Category: Goolsbee News

Track Meet.

Nick on Track

I took the afternoon off work today to travel up to Mount Vernon to watch Nick run at a track meet. He ran the 7th grade boys 1600 meters (roughly equivalent to a mile, about 19 feet short of one in fact). He made a time of just over seven minutes, which beat his last time by forty-eight seconds. He was in a very fast crowd though, and finished fifth. The first place kid literally almost lapped the field… he was VERY fast.

I told Nicholas that all that hair is obviously slowing him down… it is like strapping on a parachute. 😉

Nick also threw the discus, with his best throw just under 50′.

I could walk, ice skate, or ski 1600 meters no problem, but if you pressed me into running it I’d likely fall over dead. I hate running.

ski trip

a rest stop 1/3rd the way down Blackcomb Mountain

A few weeks ago we spent a long weekend up at Whistler, BC. It was Nick’s Spring Break, which happens too late in the year for us to visit my parents in Colorado (their snow is usually bad, or gone by then.) This year one of Sue’s law practice clients traded her some time in a condo in Whistler as partial payment, so we took advantage of it. The snow was fantastic, and we had three sunny days of skiing, and one very cloudy one. Nick & I skied together for two days… Sue’s back gave her trouble so she could not ski as much.

If you are a skier, and have never been to Whistler, make a point to do so before too long. After the 2010 winter Olympics the secret will be out and it will likely be too expensive, and too crowded.

The two mountains there are truly HUGE. The runs are all phenomenally long. The really long runs in the Rockies are merely “average” here. I’ve never skied on the east coast but the runs there must be mere hops compared to the leg-busting monsters on Whistler & Blackcomb. This photo was taken about 1/3rd the way down the far run on Blackcomb’s “skier’s right”… meaning Blackcomb Glacier, and down to the top of the Gondola.

Here is a trail map for reference

From the top of the Showcase T bar, you climb up to the entrance of the Blackcomb Glacier, then traverse out onto the steep upper slopes, and down the bowl to this spot. That alone would rate an awesome run anywhere in the world. The day that Nick & I went down and I shot this photo above it had snowed about a foot of powder on the glacier. Visibility was poor, but the snow was awesome. By the time we reached this point my thighs were on fire and I needed to lie down and rest. Nick, being 13 years old was ready for more! Ah to be young! After the rest, we then ran for what seemed like miles down the cruiser run that leads to the top of the gondola. I swear this lower part was as long, or longer than Vail’s longest front-side run, Riva Ridge. We could have continued down to the village, but instead opted to download on the Gondola. It was our last run and we were pretty worn out. “Spring Conditions” ruled on the lower mountain, which means that it was slick and hard since the snow had gone through countless freeze/thaw cycles and who knows how much rain for good measure! The day before I had skied the “Peak to Creek” route on Whistler… in 25 minutes… so I don’t think I could have done the Glacier to Village run at Blackcomb and survived.

You can see all the pics from the trip here.

It was a fun few days, with the only real bad thing being Sue’s sore back and Nick having his rental skis mistakenly “stolen” the last day at lunch. He and I came out of the Roundhouse on Whistler and his skis were missing. We searched everywhere for them and finally found a nearly identical pair one row closer to the building than where he left his. When he tried them on they were just a hair too short, so we know that whoever took his was releasing out of the bindings all the way down! We ended up downloading instead… very bummed out. The rental shop was very cool about the whole situation thankfully.

The drive home was interesting, as they are tearing up all of highway 99 to get ready for the Olympics. They have a real challenge to get that road done before 2010! I miss the old 2-lane harrowing cliff-side road up Howe Sound’s stunning fjiord. Hard to see a challenging road fall to the inevitable “progress” of safety and ease of travel. Sigh.

blast from the past

What house is this?

