Category: Personal


Newark in a Nutshell

Filed Under: Newark, On the Radar
May.10, 2006

A few readers of Our Story have maybe been perplexed my interest in the city of Newark over the past few weeks, and might think our local politics aren’t really interesting to anyone outside our physical borders. I think, though, that if you take a look at what’s happening here, that you might find yourself fascinated by the tale of a city about to experience a resurgence similar to Baltimore and New York. Newark is an underdog that, for decades, has languished in flagging attempts to recover from damage done by the 1967 riots. For the past forty years, the city has been trying to rebuild, heal the wounds of poverty and racism, and recover from its reputation as politically corrupt and a hotbed for crime.

Newark has been “turning a corner” since as far back as 1990 — bringing in new development, arts, and culture — but its growth over the past decade has come in fits and starts as the city continues to struggle with crime and poverty. For many, a change in administration has come to mean a new era for the development of the city.

In 1995, Stanford-educated Rhodes scholar Cory Booker saw the potential of this city, and a place where he could make a difference with his life. He moved into one of the most run-down neighborhoods to identify with the people living there and find out how best he can help turn it around. His social concern developed into a political interest, and, four years ago, he ran for mayor and narrowly lost in a brutal campaign against five-term incumbent Mayor Sharpe James.

But, after staying under the radar and continuing to develop grass-roots support in the city, Booker ran again in the 2006 mayoral race. This time, his 10-year commitment to the poor of this city, his idealism, and his new approach to governing seems to have struck a chord with Newarkers looking for the next phase in the city’s history. Last night, Booker won the mayoral election in a 72% landslide.

??New York Times?? reporter ??Damien Cave?? has summarized this story in an article entitled, “Cory Anthony Booker: On a Path That Could Have No Limits”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/10/nyregion/10man.html?_r=1&oref=slogin. Booker’s success could mean a real change for the city of Newark: safer streets, better education, and real growth for this city of 280,000 just five miles from Manhattan.

The “Everything Newark”:http://blog.newarker.info blog will continue to follow the story of the historic changes on which the city is about to embark. So, stick around — things are just about to get interesting. :)

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Weekend Update: Newark Election, M:I:III, Top of the Rock, and Wearing Thai Food

Filed Under: Family, Media, Newark, On the Radar
May.08, 2006

Election Day in Newark is tomorrow. Cory Booker “will doubtless win the mayorship”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/08/nyregion/08newark.html?_r=1&oref=slogin, a prize he has sought for at least five years, but the big question is whether he will be able to install enough of his team in the city council to be able to stabilize crime, resolve the looming fiscal crisis, and continue the city revitalization that has ever-so-slowly been coming to hopeful Newarkers. More coverage on the “Everything Newark”:http://blog.newarker.info blog.

Friday night was crash night: Sarah and I dragged ourselves out of NYC and into a movie theater in Elizabeth to see Mission: Impossible 3. It was everything we had hoped: fun, fast-paced, and mentally undemanding. “Highly recommended”:http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/mission_impossible_3/.

Saturday was gorgeous, though I spent most of it in a laundromat. Afterward was the much anticipated “unusual date”:http://kennsarah.net/2006/04/11/brag-moment/ at “Top of the Rock”:http://www.topoftherocknyc.com/ODTStatic/site.htm. I had briefly considered something at NJPAC this month, but didn’t want to repeat another performance venue. It was fun, with some “breathtaking views”:http://flickr.com/photos/tags/topoftherock/interesting/ of New York City and New Jersey. If you go, though, skip the “Rock Center Cafe”:http://www.rapatina.com/rockCenterCafe/ — the food, service and view were all underwhelming.

Sunday at the Village Church, where ??Sam Andreades?? showed off his apologetics chops (link forthcoming). Got Thai food with Darin and his son while Sarah and Krissy drove out to yet-another-baby-shower in the suburbs. “Owen celebrated our rare guys-only get together”:http://www.peznet.net/mig/index.php?currDir=./Owen_Sept_to_Dec_05&pageType=image&image=6.jpg by covering himself and everything within a three-foot radius of him in sticky white rice. Worked a bit on tweaking the sermon downloads page (“example”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/worship/sermons/2006/01/the-redefinition-of-simon-peter/) for the Village Church to make it more user-friendly and include links for bulletins.

