Where do you want to go toda^Wnext week?

A year ago, Amazon contacted me to see if I'd be interested in joining a team that does personalization using machine learning for Amazon subsidiary companies (Zappos, IMDB, Audible, LOVEFiLM, ShopBop, and so on). Within about a month, I had been flown out to Seattle, interviewed and was made an offer the next day -- as Andrea and I were sitting at a Starbucks discussing an apartment we had just looked at. Yesterday, I notified my manager that I intend to leave Amazon at the end of the month.

To make a long story short, I am leaving Amazon to go do work that I think and hope will be more fitting of my interests and passion. While I thought I'd be at Amazon a lot longer than nine months, I think it's best for me to make this change.

Starting Monday, June 3rd, I'll be working for Microsoft's Bing Information Platform using their massively parallelizable data processing language, SCOPE, and its corresponding scalable, distributed filesystem, Cosmos. For my friends at LexisNexis, SCOPE is analogous to ECL while Cosmos is very Thor-like (as best as I can tell, as of now).

I'm actually very excited about this change. The position I've accepted sounds quite interesting, and while the language and systems I'll use are new to me, the concepts are very familiar, given my six years at LexisNexis Risk.

Why have two dressers when one will do?

In my ever-ongoing quest to get rid of stuff we don't need, I scored big by consolidating Andrea's and my clothes into my dresser. Tomorrow, we'll see if we can't sell Andrea's old dresser at an all-neighborhood garage sale here in Fremont tomorrow.

One lonely dresser, sans partner.

What used to hold only my clothes now stores them in the top two drawers (the first of which is only about half-height). Andrea's clothes sit comfortably in the lower drawers.

"How could you reduce necessary clothing storage volume by half?" you ask? In small part by purging unneeded clothes, but I think in larger part, it was the use of a handy-dandy trick I learned several years ago for packing clothes for travelling: roll them up. There are also plenty of videos showing interesting ways to do so (for example).

The disembodied head of Curious George approves.

Through a goodly amount of evenings organizing, purging items and subsequent trips to Goodwill, we've eliminated much of the stuff that occupied our 1400 square foot rental. The basement is largely empty, save for a few toys, my moderately sparse office and a few shelves of items in the storage room.

Yet there are still more cows to release.

Caterpillar is with an "a", not an "e"

Yesterday was a pretty wild day for us. I spent the day in Bellevue, Reed had his first day of morning preschool, Andrea did a ton of running around and watched some friends' kids, and our boys adopted a caterpillar named, alternately, Catery or Caty (sound familiar?).

Their day was all sorts of crazy-out-of-whack, so I let them stay up for a little while in a misguided attempt to wear them out. We drew some pictures, played in the living room, read some stories, watched some videos of actors reading bedtime stories, and probably a half dozen other activities. I told the boys they had to say goodbye to Catery and release him outside. This sent them into terrible despair. There was much wailing. After about 45 minutes of intense negotiations, we finally arrived at the position of letting Catery sleep on the front patio outside his mason jar... with several notes the boys wrote to him, most of which were tiny, caterpillar-sized.

They finally got to bed around 10:00 -- two and a half hours after they usually are. One might suspect, then, that they'd sleep in a bit. Not so. Around 7:00, I heard Reed come to the realization that Catery was outside, and he immediately bolted for the front door, opened it and went outside, frantically looking for him. And he found him on one of the steps. How fortuitous! So this morning, the boys were taking turns gently handling Catery (Elissa would be so proud).

What is the appropriate color tie to go with your caterpillar?

Reed was so excited to be playing with his dear old friend that he could hardly stay still -- which is why I couldn't get a particularly great picture of him. But he dressed up for it, anyway, wearing one of my ties.

Beginning (or rather, continuing) to simplify

When we left Clearwater, we had a house that was nearly 3000 square feet, which, I hate to admit, is more than 20% larger than the average single family home size for the year it was built. We moved to Seattle after purging a huge amount of stuff. Now we're in a house that is nearly 1400 square feet. Still I see things all over the house we don't use. I aim to fix that.

Last weekend, Andrea and I went through our closets and dressers. Currently, each of the four of us has a dresser that is basically full of clothes, and Andrea and I have clothes in the closet. I recently donated my two suits, one of which I hadn't worn in seven years; the other I wore exactly one time two (or was it three?) years ago.

What resulted from our brief trip through our clothes was a burgeoning pile of clothes in one of three varieties: "this doesn't fit" or "I don't like" or "I don't wear for some reason."

We also went through our CD collection. You remember CDs -- those things that came out 31 years ago? Now that we each have a smart phone and a laptop, I figured there's no reason to keep any CDs except maybe for road trips. (Unfortunately, my car doesn't have an auxiliary input.) So we donated those to the Seattle Public Library.

One of the albums I donated was The Aeroplane Flies High, my Smashing Pumpkins box set that I was careful to never listen to, lest I scratch the CDs. And one of the shirts I donated was my SP Zero shirt. Andrea looked at me funny when I put The Aeroplane Flies High into the donate pile.

"Don't you want to keep that?" she asked. I shook my head. "Are you sure? You love that band."

I've become quite firmly of the opinion that entirely too much stuff is held onto for sentimental reasons or for just-in-case reasons. And as I get rid of more and more excess junk from my life, I've found it actually very relieving to be rid of it. It opens up the space in our smaller house. It requires less mental processing to acknowledge and think about the things that are there. It takes less physical work, too, as we don't have to clean up, care for, work around those items.

