Each year for the last four years, my wife and I have rented an RV and taken our kids to visit some of our national parks. In that time, we’ve logged nearly 6,000 miles and we’ve visited the Grand Canyon, Zion and Bryce, Columbia River Gorge, Lassen Volcanic National Park, the Hoh Rainforest, and Olympic […]

I spent the weekend in Chicago as a very fortunate attendee at ORDcamp, an annual unconference that’s the brainchild of +Brian Fitzpatrick and +Zach Kaplan. I’ve got several things I want to write about as a result of the many wonderful sessions – being surrounded by a couple hundred fascinating people is apparently what I needed to get […]

A good friend of mine died on Saturday. For those who didn’t have the opportunity to meet this man, I feel compelled to tell you a bit about him. I first met Michael O’Connor-Clarke at the Hilton New York in 1999 when we were in marketing for competing software companies. He at Hummingbird, the industry-leading […]

Earlier this year I asked for suggestions on Google+ about dealing with increasingly large image collections. In our house, we have two DSLRs, four phones that take pictures, and two point and shoot cameras. The images from these are scattered across several hard drives and online backup accounts; over the past several years they’ve been […]

Those of you who follow me on various social networks know of my involvement in a Congressional race in my new Congressional district. In what the National Journal has called one of the most interesting races in the country, 40 year incumbent Pete Stark is being challenged by 31 year-old Dublin city councilman Eric Swalwell. […]

We’re getting ready to go on a family vacation to Alaska, and one of the big questions in the months leading up to the trip has been what the weather will be. Last week my wife and I were reviewing our trip todos and I stumbled on a great feature in Google Spreadsheets that I’d […]

One of the first “grown-up” books I read was Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton. He wrote it in 1969, while he was a medical student at Harvard Medical School. I remember not just loving the book, but admiring his attention to detail. My Dad worked at Millipore at the time, and I was surprised when […]

“The Boy Scouts of America provides a program for young people that builds character, trains them in the responsibilities of participating citizenship, and develops personal fitness.” That’s how the Boy Scouts describe themselves at scouting.org. I support that mission wholeheartedly; it’s why I’ve encouraged both of my sons to participate in Scouts for years. Both […]

At the risk of turning into a blog-stalker that only talks about his boss, I wanted to write up something I did in June as a direct result of watching a speech Joe gave on our “culture of distraction“. Joe’s entire speech is worth listening to, as it touches on a number of issues that […]

A popular debate in the tech world is whether failure is good or bad. Eric Schmidt reminded people that at Google, “we celebrate our failures.” Taking a contrary position was Jason Fried from 37Signals, who wrote back in 2007 that “I’ve never understood Silicon Valley’s obsession with failure.” NPR’s Melissa Block recently visited Silicon Valley […]