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 2^nd 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

Welcome to the new year which means it’s time for the 2009 Hennenhoefer update:

According to family lore, Hennenhoefer loosely translates to “chicken farmer”.  Now given that we’re about as German as the Olive Garden is Italian, I never took this very seriously. But it seems you can only avoid your destiny for so long.

The Year of the Chicken started with a phone call at 6AM.  “This is the Post Office, come get your box. It’s making chirping noises.”  It turns out that all you need to start a farm these days is the internet and a credit card.

The plan that I got pitched was for 4 hens living peacefully in our backyard, no noise, no mess, just free eggs.  Now I didn’t quite buy it, but since I’m not a voting member of the household, what can you do?

I have to admit that I was a bit surprised to come home to 11 peeps living in my bathroom.  8 of them were baby roosters that were sent along for “free” as packing peanuts to keep the rest warm.  Now you really can’t have roosters in suburbia, so I guess they expected us to eat the packing material at some point.  For a while I thought the cats would solve this issue, but they refused to acknowledge the peeps. I guess my wife forgot to get their prior permission.

Still we have little boys, so I was thinking the first batch would last about a week.  So to hedge our bets, the first rule was that the kids could only play with the packing roosters.  Nate loves animals and spent weeks carrying around a pile of roosters in his little bucket, playing racecar with them down the slide, and strangely walking around with a chicken on his head yelling “CHEEP”.

A few weeks later the hens moved outside when the coop was delivered.   And as we told the kids, the baby roosters went to live on the “farm” with the coop delivery guy to live happily ever after, and no we’re not going to visit.  Now the thing that’s not obvious about chickens is they really are “chicken”.  Mostly, they walk around the yard clucking and don’t wander off.  But when spooked, they PANIC and sprint in a random direction until they get stuck in a corner like some malfunctioning Roomba.

So why did the chicken cross the road?  Lawnmowers.  Yep, suburbia is a dangerous place.  Besides free ranging chihuahuas and the occasional hawk, it’s the yard service that’s the top predator in town.  Since I can’t speak Spanish, the exact details remain a mystery.  I suspect chickens have an innate fear of spinning blades and ran off into the greenbelt, but one cannot rule out that they were bagging that day.  Anyway, after the third incident I think the mowers understood, no more trying to mow around chickens.  So 15 chickens later we have 4 hens in the backyard.

Ethan started kindergarten this year and broke mommy’s heart by insisting he’d ride the bus home.  Now there was an incident which my wife keeps repeating in public, so we might as well get it out in the open.  Consider this a public service announcement for all the other spouses winging this.

Suppose you’re waiting for your kindergartner at the bus stop and they don’t get off.  This means?

a)      He didn’t get on the bus, he must be at school

b)      You need to jump up and down while flailing your arms and chase the bus down the street.

c)       It’s time to call your wife

d)      You have to wait another 15 minutes so go ahead and get out the iPhone

Now as in most crises, you tend to go with your first reaction which for me was obviously A.  It turns out that despite the fact all the kindergartners sit in a special section in the front of the bus, the bus driver only pays attention if they end up with extras at the end of the run.  As for Ethan himself, well he says that he’s only supposed to get off the bus if he sees Mommy standing in the special place.  Humm…

So perhaps you think C is the right answer.  Again wrong.  Your spouse expects you to maintain constant contact with them at all times when children are involved.  So if you have to dial, you’ve already screwed up.

Now for most people it appears the best answer is B.  It’s common to hear of such feats as B as a sort of rite of passage toward a parenting merit badge.  Bus drivers are apparently trained to recognize the behavior resembling escaped mental patients and will immediately stop the bus and let you on to pick out the small child of your choice.

So in my case, I went with A and then C at which point she called the school which recommended D.  If a bus driver discovers a stowaway at the end of the run, they just attempt redelivery.  So all’s well that ends well, right?

Now that the kids are wrapping up 3 and 5 years, there are glimmers of hope that my wife and I will not be institutionalized in 2010.  We can now travel without diapers and both kids can bathe, dress, and play together unattended on weekend mornings until it gets light outside.

The boys and I have even become regular campers and joined the YMCA Indian Guides.  Technically it’s now called Adventure Guides, and while we Texans are fine with a secession from the Indian Nation, it really seems like too much of a hassle due to our investment in our Indian names.  Ethan goes by “Screaming Goat” and Nate settled on “Dancing Penguin” although he was tempted by “Stinky Pig”.  Since it’s a father/child camping group, we can’t disclose our actual activities or our spouses will insist on coming to supervise.

Ethan loves taking karate.  Alisa wasn’t so sure about sending him to a class where they teach them to yell, but fortunately early karate is more like running around in matching clothes.  Which combined with a cute instructor seems to have swayed her over.

