Barbaro-a champion and a true competitor

A year ago today, Barbaro was euthanized.  We lost a champion that day, and today, his owners announced his ashes will be interred at Churchill Downs, where an undefeated Barbaro, in 2006, trounced the field to win the 2006 Kentucky Derby by 6 1/2 lengths.

Two weeks after his Derby win, Barbaro suffered a debilitating leg injury while racing in the Preakness.  The damage to his right hind leg was horrible, with more than 20 breaks.  While most animals would survive such an injury, especially with the resources of the University of Pennsylvania’s world-renowned New Bolton Center supporting the recovery effort, horses need all four legs to handle their substantial weight.  When one goes bad, the other three are severely stressed and can’t handle the additional weight.  Laminitis, a disease which affects those parts of a horse’s foot anatomy that handle the shock from running and is often a byproduct of equine leg injuries, set in on his left rear leg.  More complications ensued and laminitis set in on his front legs.  At that point, his owners, believing his pain was unmanageable, made the courageous and humane decision to put him down without fanfare. 

The pain Barbaro’s owners and fans felt was greater.

 I’m not a horse person.  They’re skittish and not very smart; like TeddyBear, they get by on their looks or their horse-ness.  My lovely first wife Stacey shattered her knee when her very nice horse pitched her off during a dressage lesson for no reason at all.  If you don’t know anything about dressage, I’ll give you my opinion: watching paint dry is more interesting.

But back to Barbaro.  Like thousands of others, I followed his recovery.  Given the poor (50-50) prognosis for such injuries, all of us were thrilled when he appeared to be making progress.  We wanted to see him grazing in the sunlight and fresh air, giving the mares the eye (and anything else he was paid for). 

But a year ago, he lost his last race.  Even in losing, he remains a champion and a true competitor.  

As far as I’m concerned, he’s still undefeated.

840 hours

In 840 hours, barring a disaster or a business opportunity, I’ll be driving from Hilo to Volcano, Hawai’i, where I’ll spend several days in the hills before heading over to Maui for several more days closer to sea level.  I’ll be reading, taking walkabouts, taking pictures, and wasting gas by driving to other parts of both islands.  A few more days on Kauai is tempting; at this point, it depends.  I’ll decide when I’m there, although the real problem may be coming back at all.

I’m on my own this time, and even though I fully appreciate and happily utilize the multiple restaurants, room service, and spa treatments offered by big hotels, I’m staying at smaller bed-and-breakfast-y places.  Yes, like Austin Powers, my middle name is “Danger”.

I haven’t taken any time off in a couple of years and my psychic batteries are drained and my psychic RAM is clogged (if you subscribe to David Allen’s point of view).  The bottom line is I need to detach myself, and I learned a long time ago I need several days to decompress.  It takes me multiple days to decompress and then I can really relax.

 Barring a disaster or a business opportunity, of course.

You want a dog? Adopt one!

While “taking” Guthrie and TeddyBear  for a walk through the woods, I ran across a couple with three small children.  TeddyBear gets by on his considerable good looks (my neighbor Kathleen made that observation) and the parents asked if I got TeddyBear from a local breeder.  “We’re looking for a dog for the kids”, they explained.

 Okay, here’s how it is.  Don’t get a dog for the kids; get a dog for yourself.  If you’re not committed to having a dog, it won’t be fair for the dog to leave its care with kids.  The kids get to share the dog, and that’s great.  A dog is a perpetual infant and, in almost every case, you can’t rely on kids to care for a dog.  It takes maturity to care for another living creature; most kids aren’t ready for the responsibility and/or will be too wrapped up in their own lives to become dog-centric (sigh…like me).  IMHO, getting a dog entails accepting the same responsibility as deciding to have another baby.

 If you want a dog, be a hero and rescue a “pound puppy”.  Too many shelter dogs end up at the Rainbow Bridge before their time.  Please don’t buy a pet from a pet store; most of those dogs and cats are from breeding farms, where the females are bred to death as they generate litters of often-unhealthy young.  I know they’re cute and I know they need a home-just go to the shelter, pay less, and save a life.  You don’t buy a pet in a strip mall.  Do we understand each other?

If you’re looking for a specific breed, there are breed-specific rescue groups.  In most cases, dogs offered by breed rescue groups have been evaluated by “dog people” while in foster care pending the selection of a forever home.  This means you’ll have a good idea of what the dog is like and will be able to decide if the dog’s personality fits in with your lifestyle.  I’ve helped three Golden Retrievers make the transition: I kept TeddyBear and two others have gone on to great homes to new owners who knew exactly what to expect. 

