From the Mind of Trevor Stone

Some time in May I looked at my calendar and realized that every weekend in June was spoken for, and that July and August were looking pretty tight. This led to yet another summer where most of my free time has been spent either having fun away from home or preparing for said fun.

The first weekend in June was Untamed a pagan gathering in its second year, led by some of the core people from the now defunct Beltania event. It featured workshops, rituals, craft vendors, neo-highland games, a day of music performances, and drum circles. And rain. Lots of rain. It's been a wet year in Colorado, so I was expecting a wet and chilly event, and it definitely delivered. I wound up sleeping in tights plus two pairs of pajama pants, hiking socks under mucklucks, a T-shirt under a long-sleeve shirt under a sweat shirt, and a winter hat. I think the cold and damp helped the drum circles find some really neat rhythms and reflective grooves, and everyone had the good sense to bring drums that wouldn't detune too bad in the damp air. There was also a ham radio Parks on the Air event that weekend, and since the festival property is right next to the Pike National Forest I hung a wire antenna in the trees on the other side of the fence and made some contacts while keeping dry in my tent. Unfortunately, after I'd made a bunch of contacts around the 20 meter band and started to call for people to contact me ("calling CQ") my high-end radio from the early 1990s suddenly got stuck in transmit mode and I noticed a distinct electronics smell. The problem persisted when testing at home where it was warm and dry, so I've got a circuit board investigation project to do when I get a free weekend. Which will maybe be October? November. Sheesh. At least the maker space at my office should be back up and running by then.

As soon as I got home I had to unpack the truck, start packing suit cases, and plan two lobby meetings for CCL's return to Capitol Hill. Kelly and I flew out Friday and stayed with a friend's parents in northern Virginia. Spending three days at an in person conference is so much more invigorating than a day and a half of a virtual conference via Zoom has been. And I love "magical hallway conversations" that emerge; I ran into people from the Before Times that I didn't even know would be there, had some great conversations with folks I knew I'd find. Even the thirty second connections with folks are so much better than a Zoom breakout room. I also took advantage of the conference hotel's location next to Rock Creek Park to do a Parks on the Air activation with a small radio and portable antenna I brought. Band conditions were challenging and it's hard to get a lot of power from a small radio but I managed to secure enough contacts for the activation to count. While I was at the conference on Saturday, Kelly went to DC Pride and got into a bit of good trouble, engaging in "lawful annoying" peacockery to establish a perimeter in front of the homophobic street preacher who probably makes money suing people who punch him for being an obnoxious jerk.

Our day lobbying Congress was great. In the past we've been very focused on putting a price on carbon emissions. This is the most effective available solution to fighting climate change, but it's a topic that has trouble gaining traction in some Congressional offices due to their philosophical outlook or the political climate in their district. This year we had carbon pricing and clean energy permitting reform as dual focuses with the meeting lead and member liaison choosing the topic that's the best fit for the office. This seemed to work quite well; we had some great conversations with offices where we've previously received a tepid response, and a lot of members were quite excited to see us. I was even involved in literal magical hallway discussion: a member was in a committee meeting all day, but really wanted to meet with CCL, so her staffers took us down the elevator and around the building where we had a ten minute conversation on a whole bunch of topics before their scheduler dragged them back in to mark up a bill. I also had the honor of leading a half-hour face-to-face meeting with Senator Hickenlooper who's been a big supporter of both carbon pricing and clean energy permitting reform.