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On the Radar: Web Calendars, Lip-Syncing and Love (oh, my)

Filed Under: Faith, Geek, Management, Newark, On the Radar
May.04, 2006

* “Boil the ocean”:http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=%22boil+the+ocean%22&btnG=Search, an egregious consulting term used to limit the scope of a project: “we’re not looking to boil the ocean with this.” Fast Company took “a shrewd look”:http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/88/debunk.html at the phrase, and Bob Congdon digs up its “earliest use”:http://www.bobcongdon.net/blog/2004/06/boil-ocean.html.
* “Moleskine Bible”:http://www.esv.org/blog/2006/04/journaling.bible.coming (“via Tim”:http://www.challies.com/sideblog/archives/001828.php). Very forward-thinking book design on the part of the Standard Bible Society. Bibles used to be beautifully constructed books that were admired, but rarely touched. That’s beginning to change as people want to — literally — interweave the story of their lives with the Scripture.
* YouTube: “Two Chinese Boys”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbdpTCJgnwc (“via Slate”:http://www.slate.com/id/2140697/). Be sucked into the vortex of incomparable splendor that is YouTube.
* ??Fortune Magazine??: “The Great Escape”:http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/03/20/8371767/. Forty million American employees toil in soulless cubicles. How did they get there — and can business ever break out of the box? Probably not.
* ??Crain’s Chicago Business??: “The new face of technology”:http://chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/mag/article.pl?article_id=25714&bt=37Signals&arc=n&searchType=all (“via Jason”:http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/crains_chicago_business_cover_story.php). Start-up! Start-up! Start-up! ;-)
* ??Kathy Sierra??: “The myth of keeping up”:http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/04/the_myth_of_kee.html. You can’t keep up. There is no way. And trying to keep up will probably just make you dumber.You can never be current on everything you think you should be. Good to know I’m in good company.
* ??Michael Idov?? for ??Slate??: “Bitter Brew”:http://www.slate.com/id/2132576/. You know that charming little cafe on New York’s Lower East Side that just closed after a mere six months in business — where coffee was served on silver trays with a glass of water and a little chocolate cookie? The one that, as you calmly and correctly observed, was doomed from its inception because it was too precious and too offbeat? The one you still kind of fell for, the way one falls for a tubercular maiden? Yeah, that one was mine. Pragmatic advice for anyone who handles money. Worth listening to…twice.
* ??Sam Andreades??: “The Redefinition of Simon Peter”:www.villagechurchnyc.com/worship/sermons/2006/01/the-redefinition-of-simon-peter/. Are you really free from how others look at you? I don’t just mean saying ‘I don’t care what other people think of me’–there are plenty of people in New York saying that. … Are you really free of carrying the responsibility of your reputation with others?
* Apple: “Get a Mac”:http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/?ilife_medium (“via Dan”:http://hivelogic.com/links/133). Quietly brilliant new “switcher” ads by Apple. Is it me, or does PC look a little like Mr. Gates? :)
* ??John Gruber??: “Good Journalism”:http://daringfireball.net/2006/05/good_journalism. One can only hope that Apple will one day handle security issues as well as Microsoft does now. Wow, you can _taste_ the bitterness in this article.
* ??Evan Ratliff??: “Now for a Quick Lesson in International Relations”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/30/fashion/sundaystyles/30love.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin (“via Angela”:http://hereisangela.blogspot.com/2006/04/modern-love.html). Feeling suddenly like a shy 10-year-old in the playground, I pretended not to understand. But he walked off, and there was nothing to do but follow. I was already uneasy in Dhaka, unable to blend in or communicate, and now self-consciousness was joined by a simultaneous thrill and fear that I was walking into some vortex of cultural misunderstanding.
* ??Angela Wu??: “Religious map of America”:http://hereisangela.blogspot.com/2006/05/religious-map-of-america.html. Like, if you grew up going to church all your life and everybody else you knew did, too, you might fervently believe lots of things… (bonus: “cows”:http://hereisangela.blogspot.com/2006/05/beating-dead-cow.html)
* The Village Church just might be getting “a new calendar”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/events/ based on the open-source “WebCalendar”:http://www.k5n.us/webcalendar.php?topic=About. WebCalendar has been okay to work with, but not trivial to integrate with the site — due in part because it’s “ugly as a dog”:http://www.k5n.us/webcal-screenshots/wcss-month.png out of the box. Still, it will export an iCal feed, so if you’ve got 30 Boxes or Google Calendar, you can “subscribe”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/events/publish.php?user=public.
* ??Fast Company??: ” Varnished History”:http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/94/pr.html. The documentary itself won’t be featured in any film classes — but in the tawdry realm of corporate propaganda, there has been worse.
* ??InterVarsity??: “Ministry Exchange Overview”:http://www.intervarsity.org/mx/item/3674/. IV constructs a massive content management system to share ministry materials, providng features as web-2.0 savvy as tagging and RSS feeds. Well done–this is worth watching for a while.
* ??Ken Walker??: “The Debate Over Newark, Part II”:http://blog.newarker.info/2006/05/04/the-debate-over-newark-part-ii/. Have you heard? We’re getting a new mayor in Newark after 20 years of the same administration. The candidates recently debated — here’s how it went.

