Seeping Matter

This month marks one year since I bought my 2003 Nissan 350Z (heretofore “the Z”).  I’ve learned some interesting things about it, about cars, and about myself this past year.

First off, I bought the Z because I like hot cars.  I like horsepower, speed, handling, and great looks.  I didn’t buy the Z to impress anyone or to try to be cool.

I know that sounds like an excuse, but after a number of comments from friends hither and yon, I really did think inwardly about why I bought that car.  I can honestly say that I did it for myself, not to impress people or try to be someone I’m not.  I’m relieved to find that out.

That being said, one of the first things I learned about the Z was this:  You get noticed.  People look as you drive by them on the freeway or as they drive by you.  They will comment, “Nice car, man,” or some such, when you park near them in the parking lot, or you’ll catch them walking around your car looking when you come out of the convenience store.

Not most people, but some people.  This never happened with my Grand Prix.

Another thing I noticed:  It’s kind of a chick car.  I had it parked there at the Roosevelt Car Show next to my brother’s Mustang GT and I spent a fair part of the day sitting there while people walked by.  When people were walking up, girls would walk to the Z and guys would walk to the Mustang.  Guys would look at them both and comment to each other on how they liked the Mustang better; girls would comment to each other on how they liked the Z better.  In the latter case, some variant of the word “cute” was overheard a number of times.  This was pretty much a universal thing.

So if a Mustang is more of a guy’s car, maybe I should’ve bought a Mustang instead.  Except my wife really likes going out on dates in the Z.

A good thing I learned:  If you buy a sports car, you need some time to get used to it.  Learning where the clutch engage point is, how long it takes for the engine and transmission to warm up, how strong the brakes are, etc. took a while.  The friction limits for turning are particularly important.  I’ve almost gotten myself into trouble trying to turn with too high a g-load.  After a year of driving and about 15000 miles, I’m still learning, so if you buy a sports car, be prepared to settle in and get to know her slowly.

300 horsepower can get you into trouble in a hurry.  This is a long-term relationship, not a fling, so get to be friends first.

Now that I’ve had the Z for a year, I can tell you about some of the bad points:

• The blind spot.  Holy cow, do the 350Zs have a blind spot.  That spot off the left rear corner is completely out of my vision.  This is especially true a) if the sun is shining into the driver side window, or b) if it is dark.  Now you know — 350Zs have a serious blind spot.  If a Z is merging onto the freeway and he cuts you off, just know that he probably can’t see you there and it was most likely unintentional.
• Alignment.  You have to be very careful with a Z’s alignment so you avoid tire problems.  This means I end up having the tires rotated a lot – every 3000-5000 miles.  It’s annoying.
• Expensive repairs.  Since I bought it about a year ago, I’ve spent over $4000 in repairs.  Here’s what I paid for:
  • $1100 – New tires.
  • $2600 – New fan, water pump, and thermostat.  (Yes, really.)
  • $100 – New battery.
  • $300 – New serpentine belt and tensioner.

Of course, those are minor in comparison to the good points, some of which are:

• Handling.  The Z is like the ideal child:  Whatever I tell it to do, it does.  Immediately.  Turn here?  Okay.  Stop here?  No problem.  Jump into that small opening in traffic?  Yes Daddy.
• Power.  The Z has a weight-to-horsepower ratio of just over 11 (lower numbers are better).  Compare that to 19 for my wife’s Durango and my old Grand Prix, or 18 for my CRX.  Or compare it to 11 for a Mustang GT, 7.5 for a Corvette, or 9.2 for a Porsche Cayman S.  The Z can push you back in the seat and as you climb through the gears it just keeps grabbing at the pavement and lunging you forward.  I have no idea how fast it will go.
• Sound.  The Z comes with an excellent sound system:  The Nissan VQ35DE, an awesome 3.5L multi-port-fuel-injected V6 with variable valve timing.  If you romp on it hard enough to cross the variable timing threshold you will be rewarded with an awesome sonic wonder as the engine climbs toward the 6600 RPM redline.  And if you don’t like that sound system, or are in a place where you can’t really experience it, the Kenwood/MTX/Rockford Fosgate setup in my Z is a pretty decent substitute.
• Look and Feel.  It looks awesome from nearly every angle.  It feels awesome when you are sitting inside it.  The ergonomics would make Steve Jobs proud.  And when you strap into those bucket seats and close those high-sided doors, it feels like your car is giving you a big old man-hug.  Sorry, but it is true.

So, am I glad I bought it?

Yes.  And no.  But mostly yes.  I love driving it.  Love love love driving it.  Even when I’m not speeding, which truthfully is most of the time, I really love to drive it.  I love to look at it, and then drive it some more.

I love the thought of owning it.  The reality of owning it is less great.  It’s expensive to maintain.  My other car was fully paid for, and when I sold it there wasn’t a thing wrong with it.  Now, every time I make a payment on the Z or have to get something fixed, I think about how the Grand Prix was running excellent and was fully paid for.  Maybe I should have just stuck with the Grand Prix instead.  Inside my mind, it will forever be running perfect with no flaws.

