Just recently my family and I moved from Portland, OR to Ananda Village in Nevada City, CA. In the process of moving, it struck me that we were directly experiencing what data goes through when trasnmitted over the Internet.

First, we set up the protocols of the transfer: closing up connections where we were, opening connections where we were going, and arranging the transfer pipeline (aka UHaul).

Second, we did a serious job of compressing the material totality of our three lives into a 20' truck (and the minivan). The compression algorithm had several stages: the small scale (local) compression of packing boxes, then the large-scale compression of stuffing those boxes into the truck. I've always had a pretty good spatial ability (e.g. 3D Tetris), and got the truck completely stuffed floor to ceiling and front to back. If we'd had one more box we might not have done it!

It was quite amazing, in fact, to see that everything we owned could be fit into a 16.75' x 7.75' x 7' volume (OK, so the wheelbarrow was strapped on top of the minivan...). But it really shows what happens during compression--when you remove the extra space that normally surrounds our stuff.

Third, we did the transfer of all this "data" by driving the truck and van the ~590 miles down I-5 from Portland to Red Bluff (spending nights in Eugene and Mt Shasta), Hwy 99 (through Chico and Oroville), then Hwy 20 (Grass Valley and Nevada City), Hwy 49, then Tyler Foote Road. It was a long haul, but certainly made much easier with compressed data!

Fourth, when we arrive at Ananda Village on August 13th, we then started the process of decompressing the data--expanding from the truck into the house, again through a multi-stage process of unloading the truck, then unloading the boxes. Transfer complete!

As a fifth point, it was certainly clear that the compression algorithm (packing) took considerably longer than decompression. That is, it takes more analysis to understand how to pack things efficiently, whereas unpacking is relatively mindless (except figuring out just where everything is going to go in the new place!).

I can also say that while I won't be desirous of making a long-distance move again anytime soon, our data fortunatly has no emotional involvement in such processes and is very happy to be squished and exploded over and over again. For myself, I've been thankful for the good nights' sleep I've been getting for the last week. Phew!

Call it "New Blogger's Dilemma." Many people start a blog with high hopes, yet get stuck early on because of how prominent these first posts will be in the overall mix. I've been facing this with my own here--though I have much to write about that's not related to my work at Microsoft, the question is, where to begin? What subject shall I choose? Spirituality? Politics? Science? The Arts? What do I want to stand out in my tag cloud in the early stages of this blog? It's been a hard choice, but eventually one must choose or perish, blogwise.

So I've finally chosen to start with the subject of children. With a toddler in my life (Liam is almost three), children have been a significant part of my reality in recent years. He's also a primary reason why, as I noted in my "returning to Microsoft" piece, that I'm back at Microsoft in the first place. Recently, too, some friends of mine forwarded a link to Tim Kreider's The Referendum (NY Times blogs) whose ponderances on the fates of the childless (with "an obscene amount of free time") and the child-laden (whose "next thousand Saturdays are already booked") provides much mental fodder.

In recalling my thinking on the subject from some years ago, what might have been a short blog post turned into a longer article, which is posted on my main site. The basic thesis is that the question of which life path is more valid (which is more or less what Kreidler is asking) is not about having children or not having children, but about living either path on auto-pilot versus living either path consciously. Conscious living--making clear, conscious choices based on realities larger than ego-gratification--is really the solution to the perpetual doubt of living on auto-pilot.  

Written June 30^th, 2009

This is meant to be an insert within a forthcoming "What Exactly Does One Do With 'Oslo'?" article; originally it was part of that piece but tended to make the whole thing somewhat lengthy!

Some of you may remember the work I did in my "version 1.0" career at Microsoft, which spanned the years between 1990 and 1996. During most of that time I worked as a software engineer in the Developer Relations Group (which eventually turned into Developer & Platform Evangelism) with the purpose of helping developers outside of Microsoft understand and apply our technologies. In this capacity I ended up as the industry expert on the OLE and COM technologies. This put me on stage at many developer conferences and saw the publication of Inside OLE 2 (1993) and Inside OLE 2^nd Edition (1995).

At that time, the focus was pretty much on desktop applications; client-server applications were really just starting to hit the mainstream, including web applications. And that was the very point at which I retired from the high-tech scene altogether. (For the complete story of my first career, which many people tell me isn't actually boring at all, see my book, Mystic Microsoft.)

Thus I completely missed out on the evolution of Microsoft's component technologies beyond the desktop. While people like my friend Don Box were circling the globe talking about DCOM, .NET, and all kinds of new middle-tier and enterprise-level stuff like Microsoft Transaction Server, App Server, BizTalk Server, and what have you, I was off doing completely different things (see www.kraigbrockschmidt.com). To what extent I fiddled with technology, it was pretty much still limited to client apps, managing a few Access databases, and putting together some simple websites. What I learned of .NET was pretty slim, just enough to be mildly confused.

Ironically, the chap who was my direct manager when I wrote this, the very visible Chris Sells, got started in all this shortly before my exit. Having started his path with COM at one of my presentations, he eventually worked with Don Box at DevelopMentor where he earned his living, as he puts it, "telling people how to minimize round-trips in DCOM." Since then he's been pretty deeply immersed in the heart of efforts like Microsoft code name "Oslo."

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