"blogged" at work today

I wrote a long email to my tech lead that fulfilled the goal today of blogging - articulation, introspection, and expression of formed ideas. And now, after kegging the Oktoberfest beer, I'm exhausted and going to sleep.

The noise

Few moral issues are black and white - but religions, societies, and families give morals and absolutisms about what are good ideas and bad ideas. It's comforting to have affirmation of rightness - something that allows one to say "I did the right thing" and move on. But many people go off the rails at some point - they do something outside the playbook, and are lost.

One answer is to be one's own moral compass - to decide right and wrong on one's own, with no playbook to fall back on. It creates a deeper, more flexible person - with more humility. One can't help but be humble when one's morals are based on on opinions and not a rigid dogma.

But choosing one's own path is full of grays. If one is deciding between two things with tradeoffs, how does one feel good about not going down the second path? I usually have been good at living without regrets, but I can't help but feel tugged in different directions right now.

Trouble starting? Narrow scope

I've been struggling to blog every day somewhat because I forget, but largely because I have too broad a scope of things I could talk about and no defined audience or scope for my blog.

I assume that pretty much every college, or even high school, grad has heard about narrowing scope in a writing class. Having no set topics is leaving me awash in ideas for terrible blog posts, posts that would basically be an unemotional recitation of facts. Unless I feel otherwise drawn to a topic, I'm going to try to blog about consciousness traps this month - consciousness traps like starting too broad.

Some days, I have nothing to say

It's great to be back home. I'd love to be able to say I did something intelligent, had some great insight, or bettered myself, but instead, Helen and I went to Alice's in the coupe, I walked to the Tesla dealership in Menlo Park and checked out the Model S, and I tried out a new cocktail: the Maple Leaf.

I think a lazy (ish) Sunday was just what life needed.

In the west again

I may have to amend the 30 day challenge to be averaging a post a day, not actually post every day, since that's how it's been going anyway.

I'm back in California again. I took my favorite flight in the country, United P.S., in my favorite row of that plane, row 9. United P.S. is a domestic flight in an internationally equipped plane. P.S.'s business class has older style business class seats. I had some expiring upgrades, and this is the best way I knew to use them! Because the 757 has two adjacent exit rows in the business class, Row 9 has about 8 feet of legroom.

It also has wireless internet onboard, rare for United. I had planned to write a post onboard, but instead I took two naps and watched the inflight movie!

New York was great - I wish I'd seen more friends and family, and my liver needs a breather, but it's good to be home.

The biggest shortcoming in consumer applications right now: meeting people I care about

"Is there anyone I should meet near me?"

This is a squishy statement - imprecise ('near'? 'should'?) and not the type of thing we nerds excel in. But I believe this is an answerable question with technology. Some combination of rarity, closeness, extroversion, and other knowable factors help answer this question. Let me give you some examples:

• Do I care that my work acquaintance is at the bar a half mile away at 1 AM, when I've been asleep since 10pm? Probably not. (Especially if we've never talked outside of work)
• Do I care that my college roommate, who normally lives on Long Island, is about to fly out to San Francisco, 30 miles away from Palo Alto? Yes. (Especially if we've emailed or talked on Facebook or Google Chat since)
• Do I care that the woman who just walked into the bar also likes road biking, home brewing, skiing, and the Red Sox? (If I were unmarried) Unequivocally yes.

More than a few services have tried to solve items around this problem.

• On Facebook, you can search by "current city." Many users, however, don't fill this in and Facebook doesn't do radius search. It also doesn't cover weekend trips or other chance encounters.
• Foursquare has no concept of interestingness for a check-in. Users can select a radius for alerts, but there are so many check ins that it becomes too distracting - so users disable the alerts.
  
• Google Latitude got closest. For about a year, they had Latitude Alerts. Latitude kept your cell phone's location history and formed an approximate model of where you were at which time which day of the week. If you went somewhere strange for that day and time, it would alert people within an appropriate radius. For example, if I went home early one day, it would alert me of a friend in my neighborhood. If my friend flew from New York to San Francisco for the weekend, it would alert me. If they'd left it on, and if a critical mass of my friends used it, it would have been great.

None have handled friend-of-a-friend meetups, or potential compatible friends or partners. And none have handled a fine grain notification system that tailors itself to introversion level, work night partying tolerance, and ranking of contacts.

