daverea.com

Ten years ago, I sat in a conference room with a group of ambulance officers and paramedics. My clearance papers were on the table – a collection of training data that, taken together, was the basis for my being allowed to run the show in the back of an ambulance, alone. After I received my clearance that day, the brass left me with a parting thought: Remember: You’re never alone out there. A paramedic unit is just a radio call away. Medical control is on the other end of the phone. Your driver can help you. Ask the dispatcher, and you can even have a helicopter in fifteen minutes. But you’re never alone.

A year ago, I started a new chapter in life – pursuing a master’s degree in software engineering. My reason for returning to school: I could do a clean-sheet design for a piece of electronic hardware, but the same wasn’t so for software – and there was software in nearly everything I was creating. So, I left my cooshy job, turned in my comfy car and spent the year that followed studying my ass off.

As of yesterday, that chapter is over. My degree is finished, 64 credits and 12 months later. And I realize, in much the same way as I was never alone in my decade as a medic, that you never really start from nothing. In the software world – as in the engineering world in general – you build on the shoulders of the great people who came before you. Gauss, Tesla, Maxwell, Ohm and Shockley were all with me as I designed circuits, just as Gamma, Bass, Booch, Pressman and their cohorts have my back when it comes to creating software. Among other realizations, this past year has brought me the understanding that there’s no such thing as a clean-sheet design in the first place.

Next week, I’ll start a new job, working on new projects in the company of new friends and partners in innovation. It’s an exciting time, built not just on the foundation of intellect and creativity, but also on love and support: so my family and friends, and especially my Dad and Kelly, deserve the most thanks of all.

Yeah, I know, I fell off the Project52 wagon. Things have been just a wee bit busy, and I’ll leave the bellyaching to that.

Why? Because in this day and age when it seems like the vast majority of people would rather spend time dreaming up reasons why they can’t do this or that, there’s a never-say-die amputee somewhere out on the continental divide that’s turning people from victims to victors at the helm of a take-no-prisoners off-road Econoline.

When I think of “making something of one’s life” and “people that do meaningful things” I think of people like Lance Blair. While I’d be fine with keeping both my legs, I hope I get the chance to do something half as meaningful as he does. Keep up the great work Lance – you’re an inspiration.

(Hat tip: Engadget. A great read.)

Visually-deemphasized, marginally-interesting note: This is DaveRea.com’s 500th post! As if you cared! Woohoo!

As I recall, it was the early ’90s, I was somewhere between age 10 and the threshold of teen-aged, and was developing an appreciation for the value of loose change. Loose change could buy you baseball cards or candy at the corner store. Loose change could be hooked to batteries with alligator clips in glasses of salt water (wait…don’t all tween males at some point attempt to electrodeposit copper onto paperclips?!). Loose change could be used to test out the snack vending machine you just built out of Construx. Most importantly, loose change could be found between couch cushions, wedged into car seats, rolled beneath appliances and dropped under beds.

And so, on the occasion that my Mom ducked outside to work in her gardens or complete some manner of seemingly-boring, adult, home-ownerly task, if the thought occurred to me, I’d roam around the house collecting change. My brother’s room wasn’t very productive – he had just finished potty-training, after all – and our guest bedroom was occupied far too rarely to be much of a coin-magnet. The couch and easy-chair in our family room were convenient targets, but once in a while, when everyplace else left me empty-handed, I’d head for my parents’ room. It wasn’t off-limits or anything; heck, the door stood open unless they got tired of finding cat hair on their bedspread. And, on occasion, I’d find a coin or two hiding behind the ruffles of their bedskirt, or under the recliner in the corner, or peeking out from the gap between the carpet and the bottom drawers of each dresser.

On these occasions, and indeed any occasion that I had to visit my parents’ bedroom, I noticed that they each had a small wooden box on their dressers. The boxes weren’t the same shape, nor were they the same size, or correlated in any way other than that both parents had one. I noticed the boxes during my covert change-collecting missions. I noticed the boxes when I’d sit with my Dad, listening to TalkNet on his clock radio while he flipped through Corvette magazines. I noticed the boxes when, as a refugee of malfunctioning plumbing, I had to use the master bathroom in the mornings before school for a month or so. And I noticed the boxes when I’d sit with my Mom, talking little but experiencing much, during her final battle with breast cancer in 1998.

Every time I noticed the boxes, I came to the same conclusion: They must be for storing Very Important Things.

More…

The end of October has arrived, and as surely as tonight will bring scores of trick-or-treating young’ns to many, tomorrow will bring the start of NaBloPoMo to the blogosphere. For those who didn’t (wait…who wouldn’t?!) watch the DaveRea.com NaBloPoMo escapades last November, or who just don’t wanna click the link, NaBloPoMo is the National Blog Posting Month, where bloggers with the time and inclination post at least once a day for the entire month of November. Think of it as the “online” version of NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month.

As much as I’d like to participate in NaBloPoMo this year, I probably shouldn’t get your non-existent hopes up… Because life is a little different going into this November than it was in ’08. The week before Labor Day, I took a leave of absence from my kickass job at GM, said goodbye my cooshy 250 horsepower Saab and took a few final photographs of our home’s former kitchen. In the days that followed, I purchased my awesome brother Andy’s 2-door Honda, tore apart the kitchen, and started my first day back at school. Graduate school. Pursuing a Master’s in Software Engineering (as if I weren’t geeky enough…)

Since then, life has been somewhere between a blur and this:

Despite being welcomed by 4 courses, 16 credit hours, 5 projects and 2 research papers, I think transitioning from “upstanding adult with a full time job” to “grad student living on coffee and pulling all-nighters” has gone quite well. And despite wanting to curl up in a ball and hide a few times, or asking myself “why the hell did I do this?” on several occasions, I’m still convinced it was a good choice. New chapters in our lives wouldn’t be all that interesting without a spectrum of emotions to go with them, and heading back to school is about as easy as it is an exception to that rule – which would be not at all.

