bengt-erik norum

i submitted this, as a "medical inquiry", early this morning:

I was thrilled to catch one of your commercials on television the other night.  The URL "silenceyourrooster.com" displayed at the end told me that your product might fulfill a need in my life.  In examining the collateral provided at silenceyourrooster.com, I'm unsure how to proceed with getting Ambien CR for my rooster.

 

My rooster is a 7 month old Buff Orpington with traditional markings.  He has recently started persistent crowing from sunrise until 9AM or so.  While we find his crowing amusing and live in a rural/agricultural area, we have neighbors within earshot of his usual pasture.  If Ambien CR can actually (temporarily) silence my rooster, I believe it might be the perfect product for this situation.

 

Please advise on how I might get Ambien CR prescribed for my rooster?

with an eye toward self-sufficiency and environmental sustainability, kat and i wanted to find a place to live with some acreage.  we were hoping to give ourselves the flexibility to do some things we found difficult in california.  kat had a pretty productive patio garden in mountain view, but it frustrated her.  we wanted a garden.  we had been making goat cheese, mostly direct set chevre, from store-bought milk.  we wanted to raise goats.  we had indoor animals and wanted a dog.  in looking at what we wanted, it was clear we wanted land.

as the possibility of relocating became more tangible, we turned our focus to finding a house... and land.  i briefly flirted with the idea of a downtown seattle condo.  a new construction two bed, one bath penthouse with all the ridiculous trimmings (granite counter tops, pool, gym, home owners association and annoying pretentious neighbors) somehow seemed like a good idea to me.  i came to my senses.  i did a naive statistical regression using three variables, price, acreage, distance, and direction from microsoft's main campus.  not surprisingly, there were pretty significant correlations to be found.  the size of the parcels increased as you moved farther from redmond, to the east, and decreased to the west.  price/acre similarly decreased following the same pattern w/cardinal direction.  there were two outliers that we investigated.  the area along the snoqualmie river valley (duvall, carnation, and down toward fall city) and monroe highlighted statistically significant differences in price/acre and price/mile (from main campus).

we took this info to a realtor that'd been recommended by a friend (thanks j+l) and committed ourselves to a few solid weekends of house-hunting.  we'd visited duvall, while poking around in july and fell in love with the town.  it probably didn't hurt that we were there on the day of the farmers' market.  monroe and carnation looked doable, from a commute perspective.  with this information in hand, we compiled a list of several properties and kat set about evaluating them on a multipoint weighted scale that included "kitchen", "acreage", "distance from campus", and "bathrooms".  we narrowed it down to 14 properties for the first weekend and after setting expectations with the realtor, booked a trip for that weekend.  the list included a couple of places we "weren't sure about" and probably should have skipped.  one was a 2 acre place with a 1500 sq foot house and a 3 bay 7 car garage and 20+ foot ceilings.  the other turned out to be correctly listed as an almost 3000 square foot with 5 acre condo.  the second was built as a "duplex" style house with an adjoining garage wall.  the 5 acres turned out to be half of a 10 acre horse track.  even though the realtor said the listing agent had insisted that the "neighbor" was a very nice man named "wally", we decided not to even look.

the top three properties were:

• a large house in monroe with all the most amazing features you'd want, including granite countertops, slate floors, all new viking appliances, a wrap around porch, etc.  it came with some downsides, though.  it was located a the back of a 2 acre lawn and very little privacy.  the very friendly neighbor mentioned that it had some cc&r-style restrictions, including "no horses."  the commute was also likely to be a little hellish.  this was our #2 choice.
• right at the upper edge of our price range was a big new england style house in skyhomish on 2 acres in a somewhat suburban neighborhood.  it appeared to currently be inhabited by the owners, but looked as if it'd been rented out to a horde of college boys.  the hardwood floors were trashed, the oven was missing most of the oven door (!?) and the exterior showed complete neglect and left us wondering what else was lurking behind an inspection report.  we called this the "sad house" because we sooo wanted to make it shine again, but ultimately decided that it was just too much extra investment, given it's current price.
• the house we purchased is a 2000 square foot, one story, 3 bed 2 bath on 15 acres.  it was newly listed and the third house we looked at.  we both absolutely fell in love with it.  we walked back to the creek that forms the southern border of the parcel (cherry creek) and kept asking the realtor, "this is still the same place!?"  before we saw it in person, we'd been pretty sure that the mls listing was a mistake and was supposed to be 1.499 and not 14.99 acres.

after a full day of house hunting we returned to "make sure" we wanted this one.  after gawking at the more open floorplan and huge (though dated) kitchen, we wrote an offer on the dining room table.  we received a counter offer that was not materially different from our offer and entered escrow two days later.  we'd gone to look and returned having an offer accepted on a place we couldn't believe we'd found!

the details of the move aren't any more interesting than the typical "moving is hell" story, so i'll skip those.

some time ago, i promised a coworker that i'd blog about my "adventures in farming."  the lifestyle change we made when we moved from california to washington is atypical enough to be a novelty to people who know me.

in my last post, i explained that i'd moved to washington state and that my fiance and i live on 15 acres.  i left out the type of details that apparently make my story "interesting."

i'm going to try to catch up on some blogging i haven't done.

i'm sitting in the san jose airport waiting for a delayed flight to seattle. my work mail is syncing slowly, so i decided to clean up my personal inbox. doing so, i noticed a trend.