Ethan also announced that he’s really good at art which caught me off guard.  I was expecting something like “using the force” or “climbing trees”.  Kids these days do art several times a day and it generally resembles a Jackson Pollock rendered in finger-paints combined with some type of vegetable matter like leaves or corn mixed in.  I wonder if I can start selling his early work on eBay?

Nate announced that he’s a vegetarian at Thanksgiving dinner.  Now that’s a pretty big word for a 3 year old; so even though we talked about it for 5 minutes, he might really be a Unitarian.  Anyway, once we explained that the turkey was a vegetarian too, he was happy to eat it.

Nate also had a run in with TSA at the Austin Airport.  The boy won’t travel without his milk, penguin, and a dozen other things.  The more you bring, the more you can leave behind as you go – kind of like breadcrumbs.  Anyway, Nate was a bit concerned putting his backpack of prized possessions into the jaws of the x-ray machine.  So when the officer opened up his backpack and took out the milk, Nate made it very clear whose milk it was and the officer had better give it back.  Unfortunately raising your voice in the airport security line makes you a potential terrorist.  So while Nate escaped being placed on the no-fly list, he was pulled out of the line for a search and pat down.  After getting the “do something” look from my wife, I took a picture of the incident and posted it to Facebook.

In addition to operating an illegal chicken farm, Alisa has become addicted to Twilight, sewing stuffed animals for nieces and nephews and playing Star Wars Wii with Ethan.  As for the Star Wars part, concerned am I.  Clearly they have both turned to the darkside since they not only prefer the prequels but they also like Jar-Jar Binks.

As for me, it was an entertaining year.  Alisa threw me a semi-surprise birthday party for my 0x28th.  I walked 452 miles while deleting emails on my treadmill desk. My dad got married and had a week long wedding in Jamaica.  Not only was the week adults only, but the villa had faster internet access than home, a pretty good week.  I also spent Easter Sunday at a Morrissey concert and finally made it to the Nine Inch Nails / Jane’s Addiction concert.  As for page-turners, I’ll go with Outliers and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  For those who don’t have extra airport time, Outliers lays out the logical argument about why it comes down to luck and Zen was a great story but it left me confused.  Perhaps not getting Zen is Zen.  It did bring back memories of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid which is the only Pulitzer Prize winning book I’m aware of that includes hundreds of pages about formal mathematical systems.

On the professional side, I’m still very active with Entrepreneur’s Organization (EO) as Texas Area Director.  This year’s activities included visiting Portland OR and touring the Nike HQ, being in a parade with a police escort in New Orleans, spending three amazing days at the EO Texas Roundup in Houston, and attending my first graduation ceremony ever upon completing my 3^rd year at the EO/MIT Entrepreneur Master’s Program.

My other activity was the Design Verification Club (www.dvclub.org), so if you still have no idea who I am, perhaps we met at a meeting in Austin, Boston, North Carolina, or Silicon Valley.

As I reported last year, I continued to wade into the fight over Texas science standards.  Basically a number of religious fundamentalists quietly got elected to the Texas State School Board of Education (SBOE) and have decided to censor anything in the science curriculum that conflicts with their personal views.  The SBOE started with a curriculum drafted by scientists and educators and proceeded to remove parts of evolution, the age of the universe, and global warming.  Strangely some internal disagreement within their ranks managed to keep radioactive decay in Texas science by 1 vote.  I know, it’s hard when you can’t decide if the Earth is 6,000 or 10,000 years old.

I ended up testifying in front of the SBOE and argued we should adopt the standards as drafted by the experts.  I may have also mentioned this whole debate is making Texas look ridiculous and perhaps even that politicians should do what’s best for our children’s education and not their personal agenda.  It seemed to strike a nerve as my 2 minute testimony turned into 13 with Q&A.  I followed up a few months later in front of the Senate Education Committee and ended up quoted in the New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/education/22texas.html

Obsidian Software is wrapping up year 13 and I think it will end up being a pivotal year when we look back from a safe distance.  We took advantage of the downturn to pull in new talent and found a great sublease in a much nicer office building for less money.  For most of our customers, the decision to use our software is a make versus buy and the recent cutbacks made companies reevaluate making their own paperclips.  The upside of the downturn is it opened a lot of doors, and we’ve managed to land more new clients than expected.

My Obsidian partners Rob Gowin and Becky Cavanaugh had a good year and both have window views of downtown in the new offices.  Becky continues to obsess about her iPhone, Facebook, and her baby Charlie.  Rob’s working on his running and spends his free time shuttling around his 3 kids.

