Vis'ting

Growing up I spent a lot of time with my maternal Grandmother. Grandma Holbrook was born in 1912. She wasn't the cuddly kind of Grandma. She was tough as nails (literally, FYI), and came from an era where people had kids because they needed work done. She didn't really put me to work so much, however she was also disinclined to indulge any of my whining.

Grandma lived in a rural area where, in the past, her survival had depended upon her ability to maintain relationships with her "neighbors". In case you aren't familiar with country neighbors...the term really applies to almost anybody on your country block. And a country block might be three miles on a side. I recall that one time Grandma needed to make a delivery to Mrs. McManus down the road. Except that she really wasn't in the mood to chat for the hour and a half or so that she would need to invest if she arrived on Mrs. McManus's doorstep. So, she sent me to make the delivery on her behalf. I trudged a mile down the road with her package only to be regaled by Mrs. McManus about all manner of goodness knows what. I barely escaped her by dinner time, which may have been Grandmother's plan all along. She probably planned to kill two birds with one stone by making the delivery and keeping me occupied.

Grandma believed in running Errands. Whenever she said she needed to stop at a store, we all knew what she meant. This was going to be a full day of driving all over the better part of three counties. We would be packing sandwiches because there was a 0% chance that we would be home in time for lunch. In fact, there was a very good chance we'd be missing dinner too!

The trip would usually start with a logical premise: "I need to pick up some plants from Frank's Nursery". So, out the door we would head. A keen observer might wonder "Why do we need a bag full of sandwiches to go to one store?" But it would really be a waste to leave the house and drive all the way to Lansing for one store. So we would stop at several houses on the way to Frank's, vis'ting with people along the way. There would be at least two stops on the way to Frank's. And, you know, if you're in Lansing, you really need to stop at Horrock's. So, we'd stop there. Then we'd stop at half a dozen other businesses. Then we'd hopscotch back home, vis'ting with three or four people on the way back.

These trips used to leave Grandma exhausted for a day or two due to their length. But, as soon as she recovered, she would cook up some pretense for another trip and off we would go.

I never understood her obsession with "Vis'ting". At least, not until today. This morning I had the pleasure of visiting a friend from high school and her husband. We chatted for quite a while, exchanging stories and filling in the gaps left by the intervening years. Our kids played while we talked. When I left I reflected on how nice it was to catch up and make a connection with another person, in person.

Recent research indicates that people who maintain more connections with others live longer. Grandma lived longer than expected. She beat lymphoma into a ten year remission. She was hospitalized for nearly six months. Afterwards she had to walk with leg braces. On her way home from the hospital I am pretty sure she said something like "Do you mind if we stop at Frank's on the way home? As long as we're out this way, I need some vegetables from Horrock's. It's been a while since I checked in on Mrs. Johnson. You wouldn't mind one more stop, would you?"

As a kid I am sure I would have groaned "Here we go again!" After today, I might have said "That sounds like a good idea, Grandma. Do you s'pose she needs anything from 'Meijer's'?"

Scary Aunt

Wow! If I believed in guilt, I'd feel terrible about how long it has been since I wrote a post.

Today I remembered something from my childhood. My Mom had a motor home. We made regular trips to Lake Michigan near Muskegon. My next oldest sibling was eleven years older than I am, so it's fair to assume that my Mom had her fill of kid crap before I came along. We used to take these Lake Michigan trips with my Aunt Judy. One of my Mom's favorite threats to enforce good behavior was "If you're naughty, you'll have to go sit with Aunt Judy!"

One day I crossed the line. I'm not sure where the line was, or what I did to cross it. But I did. So, I was sent to the front passenger seat of the motor (Aunt Judy was driving). I plopped down in the seat, with my most sullen face on. Furious that I had been banished. I should note that at this time, I really had not spoken much with Aunt Judy. When you're a kid, you don't pay much attention to adults.

So, there I was. Exiled to the front of the motor home. Terrified of what sort of awful thing my Aunt was going to do to me. She spoke first. "So, you must have gotten sent here because you were naughty?"

I stuck out my bottom lip and nodded.

"This must be pretty scary, huh?"

Again, I nodded.

"Tell me...which things have I done that were really scary?"

I thought on this for a while. Try as I might, I couldn't think of anything. In fact...I realized pretty quickly that my Aunt had been used as a threat because we were terrified of her, but she had really done very little to earn her reputation as a terrifying person. At least to us kids. My aunt and I chatted for the remaining two hours of the drive and it turned out that she wasn't always scary. I won't say "She wasn't scary" because she sometimes had a sharp tongue, but it turned out that she directed it at me (or any of us kids) very little.

As an adult I still question my opinions of people and whether they come from experience or reputation.

How much difference does a camera sensor really make?

My wife and I have been married for 15 years this year, and we are hoping to take a special vacation together this summer to celebrate. Vacations mean pictures, and when I think about pictures and travel my rampant sense of optimization gets the better of me. I started wondering which camera(s) we should take. Do we take the Sony A7II which sports a full-frame sensor or do I take my Panasonic Lumix FZ-200. Gear for the A7II will be bulky and heavy, however the FZ-200 is entirely self-contained. Both cameras take outstanding photos in bright sunlight, and the lens on the FZ-200 reaches to a 600mm equivalent. The comparable A7II lens (not including body or adapter) is about the size of an old school Thermos and costs $900. That's more than the entire FZ-200 camera costs.

So, how much of a difference does sensor size make? The sensor in the A7II is 31 times as large as the sensor on the FZ-200, but has twice as many pixels. Each pixel, then is roughly 15 times as large as the same pixel on the FZ-200, which means 15 times as much light enters the camera for each pixel. Does that make any practical difference, though?