Yes, puppies are cute, but they’re expensive, messy, very time-consuming, and often incompatible with two-legged babies.  There are puppies available from rescue groups but usually the dogs are a few years older, often abandoned by their people when the reality of owning a dog sets in.  The stories behind many of these dogs are horrific, and a demise not unlike Stuntman Mike’s (in Quentin Tarantino’s “Death Proof”) is too good for the former owners.

“If you could require computer manufacturers to do one thing, what would it be?”

In the past, this question has been tossed out as a brainer-teaser by Microsoft interviewers; it gives an interviewer an opportunity to poke around inside the interviewee’s psyche.  In particular, the interviewer doesn’t care about the answer, but about the interviewee’s ability to explain and justify the answer.

One of my answers would be, ”Provide a smudge-proof screen.”  The follow-up, of course, is ”Why?”, and a reasonable answer is that the computer display is often the primary medium of information transfer.  Although information is seldom tangible, the medium of transmission (papyrus, paper, CRT, LCD) is tangible, and fingers have been poking at the medium, to provide ”digital” emphasis, since the first human conversation.

But I’ve come up with a better one.  As I walked out of the gym late Saturday afternoon, a PC’s screen saver caught my eye, and it struck me that an enormous amount of energy and resources are wasted by desktop PC’s running at night and over weekends.  It’s power to run the PC, power to run the monitor, and, if enough PC’s are running, power to run air conditioning.

Even if your PC is doing something useful (like a huge build), the monitor doesn’t need to be running.  And if your PC isn’t doing anything for a moderately long time (say, six hours), why is it running in the first place?

So, here’s my new suggestion: all computers should have power management options (display, disk, system) set by default.  Manufacturers, when installing OEM OS’s, can make this configuration change.

Microsoft, which has demonstrated corporate responsibility in its own ”greening” initiatives, could show leadership by implementing power management by default in Windows Vista.

What would your suggestion be?

Aloha!

It’s a perfect night in Seattle: cold, rainy, and windy.  We’re likely to lose power here on the south end of B.I.: there are lots of very tall trees.  Multiple (seasonal) days of rain softens the ground, the wind blows them over, my house and 267 of my neightbors go dark, I pull the generator out of the garage and plug it in, and then we wait for PSE.

So, there are two choices: ask Stewie Griffin to control the weather out here or go to Hawai’i.  I think the latter: six days in the hills of the Big Island (Volcano Rainforest Retreat) is a good start…and then I’ll finish with five days on Maui, venue as yet undetermined.  All this is commitment-dependent, of course: I’ll blow it off if one of the open projects gets approved ahead of schedule.  I had to change the flight reservation 12 hours after I made it, to accomodate by decision to attend the local PMI-sponsored ITIL V3 class.  It’s still 60 days away and I’ll be nucking futz by March.

Vacation is easy.  It’s the getting ready for vacation that’s searingly, abdominal-crampingly painful.  Returning from vacation is just a migraine headache.

In high-performance environments, you have a lot of mental plates spinning and a lot of people providing you with input and output.  And before you check out, you have to get those plates spinning fast and get some new ones spinning just as fast.  And you have to deal with gut-wrenching anxiety the last few days before you go.  I know this from years of struggling with it, and there’s no solution without a smart boss and a good team. 

There are times when the hassle of vacation isn’t worth it, and in that case I recommend retail therapy.

Yes, there are five dogs in the office.

Somebody asked.  My posse includes Blake and Jake, whelp-mate female and male Norwich Terriers; Guthrie, who came to me as a Canine Companions for Independence service dog puppy-in-training when he was eight weeks old, and then flunked out of his Advanced Training 17 month later and immediately came home with me; TeddyBear, a beautiful young male Golden Retriever I re-homed from a garage-centric environment in Bothell; and Norman, the newest arrival, a young giant (e-Norm-ous) Norwich Terrier (22 lbs. of muscle) adopted from an owner who died suddenly.

And yes, I do foster Goldens for Evergreen Golden Retriever Rescue.  For five days, I had overlapping (sorry) dogs with Walter, a slightly anxious 6′ish Golden put out of the house for a reason that Scott Peterson and O.J. Simpson would laugh at.  EGRR found Walter a great forever home and he’s probably snoozing on a heating vent right now with his new humans.

 If you’re looking for a pet, do yourself and the universe a favor and bring home a pound puppy or a pound kitty.  If you’re looking for a specific breed, there are rescue groups that can find you what you want.  In most cases, middle-age pets are stable and very grateful for a permanent home.  You’ll feel good about it too.