To all those who serve our country and their families, thanks.

Boing Boing points to a Milwaukee Journal article about a Harley hearse.  Only in Milwaukee.

The Golden Gate Bridge turned 70 today.  I remember a brochure my dad found from my grandparents' house.  They drove out to California on their honeymoon at the time that the Bay Bridge and Golden Gate bridge were being built.  I'm sure that it was built in less time than it took to fight court injunctions and hearings for the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge.

(Warning: retroblog post)

Tonight I saw Dave Brubeck at Masonic Auditorium in San Francisco.  Dave is one of the jazz greats and I have always wanted to see him perform live.  As a drummer, his Time Out album is one of those things you must own.  For those who don't know the album, it features non-traditional time signatures and its hit, Take Five, was in the background on The Sopranos the week before.  If you don't know Take Five, well, you're missing out.  At any rate, there were two standouts in the evening.  The first was the drum solo by Randy Jones.  I'm not sure how old he is but the guy is much older than I am and he really smoked.  Drum solos are oftentimes sources of cheap applause but this guy's solo was unbelievable and deserved the loud applause it got.  He fell into this theme and would keep coming back to it, building and layering each time.

Of course, the second highlight was Dave Brubeck.  There are few living jazz artists left with the cultural impact he has had.  According to Wikipedia he is now 86 but the amount of life he had onstage defied his age.  During the performance he was calling out to the other band members while comping, laughing and having a great time in general.  His chops seemed as good as they ever have been.  He had a few words for the audience and you could witness his age in his speech and in his cadence as we walked across the stage.

One other minor funny thing was a moment when the band leader for the big band, featured in the second half of the program, announced a song that incorporated some elements of Count Basie and someone in the audience yelled out "Hell yeah!"  I don't think I've ever seen a shout out for Count Basie.  He's one bad ass MF.  Jazz is alive!

The whole show was excellent and aside from the musical talent of the performers and historical significance, it was a great testament to the dichotomy of age (an odometer) versus experience (condition of the car).  I hope I can play drums when I'm 86.  Roy Haynes, another great drummer I saw years back at Stanford in his upper 70s, proves it's possible.

In my MBA program, I had an organizational behavior professor who loved to draw diagrams.  It seems like he would diagram just about any point he was trying to make.  This article in the Village Voice takes it to a whole new level (but doesn't take it to the Bay).

Well, it's April Fools Day but this isn't a joke post.  I've never been very good about posting to my blog but I've decided to make another run at it.  It probably won't be daily but I'll get something up here at least once a month.  Now that I've got a halfway decent camera in my 3G phone, I might even do a little mobile blogging.  I may also do some cross-posting of stuff around IPTV to a msdn or spaces blog since our global subscriber acquisition rate for services running Microsoft's IPTV software is ramping rather quickly now.

I've got to figure out what I want to do with photos.  I may either use my Windows Live Spaces site for that or I may share some of them out publicly via Orb.

• Prefab green building
• The rise in the "undeclared / independent" policial party
• The mobile phone as THE device (phone, email/text, video camera, music/video player, still camera, wallet, display/projector, gps, computer)
• IP everything
• Boxed wine
• More content in smaller chunks
• China

According to an article today in the Capital Times in Madison the "sconnie" culture is the new cheesehead for Wisconsin!  My younger brother's company sells "sconnie" shirts and accessories.  Maybe they should make some kind of foam-rubber thing to put on your head at Lambeau Field.

I was reading this SFGate article on BART to SFO ridership being well below estimates this morning.  Having used both BART and Caltrain to get to SFO, I have to admit that it's no surprise that ridership is so low.  I have ridden train to airport links in a number of other cities and there is a clear distinction between planners who "get it" and those who just want to spend a bunch of money (and probably get kick-backs) and check off another campaign promise on their list.