I used to check in on Foursquare religiously. Its game mechanics stimulated me, and I hoped to have chance encounters with friends. It started taking over 60 seconds to check in - geolocation takes too long, it showed irrelevant venues, and alerts were too noisy to leave on. I interviewed with them back in February for their new San Francisco office and pitched my idea - the reactions of the interviewers made it seem that they aren't interested in friends-meeting-friends.

It drives me crazy is that this information is there. As a technologist, I figure the solution is to make a new service that combines Latitude and TripIt to know where you have been, are, and where you will be, combs your email, Foursquare, Twitter, and phone logs to know who you actually care about, and make a service that works primarily with other people who use the service. But the set-up cost is high, the privacy implications are high, and I can't see enough people coming on at once make it useful - I imagine burning out early adopters as it seems that Foursquare has done.

This all came to me because I'm in New York City this week and I'm struggling to figure out who is in town, who might be in town, and where in town they are. I ended up using "current city" on Facebook serially for the five boroughs, remembering who lives locally, checking Latitude, and spamming Twitter, Facebook, and Plus to try to find those who might happen to be here for the weekend. (If you want to meet up with me before I leave, I'm hanging out at Ginger Man in the Flatiron Saturday from 12:30pm-2:30pm!)

I don't have the answers. What I do know is meeting other people, seeing the people we know and share history with, is one of the greatest things in life. Meeting more friends is also emotionally valuable. Technology can help, but it's falling flat right now.

Some days

Some days, it feels like I get nothing done. Paying down technical debt is nice and all, but it isn't amazingly tangible.

Levi's GranFondo

You know that thing in life that you were part of that just gelled? The restaurant you started going the second week it was open where the employees are all nice, they've succeeded, and you're a regular? The product you love, and when you submit feedback you get a personal, fast, great reply? That class you were in where the teacher was awesome, the other students were attentive, and you really learned the material? You know the feeling when the wind is at your back, nothing can get you down, you're present, and you're part of something? Levi's GranFondo is that for non-competitive cyclists. Even participating in it feels like being in something bigger than oneself.

Levi Leipheimer is a professional cyclist who calls Santa Rosa, California home. In 2009, Levi's GranFondo started with 3,500 cyclists cycling out of Santa Rosa, in support of Santa Rosa and several local charities. In 2010, the GranFondo was back with 6,000 riders (and me!), and the Gran route sold out in 3 weeks. For 2011, they bumped it up to 7,500 riders (4000 for the 'Gran' route at 100 miles, 2500 for the 'Medio' route at 65 miles, and 1000 for the 'Piccolo' route at 32 miles). The Gran route sold out in 6 days, over 8 months in advance of the ride. The day that entries went on sale, the site crashed due to rabid cyclists hitting-refresh, being unable to imagine missing the ride.

Fast forward to sunrise last Saturday, October first. My friend Jim and I checked tire pressure, donned spandex, and headed out from our motel to the start line. We staged about mid-pack, 20 minutes before start, and listened to the announcer list off names of famous riders prsent. This year, the names I remember (besides Levi and his wife Odessa Gunn) were Patrick Dempsey, Mark-Paul Gosselaar, and Dean Karnazes. The announcer also told us home towns - people flew from as far as New Zealand and Europe to participate (and many other countries and states). At 8am, the first riders started... and 20 minutes later Jim and I crossed the start line.

For the first fifteen miles, I couldn't ride hard, couldn't even warm up because there was no room to pass - even though the roads were closed in both directions and we could ride in the oncoming lane, there were just too many other cyclists around! Jim and I rode together for about 45 minutes, and then I broke away. I kept looking back for him, spending 20 minutes at the first rest stop looking for him. I had no cell reception (and didn't for the next 5 hours). I assumed I'd lost him for the day and carried on.

The weather report, and the actual weather at the start, was great - low 70s and partly cloudy. As I climbed onto Kings Ridge, the fog set in. I climbed on, with some amazing views of valleys and forests - but my sunglasses started to get covered by drizzle. I'd prepared for 70 and sun, not 60 and rain!

Just after the halfway rest stop, I descended the steepest of the entire ride - down towards Hauser Bridge. At one point, I checked my brakes only to find that I might not be able to stop due to the damp roads, my wet brakes, and the steep grade. Right before Hauser Bridge, volunteers were out commanding us to dismount. It turns out I could stop, although it was close! Curious, I asked the volunteer if any riders had wiped out - she replied "Every ambulance and Medevac chopper in the county is full of people who wiped out here." (I learned later that 3 people got helicopter rides from that area).

After we descended towards the coast, the fog and drizzle lifted - thankfully! I blitzed in and out of a couple rest stops because I was warmer on the bike!

