I never seem to get far away from open source, or from the UK. Maybe it's personal preference that keeps me going back. I don't know. But I definitely feel a guiding hand in my life, though I generally can only connect the dots in retrospect.

The joys of uncle-hood

2011-10-11T08:25:00.002-06:00

Olive, one of my nieces, has a birthday today, and it makes me so happy to think of her eating cake and opening presents. One of the greatest things in my life is to be a father, but not too far behind is the opportunity to be an uncle, too.

In fact, in some ways being an uncle is easier and at times more enjoyable than being a father, because "uncle" doesn't carry with it any real responsibility other than being fun. It's like being a grandparent, without the expectation to babysit.

I'm glad not to have the expectation (I don't like feeling that people depend on me), but I actually love to babysit my nieces and nephews. My newest niece, Ophelia, is coming over this Thursday to hang out for a few hours, and I can't wait. Brittany and Steve (sister and brother-in-law) are going to a concert, and I'm just going to enjoy the time cradling my niece and trying to get her to laugh, and then to sleep.

I suppose I'm doing them a favor, watching "The Loaf," but it doesn't feel that way. It makes me happy to hang out with kids. They think I'm funnier than I actually am. I can act goofy and they think I'm cool for it. They don't even realize that my minivan makes me lame, not cool. (Automatic doors! Wow!!)

Happy birthday, Olive. And hurry over, Ophelia. Life is good. Kids are great. Being an uncle and father is awesome.

High school, revisited

2011-08-02T12:53:00.001-06:00

It took me 20 years to finally attend a high-school reunion, and now I'm sad that it had to end. I don't tend to be someone who spends much time looking backward on the "good ol' days." I believe very much that the best of life is always what's coming, not what has been.

But Saturday night at my reunion this belief was shaken. Perhaps irreparably.

I was, to borrow a C.S. Lewis phrase, "surprised by joy." I had forgotten how wonderful the people were with whom I spent three years of high school. (We did ninth grade as part of junior high.) And, importantly, people seemed to have forgotten my many faults. We were just happy to be together.

Some of my former classmates have been through serious rough patches. Some are still in the middle of them. But no one cared. We've spent enough time pretending to be moms, dads, employees, etc. to know that life isn't easy. Ever.

We stood united, shuffling shambles of our once immortal selves...and much better and impressive for the experience.

Don't get me wrong. It's not that I and everyone else had forgotten that we were once divided into cliques; that we didn't always like each other; that we spent an inordinate amount of time trying to look good for each other...and mostly failing, as my picture demonstrates:

But no one cared. And that's why, I guess, I've always been pretty open to accepting Facebook friend requests from my high school peers, even if I wasn't close to them when we were students together. I trust them to know the mostly unvarnished me, and still want to be around me (if only virtually).

I could have stayed and talked all night. Which, again, is not really like me. (Just ask my family: last night I started booting people out of chairs at a family gathering to encourage them to go home. :-) But I was surprised by how much I cared about these grown-up teenagers, and how much I still wanted them to care about me.

Saturday is Jen's 20-year high school reunion. I can't wait.

P.S. I don't remember being surrounded by so many beautiful girls in high school, but I was clearly blind. Motherhood has enriched the beauty of many of my classmates, and maturity/experience has also had a (very positive) effect. But I suspect they were all beautiful, way back when, and I was simply an idiot.

Washing my mouth with soap

2011-07-27T22:11:00.000-06:00

I just spent three days on an LDS "pioneer trek," and while tired and sunburned, I'm glad that I went. It wasn't a life-changing experience for me, but then, pioneer treks aren't really for the adult chaperones. They're for the youth and are intended to help them appreciate the sacrifices that the Mormon pioneers made 160-plus years ago.

I think this "trek" accomplished that purpose.

However, I would have liked to have felt more at home on the trek. I wasn't always the most cheerful pioneer, but felt like I was isolated in that experience. We were divided into groups and I was asked to support the "parents" of our "family," which proved hard for me, given that I like to be in charge and instead had to support two (wonderful) twenty-somethings as they directed the activities of the youth (14 to 18 years old) in our group. I didn't really know how to do that well, and felt like I was failing much of the time.

There were other adults at the trek, but I always felt like I must be copping out if I spent time talking to them. The largest continent of them were the support team, anyway, helping to prepare meals and such, and they seemed like a cohesive unit to an outsider like me. Jen (my wife) was part of that group and while she went out of her way to make me feel comfortable, I felt like she was on "the other team" and I was stuck, out-of-place in my make-shift, three-day "family."

I felt really alone.

Everyone else seemed to belong. The youth had friends from the neighborhood in their "families" to whom they could turn. The support staff spent all day together. I didn't feel like I had anyone with whom I felt I could be myself. I had other friends at the trek, but for the most part they seemed to be playing along much better than I was. I worried that if I complained I would reveal myself to be somewhat self-centered, moping, etc.

In other words, that people would see me for who I actually am, and wouldn't be able to understand.

So tonight when Jen read an excerpt from Wallace Stegner's exceptional book on the Mormon pioneers, The Gathering of Zion, I felt that Stegner was talking to my heart:

The most detailed histories of the trail itself have been written in the spirit of celebration and faith-promotion, and though most of them make extensive use of journals, they end by dehumanizing the emigrants almost as much as the debunkers who see the migration as a movement of dupes led by blackguards. For the celebrators characteristically enlarge and mythify, and hence falsify, people who in their lives were painfully and complicatedly human. They leave out matters that they or the Church authorities feel to be embarrassing, they wash out of the mouths of Brigham Young, Heber Kimball, and others the strong language that stress and humor sometimes put there, they minimize frictions and gloss over personal animosities.

Amen.

I find it impossible to relate to someone that seems "too good." It's not that I'm hopeful to discover someone's dark side, but rather that I won't entrust my own imperfect self to the judgment of someone else that whitewashes their own imperfections. I can't relate to someone that either hasn't felt the pettiness, frustrated ambition, etc. that regularly animates me in my weaker moments, or won't admit it. Either way, why share with someone who clearly won't understand?

(Incidentally, this is one of the most comforting things to me in Christian doctrine. We don't look to an unfeeling god, but rather to someone who understands us absolutely.)

Anyway, I'm grateful for this pioneer trek experience, and I realize that the youth, not me, were the intended beneficiaries of the experience. But I hope that they felt more embraced than I did - embraced in their imperfections, not despite them.

You can't dope the truth

2011-05-29T07:07:00.000-06:00

Last night I finally got around to watching the 60 Minutes expose of Lance Armstrong. I've embedded the video below, in case you want to watch it. Pretty compelling.

For me, there is no longer any doubt that Lance Armstrong doped. There's also no doubt that every other team/rider with any chance of winning any major race (Giro d'Italia, Tour de France, Vuelte, etc.) is also doping. Just as much as Lance did.

Which is to say that Armstrong almost certainly got no real benefit from doping, relative to his fellow cheaters. Either he won clean amongst a peloton filled with "dirty" riders, which is pretty amazing (and, frankly, not credible), or he won dirty, amongst a field of dirty riders, which is still pretty amazing.

Either way, he's the best cyclist ever.

At least, for now. Contador is on the verge of displacing him. Contador has already tested positive for drugs. He, like Armstrong, may eventually get away with it, but it's clear that he's doping, too. But not necessarily doping his way to success. Success in cycling still comes down to brutal self-mastery, as ex-pro cyclist (and Armstrong teammate) Tyler Hamilton says.

Contador isn't winning because he's cheating. Cheating is the table stakes to get him in the game. He's winning because he's a better athlete than the field, and works harder, just like Armstrong before him.

But where these men lose every single day of their lives is in lying about it. I can't imagine the moral turmoil Armstrong endures every time he lies about being clean. It gets worse as the stakes get bigger, too. The more he's pursued, the more doggedly he denies wrongdoing. The more he damns himself.

It's not worth it. I think back to times when I've lied, worried about facing the consequences of the truth. Ultimately, in every single case owning up to my lie has felt better than nursing a lie to my "benefit." There is no benefit to deceit. Ever. But there is deep and abiding peace in telling the truth. Every time.

I pity Lance Armstrong. I pity him because he has strenuously painted himself into a corner. At some point, he's going to have to tell the truth, and he'll feel better for it, assuming he declares the truth of his own free will, and isn't forced into it. At that point, he's going to feel like a fool for hanging onto his lie for so long, and for smearing his ex-teammates.

But I hope he does, so that he can find peace.

He's still the greatest cyclist of his age. I don't want to see him stripped of his victories: what would that prove? They'd just be given to another cheater...who has yet to be caught.

The 60 Minutes story:

Grand Targhee 2011 - The video

2011-02-13T19:47:00.000-07:00

I guess I make videos like these to remind myself of just how blessed I am. It's hard to imagine time better spent than flying down a mountain with Jen and our wonderful kids. Heaven must be very much like this.

And, yes, even Lily will be there.

...And I believed her

2011-01-20T07:37:00.000-07:00

Jen has taken to writing "You rock!" in response to my somewhat self-congratulatory texts to her ("Took care of getting your headphones back," ""Took the car in to get fixed," etc.). I haven't thought of them as kudos-seeking efforts, but they probably are.

And Jen's little affirmations work. I feel good when I see them. I believe her.

Last night I was remembering a song that Mandy Pead (now Green) dedicated to me 20 years ago: "Lucky Lisp" by Morrissey. Mandy probably didn't intend anything by it, but I believed the lyrics, that somehow I was going to be successful in my life. I tried to live up to them.

I believed her.

All of which makes me think that I don't do nearly enough affirming of others talents. Maybe they'll believe me and seek to become the good that I already see in them?

Worth a try.

Getting back at Dad

2011-01-08T14:25:00.000-07:00

Dad,

Since you biked without me yesterday, today I skied Red Cloud (Deer Valley) without you.

Love,

Matt

Mogul Run @ Deer Valley (Red Cloud) from Matt Asay on Vimeo.

P.S. Click through to see a bigger size. However, the recording was done with an iPhone 4 so the quality isn't fantastic.

When it rains...

2010-12-30T22:54:00.000-07:00

It's strange how God blesses us at times.

Yesterday our SUV's alternator gave up the ghost as Jen drove it up Little Cottonwood Canyon for a day of skiing at Alta with Scout. The tow truck couldn't manage the drive up the canyon (there was so much snow that the road was closed for several hours and when it finally opened up, I don't think the driver had much desire to attempt it), but Jen serendipitously ran into old friends of ours from the Bay Area, Dave and Alisyn Crowder. They offered her a ride home and she was fortunate to spend two hours driving home with them, catching up.

So, one car down, but a rekindled friendship in the bargain.

That blessing was quickly forgotten today, however, when the tow truck driver kept delaying the rescue of our car (still at Alta). My stress levels went up, sending the family's up in response.

Around 3:00, those stress levels rose even higher as calls and emails started to flood in from neighbors and the police chief and marshall's office at Alta. Some wanted to locate Jen, thinking that a search and rescue team would need to be sent into the deep powder of Alta's off-piste territory in pursuit of Jen. After all, why else would her car be parked in the lot overnight?

Some just wanted to get rid of the car, and told me over the phone that it would be impounded if not removed by midnight tonight. I don't know why the two groups couldn't get together on their concern/demands, but one thing was clear: we needed to get the tow truck up to Alta, and fast.

But when Jen called, the driver seemed a bit put out that he'd have to put snow chains on his truck. "I'm not going to end up making any money on this job," he complained. To help persuade him, in desperation I suggested we drop by some cash.

We did so, and it cheered him up. But as I backed our minivan out of the lot, I didn't pay attention to the tow truck that loomed behind me...and put a deep dent in the back hatch, shattering the rear window in the process. Scout burst into tears, I burst into vulgarities, and Jen, well, Jen just burst, especially when I reminded her that we'd just changed auto insurance providers and that the new one would probably stink. Oh, and it's a holiday weekend, so no one is working....

It was a very bad night.

But a funny thing happened as I walked into my evening church meeting. I told a few people about the problem, and as I told these wise, older men (our stake presidency, for those LDS people following along), they mostly laughed. And I started to laugh with them. It became immediately obvious how trivial it was.

Sure, it will cost us money. Yes, it's a bother to be without our cars. But in the grand scheme of things, it's nothing. It's a trifle.

Somewhere in that conversation with these friends, I gained real perspective into what matters, and what doesn't. I'm not suggesting that money matters don't matter. They do. But Jen and I have been through far worse financial scares, and came through them fine. Life is good. Challenges are good.

My minivan? It's not so good. But it gave me a little perspective tonight, and that's a blessing worth far more than my $500 deductible.

Missed opportunities

2010-12-22T18:02:00.001-07:00

I distinctly remember being the only person in Silicon Valley during the Dot-Com Boom not to make a billion dollars. Somehow I ended up at a Japanese keiretsu, one determined to peddle silicon wafers when Silicon Valley was peddling vaporware at $10 billion IPO prices.

Sure, it was ridiculous and couldn't last, but for those who sold during the boom, I doubt they're complaining.

I then watched the management of a startup I later joined pass up at least one major buy-out opportunity, as they waited for an even bigger opportunity...only to sell for spare change a year later when the bottom fell out of the market.

So I was somewhat frustrated to miss out on another possible buy-out at Alfresco. The company probably passed on selling in the early years, expecting bigger and better things.

The only hitch? Sometimes those bigger/better things never materialize.

Tonight I made the mistake of counting up the money that could have been. Instead of waiting for the plaster to fall off our quaint but dying "historic" home, we could have rebuilt a few times over. Instead of driving my minivan I could be driving...a souped-up minivan. (I have no idea what car I'd get if I could afford a really nice one - it's hard to get excited about paying a premium for a liability.)

Anyway...feeling a bit glum at all the missed opportunities to cash out.

On the other hand, I went skiing with my family, and saw real progress in Lily and Greta. Jen is on a fitness kick and looks awesome. I have an incredible job that I want to keep doing long after the kids go to sleep. We have wonderful neighbors.

I wonder what life would have been like had these financial opportunities not been missed. Would I have the same friends? Would I live in the same place?

I'm not sure, but given how good life is, perhaps fretting about the life I don't have is truly a waste. I really don't want to be anyone other than who I am, and I don't want different friends/a different life than I already have. About the only thing I'd like to have is enough money to get powder skis. Perhaps I should try saving, instead of wishing for the lottery to go my way. :-)

Experience and growth

2010-12-08T11:05:00.000-07:00

As I announced earlier today on my company blog, I have resigned from Canonical to join HTML5 startup Strobe. I figured I'd give a bit more of a personal slant here.

Work is about stretching: it's about doing what you love, but doing just a bit more than you're comfortable doing so you grow (and therefore become of more service to family, friends, community). That is the whole purpose of existence: growth, and all that word entails.

That was what I sought in joining Canonical. I had felt that my growth had stalled at Alfresco; that I wasn't as useful to the company in Year Four as I had been in the first three years. So I left.

Joining Canonical was a big stretch for me in virtually every area. It was a role (COO) that I had never held before, with oversight of parts of the company that I'd never managed (HR, Finance, Legal, Marketing). It was also several thousand miles away. True, Canonical is a highly distributed company, but the functions I managed were all squarely based in London. This meant many nights of Ambien-induced sleep stuck in coach class on Delta over the Atlantic.

There were aspects of the job that I found very rewarding. I loved creating room for my direct reports: there's no point in hiring someone if you're not going to give them room to exercise their talents. Otherwise, you might as well do their job and save the salary/benefits costs. I tried to foster an environment in which my colleagues felt that they could make tough choices, and I'd stand behind them.

I wouldn't say that I was always perfect in this regard, but I started to see positive change that made my job worthwhile.

Ultimately, however, it became clear to me that, to be really successful in the role, I would need to grow in areas that weren't of significant enough interest for me. They weren't where my talents lay, talents that I feel a moral and even religious duty to improve. I could do them, but they wouldn't make me happy, which would almost certainly result in me giving less than my best to Canonical. That wouldn't be fair to my employer, my colleagues, or our customers.

So when an interesting opportunity was offered to me, one that lets me build on past successes in sales, business development, and technology evangelism, I took it.

Even so, it was a very difficult decision, but one that was made easier by counsel from family and friends. One of the most influential pieces of counsel came from an experienced entrepreneur-friend who told me:

Outside of technology, and much more important than that, is people and company culture. I love Drucker's statement that "culture eats strategy for breakfast". I think that you can afford to be as picky as you like when it comes to this aspect, by which I mean that I think you should walk away from any opportunity, no matter how exciting otherwise, that doesn't seem to have the right people and the right culture. What you say about Strobe is that you are drawn there by the people, so again a plus for Strobe.