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Weekend Update: Jen’s Recital, Lunch with TVC’s Übercüte Couple

Filed Under: Faith, Family, Friends, On the Radar, Personal
May.01, 2006

Drove 1 hour and 20 minutes to the Mazda dealer to pick up a sideview mirror, which was broken and later glued back on to the car. Vehicle abuse is one of the charms of our town. I need to find a new parts dealer.

Went to an excellent Master’s Degree recital by “Jenny Jobb”:http://www.myspace.com/jennyjobb at Juliard. It rocked–and I was even more impressed because flute is not my favorite instrument. Jen’s music was ecclectic and fascinating. Thanks for the invite. :)

Church on Sunday began with Darin & Sam’s Marriage and Dating class. Sam taught on the “asymmetry” of roles in marriage relationships. Judy Fujimura helpfully pointed out that both men and women both have to make the decision to lay their lives down for each other, even if the actual implementation looks different.

Speaking of the d-word, we were highly honored to spend lunch with the most “übercüte couple”:http://www.alissaclark.com/?p=287 at the Village Church. We talked shop about Newark (which is _so_ “up-and-coming”:http://kennsarah.net/2005/10/15/newark-unveiled-as-a-force-in-the-art-world/), the m-word, visiting Europe, “new apartments”:http://www.alissaclark.com/?p=300, and “widgets”:http://kennsarah.net/2006/04/28/on-the-radar/. Then we consumed the best “cream puffs we’ve ever had”:http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=2&q=http://www.muginohousa.com/creampuffs.html&e=9797.

Finished the weekend watching “Sullivan’s Travels”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=ourstory-20%26link_code=xm2%26camp=2025%26creative=165953%26path=http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html%253fASIN=B00005JH9C%2526tag=ourstory-20%2526lcode=xm2%2526cID=2025%2526ccmID=165953%2526location=/o/ASIN/B00005JH9C%25253FSubscriptionId=0EMV44A9A5YT1RVDGZ82. Very good, though we’re not sure why we put it on the Netflix queue in the first place.

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On the Radar: All Those Pretty Widgets Edition

Filed Under: Geek, Newark, On the Radar
Apr.28, 2006

* ??Heather Armstrong??: “How to medicate with legal substances”:http://www.dooce.com/archives/daily/04_21_2006.html. Two, we spread a layer of peanut butter on top because we ran out of spreadable cocaine.
* YouTube: “Apple Music Event 2001-The First Ever iPod Introduction”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kN0SVBCJqLs. Steve Jobs introduces his little digital wonder to the world.
* ??Steve Pavlina??: “How to Get Up Right Away When Your Alarm Goes Off”:http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/04/how-to-get-up-right-away-when-your-alarm-goes-off/ (“via”:http://www.lifehacker.com/software/sleep/how-to-get-up-when-you-really-want-to-169533.php). I’d love to try this out, but I have a feeling that simply _going to sleep at a decent hour_ might be just as effective.
* “Widgets”:http://automattic.com/code/widgets/, “widgets”:http://widgets.wordpress.com/, “widgets”:http://wordpress.org/development/2006/03/widgets-plugin/, “widgets”:http://wordpress.com/blog/2006/02/25/wordpress-widgets/, “widgets”:http://photomatt.net/2006/03/29/wordpress-widgets/ — the WordPress world is in love with them, and for good reason. Widgets make customizing WordPress even more accessible for mere mortals. A nice side benefit: they also make upgrading your theme much more painless. With the “ExecPHP”:http://widgets.wordpress.com/2006/04/10/execphp/ and default text widgets, you can make sidebar mods (such as advertising, etc.) without worrying about them getting overwritten after a theme upgrade. Great work.
* ??Seth Godin??: “Ode: How to tell a great story”:http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/04/ode_how_to_tell.html. Great stories are subtle. Surprisingly, the fewer details a marketer spells out, the more powerful the story becomes. Talented marketers understand that allowing people to draw their own conclusions is far more effective than announcing the punch line.
* ??Ken Walker??: “He Smells Like the Future”:http://blog.newarker.info/2006/04/26/he-smellslike-the-future/. On watching the Newark debut of Marshall Curry’s “Street Fight” (two years after the movie’s release) and Q&A with the director at Rutgers-Newark.
* ??LifeHacker??: “Download of the Day 2: Google SketchUp”:http://www.lifehacker.com/software/downloads/download-of-the-day-2-google-sketchup-170027.php. What the…?! Where did this program come from? I played with this a bit–it’s definitely complex, but interesting. Why would Google want us to play around with 3D modelling?
* ??Ben Goodger??: “Firefox 2: Safer, Faster, Better”:http://www.bengoodger.com/software/mb/2.0/firefox2-vision.html. It won’t have the much-coveted (and advertised) “Places”:http://wiki.mozilla.org/Places functionality, but Ben tells you why Firefox will _still_ be cool in 2.0. Can’t wait ’til “August”:http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox2/Schedule!
* ??Steve Smith??: “Staying Small in a Big Place: Part 1″:http://orderedlist.com/articles/staying-small-in-a-big-place-part-1/. Kind of like “Getting the Basics Right”:http://relevantmagazine.com/life_article.php?id=7104 for teams. Good read.
* “Uno”:http://gui.interacto.net/ is an attempt to cut down on the GUI dissonance you might experience while using a Mac — all of the windows are made to look the same (rather than the ongoing conflict between “brushed metal”:http://daringfireball.net/2005/09/anthropomorphized and the “other guy”:http://daringfireball.net/2006/01/brushed_metal). There’s even a matching “Firefox theme”:http://takebacktheweb.org/, which makes FF look a lot less ugly in OS X.

