2010 Letter and Pictures
To all my friends, family, associates, and people who gave me their business card,
Happy New Year and welcome to the Hennenhoefer Family 2010 update.
A good friend once told me that you know the most about being a parent the night before your first child is born. The year 2010 has been yet another crazy ride and all I can really say for sure is this train is made of LEGOs.
For us, the Age of LEGOs started somewhere in last year’s Star Wars phase and has persisted well into the Harry Potter era of childhood. As I think about it, it’s amazing that LEGOs haven’t been banned by the FDA yet. They come in colorful bite sized pieces, are clearly addictive, and when combined with hard floors they can cause serious harm to anyone barefoot and over 50lbs.
Unfortunately, my wife was never inoculated to LEGOs as a child and her immune system was gradually overwhelmed. It started with total confusion over what to do, then progressed into a master plan to classify and sort all the LEGOs into bins, and finally peaked in a freak LEGO injury during a 4 hour building marathon on Christmas. There’s always been a blurry line between enthusiasm and obsession at the Hennenhoefer household.
Personally, I find the whole LEGO business franchise fascinating. Here’s a business that takes $2 per pound plastic and turns it into simple shapes and sells them for $45 per pound. I guess what you’re paying for is the privilege of assembling your own toys, which is something no sane parent would normally do. Seriously, Hogwarts Castle has 1600 pieces with 200 pages of instructions! And good luck finding all those pieces a 2nd time…
http://www.ted.com/talks/hillel_cooperman_legos_for_grownups.html
In other news, the Chicken Saga continues. For those who missed last year’s letter, the powers that be decided we’d get four pet hens. After all, Hennenhoefer supposedly means “Chicken Farmer” so therefore it must be our destiny; that’s at least what we told the kids (whose first reaction was to ask “Why can’t we have a cool destiny like Luke?”)
Even after the lawnmowers and various setbacks in 2009, I was still fairly bullish on the idea. Austin is one of the leading cities in the urban chicken movement, and if a convicted criminal like Martha Stewart can take care of pet chickens, how hard can it be?
http://www.marthastewart.com/show/the-martha-stewart-show/the-chicken-show
Given that we only have 1 hen after 2 years, despite being in the Chick of the Month Club, I have a new theory: What if great-great-grandpa Hennenhoefer was such a bad Chicken Farmer that the family had an intervention and shipped him off to the New World?
The best part about this theory is that it’s easy to explain to the kids. It’s not destiny like Luke, but prophecy like Harry. What if we’re cursed and until the prophecy is fulfilled He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named will continue to send his minions to steal our chickens? Now what should two little boys have to do to break the curse? … This theory has even more potential than Santa Claus.
Oh, and before you think I’ve totally lost it, my wife’s idea was for me to enclose the yard in a patchwork of giant nets.
As for family life, Nate and Ethan are wrapping up years 4 and 6. I think we’re crossing over into a fun age, and both my wife and I believe we might survive this whole experience. Granted, they spend most of their time either uncontrollably laughing or making each other cry, but at least it makes them easy to locate.
We’ve also gotten much better at surviving weekends these days: camping with Adventure Guides, visiting NASA, taking a cross country trip to CO, and visiting the Texas coast and grandparents.
Ethan’s latest interests are building things, riding horses, and doing math. Actually, riding horses is Alisa’s interest. At some point it dawned on her that if she’s driving kids to activities all over town all the time, she should pick something she could also enjoy. Other adventures include seeing Star Wars: In Concert and spending 12 hours on standby at the Atlanta airport asking, “Daddy, what’s wrong with the plane? Why is the plane broken? Is it really safe to get on a plane that was broken? What are we going to do if we NEVER get home?”…. That was the first 15 minutes.
Nate’s enjoying being 4 and living in fantasy land. It seems there’s a fine line between living a life of wonder and making all of us just stare at him in wonder. I don’t think it’s lying if you actually believe it, so perhaps he’s really a gifted salesperson. He even trips me up from time to time (like when he convinced me to leave his shoes at preschool, try explaining that one when you get home.) Then, just a few days ago at the gym, I made them haul out a box of chips from back room because Nate insisted there were no chips left only to find 10 bags on the shelf. Well, his penguin told him it was going to eat THOSE chips so he needed NEW chips. I just laughed but the teenager working food service wasn’t amused.
Alisa had a fairly good year, despite a number of setbacks. Her first roommate after college, Lobo the Border Collie, passed. That, combined with the growing chicken karma deficit, resulted in her getting a new pet Roomba.