The fact that you didn't seek out Strobe seems like a plus for Strobe. They are so interesting to you that you paid attention although you perhaps weren't looking for a job and you certainly weren't looking in their direction....

Thinking about you and your professional profile, the top thing that comes to my mind is that you are a highly outwards focused executive. You love interacting with people and hosting people. You love delighting users and customers....For this reason it seems that you need to find a company with a broad appeal to large numbers of people....

As for going to a startup, biased as I am, I happen to think that the single biggest factor is the core leadership: who is the technical founder and who is the business leader. If you find a startup with a brilliant CEO, join it. If you find a startup with a great founding CTO and they need leadership of the type you can offer, join it. Employees join companies, but they quit people. And that means that to find a role in which you can become the best you can be and enjoy it for numerous years, you need to work with people you can continue to respect and enjoy for years to come.

A sincere prayer or two later, I had decided, and gave notice just before Thanksgiving.

I'm very, very excited to be moving back into a customer-facing role at Strobe. I'll be running sales and business development, but let's be clear what that means in an early-stage startup: it means doing everything related to sales and business development. There is no team to manage. No one to blame if things go wrong. I'm a trench digger again, and I love it.

As we grow, I'll hire people to work with me, just like at Alfresco. That process introduced me to some of my best friends, people who shared the early pain of company growth with me. I can't wait to go through that again.

And that's it, right? When you're willing to undergo a lot of pain for the bursts of joy that may or may not result, you know you're in the right place. That's a function of role and people, provided that it also pays enough to cover more basic needs. I love the people I've met at Strobe, though I will be sad to leave great Canonical friends behind. But since they're friends, I won't leave them: I'll see them and talk to them regularly, just as I still talk almost daily with friends at Alfresco.

All of which means I've learned something at Canonical. The 10 months there was not a waste for me, and I believe it was also useful for the company.

Ultimately, I learned not to care about the title, but rather to care about the actual work, and its effect on me as a person: husband, father, friend, neighbor, employee.

That is why, of all the kudos and congratulations sent to me over Twitter and email, my favorite one was this:

I totally support your decision, which is very wise, honest and brave. I admire you that you have faithfully followed the teaching of the scriptures. The example you set as a husband, father and a faithful believer has far more and lasting impact than your role [as] a COO or CEO.

I like it not because it's necessarily accurate - I struggle to live up to the knowledge I have through my faith - but because it gives me the right goals to target. It's certainly true that my work is not even remotely as important as my family or faith.

But it's also the case that I believe in practical religion, one that requires us to do what we believe, and not simply believe it would be nice if others did it. As such, work is a tangible expression of what I believe.

I believe in the need to grow through our work. It turns out that Strobe gives me the chance to do this in a way that better comports to who I am than the COO role at Canonical. I just wish that I had seen this sooner. But I guess I had to live it in order to understand the principle.

Seeing clearly

2010-11-23T15:47:00.000-07:00

We're sometimes blind to the best (and worst) in ourselves. I know I am.

But it's interesting that others can often be just as insightful to our character, even when we struggle to see ourselves clearly.

Just recently I was talking with one of my brothers-in-law, and he made a very insightful comment about my mom. "She's a giver, Matt," he said, "She really likes to give things to other people." I hadn't really thought of her in that way before, but it struck me as completely true.

It also hit me that I'm more like that than I'd normally suspect. I can be very, very selfish and thoughtless of others. But I also really like to give things to other people. Not because I'm particularly good or charitable, but because I really love the feeling of being able to fill the void (monetary or otherwise) in someone's life.

That, frankly, is one big reason I bake pies. The main purpose, of course, is to eat them. But I also really love to see people happy when we bring one over. And that pie class I taught a week ago? Fantastic, because I keep getting calls from neighbor ladies telling me how they made a pie and it turned out delicious, or asking for advice on how to tweak a recipe. I feel useful in such moments. I like that feeling.

Which is why an email from a friend really jarred me the other day, because I hadn't really realized this 'giver' attribute in myself. I had asked him for some counsel given some frustrations I was having at work. He wrote:

Thinking about you, the top thing that comes to my mind is that you are a highly outwards focused executive. You love interacting with people and hosting people. You love delighting users and customers.

I had to reread it, because I was so surprised by the truth of what he wrote. That really is what I like, even though I normally consider myself anti-social: I interact well in broadcast mode over a blog or from the stage, but like to flee to the safety of close associates otherwise. And yet he told me a truth about myself that I normally overlook.

I wonder how often we miss seeing the best in ourselves because we're quick to pick out the worst? The same is true of how we see others.

Anyway, it was really nice to be reminded of who I really am, and what I really like. I sometimes forget. I imagine you forget all the wonderful things in you, too.

Maturing ambition

2010-10-29T16:37:00.000-06:00

I sometimes joke with a good friend, Fabrizio Capobianco, that we were each born on the wrong continent. He, an Italian who is more American than Levis, and I, an American with a deep and abiding love for things that skew European. "Time and chance happen to us all," and nowhere is this more true than in where we happen to be born.

I meet entrepreneurs all the time who would be the next Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs if they had been born in Silicon Valley instead of the Ukraine. They have all the ambition and talent, but lack the access, the opportunity, that offers to the diligent a chance to make a massive impact on the world.

And then there are those of us who elect to sit out some of those opportunities. I guess I'm one of them.

I've always wanted to be a CEO, but it would be virtually impossible to hold that position for a meaningful technology company here in Utah. Not unless I came up with the company, but I'm not particularly creative in that way and it's much harder to get a company funded here, anyway.

The problem is that since moving away from Silicon Valley in 2002, I've never had the slightest desire to move back. It's not that the Valley isn't a great place: it is. It's fantastic. Magical, in some ways, and powerful in many others.

But it's not home. Not anymore.

In the Valley I wouldn't have the same up-the-slopes-in-30-minutes or biking-the-canyons-in-10-minutes lifestyle that I have here, nor would it be a place where my kids can participate in sports without having to miss all the big games. (Sunday is a religious day for us. I don't even watch Arsenal play on Sunday, which is hard but worth it to have a day that is different from other days.) We don't have to lock our doors; we live 30 seconds from the elementary school and just a few minutes more from the middle school; our eldest daughter attends a pre-IB program just across town.

And then there are the wonderful neighbors, family, and friends nearby.

My ambition isn't worth my lifestyle, or that of my family's. That might sound obvious, but I always assumed that my career was paramount because it was how I took care of my family's physical needs. But the longer I live, the more I appreciate the things life offers beyond a paycheck. And I realize that whether I die as a CEO will matter to exactly no one, including me.

I've also realized that what I like to do - what I really like to do - is to build companies at the earliest stage. I got to have this experience at Alfresco under the experienced eyes of John Powell, John Newton, and Steve McLoughlin, and it was incredible. We started with nothing and turned it into a major player in our market. Creating something significant from nothing: that encapsulates what I enjoy.

Guess what? It doesn't have to come with a CEO title.

Now, at Canonical, I'm learning further what I do and don't like to do. I've been very fortunate to work at Canonical these past nine months, where the company's quirkiness (highly distributed with an emphasis on hiring the right people, wherever they may be based) has allowed me the privilege of being a COO...5,000-plus miles away from headquarters. In many ways it has taught me to respect even more the work done by those without the "C" in their title, who really make any company thrive. And it has made me yearn to get more involved with customers and partners.

The more I think about it, the more I believe that CEO role I long sought may never happen. And I'm OK with that. Primarily because the nature of the work I love to do doesn't actually require that title.

Could I move and get a CEO role? Yes, I could. But we're very, very happy here.

Life is good.

So good, in fact, that I don't think I could consider sacrificing my family's happiness to satisfy my personal ambition. I'll likely never be a CEO while living in Utah. I'll never get to prove to myself that I can do it, and do it well. I, like one of my favorite people in scripture, Alma, will just have to make do with the opportunities my geography affords me.

But I'll soothe my soul with a ride up Mill Creek Canyon or a drop down Deer Valley's Daly Chutes. I suspect I'll get over it.

You mean you don't read to your kids?

2010-10-25T06:09:00.000-06:00

I can't remember a time when I didn't read to my children. And I can't imagine the day when I have to stop. It will be a sad day in this corner of Whoville.

It's possible that I started reading to Scout because Jen told me it improved child literacy, or in some way benefited the kids. Most of the few good things I do were in some way inspired by Jen's suggestions that I get off my rear-end and actually do something.

Whatever the impetus, I can tell you why I continue: because I absolutely love it. I love the time spent with my kids - as much as two hours every night - but I also love the time spent in wonderful literature. Most of the books we read are (children's) classics: books that I have read before and loved before, often several times over.

It's not all great. Lily and I are stuck in the Junie B. Jones books right now, but you have to start somewhere, and next we'll be reading Winnie the Pooh and other such classics. Greta and I are reading Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, a book that each of us eagerly anticipates reading at night. Isaac and I are into our fifth "Great Brain" book and nearing the sadness of leaving these good friends.

You couldn't possibly convince me to stop.

Scout, well, we went a year without reading because I assumed she was too busy with middle school to be able to give a half-hour to reading together each night. A month or two ago, however, I realized that perhaps the right sort of book could induce us to make time. When we stopped a year back, we were plowing through Persuasion by Jane Austen. This time I went for Dumas, and both of us look forward to Dantes' day of vengeance. (Sorry, but we do. :-) I sit by her bed and read as she falls asleep. It's a blessed time.

Each of my reading-age kids has turned into an avid reader, and perhaps that's because we read. Perhaps. But it's likely that they came out of the womb that way (I find that I have marginal influence over their personalities, anyway), and that at best I encourage their natural tendency to read.

Regardless, I'd still read to them. Because it's a way to share experiences and to confront big issues. I remember reading Pullman's His Dark Materials series with Scout and talking about atheism, corruption in religion, and other such topics. It was a faith-promoting experience for her and for me.

Someday soon I hope we'll get to wrestle through Grapes of Wrath and other favorites of mine. It's a way to share who I am with my children without preaching, and to feel who they are without prying.

It's a great thing, reading. If you don't read to your kids, you should. Not because it's good for them, but because it's good for you.

The joy of racing weight

2010-09-12T10:01:00.001-06:00

I was following my friend, Erika Timm Wilde, on Facebook yesterday, and loved seeing this beautiful picture:

Erika: 10+ hours on a bike can do this to your smile...

For some it may be hard to believe that this picture was taken shortly after Erika completed Lotoja, a 200+-mile cycling race that winds its way from Logan, Utah, to Jackson, Wyoming, and takes at least nine hours to complete (for the very fastest riders).

But it was.

Contrast her smile to how I felt last night after diving into a stack of baby back pork ribs, rosemary roasted potatoes, and French bread. The food was exceptional, but I ate way too much of it. And as I contrasted how I felt with how I saw Erika feeling, I realized that no food tastes as good as exercise feels (a slight spin on Kate Moss' anorexia-inspiring "nothing tastes as good as skinny feels").

It's not the thinness that feels good, though it does. It's the work. The sweat.

And after the last two years of being right around my high school weight (172), I realize that exercise feels even better when I'm at or near my "racing weight."

In fact, my brother-in-law recently recommended a book by that title, and it has been a real blessing. (Note: You should read the book. It's quite good. Not perfect, but very good.)

I've maintained my exercise regime of cycling or running at least an hour six days per week, but have also added in weight lifting (it's not working...yet ;-) and have been much more careful about the food I eat. In essence, I eat a lot less, more often, and consume more protein and fresh vegetables and fruit than I normally would.

In two weeks, despite eating quite a bit and not dieting at all in terms of starving myself of calories, I've dropped four pounds. I don't think that will continue (I find it really hard to get below 172), but it was amazing how fast it happened.

As a result, when I get on my bike, I feel like flying. Mind you, this doesn't mean that I actually do. I'm still much slower than the Cat 1 riders who could do this East Canyon loop much faster than the three hours it took me, but that's not the point.

The point is that I felt awesome climbing those 5,500 feet; that I didn't feel bogged down by too much food; that I got to enjoy the sunshine on that day and the pavement beneath my tires.

Last night I got side-tracked. We had our wonderful neighbors, Raj and Bretta, over and I wasn't thinking about exercise. It was also the first time Jen had ever attempted ribs and I needed to be there for "moral support." (Note to Jen: FANTASTIC!)

Regardless, today I'm back on track, because Monday morning, 4:00 AM (early because I need to fly out on a work trip), I want to be able to run full speed. God wants us to enjoy the wonderful food this world provides. He also wants us to "run and not be weary...and walk and not faint."

So, thank you, Erika, for reminding me how good it feels to complete a line of moguls, hit the summit on a ride, or kick into a sprint at the end of a long run. It's even better than apple fritters.

Well, better than 10 apple fritters. But one won't hurt, will it? :-)

Physician, heal this fool

2010-08-27T08:35:00.001-06:00

A pediatric doctor friend of mine told me the other day about a parent who "pulled the religious card" on him and suggested their child didn't need further treatment, despite my friend thinking the child has a serious (but treatable) illness.

There is nothing remotely religious about being an idiot. And it is idiocy, plain and simple, to hold up one's misconceived faith as a reason to believe that God will heal us to the exclusion of all that He has given us to resolve physical problems.

Like doctors.

Faith is not a belief in magic. It's an irrepressibly rational belief that leads us to action. Yes, there are times when we've tapped out everything we can do with the means God has given us, but this person is not in that position. She's actually trying to circumvent faith by demanding God relieve her of the burden of exercising real faith, which is a principle of action, as James says in the Bible:

What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? can faith save him?

If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food,

And one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body; what doth it profit?

Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone.

Yea, a man may say, Thou hast faith, and I have works: shew me thy faith without thy works, and I will shew thee my faith by my works.

I'm not a Deist, but I do believe that faith is incompatible with waiting around on God to do our work for us. How do we grow from that?

God generally blesses us through the people around us, because that's more efficient and God is supremely efficient, rational, and intelligent. Why send down a horde of angels to do what one inspired doctor can do?

I'm always frustrated (obviously!) by the misguided non-faith of some, which gives a bad name to real religion and spirituality. Faith need not make us idiots. It should do the exact opposite.

Missing Palo Alto

2010-08-26T21:52:00.000-06:00

Flying into San Jose this morning, I felt a deep nostalgia for the place Jen and I used to call home. That was made even more poignant by a dinner reunion with some of my favorite people, work friends from the open-source business community (Lonn Johnston, Fabrizio Capobianco, Zack Urlocker, Mike Olson, Javier Soltero, and Dave Rosenberg).

Wonderful, wonderful people. Absolutely fantastic people.

People that I wish I lived near so that I could see them more regularly. People I wish my kids knew and with whom they got to hang out.

Of course, if I actually lived in Silicon Valley, I'm sure I'd revert to type. I don't generally do any after hours socializing, and it has nothing to do with the lack of a wild party scene in Utah. (I'm not much of a wild party person, or any kind of party person.) I like to be home with my family. That wouldn't change, even if I lived in the Valley.

Nor would I want to give up the friends I have in Salt Lake.

Come to think of it, the traffic on 101 today was a bit silly, given that it was congested both in the middle of the day, and later at night. I have no traffic, working from home (unless you count the traffic of Lily and Greta barging into my room to check themselves out in our full-length mirror, which happens...often.)

And I'd hate to give up easy access to the mountains, both for skiing and biking. Silicon Valley simply has nothing to compare to Utah's mountains.

This is where life stinks: the trade-offs. But it's also what makes life rich.

Lily: No respecter of persons

2010-08-22T21:58:00.000-06:00

Lily is truly no respecter of persons. Jen, Scout, and Lily were walking home from church today with Elder Dallin Oaks, a leader in the LDS church and one of our neighbors.

Elder Oaks: "Scout, you have a bright light about you. [To Jen] You have a beautiful daughter."
Lily, standing behind him, loudly and obviously annoyed at the delay in getting home: "Grrr! *I'm* just standing here getting burned up in the sun!"

Uncomfortable silence....

Later, as Jen walked away with Lily, Jen asked, "Lily, that wasn't very polite. Is that how you're going to talk to Jesus when you see him?"

Lily: "Probably, yes."

And she will.

Halfway

2010-08-08T14:20:00.000-06:00

It shouldn't take a week to recover from a race or, for that matter, anything else.

Last week I did a 150-mile cycling race. I enjoyed it - all 7 hours 34 minutes of it - but I spent the week convalescing, trying to exercise but finding my legs consistently obstinate about cooperating.