We took advantage of the CO2 expenditure of flying to Washington DC to take a small vacation around the Chesapeake Bay region. Our first leg took us to Williamsburg Virgina by way of the Edgar Allen Poe Museum in Richmond, in part so we could pet the resident black cats. We checked into a B&B where all the rooms were themed after a U.S. president, ate some amazingly delicious mussels steamed in a chorizo sauce, walked down Colonial Williamsburg's Duke of Gloucester Street at sunset (good historic architecture vibes, cool fireflies, and reduced chaotic energy from tourist hordes). The next day we visited both Jamestown historic sites. The State of Virginia and the National Park Service both run a site focused on the first English settlement in the U.S. and its interactions with the native people. The State-run one is significantly more tourist-oriented, featuring people in period dress engaging in 17th Century crafts, recreated sailing ships (there was much quiet singing of I'm On A Boat"), and a folk park style buildings recreating Powhatan buildings and the Jamestown Fort. The National Park version is more of an archaeological site than a folk park, though it does have a working recreation of the Jamestown glassblowing site. The site is also quieter, with more of a chance to connect with the landscape and the James River, giving something of a sense of how the settlers and Indians might have experienced the place. (For one, the English woolen clothing must've been incredibly uncomfortable in June.) We finished the evening with another Parks on the Air activation from a small strip of sand at the edge of James Island. I was able to contact Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and attracted a hunter from Spain which felt pretty good for a 15 watt radio.

After a fun crossing of the Chesapeake Bay bridge and tunnel we spent the weekend in Maryland's eastern shore. The book themed B&B with a charming English hostess was much more our style. We'd hoped to take a canoe around Janes Island but the wind speed would've made paddling too difficult so we hung out at a picnic table coloring and playing ham radio. Band conditions were awful due to a geomagnetic storms, so getting the needed ten contacts for an activation took two hours. We then enjoyed a delicious crab cake lunch and then listened to Seldom Scene at the Crisfield Bluegrass Festival we didn't know was happening.

On the way back to NoVa we visited the Harriet Tubman Museum, a fairly new state park and national monument that does a really good job sharing and contextualizing Harriet Tubman's life and slavery in the mid-19th Century. Throughout the trip I was impressed with the care taken by museum curators to feature the slavery and Indian parts of the stories in meaningful ways, far beyond a token land acknowledgment.

The fourth weekend of June was ARRL Field Day when ham radio clubs across North America set up a temporary station and fill the airwaves with contacts. I've been in California for the last two Field Days, so I was excited to be able to check out the great setup the Boulder Amateur Radio Club does at Betasso park west of Boulder. I'd intended to set up a tent and operate into the late shift of this 24-hour event, but I realized that the generator would make falling asleep quite challenging and opted to get one Saturday night of the month in my regular bed. Sunday was spent recovering from the month that was, and mowing the grass that had been going bonkers from all the rain this year.

The Fourth of July long weekend brought Dead and Company to Folsom Field on their final tour. The shows were sold out or close to it, but I was able to find some spots with enough room to dance a bit. There were some really good performances, including some stellar drums & space, but I was a little disappointed with the set list. I think they only played two songs that premiered after 1979 (Standing on the Moon and So Many Roads). I knew they weren't likely to play any Pigpen or Brent Mydland songs, but it would've been great to hear something from the '80s like Tons of Steel or Throwing Stones or bring out a song that left the repertoire after the '60s like Viola Lee Blues. We also got a cat on July 1st (we'd been targeting this month for cat adoption for quite some time), so all my non-Dead energy for the weekend went into making the house safe and comfortable for a feline.

I spent the next couple unstructured weekends preparing for Burning Man. Given the amazing heat last year and the likelihood of wild and wacky weather from El Niño this year, I want to up my shade game so I have a hope of sleeping a little longer. I decided to drape a large piece of aluminet over two military surplus camo net poles, forming something of an A-frame. My ability to visualize objects and then make that imagined plan meet reality isn't one of my strong suits, so hopefully a test run of this shade structure will go well at Dragonfest (where shade that lets rain in isn't a huge win, but when else am I going to have time to try it?). I spent the final July weekend at a Ranger training campout near Ward. This was great fun, including the drinking-and-joking-around-the-campfire session, but its late season timing means I've got one less Burning Man prep weekend, and don't get a full weekend to prep for Dragonfest. Fortunately "camping in Colorado with a bunch of Pagans" is packing I can do without too much thought. I'm quite glad I decided not to go to the Ranger command team training the previous weekend, otherwise I'd have all the info for Burning Man and none of the actual necessary stuff.