One nice example of using widgets to hack your WP templates: I just set up a widget to carry some CSS code embedded in a “style” tag in my sidebar. I know, it’s right smack in the middle of my HTML which is “totally illegitimate”:http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/present/styles.html#edef-STYLE. But, hey, if the pros can occassionally “thumb their noses at the validator”:http://www.stopdesign.com/log/2004/02/05/bebad.html, why can’t I? :) (Okay, okay: Doug was thumbing his nose at a _bug_ in the validator…but, still).

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Outside

Filed Under: Business, On the Radar, Personal
Apr.13, 2006

In NYC today, making sure the project managers for our division are getting up to speed on the new “project management system from hell”:http://kennsarah.net/2006/04/05/pebfad/, (which shall remain nameless). It goes like this: I check my mail and find that I’ve received 30 new messages in the last hour since I was last at my desk. I pick the three most important — either because I can pass them off to someone else and let them work in parallel, or because it’s a critical thing that can’t wait for another hour — and forward the email, make a phone call, or do a desk visit. If I’m at my desk for more than 30 minutes, someone stops by to ask for help, and away I go. This goes on for the whole day.

Except for my 2 o’clock lunch. I ignore the one-line email (“Are you there?”) and slink out the office to the elevators. Thirty-one floors later, I’m through the lobby and standing at the lunch truck. A couple in their fifties are there, slinging hotdogs and hamburgers for a few bucks. They’re cheap, fast, and they’ve been there forever. He doesn’t say a word, and she’ll chat with you only as long as it takes to get you your burger– everyone calls her Mama.

A young man orders in front of me; he’s got his head on a swivel. Mama asks him whether he wants mustard and, looking the other direction, he replies, “My God, look at my _wife_.” I turn to look, expecting to see a woman waiting nearby, perhaps with a child. Instead, I only catch the glimpse of a woman in a skirt as she glides by — apparently he was speaking in the future tense. Mama summons him back to reality: “HEY, FOCUS. You want mustard?”

I order, take my lunch from Mama, and drink in the warm, blue sky. I decide with gravity that the day is too beautiful to waste inside of an office, and, with equal gravity, that I shouldn’t be gone for more than ten minutes. I grab a bench in the little park outside the austere office building we call “388″. Men in expensive suits stream in and out of the revolving doors, passing by Tribeca mommies (nannies?) pushing their strollers. Little kids are playing hopscotch across the stonework in the park. Working men in uniforms tell colorful stories in even-more-colorful language nearby.

Another day of “eating nuclear waste” to keep the business running. Nice thing about being busy is that, at the end of the day, you feel like you’re taking names and kicking arse — plus, it fights off the layoff jitters. I’m glad my manager gave me the opportunity to be the “key guy” on this project. I’m even more glad, though, that tomorrow is a holiday. I miss sleep.

Ten minutes come and go quickly, but are well spent. I grab what’s left of my lunch and head back into the fray.

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PEBFAD

Filed Under: Business, Personal
Apr.05, 2006

Started this morning by getting up late. Been trying to get up earlier so I can do this journalling thing at a decent time–to spend the morning remembering why it is I’m going to carry out my day. Didn’t do that. Not even close.