Happy New Year,

Eric – at –  Hennenhoefer.Org

Nate Love Penguins

To my friends, business associates, and people who know me only as Nate & Ethan’s dad,

As Alisa and I finish our 4th year of parenthood, I can happily report we’re both still somewhat sane. Parenthood is way overdue for some serious process improvement; it’s no wonder that most modern democracies have negative birth rates. All I can say is that we’re getting off this train before we need a third row seat.

My primary duty as the father in 2008 was to spend time with the boys on Saturday mornings. The boys and I would pack up the Jeep with a month’s supply of clothes, shoes, toys, and snacks and then venture out into the harsh and dangerous world to forage until nap time. Sometimes we’d visit our friend’s ranch in the hill country or perhaps spend some time at the gym, where you can check your kids in and drink coffee in the attached café. But most of the time, our Saturdays were spent at breakfast meetings with the other dads at Waterloo Icehouse while the kids were free to play and eat.

After breakfast activities, our next stop was usually the local amusement park, also known as Home Depot. Seriously, if it came down to Home Depot or Disney World, Mickey looses. Just think about it: multiple locations open 24 hours a day, free rides (carts), free popcorn, shiny things, air-conditioned, forklifts and people that are paid to answer endless questions. The riding tractor section alone can kill a half hour. First you sit on every tractor outside, then each one inside, then…

The true genius of Home Depot didn’t strike me until I started giving the kids money. Face it; if you walk into a store with kids, it’s going to cost you something to get out. You might as well preempt the whole thing by establishing a budget up-front. You give them 5 coins and everything costs a coin, unless it’s expensive or life threatening, those special items cost 20 coins. This also has the benefit of establishing plausible deniably which comes in handy with your better half when you show up at home with the florescent orange spray paint. I don’t know, the 2 year old bought it. I find our kids have a lot of pride in their purchases. It’s been at least 6 months and Nate’s room is still lit by the high efficiency orange party light he needed. Ethan’s a bit more pragmatic with a large collection of screws and nails he meticulously picked out with the advice of the local talent who knew that galvanized nails were better for space ship construction.

Alisa and I had our first vacation without kids this year. Just a few days in Lake Tahoe was a pleasant break. It combined a great sunset on the lake, a little bit of hiking and a visit to the Donner Party museum to find a cookbook. I even got to spend some time at a computer conference.

Alisa continues her adventures in motherhood. After several years of complements on how cute the little ones are and how they must look like me, she took matters into her own hands and dyed her hair blond. She also started the year out with our version of a stimulus package for the local economy. First, it was the kitchen update featuring an electrician who didn’t know how to wire up a light so he just left. Then there was the scary plumber flooding the kitchen, some mold, scope creep, and it’s no wonder there’s a jackhammer in our master bath. I’m just hoping for a working shower by summer.

Alisa also got involved with local politics this year as a block leader and state delegate. This is basically the person who encourages people to actually vote and more importantly keeps the stash of yard signs. We even had a sign escalation going on in our yard for a while. But when the neighbor pulled out the “Unborn babies for Palin” with little handprints, it seemed like a good time to let it go.

Ethan’s now about to turn 5 and continues to grow up quickly. While a year is a long time for a child, it’s the mental changes that strike me the most. It’s a fascinating process as a child really starts to understand the world. We spent a good chunk of the summer on our “airplane” project. This started as a collection of scrap wood and Home Depot items and eventually evolved into an airplane swing that we built out back. We drilled holes, sanded wood, painted, and hung it from the top of the deck. It was the perfect summer activity for a little boy. Recently he adopted a puppy; fortunately it lives inside the computer which is just the kind of pet we can handle these days.

Nate is finishing up the terrible twos and is very proud of his 5 favorite things: penguins, the color orange, rainbows, strawberry milk, and berries. But since he’s hard to understand, most people stop at the penguin part. As a result his holiday presents all had a black and white theme, stuffed penguins, penguin blankets, penguin books, penguin lawn ornaments, etc. I only mention this in case he develops a penguin psychosis later in life; this information might be helpful.

Nate also continues to be an enthusiastic participant in life. Some of the highlights include the two week phase where he didn’t like wearing clothes. These things are mostly harmless as other parents don’t blink an eye, but it can be a tad shocking when you’re out shopping and suddenly realize that he’s naked. He also has the dubious honor of leaving his second violin lesson bleeding. Somehow in all the excitement he tried to bow while watching “the bow” and stuck himself between the eyes. He’s clearly a natural.

I am struck by how much childhood has changed since I was little. No ring around the rosy, no dodge ball, and definitely no peanut products. Kids today ride around in 5 point safety seats, carrying laptop lunches/bento boxes instead of brown bags (actually a food delivery system that came with a user’s manual), and wearing what can only be described as brightly colored plastic clown shoes. I can’t wait for teenagers.