I was looking for a VERY old bit of software in order to open some very old files over the weekend, and I stumbled upon a CD-ROM that was an image of a 120mb hard drive out of my Mac IIsi… which I haven’t seen since 1994 or so. Back in 1994 or so I worked for a Fortune 500 company (IIRC it was #50 on the list that year.) I actually worked for a department of a division of that company… but anyway we had big budgets to spend on IT gear, and I was the IT guy. One of the things we had was a CD-ROM burner, which back then was a very exotic “bit of kit”, at the Brits say. We archived our work on CD-ROM and so we bought a burner. Thirteen years ago CD-ROM burners cost about $20,000 and blank discs were around $20 a pop. I remember being thrilled when we were able to buy them in bulk for $17 a disc. Well, I’m happy to say that unlike today’s CHEAP CD-ROM burners and media, the high-dollar Kodak burned media lasted the thirteen years quite well! I have a complete and readable copy of a hard drive from that old Mac IIsi. So I started looking around that old data, and I figured I would share some.

First off, is that photo above. I’m the guy on the right in case you didn’t recognize me. 😉
The real question for you pop-culture mavens out there is: can you name the location? If you are of a certain age, it should be plainly obvious. Everyone in that shot is 30-something then, and is 40-something now, so think back to our teen years and take your guess in the comments section.

I also found some old emails. Some humor is timeless, and here’s an email joke from the past. If you are offended by clinical terms to describe anatomy, stop reading and grow up! If you are a geek of a certain sort, have a look at the ASCII context surrounding the message body and unearth the hidden contextual nuggets. Feel free to quiz me about them in the comments. Don’t worry about the revealed email address… Robert Hess is quite dead, so he’s unlikely to get any spam due to my posting this. I was one of Robert’s beta testers for his wonderful AppleShare admin tool “Shaman” or as it was later known “Sharing Stone”. Robert was a uniquely funny guy, but I doubt this joke originated with him. He and I were very different people, but I enjoy having friends who are very different from me. I really enjoyed the emails we exchanged… both as dev/tester, and as journalist/unnamed source. 😉 There are a group of us that gather every year at Macworld Expo… the roster changes slightly every year. Robert & I always met up for lunch the first day… usually made entertaining by a wild ride in his car. It was shocking when he died so suddenly… at least not in a fiery car crash. Anyway… here is a blast from the past:


Item 6557845 17-June-94 17:10
From: ROBERT_HESS@MACWEEK.ZIFF.COM@INTERNET#
To: KUECHLE1  Kuechle, Scott
X0357  Microspot, World HQ,GB,IDV
CDA0858  Laser Expressions, N Soltz,PAS
EL.GRANDE  -> DAVE.WINER UserLand SW, David Winer,PAS
JMPDUDE  Puckett, Mike
THEBONMARCHE  The Bon Marche, C Goolsbee,APD
SEIWA.PUBLSH  Seiwa Computing Sys,JHAlexander,PAS
SANTORINI  Santorini Consulting & Design,PRT
SLIPSTREAM  Slipstream Solution, A J Alt,PAS

INTERNET# Document Id: 199406171609.AA13005@ncrpda.curtin.edu.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sub: Why The Internet Is Like A

---- Internet E-mail Header ----
From: "Robert Hess" - robert_hess@macweek.ziff.com
Message-Id: 199406171609.AA13005@ncrpda.curtin.edu.au
Sender: shaman@ncrpda.curtin.edu.au
Precedence: bulk
X-Listserver-Version: 6.0 -- UNIX ListServer by Anastasios Kotsikonas
Reply-To: robert_hess@macweek.ziff.com
Errors-To: robert_hess@macweek.ziff.com
Originator: shaman
To: Multiple recipients of list - shaman @ncrpda.curtin.edu.au

Mail*Link(r) SMTP Why The Internet Is Like A Penis
It can be up or down. It's more fun when it's up, but it makes it hard to get any real work done.
In the long-distant past, its only purpose was to transmit information considered vital to the survival of the species. Some people still think that's the only thing it should be used for, but most folks today use it for fun most of the time.
It has no conscience and no memory. Left to its own devices, it will just do the same damn dumb things it did before.
It provides a way to interact with other people. Some people take this interaction very seriously, others treat it as a lark. Sometimes it's hard to tell what kind of person you're dealing with until it's too late.
If you don't apply the appropriate protective measures, it can spread viruses.
It has no brain of its own. Instead, it uses yours. If you use it too much, you'll find it becomes more and more difficult to think coherently.
We attach an importance to it that is far greater than its actual size and influence warrant.
If you're not careful what you do with it, it can get you in big trouble.
It has its own agenda. Somehow, no matter how good your intentions, it will warp your behavior. Later you may ask yourself "why on earth did I do that?"
Some folks have it, some don't.
Those who have it would be devastated if it were ever cut off. They think that those who don't have it are somehow inferior. They think it gives them power. They are wrong.
Those who don't have it may agree that it's a nifty toy, but think it's not worth the fuss that those who do have it make about it. Still, many of those who don't have it would like to try it.
Once you've started playing with it, it's hard to stop. Some people would just play with it all day if they didn't have work to do.

