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Progress always involves risk; you can’t steal second base and keep your foot on first.

Fred Wilcox

For Christmas this year, my wife got me a copy of The Winners Manual by Jim Tressel – head coach of the Ohio State football team.  It’s a fantastic book, written in a style that is well suited to digesting it in small bits of 5-7 pages at a time.  Given the author, you might be surprised to find that there’s really very little football in the book.  Instead, it’s a book that helps you to realize the big picture parts of your life – your life’s purpose and the goals you set for yourself.  Reading a chunk is now a part of my morning ritual for getting the day started.

The quote at the start of this post comes from the beginning of chapter 3 – “Attitude”.  I found it particularly relevant to my current situation.  It was a year ago that I left AOL and the comforts of a steady paycheck.  The past year has been eventful (more on that in a future post), but the professional part of it has largely been a search for the right entrepreneurial business opportunity with some consulting work done along the way.

Well, we finally feel like we have the right business model to pursue and have started working on that over the last couple of weeks.  The thing is, pursuing this opportunity means more time with, uh, shall we say a non-ideal income model (on the positive side – income taxes are low).  And in the last couple of days, I’ve had someone approach me about an opportunity that is very tempting.  It would be a 40 hour per week position that brought in a nice income stream.  And in case you haven’t been paying attention to the news lately, this could come in handy.  But it would almost certainly put a serious crimp in our ability to execute on the new business.

Which brings me back to The Winners Manual and that quote.  I guess every entrepreneur eventually reaches a gut-check moment where you move from chicken to pig.  Well, oink oink – this pig is off first and running hard for second.

I just got back from three days in Denver, attending the Advanced Rails Studio (which was fantastic).  Going to Denver gave me a chance to get to see my brother, Andrew.  Although we talk fairly regularly on the phone, it had been a few years since I actually had seen him in person.  I hope it won’t be that long between visits this time.  Click the smaller picture for a bigger one.

My brother

Sixty thousand strong

Today, two days before the 2008 election, Barack Obama held a rally at the Ohio statehouse. News reports estimate that sixty thousand people attended. Four of them were our family. We arrived on the scene about four hours before the start and found ourselves in a line that was already about a quarter mile long. Fortunately however, we got reasonably close and the kids got a chance to experience the political process in action (and got to meet John Glenn in the process).

You can see our pictures of the event here.

Straight out of Twin Peaks?

As an addition to the technique I talked about in my last post, consider also adding color gels (basically colored pieces of plastic) over the flash head to create a different mood.  This self-portrait uses a red gel and makes me look like I belong in a David Lynch movie.

Maybe I’ll tell our son that this is what I’ll look like the next time he thinks it’s okay to check and see if the hand vac can sweep water up from out of the toilet.  For the curious among you out there, the answer is “yes”, though later analysis reveals that this particular application falls outside of the design specs spelled out by the manufacturer.

Next up – back to more light hearted fare.

While some of my blog entries are meant to share personal or family experiences with others close to me, other entries are more personal – attempts to capture things for later reflection.  So it is with this entry.  I hold no illusions that this will convince (or even matter to) anyone else.  But, I wanted to write down why I’m voting for Barack Obama as a way of explaining to my future self just what I was thinking.

It has taken awhile to get to this point.  I used to be a huge fan of John McCain.  And I’m a guy who has voted Republican about 80% or more of the time.  My foundational principles are a bit all over the place to the point that I would be un-electable (e.g. I favor legalizing civil gay marriage but am pro-life), but historically, it has been the Republicans that have come closest to representing my view of things.  But, to borrow a theme from Clayton Christensen’s brilliant “The Innovator’s Dilemma”, it is my view that the Republican party has “overshot the market”.  Instead of being the party that represented realism to the Democratic Party’s idealism, I now find the Republican party too often represents extremism.

The most recent Gallup survey says that a staggering 91% of the country believes we are headed in the wrong direction.  I wonder who the other 9% are.  There are many things wrong with our country, but among them I would include:

1. An exaggerated sense of American exceptionalism
2. Devaluing accomplishment and intellect in favor of electing leaders who “are like me”
3. Lack of accountability and personal responsibility
4. The sacrifice of some of principles most precious to this country in the name of security
5. A failure to properly balance our long term interests with our short term ones (at both a national and personal level)
6. A serious lack of fiscal discipline

I don’t pretend to know the right answers to all of these things, but I’m voting for Barack Obama for two primary reasons.

First, I think he has the superior intellect and temperament to attack the problems affecting us.  I certainly don’t agree with all of his policies (e.g. he can be a bit of a demogauge about the rich and corporations), but from what I’ve seen, he has demonstrated a maturity and judgment that makes me trust him more than McCain.  If nothing else, I find him far more credible in the one area where I think we can make the most progress in the next decade – remaking our infrastructure to one that supports and encourages renewable sources of energy.

Second, as I said above, I think the Republican party needs to move back towards the principles that used to be at its core – individual liberty, fiscal discipline, and cautious realism in matters both foreign and domestic.  It is my feeling that the difficult work of rebuilding the party can’t and won’t happen if they don’t taste defeat.  In the Republicans were toddlers, you’d say they needed a “time out” to think about what they’ve done wrong and see if they can behave better in the future.

So, after watching closely for several months, I’m no longer in the camp of the undecided voters.  My mind is set.  Vote Barack Obama.

Out driving yesterday, I ran across this guy, whose Michigan plates said GOBUCKS.  Holy incongruities batman.

Life after 40

I had my annual (actually a bit less frequent than that) eye exam today.  And for the first time in my life, I’m going to start using glasses.  It turns out the lens in your eye continues to grow as you age, and eventually, your eye muscles can’t contract the lens as easily for near focus items.  For most people, this happens right around the time they turn 40, plus or minus a few years.

Fortunately for me, my far focus is fantastic.  Also good is the fact that both of my eyes are nearly identical.  The end result is that I’m able to skate by with a cheap pair of +125 reading glasses I picked up at the drug store for about ten bucks.  Still, I’m not quite the spring chicken I used to be.

A tree that was sheared off in our front yard

On September 14, the remnants of Hurricane Ike combined with a powerful upper level jet stream, resulting in about 6 hours of hurricane force (70-75mph gusts) winds in central Ohio.  Hundreds of thousands of people lost power – with some having to wait up to a week to get it restored.  The damage around town is pretty significant, with downed trees and limbs everywhere.  We lost a couple of major trees and were without power for about 10 hours (we were lucky).  Westerville Schools were canceled for two days.

Roasting marshmallows around the fire

This past weekend, our family joined two other families in a campout at Hocking Hills State Park.  Although the weather was hot through the day, we avoided the raindrops.  Highlights include:

1. Cooking in a borrowed cast iron dutch oven turned out great – we used it for four meals with the best being a pork tenderloin mixed with veggies. 
2. Hiking at 3 of the 6 areas in the park (Old Man’s Cave, Rock House, and Conkle’s Hollow)
3. Swimming in the campground pool