But it will never be as much fun.

matt Cars 350z, CRX, Introspection

This weekend — tomorrow, actually — is my 20 year High School class reunion, which means I’m, uh, 29.  Again.

As everyone knows, the purpose for Facebook is to help you connect with old friends, like that girl who wouldn’t go with you to Homecoming, you know, to see if her life is in the crapper and she got what she deserved for snubbing you.  So I’ve been using Facebook for it’s designated purpose, and I’ve found a bunch of the people I went to high school with, who, inexplicably, all seem to have great lives despite the fact that I pretty much never had a date in high school.

Since the reunion is tomorrow, many of them have been asking me whether I’m coming to the reunion.  When I say, “No,” they want to know the reason, and so I tell them, “Because.”  This reasoning seems to work well when I’m explaining to my son why he has to mow the lawn, but it doesn’t seem to be working with the old high school friends.

So, in order to avoid explaining this a hundred times, I decided to just write a simple blog post about it.

I actually alluded to this in another post some time ago, but basically the issue is this:

I’m not a fan of high-school Matt.

I’m a fan of perpetually-29 Matt.  That guy is happy with himself, he’s confident, he makes loud noises on a guitar when he feels like it, drives a pretty cool car, mostly wears T-shirts to work, and has great taste in music and movies.  He’s got a wonderful wife and a great family that are awesome to hang out with.  He’s a pretty darn good software engineer and he doesn’t even feel nerdy about it (well, not TOO nerdy).  He’s so dang funny that it is sinful.  He feels free to be himself pretty much all the time and enjoys his life.

He’s not like high-school Matt at all.  High school Matt was ignored because he wasn’t athletic and ridiculed because he was smart.  High school Matt carried labels given him by other people that worked so well even HE thought that’s what he was like.  He didn’t feel good about himself for who he was and instead kept trying to pretend he was someone he wasn’t and fit in with a crowd of people that he didn’t fit with and date the girls who weren’t interested in dating him.  Even worse, he ignored the crowd he could have fit with and the girls he could have dated instead.  He was a poser and a fake, someone who didn’t value his own abilities and instead kept trying to make himself into something he wasn’t.

Whenever I’m around high school people again, high-school Matt tries to come out.  I don’t like high-school Matt.  He makes me feel ashamed of myself, not only of my past but of who I am now, almost as though who I am today is not good enough even though I’m quite happy with it.  He makes me act like someone I’m not, someone I don’t like, someone like him.  So I try to keep him hidden.

And the best way to keep him hidden is to avoid situations where he insists on coming out.  And if I go to the reunion, he will insist.

I’ve really enjoyed catching up with those friends on Facebook and hearing about their lives today.  I’m not really interested in letting high-school Matt come out to feel like a loser again in person.

So, thanks anyway, but I won’t be going.  Don’t be offended.  Or, take offense, whatever, I don’t care.  High-school Matt is obsessed with what you think of him, but that dude is gone.  The current version wants to be your friend, but only at face value.  Otherwise, nevermind.

matt Rants Introspection

I have a good friend named Chris Cooper.  (No, not the actor.)  I worked for Chris for many years when he was Director of Developer Services at Novell; now, Chris is a partner with UV Partners, a venture capital firm in Salt Lake City.

Working for Coop (he goes by Coop, not Chris; calling him Chris seems weird) was a very important educational experience for me, primarily because Coop is a businessman, not a technologist, by background.  Because of this, Chris taught me things about the software business that no other manager or director that I’ve worked for has been able to teach me.  In particular, Coop helped me understand many of the reasons why Novell made some of the decisions they made, and why they didn’t make others I thought they should.  Knowing this doesn’t mean that they are right, but it certainly helped me to gain a different perspective.

Some time ago I had the opportunity to meet Coop for lunch in Salt Lake City.  I asked him how he was liking his work and he gushed about how much he loved his job.  Then he admitted, “You know, I never would have even considered this as a career opportunity for me, let alone would I have thought I would like it so much.”  He briefly covered his background — education in business, joined Novell as a sales representative, established key relationships with others, always tried to execute in his assigned role — and then this opportunity played out for him.  We discussed how odd it is that as young people we fret so much about which major to choose and which college to go to and which classes to take and which job opportunity to pursue, almost as though we think that the sum of of these decisions is going to head us down a career freeway, at high speed towards a specific destination, with no exits or detours or scenic byways, when in fact many, many people end up somewhere completely different from what they had planned.

I mentioned this later to a long-time friend who had spent many years in his chosen profession as a physical therapist before making a career change to sell educational technology to schools (yeah, I know!).  Of course he could really identify with this.  He said that often we think of our career not only as a path, but as a freeway like I just mentioned.  But in fact, he said, our career is more like a waterway.  It might be a little stream, or a large river; it might be straight or twisty; it might be fast-moving and exiting, full of whitewater rapids, or it might be slow and steady, if somewhat boring.