So given that our kitchen still isn’t all back-together (but it’s coming along nicely), and my commute takes a little longer now (though I get 35 MPG and I’m thoroughly attached to the adorable Civic), and (oh-by-the-way) I’ve got homework to do, I hope you won’t mind me taking a pass on this year’s NaBloPoMo. I’ll try to keep up with posts – and I’m sure I’ll have some experiences with the new Droid to share in a little under a week – but to assemble a daily post that’s anything approaching intelligent, in the background of exams, Thanksgiving, homework and projects would be about like to trying to clear the leaves from our yard by blowing through a bendy drinking straw.

And with a pair of maples out front that are a decade older than either my wife or me, we have a lot of leaves…

…to these two dear friends…

…who, as I learned last night, got engaged on Christmas morning!

Congratulations Brie and Jason!

It’s that time again – time to “ring in the new year” and celebrate the kickoff of the next 365 days. There will be champagne, noisemakers, food and silly hats. There will be counting and ball-dropping and kissing. With any luck, it’ll be the last year whose double-consecutive-zeros appear in countless pairs of novelty glasses.

There are plenty of bloggers (among others) out there recapping 2008, and probably an equal number making predictions, listing resolutions or setting goals for 2009. Looking back at past DaveRea.com new year’s posts in close proximity to the last three new-year’s celebrations, it’s interesting to observe just how life has evolved.

In lieu of listing all the ways my life has changed over the last year – there are 12 months’ worth of archives to account for that – I’m curious what you see when you look back on 2008. How were you different the last time you tuned in the Times Square new-year’s broadcast? How do you think you might change between now and the final ten-second countdown to 2010?

I think I’ve told Kelly the stories at just about every winter holiday, but – to me at least – they never get old. For some reason, whenever I find my hands coated in cinnamon, sugar and bits of apple, or whenever I feel the texture of floured dough and a rolling pin beneath my hands, it’s just like I’m there. There are certainly stories I tell when – this time around – she rolls her eyes and sighs as if to say “here we go again”, but never my stories about Mom.

As we stood at the counter together last night, peeling and slicing our way through a bag of McIntosh apples for Thanksgiving pies, I recounted the story once again of how my Mom and Aunt used to compete to see who could peel the longest thread of apple skin. They’d pick out the biggest apple they could find, and deftly slide their paring knives around in a meticulous spiral. There were no potato peelers here! Slowly, a pile of ribbonlike apple peel would appear on the countertop, until someone finally exclaimed… “eergh!” as the cut end of the ribbon fell to the counter. We’d all laugh and one sister would congratulate the other – and the piemaking would continue.

Sadly, I never learned the art of marathon apple peeling, though I doubt I’d have the patience for it anyway. But there is another favorite childhood tradition I can share with Kelly in the present-tense. One of the reasons I loved watching (and, in my own small-fry way, helping) my Mom bake her pies was, oddly enough, leftover crust. What didn’t go into transforming her pies into utter works-of-art went back into the bowl … and that’s where I came in. We’d toss some fresh flour on the counter, and hit that tablespoon-or-three of crust dough with the rolling pin. It usually ended up about the size of a saucer, with the thickness of a Christmas cut-out cookie. But what came next was the real magic.

Mom always kept a shaker of cinnamon-sugar in the spice rack, and after brushing a little butter or egg white over my newly-flattened masterpiece, we’d apply a liberal dousing of crunchy-sweet flavor over the top. Along with the pie, my doughy little confection would go into the oven, to emerge (a looonnng ten minutes later) as an inimitable sweet treat.

Well, almost inimitable – because last night, after we assembled our crumb-top apple pie, we managed to have just enough crust left over for a little trip down memory lane.

This Thanksgiving, I’m grateful for memories like these, and for a loving family to share them with. I’m sure there are thousands more, shrink-wrapped just beneath the surface, waiting for the right touch, the right smell, the right place to bring them out. I’m thankful for those, too.

It wasn’t that long ago that our family owned a boat. We’re not exactly “pleasure boating” types, so it wasn’t the sexiest boat on the lake, but it got us out to fish, water ski and cruise the Finger Lakes in 17 feet of aluminum-skinned, charcoal-carpeted luxury. It was comfortable, functional and reliable, and as aluminum boats go, I’ve yet to see one that looked better.

We did have a few harrowing experiences with our 17-foot Smokercraft, though. One in particular comes to mind when I think about the word “bailout” … a beautiful sunny day that found us going through our normal launching routine at the Honeoye Lake state-run boat launch. We removed the canvas straps that held the boat to the trailer, dropped and primed the 90-horse outboard, unlocked the winch and disconnected the trailer lights. Moments later, the boat was in the water and I started the engine to back it off the trailer. And then I stopped. Something wasn’t right. The boat was sitting a little too low in the water, and all of a sudden the engine’s exhaust – which vented through an above-the-water port while not in gear – was making a bubbling sound!

Lifting up the canvas flap that covered the battery box and transom, I found … a lot of water. Turns out no one had remembered to install the plug during our hasty preparations. Fortunately, the boat was still winched to the trailer, so all we needed to do was pull it back up onto the pavement and let it drain.

More…