Now that I feel up for cycling again, I have to hold off because I'm doing another monster ride this Saturday: 97 miles and something like 12,000 feet of elevation gain. Lovely. Another week of exercise gone as my legs recover.

Presumably, the lesson I could take from this is that it will get easier the more of these big rides I do.

But that's not the lesson I'm learning. Instead, I'm feeling like a fool for my excesses.

I'd much rather consistently ride 30- to 50-mile rides, day-in and day-out, challenging myself but not working so hard that I have to rest the following day. I want to be riding every day, and interspersing those rides with long runs. I don't want to become a slave to a few major rides.

This thought struck me as Lily, Greta, and I cheered Jen to her finish in the Provo River Half-Marathon this past weekend. A half-marathon seems ideal to me: it's long enough to be a challenge but short enough that you can really push it and be out running the next day.

The thought also hit me while talking to a friend at a soccer game recently. She was pointing out which positions were more likely to see scholarship money than others, and I stated, "But I don't care about scholarships for soccer." I don't want my kids so fixated with sports (or anything) that they lose balance. I want them to play sports, do theatre, etc., but not to some silly excess that crowds out the ability to dabble in a range of things, and really commit to family, church, and school.

There are things in life that matter a great deal, and then there's everything else. And even those things that matter, like health, can be taken to extremes that cloud our judgment and muddy our ability to be happy.

So to my friend who was talking up his gym where he gets worked so hard that "his throat was bleeding," I had to reply, "Sorry. That's not even remotely desirable to me." Yes, there's a part of me that relishes the challenge implicit in his visual, which is what drove me to do the 150-mile race. But it's a part that needs less airtime with me, not more.

I guess I'm saying that I'm trying to find more balance. I used to work nonstop, and would be up until midnight on my computer, only to start the next day at 6:00. But I don't want to do that anymore (and haven't been for the past two years - I want to be with my family during that time, and I'm not really interested in trying to see if I type hard enough, my fingers will bleed).

I'm prone to obsessive exercising. But I don't want to do that anymore, either. It takes too much time from family on something that doesn't give back nearly as much as it takes away.

And so on. It's not that I'm agitating for sloth, but rather to become more temperate in my interests and activities. I've found that I'm a better employee and manager when I'm not obsessing over work constantly. I'm more faithful in my religion when I'm not overboard in my service. Etc.

The one area that I've found I need to step up, not taper off, is my commitment to family. In that, it's worth obsessing over service more. Much more.

The eternal Evelyn Asay

2010-07-09T05:51:00.009-06:00

Early this morning, my grandmother, Evelyn Asay, died. We have been expecting it for weeks. Months, even. But she chose today, roughly a week after my parents returned home from serving as missionaries in Argentina for the past three years.

What a blessing.

She was frail with age and tired of hanging on, given how much she wanted to be with her parents who died when she was a child, as well as to see her husband again (pictured below). It was a very good time to go.

I feel no sadness today - only joy. These past three years have given me an unparalleled opportunity to get outside of my self, and serve her. With my parents gone, I could no longer hide behind their service ("No need for me to see Grandma - Mom and Dad already do"), and had to do so myself.

I think it felt like a duty for exactly three seconds. That's about how long it took for me to realize that I wasn't rendering Grandma service, but rather she was serving me by talking to me, caring about me, loving me.

It was also a blessing for my children, who sometimes accompanied me. Lily and Greta, in particular, got to join me as their school demands were light. I love this picture of Lily talking with Grandma on a visit Jen had with Grandma back in 2008:

Serving Grandma these past few years has been one of the greatest blessings of my life.

Will I miss her? Of course I will, and do. But I don't subscribe to the irrational belief that life is extinguished by death. Anyone who knew my grandmother would not dare to suppose that such a strong, sometimes cantankerous spirit would simply evaporate at death.

Of course she lives on. Of course I'll see her again. Nothing could be more reasonable than that.

Luke 24:5. "Why seek ye the living among the dead?" It was a true question to ask of Christ, who made it a true question to ask of anyone else. I know without doubt that it is true.

And so I'm not saying 'goodbye' forever to Grandma, but rather letting her catch up with the rest of her family, those who have died before. I love her wit, her fire, her stubbornness (well, mostly I love that :-). It will be wonderful to see her again, but in the meantime I need to raise my own children to honor and respect her name by the choices they make.

What a beautiful person, my grandma.

Always someone faster

2010-06-27T06:18:00.000-06:00

I got out my mountain bike for the first time in a year yesterday to ride with one of my dad's friends, Rob Rowley. This is a guy who enters races against Lance Armstrong and who, as nearly as I can tell, eats testosterone for breakfast.

But I didn't know that when he invited me to ride with him and a group of friends.

I only figured it out after we made the initial climb up the Spiro Trail (Midmountain Trail) and he managed to have a normal conversation with the other riders even while my heart was hammering at 2,000,000 beats per minute (or was that per second?!?). As most of the other riders zoomed on with Rob and I faded into the distance, I caught snatches of conversation that confirmed that I was riding with a group of cyborgs, with Rob the king of machines.

And I felt OK about it.

Not at first, mind you. I'm used to being the fastest among the friends with whom I ride. I'm used to patting myself on the back for my fitness and abilities. But on Saturday I got completely dusted. I wasn't even close to being the fastest, despite being arguably in the best shape of my life.

As I ate my way through the dust clouds left by the faster riders, it struck me just how pointless much of life's competition is. All I got for my efforts was this scrape when a stump-masquerading-as-a-speed-bump thwarted my puny efforts to catch up.

I spend far too much time comparing myself to others around me, alternating between elation that I'm outpacing someone else and depression when someone richer/more athletic/smarter/better-looking/etc. blows past me.

Neither reaction really makes any sense.

The reality is that there is always someone faster. It doesn't matter what pace I'm at today, someone, somewhere is going to pass me. Even Lance Armstrong has been eclipsed after years at the top (and if you check those race results Armstrong finished three hours ahead of Rob, which makes me want to cry, just thinking of how fast Armstrong must have been going).

No one remains the "-est" in any category for very long, and most of us don't get anywhere near being the best in anything at any point in our lives, except within very small niches of very small segments of the world's population.

Far better to just enjoy the time with those around us, as was the case with Ragnar last week. Some of the people were competing to win - one of my neighbors saw his team claim fourth place overall in a field of 1,050 teams and 13,000 participants - but most of us were competing with ourselves to perform well, and enjoying the time with our teams and the people around us.

This seems like a sensible approach: pace yourself to perform your best, and try to forget about how fast others are going. Last time I checked, God doesn't care at all for how we fare against our peers. Neither should we.

My Ragnar life

2010-06-20T09:43:00.002-06:00

Perhaps life is wonderful not in spite of difficulty, but because of it.

Jen and I spent the last few days gasping through Ragnar, the 188-mile relay race that starts in Logan, Utah, and goes to Park City, Utah, with some amazing scenery and lung-busting climbs in between. Operating on one hour of sleep, our six runners (I was #9 and Jen was #12) each ran about 15 miles, which sounds easy until you realize that it's split into three separate blocks with time for leg cramping and no sleep in between.

It was a bit miserable at times.

Like at 5:30 AM Saturday morning, when our team was done with our second stretch of running and headed to Jaime Wissler's cabin in Browns Canyon to sleep...until 7:00 AM.

When my alarm went off, every rude or angry though I had ever had in my life (I've had many) went through my head and nearly came out my mouth. I wanted to be doing anything but Ragnar. I can be surly and antisocial at the best of times, but yesterday morning was not the best of times.

Or maybe it was. Less than 24 hours later, I'm looking forward to next year, despite spending $100+ to feel pain and sleep deprivation.

Why?

Because I'm not sure it's possible to have this...

...without this.

Happiness is not what comes because we've somehow scored a free pass out of trials, but precisely because of those trials. It is the overcoming and enduring well through such trials that makes us happy. The more we seek to shirk struggle, the more we become intellectually, spiritually, and emotionally anemic.

I can think of plenty of ways to make Ragnar easier. But that would defeat the point. Ragnar was great precisely in proportion to its discomfort...alloyed with good people, good exercise, and a good cause.

The madness of children

2010-06-04T11:26:00.000-06:00

Returning to Flannery, she has this great character (The Misfit) who says of a somewhat annoying, self-righteous woman (right after he shoots her), "She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."

The Misfit must have been thinking about kids.

We've had three of my nieces staying with us the past few days, and it has been a humbling experience. Particularly the nine-month old. Why? Because she cares what I think even less than my own kids do.

Olive (the nine-month old tyrant in question) isn't concerned about my cycling. She doesn't care if I get my work done. She's not too bothered if I want to run to the store or if I want to sleep at night.

She runs the show.

And I'm grateful for this. One of the most wonderful and frustrating things about kids is their complete disregard for all the "grown-up" things we do. Let's face it: our activities are not nearly as important as we think they are. Kids are a constant reminder of this.

So while I'm grateful that Scout and Isaac are now old enough to watch Lily and Greta, giving Jen and I the freedom to eat out and such, I'm also grateful that my kids get in my way...constantly. "No man is an island, entire of itself," wrote John Donne, and he, too, might have been thinking of those pesky kids that kept him from taking a carriage ride with his spouse.

But it's precisely because I can't do all the things I'd want to if unencumbered by kids that I'm so blessed by them. I'm a better person for not getting to do everything I want to do.

(But this doesn't mean you kids should get any ideas, mind you. I still want you in bed and asleep by 6:30....)

Freakishness

2010-06-03T11:23:00.000-06:00

This quotation from one of my favorite writers, Flannery O'Connor, really resonates with me lately:

Whenever I am asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognise one.

O'Connor goes on to note that to be able to spot a freak, you have to have some conception of the "whole person," i.e., what a normal person looks/acts like. This is harder than you might expect.

After all, who isn't a freak one some level?

I consider myself somewhat normal except when it comes to Arsenal. I am a bit of a freak there, but it's a freakishness to which I cling because it's a welcome relief from all the rest of the time when I'm expected (and when I expect myself) to be normal.

I can get depressed when Arsenal loses, despite having had nothing to do with the outcome. I can yell at the TV if a ref makes a bad call, despite the ref's obvious oblivion to my anger (and, let's face it, to the game ;-). I can chant with the hooligans at the matches and strike up a conversation with complete strangers on the way home on the Tube in a way I'd never do normally.

It's a respite. It makes me sane, this freakishness. Would that we would each embrace just enough inner freak to be...normal.

Who knew religion could divide?

2010-05-19T12:27:00.000-06:00

It's interesting what we miss as kids. I read all of John D. Fitzgerald's The Great Brain books growing up, but back in fifth and sixth grade when I read them, I didn't notice the cultural nuances of the book, nuances that seem so obvious as I read them to Isaac.

As you may know, the book traces the escapades of a Catholic boy (Tom Fitzgerald aka "the Great Brain") growing up in a Mormon community in Utah. Throughout the books, the author touches on the discrimination - mostly benign - his protagonist experiences.

I didn't see any of that as an 11-year old.

Of course, back then I didn't really know what Utah was, and it didn't register that I was a Mormon, and certainly that I might be in some way excluding others.

I spent those years in Virginia and Wyoming, and didn't think of myself as "Mormon," though I attended an LDS ("Mormon") church every week. I was just me. My friends weren't "non-Mormon" or anything else: they were just kids with whom I played sports, attended school, etc. It never occurred to me that I should think otherwise.

Now, some 25 years later, I still don't divide up friends and neighbors into classes, and find that most of my friends (not by design) belong to other (or no) faiths. It's not that I'm particularly enlightened: I'm not. It just seems bizarre to allocate friendship and good will along cultural (or political or...whatever) lines.

What would be the point?

Some disagree. There's a mini-war being waged in my Yalecrest (Harvard/Yale) neighborhood over whether or not to designate it as a local historic district, with all the pluses and minuses that come with such a distinction.

It never occurred to me that the issue is a Mormon vs. non-Mormon issue, so I was surprised to hear some characterizing it in this way. I thought it was about homes, not churches.

Religion is something that makes me very happy, by helping me to lead a more fulfilling life than I would normally pursue. It's a reason to embrace others, not exclude or shun them.

"Pure religion...is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction" is James' description of religion. It's unclear to me how this translates into petty taxonomies.

It's even less clear why we'd want it to do so.

The messiness of people

2010-05-07T06:20:00.000-06:00

People are messy. No, not in the way Isaac's room is messy. Rather, they're "messy" in the sense that they complicate otherwise easy decisions.

A friend of mine spoke at a conference I was hosting today. He went too long but I couldn't easily shut him down. You don't "shut down" friends.

Another, different speaker went well over limit, too, but I couldn't shut him down, either. He's the founder of the company, a good friend, and the person primarily responsible for me joining my current employer.

Messy.

Life is easier on paper. On paper, decisions are always easier. It's when you involve people that they become messy. People can't be treated like pawns; they can't be steamrolled. Either you treat people with respect, or you rightly find yourself in a life of not-so-blissful isolation.

Which is why, of course, people are worth having around, even despite how much they complicate life. They also enrich it.

If you have children, this is very easy to understand. There is no rational reason to have children, now that we don't have fields for them to farm or livestock for them to feed. They cost money, require a ton of time, and make travel and other personal indulgences much harder.

But sometimes they smile, and all is forgotten. At least for a time.

So, yes, people are messy, and make work, home, school, church, and everything else complicated. But they also make each of these things worthwhile.

...and success

2010-04-28T22:02:00.000-06:00

I can't remember why (perhaps it was before I started law school and was stressed by the intelligent people I'd soon be competing against), but I remember my dad dispensing some wise words to this effect: "It's much better to work hard than to be smart. I know lots of intelligent but lazy people. The hard workers will always win."

Maybe he didn't say exactly that, but the theme has stayed with me, and tends to color how I view others' accomplishments. I'm not easily impressed by degrees or other signs of raw intelligence. I care much more about how hard people work.

Which is why I'm so impressed with Scout and Isaac today. They're both smart kids, but that's not something for which they can really take any pride. They were born that way.

Rather, I was surprised recently that Scout decided to run for student council at West High School. Scout is afflicted by a common Asay disease (i.e., thinking that everyone is more popular, accomplished, fun, has more friends, etc. than we do), so it gave me pause when I heard she decided to run for student body vice president of her own volition.

No pressure from Jen or me. We didn't even know she was running until we were asked to sprint her registration papers to the school at the last minute. :-)

Today she made it to the final run-off, which will be decided tomorrow. I could not possibly care any less if she wins or not. She has already proved herself to me. She took a chance, put her pride on the line, and has worked hard to win. That work is more valuable than the result.

As for Isaac, his accomplishment is a bit less glamorous but no less impressive. He built his pinewood derby car (er, "space ship," since his troop is doing the space ship not the car this year) by himself.

This may not sound very cool, but if you've ever been involved with Scouting, you know that it is almost always the parents (and generally the dads) who do the heavy lifting on these cars/space ships. The winner's car/ship always looks like the father took off work for a year to devote himself to making Hasbro's next kit car/ship.

But Isaac did this one by himself. And it shows.

(Well, that's not fair: I helped him a little last year and...it was terrible. I stink at that sort of thing, i.e., the sort of thing that requires even a modicum of creativity and talent.)

Isaac created a soccer player...of sorts. However euphoric this totem-pole figure may seem now, I doubt it's going to win any prizes.

But that's OK. For me, Isaac has already won. He did this himself. In this respect, it's awesome.

Failure

2010-04-26T19:46:00.001-06:00

We could have done with a little success tonight. It turned out to be a hard day, Jen tired from having stayed up until 1:00 AM working on Scout's student council campaign posters and everyone infected with mild to extreme cases of crankiness.

But it wasn't to be. Isaac's team took the field and...fell apart. Over and over again. Inning after inning.

It was one of those times when you just want to call the game to put a team out of its misery, but the umpire let it keep going. Painful.

As the coach, it was frustrating. These were boys that I've seen field grounders, hit fast pitches, etc., but tonight their lethargy was so profound that I thought I was coaching a team filled with Rip Van Winkles. It was one of those times that I thought, "Hm, yes, let's just stop playing baseball now and focus on soccer."

Of course, there are times when the same thing happens in soccer. This failure thing occasionally rears its ugly head. And it's...ugly.

On the drive home I said some fatherly things about not giving up, losers are those that give in to failure, etc. I suppose it was all true. It was also meaningless.