He continued the analogy by saying that as you float along the waterway you’ve chosen, you might eventually realize, “Uh, I don’t think this is going where I want to go anymore.”  Maybe it started out going the direction you wanted, but quickly or gradually turned a different way.  Maybe you thought it was heading one direction, only to find that it actually wasn’t heading where you thought it was.  Or maybe it is still going where you once thought it was, but you’ve changed your mind about what you want.  Clearly, if you want to end up where you intended to go, you’ll have to pull your raft out of the waterway and choose another one.

That’s why I say, your career path probably isn’t.  It probably is a waterway.

This is why this post over the weekend by Seth Godin really stood out to me.  I’ve got a big extended family with lots of younger people (siblings, siblings-in-law, cousins, etc.) for me to give advice to that they can quickly ignore.  I’ve seen many of them struggle with this.  They choose a major because it is easy instead of choosing a major because it is interesting, or they don’t finish their degree at all, or they don’t even make choices in college or a career because they are afraid to commit their whole life to it.  I believe in the value of education, but sometimes I’ve wondered why it matters at all if your career is so much left to chance?

Seth’s post identifies the link for me.  Education should be preparing you to take the choices as they become available to you.  You might have a career endpoint in mind, but you can’t be so in love with that endpoint that you won’t consider opportunities and alternatives that become available to you along the way.  How do you even know you will like that endpoint anyway?  Fretting about choosing the right endpoint is pointless.  Your career isn’t a path, it is a waterway.  You don’t know whether the waterway leads where you want or not; you choose one based on the best available knowledge and judgment you have at the time.  You can always get out and choose another one.  So just get in and get started!

matt Business, Education Career, Editorial, Introspection, Novell

I mentioned some time ago that we are doing the Dave Ramsey dance this year. I cannot tell you how many e-mails people have sent me, all saying basically the following:  ”Matt!  I mean, Mr. Ryan!  How is the Dave Ramsey dance going?  We’re dying here!”

I cannot tell you this, because, inexplicably, none of these e-mails actually arrived in my inbox.

Still, I’m sure they are out there, floating around in the interwebs, looking for a home.  There are questions that need to be answered, and someone’s gonna have to do it.  And since I’m the only one authorized to post on this blog, I guess I will have to do it.

Most interesting comment thusfar was when Amber said, “This really bites.”  I agreed readily.  But after I thought about it for a bit, I added, “The thing is, though, it’s funny how we blame the pain on getting out of debt, when that isn’t the cause of the pain.  The cause of the pain is getting into debt in the first place.”  Weird.

The first step for us was establishing the emergency fund.  Ramsey says that once you decide to start the dance, something unkind will happen to you that will tempt you to quit.  For us, it was suddenly needing to replace the tires on my Z.  I really wanted to leave that emergency fund alone and I was really tempted to just put all of that expense on a credit card.  But instead we used the emergency fund for what we created it for, to pay for an expense that we didn’t plan, to keep us from accumulating more debt.

I realized soon after how important the emergency fund really is.  It isn’t just about avoiding more debt.  As I type this, about 45 days after having bought the new tires, I can look back and see that what mattered, more than anything else, was knowing as we came through that setback that we hadn’t lost any ground on our progress toward paying off the debt.  That was big for us.

I remember distinctly one day contemplating this on the way to work, wondering if this is ever going to end.  We’d had a major family event in January that cost a lot of the money we would have put toward debt, then in February we had to replace the tires on the Z.  I wondered if the initial progress we’d had was just an illusion; it seemed at the current rate we’d never be done.

Then I remembered Uncle Sam owed me some money.

I quickly did the math.  I realized the difference the tax return would make, not only in attacking the deficit, but also in monthly cash flow.  Then I went on through the rest of the year and saw the debts just falling away.

It’s too early to say, but I wonder if the first part of the dance is the hardest part.  You know, the part where you think you’ll never, ever learn the steps.  Then suddenly, something happens and you make some major progress.  Suddenly you think maybe you’ll learn this dance after all.

Time will tell, but after gutting it out and having some recent wins, it seems like things are a bit brighter.

matt Finance 350z, Introspection

One of the big things that attracted me to Microsoft is what I’d heard about their culture.  During my interview loop, the interviewers explained to me what Microsoft does to try to build the careers of each person that works there.  And I think it is fairly common knowledge that at Microsoft the communication is direct, clear, and open.  Not disrespectful, mind you, or at least it isn’t supposed to be.  But if your managers — or even your peers, for that matter — think you’ve made a mistake, or that your approach is wrong, or that you aren’t being effective enough, they will question and challenge you.  And you’re expected to do the same, even with your managers.

It’s very refreshing, especially in a social culture that is so different.  I don’t know if it is a Utah thing or a Mormon thing, but in most groups around here people don’t communicate this way.  Companies I’ve worked for in the past usually pretended to care about my opinion but didn’t, or really weren’t interested in what I had to say.  Or they would openly make it clear that they actively believed that my opinion was worthless.  I yearned for a place that valued every opinion, and I found it at Microsoft.  I love that.

It’s not all roses, though.

Hearing feedback about how to improve at your job isn’t too hard to take.  That’s just stuff like a suggestion about a design pattern that will help you solve a problem you’re facing, or someone pointing out to you that your implementation is not threadsafe and suggesting how to address it.  Even when the feedback urges you a little out of your comfort zone, for example to confront someone about a concern, it isn’t that bad.

