Beer with old friends is awesome

After work today, I had the good fortune to meet-up with an old friend from college in a nice little brewery just a block or so from Google's offices in Kirkland. (I really liked their porter. The red was decent.)

It had been 12 years since I saw him (and even then, it was at Andrea's and my wedding day), so catching up on how life has treated us was really spectacular: to chat with an old friend and to hear that your lives haven't played out so differently, that you are so alike and have such similar interests and philosophies is really pretty awesome.

After some rolls, nigiri and another beer at Sushi Joa, I hit the road for a beautiful late night ride home, thinking about how incredibly fortunate we are. Among all that we discussed, I think the subject that sticks out the most is regret.

Five years ago, I was offered a position at Amazon. Andrea and I decided that moving across the country wasn't the right decision for us at the time, so I turned it down. Over the following weeks and months, and indeed for the next year, I came to deeply regret the missed opportunity. After joining Amazon a year later, I hated the better part of my experience there, but at least I had the experience, and for that, I am very grateful. My life - and, I believe, that of our family - is so much richer for having gone through that change.

There's an article I like to cite from NPR entitled Does age quash our spirit of adventure?, and the core message I take from this is that we should strive to take (calculated) risks, to seek out new experiences. Enjoy what you have (without being reckless) while you still can.

Apparently the guy on the right is a well-known singer

Today is the 21st anniversary of my brother's death. I guess the death of someone close to you affects everyone differently. As for me, I suppose I have developed a mindset that keeping up with the Joneses is a bullshit way to live your life and, by extension, conforming to the others' expectations is similarly fruitless.

Sometimes its hard but not to think about what you could have done or said differently; to wonder what you'd do if you had more time.

I have no heartwarming way to wrap up this blog post, so I'll simply state, for the very small number of people that read this, that I hope you make the most out of the time you have left, be it 45 years or 80 or one. Don't just think about what's a priority in your life. Reflect on it - really reflect on it - and act on it. Because some day, someone you love will be mourning your death and reflecting on your absence years after you're gone.

In which I complain about being a mid-30s professional transplant

I've got a pretty damn awesome life. If I had been born in the paleolithic era, on average, I'd be dead by now. (Average life expectancy: 33 years. Also, 100% of people from the paleolithic are now dead.) Or in recent time, only 150 years ago, if I were British, I'd probably be a lovable chimney sweep. Or if I was born in, say, the DRC, I might have ended up a child soldier. Who knows?

Instead, I grew up in rural America, have a life expectancy of ~73 years (if I don't screw it up), took a bunch of math and science classes, and got myself a shiny bachelor's degree in computer science, which must put me right up there with four of the top ten wealthiest people in the world, right?

Actually, despite the grief my housemates in college gave me when I switched from Computer Engineering to Computer Science (personal hygiene and social ineptitude jokes abound), that was an awesome choice. Not only do I think I'm much happier swimming in code than I would have been in Fourier transforms (I still don't know what the hell they are), it turns out software engineering is a pretty damn lucrative industry.

This is how computer science and biology majors roll

The US Census Bureau's stats bode very well for me. And for that, I'm very thankful. Andrea and I are incredibly, ridiculously fortunate to have the financial security we do. (Despite taking a huge loss on the sale of our 2004-purchased home, we're very comfortable.)

On top of that, the Pacific Northwest is killer. We've had a hell of a ride in the last almost four years that we've lived here. As terrifying as it was to make the move here, it was one of the best decisions I think we've ever made. Who knew you and your dog could hike up a mountain post-Thanksgiving and have such a gorgeous view? (Also, we have an awesome dog.)

Woof.

And I get to do all sorts of cool stuff like summit Mount Rainier.

Colors!

And then a year later, Mount Shuksan.

Not as high as Rainier, but still pretty awesome.

But there's also a downside to all of it - and here's where I start bitching: it sucks trying to make friends again when you're older.

I'm inclined to think Malcolm Gladwell's infamous 10 000 hour rule applies to friendships, and all those people I used to be so close to are (or were) my friends due in no small part to how much time we spent together in elementary and high school, college classes, and in the dorms.

As it happens, when you're spending 9-10 hours every day at work (plus commute time), you don't have much time to hang out with people for fun. And those folks you used to hang out with all the time are now spread around the country, making it hard to keep up the inertia of existing relationships. The extremely unsatisfying and unsettling heat death of friendships fucking sucks. Pardon mon français tout le monde.

This is the point at which, as a stereotypical male engineer, I want to dissect the problem and control for various factors, but this post isn't problem-solving but rather complain-into-the-ether -- a problem I, admittedly, am very privileged to have.

The unfortunate design of not saving preferences

I recently reformatted my phone (a statement I wouldn't have expected to make back when I was regularly reformatting my Windows 98 computer), and when I added my second email account to the phone, Picasa Web Albums asked if I wanted to grant access to Gallery. Since I already connected to my personal Gmail account, I have no need to connect my secondary, I denied this request:

However, very shortly after this request, I was asked again the same question:

I got the same request over and over again until I finally allowed it. (In fact, even after I allowed it, I was asked two more times.)