i've received a relatively large number of messages from people that read similar to: "hey, how've you been? haven't talked to you in awhile. life's good here (insert details). i ran across your blog. how's your health?"

i'm horrible about replying to personal email. i get distracted with things that aren't nearly as important and lose the mail behind a few hundred pieces of spam. i think i need to adopt some work habits for my personal mail. in the short term, i'll post here and reply to these people that think i'm ignoring them.

having tapered off to a slow trickle of posts, there's alot of "big" or "important" life events that have passed unmentioned:

• i'm engaged to a beautiful woman, katherine brown, i met through work. wedding isn't until sept. of 2009, mostly because we've been busy with the rest of this list
• we moved to duvall, washington, a town of ~7000 people
• we bought a 3 bed, 2 bath house on 15 acres.
• kat is working in redmond, i haven't changed jobs and am still working in microsoft's silicon alley campus. i fly alot.
• my kids still live in idaho falls, id. celeste turned 8 a couple weekends ago and eva turns 4 in march. did i mention that i fly alot?

on the health front, in short, i still have barrett's and am looking for a gastroenterologist up here. the aciphex has done a pretty good job of controlling symptoms (and further damage), as long as i'm careful about what and when i eat. i'll post more on this, later this weekend.

when viewing a jpg in internet explorer (uri ends in .jpg), why doesn't "right-click, properties" get me exif data?

and where's my flying car?

i'm a geek.

i can geek out on almost anything. in trying to figure out how i'm going to structure the work my team will do over the next year, i did a fair amount of research on the topic of "innovation". i totally geeked out on it, and came out the other side feeling dumber for my efforts. connceptually, it seemed a little odd to research "innovation". in my mind, research is an attempt to uncover "prior art" (what other people have done), while innovation is all about the forward looking and the "radical departure from status quo."

having said that, i really really really like talking to people who have a novel approach to solving an old/common problem or a clever application of a new technology and want to give my team some space to do that. i have some ideas about how i might acheive this, but wanted to back them with "measurable goals".

the earth-shattering outcome of my research? i'll save you the frustration and brain damage:

• i'm really glad i'm not the director of it for some small company.
  
• lots of people think their reuse of something clever someone else did is "innovative".
  
• "innovation" is a good way to explain something that you spent a bunch of time on that still hasn't paid off.
  
• people who do innovative work don't generally use the word in a sentence without "air quotes".
  
• and... the only thing i'll retain... there are two approaches to innovation, supply driven and demand led. (more in the following paragraph)
  

two simple thoughts:

supply-driven innovation occurs when you have a new technology looking for a problem. ("oh, look! new hammer! where nail?")

demand-led innovaiton occurs when you have a problem looking for a solution. ("pile of nails and i got nothing heavy.")

yep. that's it.

it's not much, but it's what i took from three hours of reading papers on innovation, metrics to evaluate the impact of innovation, and a fair amount of meaningless drivel.

side note: in the right light diana krall sounds an awful lot like queen latifah. (see also: various artists: we all love ella: celebrating the first lady of song)

this is my 100th post to bengt.org. based on some pretty weak apache log analysis, i estimate that roughly 165 people will read this over the next year. i apologize in advance.

music that's made the last few weeks bearable.

billy talent
black strobe
eagles of death metal
hazel adkins
idaho
tortoise
metric
ratatat
dean martin
spiderbait
the smiths
white stripes
elvis
elliott smith
skinny puppy
portishead
fujiya and miyagi
bad brains
the black keys
ladytron
the donnas (yes, still)
the apples in stereo
lisa loeb
yardbirds
reverend horton heat
billy bragg
the knife
neutral milk hotel
cracker
x
johnny cash
bmrc
le tigre
morphine
magnetic fields

the official windows live hotmail launch was monday.

a lot of very talented developers put a lot of long hours to make this specific release happen. i have the privilege of working with many of them and am frequently impressed by their desire to 'do the right thing.' this is one of the reasons i love my job.

i've worked for microsoft for 7.5 years and had something to do with hotmail that entire time. i've seen many many talented people have a profound effect on the service we run. many (most, in fact) have moved on, inside or outside the company. some have gone back to school, some have moved north to redmond, some have left to work for other companies, and a fair number have left to pursue careers with our competitors.

it wouldn't be right to congratulate the current product planning, customer support, business, marketing, dev, and ops teams on this major release and re-branding of hotmail without highlighting the incredible legacy left by their predecessors. there are hundreds of people who've worked on hotmail over the past 11+ years, most of them will go unrecognized. hotmail works, in part, because of a number of very wise decisions that were made many years ago.

congratulations to all of you who used to work on hotmail. any success we have is partly your doing.

i haven't posted for months, but endeavor to do so more.

i've returned from a great vacation and despite feeling alternately tired and overwhelmed by the flu-like symptoms, i'm pretty optimistic about my life. ;)

a few quick updates:

- i'm procrastinating the surgery but have been managing my diet closely. symptom-free for the most part.
- my kids are now 7 and 3. i feel old, in this context.
- work is going well. i'm frequently reminded of how kick ass my team is. makes my job easy.

i might even post again, later tonight, but figured it was worth getting something out there, even if i don't.

i contacted the thompson center, after procrastinating for a couple months. dr. overholt is out until march 20th, but i will likely have my surgery the last week in march.

i'm nervous, but optimistic about getting through this phase of the treatment.

i've almost entirely lost my voice, today. horrible cough, too. i'm tired of being sick.