It’s much harder when the feedback you get is telling you that you have to change something that is just a part of who you are.

The first type of feedback doesn’t even have to do with you personally.  It’s just coaching on how you do your job.  You aren’t your job (or at least you shouldn’t be).  The second type of feedback might have a little to do with you, but it is more about encouraging you to improve on something you already want to improve on anyway.

The last type is the type I got last week.  I won’t go into any details on it, but the general summary of it is this:  ”There’s a handful of character flaws, inherent in your personality, that you need to overcome in order to move forward in your career.”

Or to rephrase:  I was good enough as I am now to get my current position, but I’m not good enough as I am now to move ahead.

Truth is, we all need to learn to take feedback like that.  It’s all about becoming the best version of ourselves.  Nobody on this earth is perfect, so we all have things to improve on.  But when it isn’t your skillset or your approach but your lifelong self that isn’t good enough, wow.  I’m gonna have to dig deep to learn to deal with that.

matt Rants Introspection, Microsoft

A while back I challenged both of my readers to do something hard this year and mentioned that there were some important, hard things we were going to do this year.  Well, I’m fessin’ up.  One of the hard things we’re going to do this year is get out of debt once and for all.

Well, mostly.  Hopefully.

A few months ago a friend of mine mentioned that he and his wife were reading this book by some guy named Dave Ramsey.  I’ve read a lot of finance books and maybe I’ll even recommend some here one day.  The book sounded interesting so I went and picked it up.  Amber and I have been reading it together.

Then I had that epiphany a couple of months ago.  I realized that I would thank myself for the rest of my life for being willing to tackle such a difficult challenge this year.  I actually started getting excited about getting out of debt, thinking how awesome it would be to overcome this massive challenge and to have so much free cash every month.  I put together a two-page spreadsheet, one containing a budget plan with a leftover total at the bottom, the other containing a list of our debts, the interest rates of each, balances of each, and a debt snowball.  This way I could tweak the budget and see how it would affect the debt snowball.

With a little work and some sacrifice I could see how we could have every one of our debts, except our home, paid off in a year.  Or so.  And, I could even keep the Z.  (Insert big sigh of relief here – whew!)

So we’re doing it.  All in.  We’ll have our first debt paid off within a week or so, and we’ll be moving on already to the next one.

It is really hard.  That’s how I know it will be totally worth it.

matt Finance 350z, Introspection

When was the last time you did something hard?

I don’t mean “hard” as in trying to drive to work in the snow.  I mean something really hard, like earning a college degree or starting a successful side business or losing 20 pounds.

If you’re familiar with the LDS faith you are probably aware that many young LDS men serve a two-year mission when they are about 19 years old; they are certainly expected to.

I teach a Sunday School class comprised of high-school-age youth, and not long ago as I was preparing the lesson I could see that this topic was going to come up.  I thought about my own mission, which I served in southern Spain from 1991 to 1993.  I was preparing to tell them something I’d found to be true about my own mission, which was that although it was very hard to do, I’ve never regretted having done it for an instant.  I know that same statement holds true for pretty much every person I know who’s done it.  And I also have many friends who did not go, and the general consensus among them is regret — regret for not having done it.

I thought about how true that is about many things in life.  I thought about some other hard things I’ve done, like graduating from college, proposing and shipping a controversial product, or raising a family.  It isn’t just that you are ultimately glad that you did those hard things.  When you look back on your life, you realize that a lot of the things that define your life, a lot of those things you are most proud of, were difficult things that you probably didn’t really want to do at the time.

Isn’t it odd how much we resist doing those hard things, even when we know how meaningful those experiences will be later?  I’ve never heard of a person who said, “Yeah, instead of going to college I just wasted five years of my life playing video games all day long in my parent’s basement, and boy am I glad I made that choice.”

This has been a humbling but important realization for me going into 2010.  There are a number of really important, hard things that I need to get started on right now.  I took the opportunity to look ahead and imagine myself five or ten years from now.  I imagined looking back at 2010 as if I had done those hard things.  I thought about how relieved and pleased I’d be that I had chosen to do those hard things back then, and I could imagine how much better my life would be after having done these hard things.  I could also see how my life would be if, instead of doing those hard things, I kept doing things the way I’m doing them now, that is to say, easier but not life-altering.

Having done this introspection, I know now I’ll look back, either way, at 2010.  It will either be the pivotal year when I made the big changes to improve my life, or it will be just another year in my life where I chose the easy road to mediocrity.

So, I’m doing some hard things this year.  Some of them have to do with my career, so you’ll find out about them.  Some of them are personal, so I’ll only talk about them in generalities.  Either way, 2010 will be a year to remember for me.  It’s going to be a hard year, one that I won’t regret.

matt Rants Introspection

For nearly ten years we’ve lived in the shadow of Maple Mountain.