The reality for Isaac and, to a much lesser extent, me, is that tonight we completely screwed up, and it just feels bad. We could lie to ourselves and pretend that "we'll get them next time" but we're still stuck with this time, and it hurts.

Failure stinks. I've had plenty of experience with it, and no matter how good it may be for me, I really don't like it. Maybe I'm more used to it now - less surprised that I'm not the greatest at everything - but that doesn't make it feel better.

P.S. Isaac is in the kitchen as I type this, agonizing over how to get the noodles from Jen's chicken noodle soup into the bowl so he can eat it. I think he forgot he just had a game. Maybe I'm the only one focused on failure right now. :-)

Two things guide me...albeit imperfectly

2010-04-02T11:58:00.000-06:00

As a highly flawed person, I'm always grateful for good advice from others, whether personally directed at me or shotgunned out into the ether.

If I were to identify two bits of counsel that direct me more than anything else, it would be counsel on pride and...more on pride. I wonder if there's a common theme there? :-)

The first comes from Ezra Taft Benson, former president of my church, who said that "Pride is concerned with who is right, but humility is concerned with what is right."

I think of this often when I'm in the midst of a debate with someone, and it usually, eventually steers me right. Ultimately, the "who" in an argument matters very little, because the "what" is really the marrow of any conflict. Ironically, when we settle on "what," we don't conflict very much, because "what" is a question of facts, not feelings.

Or, rather, the more we focus on what is right, the more we're concerned for people's feelings, because it's always right to treat others with love and respect. When we're in the midst of doing that, it's very hard to fight.

I've witnessed this at work. In one example (among many), one of my direct reports was struggling to get along with others within the company, but didn't recognize it and grew quite defensive when presented with the concern. Instead of having a "Lord, is it I?" moment of humility, this person wanted to confront the accusers and kept pointing to various reasons why they were wrong.

But this missed the point: the point was that people felt hurt by this manager. It really didn't matter if the hurt was justified or not. The solution was to respect their concerns and seek to get along, rather than to prove that he/she was right.

However, given that we're all prone to screw up on this and other matters, the second bit of counsel is critical, and has been emphasized in every interaction I have ever had with my dad. It comes from scripture:

No power or influence can or ought to be maintained by virtue of the priesthood [or, if you will, by one's authority in any organization], only be persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned;...

Reproving betimes with sharpness when moved upon by the Holy Ghost; and then showing forth afterwards an increase of love toward him whom thou has reproved, lest he esteem thee to be his enemy.

My dad has been angry with me countless times, but I can not remember a single time when he didn't apologize to me soon after getting angry with me for losing his temper, or whatever he had said or done. Not one time. Ever.

I have tried to emulate this scripture, and my dad's example, in my own relations with my family, friends, and others. I get mad really easily, but I repent quickly, too.

Because life is simply a series of interactions with other people, it's critical to focus on being humble and then asking forgiveness when we're not, and never to use authority as a club to bend others to our will, however right we may think we are.

People are not pawns.

As a bonus round, one other principle has stuck with me since I first heard it in a high-school philosophy class. It's a Zen proverb:

To know and not yet to do is not yet to know.

I try to remember this when dealing with others: I believe good actions derive from good principles and good beliefs. Often our wrongful conduct is a product of wrong or incomplete knowledge.

At least, that's what I tell myself. The alternative is that everyone else is a complete idiot, which is only sometimes true. :-)

I stand all amazed

2010-04-02T11:54:00.000-06:00

Could this world be any better? I mean, really?

It's not as if there aren't plenty of things that simply stink with this world, starting with our fetid refusal to care about the things that matter most (spirituality, family).

But so much is wonderful.

I'm on a 767 flying home to Salt Lake. What an incredible thing, air travel. We whine about airplane food, being shoved into too-small seats, but let's face it: the ability to spend a mere 10 hours or so flyng over 5,000 miles is breathtakingly cool.

(Admission: I'm writing this from first class, after a surprise upgrade. It's possible I wouldn't be exuding so much praise if I were in 37B.)

While I type this (laptops are a miracle in themselves), I'm listening to a Killers song ("Losing Touch") that is so fantastic, I want to cry listening to it. Perhaps you prefer other music, but something by someone makes you feel the same. I welcome the reality of evolution, but the animating genius that gives life to Neil Young's harmonica, to Morrissey's whimsical lyricism, and Bach's haunting organ is divine.

Music is a gift from God.

Maybe Google is, too. I spent time last night talking with a friend who works on all the Google technology we never get to see, because he and people like him write the software that manages Google's internal operations. The company's ambition and intuition is awe inspiring. It's more than human.

So is Flannery O'Connor. I'm reading her biography right now, and can't wait to meet her some day. At least, I hope I'll have that opportunity. I love her sense of the freakish in all of us, but mostly where it points. Speaking to a friend who had warned Flannery about the horrors of her past, Flannery cautioned:

Where you are wrong is in saying that you are a history of horror. The meaning of the Redemption is precisely that we do not have to be our history.

As for her seeming focus on the freaks and ghouls of humanity, she suggested that it was her way of waking the world to the reality of the divine:

To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.

For those who have read any of her novels or short stories, you will appreciate just how "startling" her characters can be.

Wonderful talent. Wonderful purpose. Her characters marching feebly on to Zion, as Ruby's vision in Flanner's short story "Revelation" suggests:

[A] vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black [folks] in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right.

Oh, my. I am quite literally in tears as I read it, it's so startlingly exceptional. We are blessed to have writing like this from which to draw inspiration...and hope.

I could go on (don't get me started on how great Utah skiing is...). But you get the point. Life is beautiful, even amongst the wreckage of U.S. politics, the callous disregard for human worth, the scourge of pride that afflicts us all.

But these are the sideshows, the uninteresting bits that get in the way of our appreciation for just how fantastic things really are. Of how fantastic we are.

I'm collecting you..

2010-04-02T11:52:00.000-06:00

A good friend of mine, Jason Matusow, once did me the disservice of suggesting I fit into one of Malcolm Gladwell's somewhat silly categories: that of "connector." As I joked at the time, this just means that I don't have any value in myself except as a link between people of real value.

Alas! I think Jason might have been right.

I collect people. The first time I meet someone, either in person or through email, I enter them into my address book. Almost no one leaves my address book, but I add hundreds every year.

What do I do with these addresses? Hmm....Pretty much nothing.

But every so often, I'll be asked, "Do you know someone at [name your organization]?" The answer is increasingly "Yes." And then I connect them.

I would prefer that all of these people were looking for me so that they could throw money at me or something, but that doesn't appear to be on the cards. So, for now, I'm the collector and the connector.

You win, Jason.

The on-purpose accidental career

2010-03-29T01:28:00.000-06:00

It's only when I look back that everything seems perfectly laid out in my life. From high school until now, and probably well before my graduation, life just seems to fall into place.

In particular, when I look back on how my "career" (I hate that word, as it seems a relic of a bygone era) has progressed, it seems clear that some higher power than mine has been involved. I never set out to get involved in open source: open source found me through a family friend who started out advising me on which Salt Lake City law firms to join during my first summer of law school, only to interrupt this search one day with, "You shouldn't go work for a law firm at all. You should go work for Matt Harris at Lineo, an embedded Linux company."

I had no idea what that meant, but it sounded better than slogging it out at a law firm. So I jumped.

What a fortuitious move that was. It catapulted me headlong into one of the most interesting and transformative trends to shape computing in the past several decades. Open source has become standard operating procedure for the technology industry, but in those early days (circa 2000-2001), it was still very much a point of confusion and contention.

My departure from Lineo to Novell didn't feel like a guided decision at the time: it was simply an act of desperation as Lineo hit the wall and Novell, for once, looked mildly stable. Within months of joining, however, the open-source experience I had gained at Lineo was being put to use in the newly formed Linux Business Office at Novell.

Three years later, my boredom in my mostly evangelist role pushed me to look elsewhere, and I found my way to the experience of Alfresco's management team, a team I felt had much to offer me by way of mentorship, but which I worried I had little to give in return.

This didn't stop me from sucking the marrow from Alfresco's deep bench of experienced management team. I learned more at Alfresco through the likes of John Powell, Martin Musierowicz, Robin Vasan, John Newton, and others than I deserved to learn. It was a tremendous learning experience. I feel very blessed to have been there.

Eventually, however, I felt that I wasn't learning as much and, more painfully for me, that I wasn't giving as much. So I left to join Canonical, where I am today.

Each move hasn't felt like it was guided by some invisible hand, directing me to this or that opportunity. Like anyone else, I have been nudged along in my decisions out of boredom or ambition or whatever. It's only in looking back that my "career" feels cohesive and very clearly directed.

This is why I urge people, when asked, to not attempt to plot out the full scope of their careers. I don't think it's possible to meaningfully do so, because I believe it's the short-term frustrations and enticements that combine to make a cohesive, long-term career. Just plot out the next two years, and keep doing that. Focus on doing an exceptional job in the short term and the long term takes care of itself.

It certainly has for me. Again, I don't feel that I'm unique in this, and I certainly don't feel that any special blessings have been reserved for me to which others don't have equal access.

Rather, life presents us with problems and if we're faithful in meeting them head-on and trying our best to navigate through them, things sort themselves out, and always for the best...in the long term, even if we can't see how we'll ever manage in the short term.

That Delta lady

2010-03-28T14:00:00.000-06:00

Just before Christmas last year, Jen, the kids, and I flew through Atlanta on our way down to Buenos Aires. At the Sky Club (formerly "Delta Crown Room") a sweet, Southern lady at the desk checked us in, and in the process made us feel hugely welcome. She made each of the kids feel at home.

She was wonderful.

Today I met her again at the same Sky Club. She looked at me for a second like she remembered me, and then I reminded her of her generosity toward my family. She lit up and started talking about how much she loves kids, and people from Salt Lake City ("You people are so nice! I got on a plane once and said, "Welcome to all, and especially those from Salt Lake City!").

She made my day when I was here with my kids. She made it again today without them.

At a time when political squabbles sour human interaction--when every conversation seems zero-sum in a way--it's great to be among people like this lady who just make you feel good. What a blessing she is to her employer and to people like me who spend 30 minutes in the Sky Club, but the rest of the day glowing because of it.

Trust and Arsenal tickets

2010-03-27T07:26:00.000-06:00

Someone has got to figure out how to facilitate trust on the Web. It's perhaps the last big problem to solve for unleashing peer to peer commerce and social interaction.

If there really are six degrees of separation between us all, then it shouldn't be (too) hard to map all human relationships such that when I click on a Craigslist ad to buy something, I have a fair idea as to how much I should trust the person on the other side of the transaction.

I've been thinking about this problem for years, and am surprised (shocked, even) that no one has taken on the challenge. There's money in trust. Why isn't someone making that money? (If you want to know why I am not making that money, it's because I'm not an engineer and haven't a clue as to how to implement it.)

Here's a typical scenario.

Earlier this week I was desperately scouring the Web for Arsenal (vs. Barcelona) tickets, and turned to Craigslist London. I found a guy who claimed to have two tickets for sale, and we began conversing over email. (Actually, I started talking with a few people, but a few were obvious scammers and he sounded most credible at the best price.)

The more we talked, the more I trusted him. He sounded a bit like a technophobe, so instead of wiring the money into his bank account I set up a Western Union money transfer. I was at his mercy.

He picked up the money yesterday and I didn't hear a word from him, despite him saying that he'd email me to let me know the tickets had been sent. I repeatedly emailed him, each time a bit angrier and more desperate. Still, no response.

I was despondent. I didn't want to get shafted out of my money or the tickets. I lost my faith in humanity.

Today he emailed me back to apologize, and the faith is restored. But I really shouldn't have to buy on faith. Faith/trust can and should be baked into each interaction with someone else, because it shouldn't be tremendously difficult to determine who I know (through email records; LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and other friends lists; and even my cellular calling records), how well I know them, and therefore the level of trust I have in those closest to me.

Now extend that. I know my friend Lonn and trust him completely. If he indicates his network and his relative trust in each person/node in that network, then I'm suddenly two degrees of trust away from a safe transaction. Now extend that one further, and then three more, and I can do business with anyone on the planet with some relative assurance that I won't get shafted.

Why hasn't someone done this?

Why don't you? I don't know how to code, but I sure would be happy to pay for the service if you come up with the product. Please?

The people problem

2010-03-10T19:03:00.002-07:00

Life would be so easy if it weren't for people. It also wouldn't be nearly as fun.

As bad as earthquakes and other natural disasters are, they're somewhat better than the constant barrage of inanity and violence caused by people. As an example, I'd rather take my chances that I'll be hit by lightning today than play the odds that some nimrod will make rude comments on my CNET blog, or attack me in some other way.

It happened today. It happens every day.

As bad as people can be, however, they are also the single-best part of living in this world.

If I couldn't wake up to Lily and Greta tag-teaming to get pancakes or chocolate milk out of me, I'd be a poor man, indeed. If I didn't get to see Isaac and his friends enjoying a comeback in basketball, I'd be missing out. If I couldn't watch Emma with Jen and Scout, I'm not sure life would be nearly as sweet.

And so on.

Fortunately, there are far more good, well-intentioned people than there are jerks. The jerks make lots of noise and tend to obscure the wonderful people all around us, but perhaps we just need to learn to tune them out and focus more on good people.

So, while I had a bout of frustration today with a guy who desperately tries to misunderstand every word I write, I also bumped into dozens of fantastic friends on Facebook, email, and the phone who more than redeemed my day. Such people make life wonderful.

And, as I said, there are far more such people than jerks.

Not that I should be making blanket statements about jerks. I do think there are people who are fundamentally flawed when it comes to sociability, but most people are only jerks some of the time. I know I am. (And you know I am, too.)

Anyway, I take heart in knowing that while the poor (and the rude and mean-spirited) we have with us always, the greater part of humanity is good and tends to make us happy.

Not my will...

2010-02-17T21:33:00.002-07:00

I just had the most remarkable evening. Oddly enough, it was precisely the evening I had been hoping I wouldn't have.

My ward ("parish" or "congregation" for those not familiar with the LDS nomenclature) is responsible this month for service at the VA hospital nearby. I'm responsible for coordinating volunteers (and for being one of those volunteers) Monday through Thursday this week.

Each night I muster all the faith I have to plead with God to let me sit around with my family, doing absolutely nothing for anyone else. Monday and Tuesday, I "scored." Tonight, not so much. There were eight veterans that requested a visit.

Eight veterans translates to two hours or so at the VA, which translates to no reading to my kids, no catching up on work I couldn't get to during the day, and no sitting around the kitchen willing chocolate temptation upon myself.

(Lent started today, I think, and our neighbors inspired Jen to give up anything that tastes good for the next six weeks. I'm trying to go along with it by abandoning desserts. Given that Mormons already have monthly fasts and such, I'm not sure why we're also borrowing other religions' acts of immolation, but....)

As I spent time with these men (sometimes there are women, but tonight they were all men), my hard heart softened and I really started to enjoy talking with them and seeing how we could help. (My next-door neighbor joined me.) By the end, we were actually seeking out others that hadn't specifically asked for a visit, such that I think we ended up seeing 10 veterans.

It was awesome. I hadn't wanted to go at all, and by the time we had finished, I couldn't imagine an evening better spent.

Service is like that. Good service is rarely convenient. But it pays rich dividends. Now I just need to work on not trying to avoid it at all costs.

Ski season hits the Asay house

2010-02-13T08:00:00.002-07:00

I enjoyed skiing growing up, but it wasn't until the past few years that I really started to love it (for reasons discussed elsewhere).

Now my family seems to love skiing, too, which makes for some incredible ski vacations (well, one each year to Grand Targhee, but we've got to start somewhere!). Here's the video I made to celebrate our most recent trip:

What I don't show is that our wonderful neighbors, the Srivastavas, overlapped with us by a day, enabling us to spend time (and share food - Grand Targhee food is, well, not that great) with them.

Just a week later I hosted my annual "Open Source Goat Rodeo" for members of the open source business community. It was a lot of fun and this year included some of the best skiing I've ever had (and excellent snow):

In both videos I'm the one in red and black. Well, Jen is, too, in our family video, which makes it a bit confusing (watching the video, Lily kept saying, "There's Mommy!" when I was shown skiing and the opposite when Jen was shown...), but still fun to watch. At least, I think so. :-)

Surprise! Even I can be liked

2010-02-07T14:15:00.001-07:00

I had a wonderful experience this past week, one that everyone should have, and which I'm convinced everyone could have (and certainly one that everyone deserves). I announced a new job, and in the process discovered that I'm not alone. That people actually care about me.