Alisa’s also the unwilling co-coach of 1st grade Math Pentathlon. I did say I’d help a bit with math at Ethan’s school, but I was on a plane and missed some parent orientation meeting, where someone checked all the boxes and, voila, instantly I became a super volunteer. When I showed up for training, I found out I was now the 1st Grade coach of an entire program, which leads up to a tournament. Better yet, we only had half the number of volunteers needed, and it wouldn’t be fair to not include all the kids so… good luck 
.
At that point, Alisa still thought the whole endeavor was rather humorous (and actually I was getting off easy since she had to deal with soccer and spelling homework). So, after getting Alisa to agree to cover for me while travelling, I created the lesson plans, hired a college student to fill the empty volunteer slot, and continued to travel 50% of the time. I hear things are going well, and they even asked me to coach again in the spring.
As for me, it was fairly steady year as I settled into midlife. I’m a chronic headache sufferer, but I have had a lot of success managing my headaches over the last few years, at the expense of gaining extra weight. This year, I was able to drop 20 pounds, so I only have 10 more to go, which I think is possible to do without hitting any headache triggers. It only took a year of eating salads and 766 miles on my treadmill desk. I mention all this because if you get headaches, see a specialist. Things have gotten much better over the last 20 years.
On the entertainment front, The Social Network was fun for so many reasons. As for Sci-Fi, I’m heavily into Charlie Stross at the moment. The Big Short by Michael Lewis was also fascinating, in a sub-prime-collateralized-debt obligations type of way. But, in a rather shocking turn of events, the best fiction goes to Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky. This is actually fan fiction and since I haven’t actually read the real Harry Potter stories, I’ll have to just say it’s much better than the movies, more Ender’s Game than a kid’s story.
On the professional side, I’m still active with the Entrepreneur’s Organization (EO) and have wrapped up my second year as Texas Area Director. This year’s activities included spending three amazing days at the EO Texas Roundup in Dallas, where President W gave his first talk to a business audience after leaving office. No matter what your politics are, hearing a President talk about his term was a unique experience. I also attended the EO Global Policy Summit in Washington DC to get more education on how politics really works. I’m not sure how to make this actionable yet, but I’m thinking that just saying our politicians are out of touch is only part of the problem. What if the other part of the problem is that we’re out of touch with our politicians?
The other project I’m simmering on is how society adapts to change. This took me to the Singularity Summit 2010, which was a fascinating weekend. The videos are coming online, but I’ll warn you that it has a TED level of addiction risk. Check back next year and I’ll have some progress on this and the political front.
If you’ve read this far and still have no idea who I am, perhaps we met at Design Verification Club (www.dvclub.org), where I help organize meetings in Austin, Boston, North Carolina, and Silicon Valley. If not there, perhaps the Microprocessor Design and Test Conference, TexChange, Austin Technology Council, or perhaps you’re the guy who always sits next to me on the IAH-NRT flight in the exit row…
Finally, besides the chickens, I get a fair amount of email about the fight over Texas science standards. I continue to wade into this battle from time to time to promote the idea that science standards should be written by experts in science and education, which is really scientific doublespeak for saying, “we’re not going to let religious extremists censor the Texas science curriculum back into the dark ages so it’s compatible with their world view.” Now that I’m a few years into this fight, the good news is that most of Texas agrees, and it’s really just a highly active minority stirring things up. The big news from 2010 was three of the religious extremists on the Texas School Board of Education (SBOE) were not reelected.
I encourage all emails sent to me about faith based science be written in all caps for consistency.
Obsidian Software is wrapping up year 14, and we have had a fair amount of change. We lost some employees who wanted to try new things, and we had some talent return after trying their hand elsewhere. This seems to be an industry trend, with a fair amount of musical chairs going on. I’m actually concerned the next issue will be a labor shortage, and Obsidian has started to take steps to encourage more engineers to join the processor design community via scholarships to technical conferences and promotion of industry wide internships.
My Obsidian partners, Rob Gowin and Becky Cavanaugh, had a busy year. Becky keeps a full schedule between singing in her band and chasing baby Charlie. Becky’s also the only person I know who has upgraded their stress dream to iPhone enabled. She’s driving down some dark road and doesn’t know where she is or where she going and starts panicking because she can’t find her iPhone…. Oh, the horror.
Happy New Year,
Eric – at – Hennenhoefer.org