The USGS refers to it as Spanish Fork Peak.  And indeed, if you are looking for information on the Internet about this mountain, that’s the name you should look for.  However, people around these parts call it Maple Mountain, and so do I.  We’ll refer to the highest point as Spanish Fork Peak.

Anyway, having lived here and looked at it for so many years, it only seemed logical that Derrick and I should climb it someday.  So early this year, we set a goal to climb it this summer.  I sold Derrick on it by convincing him that it would be neat to say he’s climbed a mountain.  I had a slightly different motive.  Of course, I wanted to climb it myself.  But my main reason for doing it was to give Derrick a character-building experience.  I felt he needed an opportunity to do something hard, something so challenging that it would break his body down to the point that he’d have to dig past what his body wanted and rely on the will of his spirit and the help of God in order to achieve it.  Experiences like that stay with us and strengthen us forever.

The big day was actually two days, last weekend, August 21 and 22.

Here’s some information about the mountain:

• The elevation at our house is about 5200 feet above sea level.
• The base elevation at the trailhead is 5612 feet.
• The official elevation at the top of Spanish Fork Peak is 10192 feet.
• That gives a total elevation gain for the hike of 4580 feet.
• The distance from the trailhead to the summit is 5.2 miles.
• The average grade (slope) of the climb is 20% — that means you’re going up a foot on average every five feet (about one foot up per full pace).

Here’s a map of the trail, in blue:

This is a pretty good map if you know how to read contour maps.  However, it isn’t really labeled, so I added some:

My friend Greg came with us.  Greg’s done this hike before, and he thinks this is one of the most difficult hikes in Utah, because:

• The trail is rough and uneven, strewn with large rocks and tree roots or loose topsoil for most of the trail
• The trail is steep — as we’ve said already, you rise almost one mile in just over five miles of hiking
• The trail is almost consistently climbing — there is very little opportunity for rest
• There are no sources of water anywhere along the trail — you have to pack all of the water you need

Because there was no water, I brought my own in, about 8 or 9 liters for Derrick and I.

We started up the trail around 6:00 in the evening on August 21, 2009.  The plan was to hike about 2 miles up to about 7100 feet, the first place where the trail has any sort of flat space where you can pitch a tent.

This is pretty much what the trail looks like for the 1 to 1 1/2 miles preceding the campsite (in other words, the bulk of the trail):

It is CONSTANT CLIMBING for that 1 to 1 1/2 miles over terrain like that. There are some neat distractions though, like this wild raspberry we found:

My pack was pretty heavy because I was trying to keep Derrick’s pack light so I was hauling a bit more than my share.  The trail was not only strewn with rocks as shown above, but also had a lot of large steps to climb created by tree roots crossing the trail.  These big steps were really hard for Derrick:  With smaller legs and a backpack hanging off his back, it was hard for him to get up those big steps without falling over backwards.  I caught him and helped him a couple of times.

Hauling that pack up that trail was TOUGH.  I was pretty relieved to finally see the meadow.  Derrick was tired also, but did pretty well.  We got there about 8:00 p.m.  Dinner was rehydrated chicken and rice. I used my awesome new backpacking stove and a sweet mess kit to prepare it. I must’ve been awfully tired. I know the ground I slept on wasn’t real soft or flat, but I slept like a rock anyway.

The next morning, we got up, ate, packed up our stuff, and stashed most of it.  Derrick and I were just going to take the small pack up the hill with a full 2L bladder of water and some energy gels and power bars.  Derrick offered to carry the pack.

Here’s a view of the campsite looking up the trail.   By the time we got to those aspen trees Derrick decided I could carry the pack for the rest of the day.

Here’s a picture of Greg at the campsite.  He looks a lot more chipper than I do.

We headed out of camp about 10:00 a.m.  The next landmark on the trail is called Maple Lake (labeled in the annotated map as “Disgusting Water”).  They call it Maple Lake because that sounds a lot better than Maple Mud Puddle.  But in truth, it is not much more than a large mud puddle.   It’s pretty much just fed by snow and rain; there’s no exit and no streams or springs feeding it.

I guess what I’m saying is, don’t start thinking you can avoid packing water and just purify this stuff.  I’d have to be almost dead to drink it.

We made it to the lake at about 11:30 a.m.  We rested for a bit on a log that you can barely see in the shade of the trees in this picture below, then continued on our way.  Just after the lake you start climbing again.

About this point you come out of the trees a bit and things open up.  Lots of mountain flowers up there, for one thing.

Great views at this point, also:

There’s a set of switchbacks that lead up to the mountain ridge; as you crest the ridge you can see Utah Valley again.  Anyway, just before we started up these switchbacks we saw this bald eagle:

At least, Greg said he saw a white head and was convinced it was a bald eagle.  I couldn’t tell, but in my opinion this was much too big to be a hawk for sure.   We watched it fly over and nest in the cliffs behind Spanish Fork Peak.  We thought we could hear eagle babies crying out from the nesting area.

So, yeah, it is pretty and all, but it’s still a rough hike, and it was really hot that day.  We started up those brutal switchbacks (labeled in the annotated map as “Pure Hell”).  Greg had been cramping up for about a half hour already by this time, and one time he almost fell down the mountain because of the cramping.  On our way up, we ran into some guys who were leading horses down the trail.  Dirty rotten cheaters.