It was exhilarating…and bewildering.

All day Friday, congratulations hit my Twitter account (mjasay). I got dozens of emails, too, and 50+ comments on my CNET blog where I announced the change. It was overwhelming, because I (perhaps like you) normally assume that no one is that interested in me.

Of perhaps greatest significance to me, my close friend and former boss, John Powell, wrote a public thank you for my service to Alfresco. It made me cry. Each time I read it. Here was a man that I love and respect dearly showing me profound respect, even as I left his company.

You can't buy friends like that. If you could, I would have tried, as I often feel alone.

Not that this is peculiar to me. I suspect that Facebook, with its 300 million members, is ample proof of this. Even as technology has made it easier to connect we're perhaps growing increasingly distant from each other.

But this isn't what we want. We want to stay in touch. We want to feel a connection to others. We don't want to be alone.

And we're not. My job change experience confirms it. If people can care about me, they can care about anyone.

Growing up, I assumed that everyone else was having fun, and didn't want to involve me. I still feel that way much of the time, which is what makes my family so comforting to me: I know that Jen, Scout, Isaac, and Greta all want to see me, and care about me.

As for Lily, well, let's just say she's willing to acknowledge that I'm her dad, but only from a distance. :-)

I keep discovering, however, that whenever I leave my shell long enough to reach out to someone else, they were waiting for someone to recognize them, too, and want to be with them. I think we're all like that: pathetically, pathologically incapable of realizing just how much we matter to other people.

Not because we're famous. Not because we're rich. Not because we're anything other than…ourselves.

Life is good, because people are good. Even me. Friday confirmed that. Thank you.

Risk and reward

2010-01-23T13:13:00.003-07:00

I remember the first time I went skiing. It was Brighton, I was in 7th grade, and I was petrified. I didn't know how to stop and desperately, desperately wanted to.

That was my problem, in fact. I wasn't willing to let myself go because I thought something terrible would happen if I did.

Many crashes later, I realize that nothing terrible is going to happen. Not normally. The minute I realized that is the very minute skiing became a pleasure and my ability took off. It was the fear that held me back.

Once I accepted risk as an integral part of skiing, it became amazingly fun.

I've noticed the same thing at work. The more risk I've been willing to accept, the better the work. I could have stayed at Novell for a long, long time and cashed a generous paycheck. But Alfresco came along and offered something better: risk.

Risk is when you grow. It's what drives us to adapt to hard circumstances and become equal to those challenges. Relationships are a risk ("What if she leaves?"). School is a risk ("What if I fail?"). Kids are a risk ("What of I kill them? What if I don't?").

But all of these risks pay off. Even the mundane ones. Jen took a risk on getting our basement redone, and it has been well worth it (though we agonized over stretching ourselves financially).

Risk is good. It's what makes us grow.

Ex nihilo motivation

2010-01-20T21:42:00.003-07:00

The past few months I've been thinking a lot about motivation. Since mid-October 2008 I have exercised somewhat religiously, running 40 miles (or skiing/biking the equivalent) every week. I dropped 20+ pounds and have stayed at 172-175 pounds since then.

This sounds great, and I suppose it is, but I spent a year or two before then largely languishing. I couldn't get excited about consistently exercising or, more pertinently, not consistently binging on whatever food Jen was foolish enough not to lock up.

My motivation to lose weight? A 19-year old neighbor calling me fat. That's all it took. After years of wanting to exercise and control my eating, one random comment from someone who has no conception of body fat and I was devoted to losing weight.

Why?

I wish I knew. Something in me snapped. I discovered desire.

But why then? It's not as if I didn't want to get in shape before. I did. But I lacked the inner conviction to guide my outer actions.

This time it was exercise, but I've had it in other areas of my life, too. One day something just clicks and I decide to read a book, apply to law school, or whatever. I can't figure out from where the desire comes.

This hasn't, of course, kept me from advising everyone else on how to start running, read more, eat less, ask so-and-so on a date, etc. I don't seem to have lacked for motivation in telling others to get motivated. :-)

Any ideas on how motivation is born?

From the same mouth...

2010-01-08T16:33:00.000-07:00

People are complicated. In the very same day, and perhaps at the very same time, we can be both kind and thoughtless, bitter and sweet.

Take me, today. I stupidly posted some information today about a friend that annoyed him and probably got him in trouble with his employer. I didn't mean to, but I also didn't think through the consequences carefully enough.

In the same day I received an email from a different friend thanking me for buoying him up through a difficult period of his career, something that I was mostly unaware I was doing. I was just trying to be a good friend.

Same Matt. Very different consequences.

I do this all the time, and you probably do, too. It's what makes people interesting, and it's also what makes it so hard about judging others. We tend to hone in on the bad that others do, and there's plenty of that in anyone, if I'm any indication of badness quotient.

But often that bad is tightly connected to the good in people. It can even be the same personality trait that in one situation leads to good behavior/consequences and in another...the inverse.

I'm neither as bad as the first friend is feeling right now, nor am I as good as the second friend may feel. I'm somewhere in the middle. We all are. But we're mostly good, with occasional bouts of bad.

James writes:

Out of the same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not so to be. (James 3:10)

He's right, but the trick is to continuously remove the cursing and amplify the blessing. Today I feel terrible for what I did to my first friend. I'm hoping that tomorrow I'll have the opportunity to "bless him" to the extent he can forgive the "cursing."

I did call him, operating under the principle laid out by William Blake in his classic "A Poison Tree":

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe;
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

It's better to talk it through. That's when we see that others are as complicated as we are...and that they almost never intend the hurt that they do.

I know I didn't.

Assume fragile

2010-01-03T06:42:00.002-07:00

I was talking with my daughter, Scout, yesterday. She wasn't excited to go to her ski class after being away for a few weeks. The thought of skiing with a group of people that had solidified friendships (which didn't include her, presumably) while she was away was painful.

I can relate. Throughout my life I've assumed that everyone else is happy, everyone else is friends with...everyone else, etc.

But as I've grown older, one thing has become increasingly clear: everyone is fragile. Everyone is needy. Everyone wants a friend but isn't necessarily very good at making or keeping them.

So I told Scout to stop sitting back, waiting for someone to call her, talk to her, etc. Friendship is hard work, and your odds of making friends are better if you initiate the friendship and persist in trying to form it.

Assume that person would really like someone to talk to on the lift. Assume that person you haven't heard from in months would welcome your call. Assume that everyone else really isn't gathered in a room, laughing it up without you. Etc.

Things get better (and worse, in some ways) when you get married, because then you have a built-in friend. But it's too easy to take your spouse for granted (which is the "worse" part). And it's hard to match couples with other couples.

But I'm so grateful for those people who are friends with me, who put up with me when I retreat into my cocoon (I tend to be an introvert, except with people I already know, which creates some problems), or become moody, or whenever I'm a suboptimal friend (which is just about always). I have friends who never seem to treat me as I deserve.

Thank heaven for that.

In 2010 I'd like to be a better friend, and a better family member. I'm hoping to appear less aloof and more concerned about what is going on around me. It's not that I have better things to do. I don't. I'm not sure there is anything better to do than to be a good friend.

Peaks and valleys

2009-12-13T13:27:00.003-07:00

The last few weeks have been a bit of a struggle. Actually, much of this year has been difficult.

It's not the first time. Our first two years in California were frustrating. There were certainly bright spots (friends, dates, wiffle ball at lunch, etc.), but church, finances, work, etc. conspired against us.

It felt like a transition period.

And it was. We left Campbell to head a few minutes north to Stanford, and it was like life started up again. Stanford was as close to heaven as I think I've ever been: our apartment was nothing to get excited about but our friends certainly were. It was at Stanford that I got into open source, that we created some lifelong friends, and that so much that we're currently doing really started.

When we moved back to Utah, it felt like the brakes were put back on. There wasn't much about living in Orem that we liked, though work was fun that first year.

Our unhappiness with our home led to our move to Salt Lake and, again, life seemed to blossom again.

Along the way, there have been times where I've loved it and Jen hated it, or I hated it and Jen loved it, but we've basically balanced each other out and have greatly enjoyed living here.

We still do, but this year has felt like another transition time. In church, family, work, etc. it feels like things are about to change, or should change. I wish I knew what.

But having been through such personal valleys before, and having emerged to sprint up the peaks, I feel confident something good is coming. My role at Alfresco is changing: perhaps that's the change I need. Jen's church calling has changed: perhaps that's the change that has been knocking on the door.

I don't know. I just know that this year has been very hard in many respects, but mostly for all that hasn't happened, rather than for what has. I feel like I'm waiting for something to happen, and I'm really terrible at waiting patiently for much of anything.

Of course, I could be at the bottom of a valley...which is about to turn into a 20,000-foot hole. Now that would be interesting. :-)

Do you ever feel this way?

For my parents - "A Child's Prayer" (en espagnol)

2009-11-26T11:01:00.005-07:00

Scout sings in the International Children's Choir, and this morning they did a Thanksgiving performance. It was beautiful, as ever, which I tried to capture with my little Flip video camera.

Watch it here. Or below:

But I wanted to post it quickly so that my parents, who are serving a mission for our church in Buenos Aires, Argentina, could hear "A Child's Prayer"...in Spanish.

Oh, and here's a take on Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus." (Or, as Lily calls it, "Hello, New York." My sister, Natalie, is right: everyone should have a four-year old to entertain them.)

The climate change fiasco

2009-11-24T11:56:00.003-07:00

Wow. Just wow. Reading through some of the emails climate change scientists sent attacking critics makes me weep for science. I expect this sort of behavior of Chevron or industry, but not of scientists.

Science isn't perfect, but it's supposed to be about truth-telling. It's designed to remove lobbying and such from the calculus of what is true, what is accurate, etc.

But these emails make it look like science is political.

I already knew from reading Popper and Kuhn that science is imperfect. I just I just expected more than this.

This is shameful.

I'll be rich...tomorrow

2009-11-23T16:31:00.002-07:00

A friend came over today to estimate the cost of redoing our basement. We're trying to construct a cage that will house Isaac: somewhere that he can wallow in his own filth without infecting his sisters. (Not that Lily is a model of cleanliness, but....)

Anyway, Curtis (my friend) asked if we were trying to get by, build our dream basement, or something in between. I explained that ever since we moved to this house we've dreamed of knocking it down. Each year, the plan is to tear it down and rebuild "next year." We even paid an architect friend to draw up plans for this "next year" house.

But "next year" never comes. "Next year" is always predicated on my company selling for obscene amounts of cash, and apparently obscenity, while perfectly fine in movies and music, is out of style in business.

!!%@%!!

From 1997 to 1999 I was the only person in Silicon Valley who didn't make a billion dollars. I'm apparently influential in open-source software, but I can't even scare up a measly million from it.

I guess this means I'm just like everyone else.

Blessed. I make a comfortable living. Mostly because of work, I and my family get to go to cool places (though they usually get to see the places, and I see the insides of hotels and conference rooms).

Yes, Jen and I still have to save to buy things we want (though we don't do it nearly as well as we wish). Yes, I still hate our house and would rather not drive our minivan (which is meant to inspire me to sell the company), but I like not having car payments, love having a house we can afford (even if I'd rather blow it up), and adore our neighbors.

(My six- and three-year old neighbors just put a fake present tied to a string on our porch, then pulled it away when I came out. Last night, our neighbors across the street had us over for dinner. If I didn't believe in God before, having neighbors like these would make me a believer.)

So, I guess I'm getting used to "next year" never coming. I still hope it will, and work like it will. But I suppose it will be OK if life is good without truckloads of cash down in the basement...covering the stains left by potty-training kids and walls gouged by over-exuberant children.

"Dad" used to mean something

2009-11-13T20:24:00.002-07:00

I used to know what I was supposed to be doing as a dad. When my kids were very young, my job was to feed, clean, and teach them. Basically, I was damage control. I was authority. I showed the way.

Scout is with me on a business trip, however, and it's clear that this old role is fading. Yes, I'm still responsible for general maintenance and helping to guide her, as well as my other children, but they don't seem to need me in the same way as they get older.

More troubling, the difference in our ages seems to shrink with time. I used to know dramatically more than my kids. They were somewhat helpless without me. That's no longer the case.

Each of my kids, and Scout most particularly as she's the eldest, seems to be getting their own ideas about life. They're real people with real opinions and real concerns. They're not my kids anymore. They're increasingly themselves.

I guess they always were. But it's both frightening and exhilarating getting used to this new phase.

It must be the same with God. I'm reminded of what Paul wrote to the Corinthians (chapter 13, verses 11 through 12):

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

The closer we come to God, the more we become like Him, and, I suspect, the more we understand Him and like the sorts of things He likes.

A bit like my relationship with Scout. She's becoming an independent person, and our ages seem to be converging as she catches up with me. It's much the same with my dad. He used to be something different, something distant: bigger and untouchable.

But now he's my friend. I don't think of him as over me anymore, but alongside me.

I understand the sorts of things that make him tick, because I have to deal with the same issues (or similar). He still exceeds me in experience, but I no longer feel like we're living separate existences. He's farther along the path than I am, but we're on the same path.

It's 4:35 AM here in Paris, and I've been awake since 2:00 AM, worried that Scout would wake up and I'd feel the need to help her fall asleep again, somehow. That, I suppose, is what distinguishes us, at least for now: we're increasingly similar but I still feel an obligation to raise her. Some day, that will probably change as I get old and she has to nurse me through my frailty.

It's humbling. But it's also encouraging to realize that age differentials dissipate over time, and that my responsibility is increasingly to be a friend, not a distant authority figure Who Knows What Is Right.

That's a comforting thought.

Couples dating: Just when you thought high school was over

2009-11-11T10:58:00.002-07:00

I absolutely loved this Wall Street Journal article on couples dating. No, it's not some twisted wife swap sort of thing, but rather the very real conundrum you face when you marry: with whom should you hang out?

It turns out that it's even harder to date a couple than it is to date when you're single, because you're dealing with 3x the neuroses, character flaws, etc.

Actually, the date itself is just the beginning of the stress. Wait until the next day, which can be just as excruciating as the day after a singles date. If you didn't like the other couple, you'll need to plot ways to avoid them. If you did like them, you'll need to deal with your anxiety.

Because what if they don't call? Should you contact them? And if you do, and you still don't hear back, what does that say about your relationship with your partner? Are you irritating? Insufferable? Uninteresting as a team?

When you find a great couple, however, it's absolute bliss.

It might also be good for your marriage:

Research shows that couples who are friends with other couples have happier, longer-lasting relationships with each other.

The reasons are simple. If you have friends who enjoy you as a couple, you may feel better about your union. These other couples can be a support network. And the process of making new friends together may inject energy into your relationship and give you something to bond over.

Jen and I are fortunate to get along with several different couples. That probably says more about how patient and good they are than it does about us. We're the difficult couple. :-)

Wash after you shake Lily's hands

2009-11-07T10:09:00.003-07:00

Oh, my. Last night as I read Charlotte's Web to Lily, I noticed that her hands smelled terrible. Putrid, even.

I hustled her to the bathroom, where she glared at me. "How did your hands get so smelly?" I demanded.

Just then a plastic flower - shown at right - fell out of her underwear.

"Lily," I said, "Where did that flower come from? Was it in your underwear?"

"No," she replied.

"Then where was it? I saw it fall out of your underwear."

"I had it in my bum."

"Do you mean you had it crammed between your bum cheeks?!?"

"Yes," she sweetly said.

I didn't have the heart to tell her that manure won't work as a fertilizer on plastic flowers.

Contrition at such a young age

2009-10-04T21:36:00.003-06:00

Something was really bothering Isaac tonight. He's always sensitive to criticism (I guess he gets this from his dad), but tonight at dinner he seemed particularly fragile.

Later, when we were reading, he teared up again, and when I asked what was wrong, he said it was because we had been making fun of him at dinner. (Mea culpa: we had, but I didn't even get my best jabs in because he was so sad. :-)

I held him close to me while we read Sherlock Holmes and then figured it was over.

It wasn't.

As he was going into his room to sleep, I heard a tremor in his voice and got down on a knee to be eye level with him, and asked him if there was something bothering him, something more than he had told me before.

"Yes," he quavered.

It turns out that Friday night while we had been at our church for my mission reunion, he had discovered some spray paint and "accidentally" made four "small" spots on the wall (on the stage in the gym). It had been eating him up for days.