On the professional side, I’ve signed up for another leadership role with the Entrepreneur’s Organization (EO) as Texas Area Director. My job is to work with chapter leaders in Austin, Dallas, San Antonio, and Houston to continue to strengthen EO in Texas. EO continues to be a great experience, every time I figure something out there’s a new challenge. Other than visiting the chapter in Texas, my EO adventures included attending the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting, a party in the St. Louis Arch, an evening in the Vancouver harbor, and playing a live action game / scavenger hunt in the streets of San Francisco (thegogame.com). Who knows what 2009 will hold.

Meanwhile, I continue to try and overcome my Yankee heritage and get full Texas citizenship. As with most things, it’s the small lessons that are memorable: remember to keep your hands inside the roll cage (it’s there for a reason), when firing automatic weapons it’s considered bad form to let the hot shell casing drop down your neighbor’s shirt, and when burning enough brush to darken the sky, it’s best to give the local fire department a heads up. And then there’s the minor issue of most of Texas thinking Austin’s really a piece of CA. This could take a lifetime.

As for the rest of the Austin business scene, I had to cut back a few things due to EO, but I’m still active in the Angel Investment Group (CTAN) as well as attending an alphabet soup of events (ATC, Bootstrap, TiE, RCIC/ETF, ABJ, MIT, RICE Alliance, YPO, Texas Round-Up, CCAPC, AEA, Leadership Forum, and organizing the All-Board event). For continuing education, I’ve finished the second of three years as part of the EO/MIT Entrepreneurial Master’s Program.

My other activity was the Design Verification Club (www.dvclub.org). Thanks to all the speakers and volunteers who helped make this happen. We recently added a chapter in Bristol UK to the existing chapters in the US and India. So who wants to present this year?

I’ve also waded into uncharted waters recently with my newest cause. I’m not really a superstitious person, but I do find the universe to be full of a mostly enjoyable level of irony. But even I have a limit. Like when your coworkers want to add sarcasm to the company’s core values or when you start to pay attention to the local schools and find out Texas is flirting with adding Creationism into the science curriculum.

The whole Creationism thing was really the last straw for a lot of reasons. Being from Pennsylvania, I’ve seen this whole game before as part of the Dover, PA lawsuit. Now I’m a bit of a science & technology geek, so the last 8 years of the “War on Science”, where facts and reason took a back seat to ideology, was troubling. So when I learned that Texas had been targeted as a key state in this issue due to its size and the logistics of the textbook market, I knew that it had just become time to put up or shut up.

I teamed up with other business leaders, educators, scientists, clergy, and parents to try and get a reasonable science standard passed before Texas gets embarrassed on the international stage. The thought of Austin being the next Kansas or Dover, PA is just not a fair representation of Texas. I can just see it now, years of hoopla and jokes about Texas on the late night talk shows. Anyway, I’m off to try the ounce of prevention path and will testify at the public hearings later in this month. If you’re a friend of science or have any advice on how to pull this off, drop me a line. If you want to know more about the back story, search google for “Texas evolution” or “Texas evolution Dunbar” if you live in Austin.

Life at our little startup, Obsidian, is kicking off year 12. Despite the world appearing to collapse, business is strong. We hope to take advantage of the turmoil and pick up a few great people. Currently, we have an opening for an ops person and we’re always looking for co-ops. Beyond that, let me know if you’re on the market, I might know of something. The sea is a bit stormy, but long term there’s always a shortage of great talent. We’re also thinking of moving, perhaps somewhere by Zilker Park that will let my coworker bring her 100 lb rodent to work from time to time. http://www.myspace.com/caplinrous

My Obsidian partners Rob Gowin and Becky Cavanaugh continue down the kid path also. Becky’s the very proud mother of baby boy, Charlie. At a distance he seems a lot like I remember my little one. Perhaps it’s all the hand-me-downs. I bet I could claim him as a dependent. Anyway, up close they are definitely different, and I don’t remember mine ever sitting still or being quiet. As for Rob, nobody’s really sure what’s he’s up to, and that’s the way he likes it;) I do know he’s caught the running bug again, so if you’re down in Zilker Park, keep an eye out for him.

Eric at Hennenhoefer dot org

Hennenhoefer’s 2008

Ethan

Nate Turns 2!

Epcot

Marshall Ranch

With Cousins
Can you find all 3 penguins?

South Texas Bench

Making cake for Mommy

Picking flowers for Mommy

A moment of quiet

Fireside with cousin

Marshall Ranch

Ethan first lesson

Nate and the buttercups

Ethan turns 4 at NASA

Nate’s very serious about berries

Ethan’s flying his airplane

(Scroll down for pictures)

To my friends, both real and imaginary,

I have to admit, after last year’s letter, I’ve been somewhat dreading writing this. It seems the troubles of 2006 channeled some unknown writing ability. Not bad considering I got to skip a year of brooding and wearing black like my artist friends searching for their voice. I didn’t even end up in rehab. Anyway, this is an engineer’s story, so low expectations please.

