The black bag

I was given this Kenneth Cole black bag at the official IPO party for PSINet (traded as PSIX) by the investment banker who led the IPO. I used to keep my computer and various corporate stuff in this bag as I travelled around, it was and is a great bag. More bag then I would have bought myself and eventually more bag that I needed for my Panasonic ToughBook being rained on in the mud.

In some ways it is one of the last vestiges of a former corporate life. It was in the bottom of my closet and I gave it to my son to carry his books in to and from school (sans strap). It kind of has a renewed lease on life.

The bag reminds me of temptation, the temptation of ego which is one of my weaknesses, it takes me back to some decisions I made during the hey days of the 90's and the Internet bubble, something that is in a bit of a comeback right now. Being in the center of the Internet run up, a CTO/COO and doing an IPO was pretty much a corporate person's dream. It was great but it wasn't quite my dream.

I was just trying to build a better mouse trap, the rest of it was I guess just icing.

However the mouse trip issue alone was enough to destroy oneself through ego.
Years before I had set some trigger points for myself to power down. One of them for me was the IPO itself, I decided not to participate in this 1995 IPO, not to go to the investment banker's trading floor etc. I stayed home and played with Derek and didn't even goto work. My partner was a little surprised, but he had gotten used to my out of the box actions over 10 years of partnering, be called me from the trading floor to give me the news.

But I knew that I had to do one thing this day, I called up the 20 some people who had worked for the previous 5-10 years who were employees 3-25 and invited them to my favorite spot, the Ice House Cafe in Herndon Virginia at five 5pm. 5PM? They had never left work at 5PM before, but this was an important day for Mark Fedor, Wengyik Yeong, Mitch Levinn, Kimberly Brown, my dad, and my brother and others.

The "Ice House" had a private back bar which I rented, and for a couple of hours bought appetizers, beer, and their speciality - raw oysters. The owner would show up about 6pm with two buckets of ice filled with these bad boys everyday from his trip to the Bay, they were fresh and they were good.

And for the first time in 10 years we talked about money, not the whole time, but a bit. In 10 years I had never talked to these people about money, I didn't want to use money as the motivator it became for the rest of the Internet, and certainly as the 90's progressed. I wanted them to build the mouse trap.

Maybe this was a trade of Hubris for Greed, but I don't think so, because I remember the fear more than any hubris in building that mouse trap.

Mom and Dad's Porch

From my past posting you know I like porches and I mentioned my parent's porch, so on my way to do a little PC training in New Cumberland to a Senior Citizen I stopped and took a snapshot of the porch as it is today. The porch hasn't really changed that much, the big porch swing is gone, replaced by chair swings, keeping up with the times but retaining she spirit of the past.

What struck me was how small the house looks from the front, one window on either side of the door. That probably says alot about my expectations on houses and my lifesytle. When I left metro DC I wanted to move back to NewCumberland but that was kind of nixed. Now I think I apsire to move to Lingelstown to a house like this or maybe back to NewCumberland to this house on 15th street.

What also struck me and not available in the picture is the flanking trees that I remember my father planting in the front yard (twice really, the first ones died). They are gigantic, I remember them when they were sticks. Now that is scarey. In the back of my mind I equate my children growing older to the Sugar Maple trees around the training ring.

You got to wonder if those trees will last longer than the house, they will certainly last longer than me.

What is a porch for?

When I was a boy living in NewCumberland, we knew what a porch was for - cooling off, talking and seeing the neighbors. Everybody was on their porch in the Summer, or walking down the sidewalk between porches. You had to have a swing, and libations to fit in with this crowd. For christmas when we had a few extra dollars we put a christmas tree with lights on the porch.

I'm not sure in NewCumberland now a days if they still do this, but I like porches, so I built four of them. The front one doesn't have a swing, and that may have been a mistake, but not having any neighbors as it sits in the middle of 60 acres kind of eliminates that opportunity anyway here in Lower Paxton.

Since the fruit does not fall far from the tree, we put a tree on the porch, grown in our christmas tree patch, and we put a bunch of other decorations as well. But we've found some other things to do.

Carving pumpkins is my favorite. Find a beautiful Fall day, some pumpkins, some kids, some sharp knives and you can have a good time. It also makes a good backstop for every "First Day of School" picture, though I have yet to put them all side by side because I'm afraid it would be scarey to see diapers becoming trousers, boys becoming men, and a bit of apprehension become "can't wait to see my buds".

In Anna Karenina, Tolstoy writes: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Maybe using your porch improves your ability to have a happy family, or at least looking back you can remember the happy times you had on a porch.

The Old Training Oval

Being an engineer, I like things that are designed, being a creationist I see design everywhere. When I bought the Farm it had been empty for six years, and the previous 20 years to that, there hadn't been a lot of investment in upkeep, but underneath the ruin, weeds, poison, etc there was 60 acres of design.

In the middle of the Farm there was a broken down training oval because it had been a horse farm and years ago (ending in the 60's) the Pennsylvania Horseshow used to hold there annual event here. It was ugly. So my cousin and I tore it down, boy did things look better, and off we went to the next project on a long list of projects.

