I just helped Ducks in a Row software launch their new web site. They sell home inventory software, and–soon–other software for personal risk assessment.

I’m spending the week on a business trip to San Jose. The company put me up at the very tony Valencia Hotel which is located in Santana Row. Wikipedia says that “Santana Row was intended to be Northern California’s answer to Rodeo Drive featuring the one of the highest concentration of luxury retailers in the Western United States.” Oh. My. God. I have never seen such conspicuous consumption, especially the cars. The hotel offers valet parking, but in the evenings, they park a few cars in front of the hotel, not in the garage. I’m not sure what it takes to get your car parked conspicuously on Santana Row, but tonight there was a blinged-out Rolls Royce and several other extremely expensive cars in the hotel’s valet spaces. It’s obscene, really.
UPDATE: A fellow hotel guest told me this morning that one of the other cars in front of the hotel last night was a sports car (I don’t remember which brand) that sells for $1.2MM.

I seem to be experiencing another blogging lull. Mostly, it’s caused by being more engaged in other areas of my life, especially my new job. Stay tuned; I’m sure I’ll be posting more again soon.

My conversation with Samuel on the way to school this morning:
Samuel: When I grow up, I’m going to be a little taller than you, and Hannah is going to be about the same as you.
Me: Yeah, that’s probably about right, but I’m not sure Hannah will be quite that tall.
Samuel: Well, we’re all going to tower over Takako. Even Mommy towers over Taka.
Me: Well, Mommy is a little taller than Takako, but I wouldn’t say that she ‘towers over’ her.
Samuel: Well, the midget people who used to own the earth aren’t taller than Takako.
Me: I’m afraid I’m not familiar with these midget people.
Samuel: You know, the midget people who used to own the earth.
[Pause while I try to figure this one out]

Me: Do you mean the ones from National Geographic?

Samuel: Yes, that’s what I mean.

For my new job, I’ve been re-reading Agile Project Management with Scrum by Ken Schwaber. In the Introduction, the author says that common sense is a critical element of the processes that he outlines.
I’m usually wary of appeals to common sense, as they are often used in conjunction with various logical fallacies. In this case, however, I really like Schwaber’s definition of common sense. He says that it “is a combination of experience, training, humility, wit and intelligence.” It really surprised me to see humility and wit in his definition, and it was a good sign that I would like the author’s point of view more generally.

Three weeks ago, I started a new job: QA engineer with Borland Software. I couldn’t be happier. The group that I’m working with is implementing a full-blown agile/scrum process. When I was interviewing with Borland, I told my interviewers that I’d used some agile methodologies in previous jobs. But now that I’ve been participating in a real agile methodology, I realize that there’s a fundamental difference between adopting some of the methodologies and adopting the philosophy of agile/scrum: it’s all about respect, truthfulness, collaboration, visibility, continual feedback, putting individual egos aside for the greater good, etc.

We had a crazy weekend. Katie’s mother and aunt had been scheduled to move on Saturday, so we had planned to go to San Antonio to help with that. However, their move got postponed until Tuesday, so we drove down to help prepare for the upcoming move.
On Saturday evening, we celebrated a belated Passover Lite with Katie’s dad’s cousin and his wife, Bob and Paulina Polunsky. Hannah spent the night at the Polunskys’, and Samuel, Katie and I stayed in a hotel (we’d planned for both kids to stay with Polunskys, but alas, that didn’t work out).
During the night, the Easter/Passover bunny visited the kids at the Polunskys, so after an Easter breakfast of fried matzah at their house, we wrapped up our work for Mawmaw and Allie and hit the road home. I have to return on Tuesday to help with the rescheduled move.

I’m happy to report that today I launched a new design for ReligiousResources.org. I’m pleased with the design, but visitors to the site will not see the biggest improvements: I’ve completely reprogrammed the admin functionality (managing listings, etc.). But that change should make life much better for Susan, and will hopefully make the site more useful.

When I was reading this ask.metafilter.com thread the other day, something I’ve been thinking about for a while finally clicked. What caught my eye was that a few respondents mentioned the volume of music, in gigabytes, that they had downloaded from emusic.com back when it offered unlimited downloads.

When I was growing up, our house was located at the very top of the Guadalupe river valley. We had a spectacular view to the southeast all the way across Canyon Lake to the other side of the county.
When I played trombone in middle school and high school, my parents made me practice outside (not a problem, since we had few neighbors). I remember the awesome echoes that I got with that. I would blast a loud short sound and just listen to the echoes.
Also, at one point we had a religious cult living in the old ranch house a couple of miles away. My friends and I would get on the garage with a telescope and spy on them, though we never saw anything extraordinarily weird take place.