Looking back, 2007 was again dominated by life with two little boys. Life with kids feels like a reality TV show, or perhaps since there’s a writers strike; it’s a really well done marketing campaign to develop future AA members.

This year Halloween wins the award for good ideas that took on a life of their own. Alisa and I kicked off Halloween in Las Vegas with KISS at the Global Entrepreneur’s Organization (EO) conference. Now I have to admit I’m not a KISS fan. I spent the late 70s falling into the computer geek abyss with the release of the Atari 2600 and didn’t come up for air until the Smiths/Cure era. But as far as costume parties go, this one ranks at the top.

From there we returned to Austin where the dress up party continued. We won the highly competitive neighborhood costume contest in the group category for our interpretation of “soup” (see picture). Even stranger than dressing up as a tomato was having our photo end up in the www.souppeddler.com newsletter and being filmed as part of a documentary project. Being a university town, bumping into starving artists with a video camera doing a “project” did not seem odd at the time. Since there were no waivers involved hopefully we’re in Borat 2.0.

And to wrap up the holiday, there’s the annual visit from my wife’s sister and family with 3 kids. We seem to have settled into a yearly ritual where they visit us for “Halloween with the Heathens” and we reciprocate by visiting them for “Christmas with the Jews”. Normally their 3 kids plus our 2 little ones all under 4 years makes it …. memorable. Well, this year my brother-in-law wins an award from the President of the United States for his stem cell research. So they both fly to DC at the last minute for a special award ceremony at the White House and LEAVE THEIR THREE KIDS WITH US in Austin. Yep, us, the people who we wouldn’t leave our own kids with;)

Now, I’m still thinking I was set up. How do you respond to that? I mean I’ll need to win a Nobel Peace prize to just to drop my kids off for a few days at their house. Good thing I’m not the competitive type. Great job Peter!

http://www.upmc.com/Communications/MediaRelations/NewsReleaseArchives/2007/November/RubinAward.htm

Alisa began the year training to ride the Hill Country Ride for AIDS 50 mile bike ride (canceled due to sick kid). It was followed with successful training for the Capital of TX Triathlon (canceled due to flooding). She did have some success with a personal trainer (fired after 6 weeks for being wacky) and briefly had a nanny (made it all of 4 days with us). So I guess it’s not really a surprise she raided my old college stuff and is starting a Cure/Morrissey phase. Despite those disappointments and being a stay at home mom, she’s recently kicked off a “self improvement” project that started with dying her hair black with streaks of red. Fortunately our look of desperation plus a few extra checks got Nate into preschool early, so things are looking up.

Ethan’s about to turn 4 and continues to be a very active child. Some of our adventures include fishing (quickly followed by crisis when we caught a fish), camping at Ink’s Lake (well, sleeping in a Westie outfitted with A/C), and ranching with his friend Rafe (ranching an unexplainable Texas thing). Recently Ethan’s been asking for help to build a rocket ship out of tinkertoys. Once completed he plans to blast off his little brother into space so he can pursue his dream of driving a garbage truck in peace.

Nate just turned two. He’s a peaceful soul, the quiet type of trouble. . . He does have a weakness for animals. His favorite part of Disney World was watching the birds roaming about with the airport tile mosaic a close second. He does enjoy traveling with his friends. Recently he insisted we take the cat with us shopping. The result was a 2 hour outing to PetSmart while the kiddies “walked” her a bit in between fighting over whose turn it was to hold the leash. Actually, it was more like cat tobogganing with her happily sliding on her back down the newly waxed floors. Note to PETA, the cat was wearing a harness and no animals were harmed (just kids and they heal quickly since they are made of rubber at this age). As for why the cat ran away from home 2 weeks after the adventure and was never seen again. . . I chalk this up to her being a stray to begin with and it was just a 7 year itch. Alisa said coyotes ate her, but that’s just that Cure phase kicking in.

We also had our first ER visit with Nate. Given we have a combined total of 6 little boy years, it’s amazing we made it this long. Remember what they say about walking with something in your mouth, well on page 528 of the parent guilt manual it clearly says not to let your kids eat corndogs while dancing on a curb to holiday music on the Trail of Lights. I met them at the ER an hour after the event and Alisa was still in shock. Nate’s fine and was more interested in making turkeys out of the ER gloves than worrying about his blood trail.

As for me, I’m starting to have some hobbies again. We’ve managed to see a fair number of movies. I’m going with Charlie Wilson’s War as my favorite since Philip Seymour Hoffman clearly rocks in everything he does. I’m still hooked on dark dramas; Battlestar Galactica, House, Life, Dexter…. Dexter season 2 shows the most promise and while being a serial killer seems reasonable, am I the only one who doesn’t buy the sister and the FBI agent? As for the longest 90 minutes of entertainment 2007, that would be our family outing to the Chipmunk movie. Strangely the kids and in-laws loved it.