On the coast, I was ecstatic to catch the back of paceline - I was tired and wanted all the aerodynamic advantage I could get. It was the first time I was out of the wind the whole day. Within a mile of joining the paceline, though, the rider just in front of me jerked on her brakes, jogged left, and clipped my front wheel, pushing my wheel left. All of the sudden, I knew I was coming off the bike in the next second; the only thing I could do was choose where. I picked the brush on my right - it looked dry and scratchy, but it had to be better than pavement. I pulled the wheel back right and aimed at the brush. Over the bars I went, hitting my head in the brush and coming off the bike.

After shaking myself off, I checked my bike and my body out. I had dirt on my left leg, scratches on my left forearm and left calf, and a tiny cut on my knee. Astoundingly, I wasn't injured (although four days later my neck's still a bit tight!) and my bike was fine, though my chain came off the front derailleur. After putting my chain back on, I mounted, and continued on.

I was weary for the last thirty miles, but finished the 103 mile ride in eight hours and fourteen minutes, including rest stops. I grabbed some food at the finish line festival and sat down, waiting for Jim and wondering how I only left that morning.

I finally heard from Jim - one of the riders who fell near Hauser Bridge fell down an embankment and had to be rescued - the rescue closed the road for over an hour. Jim, much like me, was not prepared for drizzle and cool weather - he was on the verge of hypothermia. Jim elected to get a ride back to the start from a volunteer - but the volunteer couldn't show up until the road re-opened, so he had to wait in the cold for two hours! When he showed up at the festival, he was in surprisingly good spirits for someone who had spent the day cold and not doing what he'd come to do.

You'd expect that the local, non-cycle community would be annoyed by road closures, delays, and 7500 cyclists invading the community. But for much of the ride, we saw nothing but happy families cheering along the road. Levi's Gran Fondo brings in a lot of business for the Santa Rosa - full hotels and busy restaurants. It brings in money for local charities. And my guess is the community feels as swept in this as I did.

The Land of Milk and Honey

As I posted yesterday, I'm in New York for the week. New York is a fascinating, disorienting place - I'm out of my comfort zone the moment I hit the baggage claim and limo drivers solicit passengers. It continues when I get to the subway platform and find out, from another passenger, that the subway line I want isn't running this weekend due to construction. It's not a friendly place for tourists much of the time.

This is my twelfth trip to New York. I've progressed from finding it scary, overwhelming, and impossible-to-get-my-mind-around to exciting, overwhelming, and impossible-to-get-my-mind-around. I've learned some of the city's ways, and have cracked some of the keys to getting around, getting great food, and not getting ripped off. Some of the credit is due to Yelp and Google Maps Transit, some is due to becoming older and more experienced with cities, and much is thanks to friends' personal recommendations.

I started enjoying cities a lot more after I lost weight. Cities are tiring to heavy, out of shape people. Cities require a lot of walking and stair climbing. Cities are hard on people who take up a lot of space. Cities are warm at awkward moments. Cities have a ton of fashionably dressed, attractive people - and when I was heavy, I was self conscious about being both fat and foreign.

New York is hard on me even after all these trips - I usually have no clue which way I'm going when I get off the subway. I hate cold shouldering people who try to hand or sell me things.For someone who grew up rurally, being constantly surrounded by masses of people may never become comfortable. I'm still somewhat on alert on the street.

New York has her wiles for pretty much everyone. Her charms for me include great speakeasies with great cocktails. Great theater. Great architecture. Great food. Great people watching. And I have a lot of friends who live here.

Walking around New York also piques my inner details nerd. The infrastructure required for housing and hosting ten million people is immense. I'm always amazed by the same things. I'm amazed the seemingly endless subway trains that show up every five minutes. I'm amazed that there are multiple train (not just subway) lines running under the city. I'm amazed by the network of food delivery services. I'm amazed by businesses squeezed downstairs on a side street. I'm amazed that it seems to work, day after day, without falling apart.

New York doesn't seem to be a place that encourages the lazy. It asks you to work for its charms - by handling the masses of humanity, by handling the challenges of navigating, by handling the immensity of options, by handling her special challenges, she'll show you her parks, her hole-in-the-wall gems, and her best. It's not an easy city, but it is an amazing one.

I meant to post yesterday

I meant to post yesterday, continuing the 30 day blogging challenge, but I was ill.

I'm in New York with my team this week, occupying our Meatpacking District office. We're literally sleeping in our office's unfinished fourth floor.

