Me
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My name is James. I grew up in a large family in the Pacific Northwest. I've lived in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, Kansas, and Russia and love to travel. So far I've been able to visit Eastern Europe, Central America, Puerto Rico, France, and (of course) Canada and Mexico. Asia is next on my list.
I have too many hobbies and interests to count. High on the list are gardening, singing, learning languages, messing about with computers, and biking, paddling and hiking the great outdoors. I currently live with my wife and three children in far north Idaho (think Canada) where I am a business manager for Coldwater Creek, a women's retailer.
July 12th, 2001
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.
March 10th, 2008
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.
March 6th, 2008
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.
Check it out.
March 1st, 2008
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.
February 24th, 2008
The last few months have been full of thoughts of my dad, who passed away last fall. It's interesting how his death has affected me and my outlook on life. While I cannot honestly call myself a philosopher, I have attempted over the last 5 years or so to delve into my own beliefs and try to formulate my own philosophy of the world. As many who know me well can attest, this has involved a lot of change in my religious orientation and my attitude toward the idea of God.
I think the main thing that religion can impart is a strong sense of hope. Especially in my Mormon upbringing, death marked a sad but ultimately temporary separation. For those that believe, God will make everything work out for the best, if we only have the patience to wait. I know this gives a lot of comfort to many people and is probably one of the strongest arguments for the religious life.
With my dad's passing I found myself without this traditional religious comfort. Many people would find this very depressing (and have told me so); I suppose this is because many people don't have enough experience with atheism or atheists to know how they might deal with death's finality. For my own part, I find myself more and more understanding this event through Buddhist teachings about individuality. Perhaps an analogy will help explain.
If I see a cloud, I say, "there is a cloud". It is distinct from other clouds by its shape, contours, color and position in the sky. However, each moment that passes the cloud changes. At first the changes are very small, and I can still identify the overall shape and color of the cloud. After an hour, the cloud is gone, and in its place are more clouds. Am I right to bemoan the loss of the cloud? The matter from which the cloud consisted has not been destroyed. Rather, it was my characterization of the cloud as an individual thing that caused my suffering at its passing. The cloud never existed; what I saw was a mischaracterization, the temporary manifestation of something that is really a part of everything.
Christians might see in this analogy a reference to the separation of body and soul that happens at death. Being a materialist (in the sense of believing that the natural world is the only world), I might say that my sadness at my father's death is caused not by his passing, but by my misunderstanding of the actual nature of human life. Was the soul of my father truly a thing distinct from nature? Of what did my father consist?
This question helps me realize that people are not so much substance as they are cause and effect. My dad had experiences that made him distinct from other people, but he was also constantly changing as his experiences changed. The dad I remember from my early childhood is not the same man I remember in his last hours of pain and sickness. Similarly, he did not consist solely of his body or soul, but of his effect on others, and the memories that I still carry from his life. His existence was not concentrated in his physical body, but was diffused throughout the world, both before and after his death.
I'm certainly no expert on Buddhism or any other religion for that matter, and the idea that the "self" doesn't actually exist in individuals is very difficult to think about (namely because it is impossible to think about anything without characterizing it as something distinct from other things). Perhaps my beliefs are a bit mystical, but they have helped me find understanding regarding my dad's passing and my own reaction to it.
January 31st, 2008
My first semester of grad school is drawing to a close, and it's been the most hectic three months of my entire life. I guess I shouldn't complain, since it has also been very enjoyable, but I am looking forward to a vacation. This week I am working with my team to finish up our semester integrative project. We present that on Friday and then our last class session is the week after Thanksgiving.
Currently the biggest dilemma regarding my MBA program is choosing a topic for my thesis / final project. My current ideas are pretty vague, with words like "technology", "international", and "non-profit" floating about with little in the way of actual plans. This is becoming a problem, since I need to have any travel scheduled by January or February in order to have time over the summer to actually work on the thesis. I'm finding that an executive MBA is a little more challenging in the sense that I don't have three months for a huge internship in the summer. This restricts the kinds of topics I can choose, since any really involved research I do has to be stuffed into two weeks of vacation from my job.
Back in August when I brainstormed over possible topics, I realized that if a foreign language was going to be part of the experience, it would have to be Russian. My French is too shaky for even intermediate business terminology, and would require a heavy commitment in time to get up to snuff. My Russian, which I haven't actively spoken since a research trip in 2001, had accumulated some serious cobwebs, but I knew that the grammar and vocabulary were buried somewhere, just waiting to be brought back to light. The problem was finding a tutor. When Kayla and I were planning our vacation to France, I hired a Belgian friend to come to our house and work with me for about two months prior to the trip. This time, I resorted to the Internet. The results have been encouraging. Each week I have a 45-minute lesson with a tutor I found through VerbalPlanet.com. For seven euro per lesson, she works me through the painful process of remembering a language I once spoke more or less fluently. We use Skype to talk for free and she posts a list of vocabulary to review each week. After about ten lessons I can finally converse without stumbling on every word, and feel reasonably confident that by the summer I will be back in decent shape. Assuming, of course, that I end up doing anything related to Russian.