On the professional front I spent the first half of the year wrapping up my term as President of the Austin Chapter of the Entrepreneur’s Organization (EO). EO’s a great adventure that continues to exceed my expectations. I’ve also joined the Board of TexChange and have been active in a local angel investment group (CTAN) as well as attending an alphabet soup of events in Austin (ATC, Bootstrap, TiE, RCIC/ETF, ABJ, MIT, RICE Alliance, YPO, Texas Round-up, CCAPC, AEA, Leadership Forum). For continuing education, I’ve finished the first of three years as part of the EO/MIT Entrepreneurial Master’s Program where I learned it’s not wise to drink with Aussies.

My other activity is the Design Verification Club (www.dvclub.org). Thanks to all the speakers and volunteers who helped make this happen. We added chapters in San Diego and Bangalore to bring membership up to over 2000 engineers in 7 cities. So who wants to present this year?

Life at our little startup, Obsidian, is kicking off year 11. We had a great 10 year anniversary party last spring. It was a bit surreal; I remember the early days in my house like it was yesterday. Oddly, not much really changes. I’m still up in the middle of the night typing away with my cats Tcl and Perl on my lap. I guess the only real difference is they don’t let me write code anymore.

My Obsidian partners Rob Gowin and Becky Cavanaugh continue to live in interesting times. Becky is expecting a little boy next year. I hope he’s really wild! We have lots of really loud toys that I plan to put new batteries in and pass along;) Rob is also enjoying parenthood mixing tutoring math and driving to soccer games with trips to Fry’s and hacking his Eee PC.

I also have a new company, Silicon Elite, with two new partners, Rob Keist and Nathan Sheeley. We’ve decided to change the rules in the engineering consulting business. … tune in next year for that story… Meanwhile, we’re looking for a few gifted engineers to help with the quest.

I hope everyone had a wonderful 2007 and the New Year is starting off on a positive note. I look forward to catching up a the adventure continues.

Eric at Hennenhoefer.org

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Friends, business associates, and people I’ve met on planes,

Happy New Year and welcome to 2007. All I can say is it’s about time!

For the Hennenhoefer family, 2006 started off on a high note with the arrival of our second son on January 23^rd. After six hours of labor my wife gave birth to a healthy 9lb boy, Nathaniel Sterling Hennenhoefer. Despite our planning, it was a natural birth with delivery only four minutes after we arrived at the hospital room.

A few hours after Nathaniel was born, 2006 started taking a turn for the worse. I fell ill and ended up spending the night on the bathroom floor in the maternity ward. You might think a hospital is the ideal place to get sick, but it turns out it’s not. Hospital staff is not permitted to say anything that sounds like medical advice to a non-patient. Instead, the nurses brought me water and asked if I realized I looked quite pale. To a sleep deprived person who’s been mistaken for an albino in the past, this comes across as friendly chitchat.

Finally, after wandering down to the ER, I was given abdominal surgery for blockage caused by a combination of broccoli and a Meckel’s Diverticulum. The surgery was followed by nine days in the hospital, 12 staples, and a six-week recovery that I’m still trying to schedule. Again, for all the people I emailed or talked to while in the hospital, sorry about that. I was on a lot of drugs and it took the nurses a few days to confiscate my blackberry.

All in all, the hospital stay was not a big deal for me. Modern medicine is a wonderful thing and they had me on the good stuff. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for my wife, Alisa. Although the hospital will extend maternity stay for an extra day if the father is having surgery, an Invisible Fence / Baby-LoJack technology attached to the wrists of maternity patients prevents them from leaving to visit other floors. Alas, she was restricted to the maternity ward while I enjoyed my post-surgery pain killers.

Once Alisa got home her mother came to the rescue; or tried, rather. During the first night of her stay at the Hennenhoefer house she fell and broke both feet. A visit to the emergency room ended with Alisa’s mother being confined to a wheelchair for six weeks.

The following week Alisa totaled my car. Fortunately she was unharmed, just a little shaken up…

I want to thank everyone for their help and for wishing me well after my surgery. However, there is one minor detail that must be addressed. Since there is some confusion over the protocol for these types of things, I’ll just be blunt. It turns out that motherhood trumps surgery. Trust me on this. If you see us out and about, the proper greeting would be something like this:

Alisa dear, you look great! A 9lb baby without any drugs is simply amazing! Nate is the cutest baby ever… As for you, Eric, you really need to plan your emergency room surgeries better. Do you have any idea how hard it is to bring home a new baby all alone? At least you’re recovered now. Someone needs to buy Alisa a lot of flowers…

With respect to the actual child raising part, 2006 left a lot to be desired. Even easy-going infants like Nate are a lot of work. And Ethan, who was enjoying his terrible twos at the time, was in a highly active state. Up until a month ago his favorite activity was biting other kids; his rationalization is that they’re fun to eat. Whether or not his friends are fun to eat, it was no fun getting banned from all the play groups and having Alisa and I summoned to the director’s office for special counseling. When does it get easier?

