Here are some photos from the last two months. You can see the complete album here.
A children's theater came to town a month or so ago. It was an interesting setup: they ran auditions at the beginning of the week, rehearsed all week and performed on Friday and Saturday. Nadine played one of the Merry Band in a production of Robin Hood (she's the left-most in the back row).
I missed the Easter egg decorating but apparently the kids had fun. We tried Nadine's method of blowing out the eggs first so you don't get that horrible boiled egg smell permeating through the house.
The Easter egg hunt at the park was also a success.
For Spring Break, we went to Seattle to visit Nathan and Monica and some friends we met while living in Kansas.
Monica suggested we visit the Fremont Bridge Troll, a concrete sculpture under a bridge. The troll is gripping a VW Bug in its hand.
Jeremiah and Nathan got along really well. Jeremiah was begging for Nathan to play with him every minute of the day.
Kayla and the kids went up the Space Needle while Madeleine and I strolled around the grounds.
The boys were so happy to play with their friends. Our friends have one boy and four girls, and I think he was glad to have Hyrum come visit.
On the way out of town we stopped by the LDS Temple and had a walk around the grounds.
The boys were glad to be home. A couple of days ago we had the neighbor kids over to play in the sandbox. The weather has finally warmed up and Spring is on its way!
We spent a long weekend in Seattle. On Friday it snowed all day, and (surprisingly for this time of year) the snow stuck to the ground overnight. Saturday we had a morning of decent weather, then heavy rain. The last few days were much better, cool with sunshine.
We stayed with some friends in Lynnwood and I went on several bike rides. We did the obligatory spring break visits: Space Needle, Science Center, Pike Place. We also visited some interesting landmarks, including Gasworks Park and the Fremont Bridge Troll. This was Nadine's first trip to a city since she first landed in New York last August, so it was a big deal. Lots of shopping! I got zero homework done, and felt good about it. The kids had a great time playing with friends and visiting Uncle Nathan and Aunt Monica.
One of my tasks while in the big city was to buy a bicycle for my trip to Denmark this July. I have a conference to attend for my MBA program, and the week before the conference I plan to cycle and camp in one of the world's most bicycle-friendly countries. I have a solid road bike, but wanted to get something more appropriate to touring and the possibility of the occasional unpaved road. The airlines, in an attempt to shore up revenues under rising fuel prices, have jacked up the fees to transport bicycles (Northwest charges $150 each way). I worked out the math and came up with three options: buy a bicycle and transport it, rent a bike in Denmark, or get a folding bicycle that would fit in a suitcase (and thus avoid airline fees).
I went with option #3, which at first blush seems a little strange. I wasn't familiar with folding bikes at all and thought they were something of a gimmick. However, renting and shipping were both unappealing because I am basically throwing that money away, when with a folder I have something to keep at the end of the trip. I did my research and found several options that are appropriate for touring and that would still fit in airline-approved luggage.
There are just a handful of companies that build decent folding bikes for touring, in descending order of quality and price: Moulton, Bike Friday, Birdy, and Dahon. Since this is my first folding bike I had no intention of plunking down $3,000 on a Moulton. I opted for a mass-market Dahon MU P8 which cost about $650 with racks and fenders.
My wife laughed when she first saw a photo of the bike, but after checking them out at a Seattle bike shop she agreed it would work well. Despite the 20" wheels, the bike has a great feel. Best of all, it's a simple and straightforward machine that you can take anywhere. I ordered from a shop in New York and should be able to take it on its first spin sometime next week.
We had my mom, sister and brother up for Easter this year. It was beautiful and sunny the day before, but Easter was cold with a mixture of snow and rain all day. Below is some video footage of the family.
The girls are out of town this weekend, so I spent the day with my two sons. It turned into a beautiful spring day with huge white clouds and sunshine reflecting on the snowy mountains. We turned a corner of our patio into a sandbox using some landscape blocks left over from our wall project. The truck, which has been buried under a layer of snow for the entire winter, took a while to start (I forgot to unhook the battery last fall). We finally got going this afternoon and drove to a forest road where a huge sand bank is exposed. I shoveled about a square yard of north Idaho sand for our new sandbox while the kids ran around. It was really a great find... clean, natural sand with absolutely nothing intermixed. When we got everything put together the boys spent an hour digging and arguing about who owned which part of the sandbox. All in all, a success!
Friday night I went down to Spokane to see my mom, who has been busy with her estate sale. She had an incredible turnout the first day, and when I arrived most of my dad's stuff had been sold. I did have a chance to walk through the shop and think about dad and all the memories associated with each remaining item. It surprised me how a simple object can bring back a flood of thoughts and associations. It's strange that the most important memories of our lives can be so well defined and remembered by association to trivial physical objects. Walking through dad's shop I can still see him in there, puttering around and looking for a misplaced tool in a sea of mechanical detritus. In the last few years some of my best moments with him were out in the shop or in the garden, talking about things we shared in common. I'll miss him. And, ironically, I'll miss the junk that reminds me of him.
I've recently be re-introduced to the world of fifth-grade math, thanks to my cost accounting class. When was the last time you looked at a story problem? My team member and I spent two hours last night poring over problem sets from our textbook. Here's a flavor of what my course offers in the way of accounting problems for the MBA student.
