Alex Hopmann’s Blog

A new hobby for me is whitewater rafting. Kat was a commercial rafting guide
so we have a bunch of friends who hit the local rivers during the right time of
the year. Last year was a bit of a bust because the snow levels were so low-
rafting in the north-west mostly relies on the melting snow to bring up the
water levels. This year is the opposite- we had huge snow all winter and the
rivers are just huge right now.

For her birthday I got Kat a new raft- anTer
Aire Super Puma.
These are a bit smaller than a normal commercial raft but more importantly they
are more streamlined at the ends- this means they are both more maneuverable but
also easier to tip and take a bit more work to keep pointed in the right
direction.

We spent a whole evening putting the raft together- you need to lace the
floor in which is a super-pain. Even more so when we realized we did it
backwards and had to redo the whole thing. This weekend we headed up to the
Wenatchee river and did our inaugural float. For our first trip we had 5 of us
in  our boat and there were three other boats. Ironically two of the other
rafts had carnage but we never tipped or lost anyone except for when we
intentionally practiced tipping the raft. Here is our victory shot afterwards-

On Sunday we hit the river again but many people didn’t make it back out from
the campground so there were just 3 of us in the boat- its quite a bit more work
with just 3 of you but I thought it was extra fun with the extra pressure about
working hard since no one else is going to be able to carry your load.

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AT&T appears to have put videos of several of the Coachella acts online including my
favorite Bloc Party. If
you go check it out you can probably see my hands going crazy somewhere in the front. They have Ladytron
also but the Bloc Party set was the best show I’ve seen in a long time.

Here are a couple of pictures I took at the show-

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Friday we got going pretty late and since we needed to get to Leavenworth and be ready for rafting in the morning we skipped the Friday night
line-up. Saturday we were running really late after rafting (more on rafting
later) and were pretty sure we had missed the Shins. On the way over we passed
through some pretty intense thunderstorm cells and apparently they had hit the
show also causing an hour delay- I suppose it isn’t really fun to watch a
concert in a hail-storm.

The Shins were really great. After that we were really looking forward to seeing
the Flaming Lips. I’m not sure what I think about their music but I’ve heard
great things about their show. We waited a half hour while they set up the stage
and they they announced that they were switching the order of the Flaming Lips
and Ben Harper because of the delays. Since Ben Harper was scheduled to be on
for two hours and we had an hour drive and an early-morning appointment at the
river we bailed and went back to our hotel.

Sunday we got there quite a bit earlier and were in time to see the Decemberists.
They were great and I plan to check out their stuff more (especially since you
can get their albums on
eMusic).
They were followed by Matisyahu- I thought he was good although Kat didn’t
really like it. We retreated for a couple margaritas in the cliff house with
beautiful sunset views during Queens of the Stone Age and came out afterwards to
see Death Cab for Cutie.

To be honest I was a bit down on Death Cab going in. We had seen them at the
Paramount and it was really disappointing. Pretty much nothing but bed-wetter
songs and very pop-music-for-15-year-old-girls sort of thing. Luck for me at
Sasquatch they turned it all around and played an amazing rocking set.

They were followed by Beck “presented in puppet-vision”. Beck had a little
puppet stage set up in back and the big screens showed the (live) footage of the
puppets acting out all the musicians on stage. He also had a guy who did just
crazy Napoleon Dynamite style dancing and played a ton of my favorites.

In the end Sunday pulled it all out for Sasquatch but in retrospect I should
have only gotten tickets for Sunday. Still Sunday was a great show and I’m
really glad I didn’t miss it.

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This weekend Kat and I are off to the Sasquatch Festival which has expanded into a three day
event held at the Gorge in eastern Washington. The Gorge is a great venue but its a bit of a pain
to get to for a single day. Since the event is all weekend we are actually going to be staying
over in Leavenworth, rafting in the mornings (huge water on the rivers still!) and hitting
the shows from relatively nearby in the afternoon/evenings.