Yesterday, I checked off a good number of my NYC TODOs:

• Walked on The High Line, a former rail line that has been converted to a park. It's incredible.
• Went to Cafe Grumpy, a cool coffee shop with Clovers.
• Went to Energy Kitchen, a fast food place specializing in protein rich, calorie low meals.

And then in the afternoon, I fell ill. My stomach is still tender today, but I'm feeling way better all around.

On my consciousness

My own ego is a blessing. It's wonderful when someone gets angry at me, I can think to myself, "I'm not a bad person, I'm worthwhile". I usually get past my impulse to brush the person aside and invalidate him. Instead, I try to listen to what's underlying his criticism - am I doing something unkind? Is he having a bad day? Is there a misunderstanding? Can I do something to turn this bad interaction to a positive one for both of us?

My ego is also a terrible force. In high school, my course work came easily. I had great teachers, I grokked the lessons, and I never had to push myself to study or learn. The first week in college, I started struggling. The material was hard. The concepts weren't as intuitive. I didn't know how to push through, I didn't know how to dig deep, and my ego told me that office hours and tutoring were for other people. My ego told me my grades were more important than my learning, and so I half learned things by just scraping by on some assignments. For exams, sometimes I learned what kind of questions would appear and how to answer those questions instead of learning for the love of learning. I understood some things for long enough to hand in the assignment. I no longer took the content and made it part of myself in a deep, self-altering way.

My short term, short-sighted focus on the deliverable recurs in some aspects of my work and my life. I have consistently worked with people at or above my intelligence level. Intellectually, some people will get some topics faster than I do, and I'll get some topics faster than others. But when I don't understand a design, an algorithm, or solution at work I struggle to ask for clarification and I didn't do the work on my own to figure it out later. My ego says "Don't admit to them, or yourself, that you don't get it." And I skated by, not growing myself as I could have.

This probably sounds like I haven't learned or that I haven't grown in the past decade. That's not true - I rocked some courses, I have put in great work on some projects. However, I have grokked things more slowly than I could have. I've wasted days of work trying to understand solutions before understanding the components of the solution. For example, I have participated in team design discussions suggesting the details of the MapReduces we'd use before reading the Wiki page on MapReduce and writing a few. Time and again I've tried to solve the problem before understanding and internalizing the components of a solution. Each time, I've done myself, and my team, a disservice.

So how do I grow myself? First, I get the ego out of the way. I admit to myself, and to others, that I don't know or don't understand. Quoting Penn Jilette talking about one of the best minds of the twentieth century, Richard Feynman:

My friend Richard Feynman said, "I don't know." I heard him say it several times. He said it just like Harold, the mentally handicapped dishwasher I worked with when I was a young man making minimum wage at Famous Bill's Restaurant in Greenfield, Massachusetts.

"I don't know" is not an apology. There's no shame. It's a simple statement of fact. When Richard Feynman didn't know, he often worked harder than anyone else to find out, but while he didn't know, he said, "I don't know."

I like to think I fit in somewhere between my friends Harold and Richard. I don't know. I try to remember to say "I don't know" just the way they both did, as a simple statement of fact. It doesn't always work, but I try.

Second, I start slower. I learn the material. I never start on a poor foundation. I don't let deadlines cause me to try to create a solution without the necessary comprehension.

Third, and the most important, is growing my consciousness. I get tunnel visioned - and my higher, self-reflective brain takes a vacation. That's the part that can actually change these habits and break the cycle. To be more self-reflective, I need to slow down - I should stop typing code when I should be thinking, asking more assertively when I don't understand. In my most panicked times, I'm doing my team a disservice by trying to fix problems before I understand the problem and the solution.

I have a few things I'm going to attempt to grow my consciousness:

• Do one thing at a time. Be present for it.
• Make sure each day contains one non-work thing I'm present for and do without the nagging guilt of "you should be doing something else". Cycling, yoga, weight lifting, driving the coupe, reading for an hour - anything that absorbs me completely.
• Learn. Ask. Quiet the ego and say, "I don't understand. Would you explain that again?"
• Slow down. Recognize that if I slow down I'm more likely to make deadlines, and if I miss a deadline I might as well learn something.

What do you think? I've checked my ego, is there something I can do to be better? Do you suffer the same?

30 day challenge

After watching Matt Cutts' 30 day challenge TED talk, I decided to try out 30 day challenges.