"Jane and John decide to start a lemonade stand. They offer three products: Products A, B, and C. Jane buys lemonade powder for 3 cents a pound. John buys pre-stirred lemonade at a dollar a liter. Jane buys lemonade on a cash basis, John on an accrual basis. Using the actual absorption cost system, calculate to the milligram Jane and John's sales and productivity given that weather is 10 degrees cooler than normal and the cost of lemonade increases based on the consumer price index, minus exchange rate adjustments for imports from Australia. Note that Jane speaks only pig Latin so all communications with John must be done via braille cards."
This kind of problem actually has a solution, and if you spend about two hours cooking up assumptions and allocating costs, you can come up with a defensible answer. It's just that my brain has been programmed by my Protestant capitalist ethic to recoil in horror every time I see work that adds zero value and takes an infinite amount of time to complete.
So I ended up doing something I've never done before. I looked at the syllabus and calculated how much my grade would go down if I didn't finish every problem. Turns out that a 1% grade hit to avoid 10 hours of work is just about right.
I try not to write too much about my professional life in this blog; I have a hard enough time explaining my work to my wife, let alone everyone else. However, I think it's safe to say that anyone who works in an office and does any kind of analytical work also finds that they spend a lot of time in front of spreadsheets. Thanks to Microsoft, that spreadsheet is very likely Excel.
My introduction to Excel was during my first job out of college as an analyst for Payless ShoeSource. It took about a week in that position for me to realize that a good part of my success depended on my skill using Excel to transform meaningless numbers into actionable business projects. People who knew Excel got promoted, and people who didn't ended up working in HR.
It's no exaggeration to say that I spent the next two years almost wholly devoted to becoming an Excel pro. The great thing about working for a big company is that in the beginning of your career (if it's structured right), most of your time is spent learning. I think during those two years the actual amount of time I spent "working" in the traditional sense was less than 50%. The other half was spent experimenting, building, and rebuilding until I knew Excel and related technologies in and out. Since those days, not much has changed except the venue. Excel continues to be the tool de rigeur for anyone doing even marginally serious analytical work. At my current employer, I've spent a good portion of my time training the next generation of analysts how to master the secrets of Excel and VBA, and it is still the most important indicator of success in our analyst group.
However, anyone who has plumbed the depths of Excel also knows its limitations. Many people try to use Excel for jobs to which databases are much more suited; accordingly, I've had to become an expert in SQL and database design. But the user-side of any analytical tool is still going to be Excel, whether you want it to be or not. I've seen multi-million dollar systems languish because users simply copy and paste the results to Excel for manipulation, then paste them back when they're done massaging the numbers. Excel is simply more flexible than nearly anything you can think of, especially in a world of inflexible, user-unfriendly business software packages.
But Excel can't do everything. I ran into a problem about six months ago. I had built the latest incarnation of our company's item forecasting model in Excel. It was really an amazing tool, full of nuance and flexible to the n-th degree. And incomprehensible to everyone except myself. And, even for an old Excel hand, making any substantial changes required not only an expert knowledge of Excel, but hours of error-checking to find the inevitable problems. The cost of maintaining the model had escalated to where only a few people in the company would even know how to approach fixing an issue. With Excel's help, I had outsmarted myself.
Enter Quantrix. Part of my job is to keep up on the latest technologies that might prove useful for our business. One day I stumbled across Quantrix, and my life has not been the same since. I'm not kidding.
Quantrix does most of the things Excel does. But the fundamental premise is much different. For one thing, developing analytical models takes about half the time as Excel, and the time savings increases the more complex the model becomes. Need to add scenarios? Just add a new dimension. Changing the formula for net sales? Change it once, and it propogates throughout the whole model. Need to build a relationship between departments and sub-departments? Add another matrix, and Quantrix remembers the relationship and applies it to every formula. It's brilliant.
Now I'm in selling mode. Here are some key features:
No more two-dimensional spreadsheets. Add as many dimensions as you like, and give them real names like "Product" and "Time".
Pivot dimensions in rows and columns just like a pivot table. But it's still editable!
Write formulas once, and watch them applied to thousands of cells. Errors are immediately pointed out to you.
Create multiple views of the same data, and all remain editable and linked together.
Since discovering Quantrix, I use it more than Excel. For me, that's a change on the level of emigrating to a new country, or becoming a Mac user. It's revolutionary.
A couple of weeks ago a friend at work invited me to play racquetball for the first time. We have a racquetball court at work but I'd never thought to use it before. I've been playing 3 times a week since and love it.
I think the main attraction is hitting this very dynamic ball over and over... it's a stress reliever. Just the action of hitting something is so out of the ordinary. And it's a great sport to practice alone (which always appeals to me). It's like a high speed game of ping pong where you can't lose the ball.
We're experiencing a record year for snow in north Idaho. Total snowfall has been more than 100 inches, and we've had about 2 feet on the ground for quite a while now. Every parking lot is edged with mountains of plowed snow and walkways are beginning to look more and more like trenches every day. Of course this means we've had excellent sledding and skiing all winter. Our neighbors graciously allow us to tramp up their hill and sled down into our back yard, and it is a perfect sized hill for easily-tired children.
After a couple of months of winter I usually start to cook up some new ideas for the spring. One of these is raising rabbits. Ever since I bought my Mad Bomber rabbit-fur hat, I have been hankering after a herd that I could call my own. Tonight I am picking up two female rabbits, one a grey lop (short-hair) and one a white Angora (long-hair). The grey lop will, if my plans work out, serve as the maitron of a long line of rabbits raised for their pelts. The Angora's offspring will be luckier, since you just shear the wool (I'm hoping to make some felt products).
