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June 30, 1999
News
Information about Ty Davison straight from the horse's mouth.
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Years worth of mind-numbing details, ponderings, and events.
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June 30, 1999
Matt, Dennis, and I head over to a local grade school for a little kick-around with ye ol' soccer ball. Happily, Dennis plays keeper so Matt and I were able to get a lot of shots on goal. Barring last Saturday's scrimmage, I'd not played since February, so I'm sure I'll be feeling this tomorrow. Sure had a good time, though.June 29, 1999
Me: Uh, yeah, I ordered a subscription to The Oregonian online last Saturday, and we haven't started receiving it yet. [I give the circulation person all the relevant address info.]Circulation Droid: Oh well, we have no record of any of that. I can take your order now if you like.
Me: Yeah, I guess so.
Thus we get yet another example of how not to use the Internet in business, because no matter how terrible the design, no matter how clunky the interface, it's still not as bad as having the whole thing not work when you've told a customer it will. (The all-time worst example of this from my experience is the Mac Professionals Book Club, whose web site automatically ordered 4 books for me when I visited despite me not ordering a thing. My, what a thrill that was.) In the grand scheme of things this isn't that big a deal, so maybe I just woke up on the whiny side of the bed this morning.
Happily, Erin continues to have a great time with her summer school courses. It's hard work to be sure, but she's really enjoying the individual conferencing and the opportunity to help students 1 v 1.
June 28, 1999
Finally summoned the courage to head over to the community fitness center (a 15 second walk from our front door) and give the old treadmill a try. I found it a touch disorienting at first, but so long as I don't look down, it's just another jog in the park. (Albeit a park lined with mirrors and unchanging scenery.) It's kinda trippy when you get off, though. Because the background now moves with you, even a slow walk then feels like light speed.Erin first day of teaching credit recovery summer school English was stellar. To a certain extent she's rewriting curriculum on-the-fly in addition to helping the kids. She came home with lots of stories and with eyes a-sparklin', so you know she's enjoying it.
June 27, 1999
Helped my friend Julie pack up her stuff into a U-Haul in preparation for her upcoming graduate school adventure in New York. She'll be studying Decorative Arts with a focus on appraisal (versus curitorial).Congratulations to our friend Ginger who took an English position at my alma mater, Sprague High School. As I told Ginger, I don't know about the kids at Sprague nowadays, but the Class of '87 rocked!
My friend Dave, a hero of our recent move by any rational calculus, continued his winning ways by letting us borrow his spare TV. Plugged into a rabbit ears which I bought at Fry's Electronics, we now receive CBS, NBC, PBS, UPN, WB, FOX, and assorted crappy fundamentalist religious programming. For whatever reason ABC is utterly inaccessible, but other than the slight bummer of missing Monday Night Football, I don't really care. Given that in Mountain View we could only get UPN and WB of all the majors, Dave's TV represents a major step forward in terms of reception.
Unfortunately, it looks like our first casualty of the move is our VCR, which emits a whiny sound when playing tapes and exhibits major, unfixable tracking problems. Doesn't matter for TV shows, but for renting movies or recording, it's an ouch. Hopefully it will cost less to fix than to buy a new one.
June 26, 1999
My friend Dennis invited me out for a bit of soccer kick-around this morning, and though my first exercise in weeks had a bit of a painful aftermath, on the whole it felt great to return to the action. Like the Saturday recreational soccer I was doing in Santa Clara, I'm hopeful that I'll be able to continue this for months to come as well.Erin and I continued unpacking, and even found time to head to WinCo for some groceries. Our unsurprising discovery: Virtually every product is less expensive in Clackamas compared to Mountain View. Dairy products in particular are up to 50 percent off comparatively. This is a very welcome change!
June 25, 1999
Saw my friend Julie (aka Aazura) in her final belly dancing performance in the Northwest. Well, final for a while, anyway. She's headed to graduate school in New York. She asked nicely, so I'll be helping her move on Sunday.June 24, 1999
GTE finally got the phone going (though no long distance yet) so I'm once again online. (Surfers of cyberspace, prepare yourselves! Davison Online has returned!)A quick note that if you've sent email recently, I'm still busy sorting through dozens of different messages, so it might take me a bit to get back to you. I'm going as fast as possible.
After unpacking dozens of items and shifting furniture hither and yon, we escaped to Erin's relatives George and Irene's place for a pleasant dinner get-together. Great time!