Eventually we crested the ridge (labeled in the annotated map as “Great Views”).  That was really cool to see our home again from that perspective.  It came just in time, too.  Derrick was starting to get tired of all the walking.  I think coming up over the top of that ridge helped him realize that he did want to go the rest of the way.  Or maybe he was too exhausted to complain anymore.  He had been complaining a bit, but it pretty much stopped by this time.

In this shot, we’re looking back over the trail we’ve just followed, from about 9600 feet up. In other words, this shot is looking about straight east from that first ridge.

This shot is looking ahead from the same place, basically looking south.   You can see the trail in the bottom right portion of the picture. Spanish Fork Peak is up in the upper left corner.  We have to go around the front side of the peak directly in front of us.

Once you’ve scaled that first ridge, the trail goes through a stand of trees on the front side of the mountain, and then you emerge on the other side with a really excellent view of the whole valley (labeled in the map as “Awesome Views”).  We got here about 1:00 p.m.

Flickr won’t accept the full size picture; click here for the whole thing.  The view is actually much more open than this appears; in the picture I’m covering about 180 degrees.

Oh, and sorry it doesn’t line up well.  Hey, I’m a computer programmer, not a graphic artist.

From here you continue around to the south side of that peak and crest the ridge again (labeled in the annotated map as “Excellent Views”).   Here’s another view of Utah County from this point:

And here’s the view looking back at the back side of the mountain.  You can see Maple Lake in the bottom right corner.  We’re looking straight east in this photo, and Spanish Fork Peak is southeast of us, or kind of ahead and to the right.

It was at this point that Greg ran out of water.

We worked our way up the final part of the trail.  By now we were pretty pooped.  Even if you’ve grown up a mile above sea level, adding another 5000 feet makes a difference.  The trail heading up the final slope (labeled in the annotated map as “The Utter Depths of Hell”) to the summit is a killer, but we were determined not to quit.  We made it all the way to the top (“Killer Views”).

Here’s Derrick, myself, and Greg at the top: 10192 feet up.

In that pile of rocks there is a mailbox that holds the registry. Derrick and I wrote:

“Derrick Ryan, Matt Ryan – 8/22/2009 – We Made It! Woo-hoo!!!”

So look for that if you ever go up there.

Also at the top of Spanish Fork Peak is a large orange triangular structure that has to be at least 12 feet high.  Select peaks in Utah have these; they are used as surveying landmarks.

It was awesome up there, and totally worth the climb.  But we were honestly pretty worn out by this time, and we still had five miles back down the trail to hike before we were done. Plus, the top is actually pretty pointed; I’m not sure there’s enough square footage up there to make a proper-sized bedroom, even.  Think of a bedroom, that’s about how big it is up there.  It was about 2:00 p.m. by this time, so we started back down the trail.  It’s a bit nostalgic to leave.  I mean, you know you have to leave, because you have to get home, and there really isn’t a lot to do up there.  But nonetheless you kinda hate to leave when you’ve worked so hard to get up there in the first place.

We continued down around the front peak and back to the saddle ridge, the first ridge you crest when you come up those switchbacks.  It was here that I ran out of water.

We were out of water and still about 2 1/2 miles from our campsite.  It was about 2:30 in the afternoon on one of the hottest days of the year.

We headed down the switchbacks.  Greg was cramping up pretty badly and having a hard time walking down those steep slopes.  The trail there is covered with loose soil and small rocks, making it very slippery.  A number of times one of us would step, slip a bit and catch ourselves.  This is not good if you are cramping up or running out of energy.  Finally, just before we got to the bottom, Greg’s momentum got the best of him and he found himself jogging down the trail trying to keep from falling.  He put on the brakes and completely lost his footing.  He landed hard on his elbow, which hurt plenty, but what hurt him even worse was the cramping in his legs as he tried to stand up again.

We were getting into a bad situation here, but the only way out was to keep going and try to make it to camp.

Meanwhile, my toes were killing me.  If you’ve hiked down a hill, you know how your toes can start to hurt as they jam themselves against the front of your shoes.  I worried that I might have my nails too long, exacerbating the problem.  When we got to the lake we sat down to rest again at the log and I took out the first aid kit.  We didn’t have nail clippers in there, but we did have scissors.  I took my boots off and trimmed my toenails with scissors.  This is not a recommended procedure under normal conditions, because it is very hard to control and you sometimes end up cutting off too much, like I did.

We started off again and made for camp.  All we kept thinking about was the fact that I still had about 2 liters of water waiting for us there, leftover from the hike the evening before.  I could tell that we were getting more and more tired, as we’d just trudge along for several minutes without anyone saying anything.  The only noises we made were usually dull, trudging footstep sounds and those deep sighs you take to try to reassure yourself.

We finally made it to camp about 4:30.  I went straight for my pack where the remaining water bladders were stored.  I pulled one out and gave it to Derrick, and pulled the other one out and handed it to Greg.  With all his cramping I knew he was more dehydrated than I was.  After he’d had a bit to drink, I took my turn.  As I started drinking, I could feel my body start sweating again.