As he told me, I could feel the burden lift from his shoulders, and doubly so when I told him that I was glad he had told me, and that he should not think about it any more, but that it would be OK. His whole countenance brightened and he went to sleep, free from the guilty conscience that had plagued him.

I can relate. I've done enough bad things in my life to be very familiar with the comfort of contrition, and the salve that confession and repentance brings. It's such a waste to carry sins around on our consciences.

While listening to the proceedings of a conference for my church on Saturday night, a church leader spoke of the need to abandon anger and repent. It hit me how often I get frustrated and angry while writing my blog or on Twitter, and I immediately crafted an apology to those that have been stung by my criticisms. I doubt many people knew to what I was referring, but it made me feel better to apologize and move on.

For Isaac, he learned a wonderful lesson tonight: it's always better to own up to mistakes so that you can move on. He'll be a better man for having done this once. He'll be a great man if he can learn to do it over, and over, and over, and over.

One of these things is not like the others...

2009-09-14T06:46:00.005-06:00

Lily drew a picture this morning and showed it to me so that she could point out the different people in it:

That's me. And that's you. And that's Maddie. And that's Grey. And that's just an alien face. And that's Jane. And that's Greta."

Here's the picture:

All are alike unto God...and Lily. Even aliens.

A glimpse of girls camp

2009-09-12T11:23:00.002-06:00

Jen and I spent our fifteenth anniversary in the mountains of Utah at Camp Everett. That sounds great, until you realize that the reason we were there was for our ward girls camp.

However, it turned out to be a wonderful four days, and Jen did a fantastic job of organizing it. Here's a look at what we did:

These girls truly are beautiful.

The music, by the way, is The Flaming Lips.

The point is perfecting, not perfection

2009-09-07T23:41:00.003-06:00

I read something this morning that gave me a lot of comfort, given my many imperfections. It's in Alma 13:10 (a verse in "Mormon" scripture). Speaking of a group of super-select, righteous people, Alma mentions why they were so good:

[I]t was on account of their exceeding faith and repentance, and their righteousness before God, they choosing to repent and work righteousness rather than to perish....

In other words, these people weren't select because they were better than anyone else, but because they recognized their faults and worked to remedy them.

That's very comforting, given how imperfect I am/we are.

Happiness' multiplier effect

2009-09-02T15:25:00.002-06:00

Today started wrong. My hotel lost a new shirt of mine (sent in for laundering), and I desperately needed it tuis morning for business meetings. Not only did the hotel (The Blackstone in Chicago) offer to buy me a new shirt, but it also chauffered me to a Nordstrom to get a replacement, then drove me to my meeting.

Nice.

My poor compensation was to leave a tip for the driver. I should have bought him some Garrett's popcorn.

When I got to my flight, Delta didn't have an upgrade for me, leaving me no room for my bag. The flight attendant sweetly offered to check it for planeside delivery, and then went one step further: she stowed it in a closet at the front.

This time, my payback was better. A mother and baby were squished in the window seat next to me. I *hate* window seats, because I don't like having to ask permission to go to the restroom. But I felt so happy by the way I was treated that I gave up my seat to her. (I almost certainly would do so, whatever my mental state, because mothers always deserve deference, but today I'm actually happy about it.)

I feel great. She's happy. I'm not normally the center of a domino effect of happiness. I'm usually the one to squash happiness. But today, because a hotel staff went above and beyond, my day was changed. I hope others will be happy because of me, too. Imagine that.

Coddling moms get collicky babies?

2009-09-02T06:28:00.003-06:00

Interesting article in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday confirms my worst suspicions: I am responsible for my kids' neuroses.

Well, actually, though that's likely true, the article hones in on how moms affect their babies' sleep habits:

While a mother is still pregnant, researchers can size up the likelihood that her infant will be a good sleeper by assessing the mother's beliefs about infant sleep, says a study in the latest issue of Child Development. If an expectant mom thinks babies who cry at night are suffering distress and need to be soothed and comforted, her baby is likely to have more wakeful, weepy nights later, after controlling for other factors. On the other hand, if an expectant mother believes parents must draw boundaries against getting involved with a baby at bedtime, her infant will probably sleep better, assuming other factors are equal.

The major reason is that moms' beliefs shape their behavior and feelings toward their babies, which in turn influence babies' sleep, says the study of 85 mothers and their babies by Liat Tikotzky and Avi Sadeh at Tel-Aviv University. Mothers who believed in comforting crying babies at night also tended to be more active in trying to soothe them, holding or feeding them or bringing them into their own beds. These behaviors led to poorer sleep for the babies.

On the other hand, mothers who believed in limiting their involvement were less activist at night and also had babies who awakened less.

Amen. Jen and I are fortunate to have stone-cold hearts and early on with Scout realized that we were going to go insane if we kept catering to her every whimper.

And while I need to be much more empathetic than I am, I have to say: I don't miss the sleepless nights we used to have. Our kids are pretty good sleepers. The secret? We ignore them! :-)

Not that this doesn't create other problems, like psychopathic Lily or funeral dirge Greta. But hey! At least we sleep while they wreak havoc and whine.

Such an Asay

2009-08-28T11:39:00.003-06:00

Lily may look like a younger version of Jenny (though Jen has much better hair), but when it comes to food, she's all Asay, as a conversation today proves:

Lily: Is it lunchtime?

Me: Yes.

Lily: Oh, good. I've been just waiting to be hungry.

It's hard to describe in a more concise way just what it means to be an Asay.

There is mealtime. And then there is all that time in between spent waiting for it to be mealtime again.

Lily's song of protest

2009-08-11T07:16:00.004-06:00

Lily likes to sing while she colors, but sometimes she gets the words a little bit wrong. Or maybe it's all intentional on her part.

I suspect the latter, at least this morning while she sang a LDS Primary song called "The Family Is of God". These are the actual lyrics:

God gave us families
to help us become
what He wants us to be—

This is how He shares His love,
for the family is of God.

And here are Lily's:

God gave us families
To hell what He wants
What He wants me to be.

This is how He shares His love,
for the family is of God.

Lily tends to slur together words while she's singing when she's not exactly sure of the correct words. Given that I don't think she knows what "to Hell with..." means, I'll be charitable and believe she just said something that sounds like "to Hell what he wants."

But that's the charitable view. The more likely view is that Lily cares about as much about what divinity wants from her as she does what Jen and I think. Scary. :-)

Blackmail hits the Asay home

2009-08-10T10:41:00.003-06:00

Jen discovered this note from "Doggy" (Lily's stuffed animal) addressed to Greta, threatening a severe licking of Teddy (Greta's stuffed animal) if an allowance isn't paid.

The handwriting looks suspiciously like Isaac's....

I guess money laundering and racketeering come next.

No other sport like it

2009-08-06T08:18:00.003-06:00

I played soccer (football) growing up, but it wasn't until Jen and I moved to England for my Masters that I became deeply afflicted with the sport. Something about 30,000 lunatics all screaming obscenities in unison...beautiful.

Well, last night the obscenities were in Portugese, but they were no less inspiring (?) for that. (Unfortunately, my French came in handy in understanding the fouler words used in the chants and accusations.) I went with a business partner (Infused Solutions) and a wonderful fellow Alfrescan, Michael Uzquiano, and we enjoyed watching São Paulo beat Rio-based Botafogo 3-1.

This was the crowd after the third goal:

Tão bonita!

My first road bike ride

2009-07-25T13:35:00.004-06:00

I distinctly remember a Sunday morning in Brussels, when I served there as a missionary for my church. We were driving to church in our trusty Opel (a bit like a Ford Fiesta), and came to a light just before a long tunnel.

A BMW 850 ($250,000+ car) came up next to us. I started to rev the engine (i.e., swat the mice to get them ready to run), indicating a race was on. The BMW driver seemed not to notice and, when the light changed, I got 50 yards ahead of him. My companion and I were shouting with glee, thinking we had dusted the 850.

Nope.

We suddenly saw a blur blow past us, only to disappear into the distant end of the tunnel. It must have been going 150 MPH or more.

That's how I felt this morning, riding with my brother-in-law, Ryan, on the Alpine Loop route which, from my parents' house, climbs roughly 3,000 feet over 10 miles. This was my first time ever on a road bike, but I thought my mountain biking experience would be sufficient.

Not so much.

Ryan, an experienced road biker, held back for most of the ride, but at one point I encouraged him to go ahead. And he did. Within seconds Ryan was a blur in the distance. Within 10 seconds, he was on an entirely different continent, and I was left to rue the day that Natalie had ever married him.

Well, not really. Actually, but for the fact that he made me look like a slovenly couch potato (Remember: I mountain bike or run five to six times per week - I'm in pretty good shape), it was awesome to spend that time with him.

In fact, I was enjoying it so much that I enthusiastically suggested we head up South Fork instead of peeling off to retire to my parents' house. My enthusiasm lasted roughly 15 seconds, when we began to climb again.

One-thousand feet of elevation later, with Ryan blasting out in front of me to salvage his pride against someone that dared to move past us (I was just grateful that the other rider didn't laugh at me), I knew I had been conquered utterly, thoroughly...

...and yet what a wonderful experience. I think I'm going to spend a lot more time road biking until my dad comes home from his mission, and until the next time Ryan is in town. I want to be able to keep up with him at a pace that is closer to what he's used to. It took us one hour and 10 minutes or so to make the initial Alpine Loop climb to the summit, a trip that Ryan has done in as little as 54 minutes. My goal is to do it in an hour.

Or maybe an hour and nine minutes. Best to start small. :-)

Rumsfeld's prayer

2009-07-20T14:48:00.002-06:00

Yesterday, Mike and Jackie Leavitt spoke in our ward (church). They live two blocks over and are back from their foray in Washington, D.C., where Mike served as the Secretary of Health an Human Services under President George W. Bush (and, prior to that, as Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency).

His talk was exceptional. In it he mentioned something I had never known: President Bush started every Cabinet meeting with a prayer, given by different Cabinet members. (Mike was very careful to point out that he believes prayer is not a Bush or Republican phenomenon, but that it almost certainly accompanies every administration, though perhaps some pray more than others....)

Upon request, a collection of those Cabinet prayers was compiled and sent out to each member. Mike read a few of the prayers over the pulpit.

One prayer, in particular, struck me, in part because of who offered it, and in part because of when. Three days after the horrific September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, much-maligned Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld offered up this beautiful prayer:

Ever-faithful God, in death we are reminded of the precious birthrights of life and liberty You endowed in Your American people. You have shown once again that these gifts must never be taken for granted.

We pledge to those whom You have called home, and ask of You – patience, to measure our lust for action; resolve, to strengthen our obligation to lead; wisdom, to illuminate our pursuit of justice, and; strength, in defense of liberty.

We seek Your special blessing today for those who stand as sword and shield, protecting the many from the tyranny of the few. Our enduring prayer is that You shall always guide our labors and that our battles shall always be just.

We pray this day, Heavenly Father, the prayer our nation learned at another time of righteous struggle and noble cause—America’s enduring prayer: Not that God will be on our side, but always, O Lord, that America will be on Your side.

Amen.

It's possible that Rumsfeld was lying, but I don't think so. I agree with Huckleberry Finn: you can't pray a lie.

I believe Rumsfeld did want his natural inclinations tempered; that he did want to do what was right. It's very possible that he lost his way, as all of us do as we daily strive to do what is right. He just did so on a bigger stage.

Hearing his prayer, and the others, has made me feel more empathetic toward the current Obama administration, which seems (to me) to be veering dramatically off-course but which is likely trying to do the best it can with the knowledge and resources available to it. It has also made me more forgiving for President Bush and the failings of his presidency.

It's enough for me to know that people recognize their need for help. With humility, anything is possible.

Conversations with Lily

2009-07-17T13:14:00.002-06:00

It's just a matter of time before Lily takes over.

This morning while shaving I overheard her in the room next door, playing with dolls. Here's one snippet of the conversation:

Doll 1: You know who is so funny? Jack. He never cleans up after himself.

Doll 2: Yeah, and no one ever catches him.

Sometimes I think Lily is getting better. Now I know that I simply haven't heard about all the things that she and "Jack" have been up to.

Spies like us

2009-07-16T17:34:00.002-06:00

OK, I doubt many people have followed this British soap opera, but it's quite funny. John Sawers, the new head of M16, the UK spy agency, inadvertently posted (well, his wife did) personal details of the family on Facebook. So much for secrecy.

The Spectator, in its usual style, pillories it all:

What other photos exist, which Lady Sawers has not quite got around to uploading yet? Perhaps there’s a snap of Britain’s actual chief spy pretending to shoot her with his hairbrush. In black tie, obviously. Or maybe he’s in a safari suit. Maybe he’s pretending there’s a laser that comes out of his watch....

It’s downright embarrassing, nationally speaking. It’s like the head of Nasa pretending to have a light-saber. It’s like seeing the Transport Secretary sitting on the loo in a train-driver’s hat, pulling the chain over his head, and going choo-ka-choo....

[In the past y]ou thought of the head of MI6, and you thought, this is probably a person with computer skills at his disposal that are far beyond the ken of mere IT geeks like us. You didn’t think of him as being somebody so adrift with modern technology that he doesn’t even tell his wife it might be a good idea to click the ‘private’ box on Facebook.

Dearlove was only the second top spook to be officially named, after Sir David Spedding. His successor, Sir John Scarlett, was the first to be officially photographed. A decade from now, I suppose, new heads of the British Secret Intelligence Service will have their appointments announced with jaunty Q&A interviews, in the style that once used to appear in Smash Hits! That’s progress, I suppose, and in the name of transparency, I suppose it’s all for the good. One day everybody will be on Facebook, or something like it, head of MI6 or not. The problem, now, isn’t that ‘C’ was up there. It’s that he looked like a total berk.

I really can't stop laughing.

Why I'm a Gunner

2009-07-11T10:56:00.004-06:00

I just finished reading Jason Cowley's The Last Game: Love, Death, and Football, and found my head nodding in agreement with this passage:

If the owner of a football club is wealthy enough, success can be bought; you can even buy the Premier League, as Blackburn did in 1995 and Abramovich's Chelsea have done most recently.

But it's far better, surely, to achieve consistent success without having to pay grotesquely inflated transfer fees for ready-made superstars, as Chelsea have done; to achieve success and respect, as Arsenal have under Wenger, through the discovery and nurturing of exceptional young individuals, from all over the world, and making of them, through the collective expression of the team, something remarkable, lasting and true.

Arsenal today are one of the superpowers of the European game, with 60,000 spectators at every home game and a growing worldwide fanbase. In spite of his inscrutability and reserve, and his at times baffling expressions of self-righteous indignation - his sense that Arsenal are uniquely persecuted by referees and other teams, repeatedly fouled and unfairly cheated - Arsene Wenger has effected a glorious revolution during a period when it has been said that the Premier League is not an English league any more; England simply 'hosts' the world league.

At their best his Arsenal have shown us not only how the game can and should be played - 'yes, even sometimes art' - but also how young men of different races, religions and nationalities can work together harmoniously to create a moral example and vision of the cosmopolitan good life. 'Football,' Wenger has said, 'must be about values and morals, always.'

And that is why I love Wenger, and why I love (almost to obsession at times) Arsenal.

There is an energy in a football crowd that I've not felt anywhere else: an ecstatic elation as the crowd rises to celebrate a goal. It is something profound and beautiful.

Yes, it's just a sport, but if you've been and felt it, then you know what I'm talking about. It's something more.

With Arsenal, it's much more. There have been times when the free-flowing football has actually brought me to tears.

The Japanese, in my Mitsui experience, drink to relax. I watch Arsenal.

Here's the Michael Thomas goal against Liverpool in 1989 that decided the title for Arsenal in the last minute of the game, and that ushered in the modern era of football and, in particular, Arsenal football.

Days like this I think I'm my dad

2009-07-11T07:45:00.002-06:00

Jen and I were both up early today: Jen, to run a half marathon. Me, to ride 22 miles on my mountain bike:

I was really disappointed to be passed by two road bikers, but if you've ever been on a road bike and on a mountain bike, you know that the former goes a lot faster than the latter. At least I was able to spike their tires as they passed. :-)

This is one of those times that I'm so grateful to live where I live, and why I think I may be becoming more and more like my dad every day. At mile 20 I started thinking, "Hmm, I really should run this in a few weeks when my sprained ankle is a little better."

Of course, if I were my dad, I would have already done it...on crutches.

(This is, after all, the man that tried to do the 103-mile White Rim Trail ("White Knuckle Trail"), which most people take several days to ride...in one day. I think he passed out at mile 72, fell over his handlebars, and broke his collar bone. Had they not stretchered him out, he likely would have crawled the remainder. I can't wait to see him in a few weeks in Argentina.)