The lineup this year is a bit less interesting than I’ve seen in the past. As usual
a great way to check out many of these artists is by downloading their stuff from
EMusic.
They still have their “50 free songs” promo if you sign-up a new account and
after that its as low as 22 cents a song. Plus none of it is DRM protected so you can easily listen from any
of your computers, create a music library server, transfer it to an iPod or other device, etc.

The only catch is that they don’t have all the major-label stuff. Still, from this year’s line-up they
have Nine Inch Nails, Bauhaus, HIM, TV on the Radio, Matisyahu, The Decemberists, Gomez, The Flaming Lips,
and probably more of the other non-mainstage acts.

Overall for the Sasquatch show I’m mostly looking forward to the Sunday line-up but just keeping my
fingers crossed that
the whole thing isn’t ruined by bad weather.
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I’ve been suffering for almost two years now with this Samsung i630 smartphone. The thing is huge, ugly
and doesn’t work very well. It is slow, it responds slowly to calls, hangs, and other fun misbehavior.

So the basic result is that I’ve been shopping for a new phone for months
now. I love the little querty-keyboard thing on the Treo’s and had been leaning
towards one of them, but have been holding off because they are still huge and
fairly expensive.

So it is not a big surprise that I was really excited to read

Michael Gartenberg’s write-up of

the new Motorola Q. Windows SmartPhone, querty keyboard, super-slim nice
looking form-factor, fast internet connections. Best of all its going to be
priced at $199, basically half the price of the Treo. He points out that this
phone isn’t for everyone but it sounds just about perfect for me.

I just hope that the pdanet
folks make sure that it works with this phone.

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Kat and I took a trip to Vancouver this weekend. We had been planning on flying down
to Napa but the Napa forecast was for thunderstorms which put a damper on the whole thing
(since they are aren’t especially good for flying OR for nice wine-tasting parties).

Last year we had a similar change of plans and just went to Portland for the weekend instead. This
year we headed the other direction and headed up to Vancouver.

One note- I’d love to be pasting some of these reviews on Judy’s Book but
they don’t appear to cover anything in Canada. I’ll have to chat with folks back in the office about that this week,
although I do understand that there is probably a pretty high entry cost into any new geography for them.

Friday night after a long drive we went straight to Vij’s. We were a little stressed that we wouldn’t make it
in time before they closed but everything worked out. We checked in and had a nice glass of wine and some snacks
as usual while waiting. I just don’t understand why more restaurants can’t do half as good of a job of taking care
of their guests that are waiting for a table. The meal was wonderful as usual- we had short ribs with cinnamon, an Indian crepe with navy beans, venison
medallions,
and their signature lamb popsicles with fenugreek cream sauce. I also managed to pick up an extra canister of their
roasted fenugreek leaves which they normally sell in the shop next door. At this time of night the next-door place was
closed but the proprietor got me a can anyway. This has been my secret ingredient recently in a lamb marinade I make for the grill so
I was pretty eager to get some more.

Saturday morning we
went to the Granville island public market for lunch and a little shopping. Maybe some
Vancouver residents think the opposite but this feels much cooler to me than the
Seattle public market. Lot’s of interesting food stalls, not quite as much
straight tourist junk and several shops offering stuff that is really hard to
get in the US including some leaves used for Thai curries, etc. We had a good
donut but the secret was to get an absolutely fresh one- the other ones we tried
were just ok. We also had a bagel from Siegels- these were only ok again but we
found out later that their main branch is in town. We also sampled a soup from
“The Stock Exchange” and some pies from “A La Mode”. The soup was pretty good
but I found the pies disappointing- especially the raspberry/rhubarb which just
didn’t taste right for some reason.

After lunch we headed to the movie theatre to see the Da Vinci Code. I
thought it was pretty good- when I read the book I felt it was written to be a
better movie than novel in the first place and the movie didn’t disappoint
(although neither did it join the pantheon of the greatest movies).