August was no alcohol, and I counted it as a win - I did have a going away drink when my tech lead left, and I sampled some homebrew when I took gravity measurements. I learned that I had become too accustomed to having a beer in the evening - merely drinking it instead of enjoying it. I believe I have reset myself to opting in to alcohol instead of opting out.

September, I tried the One Hundred Push Ups program, but I dropped out after the first week. My form was terrible, and I hurt my lower back by going for numbers instead of quality. I may try this again later - I still hope to increase my upper body strength, and there's something about pushups that makes me feel more at home in my own body.

October's goal is to blog daily. I find myself more confident in my own head when I talk about or write about what's going on. I tend to be too in my own head to be conscious about what's going on at work or in some facets of my life. I believe that writing an entry every day will strengthen the reflection muscles and make me more present and conscious about what's going on (more on this struggle, hopefully, in another post later today). I think we all suffer from this at least a little - why else do answers come in the shower, or solutions to our bugs come when we're describing the problem to a coworker?

You might have noticed that this is posted on October second. Yesterday, I rode my bike over 100 miles on Levi's GranFondo. I decided on the ride that this would be my goal, but returned home at 8:30pm exhausted and mentally gone. So perhaps this month's challenge should have been "bike 100 miles or blog every day"!

The first 90 days

If I had written this paragraph, it would have also included the words "panic" and "anxiety." But this is a good summary of my first 90 days.

During times of rapid growth, a team doesn't necessarily take the time to stop and get to know each other because they arrive and the first thing they notice is, "Whoa. Everyone is in a big fucking hurry, so I must hurry as well." Their normal instincts regarding getting to know those around them are buried in their goal of being recognized as a person who is also in a hurry.

From Rands' post Fred Hates It.

Changing attitudes

Growing up, Saturday morning was chore morning. I'd put new sheets on my bed, vacuum, dust, and tidy my room, and take out all the trash in the house. I didn't like it - since I didn't know how unlivable a heavily dusted, un-vacuumed, messy room was, I didn't see the point of Saturday morning chores. And so I have a bit of a block against dusting, vacuuming, and tidying - Helen and I have a maid come biweekly to do the vacuuming, dusting, and cleaning.

But I've started to do something that looks suspiciously like doing chores: I've started to block out time with the simple goal of making my life better. If I have a weekend chunk of time free, I just walk around thinking "What would make my life better?" and then I do it! It might be filing the stack of papers on my desk, it might be breaking down boxes and bringing them to recycling, it might be recycling old magazines, and it might be rearranging the food on the shelves. It might be going through the Wii remotes and putting new batteries in and charging them. Since I'm setting out with the goal of making my life better, I'm happy, energetic, and almost bouncing like Tigger.

Here's the funny thing to me: I don't like chores. But these things I'm doing are chores - and I'm doing them happily.

Kindle books I can loan

People with Amazon Kindle Books can lend them to friends. The recipient has one week to accept and two weeks to read. If you want to borrow them (and I know you!), contact me through email or Twitter.

This is the list of Kindle books I have that are loanable:

Fiction:

• A Deepness in the Sky
• Mercury Falls

Non fiction:

• Being Geek (by Michael Lopp a.k.a. Rands)
• Hold On to Your NUTs
• Intuitive Eating
• The Portable Atheist

(Current as of April 20, 2011)

Distributed identity management

Contact and address book management is annoying and over manual - this should be automatable. Here are a few cases that highlight the redundancy and time wasting right now:

• Mike changes his phone number. Mike either hopes people notice the change or he emails out his new number to people he thinks have his old number. Wouldn't it be better if wherever you had Mike's number, it automatically became the new number?
• Jane wants to use Facebook as her address book. But there's no way for Jane to add a phone number to a contact such that only Jane can see it. Even more difficult - Jane's grandmother isn't on Facebook. Jane can't create an address book entry for her grandmother.

I don't know exactly what the proper solution is, but I'd love to see some kind of distributed e-identity system that allows for notification of changes with minimal interaction. I see it working somewhat as following:

• I have a list of contacts. For some contacts, it's information they curate. For others, it's information I enter - maybe they've never participated online in this system before.
• I can see who's got me listed as a contact. (Or I can see who's listed me as a contact and opted into me seeing that they've listed me)
• When I change some detail about myself, I can select whom I'd like to notify about this.
• When users get notifications about a change (maybe email), they can choose to accept or ignore the changes. Or if a user doesn't act on it immediately, the information is annotated with the change and the user can accept it or reject it later.
• I can choose to trust people's changes - I don't even see their update notification, their contact info is gracefully changed.

