a musing julius…

i’ve been crazy busy as of late (the last 10 weeks…) and blogging is nearly the last thing on my mind. there are many things on my mind, but i went back to my resolutions being that 1/4th of the year is nearly done, and thought it’d be neat to see how i’m doing.

here were my new year’s resolutions and my status:

on track:
- run one 10k and one 5k | i’ve run a 4mi race, which i’ll cross off as my 5K. a 10K and 9 months to do it.
- visit three new places that i didn’t see last year with at least one international destination | i’m headed to new york in a couple of weeks, will be at the kentucky derby, and i’ll hit up poland sometime this year.

we’ll see:
- come home to chicago at least once every 6 weeks | i’ve been back twice this year, which is slightly off track, but it could be worse…i’ll catch up in april with two visits.
- run two half marathons | i’ve done zero, but one in may/june and another in october still isn’t out of the question.
- organize myself with to-do lists at work | i’m not doing to-do lists, but i’m a lot more organized, thanks to two giant whiteboards.

way off track:
- set a new personal record for a half marathon (below 1:38:00) | i’ve gotten a whole lot slower…trying to catch up to my former running glory is tough, given the below item.
- improve my work-life balance | this is my most far off resolution. i work more than i ever have, but i love it. it kind of rocks my face off. and i guess as long as i feel balanced it doesn’t matter if i work 8 or 18 hours a day.

4 weeks ago, i was approached by my current management and told that i was to report back to my old job and assist in the launch and development of SYNC version 3. the power struggle and politics of the move would only become evident to me weeks later (that story another post)…but i made the move back to building 5, sat down with the team, and began weaving myself back into the work that surrounds SYNC. recall that most of 2008 for me consisted of travelling across the country and across the globe to ensure the product was successful.

while i knew returning to version 3 (and potentially version 4) would be a lot of work, i didn’t quite realize the extent that things were FUBAR-ed. over the last 4 weeks, i’ve worked 12+ hours a day, and 2 of 4 weekends have been spent at the office or in a car testing the product. my scribbles on the whiteboard in my directors office highlight the major issues we face with a launch breathing down our necks.

unfortunately, devoting so much time to work takes a mental and physical toll on me. hence, the epic struggle of work versus life. i went out to dinner with my good buddy jon, who is a consultant for boston consulting group. he works more than i do, and over a dinner (which we both arrived to at 9pm after working the entire evening) we discussed the toll of 12 hour days. my favorite observation: you’re basically forced to eat like crap because coming home late every night. jon makes a t-bell run once a week. i eat thai once a week. i used to run 20+ miles a week. now, i’m lucky if i can string 9 miles together in 10 days. contemplating waking up at 6am to workout in the mornings would mean just 2 hours of actual time for life during the week. and i’m making plans with friends during the week because it’s just easier to leave work at 8 or 9 and grab a beer than going out on the weekend.

one of my new year’s resolutions this year was to improve my work-life balance. with this new job, julius = fail. maybe once we launch…i’ll do better. but probably not.

naim tagged me in a 7 things post where the intent is to reveal 7 things about myself, which i think are important to note about myself. so here goes…

1. my parents are the most important thing in my life
this might seem like a no-brainer, but i cannot express how much my parents mean to me. it’s just impossible to describe in words. they are my best friends, my mentors and my unreachable example of living life filled with love. i’ve written about their lives before…their antics across the world, and their hobbies. anyone who meets them knows exactly how i feel the way i feel about them, and all those who have crossed they path tend to agree they’re two of the coolest people you’ll ever meet. ever.

2. i miss chicago, but i love detroit
chicago is a lovely city. it’s impossible not to love it as a city, as a place to spend time, or to build a family, or retire. i miss chicago and the friends (and parents) i left behind coming to detroit. but man, i look out onto woodward ave in detroit and i see nothing but promise and potential. this place has become a home, and in general, it’s embraced me as one of its own. i hope one day i can settle down here (read: buy a loft downtown with a freaking patio or balcony) (you hear me detroit? i want a balcony!) and make this a better place to live. i hope i’m on that path

3. running changed my life
no decision i’ve made has impacted me more physically and mentally than the decision to start running. i’ll admit when i first started, it wasn’t for the right reasons. it was a decision filled with anger and pain. as the months passed, i realized that i enjoyed running for the right reasons. so, the decision to continue running was really mine, and mine alone. i’ve lost weight, become more fit, improved my confidence, and found that not only can i run a half-marathon, i can do it at a 7:40 pace. (7:15 pace here i come)

4. i speak polish
i still meet people that i work with on a daily basis that don’t know i speak polish. i’ve had friends for months that had no clue. anyway, it’s important. because i speak it often. and contrary to some people’s thoughts, its NOT to impress people. speaking another language fluently is a strange feeling. in high school, i learned french. it was super frustrating having to translate from thinking in english to literally translate words in french. when speaking in polish, there’s no translation, no thinking, just there. don’t even have to think to speak it. i think it’s neat.