For dinner Saturday we went to Lumiere where we sat at the “tasting bar”
which is actually a set of tables outside the main dining room (although they do
have a few seats at the actual bar that are open for walk-up guests). I thought
Lumiere was great- we started with a hamachi salad which included some crab and
greens. We then had some squash ravioli with truffle butter sauce. I’ve often
found squash ravioli to be a fairly boring dish put on the menu so there is
something for the vegetarians, but these were great- intense and flavorful. The
third starter we had was the duck broth with dumplings. This was a stand-out for
the whole evening- worth the trip just for this one dish. The duck broth was
just so flavorful. For our main courses we had veal cheeks, foie gras two ways
and some potato puree and two-color asparagus. These were all very good,
although it was another example of dishes that were bigger than they needed too
be and that were also outclassed by the appetizers. The appetizers were just
more interesting and memorable. We finished with a tapioca pudding and a
chocolate fondant and a glass of Gehning Brothers 2003 Riesling ice-wine which
was really excellent. Some of the ice-wines are over sweet without the right
balance but this one had a great acid and tropical fruit flavors.

Its also worth noting that the wait-staff was great. Good wait-staff can’t
make up for bad food but at an already good place makes it extra special. They
were attentive, helped us deal with our small table and made some great
recommendations for the next day. This is where we heard about the main branch
for Siegel’s bagels and Caffe Artigiano. The next morning we started off
checking out Artigiano where they made a great “Spanish Latte” which included a
little sweetened condensed milk, some great coffee and clearly skilled
barista’s. After that we headed to the main Siegel’s branch which was I thought
better than the bagels in the market. And finally as we headed out of town we
stopped for our real lunch at Sun Sui Wah which is probably the most well known
dim sum place in the Vancouver area.

We stayed at the hotel Listel. The Listel is somewhat less expensive than my
favorite place The Opus, and its in a pretty good location and I thought the
service was very good. Their “thing” is that they feature lots of art including
art from a local gallery in most of the rooms on the floor we were staying on.
This made it better than your typical generic business hotel, but it still
wasn’t as stylish or cool as I expected. There was one big problem with it
though- the shower was not very nice to start with and the water temperature
sucked. It was just way too cold. To be fair, we didn’t complain about this
until on our way out so we didn’t give them enough chance to fix the problem.

The trip back across the border was a pain as usual. I really need to check
out the Nexus pass thing since that line just
zooms by the rest of us. There was this annoying guy ahead of us in line who
kept shutting his car off every time he stopped and then had to restart it again
to move forward. Cars from the other lane kept scooting in front of him and
every time (dozens!) he started his car we could smell the stick behind him. I
have to assume he thought he was somehow saving fuel or reducing polution
without realizing that starting a conventional engine (as opposed to a hybrid)
causes a ton more pollution than just leaving it running for a couple of
minutes.

One other quick note- many of my friends and I have done lots of food photography over the
years (check out tastingmenu.com for some of the best).
Getting good photos in the low light conditions of a restaurant is always a big problem. But if you
use the flash the result is often washed out and even worse. Lately I just figured out a track of using
the flash but putting a napkin over it- the resulting lower level of diffuse light works just great and
while you need to be a little careful to not annoy other diners too much it isn’t as bad as the full flash.

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I’m interested in exploring creating RSS feeds with calendar data. In essence
taking RSS (or Atom) + iCal (or preferabbly an XML expression of iCal data) and
creating feeds with it. Imagine an easy standards-based way to subscribe to a
feed of US holidays or the local school schedule or a sports team’s schedule.

I suspect that someone has already done something in this space so I’m doing a
bit of research. My first attempt to look for info via Google surprised me a bit by how
sparse the results were. In any case I’m going to try to catalog other
references and I’d like to encourage people to contact me at
alex@hopmann.org if you are interested in
this topic and want to collaborate.