Surprised by Jen

2009-07-05T17:11:00.003-06:00

Jen and I were sitting in our front room today, talking after church. As she spoke, I turned and looked at her - really looked at her.

I was surprised by what I saw.

I've long been attracted to Jen. That is, after all, one of the reasons we married.

(Having said that, though we met in junior high, I didn't really get to know Jen, and certainly didn't fall in love with her, until we wrote letters to each other for 18 months while I served a mission for our church in Belgium and France. I fell in love with Jen, the person, rather than Jen, the body/face.)

But as I turned to look at her today, I was amazed by how beautiful she has become. Maybe she's always been this pretty, and I simply didn't notice.

But I think Jen actually gets better looking every year, and today I caught her in full bloom.

Today, among many other days, I consider myself fortunate to have been smart enough to marry Jen. I think of all the different sorts of personalities with which I could have settled in, and I don't think I could have been as happy with anyone else as I am with Jen.

I'm sure Jen would clash with other personalities, just as I know that I grate on some people. But Jen and I, despite our sometime differences, really get along well. She complements me as no one else does. I hope I do the same for her. Or that I will live to earn that place.

I didn't fall in love with Jen today. I was just blessed to discover how fantastically fortunate I am, in part because of how lovely she is.

Gordon Brown's "Audacity of Hopelessness"

2009-06-24T10:14:00.002-06:00

I find that I follow UK politics more closely than US politics, perhaps because I like the political commentary in Britain so much more. For example, I found this note in The Spectator to be very funny (and true):

Labour got 15 per cent of the vote in the European elections, in which only 34 per cent of the electorate voted. That is roughly five per cent of those entitled to vote. When you add those too young to vote, this means that, on average, only one in every 25 people you pass in the street voted Labour last week. So when Mr Brown emerged triumphant from the meeting of his parliamentary party on Monday, his slogan was really ‘The Audacity of Hopelessness’.

As popular as Tony Blair was, Gordon Brown...isn't. At all. Labour has really messed up over there, and then managed to get caught in the economic crisis, as well. Double whammy.

And yet Brown continues to hope....

Lily, the secret-keeper

2009-06-20T17:12:00.005-06:00

Lily knows how to keep secrets. This is what we discussed today while I was baking a pie to eat on Father's Day:

Lily (seeing me eat some chocolate): Dad, you love chocolate, don't you?

Me: Yes, I do.

Lily: That's why we got you some chocolate for Father's Day.

Me: Who did?

Lily: Mom, Scout, Greta, and me. But it's a secret.

Me: Um, Lily, you just told me about it. It's not much of a secret anymore.

Lily: But I'm not telling you where it is!

I suspect that if Lily did, in fact, know where the chocolate is hidden, she would have opened it up to share it with me.

Not that Father's Day presents are much of a surprise. Jen told someone the other day on the phone what she was planning to get me, even though I was sitting five feet from her in the adjoining room. I guess they figure it's not worth trying to surprise me. :-)

Match of the season

2009-06-20T17:05:00.002-06:00

For the past two years I've been to the "match of the season" as rated by Sky Sports. In 2007/08 it was Tottenham vs. Chelsea at White Hart Lane, which ended 4-4, and this year the score line was the same but the teams (Liverpool and Arsenal at Anfield) were different.

It was a wonderful match to watch, made better by sharing it with Jen. This gives you just a hint of why I love football so much.

Those wild and crazy vegetarians

2009-06-19T08:57:00.001-06:00

Reading The Guardian on my flight home from Europe today, I came across this funny (bitingly so) note from Hadley Freeman, an American by birth, but Brit and vegetarian by circumstance. I think I once tried to be vegetarian. It lasted for a few days.

While one of my best friends and favorite people is vegetarian, I must admit that Freeman's description is very apt for many of the vegetarians I know:

...[T]he worst thing about being vegetarian isn't that epiphanical moment when you realise the one phrase you know in multiple languages is, "Just a green salad, please." It's other vegetarians.

When I used to say that I was vegetarian back in the 80s, the reaction I got was something akin to what I imagine Scientologists get today. Now, though, I swim limpidly in the mainstream alongside the tedious likes of Moby....One day I woke up and realised these had become my people. As if having crap hair wasn't bad enough.

Because the vegetarian bandwagon has been so thoroughly jumped by celebrities, a demographic that survives by constant self-validation, we now live in a world of high-profile vegetarian evangelism. Thus, the whole shebang...has taken on the sweaty sheen of moral superiority, bossiness, and over-simplification...and makes me want to stuff a fistful of veal in their gobs to shut them all up.

Indeed.

Unfortunately, I find that this isn't unique to vegetarians or, really, to cause-mongers of any kind. I find myself embarrassed all the time by people that share my beliefs/habits, just as I'm sure I set others' teeth grinding at my behavior or comments. (Perhaps your teeth are grinding even as you read this.)

From self-righteous Mormons to clueless conservatives, I'm surrounded by people that think like me...but don't. Not all of them, anyway. Not really.

So, my apologies to the non-bozo vegetarians out there. I'm sure you're nice in your way. I am, too, in mine. We just choose to be obnoxious in different ways. :-)

Tell the truth, or not

2009-06-15T08:09:00.001-06:00

I loved this anecdote in The Daily Mail on Sunday:

We are reminded of Bob Arum, the American boxing promoter, who once made an impassioned speech to a press conference.

'But Bob,' protested a journalist, 'yesterday you told us something completely different.' Arum never paused. 'Sure', he said. 'But yesterday I was lying.'

Nice.

Freely given, freely give

2009-06-14T14:32:00.002-06:00

Walking back to my hotel tonight after a lovely dinner with Larry Augustin and his family at Amaya in London, I was surprised by the peace of Hyde Park:

A warm feeling of happiness came over me as I realized how lucky I was to be walking there, seeing that (OK, it might have been the chocolate dessert I had, but...). I'm very, very blessed.

It actually makes me realize that I need to start being much more generous with my time, and I spent the remainder of my walk trying to figure out ways that I could use my means to enable others to live like I do.

Jen and I aren't rich, but we're comfortable. We don't spend much time thinking about starvation. (Fast Sunday doesn't last that long. :-) We worry about things like which soccer teams our kids are on, the teachers they get in school, etc. What could I/we be doing to lift others out of subsistence living such that they can more comfortably concern themselves with college rather than simply learning to read?

We give at least 10 percent to our church, but I'm thinking there must be more that we can do. I certainly know that there's more that I must do. I've been given far too much not to be more liberal in my sharing of it.

But what? I really don't know. I feel like education is probably at the heart of all the good that I've experienced: education is the gateway to faith, to professional attainment, and to personal enjoyment (Reading Dickens or Steinbeck provide incalculable happiness to me).

So maybe that's where I should begin....

I'm really not sure. But I do want to do more than fret about this. I just need to figure out how to start.

Why Kaka beats Ronaldo

2009-06-13T16:20:00.002-06:00

I loved this op-ed piece - "Some heroes still need to score on the likeability charts" - in today's Financial Times. It reminds me of why I like Cesc Fabregas so much (a footballer Jen, Scout, and I were privileged to meet, albeit briefly).

It's also one reason (There are several) I have so much respect for Kaka.

Kaka is a brilliant footballer but my main memory of him is what a nice chap he was. Strangely, being nice matters, especially for great sportsmen. It is something Cristiano Ronaldo may eventually find out.

When sports journalists reminisce about athletes they have interviewed, they never ask each other: “What did the guy say?” Instead they usually ask: “What was he like?”....

Many great footballers are nice. Their job gives them such happiness, energy and a sense of good fortune, and they are treated so well by most people they meet that they beam upon the world. A German friend of mine interviewed Lionel Messi in Barcelona and reported back that the Argentine had spoken entirely in banalities. But more importantly, said my friend: “What a sweet little man he is!” Messi appreciated that the German had made the sacrifice of trekking all the way to Barcelona. He was eager, almost desperate, to make his guest happy.

Niceness works for coaches too. Frank Rijkaard and Jose Mourinho have both won Champions Leagues, but Rijkaard is possibly the most impressive human being in football, whereas Jose Mourinho is just a great football coach. Or take Guus Hiddink: the main reason players and staff at Chelsea want him back seems to be that they liked him.

Not many seem to like Cristiano [Ronaldo].

He's making so much money, maybe he doesn't care. Some day, however, he likely will. We'll remember Kaka and Messi as players, but also as humans.

Men are so predictable

2009-06-10T22:07:00.002-06:00

I'm reading Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution Is True (Why not? It has been many years since I thought evolution was somehow inimical to my belief in God), and I loved this paragraph.

Before Darwin, sexual dimorphism was a mystery. Creationists then--as now--could not explain why a supernatural designer should produce features in one sex, and only one sex, that harm its survival. As the great explainer of life's diversity, Darwin was naturally anxious to understand how these seemingly pointless traits evolved. He finally noticed the key to their explanation: if traits differ between males and females of a species, the elaborate behaviors, structures, and ornaments are nearly always restricted to males.

I laughed out loud when I read that tonight. As much as Lily and Greta preen before the mirror, Isaac, doing his slow-motion action shots while bored at short stop or first base, makes them look tame in comparison.

Now I need to look back through old journal entries to see what bizarre behavior I acted out to attract Jen to me. I'm just glad she paid attention to the Malcolm X t-shirts. I'm sure that was the attraction. :-)

Why I'm conservative

2009-06-10T22:00:00.003-06:00

I thought this James Delingpole opinion piece in The Spectator ("The right to swear is integral to being a true conservative")is at times dead-on, and no more so than when he writes:

The reason I am a conservative is not, as my left-liberal friends’ caricature version so often has it, because I’m a closet fascist who loves making rules and bossing people around.

Quite the opposite. I’m a conservative because I believe that we are, every one of us, so magnificently special and delightful that only under the most extreme of circumstances should our most precious possession of all — liberty — be stolen from us by the overweening state.

This, when you think about it, is a much more generous response to the messy human condition than that of left-liberals. In their ugly, begrudging, bossy weltanschauung, man is so utterly incapable of doing the right thing that the only way to create a fair and just society is for a higher agency (big government) to steal half his money and spend it as it sees fit, while micromanaging his behaviour with all manner of pettifogging social regulation.

OK, for my liberal friends reading this, you may disagree with that characterization. But it's a reasonable approximation of my feelings as a conservative.

Coaches say some inane things

2009-06-09T10:59:00.002-06:00

I love this list of the ten most annoying things that football (that's soccer, mind) managers say. Here are three choice samplings:

I can't fault the lads for effort

This is another way of saying that they're rubbish. There should never be a situation in a professional game in which 'effort' is a benchmark of performance. That's what you say to your kid's team before you take them out for pizza after losing the Under-9’s Cup Final; to say it to guys earning five figures a week is absurdly patronising....

We showed character

We played absolutely rubbish, the opposition hit the woodwork five times, and then we scored a fluky injury time equaliser off a corner that shouldn’t even have been awarded.

We’ve got a great crop of youngsters coming through

The first team’s awful, the reserve and youth teams are pretty average, but there’s no money available for transfers and we need to keep the fans’ spirits up somehow.

Hilarious, and true. Actually, whatever the sport, I find most interviews with coaches and players to be mind-numbingly tedious.

For example, what was Karl Malone supposed to intelligently say about a game? He was simply trying to score baskets and prevent baskets. What more can be said?

Oh, maybe this. Good ol' Malone. :-)

Guess this means I'm old

2009-06-08T20:37:00.002-06:00

My soccer team gave me a soccer ball, a gift card, a signed card at the end of our season. I gave the gift card to my co-coach (who was somehow overlooked) because it didn't mean nearly as much to me as the messy scrawls of the boys and the thoughtful comments of the parents.

I'm old.

My grandmother is moving out of her home and into my uncle's house, and so will be selling or giving away much of her possessions. When I went over the other night, the only thing I wanted were the genealogical records and family photos. Nothing she owns could be as valuable to me as her family memories.

I'm old.

I should have known. You can't be young and have a daughter graduate from the sixth grade, as Scout did today. You can't be young and have a sprained ankle keep you hobbling for two weeks as mine has.

I really must be old. I quite like it so far. I'm still a bozo, but I'm starting to care about the right things. I guess this is what progress feels like.

Making The Economist

2009-05-28T11:32:00.002-06:00

I don't generally get excited about being quoted in news stories anymore. It's just part of my job to evangelize for my company, Alfresco.

But there are (at least) three publications that give me shivers if I see my name in them: The New York Times (hit its liberal pages in 2005 and 2009), The Wall Street Journal (made it in 2007), and The Economist (got a nod in 2008 and 2009).

Today was a "shiver" moment with this article in The Economist. The article deals with a shift in my corner of the software industry - open source - which is growing in popularity even as it decreases in its distinctiveness from traditional, proprietary software.

Ultimately, this sort of thing doesn't mean very much. I'm fairly certain my kids could not possibly care less, and Jen has to stifle a yawn when I show her the articles.

But I like to think people respect the Asay name a little more if they see it in print. And it's important it makes me proud to be giving a little back to the Asay name. Ever since we fell from grace as proprietors of the Chateau d'Azay-le-Rideau (or so my grandfather tells us) - and boy, what a fall! - I've been trying to do my part to restore Asay pride.

Now if I could only stop yelling at umpires at Isaac's baseball games, that name might go untarnished by me. :-)

My grandfather doesn't live there

2009-05-25T15:16:00.003-06:00

I drove down to Riverton to see my grandfather today. Chester Harris Asay died on June 9, 2003, and is buried 25 minutes from my house in the Camp Williams cemetery for military veterans.

As I leaned over his grave, it seemed so clear that my fun and often funny grandfather was at least a billion miles away. He wasn't lying, crumpled and crumbling in this grave. My grandfather still lives.

It's such a ridiculous thought to conceive of life simply ending because our body gives up. My grandfather's spirit certainly never did.

Some day I'll get to meet him again. I expect he'll laugh that I bothered to put flowers on his grave, though I'm sure he appreciated the gesture. He would almost certainly have preferred a little radio tuned to KSL so that he could listen to all the BYU games.

But then, I expect he has better things to do now. I'm not sure exactly what he's up to, but I know his life is far richer than sitting on a hill, overlooking a freeway. My grandfather never spent much time sitting around in life. Why would he do so in death?

We don't know our strength until we resist

2009-05-20T13:00:00.003-06:00

Jen shared this C.S. Lewis quote with me (comes from Mere Christianity) the other night...amazing.

A silly idea is current that good people don’t know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives into temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is the only man who knows to the full what temptation means—the only complete realist.

Powerful, no?

Unfortunately, we often judge people based on the errors to which we see them capitulate, having little idea of what they have withstood. Regardless, I believe God's interest in us pertains to the future, not the past. God doesn't fetish our failures - He looks to our potential (John 8).

I just need to exemplify this same charity in my own life.

Jen and Matt finally have a great honeymoon

2009-05-13T06:18:00.002-06:00

People either report bliss or hell the first year of their marriage. We had the latter, and I'll take the blame.

Unfortunately, the sparks of that unpleasant first year started on our honeymoon, which proved to be more vinegar than honey. Fourteen years later, however, I'm so grateful we didn't give up. I can't imagine being happier.

And so, I'm very grateful that we were able to take a trip to Europe together in April, largely thanks to wonderful family (starring my mother-in-law, Kathy), who assumed the burden of our children for a week, resulting in this lovely time in Barcelona, Liverpool, London, Brussels, and Paris:

What a beautiful woman. And what a perfect week.

The true meaning of Christmas (according to Dumb Bunnies)

2009-05-11T21:37:00.005-06:00

I've long wanted to post these two pages from a Dumb Bunnies book that we have. I've read it with the kids a hundred times, but I laugh every time I read this page. I think the comic timing is nearly perfect:

If you haven't read any Dumb Bunnies books, I suggest you try the Dumb Bunnies' Easter. Enjoy.

Piglet and swine flu

2009-05-06T13:15:00.002-06:00

I thought this was very funny.

Of rights and responsibilities (and lazy fat slobs)

2009-05-06T11:06:00.003-06:00

Today, the European Union Telecoms commissioner declared Internet access a "fundamental right." What a load of rubbish.

Unfortunately, it's worse than rubbish: it's dangerous, as I write on my CNET blog. The early rights that the authors of the U.S. Constitution mostly required government to keep out of the lives of citizens. These new rights (including the "right" to healthcare) mostly have government invading (through taxes and other means) our lives.