June 23, 1999—Moving Daze
Many thanks to Dave, Liz, Dennis, Matt, Bret, Ed, and Missy for their help in moving us into our new apartment in Clackamas. It wouldn't have gone so smoothly without you! [Thanks also to everyone else who volunteered to help us move. It's a wonderful feeling to have so many friends.]Despite our recent excellent experience with professional piano movers, our makeshift amateur piano-moving crew brought our upright musical beast into the new apartment without a hitch. It probably went in even easier than my new desk. Great work, everybody!
In fact the only hitch in the day was GTE's inability to get phone service working immediately (though they did give us a $25 credit so what-the-heck).
June 22, 1999—Moving Daze
I don't remember ever spending 15 hours on the road, so in that respect alone this was a memorable day. Fortunately, we had four people on the trip (me, Erin, Dave, Liz), so every driver had a partner with whom to chat. I will concede that driving the truck was fun and an interesting change of pace from our regular car. Nothing is fun for 15 hours, though.Despite a stop for breakfast a Bill & Kathy's Diner (thanks Liz!), and for lunch at Denny's in Medford, by the time we hit my parents' place in Salem, we were pretty pooped.
June 21, 1999—Moving Daze
Clean up and check-out at Apartment #1 on 392 View Street. I dare say we left the unit in better condition (and certainly cleaner) than we received it. Sure, we put a couple dents in the walls here or there, but nothing that wouldn't fall in the "ordinary wear and tear" category and nothing that isn't easy to fix.And so we ended almost three years of living in Mountain View, California. When we came down, Erin was fresh out of graduate school and I was the Finance Manager for a multi-million dollar corporation. She acquired three years of teaching experience (and became excellent at it) and I shifted my life's focus to pursue things I'd always dreamed of pursuing (like putting out a music album). I've always been one to ponder opportunity costs, but at least at this juncture, with the future looking about as bright as possible, I can't help but think that the last years were about as amazingly successful as we could have hoped.
June 20, 1999—Moving Daze
More packing this morning with the addition to the team of Mark and Christine as we raced somewhat furiously to get everything out of the apartment so we could all break for a 1 P.M. minor league baseball game in San Jose. We ended up a couple innings late, but the rest of the game was a pleasing comeback by the home team, and of course the minor league baseball atmosphere was hard to top.June 19, 1999—Moving Daze
Who says there's no excitement in truck rental? We showed up at 8 A.M. at the Sunnyvale Ryder location only to find that the 15-foot truck Ryder advertises as capable of packing the contents of a "1000 square foot" apartment or house was woefully undersized compared to our needs despite our Mountain View apartment's 609 square feet. The "excitement meter" jumped a few notches when we discovered that neither Ryder Sunnyvale nor the nearby Ryder locations had a a larger 20- or 24-foot truck available.A call to the national Ryder center determined that no 20-foot trucks, our first choice, were available through the whole of the Bay Area. The rep said she'd do some checking and call us back in about 30 minutes. There might be, she said, a 24-foot truck available in South San Francisco, San Mateo, or Pleasanton.
Other than the obvious need to start getting our stuff out of the apartment, a greater time pressure presented itself in the form of piano movers I had contracted to move my piano (housed for three years at Mark and Christine's in Redwood City—thank you!) at 11 A.M.
We sat around waiting for the phone to ring and hatched various schemes as to how we could still make this work if Ryder fell through. The most outrageous idea (conceived by yours truly) involved renting the 15-foot truck, packing it to the gills immediately, driving it up to Clackamas, unpacking everything, driving back down to Mountain View, packing the remaining possessions, and driving it back up to Clackamas again. Fortune smiled on us and we didn't have to implement that plan, but I will note for the record that both Dave and I would've been foolhardy enough to have pursued this idea with vigor if necessary. (Sometimes I think we haven't grown up from our college days at all.)
Anyway, at about 9:20 we got a call from Ryder national and were informed they had a 24-foot truck for us in South San Francisco. The amusing kicker was that this 24-foot truck was almost $50 less than the original 15-foot truck. Go figure.
We ended up pushing back the piano mover by 30 minutes, but in the end, we got the truck, got a terrific demonstration in how to move a piano (hint: don't do it yourself—hire professional piano movers), and had most of the apartment contents loaded by the end of the day. The amazing thing is that the packing crew consisted of only me, Erin, Dave, and Liz.