Issues I have with taking public transit to SFO:

1. The link between Caltrain and the airport, a BART train, only seemingly runs every 30 minutes and it NEVER aligns with the caltrain schedule.  In fact, the train often just sits there in the station with its doors closed, taunting you with the view of the airport in the distance.
2. The BART train uses BART fare cards (a separate and overpriced transaction) just after you got done paying caltrain with your caltrain pass/fare.  There is no "get me to the airport" single payment mechanism.
3. When going from San Francisco to SFO on caltrain, you have to go through a maze of escalators and elevators to go over the caltrain track and into BART.  Didn't anyone get the memo that we have luggage when going to/from the airport?
4. There are no clearly posted BART or Caltrain schedules ANYWHERE in the airport.  The odds that I take BART to Caltrain or BART to the city would go up sharply if I knew when the next train was and the rough estimate of when I would arrive.
5. Most people have to take the AirTrain (little airport shuttle on rails between terminals) to get to the BART train to get to CalTrain to go home.  Not only are the schedules for BART and Caltrain not posted but they are not aligned, as mentioned earlier.
6. Taxi to SF: 15 minutes;  Public transit to SF: 45 minutes to an hour depending on time of day.  Don't plan on using caltrain link after 9pm due to Caltrain schedule.
7. The AirTrain station has a bunch of STAIRS you have to use to get connected to the terminal.  Again, did somebody not know I would have luggage?
8. To address low ridership, they decreased the frequency of the BART airport link.  Brilliant.

So here are the rules for a successfull rail / airport link - almost all of which do not apply to SFO:

1. Minimize stairs and escalators between train and airport
2. Have trains actually arrive AT the airport, not one or two stations / transfers away from it.  Extra credit if there are multiple airport stops that the train makes (such as the R1 in Philly)
3. Have trains to the airport run frequently or at least at highly reliable and predictable intervals (like on the hour and half hour)
4. Make it easy and inexpensive to use the payment mechanism and have only one mechanism.
5. Have the total trip time be competitive with driving/taxi - not just for the people in the boonies when compared to rush hour but for those who want to get to/from the major cities (SF, Oakland, San Jose in the case of SFO versus Walnut Creek).
6. If the airport link does require transfers from other lines/modes of transportation, synchronize them.

Having said all this there may still be 1 or 2 times per year when taking Caltrain/BART to SFO will make sense for me, but there are so many boneheaded design decisions that got made with the Caltrain/BART/SFO link that I think they should probably scrap it, take the money they are losing daily and just run a shuttle bus from the caltrain and bart stations in the city (SF) to the airport at a lower cost.

For those wondering, my favorite rail/airport links are Washington, DC and Philadelphia.

Those two people who follow my blog have probably given up on following it since I haven't posted in ages.  The caltrain love poem didn't happen and instead I've been having a very time consuming relationship with my work now that I am responsible for the applications, user experience and server components (metadata mostly) for Microsoft's IPTV and cable products.  The good news is that I really enjoy my work, the people I work with and many of those extra things that don't fall cleanly into either of those.  The bad news is that the long hours have come at the expense of many other non-work things in my life. 

In catching up with my blog feeds today I came across a FT article about "tribal workers."  I think this article describes many things I identify with (beyond just my age).  While I don't believe that the number of hours worked alone is a sign of "success" I do feel the challenge of having too many options and the focus on my career.  I've got the Georgetown undergraduate degree (double major in Econ and English with honors) and the UC Berkeley MBA not to mention some good career experience.  I've worked in DC and Silicon Valley, live in San Francisco and have had some great travel through my job at Microsoft.

I have to think some more about whether or not I fall in this new "class."  I probably do -- I had a pretty good streak of 80-90 hour work weeks in the past few months and I just got off the phone (via my parents' VOIP service) with my relatives in Italy who were watching the World Cup game at the same time I was.

Italy won and I think I probably felt like more of an Italy fan than a US fan as far as the world cup goes.  Don't tell that to the Germans I work with on IPTV. :)