Life is a lot easier now that the little ones are almost one and three. They’re definitely still crazy, but less so. On a typical day Ethan will pounding on my door because he needs to tell me something very important. Seconds later he’ll be dancing around singing “Jingle Snakes”, all while completely naked.

As for my free time, it is fleeting. I used to read books and keep up with the movies, but these days I get my kicks from individually wrapped snacks. Thankfully, I’ve managed to keep up with Battlestar Galactica, House, and the Colbert Report. I find that the dark drama and satire help to balance out the over-cheery songs from Dora the Explorer and Twinkle Twinkle that haunt me wherever we go.

Some of my other adventures include attending a Colbert Report filming at Bikini Bar and Grill in Austin, racing go-karts, orienteering with Navy Seals, sailing off the coast of San Diego, smuggling toothpaste onto airplanes, having lunch with a Congressman, saving Perl the Cat with a month of feeding out of a syringe, driving a skid steer, and building a castle with the little ones. I guess I’ve kept pretty busy.

On the professional front I’ve kept myself very busy with two extracurricular activities in 2006. I’m President of the Austin Chapter of the Entrepreneur’s Organization (EO). As this is only one chapter in a large global organization, I was sent to President’s School in D.C. for three days to learn my new job. Research has shown that entrepreneurs individually are unmanageable, but if you can get them organized great things will happen. Armed with my new training and gold EO lapel pin, I’ve been working to get the word out about EO and help pull together all the Austin business groups.

My other activity is the Design Verification Club (www.dvclub.org). The DVClub started a couple of years ago as an Austin networking lunch for verification engineers. Today we have over 1000 members. The plan for 2007 is to host 20 events, in Austin, Boston, Cary NC, Dallas, and Silicon Valley. Thank you to everyone that has helped out with this project in 2006. It has been a lot of fun. And, if you happen to know any good speakers, I’m looking for 40 presenters…

On the work front, everything is going great at Obsidian. Our little startup company will be ten years old next month. The microprocessor segment continues to be hot so there’s always more work to do than time in the day. It’s a good problem to have and it means our next problem will be finding more talent, in case you happen to be looking.

My partners Rob and Becky are well. Rob and his wife, Sara, are up to three kids and a minivan. Becky continues her obsessive ways and shares my excitement for the end of 2006. We made it through last year and 2007 has a lot of potential.

I hope everyone had a wonderful 2006 and the New Year is starting off on a positive note. I look forward to catching up.

Eric

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(scroll down for pictures)

Friends and Business Associates,

Happy New Year and welcome to 2006!

This morning, enjoying my first cup of coffee for the day, I pondered over what the best phrase would be to describe 2005. Then it hit me. The Year of Starbucks.

I think there’s more to this trend than my infant, work, and travel-induced caffeine addiction. I noticed something strange was happening when people started holding office hours at Starbucks. Suddenly it was commonplace for people to say, “Drop by and see me next week. I’ll be at Starbucks Westlake on Tuesday morning and Friday afternoon,” or “Starbucks Arbor on Monday and Wednesday morning,” or some variation thereof. It really sank in when one of my engineer friends just stopped going to the office. He doesn’t actually work with anyone in Austin. As a member of a cross-functional global task force there’s no real need for him to bother with driving in and sitting in a cube. All he needs is WiFi and coffee to keep him going between conference calls every eight hours. So he goes to Starbucks instead of work. It doesn’t sound too bad. With my closest Starbucks only .2 miles away by car (in America we always drive), it is the closest source of caffeine other than the bottle of Excedrin on my desk.

Aside from the coffee, 2005 was a success in terms of meeting people. Since starting Obsidian several years ago I’ve been so preoccupied with running the company that I haven’t been able to get out much. This year I made a point of getting more involved in business groups and I’m really glad I did. It’s amazing how many interesting people I’ve met with just a little extra effort. To all of my new friends from EO, AeA, Austin Technology Council, Texchange, Austin Wireless, Microprocessor Forum, and DAC: It’s been a blast.

The other fun project I’ve been working on is starting quarterly lunch groups for people in the verification community (http://www.dvclub.org/). Over 250 people attended events in Austin, Dallas, and Silicon Valley in November. Thank you to all the speakers and everyone who came. It’s been long overdue for this community to meet regularly. Planning for Q1 events is underway; anyone want to be a speaker?