R.I.P. Robert.

How I spent my Sunday

If you recall, last December we had a huge windstorm that felled a 103′ tall Douglas Fir tree in our back yard. This happened literally days after we finished the cleanup from the big snow storm a few weeks before. That storm had most of our trees breaking branches off and falling (due to the weight of the snow) and we hired a landscaper to come saw them up and put them into a huge pile. We tried to do it ourselves but it was just too much work and we are short on time and the tools required.

The tree was another matter. My friend and coworker Shawn Hammer came and sawed up the tree into manageable chunks a couple of months ago. The remaining work is to just split and stack it to dry for use as firewood (for next time we lose electricity for a week!) I can do this job myself. But unlike other jobs, where it was important for issues of safety or whatnot to get it done swiftly, this job can be done at a leisurely pace.

An odd fact about me is that I don’t really like power tools. I’m not a luddite by any stretch of the imagination, I just don’t really mind using hand tools for a task like this. I was thinking about this while I was splitting these very heavy logs with an axe, a splitting wedge, and a 5lb short sledge hammer; we invented power tools to make human effort scale to meet commercial need. Power tools enabled us to get things done more efficiently. In this case, efficiency would be a luxury, not a NEED. I don’t have to have this wood split and stacked anytime soon. It could literally wait forever. My family might not want to have this stuff littering our yard, but in reality there is no pressing need to get it done. So why haul in some gas-powered splitter or something? The physical act of using hand tools to do the job is so much more engaging for me mentally. Looking at the wood grain, and knots and finding the just right spot to place the wedge. That moment of Zen-like calm as I relax, adjust the grip on the handle of the Collins Axe as it dangles behind my back… concentrating on the spot of wood that I wish to strike, before snapping it through the arc and (hopefully) through the log just right. The rhythm of the hammer on the wedge, and the tell-tale changes in pitch as it digs deeper into the wood, and then changes again as the pressure releases and the splitting starts. You cannot get this sort of VARIABLE connection to a task when just feeding a machine. The rhythms of feeding machinery can be theraputic, but it isn’t quite the same as doing the work by hand.

So I wandered out after breakfast and spent the better part of the day splitting wood. After I started I thought it would be fun to capture it in a timelapse; so I went and set up my laptop and iSight camera on the deck and fired up iStopMotion and got what you see above. That is about four and a half hours of work, condensed into a few seconds. Sorry about the out of focus-ness about it, but the iSight is obviously not really meant to be a long-range lens! My duct tape “tripod” also failed me, as you can see the camera shifted over time.

You can see the logs vanishing from the lower right and the pile of split wood growing in the upper right as the day goes on. Each log segment would yield about eight bits of firewood after splitting. I vanish about a third of the way in for a while… off to the barn to sharpen the splitting wedge (with a Dremel tool… see I’m not completely averse to power tools!) I’m also joined by Nick & Sue later in the day, and eventually they convince me to stop and go inside (but not until I split two more logs!) Sue brought me some iced tea at one point, and she runs the mower for a while too. Nick helps collect and stack the wood for me. The dogs just wander around being useless… and occasionally steal bits of wood to chew on. Christopher is no doubt very happy to be six-thousand miles away right now, or he’d be helping me too!

I managed to get over half of it done, so maybe next weekend I can wrap it up. Then we’ll have to stack the big pile.

The camera is pointing SW.