We've got big plans for the future. Those plans don't involve an excess of stuff, and it's better to get rid of them now.

Nothing lasts forever. Almost nothing.

This morning as +Andrea was dropping me off at work, I pointed out to Jacob and Reed the hotel that is being demolished to make way for one of Amazon's three new buildings:

Jacob asked a great question: Do buildings not last forever?

I explained to him why this particular building was being demolished. The company I work for bought the land and the hotel because they want the land so they can build a tall building for people to work in. In order to put the new building up, they had to take the old one down.

So no, buildings don't last forever. Cars don't. Nothing lasts forever. Not even people last forever. Then he had this amazing response that has me still beaming. He said, "Dad, I know something that lasts forever." 

"What?" I asked.

"Numbers."

Maybe to him, this was a random idea he threw out. Maybe he had a deep thought here. At least to me, this is an incredibly abstract, mature concept. In fact, I just read an interesting blog post a few days ago about the importance of numbers to emptiness in Buddhist philosophy and how John von Neumann - a "founder" of computer science - demonstrated that numbers can be bootstrapped in the absence of anything physical.

In other words, numbers exist in emptiness -- forever.

The Ninja and the Photographer

Our boys have taken to being ninjas, covert moves and all. So much so that today, I made them masks out of my old Perl shirt, cutting eye holes and trying to fit them as best as I reasonably could given my lack of expertise in sewing. Here's Jacob holding an empty spool from when I was toiling over thread and needle. I think he said it was his ninja bomb:

Not at all weird.

Hiding from Mom.

While I was getting Jacob's ninja hood set and taking the above picture, I noticed Reed grabbed my camera and started playing with that.

My boys on their very different life tracks, neither of which, apparently, involve shirts.

So I let him take my picture:

While I took his:

Pictures of people taking pictures.

This was all before 9:00am or so. We spent the rest of the day going to Discovery Park, organizing the storage room (and purging quite a bit of stuff we don't need), playing, and even getting my motorcycle towed to Seattle Used Bikes. It's in rough shape, so I'm calling in the big guns, which is to say, anyone that knows more than "gas goes in the tank, engine goes vroom, brakes make it stop."

How would you prepare for Groundhog Day?

The other day was Groundhog Day, which got me thinking about the movie of the same name, which is one of my favorites. The film never tells us how long Phil is stuck in his time loop, but the director thought maybe 10 years and the screenplay author thought maybe 30-40 years or even as much as thousands of years. They intentionally avoided presenting the dark side of being caught in a (potentially) infinite loop, though that would probably make for a very interesting horror or thriller movie.

Groundhog Day has even been called "the most spiritual film of our time," praised by some Catholics as a representation of purgatory and by Buddhists for its telling of karma and rebirth.

Had Phil Connors known he was doomed to repeat the same day over and over again, I wonder what he would have done to prepare. So as a pointless thought experiment, here are my musings on what I would do if I knew it was coming, assuming one day to get ready. (By the way, I'd love to hear what others would do in such a situation.)

First off, things I would not do: basically anything that would leave me regretting "yesterday" for the next ten years. No getting drunk the night before, no staying up late to see if anything interesting happens at midnight, no run-ins with the law that would doom me to ten years in a holding cell, no petty fights with Andrea the night before. You get the idea.

So what would I do?

• If my Groundhog Day falls on a work day, I'd take that day off. I'm not spending the next ten years getting a call from my boss asking if I'm okay or if I'm coming in.
• Get supplies. I wouldn't want to run to the grocery store every day for milk if I didn't have to, so let's stock up on all the necessities. And because I'm sure cereal will get boring quickly, having enough ingredients to make a host of dishes is also important. Salt, flour, sugar, milk, eggs, and so on.
• I'd need a reasonable amount of cash on hand. Maybe a few hundred dollars. Sure, credit cards will still work just fine, but there's no lack of use for cash. Stop by the bank for a handful of various denominations.
• Get the house in order. Go through, clean the place up, dust, vacuum, wash and put away dishes. Make sure there's a full roll of paper towels handy, a clean hand towel in the kitchen and bathroom, a new roll of TP, and enough soap, shampoo, and so on. Along these same lines, the car's gas tank should be filled to the top and cleaned out. Who wants to spend the next ten years driving around in a car that has crumbs all over and needs to be filled up after 20 minutes of driving? And as of right now, my motorcycle is on the fritz, so maybe I'd rent a nice new bike for a day.
• Get myself in order. Shave, shower, get to bed at a reasonable time. Despite knowing I'm about to be stuck repeating the same day and all it entails -- weather, traffic, possibly crabby kids, and so on -- I'd like to think a bit of relaxation the night before would reduce cortisol and generally make for a better tomorrow.

It all seems pretty tame, doesn't it? But in my mind, all these little annoyances would really add up over time.

A more interesting question is: what am I going to do for the next ten or forty years? In Groundhog Day, as I recall, Phil learned about French literature, how to play the piano, and he learned everything about everyone in Punxsutawney. Seeing as how I tend to be a fiend for trying and learning new things, there are plenty of things I'd love to spend nearly limitless time doing, including but not limited to:

• Playing guitar
• Speaking a foreign language. On my list are one or more Scandinavian languages and Japanese.
• Improving my parkour.
• Meditating more regularly.

Somehow, this comic seems particularly relevant.

How would you prepare for your own personal Groundhog Day?