August's weekend lineup features Dragonfest, then Pack For Burning Man Weekend, then Burning Man Opening Weekend, then Man Burn Weekend, then Get Home, Unpack, And Fall Asleep Weekend. That's usually followed by Clean The Dust Off All Your Stuff and then, wouldn't you know it, it's autumn equinox and time to do some kind of anniversary/birthday weekend getaway.

Yeesh. Maybe one of these years I'll spend a summer just hanging out.

I've posted my good photos from this summer to Picasa (or Google+ if you prefer that interface). Based on a conversation on a Google+ post a few weeks ago, I've adopted the following face-tagging policy:

Feel free to tag yourself in my photos. Please don't tag other people unless you know they're okay with it. If you see someone you recognize in a photo and don't know if they've seen it, send them a link.

2011 Winter and Spring

2011 Beltania

2011 Apogaea - Illuminate

2011 Dragonfest

2011 Burning Man

2011 Summer Misc

First: Anybody got any cool plans for the 4th (i.e. the next 24 hours)?

Second: I'll be volunteering for a week to set up Dreamtime, a festival that's equal parts new age workshops, tribal electro music and dance, and Burner-minded people. I'll be hoisting shade structures and unfolding yurts after the 8th; the festival runs from the 16th through 20th.

Third: mollybzz are talking about a two-week road trip northwards. I'd like to see Glacier National Park before it becomes Ironic National Park. Molly's never been to Yellowstone... or Canada. And I think there's some good hot springs in Montana. Got any travel tips for Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Alberta, or the Canadian Rockies? Is Calgary worth visiting?

Fourth: I'll be at Dragonfest the first week of August. I'll be helping with Men's Mysteries. I wonder if I should come up with a workshop, too.

Fifth: Anybody going to Burning Man? I'd like to go, but only if I have a camp to connect with. Teaming up on transportation from Colorado would be nice, but connecting with a sweet camp from elsewhere is also keen.

That's all that's on the radar so far. If you'd like to hang out, we should do so before July 8th! Otherwise, you may have to wait until mid-August or catch me at my tent.

Boy, unemployment sure feels great.

As I've said before, the freedom to leave is one of the most important. One must feel strongly about the benefits of a situation before giving up the freedom to walk away.

Sometimes it takes me a long time to leave. I'm often one of the last to depart an interesting party. I spent fifteen semesters at The University of Colorado. I lived in Boulder for twenty-four years. I've worked at Tyler Technologies for over four years.

I've been thinking about leaving Tyler for a while. I've learned a decent amount and written some good code, but I've also spent a lot of time writing boring code. Our product has some interesting solutions to typical government software needs, but in the end most of it is "Let the user enter this data into that view and store it over there. Take data X and make it look like Y so we can use the Z that we already built." Once I got that down, most of the interesting bits lay in what this and X are. And while I'm glad to have learned about legal descriptions and property appraisal, they don't hold fundamental interest for me.

I informed my manager a year and a half ago that "my time with Tyler is limited." He said he'd do whatever he could to keep me there, but I told him that the sorts of things I'd like to be working on are beyond the scope of what the company should pursue at this point.

I'd considered quitting as early as last summer, but the times at which it would have been auspicious to leave were also fairly hectic personally, so it was nice to have stable employment at which I'm appreciated (if underutilized). Before I went to China, my manager and I agreed that when I got back I'd wrap up the project I was working on (an implementation of a calculation method which proved to be 10% interesting and 90% tedious) and then work on an interesting module until I was ready to leave, "probably in May or June."

I came up with the "May or June" timeframe by intending to move out by the time my lease is up in June. I could spend March through May talking to potential employers with interesting projects in cool locations and then move in early summer... or perhaps in late summer, after traveling around the U.S. for a while.

