Pete and Debbie’s plane finally arrived at SFO at about 7:15 last night, more than three hours late, and by the time we got home (after stopping to feed them — since the flight was only supposed to be two hours long, there was no food on board other than pretzels and “nutritional bars”), it was quite late.

We’re supposed to be on vacation this week, but since Jeffrey’s in school, we can’t go very far. Today, we took a nice walk after breakfast; then, since it was lunchtime, we walked to lunch — the same walk, as it happens, since that’s where the closest restaurants are. Oh, well, I needed the exercise!

After that, I had a conference call I couldn’t avoid (I’d suggested scheduling it for today before realizing I was “on vacation”), and then we visited the Saab dealer to get our new, slightly smaller keys, and then Fry’s to return my failed X-10 ActiveHome controller. Returning things to Fry’s is always an experience — this one only cost me an hour or so. And they didn’t have any more ActiveHome controllers (they had a huge stack a week ago; maybe they were all bad?), so I’ll have to find one elsewhere later on.

This is definitely not a high-pressure vacation so far.

How do you read a ruler?

I got an odd e-mail from my mother yesterday. One of our cousins is a teacher in Richmond, and she asked Mom if I could find anything on teaching the kind of “rulers” I used to use in school. I guessed that what was meant was slide rules, and I sent off a pointer to Sphere Research’s Slide Rule Universe, which has more than you need to know about slide rules — and even a 43-page brochure from Pickett on teaching the slide rule.

This morning, I got a reply from my cousin — she didn’t mean slide rules — she meant rulers. Plain old regular rulers. Apparently some of her 10th grade students can’t read them, and it’s not covered in high school curricula.

I did a search, with limited success; I don’t know if it’ll help her or not (I did find a $149 instructional videotape on the subject, as well as some porn — I doubt either of these will be useful), but we’ll see.

I’ve had mixed experiences with technology today, and for a change, none of it is work-related.

Shir Hadash held a blood drive this morning, and I’d signed up to donate. But when they signed me in, the computer printed “Not Eligible” on the form — this alarmed me, since I couldn’t think of any reason I wouldn’t be eligible to donate, unless they’d found something bad in my blood from a previous donation. So the head nurse called back to the home base, where they discovered that I’d been deferred last time because I’d taken antibiotics within 72 hours of trying to donate, and someone had coded my record to indicate that I was taking them on a regular basis and was unable to donate because of that. Fortunately, that’s not the case — but no one was available at the blood bank who could update the records, and so they couldn’t take my blood. *sigh* I had a doughnut anyway.

We’re also waiting for my brother-in-law and his wife to arrive from Denver, where the weather is apparently dreadful. I used United’s “Flight Paging” service to have updates on their progress sent to my cellphone, and it’s worked wonderfully well — I got a page two hours before their scheduled arrival, then another one twenty minutes later telling me that they’d be an hour late, and another one just a few minutes ago telling me that the flight would be over two hours late. Pete also called from the plane to tell me that, while it pushed back from the gate almost on time, they were waiting for de-icing, with no estimated actual takeoff time. So thanks to modern technology, I’m sitting comfortably at home instead of paying $4/hour in parking fees to wait at SFO.

I don’t have very much to talk about today — I had an early phone call, and, as often happens on such days, I wound up spending the day working from home instead of driving to the office. This saved me from another exposure to the world’s saltiest sauce; on the other hand, it’s not clear that microwaving a frozen entree is much better for me (even if it did come from Trader Joe’s, so it was low in fat).

Turnabout is fair play

I’ve just finished providing “360-degree input” for four of my fellow employees. This is an exercise in which you are asked to answer two simple questions (slightly paraphrased):

• What behaviors has this person exhibited in support of Win/Execute/Team and what effect has this had on others?
• How can this person improve their behavior and what positive effect would there be?

The results are sent to the employee’s manager, who then consolidates them into one document which is made available to the person with the attributions removed. This is supposed to provide perspective for the manager’s year-end evaluation of the employee; since I’m not a manager, I can’t say whether it works or not.

The first question is usually pretty easy to answer — in general, no one is going to ask you to provide a 360 unless they expect you to be able to say good things about them, and I like giving praise (especially when it’s deserved). I’ve always found the second question to be much tougher — even when there is something I’d like the person to do differently, this doesn’t seem to be the right way to get the point across. So I find something to write, but it’s usually inconsequential (along the lines of “Fred would be more effective if he didn’t include the entirety of every e-mail in his responses”), and I feel like I’ve wasted my time.

Do other companies have this particular ritual?

Shabbat Shalom!

The day didn’t get off to the best of starts: the radio didn’t go off — and I had two different X-10 boxes programmed to fire it off. But we woke up only 20 minutes or so late, which isn’t too bad (actually, it felt good to wake up naturally instead of to the radio).

And Jeffrey got off to school on time — in his pajamas, true, but it was pajama day, so that was fine. And we found out that the cleaning service would be at our house on Saturday morning instead of today, but that’s ok, it gives us more time to straighten up for them. I even got a bunch of e-mail tended to before leaving this morning. And remembered to buy gas on the way to work.

Got to work, opened up the trunk to take out my briefcase…and it wasn’t there. I could have sworn I’d put it in there, but maybe not — and I have two other computers in my office, so that’s not a big problem either. Off to the presentation on “Emerging Technology Opportunities”, which was quite interesting — unfortunately, I couldn’t resist the donuts which were available before the presentation, but at least the one I ate was chocolate, so the calories weren’t in vain.

I should’ve let the donut serve as lunch, too — I had pasta (feeling slightly virtuous in doing so), but there was a small problem with the marinara sauce — whoever made it decided that salt was the most important ingredient. I spent much of the afternoon going to the cafeteria for yet another mug full of ice water in hopes of conquering the thirst!

It didn’t seem like a good day to work late, so I left on time, but was slowed in my progress halfway down the hill by a line of stopped cars. This is very unusual, since the road down the hill only serves Almaden traffic — no intersections to mess up the flow. But then I looked ahead of the first car, and realized why we were stopped: there was a long line of wild turkeys crossing the road, at least a dozen of them, with another dozen or so staying put where they were. Somehow, it seemed appropriate.

And how was your day?