We just rested there for probably 1/2 hour.

Derrick was mentally in a place he’d never been before.  Oh, he was fine, it wasn’t like he was losing his mind or anything.  I think he just had no idea something could be so hard.  And he knew the worst was yet to come, at least for him.  He sat down on the grass to rest.

“Dad, will you sit next to me?” he asked.

I sat down right next to him.  He rested his arm on my leg and leaned against me.  Derrick’s never really been much of a cuddler, so when he acts like this you know something’s going on.  I just put my arm around his shoulders and patted him.

We knew we had to get going.  We were all really tired.  But we were running out of water, and the only way to get more was to get back to the truck.  We stood up to go, and I stared and stared at those packs.  Even though Derrick was carrying hardly anything, I knew he dreaded the thought of having to put that on.  I hated that thought myself.  And I couldn’t even fathom putting mine on.  I didn’t know how I’d be able to stand up with it on, I was so tired.

Greg offered to say a prayer.  We stood in a circle while Greg said the prayer.  It was a good thing he did it, because I don’t think I could have spoken at that moment.

I’ll never forget that prayer.  It wasn’t long or fancy.  But I felt at that moment that Heavenly Father was aware of us.  I felt that He knew why I’d tried to do this — to help give my son a valuable growing experience — and that He would help us get out.  I wasn’t worried anymore.

I’m grateful for a friend like Greg who thinks of that sort of thing.  I’m ashamed to say I would not have thought to pray on my own.  It isn’t that I don’t believe in prayer; I do.  I don’t know why I don’t think to do that more often.

I picked up Derrick’s pack and put it on him.  I felt horrible doing it.  I wished I could carry it for him.  But I knew there was no way I was going to be able to carry his and mine also.  I readjusted it to fit him and then put mine on.  I felt the way Derrick looked.

We headed off down the trail again.  Derrick had a water bladder in his pack and I had one in mine.  Greg was out, having run out on the saddle ridge earlier, but we were letting him use ours.  But we didn’t really have much left.  About a half hour down the trail, Derrick and I both ran out.  That was the end of the water.

The first 1 – 1 1/2 miles down that hill after camp were basically a controlled stumble for me.  I never thought I’d get tired and have to rest going down the hill.  Every so often Derrick would stop and put his hands on his knees and rest.  He’d say some variation of, “Dad, I’m tired.  I don’t think I can go on anymore.”

This worried me.  It was different from the complaining.  He wasn’t saying he didn’t want to; he was calmly expressing his concerned belief that he was unable to.

I’d tell him different things to keep him going.  Sometimes I just reassured him:  “Yes, you can.  You can make it.”

Another time, I told him:  “We can stop and rest whenever you need to.  But every minute you stop to rest is a minute longer you are holding that pack and not getting any closer to the truck.”

It worried me, and yet, this is exactly what I was hoping for when I made these plans in the first place.  He was having exactly the experience I wanted him to have, and it was about killing me having to watch him go through it.

Finally I told him how the prayer had made me feel.  I told him I knew Heavenly Father was aware of us on the hike.  He knew where we were.  I told him He would help us get back, and I knew it.  We didn’t have to worry — we just had to keep doing our part, keep walking.

Finally the trail flattened out.  My left big toe was throbbing.  I was relieved to get to some flat ground that was a bit easier to hike.  Suddenly we could see the gate at the trailhead, and the parking lot, and the truck.  We’d made it.

We got to the truck and I took Derrick’s pack off of his little body and threw it in the back.  I put my arm around him and gave him a hug.  I told him how proud I was of him.  He was sobbing quietly to himself.

I got my pack off, then helped Derrick climb into the truck to sit and rest.  The trailhead is at the top of Whiting Campground, and the campground had a culinary water tap about 100 feet away.  So I took Derrick’s water bladder over to the water tap and filled it up with nice cold water and brought it over to him.  I had a 1 liter bottle for water in the truck, so after I got Derrick some water I filled that bottle up for myself.  It was almost gone by the time we got home about 20 minutes later.

If you want some other really great images of Spanish Fork Peak, click here.

matt Family Interesting, Introspection

It took me a while, but I finally settled into my routine and got to where I’m reading my RSS feeds most days again.  I was going through the posts of the past month or so, since the job change, and ran across this article on the “Making Good Software” blog about things that keep someone from being a good software engineer, outside of (and often in spite of) an ability to engineer software.

I’ll summarize here.  It isn’t my intent to plagiarize; if you are remotely interested go read the article.  Here are the things:

• Lack of discipline
• Big ego
• Poor communication
• Forgetting the customer
• Lack of proper work prioritization

I have known many of these people during my career.  Indeed, I was one of them.  I remember coming to Novell from IBM almost ten years ago.  I thought I was pretty hot stuff and I made sure my team knew it.  In fact, I actually said (this is embarrassing to admit) on more than one occasion, “There are people who know C++ better than I do, but I haven’t met any of them.”  My ego surely made me hard to work with.  It definitely was a cause of friction between myself and my management chain, and ended up being a (deserved) source of frustration and difficulty for me, until I recognized the problem and started working to address it.