• There is a mention on
  the Google GData page of the
  scenario.
• PHP Magazine has a demo
  that fetches data from the Google calendar. They used code from an RSS
  reader but RSS itself isn’t part of this scenario at all.
• Trumba appears to
  have done this. Their format looks perfect and for now I’m going to use
  it as a starting point. Unfortunately they closed my old demo account and I
  don’t see any calendar examples in their docs where I can look at a real
  feed. I should add that I just re-signed up for a free account and they have
  an interesting usability issue. They require you to fill out all kinds of
  questions about your industry and size of organization. You can’t skip these
  questions which is going to tempt a lot of people to just respond with
  something random which will likely make the market research they wanted to
  get out of it very suspect.

I’ve taken the liberty of publishing a Trumba calendar here-

http://www.trumba.com/calendars/alexs_calendar1.rss?xcal=1  . It
doesn’t by default include the xcal data, you need to add that parameter to make
it work.

The xCal specification also appears to be an important part of making this all
work. I found
a link to a
fairly recent xCal specification written by Doug Royer who I worked with
some back a long time ago when I was involved with some of the iCal working
group activities. There are some
more links on this site over here.

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This week I started some part-time contacting for Judy’s Book.
Judy’s is a local startup funded by Ignition
among others and Rich Tong put me in touch with them. Their
site is a cool place to share tips about great local shops, restauarants, ask questions to the local
community and all that kind of thing. It’s got all the usual modern cool things
like friend lists and a trust system that helps the community rate who provides
helpful advice and keep out the trolls.

So far I couldn’t be more happy with the experience. Ok, its only been two
days (+ a little extra) but it has really been one of those experiences where it
feels like I’m understanding much better what I’m really good at (and enjoy the
most) at work. Plus its always great to meet a bunch of smart enthusiastic
people working on an interesting project.

At Judy’s I’m working with a small team of people to come up with some
totally brand new stuff. Of course I can’t say anything about what it is yet,
but the whole combination is really cool. Part of what I’m enjoying is that with
this small team I can be really fast at
pulling together prototypes, concept pages, etc. We can do a
combination of conceptual discussions (who are the customers?, how do we compare
to the competition?) with concrete “wouldn’t it be cool if it worked like this”,
“let’s try it this way” development.

I feel like its important for me to acknowledge at this point that I
recognize that the “deliver the product over successive years” part of the job
in the software industry is really important. I’m even slightly defensive on
this topic since I get concerned that people think I’m not good at finishing a
longer project. In reality I’ve shipped dozens of versions of the Resnova
products, stuck through a 3 year Exchange 2000 product cycle and spent more than
3 years working on Avalon.

What I’ve realized is that I can do those projects. I spent years thinking that was what I had to do to be on
track for a successful career. More recently I’ve been thinking that since my skill-set seems especially well suited for that first
6-12 months of a project, I should focus on how to deliver the most
value with that. Right now I’m actually doing that with three
projects simultaneously and while that is probably a bit much, it still helps
every day feel different and gives me plenty of outlets for creativity.

Working on projects like these can have some unique challenges. For example, you
want to build things so that as much as possible of what you build can be
carried forward, especially the architecture. The last thing anyone wants is to
inherit a piece of junk that is held together (barely!) with bailing wire and
needs to get scrapped in a big, expensive, from-the-ground-up rewrite. At the
same time, realistically anything you create in the early phases is going to get
rewritten over the next 6-24 months. Hopefully several times. So build things
with an elegant architecture, but with rapid development techniques and plan on
everything getting rewritten one chunk at a time as the needs change.

The
other set of issues and revolve around your team. I’ve often noticed lots of
uncertainty in dealing with other people. Is it a prototype? Is it production
code? How much does it represent a statement about the future product direction?
The simple answer is that in a startup, everything is an experiment, but that level of ambiguity can be a really
difficult thing. I’ve met many people who thought startups would be great for
them but they wound up miserable with the level of change and uncertainty. I’m
probably confusing some people who have worked with me since I’ve been in a role
where I’ve been trying to lock down a plan and reduce churn before. To deliver
polished products to customers you do need to lock down at some point. Part of
the fun thing about this current role is that those type’s of issues aren’t
something that I need to deal with.