Some solutions get close - most notably Plaxo. Plaxo charges $60 a year for the sync, though, and I don't think an external service is necessary for this. Address Book's use of vCards allows me to send out a vCard when I change my information, but vCard doesn't seem seamlessly integrated into other services and isn't as graceful as I'd like.

I'd love to see better integration across different services and applications on this. I'd love to see my Google Contacts knowing about people's Facebook information. I'd love to see this taken from an occasional sync to a gracefully pervasive and integrated system.

I'm not quitting, I'm declaring victory and moving on.

I sent this out to my coworkers and friends at Google a couple weeks ago:

Hey everybody,

I'm not quitting, I'm declaring victory and moving on.

My last day at Google will be Friday, April 1. It's been an honor to have worked at Google over the last 5 years. There's a real wealth of intelligence, passion, talent, generosity, and big hearts here, and I'm hoping for your continued success.

A big, genuine thank you to everyone, especially the official and unofficial mentors and the people who went out of their way to help even when they didn't have to.

FAQ:

Wait, I thought you resigned last fall!?

That was Ian Langworth! I still can't escape the Ian-Matt-Lan-Rob confusion!

What are you going to do next?

I'm going to Disney World! No, seriously, I'm going to Disney World in May. I'm taking about a month and a half off. After that, I'm going to work at Palantir on their Finance product. I'm excited about what they're doing and the approach they're taking.

Will there be drinks?

Yes! Details forthcoming!

How can I reach you?

Facebook
Twitter @mlroach
LinkedIn

I wish you all the best,

Matt

P.S. If I may quote Kevin Stephens quoting someone else, "I've been offended by not getting people's farewell emails before, but now, facing up to the task of not spamming and not leaving anyone out, I see it's a daunting one. If this reached you and you don't give a hoot that I'm leaving, sorry for the spam. If this was forwarded to you and you're offended at being left off the list, sorry as well."

Part of my grandfather's legacy

[I posted this to Watchuseek - so the language is going to be much more tuned to watch aficionados than my friends & family. My grandfather, John J. Bubbers, passed away in May. The watch I'm referencing, an Omega Speedmaster Pro, is also known as "the moon watch" because it was worn by Apollo astronauts and tuned to being in space in several ways.]

My grandfather was a product of the great depression. He was born in the US, moved to Germany during the 1930s during the Great Depression, and moved back to the United States after the outbreak of war with his family. His family had almost nothing, from what I understand leaving it behind to flee Germany.

A self made man, he put himself through college while holding down a full time job and raising my mother, my aunt, and my uncle. He started his own businesses, and traveled the world for them. He said he picked up this watch in Switzerland the week after the moon landing. From Chronomaddox.com, I believe this is a ST145.012, a caliber 321 Speedmaster.

Over the past few years, I've been flying to Boston (from San Francisco) every other or every third month for a weekend to get to know my grandfather as an adult, get to hear the stories he was too quiet to tell in front of many people. (He wasn't a quiet man with his opinions, but he never told old stories with a group.) He remained heavily involved in HAM radio and his community until the end. He was heavily into the details of everything he did and was engaged in a way that's sadly rare.

I've been wearing this in very heavy rotation since his memorial service, and today sent it to Nesbit's for service. The Hesalite is pretty heavily scratched, and I believe it wasn't regularly serviced before. If I turn the crown backwards with the crown out, the movement can stop and I'm noticing significantly diminished reserve when the chronograph is running. But all in all, she's a beauty for a 42-ish year old watch.

I can think of no better way to remember my grandfather than to wear his old watch, to look at it and think of him every day I wear the watch.

Full photo gallery

You're just a shade

For those who haven't seen Inception, minor spoiler alert.

Inception is about people who can modify other people's dreams. One of the dream changers keeps unintentionally bringing his dead wife into the dreams. He tells her that he can't live the rest of his life in the dream world with his imagination of his wife:

I can't imagine you with all your complexity, all your perfection, all your imperfection. Look at you. You are just a shade of my real wife. You're the best I can do; but I'm sorry, you are just not good enough.

Quick painting tips

• The answer to "have I put enough paint down?" is always "no."
• You only have too much paint on your roller when it doesn't roll.
• Either color match or do something different. It'll save you from putting too little paint down and having to do a second coat.
• 3-4 people is perfect. Any more than that and a surface will get missed (if the old and new colors are close enough).
• The answer to "did I put too much spackle down?" is always "yes".