You would think that I’d be really sore, but I’m not. We’ll see what tomorrow brings! It helps that I’m ambidextrous (another little known fact about me: I can do just about everything with either hand. I write right-handed, as for some reason when I write left-handed I write backwards. The handwriting looks pretty much identical, but just backwards. I can draw, paint, play sports, swing a hammer or use other hand tools, operate a mouse, etc with either hand just fine. I usually go months at a time using the mouse with one hand or another… then suddenly switch. Lately I’ve been mousing lefty.) For me there is a sort of mental switch of gears when I change hands… it is really an adjustment to how I SEE things more than concentrating on my arms and hands. This allows me to work longer at things like swinging a hammer as I can just swap hands if I get tired. I never told my dad that when I was a teenager though. Funny how that works. 😉

Love notes from my Alma Mater

Little known fact about me: I graduated from Texas Tech University in 1985.

I attended Tech specifically to study under a professor by the name of Frank Cheatham. Frank taught Design in a method that can only be described as “brutally efficient.” I have a lot of respect for Frank. He was a VERY difficult (but excellent) man to learn from, as he demanded that students *think*, and develop the conceptual skills required, not just the technical ones that are taught in most design programs. Frank had a strong will and ironically those that RESISTED him actually did better in the long run. I was one of those resistors. If you were weak willed, you would basically just do what he implied and your work reflected “Frank” rather than “you.” This meant that you would be unready to stand alone in an intellectual and conceptual way in an industry that was based entirely on intellectual concepts Your ability to promote and defend your ideas became your measure of success.

I argued with Frank a LOT. But it served me well. To illustrate his “brutality” the best example is just number of students. I started the program with approximately 95 other aspiring students, FOUR of us graduated. I’m sure every student experienced the “you should change your major” speech from Frank Cheatham. When it came it felt like a devastating attack on your core values, but in reality it was a challenge for you to defend them. Google tells me that Frank Cheatham died in 2003.

Anyway, I enjoyed my time at Texas Tech, but I do not have any particular fondness for the institution itself. It was merely the broker between myself and the source of my *actual* education, which came from Frank and other faculty there, such as James D. Howze. I met some great peers there too, and still stay in touch with a few other Tech alumni from time to time*… but I have no real affiliation/affection for Texas Tech, or Lubbock. It was just a place I spent four years, got an education, and left.

Texas Tech does have some Ninja-elite Alumni finders though, because they never fail to track me down… no matter where I move. It isn’t like I let them know when I move. I have never sent them a dime, at least after my last semester there in 1985! But they track me down and send me newsletters, credit card offers, invitations to football games, etc. They even found me when I was in the UK!

They’re a 2nd tier University, with a serious inferiority complex, driven by history and location. Every state has one of those, such as the cow college here in my home state. They just try harder because of it. Of course in some situations effort will never get you to rise above your true limitations. Like black roots on a bad hair dye job, the reality peeks out around the shiny polish applied over everything.

I received a communication from the Texas Tech Alumni today… an email newsletter. In it, was this verbatim series of headlines:

CNN Spotlights Recovery Program
Business School Ranked 3rd in Big 12
Meat Evaluation Team Wins National Title
Experience Gourmet in Lubbock

Sigh. What can I say?

* If you were in my class in Design Communications, or shared space in the first floor, short wing of Clement Hall between 82 and 85 let me know!

Happy Birthday Christopher!

Today is Christopher’s 17th birthday. It is the first time he has been away from home on this day of the year. He’s 10,000 kilometers (6000+ miles) away. We’re going to call him later tonight.

I thought I’d share some photos of him over the years, in context of the usual subjects here on my website. The above photo was him in 4th grade, heading off to school in Wanborough, Wilts. Behind him is our trusty Volvo 440TD, a nice little Diesel car we owned in the UK.

Below are a bunch of photos taken on various rallies (some you have seen before), with Chris doing his usual stellar job of TSD Navigator. He’s REALLY good at it.

I miss you Chris!


Above: on the Deception Pass Bridge during the Tulip Rallye.


Above: Seattle Jag Club “Fall Colors Tour”


Above two: on the annual Poppy Rally in British Columbia. Due to weather issues, we took the Jetta!