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David Pogue wrote a good article in the NY Times today on why the world
doesn’t really need high-definition DVDs. He goes into why this is a cynical
attempt by the consumer electronics and movie industries to get you into another
round of buying all new equipment and re-buying all those movies that you
already bought once on VHS and again on DVD.

The one thing that the article doesn’t go into is how these guys are missing
the thing that I think consumers actually DO care about. I agree with his
review that the new movies do look somewhat better than existing DVD on a great
large screen (I got a chance to check this stuff out at the CES 2006
conference). However I would trade that in a minute for a truly convenient movie
watching experience. I personally hate dealing with the masses of physical DVDs
(or music CDs for that matter) and rip everything onto a server. In doing so I’m
giving up some quality, but the overall experience is way better and the number
of difference devices that I need to get it all to work is greatly reduced.

So where is the industry then when it comes to providing the really
convenient integrated experience without lots of physical media? One could
presume that the issue is that this is a disruptive technology (see the book
“The Innovator’s Dilemma”). The existing industry is used to making money by
coming up with a new generation of hardware and using that to resell both the
player and all the content again. To them they don’t see any upside in providing
consumers what they really want.

The problem with creating the disruption is that the 5 main studio’s control
all the content and as far as I can tell they don’t want this model to change at
all either. So you can’t just bypass the consumer electronics industry right now
and provide the true “buy a movie, have it on your local server, watch from any
media device in your house anytime” experience with the existing movie studios.
However another lesson from The Innovator’s Dilemma is that the disruption
usually starts outside of the existing structure. The best example I’d point to
right now is youtube.com which is
increasingly providing some really interesting content that you can just watch
on any computer in the house. This last week for example I was able to watch two
really good pilots for TV shows that never got picked up and another interesting
short movie. All of my TVs are attached to computers so that connection already
works for me, but it doesn’t for most people, and youtube also needs to be
hooked up so its easier to add “content” from youtube into my own library. It
would also be nice to be able to get somewhat higher quality content- DVD
quality can be done for about 600MB/hour and I often don’t mind setting
something to download and watching it later.

A lot of attention has been paid to the XBox 360 with a HD-DVD player and the
PS3 with Blue-ray. For me these are both very important devices but their
ability to play high quality video off a server of via the Media Center Extender
support is much more important to me.

Of course I’m usually wrong about what consumers really like. I hate
ring-tones and can’t believe that the industry makes billions (really) selling
stupid little song loops for $3-4 each (especially given that the songs
themselves sell for $1). Maybe consumers will flock to the stores buying Hidef
equipment and content, but I’m hoping the disruption grows somewhere and that
the studios realize pretty quickly they need to jump on board.

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I’m spending the beginning of this week touring around Oregon’s Willamette
valley, specifically Yamhill country near McMinnville and Newberg. This area
specializes in Pinot Noir which is a grape that I’ve continued to have a hard
time “getting”. I’ve had some very good Burgundy wines but whenever I find one
that I like they always wind up costing more than $300/bottle. In any case I
thought it would be a great idea to check out the region in a bit more depth to
see if I can appreciate the wines a bit more plus I have heard that the area is
beautiful and not over-developed and over-crowded like Napa.

We flew in to the McMinnville airport and our first stop was across the
street at the Evergreen Aviation Museum, home of the “Spruce Goose”, Howard
Hughes’s famous airplane. The thing is just incredibly huge- basically bigger
than a 747 or 777, yet almost entirely made out of wood. The museum also has a
great collection of other airplanes including a Beech Constellation (first
production composite aircraft, a Burt Rutan design), a Titan II rocket, and
plenty of other stuff to put it into the world-class catagory along with the
Boeing Air Museum in Seattle and the Air & Space Smithsonian Museum in
Washington D.C.