But the space was empty and generations of horses and people had tracked the earth into the oval, everyday I walked past it, there would be a whisper, "needs a training oval". My father and I, my cousins, my uncle had been replacing the rest of the fencing on the farm, killing the poison, etc. Nice straight fence we did, a couple of acute angles - not a problem.

An oval, I don't think so.

So I hired someone to build me an oval, six men showed up, they had wet wood, they had special tools, down-sized "come alongs", they had experience, they sweated alot, I'm pretty sure they drank some beers. In two days they were finished, it was awesome even without paint which we put on ourselves.

Having watched Derek being trained on a horse, (he sits a horse nicely by the way), I noticed that the trainer knew what they were doing, the horse knew what it was doing, the trainer's horse knew what it was doing. Derek was trying to learn what to do. I even knew what I was doing (not to try).

I think about that oval, it has no moving parts, no electrical connection, no software, it doesn't appear very complex, but to get one trained rider there is huge stack of design and experience, experiences that I am willing to admit I don't have and won't even attempt.

But I enjoy the aesthetics of the oval, I enjoy watching a horse, a rider on a horse. I know the story of the oval, I saw the experiences in operation. The kids now repaint the oval every now and then, yet more experience.

The oval looks simple, I take it for granted that it is simple, but is it really?

What else looks simple to me, and that I take for granted....

Greenhouse Thoughts

Today I hand split (my preference) a bit of wood to heat the greenhouse and did my normal routine of looking for bugs, checking water levels, a little bug spraying, checking the hydroponic system and picking some tomatoes and ground lettuce (for "Speedy" the dwarf rabbit who roams our house). The splitter is for the 4 foot diameter hickory tree which defies my pounding with the hand splitter.

The greenhouse is a classic "Marty Project", lots of vision, a little shakey in details and finish, and requires help by others, (help can somtimes be 90% of the project). This one was even more interesting because after grading the hilltop and dumping stones, and then a bunch of pounding of the steel pipe into the ground and a very few other things I abandoned Harrisburg and went to New Orleans for a month and my cousin Steve continued the project as he does many times.

Still to this day it is not really complete, but that hasn't stopped me from using it, in fact I put the fish (more on that another day) in the roofless footprint before I left for New Orleans. We even just got gas backup heat into it about a week ago thanks to Steve and my Uncle Pepper.
But despite all of that, we've eaten cucumbers, tomatoes, radishes, lettuce etc from the Greenhouse.

This is another piece of the Marty philosophy - when you have enough done to do something with it, do it. Rarely does this really impact the strategic value of the project, usually it refines it. My poor wife Diane sees this all the time in me, my engineering incrementalism is applied everywhere.

I can't remember if it was my friend Seth or who - they equated this with God's ability to use us despite not having perfected us.

Creating the Chocolate Cafe in Lingelstown

This is a project that I and a bunch of others have been slowly working on, trying to restore a 100 year old church so that it can be used to create community again in Lingelstown. 6000 square feet of wooden building. The Schoffstall Associates crew has been cleaning and fixing this up in preparations for Blue Mountain Foods to start the cafe in it after a major contractor rehab to install a kitchen and try to conform to the various Lower Paxton Township regulations. It is really hard to not lose the historic and aesthetic sense of this building with these regulations which I think are more focused on boring box buildings and greenfield.

Lingelstown has a real opportunity to create a small historic retail core of community oriented businesses thanks to Geof Smith at St Thomas Roasters showing us all what can be done. But it is a trial to be patient with the restrictions, I thankful that Bill is helping.

St Thomas Roasters In the Afternoon

The west hanover shop is quiet in the afternoons. Bad for business but good for meetings.

I came here to meet with Pastor Joel for our regular weekly meeting, but I'm guessing that he is tied up with two new babies in the last 72 hours. This location and the location in Lingelstown for St Thomas are where I like to have my meetings. Meeting people in public is about a couple of things for me - transparency of almost all that I do, not forcing people to meet me on my terms on my turf and lastly my hatred of institutional ivory towers.

This period of my life reminds me a lot of the two years I worked and taught at rpi, it is a lot less ferentic and a lot more contemplative, though stress levels are the same just different. What RPI taught me in those two years was the value of engagement and the valuelessness of institutional loyalty.

Like all institutions RPI was an ivory tower filled with people who believed that you had to come to their office to get things done. And they never left those offices, from staff to administrators and for the most part the faculty with some noticeable exceptions like Joe Flaherty. In 24 months I taught them the value of roaming the campus to get things done, though despite all of the publishing that was done then it was clear they never appreciated it. How do you know what people are like, what they want, what they need, without going native where they live and work?

Prior to this in the startups of Boston in the early 80's I learned the value of meetings. that the law of diminishing returns applied to them as well, whether it was a consensus building meeting or an authorative meeting, or an instructional meeting. After 60 minutes there was an immense drop off in value. And that was with that generation, i suspect it is less for Derek's generation.

By the late 80's I had added the concept of "one screen thinking", if your email didn't fit into an 80x25 screen (i'm dating myself) then it would never be read, formatted it should fit on one piece of paper double sided in memo form on paper.

I guess I'm having these thoughts because I talked to Seth, and commented on his organization.