Woke up just in time to drive Sarah to the train station and come home to shower. Only to realize that the hot water wasn’t working. Hemmed and hawed until I decided that a cold shower was better than no shower. Did the lather-rinse-repeat thing while uttering unvoluntarily at the shock of icy water. Called in the issue to the landlord’s English-speaking son on the way to work.

It’s been like this. No time for the important things because the urgent things crowd the mind. Work’s been insane. My manager is betting the farm on a pet project and speaks with the head honchos at corporate headquarters tomorrow — so he’s been out of play for weeks. My coworker’s father-in-law, who had been just hanging on after two successive heart attacks and quadruple-bypass surgery, finally passed away yesterday. A majorly disruptive project management system goes into production for our group of over 150 people on Monday, and I’m the only one left to support it. We’re officially in a contingency situation.

I went to a senior manager’s two-hour town hall today with some 300 other coworkers. He explained to us flatly that our technology division’s sole raison d’être is to MAKE THE BANKERS MORE MONEY. He spoke of “giving a shit” and “eating nuclear waste” (his words) to ensure we meet our commitments. He told anecdotes of working 70-hour weeks and weekend upon weekend to address production outages and deliver projects on time. So much for work-life balance.

The landlord discovered nothing was wrong with the water heater, so I looked at it again after I dragged myself back through the door at 8:00 PM. A quick test and a trip to the basement made me realize that the problem was in fact a PEBFAD (“problem exists between faucet and drain”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEBKAC). We’ve been living in this apartment for almost three years and I had been turning the wrong knob for hot water.

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Blogging the Renaissance

Filed Under: Geek, Newark, On the Radar
Feb.15, 2006

Announcing “Newarker.info”:http://newarker.info, devoted to covering the life and times of Newark, NJ from the perspective of the people who live here.

Newarker.info is just a blog and wiki for now, but I’m curious to see if we can ride the wave of the “renaissance” underway in the city of Newark. There seems to be a huge opportunity right now to build an online community for the city as more people take an interest in living and working here. The closest attempts I’ve seen are simply forums (“Newark Speaks”:http://www.newarkspeaks.com/, “The Newarkian”:http://www.newarkian.com/), which lack some of the more interesting features of the web, like RSS feeds.

My time commitments to the project are slim, so if any fellow Newarkers are interested in participating in a group blog, I’d welcome the help. :)

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How Not to Suck at Your Job

Filed Under: Business, Personal
Jan.31, 2006

??Ken Walker??: “Getting the Basics Right”:http://relevantmagazine.com/life_article.php?id=7104. Hey, that’s me. :)

“Alissa”:http://www.alissaclark.com needed an article for the Career and Finance department of ??Relevant Magazine??, so I thought I’d divulge all the secrets of my success in 1,000 of my favorite words. Speaking of not sucking, do you know _how_ to condense everything you’ve ever wanted to say about the corporate world into a two page blurb? Revise, revise, revise. Then ask for feedback from people you respect (and will be honest about how much it _still_ sucks), and revise some more.

The final article endured 61 mostly-late-night revisions, ballooning up to as many as 1,714 words at version number 34. The picture below is every change I made between that version and the final. Highlighted green words are additions, grey struck-out words are removals. Here’s to “embracing your constraints”:http://www.37signals.com/svn/archives2/the_positive_side_effect_of_big_text_less_text.php:

Getting the Basics Right, versions 34 and 59 compared

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By the Numbers

Filed Under: Family, Geek, Personal
Jan.05, 2006

My nose has been buried in bank statements lately.

We’ve been closing out 2005 in order to try to get a handle on how our spending might look for 2006 and how soon we’ll be able to achieve some goals. Stuff like paying of all our debts, buying a house, and maybe even (gulp) starting a family. It’s funny to look back over a year or two of financial history. Birthdays, new car, doctor visits, job changes: they’re all there large as life in the numbers. It gets me thinking about all the data — in a previous generation, I would have said “paper” — we generate with our lives.

Emails we sent, notes we scribbled, blogs we published, documents we wrote, financials we recorded, appointments we kept, videos we made, contacts we made, songs we listened to, places we went and the pictures we took there will all one day be indexed and integrated into a singular user interface for you to query, categorize and pivot any way you want. Consider the Google Desktop search and its growing list of indexing plugins. Forget This Day in History, my kids will be able to see This Day in Ken Walker.

Not that any of this is new: people dig through the the archives to learn about other people all the time. It’ll just be a lot faster than it used to, shuffling through mountains of paper, stashed into shoeboxes. Instead, what will likely be left of me when I’m gone is an electronic storage device, about the size of a USB key, with my life’s history on it — indexed and tagged with all kinds of metadata.

But it will probably still be in a shoebox.

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