From there it was pretty easy to hit a few wineries. There are tons of them
all around and they are pretty close together, but we did discover one issue
with visiting the area. Most of the area’s wineries and restaurants are closed
on Mondays and many on Tuesdays. For future trips I’d recommend going Wednesday
to Friday for easier availability of visits.

We stopped by Archery Summit where we tasted several wines. This was a pretty
good way to get started since I was familiar with them from their past
association with Pine Ridge in Napa (although that association appears to be no
more- the woman in the tasting room seemed slightly offended when I mentioned
Pine Ridge.) The setting was very nice, and the wines were pretty good, although
their most expensive one didn’t really impress me that much and the price tag
for the one I like best was pretty high. One interesting angle was the hard-sell
on their wine club. Basically they made a big point that their wine club is
almost full and at that point they aren’t going to bother selling any wine at
retail since the club will buy up the whole allocation.

From there we cruised around, found lots of places that were not open on
Monday and ended up at the Ponzi wine bar in downtown Dundee. This was a nice
place to sit down, have a snack and taste some wines from Ponzi and some of
their friends. We checked in to the hotel, rested a bit and had some nice
Spanish food at Las Ramblas on the main street of McMinnville.

On Tuesday we got up and made some calls for some appointments at some other
wineries. We started out at Sineann which was a great experience. The place is
tiny, sharing space with Medici and Russell Hodgkins, the assistant winemaker
started off pouring us tastes of 11 of their released wines, including three
Gewrztraminers, a bunch of Pinot Noirs and a Merlot and a Cabernet Sauvignon.
Of the Pinot Noirs, I actually enjoyed their basic “Oregon” best- it had a rich
full nose with vanilla, tobacco, and a little touch of root-beer. The mouth-feel
was medium, but with really great balanced fruit. They make a bunch of single
vineyard Pinot Noirs, but to me, none were better than the blended one.

After tasting the release wines Russell took us to barrel taste. We probably
had another dozen or more tastes and these were a fascinating chance to compare
the different vineyards and even different blocks within the same vineyards.
Often it was amazing how distinct it could be even within the same vineyard.
Barrel tasting is difficult since I still have a very hard time translating to
what the finished wine will be, but opportunities like this are the sort of
thing that you need to experience to build that skill so I really appreciated
it.

As we barrel tasted Russel mentioned that they make some Zinfandels. We had
been joking earlier about the concept of Oregon Zin, but I really enjoyed the
two they were making so I picked up a few bottles of the earlier vintage in
addition to some of that Oregon Pinot.

After Sineann we headed to the nearby Domaine Serene which appears to be one
of the more established estates. The buildings were gorgeous with way more space
than they needed for their production level, and some really cool architectural
elements like a triangle/spiral staircase that went up for 5 or 6 stories. Their
wines were nice, but again for me they were overpriced compared to how much I
loved them. My favorite was their 2003 Winery Hill Pinot Noir which was
apparently only planted in 1999. This was the first vintage, but while it had a
lighter nose (the bottle had just been opened) it had more finish and complexity
that some of the others.

For dinner we went to Joel  Palmer, which is a place that we discovered
specializes in wild mushrooms. I’m not a big mushroom person (I usually avoid
them) but the food here was very good and I managed to both find some things
that were not mushroom-heavy and enjoy the mushrooms in the amuse bouche and the
tastes of my friend’s food. We had a GREAT bottle of wine with dinner- The 2003
Patricia Green Bonshaw Pinot Noir. This was just great, bold and yet with plenty
of complexity and elegance. It went great with the mushroom stuff, but also with
the spiciness of the crab bisque I had and showed a super-long finish. Patricia
Green is a definite stop next time I’m in the OR wine country.

My overall conclusion is that there are plenty of great Pinot Noirs coming
out of Oregon that I can really appreciate. You have to do some work to find the
great ones that are a good value, but that is true for almost any grape/region,
and the ratio in this area of worthwhile stuff seems much higher than in
Burgundy. I’m looking forward to checking it out again and seeing if I can turn
around my general prejudice against Pinot Noir.

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