June 18, 1999
My good buddy Dave flew down today to help us move out of the abode here in Mountain View. He'll be joining us for the caravan up to our new digs in Clackamas. And just think, his only payment will be free pizza.The house continues to be in a major state of chaos, but odds are good that we'll be able to throw everything into the back of the Ryder truck tomorrow. Part of this throwing of possessions will include Zeke, the G3-powered Power Mac, so I'm likely to be off-line until about June 23. I'll be checking email off-and-on, but don't expect a major web site update until then.
Next stop: Oregon!
June 17, 1999
Erin made good use of our "bonus day" by clearing out her classroom at St. Francis. Meanwhile, I called on all the various utilities for both Mountain View and Clackamas as well as sent out our new contact information to all the appropriate parties. (Apparently we know a lot more "appropriate parties" than I realized because this mass email send took a long time.) I also managed to pack a few boxes.After this busy day, Erin and I sat down and watched the Will Smith, Gene Hackman, Jon Voight thriller Enemy of the State. It's one of the better Jerry Bruckheimer films (others being Top Gun, The Rock and Con Air). I'm happy to say that with one exception the technology used was real and the situations described were (sadly) plausible. Lots of witty dialogue and overall it's pretty solid entertainment. I'm going to go out on a limb and recommend it.
We also saw Ever After, a relatively recent fairy tale picture starring the amazingly likable Drew Barrymore. The film suffered from poor screenwriting, marring what otherwise could have been something rather grand. As it was, the acting was good and there were enough individually winning scenes that it was a more than tolerable movie. Really unfortunate that a better writer couldn't have taken a whack at the script though; with some work, this had the potential to be something great. As is, it's not a complete waste of time, but you're not missing out if you don't see it.
As a sidenote, we got the terrific news today that Circuit City killed their consumer-unfriendly DIVX format. DIVX was a grade-A rip-off, and I couldn't be more pleased that it's gone.
June 16, 1999
Erin and I concluded a very successful trip to Oregon today by returning to Mountain View a day earlier than anticipated. It was tough to drive up on Monday and drive back on Wednesday, but this gives us an extra packing day, so we figured it would be worthwhile to go for it. How often, after all, does everything work just as it's supposed to?It certainly did this time around. Our new digs will be in Clackamas, Oregon. Our new apartment is an 850 square foot 2BR with a full-size washer and dryer, a dishwasher, and a sink/vanity in the master bedroom. It's about 25 yards from our back door to the Community Center which houses a fitness room, lounge area (with large TV), jacuzzi and swimming pool. And did I mention that rent is roughly half what we're paying in Mountain View?
We borrowed Ma & Pa's car in order to make the jaunt from Salem to Clackamas so that our 626 could get some new front struts and an alignment. No problems there either, and the car rode great on the way home.
Which was a good thing because—in what was the only downer of the trip—we darn near got run off the road by an S.O.B. in a dark green Ford F350 truck. (Yes I mean you, Oregon license VJN 686.) As Erin can testify I don't generally get angry with people, but I sure do when they put people's lives at risk. Anyone—particularly those with some law enforcement background— having suggestions on the best way to deal with situations like these in the future, please email me.
Don't know how many people remember the Waterhouse Securities saga from last month, but I'm happy to report that I received a call and a letter both letting me know that Waterhouse had finally, almost six months later, carried out my instructions and transferred the money I had asked them to. They won't win any awards for promptness, but at least the problem is solved.
June 12, 1999
Many thanks to our friend Jennie for hosting a terrific farewell get-together for us this evening. Thanks also to all our friends who were able to attend. It was wonderful to see everyone at least one more time before we head off to the great Northwest. Erin and I are both hopeful that we'll have lots of visitors from the Bay Area in the years to come.In other news, the car is driving fine, but the dashboard lights are still out. This problem obviously took a back seat to the problem of just getting the car to run, but it's an annoyance, particularly at night. Not sure what it will cost to get this fixed, but I guess I'll add it to the list. I'll get new struts on Tuesday.
June 11, 1999
Picked up the car late yesterday. Two relays, one onboard computer and $1000 later, everything seems to work just fine. I still need new struts and probably a new heater core, so the 626 isn't the bargain it seemed when I bought it three months ago, but it should still work out quite well over time. Good thing I love to drive it, though.The cold I feared has arrived. I slept exceedingly poorly last night and arose this morning at 5 AM. Any idea how long it's been since I've been up at 5 AM? Years, I'm sure. I'll be catnapping my way through the day as a result. More sleep is probably my best bet for betting this thing anyway.