5. i love brunettes and blondes, but what i really need is a redhead.
they match my beard.

6. becoming cultured by traveling the world is the coolest thing a person can do
i envy my friends that dropped their lives to travel the world. like hari, who worked for a year in china, only to buy a ’round-the-world ticket to visit places like sub-saharran africa, nepal, tibet, the middle east, and all of europe. or rheanne, who went to places like indonesia, australia, laos, vietnam, fiji, and countless other small islands after her graduation, instead of doing what i did, which was get a job. i’d like to travel more (as my new year resolutions state) and get a feel for new places. we’ll see what this year holds.

7. i wanted to be a voice actor before i went to college
i’ve always felt like my voice was “cool”, not so much in a don lafontaine cool way, but in a “he could probably be on the radio” kind of way. anyway, i think a strong voice has a story to tell on its own, even when it’s not telling a story.

so i think tradition states i tag people to post on this subject, so i’m tagging the following people who i know haven’t done this!

ryan
fred
travis

for a new car…no seriously. listen, i love my mustang. i really do. i want another one. perhaps a 2010 mustang. maybe a 2010 shelby gt500 (ha, i wish.) and a closet full of snow tires. my buddy andy (one of the gt500 calibration engineers at roush) picked me up in a gt500 when we went to the ford press conference at the north american international auto show. it rocked my face off. i want one for each day of the week. and one with snow tires. (his test car had snow tires…and we can definitely say the wheel spin we experienced wasn’t due to ice/snow on the road. more likely the 540 odd horsepower…)

but detroit has had 37 inches of snow this winter. normally, we’ve had 10 inches by this point. last weekend, i made a trip up to a friend’s place in ferndale and i got stuck in her driveway. she had to push my car out of the driveway so i could park in the street, in hopes my car would have a better chance of easily getting out. the plan was working until about 11pm when a snowplow proceeded to plow me in, requiring her yet again push me out when i left (she reassured me this was common place with her truck, so i offered to push her out the snow someday as repayment.) the day before that, i had to drive 2 miles in ann arbor in REVERSE because my car wouldn’t make it up a hill driving forward.

so mustangs in deep snow = FAIL. so what am i thinking? well, until i hear of a ford fusion that is getting a ridiculous ecoboost engine that pushes 415 hp to 4 wheels with a 6 speed transmission that matches engine and wheel speed on downshifts, has paddle shifters and can rip a 1/4 mile in 13 seconds, i’m gonna say maybe the rumored 2010 ford taurus sho (which should come with above-mentioned transmission, and might pull more modest numbers than those listed above.)

either way, the mustang has severely hampered my winter driving travels, along with my parking ability. i get stuck in the parking lot at work. i pray i can “rock” my car out of its spot when i leave work.

however, i’m guessing when all the snow melts come late march, early april…and once the pony gets clean and the lewinski stains are gone, i won’t be able to let it go.

in 2007, i wrote down my resolutions and rated myself at the start of 2008. since i didn’t write down my resolutions for 2008, i can’t rate myself. anyway, i’m going to write down my resolutions for 2009 and go from there.

- run two half marathons
- run one 10k and one 5k
- set a new personal record for a half marathon (below 1:38:00)
- visit three new places that i didn’t see last year with at least one international destination
- come home to chicago at least once every 6 weeks
- organize myself with to-do lists at work
- improve my work-life balance

while some of these are easily quantifiable, the others will take an entire year for me to judge. i’ll do a review mid-year to see how i progress.

happy new year everyone!

to say i’ve been slightly worried about this holiday season is a bit of an understatement. for 24 years i’ve celebrated christmas with my parents; my only directly related family in the states. on this 25th year of my life, my parents will be on a boat in the netherlands antilles. i will be in chicago, taking care of their business, our dog kuba, and catching up with old friends from home i haven’t seen in almost 2 years.

so while i sit at a friends house, enjoying christmas eve dinner (polish people celebrate on the 24th) my parents will be celebrating, on a yacht, somewhere in the antilles. how sweet is that? it’ll be my first christmas without my parents. i will miss the crap out of them, and being home for a week, before i inundate myself with traveling to 3 states in 3 days.

the next 3 weeks will certainly be something to remember…

in august, after leaving my job as a Ford SYNC developer/consultant/architect i took a new job in infrastructure operations. i knew of a few people that chose such a life, and never really believed the stories they told. they couldn’t really be paged at all hours of the night. they weren’t really up at 3 in the morning resolving issues with servers in our datacenters.