November 11th, 2007
So I'm having this dream. I'm back at college, riding my bike up the hill to an early morning class. A single-strap bookbag threatens to strangle me as I stand up to crank the pedals, my legs burning, hands tugging backwards on the handlebars. My eyes are bleary from a late night studying business cases and eating cheap pastries pulled from the grocery store discount rack. I'm thinking about the litany of classes waiting ahead, and how there's little chance I'll be able to sneak a nap in between the cracks of my frenetic schedule. I finally pedal up to the bike rack. I drop the bag, lock the bike, then grab my stuff and head for the door of the building.
First order of business: breakfast. Strangely, my usual 6 a.m. bowl of Corn Squares has been replaced by a catered continental spread, replete with poppy seed bread and unpalatable granola smothered in yogurt. My fellow classmates seem oddly grown up, queuing in front of the breakfast donuts and chatting about world events. Something doesn't seem right....
Then it hits me. I'm no longer 19. This isn't the college I attended as an undergraduate. But what am I doing here? What bizarre sequence of events has banished me back to the academic world from whence I came, five years ago, eager to experience the corporate maze?
Eventually I awake out of my fog to realize that I chose to be here at 6:30 a.m. I chose to go back to school. What madness was this?! Goodbye free time! Goodbye family outings! Hello homework! Enter exams!
August 17th, 2007
For most of the years I attended Brigham Young University, I was among the most conservative of the Mormon school's clean-shaven youngsters. Now, looking back as one who passed through the veil of BYU's brand of conformity and beyond into a world of more independent thought, stories from BYU provide no end of amusement.
Two days ago BYU's student newspaper posted a story about students who were caught perpetrating illegal acts by BYU's ever vigilant Honor Code Office. The Honor Code folks were tipped off by photos from Facebook, the online social networking site.
My favorite account was of six female students who were turned in to the Honor Code office after they posted photos of themselves hanging out in their own dorm rooms "dressed immodestly". (At BYU, dressing immodestly often consists of shorts above the knee and sleeveless tops). According to one of the students involved:
She didn't consider the pictures bad or immoral, but was surprised when approximately 50 pages of pictures portraying the girls dressed immodestly were given to BYU's Honor Code Office with a note reading, "Thought you should know."
I can just see the consternation on the Honor Code official's face when he reviews these photos... of students in their own dorm rooms! So now apparently it's illegal to dress immodestly in your own bedroom at BYU. (laugh, choke).
Ah, BYU. Wish I was there. Read the original story here.
August 2nd, 2007
Saturday morning I woke up with my back covered in what looked like black fly bites. I immediately suspected that some renegade insects had penetrated the defenses of our house and feasted on my flesh while I slept. However, beyond some paranoid swatting at the lone fly I did find buzzing about the kitchen, I forgot the incident. Then Kayla took me up to the Moyie River to kayak. It was a great trip--about an hour and a half from near the border station at Eastport down to the Moyie Crossing picnic area. However, at the end of the float I realized that my legs were covered in welts--just like the "fly" bites I had earlier. I was justly outraged and wondered vaguely if I had contracted some sort of parasite.
Since Saturday it has been like a detective's mystery, trying to sort out the pieces of my new "disease". After several experiments I determined that the welts were caused by an insect, probably wind-borne, which attacked me within minutes of stepping outside the house. Liberal applications of DEET and complete clothing coverage helped, but if there was so much as a button hole not covered and sufficiently sprayed, the little buggers found their way in and began wreaking havoc. Welts sprang up all over my body, wherever the insects found passage.
Monday evening I decided to offer my body up to science in one last-ditched experiment. I would mow the lawn (a two-hour job) with no insect repellant and wearing only shorts and a tee shirt. This was my way of plumbing the depths of the problem, to see how nasty the critters could be. I had also decided that I couldn't stay indoors the rest of the summer, and that this would be my way of standing up to Mother Nature's assaults.
Well, the bugs won that engagement hands down. When I returned to the house my upper body was completely covered in red welts, big bumps the size of quarters merging around smaller bites that wove a tell-tale path from my belt line straight up to my neck. I conceded defeat and called a dermatologist.
Luckily, before I could shell out hundreds of dollars in medical fees, I began reading on the internet to try to self-diagnose. Based on my research, I believe that the culprit is some form of mite (tiny arachnids like chiggers or miniscule ticks). We are all being nibbled on constantly by various mites and other invisible creatures, but my body was having an allergic reaction to either a new pest or an unusual population explosion of the mite. The hives on my skin were my body's overreaction to the mite's nibbling. So, Tuesday morning I bought some strong antihistamine (Claritin), popped a tiny tablet and... was immediately healed. It's actually quite miraculous in my opinion. I go from complete misery to absolutely no sign of welts or bites anywhere, within 24 hours.
It's been like a rebirth. I spent all evening outdoors tonight, soaking up the beautiful summer and enjoying everything with new eyes. Being stuck indoors is akin to a serious disability for me... and I've been spared. I can't express how grateful I am for the miracle of modern medicine.
July 11th, 2007
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