Above: Seattle Jag Club’s Mt. Rainier Drive


Above two: The fateful 2004 Run To The Gorge

Wil Wheaton’s Geek in Review: WILLIAM FUCKING SHATNER

Wil Wheaton’s Geek in Review: WILLIAM FUCKING SHATNER, Part I
Wil Wheaton’s Geek in Review: WILLIAM FUCKING SHATNER, Part II

Ok, so I have this William Shatner story that I have to tell. If anyone knows Mr. Wheaton (or even has a TypeKey account so they can comment on his blog) and can pass along the URL, maybe he’ll get a chuckle out of it.

The scene is New York City, in the autumn of 1988. I had recently married Sue (9/9/88…. guess who picked that hard-to-forget date?), and my parents lived in NYC at the time. My dad was transferred there for work on a two year assignment and they decided to “live like tourists” for those two years and experience NYC to the fullest. Sue & I flew out from Seattle and stayed with them for about 4 or 5 days. Mom & Dad had met Sue just once, very briefly before we for all practical purposes, eloped, so this was a more formal “get to know Chuck’s new wife” visit. We too were swept up in the “Goolsbee’s Do Manhattan” theme. Sue had never been in NYC, so she was awestruck by it all. The whole time she was playing up her whole country girl persona and asking when we would see a celebrity. None were to be found. My parents took us and my little sister (who was in high school at the time) to a Broadway play. “Phantom Of The Opera” (I found it to be rather lame and overdone… but I guess all my years of art school ruined me for appreciating simple melodrama.)

So Sue & I were sitting in our seats, waiting for the show to start. My parents and sister were sitting in the row in front of us, a little to our left. Our seats were perfect (too bad the play sucked) right in the middle of this huge slice of parabola that was this very nice theater. Sue is chatting with my sister diagonally in front of her as I’m just sort of scanning around at the architecture. My eye catches sight of … you guessed it “WILLIAM FUCKING SHATNER” edging down our direction from the right side of the theater, but two rows below. I nudge my wonderful wife and whisper, “You wanted to see a celebrity? Well here comes William Shatner.” I see my little sister’s eyes light up, and Sue says ‘Who is that?” I answer: “You know… Captain Kirk.”

What followed was one of those exquisite moments in time. Where physics seems to become irrelevant and time suspends and elongates. Here we were in a huge, crowded, acoustically perfect space. There were hundreds, if not over a thousand people all around us, every one of them murmmering their little conversations while they passed the time awaiting the rest of the crowd and the dimming of the lights. Sue, finally getting her wish, was basking in the presence of celebrity… even if she really wasn’t sure the stature of the celebrity she was in close proximity to. WILLIAM FUCKING SHATNER (thanks Wil!) was accompanied by a woman, who was shuffling along the row of seats in front of him. Just as the two of them passed directly in front of me, time and space distorted even further and at that very moment came one of those silent pauses in a crowd where all noise ceases. It was as if every person in the entire theatre had just completed their sentence, hitting the terminal punctuation mark with a pause for breath, in a perfectly synchronous, simultaneous fashion. That silent pause was just long enough for all echoes to settle and be absorbed. At that very moment you could have heard a pin drop.

Except no pin dropped.

Instead my wife opened her mouth and uttered in her rarely used, but distinct Oregonian Hick tone:

“He’s SO fat!!”

Those three words filled the acoustically perfect, and perfectly silent-for-a-fraction-of-a-second-before-and-after, gigantic space of the theater. The words blurted out and orbited the space. They travelled at the speed of sound and reflected off every surface of that theater and were absorbed by every human being there. Eardrums wiggled and three tiny bones did their little jitterbug dance to the tune of my wife’s flat Oregonian-by-way-of Alaska accent. I felt like a black hole had just opened in the seat next to me and the universe did a huge optical zooming effect towards us. I gasped “Sue!” an instinctively shrank a few sizes in an attempt to blend in with the velour pattern of my padded seat. It was one of those moments that could have provoked an interstellar war lasting generations. Thankfully before a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers unleashed electric death, the vast murmur of the crowd returned.

WILLIAM FUCKING SHATNER never even blinked. But the sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruiser female companion of his rotated her weapon turret towards my wife and flashed her twin phaser banks while narrowing the firing slits in a very threatening manner.

If looks could kill, I would have been widowed before my first anniversary.