Yet again, as the auspicious time for departure approaches, I've found reasons to put it off. My job search progress is nil, in large part because I've spent so much spare time drumming, roleplaying, hiking, and attending concerts. But there are work reasons, too.

Based on dissatisfaction from many customers, the president of our division has said that the module I'm working on is our top priority. I understand the customers' frustrations: most of the original development was focused on our largest client who, after a management change, decided not to buy the module yet. At around the same time, I was moved off that project and my time focused on Utah, sales analysis, big bugs, and other areas varying in degree of interesting. The module therefore never had a complete feedback cycle with clients who actually purchased it. And since the client we originally focused on does some things differently than the ones who are using the module, some behaviors are a bad match to user desires. After collecting complaints, we held a meeting and agreed on a two-phase approach. The first phase will deliver easy solutions to some annoying issues. Phase I will be included in the upgrade to our new release, slated for this and next month. The second phase will feature some more time-consuming but intellectually interesting solutions to some fundamental issues. I've refused to give time estimates on Phase II because I won't know what's needed until we've researched and experimented.

I told my manager and our president that I'm committed to completing Phase I. I've also said that I'm open to staying through much of the development of Phase II, leaving perhaps in September. My reasons for this delay are two-and-a-half fold.

First, I'm interested in sticking around because I take pride in my work. By completing, or at least making progress on Phase II, I'll be able to do a better job on some things I did when I was fresh out of school and didn't know any better. I'll be able to use some interesting techniques from my graduate-level courses on natural language processing and machine learning, the promise of which was one reason I was interested in this job originally. Plus, I figure if I do a good job using interesting computer science techniques I'll have something more worth discussing at a job interview with a prestigious company.

First and a half, my company is looking to hire a smart and creative someone interested in working on this module.* I'd like to work with the new developer on the existing product and design for Phase II so that I don't indirectly hand everything off to someone who spends a month going "What the smeg? Who wrote all this jibba-jabba? Why in Belgium did he do that?" As Eric Steven Raymond wrote in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, "When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor." He was writing about open source projects; it's not as big of a deal in my case (Tyler can hire a competent successor after I depart). But I'd like to perform a quality handoff as a professional courtesy: I don't enjoy diving into weird code without advice from the author and I figure other programmers don't either.

Second, staying employed lets me spend significant portions of the summer having fun while still getting paid (instead of cashing in unspent time off for a lump sum). If I were to start a new job in June I'd only have a couple days saved up by the time the weather was cold and the nights early. I've got enough money that I could afford to put my stuff in storage and take a summer-long road trip, but I don't have a good candidate for the passenger seat in such a performance and I'd feel guilty about using all that petroleum by myself. I'll be able to spend about 20 days of vacation (that's a month of workdays) between now and September and extra vacation is on the table (along with extra money or something else I think of) as an incentive for sticking around through Phase II.

So unless someone has a compelling reason why a three month road trip would be a good idea, I think I'll go month-to-month on my lease and figure out how to spend another month of time off.

What happens to our intrepid programming hero? What sorts of vacation plans does he have? Stay tuned for the next edition of flwyd.livejournal.com to find out!


* If you, or someone you know, is interested in employment programming in Java with a focus on extracting names, property locations, and other interesting data from semi-structured text, drop me a line. I realize that "I'm quitting because I want to work on something more interesting,** want to take over for me?" isn't the best sales pitch, but I think the opportunity is worthwhile. Phase II should involve some really interesting work, there are other cool projects that need someone to work on them, the environment is fun, and you'll be well appreciated and compensated. I'm leaving in part because I want to move to Boulder, the west coast, or somewhere else nifty. I don't have any ill will toward the company or its current employees (at least on most days).

** If you've got connections or leads pointing to computer science-type positions relating to natural language, GIS/mapping, programming language development, artificial intelligence, or unusual human-computer interaction, put me in touch. My résumé is fairly up-to-date.