The image below was shot on both cameras, using in-camera Jpeg compression. They are both using 1/125 shutter speed, 1/3.5 aperture, and ISO 2500 light amplification. From a distance, both halves of the picture look similar. Once you zoom in, though, you can see how much noise the smaller sensor introduces into the photo. Download the full photo at this link.

Double Your Pleasure

While kayaking with a friend yesterday, he mentioned something that piqued my interest. He essentially said that, in terms of dopamine levels, sex and nicotine are on par…and that both pale in comparison to cocaine, which in term can’t compare to methamphetamines.

The image above is attributed to the UCLA Integrated Substance Abuse Programs, although I was unable to find the exact publication. I was however, able to find an excellent slideshow on PBS (narrated by Dr. Richard Rawson) which discusses the image above.

The baseline is 1. It’s interesting that the cheeseburger is halfway to sex and nicotine is on-par with sex. In the image above you can imagine that a methamphetamine user, whose baseline has been adjusted upwards from 1 to 11, probably doesn’t have good days unless they are using. On the other hand, if the most indulgent you get is an occasional cheeseburger…I’ll hazard a guess that you have a lot of good days, because your expectation for dopamine release is so much lower than even a nicotine user’s expectation.


It seems logical to me, then, that the key to living an extraordinarily happy life might be to limit your own exposure to things that spike dopamine levels. For example, if your typical meal consists of unadorned lettuce…an apple or an orange is perfectly heavenly in comparison. By indulging infrequently in activities which increase dopamine levels significantly, the increase from small pleasures should appear comparatively large.

Being Purposeful

A coworker recently poked her head into my office and casually said "We've drafted an RFP for the new website, can I send it to you for review?"

Although I was pleased by the opportunity to opine, my eyebrows went up as I asked "How about if we get our teams together and make sure we all understand what we're looking for in a website, and then move on to the RFP?" We did, and it was a great conversation. Both the Marketing and Information Services teams had great ideas to add to the conversation, and I am sure that our website will be better for the discussion.

It seemed counterproductive to me that we would consider taking on any part of a project as big as redesigning our website without first understanding what we wanted to get out of the project. Yet...when I asked myself "What am I trying to get out of life?" I could not answer.

For someone as goal oriented as myself, this is a glaring omission. If my goal is to spend as much time with my daughter as possible, perhaps I should quit my job. If my goal is to maximize the amount of travel that Aimee and I do in retirement, perhaps we should downsize our house now rather than when we retire.

Of course there are many answers to this question for each of us. We probably want a mix of things out of life. If you were to write down some of the things you want out of life, how many of your actions today have moved you closer to those goals?

The answer for me today is "None." Tomorrow I will change that.

A strange paradox

Imagine, for a moment, if you discovered that you were going to die in the next ten minutes. Most of us would hardly be at peace with such a prospect. In fact, we'd fight tooth and nail for another ten minutes.

So why is it that we spend so much time trying to escape from reality? We spend tremendous amounts of time using drugs to help us cope with reality, knowing full well that it's unhealthy and leads to terrible decision making. We spend days each year watching television, or even reading books. In fact there are very few things that we can't take to an unhealthy, obsessive level in our quest to avoid reality. In the end we'll regret most of it.

We will regret the extra hours we spent working, the times we went out drinking instead of exercising. In the end we will regret thinking less instead of more, and we will wish that we savored every experience...even the terrible ones. We'll wonder why we bought a new car instead of traveling to Ireland.

I don't know why we do this or what we should do instead. I don't know how to make myself savor each fleeting moment-including the ones I don't like. I'm curious, though...and that's a good start.

It's all about the goal

I had a race today, and I didn’t do very well. In fact, my race was doomed before I started due to poor planning. It turns out, though, that it was a powerful life lesson. Let’s start with the race itself...

It was cold when we started. About 45 degrees and raining. I signed up for the Olympic distance, which would mean spending about 2 1/2 hours in the rain.

The swim was actually pleasant; the water was substantially warmer than the air. The bike ride was more challenging. Several riders in front of me crashed painfully on a set of nearly invisible, unused railroad tracks. Rain coated my visor and made it tough to see. About 7 miles into the 26 mile course I splashed into a puddle that turned out to be a huge pothole. My water bottle ejected but I pressed on.

My ride suddenly got bumpier. Roads do that. Right? I looked down and noted that the pavement seemed pretty smooth. I pulled off to the side and saw that my rear tire was flat.

The flat wasn’t a problem; we keep spare parts on our bikes. The ten minute tire change was a problem though. I had gotten cold and the delay had destroyed my goal of finishing with an average bike speed of 20 MPH. I called it a day and headed in.

After some reflection, I realized that the day was a failure. Not from the tire, the pothole, or quitting early. Even before that. My two goals this race were to hang with some of my training partners, and the aforementioned 20+ speed. Both of those goals were intolerant of incidents such as a flat. A better approach would have been if I planned to set a personal record for an Olympic where I change a flat. Or, perhaps, a 20MPH bike leg omitting the mile where I changed the flat. In other words, in preparing for the race, it isn’t enough to put a flat kit on the bike. The flat kit needs to be partnered with a compelling, flat-tolerant goal in order to be truly useful.

This doesn’t just apply to cycling or racing. Having fault-tolerant, properly aligned goals is important in our business and personal lives too. How many businesses have we seen fail because they focus narrowly on profitability rather than their entire community? A small change in goal may have made all the difference for them.