Mike Ball

It’s been a long time since my last post, and the only excuse I have to offer is that I’ve been recovering from one of the more exhausting weeks I’ve ever spent. I sort of left you hanging, assuming that someone is listening

We tried to recover our position when we gave the summary on Wednesday morning. It partly worked. We passed this milestone with good marks, but now we have to write the actual proposal for the final phase. The amount of that contract is somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion, so it’s no small thing even for a large company like Sun. We had a followup meeting on Thursday (just Sun) and I’ve never seen the group looking that tired. Everyone there looked exhausted.

Since then, I came home, slept a lot that first weekend, and tried to get back into things last week. I’m still having a bit of trouble developing a realistic sense of urgency.

I’ve just been through two very long days of meetings in the Sun Executive Briefing Center. Both days started at 8:00. Yesterday I left Sun at 7:30, tonight I left at 8:58. Both days reminded me that I’m not as young as I used to be. We are presenting the description of our new system proposal to Darpa in preparation for the actual proposal, which goes out at the end of April. Unfortunately, we changed a lot of details of our design at the last minute, and we haven’t yet done a good job of explaining why. We assumed too much. The late night tonight was spent figuring out how we are going to handle this tomorrow, which is our last chance this review.

Weather, when I’ve had the chance to see it, is clear and cool, with a stiff breeze cooling things down. A lot of trees are blooming already, and a lot of people are sneezing already. It’s very pretty, but it sure isn’t normal, and I wouldn’t be surprised at a cold snap killing the blossoms before spring.

This morning I went to Hobee’s for a breakfast meeting with one other person from Sun. By the time the gathering was all there we had a party of six. Our recent shared anguish made for some interesting conversations. I’m waiting to see how many we have tomorrow. I’m expecting at least two others.

I came home last night after playing D&D, and discovered that the road home was fogged in. For those who haven’t been there, our road curves around the side of a hill (mountain to you Easterners), and it doesn’t have much use for things like curbs or sidewalks. In fact, it doesn’t have much use for lanes, and there’s always a bit of negotiation when you meet someone coming the other way. Mostly you use available driveways or wide spots, but that’s a different story. Turning off the main road is always an act of faith, because the road plunges downwards and you can’t really see that there’s a road there until you make the turn. Last night, there wasn’t a road there, just a wall of white. I navigated (very slowly) by keeping track of the right edge, which is the uphill side, until I discovered the problem with that strategy. Driveways. I was well down somebodies drive when I realized that I really shouldn’t be going downhill quite that much. Slowly, very slowly, I backed on to the main(?) road and tried again. There was a driveway to the right, so my “right edge” strategy didn’t work. It took plowing ahead until I found the right edge again before I got going. In fact, at one point I started down that same driveway again! If I’d had a flashlight in the car I would have gotten out and checked on foot. After today I’ll have one. The one good thing was the total lack of other vehicles. Actually, as I come to think of it, the road could have been covered with other vehicles and I’d never have known.

Once I got home, the view outside our windows, which is normally filled with lights from the valley, was totally black. This morning, the fog had settled in the valley and it looked as though you could walk to the mountains on it. In an hour, it was gone. Bright and clear again.

For those with a more mundane bent, this sort of thing happens fairly frequently here. There’s an inversion layer over the Pacific that moves inland at night, bringing our normal nightly overcast. Sometimes it starts dropping, and the overcast layer becomes fog as it sweeps down from the mountains to the valleys. I just happened to be coming home when it was around the 1000 foot level. The situation is not uncommon. My being out in it was.

We just had a midair collision near our home this afternoon. Flo heard an aircraft engine rev, then a thump, then saw a fireball fall from the sky. I heard the thump, but didn’t think much of it. Apparently an experimental plane and a helicopter had a collision, nobody knows why. They hit the ground very close to the highschool that Andy used to attend. One piece fell in Harry Griffen park, a big place for sports practice. Luckily, nobody on the ground was hurt, though one house had some fire damage.

Really brings it home that there just isn’t anyplace safe in this universe

We just went to see the new collaboration between Twyla Tharp and Bob Dylan. You can read about at the Old Globe or by an independent reviewer. It was a preview performance of the world premier, so we were getting in pretty early. OK, I must admit that I didn’t realize either of those details until after the fact, but at least it sounds like we are “with it”.

The show was lots of fun, with lots of the energetic and acrobatic dancing that Twyla Tharp does so well. It was also loud! I stuffed lumps of kleenex in my ears and they are still ringing a bit as I type.. The next time something is called a “rock musical” I really should take some earplugs. Kevin talked us into seeing Rent in San Francisco and we had the same trouble.

Despite all that, I liked it. I do wish they had put a little more emphasis on some of his later more lyric work rather than all of the angry young man songs, but I guess they wanted the energy of his earlier work for the dance.

I got pictures from Kathy an put them up on the website. I’m investigating an arrangement that lets people post pictures and stuff on their own, but I don’t have it set up yet.