I'm not a right-wing crazy, but this is...inane.

So it was with much joy that I read "There is no sacred right to be a lazy fat slob" in The Spectator. What a glorious publication.

Here are a few choice morsels:

Alas! Billboard culture has already doomed us to failure. And when all our impossible, airbrushed aspirations come to naught we look glumly down at our bellies and feel depressed at being imprisoned within such well-padded cells. The result: we have a Mars bar to make ourselves feel better. And so the cycle continues.

The leading exponent of this sort of guff is Susie Orbach, the veteran writer and psychologist who has been arguing since the publication of her 1978 book Fat is a Feminist Issue that ‘for most people the problem is not their fat intake or their actual size, but the torment associated with fat in their minds’.

I’m sorry, but this is just fatheaded. The problem isn’t the mental torment caused by seeing airbrushed billboard images of David and Victoria Beckham showing off their beautiful bodies in matching Armani pants. The problem for most ordinary people really is their fat intake and actual size....

Almost everything about modern life inclines us towards fatness. We are sedentary workers, sugar junkies and motorised transport addicts. We disdain manual labour. Our national dish — whether it’s fish and chips or chicken tikka masala — is takeaway. We have neglected physical exercise in our schools and instead successfully indoctrinated in our children the supreme right of the individual, by which it’s okay to be anything you want, even if that thing is a lazy fat slob....

It bothers me that I pay the same national insurance contributions as folk who waddle around all fat and clumsy when I am statistically far less likely to hospitalise myself through my love of cakes. It gets right on my man-boobs that we would rather blame big corporations for selling us airbrushed images of perfection than blame ourselves for failing to exercise restraint when the cheese trolley comes round.

None of which is intended to be a slam on the overweight, at least, I don't intend it as such. My problem is with our entitlement culture. I have a "right" to eat whatever I want...but also to have all the risks associated with that right.

At some point, my "rights" impinge on others, because through government we end up paying for others weight-gain, neuroses, etc. I'm OK with this up to a point, but I sure would prefer to give to others through charity, rather than through compulsion.

Lily has "issues"

2009-05-05T12:21:00.003-06:00

I was eating lunch with Lily today and she said,

"Dad, I need a paper towel because I've got issues."

I knew that, and Jen knew that, but it's nice to see such self-awareness at such a young age.

All my friends wear the low riders

2009-05-04T15:48:00.003-06:00

It's official. I'm cool.

Well, actually, I'm not cool, but as of Saturday Jen ensured that my jeans are cool. (She couldn't get the genes to become cool, so she went for the body-wear instead.)

That's right: I've got low-riders.

Jen said my jeans before looked like this:

I always thought I looked OK, but now, well, now I have cool jeans.

For years I've wondered why people couldn't find jeans that fit them/covered their underwear. Now I know: it's not intentional, that's just how cool jeans fit.

Yes, there are laws against such jeans, and I'm told there are some low-rider jeans that go even lower, but I'm content with the level of low-riders that I have now...so long as I pull my t-shirt down repeatedly throughout the day to maintain my modesty.

You may laugh at how I look, but what do you know? You're probably not even cool. :-)

(P.S. Much as I'm trying to make fun of these jeans, I actually think Jen is right: they're better than my old grandpa jeans that I wore for years. I'm just grateful she married me despite my uncoolness.)

Scout: Hyping swine flu

2009-05-01T08:22:00.004-06:00

A concerned parent of one of Scout's sixth-grade friends just knocked on our door. Here's a transcript of the conversation:

Parent: Matt, I just wanted to stop by because I'm concerned. My daughter just talked with Scout, and Scout says you guys have swine flu, and while I'm not very worried [Actually, she was very worried] about the kids, I'm worried about exposure to my 90-year old parents.

Me: We don't have swine flu or anything remotely resembling swine flu.

Parent: Oh, well, Scout said something about your girls being sick...

Me: Lily has an ear infection. I don't think that's contagious. Greta has a cold.

Parent: ...and that Greta was staying with a sick friend who just got back from Mexico...

Me: Um, no. She stayed at a friend's house that will be going to Mexico in four weeks. I don't think she's caught swine flu in anticipation of crossing the border.

Parent: Oh, well, that sounds like a case of miscommunication.

Me: You could say that.

Scout has been on a crusade to disabuse the world of its infatuation with fear of swine flu, but bragging to the world that we are plagued with it probably isn't the right way to go about that.

I will be having a talk with her when she gets home from school...if she hasn't put the school on red alert for swine flu pandemic by then.

Delicious passages from Coraline

2009-04-30T21:01:00.005-06:00

I just finished Coraline on the flight back from Chicago today. Though the author, Neil Gaiman, thinks it his best book, he's wrong. The Graveyard Book is much, much better: clever, thoughtful, and born of a hugely interesting premise (a boy raised by ghosts in a graveyard).

Even so, I loved this passage from Coraline, which has Coraline negotiating the release of her parents with the "other mother," a monster in mother's clothing that occasionally forgets to keep her ghoulishness in check:

"How do I know you'll keep your word?" asked Coraline.

"I swear it," said the other mother. "I swear it on my own mother's grave."

"Does she have a grave?" asked Coraline.

"Oh yes," said the other mother. "I put her in there myself. And when I found her trying to crawl out, I put her back."

But it's not just the grim "other mother" that I found intriguing in the book. I also liked this lesson in what life is about, when this "other world" attempts to convince Coraline to stay rather than return to her less-than-perfect family/life:

Stay here with us," said the voice from the figure at the end of the room. "We will listen to you and play with you and laugh with you. Your other mother will build whole worlds for you to explore, and tear them down every night when you are done. Every day will be better and brighter than the one that went before. Remember the toy box? How much better would a world be built just like that, and all for you?"

"And will there be gray, wet days where I just don't know what to do and there's nothing to read or to watch and nowhere to go and he day drags on forever?" asked Coraline.

From the shadows, the man said, "Never."

"And will there be awful meals, with food made from recipes, with garlic and tarragon and broad beans in?" asked Coraline.

"Every meal will be a thing of joy," whispered the voice from under the old man's hat. "Nothing will pass your lips that does not entirely delight you."

"And could I have Day-Glo green gloves to wear, and yellow Wellington boots in the shape of frogs?" asked Coraline.

"Frogs, ducks, rhinos, octopuses -- whatever you desire. The world will be built new for you every morning. If you stay here, you can have whatever you want."

Coraline sighed. "You really don't understand, do you?" she said. "I don't want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted? Just like that, and it didn't mean anything? What then?"

Indeed, what then? Life isn't meant to be easy or always happy. It's a bit like (OK, not much, but bear with me) eating Giordano's pizza. Jen and I went to Pizzeria Uno the first night in Chicago so that having Giordano's the second night would be all the sweeter.

Or something like that.

Proof that Lily is real woman

2009-04-29T07:21:00.002-06:00

Jen bought Lily some new jeans last week. Today I was working when I heard Lily behind me, grunting and snarling that she "can't get these stupid jeans on!" I turned and watched her struggle to get her chubby little legs into the needle-thin legs of the jeans, straining and grimacing with every move.

"Why don't you just wear some jeans that fit?" I finally ventured.

Immediately her countenance changed to a happy smile and she said, "No, Daddy. I love these jeans. They fit."

"Fit" is a relative term with girls, I guess....

Asking the right questions

2009-04-26T16:44:00.004-06:00

While visiting Gaudi's Sagrada Familia in Barcelona recently with Jen, I was reminded of how much I love great questions. In particular, I find that the scriptures that mean most to me, and have had the greatest impact on my life, are those that ask deep, probing question.

In this case, Gaudi called out Pilate's haunting question, "What is truth," made such by the bitterly ironic fact that he was likely staring at Truth even as he asked the question.

Another question that guides my life is that asked by Christ's apostles when He suggested one of them would betray Him (Matthew 26:22). Rather than point fingers, as we're wont to do, they asked,

"Lord, is it I?"

We're always well-served by looking inward for fault before we assign it to others.

Another question that I love is found in both the Book of Mormon (Alma 32:5) and in the New Testament (Acts 2:37), and comes in response to people feeling "pricked in their heart" by the spirit of truth. In both places earnest people ask,

"What shall we do?"

This question, like the first, is a mark of humility; a willingness to not only to listen, but to do. It's a reminder to me that faith without works is dead, with faithful works meaning much more than going to church and such. It's a question that should lead us to be our best selves in every situation.

Of course, often we're stymied in our quest to know what to do because we lack the right influences, which is why I love the question the Ethiopian asks Philip in Acts 8:31 when Philip queries whether he understands the writings of Isaiah:

"How can I, except some man should guide me?"

This question helps me to remember that I have a duty as a steward of so many good things, whether in religious, business, family, or other affairs. "No man is an island, entire of himself," wrote John Donne, and the same is true for each of us. We have a responsibility to care for others - to remember to "guide" others, in whatever fields our particular talents qualify us to guide others.

There are other scriptural questions that guide me ("Can you feel so now?" "Have you sufficiently retained in remembrance the captivity of your fathers?" etc.), but these three have a material impact on me every day.

Eyewitness accounts suggest 'This boy has got game'

2009-04-23T13:13:00.003-06:00

Jen and I are still in Europe (Brussels), which made Mom Minster's play-by-play account of Isaac's first game of the season so awesome:

It wasn't just the black baseball shirt with the #6 and the name 'Asay' printed on the back and the matching baseball hat that made him the 'cool dude', although he looked like a little jock stuttin' out on that field.

It wasn't just the new black baseball cleats with the white stripes on the side that he picked out himself with the cool new black and white batting gloves sticking out of the back pockets of his baseball pants just like the professionals do that made him a 'cool dude.'

Those things were 'cool'. But the coolest thing was knowing that he was the hero of the game, responsible for 4 of the six runs with his high fly to left field while the bases were loaded and winning the game 6 to 4!! The spectators weren't too surprised however, because his first hit was a line drive between first and second base that proved to be a double for him, running like greased lightning to second base. And his handiwork as the first baseman was pretty terrific too!

Who was this 'cool dude'?

Why, ISAAC ASAY, of course!

What a great summary of the game! Jen and I wanted so much to be there, but doubly so now that I've read Mom Minster's report.

His coach's report was also nice:

[Isaac] hit 2 great hits, a double and a triple; I think Isaac had 5 RBI out of 6 runs we scored. We won 6 to 4. He was our
top hitter for our first game which is why we had him hitting 4th, cleanup, in our line up and he did a great job on first base....

He is a great kid, everyone on the team really likes him and he tries very hard to do all our different drills. He will make great progress this year.

He's right: Isaac really is a great kid.

California: A country unto itself

2009-04-22T06:35:00.003-06:00

I have long thought that Californians live on a different planet. The Brits, however, simply believe that it resides in a different country than the United States, as a recent trip to Marks and Spencer in Liverpool suggests:

There's American...and then there's Californian.

Scholesian integrity

2009-04-22T06:24:00.004-06:00

Paul Scholes has spent nearly 23 years with Manchester United, where he has been one of the world's most admired midfielders. He is a fantastic player and competitor, the sort of person you want on your team, not your opponent's.

Yet in all the years he has played with United, Sir Alex Ferguson, United's coach, tells The Times that he has never had a single approach for Scholes. This is mind-blowing given how frequently other players are linked with the Real Madrids and AC Milans of the world.

Ferguson, however, suggests that it's all down to integrity:

Funnily enough, we have never had one inquiry for Paul Scholes and you know why? Because they all know he would never leave. He has maybe had private approaches, people begging him to join them. They all know he wouldn't want to leave here, but he could have played in any league in Europe, no problem.

What a testament to Scholes' commitment! Here's a guy who could command a massive salary hike elsewhere, but he continues to devote himself to his first club; his first love.

I think there's a lesson in this. Often we chase the "greener grass" elsewhere while overlooking the chance to tend and improve the plot right in front of us. I'm not suggesting that ambition is wrong: I consider myself a highly ambitious person.

But there's a difference between ambition and a certain skittish inability to commit long-term to someone or something.

I suppose we must put our talents where they're most likely to grow: that's what we're supposed to be doing with our lives, after all. Sometimes this will necessitate moving on to another company, another neighborhood, etc.

But just as often, if not more so, it suggests that we need to invest more of ourselves in the ward, job, neighborhood, etc. that we already have. It's hard to come to any other conclusion after reading Jacob 5, and reflecting on God's long-term commitment to us. (Heaven knows I have never done much to warrant that commitment.)

I'm going to be a bit more like Scholes today. Well, minus the blatant handball in last year's European Supercup. But I think that one was because he thought it was the world volleyball tournament against Zenit St. Petersburg. :-)

The big lie

2009-04-14T08:19:00.004-06:00

Reading my scriptures this morning, I was struck by this verse in Genesis:

God doth know that in the day ye eat [of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil] thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

It's a subtle lie, but it's a lie all the same. To be as God isn't simply to know right from wrong: it's to choose to do right.

Sometimes we think experience alone is worthwhile. It's not, or at least, not as worthwhile as we think. Experience that leads to wisdom (i.e., applied knowledge) is good. But just getting battered by knowledge of the all the bad this world has to offer does nothing positive, and certainly isn't God-like.

It's one reason I have little patience for those that argue that movies should reflect "real life," and the more of it, the better. This argument seems to assume that watching people hauled off in bodybags is somehow helpful. It's not, or not necessarily so.

Knowledge of the bad without an impetus to do good, and without actually doing that good, is hollow. Knowledge isn't an end in itself. It's a guide to an end, which is correct action, which generally will involve service to others.

Only in France

2009-04-09T13:42:00.005-06:00

Having spent two years serving the French (and Belgian) people, I have a great deal of love and respect for my francophone neighbors across the Atlantic.

Even so, I find headlines like this (from The New York Times) a bit bizarre, if accurate:

Mes amis francais, PLEASE don't make fools of yourselves by holding up your economy in the interest of absolute liberte (to do whatever), egalite (to make everyone poor together), and (forget) fraternite.

Your boss is not the problem. Not most of the time, anyway. Life is just difficult, and you have to muddle and struggle through. You can do it. But the fact that you feel secure treating people like dirt - kidnapping isn't one of those wonderful virtues for which people like to be known - indicates that you need to loosen the safety net holding up your employment (and helping to hold down your economy).

Kidnapping should be a firing offense. Really.

Mercy and its dividends

2009-04-09T12:00:00.003-06:00

I just finished Charles Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby, and absolutely loved it. As I neared the end, I was impressed by this comment from the inestimable Charles Cheeryble [for those who read Dickens, you can tell from the name that Cheeryble is a Good Guy]:

'I am no angel, Heaven knows,' returned brother Charles, shaking his head, 'but an erring and imperfect man; nevertheless, there is one quality which all men have, in common with the angels, blessed opportunities of exercising, if they will; mercy.'

What a profound thought. Most of us don't have a lot of money to spare these days, but we have an overabundance of opportunities to dispense mercy, even if it sometimes feels like we can only muster rations.

We have more than that. And the great thing about mercy is that it pays amazing dividends.

The wisdom of Gandalf

2009-04-06T14:49:00.003-06:00

Isaac and I are in the middle of Tolkien's The Return of the King right now, and came across this passage that I had forgotten, wherein Gandalf counsels Aragorn and the other opposition leaders as they considered the last great war with Sauron:

Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.

It's a bit like Christ's injunction to his disciples:

Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

There's no need to spend time fretting about problems in the distant future: we have more than enough with which to deal today.

It's also a bit like the LDS apostle Dieter Uchtdorf's request that we "lift where we stand," rather than seeking out challenges and honors far afield.

Ever since Jen and I moved away from Canterbury, England, I've wanted to go back to a small city where there's a lot of work to be done in my church and neighborhood. Unfortunately, my sight keeps getting blocked by all these !?%!@&!! needy people nearby, including myself. :-)

At present I don't need to go to Latin America to help people find jobs - there's no shortage of joblessness here. To find a ward/church in need of people willing to lift up others in their distress, I could go to France or somewhere far, but every week I discover people all around me that could use my help.

And so on. There's more than enough service to be done, wherever we may live. What's lacking is not opportunity, but desire. I'm working on my desire to serve. Too often the desire to find "big" challenges far away is precisely an attempt to avoid the big challenges nearby: it's sloth disguised as ambition.

Skiing with the open source crowd

2009-04-02T17:41:00.001-06:00

I had a great time skiing with some industry friends last week at Alta and Snowbird. I figured I'd share:

Open Source Goat Rodeo 2009.