I’m pretty ashamed of having behaved that way back then.  I hope I’m better than that today.  I guess recognizing the weakness is a good first step.  Fortunately for me, back then I was on a really great team with a lot of very capable, patient, and talented engineers that waited for me to learn from my mistakes and to grant them the mutual respect they deserved.  I consider myself pretty fortunate to have been able to learn from them what real software engineering is about.

Over my career I’ve had to work with people like this from time to time, software engineers that manifest one or more of these traits.  Sometimes these guys are pretty talented technically.  I’ve felt sorry for them as I’ve observed, realizing that these weaknesses are going to hold their career back until they recognize them and work to overcome them.  No amount of programming prowess will compensate for it.  And what’s even worse is, often because these people have the personality issues they have, you don’t get anywhere by trying to bring these weaknesses to their attention; they are often unreceptive to this type of feedback.  Like I said, you just have to wait until they recognize it themselves.

I can imagine being in a performance review with someone like this, having them explain to me all the technical awesome they did, and me replying, “Your poor soft skills are shouting so loudly that I cannot hear your technical awesomeness.”  Or, as I said in the title, actions speak louder than code.

I really believe this is true.  To write software professionally, of course you must have technical ability; however, this is a necessary but not sufficient condition for greatness.  The best software engineers I’ve had the fortune to work with in my career, past and present, not only had awesome technical ability but did not exhibit weakness in these areas.  And I’ll tell you what:  Those teams are wonderful teams to be a part of.  Those teams create strong. uplifting work environments and are able to deliver great products that meet customer demand.

Another way to say this is, in order to be a good software engineer, you must first be a good employee.

In fact, I’ll tell you how important I think this is.  The ability to mitigate or eliminate these defects from a software engineer’s persona is so important to me that, if I had my own company and were making the hiring decisions, I would not hire a candidate that I knew had these problems, no matter how incredible their technical ability.

A person with these weaknesses is really only suited to be set to the side to work on a special side R&D project where interaction with other employees is limited, and they don’t have to interact with customers at all.  Problem is, those kind of projects are either a) strategically important to the long-term future of the company, or b) of little to no real value, or c) a combination, often high potential value but with a lot of inherent risk that causes the real value to be low.  If the project is strategically important or of high value, do you really want to reward the biggest jerk in your company by giving him the highest profile assignment, leaving your best engineers to maintain the legacy project?  Wouldn’t you want to have someone working on that high profile assignment that knows how to collaborate with others and assemble all the best ideas to solve the problem the best way, even if that solution isn’t his/her own?  Contrariwise, if the project is of little real value or has so much risk that it offsets the real value, why even do it at all?

Nope.  In my company, if I were ever to have one, I wouldn’t hire or keep an employee who had these weaknesses and was not committed to addressing them.  I’ve seen the difference, both in morale and productivity, between teams where they don’t have these problems and teams that do.

matt Programming C++, Career, Editorial, Introspection, Novell, Programming, Rants, Software Development

Yesterday was my last day at Mozy.

I left Novell and came to Mozy just over a year ago.  For a variety of reasons, I chose to leave Novell even though in my case I had to take a cut in pay to do it.  I don’t regret this decision at all.  I’ve learned tremendously from Mozy, met a lot of really great people, and really loved working at Mozy.  It’s a great company with a great product, but the best part about Mozy is the people – there are some really great people there, many of which I didn’t really get to work with as much as I would have liked, and I’ll definitely miss the opportunity to work with them.

At my one year mark last May, I took a step back to look objectively at my job at Mozy.  This happened to coincide quite closely with EMC’s recently announced employee 5% pay cut, which of course also affected then-current Mozy employees.  (By the way, you have to love how EMC told the press that they were “asking” employees to take the cut – it was more like “we’d like to ask you to take this cut in pay, or leave.”)  I looked at the tradeoff I’d made a year earlier, now with greater insight, along with the adjusted compensation, and realized that I wouldn’t have made the decision to come to Mozy last year after all.

It’s an odd conclusion because I still would have made the decision last year, knowing everything I’d learn and the relationships I’d build.

It was at this point that a great colleague from a former team at Novell, one of the two best teams I’ve ever worked on (the other also from Novell), told me that the company he is now with was hiring, and asked if I would be interested.

Truth is, he and I had discussed this exact position about a few months before, and I’d told him at the time that I was happy where I was.  But then EMC changed the dynamics of our employer/employee relationship, and when he approached me again, by this time I was willing to consider a change.  And as my new employer and I considered it, we both came to the conclusion that it would be a good thing.

I’m really looking forward to this new opportunity.  I’ll learn a lot, I hope to contribute a lot, and know for a fact that the team I’ll be on there is outstanding.  At the same time I’ll miss the cool of Mozy.  It’s still a great place with great people.  Especially if you are considering working there now – the 5% cut does not apply to new hires, and I know they are still looking for great engineers among other things.

matt Technology Career, Introspection, Mozy, Novell, Software Development