I by no means consider myself a "designer," but having at least done some reading on the subject, I feel like I see terrible design everywhere now. If you're an engineer, you'd do yourself a favor to read Don't Make Me Think, and if you've got plenty of time, The Design of Everyday Things.

Your app redesign sucks

Not terribly long ago, Google added their Google Play Music radio stations with a free, ad-supported version for everyone. Aside from the fact that their recommendations are terrible in my experience, they've nerfed their user experience. Just yesterday, in fact, I wanted to play the song The Pretender on my phone. Here's the result screen from my search:

While their auto-generated The Pretender Radio station is at least relevant, it's not what I am looking for -- the song I have played many times on my phone is nowhere to be seen.

I don't even get to my intended result until I scroll down. Here's what the full pane looks like:

Of the entire result pane, less the operating system's top bar and Music's top search bar and bottom music controls, about 11% of the real estate -- all of it below the initial view -- is devoted to what I'm looking for, and what I ultimately clicked on.

The radio stations have become a big pain point for me lately, as I tend to play music almost exclusively from Google Play Music, either on my phone or on my work or home laptops. The pain comes partially from their A1 position on nearly every screen but also from the fact that Google apparently isn't taking the hint that I don't use it and isn't letting me collapse or hide this section.

Their desktop experience isn't much better, yielding about 26% after discounting the search bar and controls:

The first project I worked on in Bing measured dissatisfaction (referred to as DSAT) with search results in XBox Music and Video search results. For example, when you search for "seven" in the context of videos, you might expect to see the results "Se7en", "Seven Years in Tibet", "Seven Samurai", and more. Ideally, the first result is the one you wanted, and if you clicked on the fifth one or if you didn't click any, that is a DSAT -- the results were poor. We took those data and learned from it to improve the quality of the results.

I imagine Google has some sophisticated ML to do exactly that; however, this is not an engineering problem. It's a simple matter of understanding what your users want, and at least in my humble opinion, this ain't it.

Don't punt parenting to teachers

As with many big companies, we have many non- or tangentially-work-related distribution lists. On one of those lists, someone yesterday asked this (paraphrased) question:

I have a two-year-old. How and when do I decide what education to give my child (public vs private; Montessori vs traditional; etc.)?

And because this person made it clear that they were soliciting any advice, I chimed in. Here is my verbatim response:

Okay, since you are soliciting any advice, I’ll go on my tirade, starting off with: Don’t fret.

From this article http://www.businessinsider.com/is-that-private-school-really-worth-it-2011-11:

“The study found that low-income students from urban public high schools generally did as well academically and on long-term indicators as their peers from private high schools, once key family background characteristics were considered," according to the findings. [emphasis mine]

I believe many studies show that genetics and family involvement are the biggest factors in students’ success. Which teachers your child has aren’t nearly as important. After all, your child will spend a few hours each day with a teacher, but he or she is spending much more with you. That said, this may change as kids get older and their peers become their bigger influences instead of Mom and Dad.

So for your two year old, just try your best every day. That doesn’t mean you have to do your best, just keep on trying to do well J

FWIW, my focuses (caveat emptor!) have been on:

•  reading to my kids early and often (language skills, vocabulary), making sure they’re following along (“How many dwarves are in Bilbo’s house? Who do you think is at the door this time?”)
• building emotional intelligence (when reading books or watching movies, stopping to ask, “What just happened? How do you think that makes so-and-so feel?”)
• working on imagination, self-reliance, and a connection with nature; I really enjoyed Last Child In The Woods)

Perhaps not Dear Abby-caliber, but while I'm not an expert in real life, I do play one on email lists.

Today, another non-expert responded with, among other blasé comments, this scathing rebuttal to my email:

I disagree with Adam, as with my schedule my child often spends 10 hours a day with his teachers. It’s important to me that the time they spend with him is positive and will help in authentic ways. 

This person didn't say how old their child is, but if you assume somewhere in the 7-12 year range, they should be getting 10-11 hours of sleep per night. This means your 7-12 year old who is with their teacher 10 hours each day is spending less than 30% of their waking weekdays with you.

But then there's TV. A few years ago, Nielsen noted that kids 6-11 get an average of 28 hours per week of screen time. It's only that low for this age bracket "due in part that they are more likely to be attending school for longer hours." So if you assume a heavy skew toward the weekend -- nine hours on each of Saturday and Sunday and "only" two hours each weekday, that 30% of waking time drops to 15%.

When Andrea was a teacher in Minnesota, she regularly told me of parents from the Catholic school that were on either end of the spectrum. Some were so heavily invested in their kids -- perhaps in large part because they were shelling out money for a private education -- that they knew all the teachers, knew their kids' classmates, and were involved in the classroom. Others apparently felt that the tuition they paid gave them a free ride to punt their responsibilities to the school. "My Timmy is so talented, I just hope you can see it. What are you doing to make sure he succeeds?"

If your kid is in school for ten hours each day, and if you don't think your parental involvement (or lack thereof) is still the biggest influence (along with genetics) on your child's success in school and in life, then you're doing it wrong.