Everything is progressing well at Obsidian. Nine years into it I guess the word ‘startup’ no longer applies. The microprocessor business has seen an up-tick in the second half of 2005. Everyone is hiring again and projects are starting right and left. Obsidian launched a major new product aimed at less complex processors and we spun off our service group into a staffing company (Veriseo). Hopefully this will allow me to focus on the processor side of the world while our Ops guy, Hoss, works on expanding Veriseo. Launching a new company is fun, but it’s nice not to have to do it from scratch this time.

My partners, Rob and Becky, are well. Rob and his wife, Sara, will also have their second child early next year. I’m hoping he’ll be a real handful so someone else’s kid will be the bad one at playgroup for a change. Becky is still singing with her band, working obsessively, and doing crazy things like playing golf with her husband, Randy.

This year I continued to travel a fair amount for work. Japan was perhaps the most memorable trip of 2005. International travel is sort of like a dream where things never quite fit together. A typical day doing sales calls in Japan involves walking ten miles, having a stranger tell you he likes your shoes and asking what size they are (maybe practicing English?), and walking into a Starbucks in January where Christmas songs are playing and no one has heard of decaf. I think I’d like to head to Asia sometime in the next few years. Plastic food no longer seems so strange.

Luckily, my personal life is somewhat undercontrol. Baby Ethan is 22 months now and in a couple weeks will be joined by a baby brother. Raising kids seems to be a series of challenges, constantly fixing one problem only to find another. 2005 saw a great improvement in Ethan’s sleep habits, but we also entered into mobility and the world of “No.” Needless to say, we’re not out of the woods yet. The thought of raising two boys seems completely overwhelming to us. We asked around and have managed to find several other couples that actually survived two small boys, but it doesn’t sound easy. If you don’t hear from us next year, you’ll know what happened.

Alisa continues on the bumpy road of stay-at-home mom. It’s a job of great highs and lows. Most of the time she’s very happy with the experience, but sometimes she wishes she was back at Dell, arguing with adults. Alisa even ran her first marathon last spring. Wow.

I hope everyone had a great 2005 and I look forward to seeing you all in the new year. We should grab coffee.

Eric

[Note: On Dec 19th, 2006 my headache doctor banned me from all caffeine, thus ending the Year of Starbucks]

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Eric, Alisa, and Ethan

Playing with Rocks

Playing Dress up

First Birthday

Spring in Texas

Swinging

Visiting CO

Learning to Walk

Now we’re having fun

Friends,

Greetings and Happy Holidays as a busy 2004 comes to a close. For the Hennenhoefers, this year was especially busy due to the birth of our first son, Ethan Todd Hennenhoefer, on February 21^st. Having survived pregnancy, sleepless nights, crying babies, and all the other babies that come out of the woodwork once you have one, I’m looking forward to a calmer 2005.

Alisa left Dell this year to be a stay-at-home mom for a while. She has threatened to quit several times, but overall she is enjoying the change. It’s a very rewarding job, but certainly has its bad hours. She requested a promotion in her last quarterly status update, but Ethan is a pretty tough boss.

I’m still spending a good portion of my life traveling. The upside is that I’ve given up on trying to do real work on planes and now it’s a great time to catch up on reading. Some of my favorites this year (for the science geek in all of us) were On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins and Genome by Matt Ridley. Thanks to ABC for messing up my Tivo with strange start times for Lost, for I now have the power of BitTorrent. HDTV on my laptop with no commercials is a great thing even when I’m not traveling. Now if they could just find a way to make it legal.

Currently, we are busy preparing for the “some assembly required” holiday season. These days it’s impossible to make a children’s toy that doesn’t take batteries, have flashing lights, and make noise. As much fun as Ethan has with the wrapped presents, I wonder how necessary all these fancy toys really are. Pushing boxes around keeps him pretty busy.

On the work front, everything is going great at Obsidian. Our little startup company is eight years old now and is listed on the INC 500. The only things that remain constant are my partners, Becky and Rob, my email address, and the Obsidian kittens, Tcl and Perl, which have been spending more time at my house than the office lately. Becky got married to Randy Siebod this year, in a “small” wedding that somehow got scheduled at my house. It was fun, but for the record, there is no such thing as a “small wedding.” I performed the ceremony, which was actually my second. So far I’m 2-0, so I might quit while I’m ahead on this one. Rob and Sara also joined the ranks of new parents this year with their daughter Dayana. It seems there are babies everywhere.

Welcome to 2005 everyone. I hope you’re all keeping warm and I look forward to catching up with you soon.

Eric

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Ethan’s First Plane Ride

Infant

First Halloween

Alisa and Eric go party hopping

8 Months

Easter

Bath Time

6 weeks