whoops. i was wrong.

since taking the job, i’ve worked more saturday’s and sunday’s then i had in my career. one weekend, i worked a friday holiday, and both saturday and sunday, with a grand total of 30 hours worked, in addition to the 36+ already worked in the 4 day stretch prior to friday. 66 hours! in a week? are you crazy people?

yeah. we’re all a bit crazy.

last night, when i went to spend a quiet dinner with my buddy at his place, i got paged before i got off the highway. dinner was held up for an hour before i resolved the issues that needed resolving. we returned from dinner and no less than 20 minutes of observing my friend sweet dj setup did i get another call, requiring my attention yet again. two hours of work on a saturday night i’d hoped would be quiet.

last sunday, i spent 9 hours on the phone listening to our network team argue with our server team to decide if the issue was network related or server related. in the end, the server team prevailed.

3 weeks ago, our on-calls didn’t wake up when being called or paged, so as lead i was next on the list. i had to fire up my computer at 2am, fix the issue, and get back to sleep.

and to be honest, i kind of love this. i’m no genius when it comes to fixing issues, but when i get called, and if i get it right, it feels really good. a lot of the times though, i defer to my team whose experience in the field far far far exceeds the 4 months i’ve been doing this. i don’t know how they’ve done this for 10+ years. at 4 months in, i’m undoubtedly tired. adjusting to being available at all times has been a struggle (running outside for more than an hour seems like an impossible goal)

it’ll be interesting to see what the next year holds for me.

in an interview on good morning america, president-elect barack obama discusses the issue of big 3 ceo’s flying corporate jets to washington. he says the CEOs were “a little tone deaf with what’s happening in america right now.”

really barack? really?

if i recall correctly, your boeing 757 described here is much larger and more luxurious than the fokker 70’s that the big 3 use to fly their ceo’s on business. in fact, the overhaul of your plane cost nearly $500,000, not to mention the leasing costs of such a plane.

see it’s about time right barack? you couldn’t afford to wait at airport security while on the campaign trail. during those two hours of security and sitting at the gate, you could be talking to people in ohio or pennsylvania. so why should CEO’s have to wait? do they not also have important business to conduct? why are you different? because you were running for president, it was okay?

their asking for a bailout is no different than you asking each and every american to donate to your campaign while you fly around the country in a private jet that rivals first class on all domestic airlines. i’ve flown first class, it doesn’t look anything like your plane. 

it’s all taxpayer money. but i guess because it was given to you freely means you can spend it however you want, right?

stop calling the kettle black.

i recently made a trip to somerset one day after work to return some pants i had bought from banana republic. now, i find somerset the ultimate people watching venue. you can find the ultimate fashion statement or trend in one visit during the holiday shopping season. my first year in detroit, the trend was uggs, and i had counted over 80+ people in the first 10 minutes before i realized counting was futile. two years, i counted the number of burberry-like scarves people were wearing. i hit 56ish before i realized that too was silly.

anyway, so i’m walking in the relatively empty mall to the apple store after returning the jeans i had bought, and on the way, i see, FIVE men, at least 30-55 years old in age, just milling in the distance.

what? why are you all milling…awkwardly standing with your hands in your pants, some of you staring at your cell phones. then i see it…that pink neon on black granite…victoria’s secret. the threshold into the store contains a force field preventing those men who lack confidence from even approaching. often, you see women stopped in their tracks hanging onto an outstretched arm of their boyfriend who dare not enter the sacred “secret” store.

i’m not quite sure what the aversion is, but men just can’t seem to grow the pair required to walk into that damn store. maybe they’re afraid of telling their spouse/girlfriend/mistress of what they like. maybe they’re afraid of looking at women that are more attractive than their current spouse/girlfriend/mistress. maybe they just don’t like lace. i don’t know. i just know that 5 men, standing outside of victoria’s secret is just WEIRD. go wander somewhere. walk in to the apple store across the way. get some sweet from starbucks for the girl who’s buying the underwear that you don’t want to admit you like seeing. don’t stand there and be awkward.

just walk into the damn store already.

justice is a little french band that i was introduced over a cadillac commercial where one of the hooks from the song was used as the background. that song was called genesis and you can listen to it here. that’s where i became attracted musically to justice. unfortunately i missed their american tour which consisted of just two shows, one in l.a., the other in nyc. currently touring denmark, england and germany, i’m half tempted to fly out to see them perform.

but the real genius is this song and video. incredibly creative, unique and frikin’ sweet. i think the cool effects really start at 50 seconds into the video. but the whole thing is worth the watch!