June 9, 1999
Went with Erin and her dad Bernard to a showing of Star Wars Episode I—The Phantom Menace this afternoon. (Expect a full review of this epic shortly.) Despite generous helpings of popcorn ($5 a bag!) at the movie, we joined Erin's mom Liz for dinner at a local noodle house for yummy eats.Erin is now busy with finals grading and year-end cleanup. We were up late entering grades and such, and I expect a few more midnight oil-burning adventures lay ahead. Unfortunately, I feel something of a cold coming on, and boy, if that's the case the timing is really lousy.
June 7, 1999
It's been a pretty exhausting last few days what with the packing and all. It doesn't help that the car is still in the shop. Apparently Mazda shipped the wrong relays, so hopefully tomorrow we'll get the right ones and have everything assembled. Being without wheels isn't much fun.While I'm packing everything, Erin's in the midst of finals week. Her finals are over by Wednesday, then she needs to correct the work, calculate final grades and turn them in. She's hoping to all finished by Saturday night if not sooner. Me? I'm the data entry guy in the whole equation.
June 5, 1999
Erin finished up regular classes yesterday, completing what can only be termed a banner year in her teaching career. Clearly, I'm a biased source here, but given all the notes and cards she received from students, I'm guessing that my own high opinion of her abilities isn't a delusion on my part. (I suppose it could be a group delusion created by Erin's incredible hypnotic abilities.) This has been a wonderful year for her professionally.We watched the cute Drew Barrymore in Home Fries, a low-budget comedy also starring Luke Wilson (who I first saw on an episode of the X-Files). It's a relatively likable film. There's nothing particular grandiose or meaningful here, but it's a pleasant enough way to spend an hour and 40 minutes. As a bonus, the music was pretty good too.
Erin and I have changed our email addresses, news that will be posted everywhere I can think of since in a matter of a few weeks we'll see email to the old Slip.net address a-bouncing. Here's the new email addresses, and kindly take a moment to write them down wherever is appropriate for you (no bathroom stalls, please):
Ty Davison: [email protected]
Erin Lilly-Davison: [email protected]
I've moved Davison Online from the "I-don't-have-a-clue" Slip.net to the excellent SiteRev.com, and the new URL will be http://www.siterev.com/~davison. Please make a note of that as well, or bookmark the site at that new address. Given the scope of this transition, I wouldn't be surprised to find some bugs in the system as it were. If you spot anything out of the ordinary—URLs that are dead or need to be changed or whatever—please let me know.
Thank you!
June 2, 1999
The car is still in the shop. Onboard computer is on order from Mazda and the relays have been replaced. If all goes well, it'll be out be Friday. If not, early next week. Good thing I love to drive this car.Watched Star Trek: Insurrection this evening. [Warning: Spoilers may follow. Skip this paragraph if necessary.] Great special effects but pretty lacking in dramatic tension. It's great to see the gang back in action and all, but how about some character development? There's really relatively little of long-term consequence going on here, especially compared with earlier Star Trek movies where we kill off major characters and destroy the Enterprise and so on. Insurrection has none of these, and despite some touching scenes—man, that Patrick Stewart is really a fine actor—the script has some terribly cliché moments and some awful children's dialog. Getting Riker and Troi back together was cool, and I liked seeing LeVar Burton's eyes for a change, but that's about it so far as long-term implications. Ultimately, Star Trek fans will enjoy this for the eye candy it is, but it's unfortunate that we didn't get a little substance to go along with it.
I sold out of my position in Berger 100, a mutual fund with pretty lackluster returns over the last five years. Despite late '80s and early '90s success, the fund never fully participated in the more recent market run-up, and frankly, five years is all I'm willing to give a fund to get their act together. It was up 14.8 percent in the time I owned it, a decent return except when compared to the benchmarks. Berger just fired their latest manager, so I figured it was time for me to jump ship as well. I've moved everything into Fidelity Dividend Growth, a fund with stellar returns in the last 1-, 3-, and 5-year time periods. Let's see how it does for the next five.
June 1, 1999
After today it'll be three more regular school days plus one week of finals and Erin will have completed year number three. This has easily been her best of the lot. Even with last year's monster stride over her first year, in this third year she's probably made even more progress. She's really come into her own, and it's been amazing to see the transformation. Focusing on rapport with students (plus having a couple years experience) has enabled Erin to move toward a teaching style that's a better reflection of who she is, which is to say "goofy," and I mean that in the best way possible. She's having a lot of fun doing what she's doing, and that's something anyone—but particularly kids—can relate to.
