Bill Watt’s Blog

Well- another year in my life has passed and it has been a good one. Here are a few of the highlights and you can read the older posts should you care about additional details:

• Alice and I have been having fun in CA
• I continued to attend the Wednesday night dinners with Jason, Jason, and JSK for most of the year. These were often 2 or more dinners a week so it is worth noting given the enjoyment I got and the amount of time consumed.
• I took a 6 week sabbatical from eBay including a trip that spanned places in England, France and Luxembourg (and visiting with friends in each) as well as some time in Santa Barbara and with the family in Ohio
• In one step I ended my time at eBay after 4.3 yrs and finished my official association with FairMarket after 9+ years. Many people thought this day would never come.
• I took almost 2 months off (was planning for longer) before accepting the next stage of my (work) life at Current.com

Ah, it was a good year.

First day back… sabbatical is over.

It is pretty interesting to me that I haven’t taken more than a few days off here and there in the last 3 years and I was just able to take 6 weeks out. It is an awesome team around me (PD, QA, PjM and PM all rock!) and looking in from the outside was a great reminder that we have a great base that doesn’t depend on one person showing up.

Please… don’t get me wrong. I have no lack of ego and I know what I bring to the team but it was cool to see the team, especially my PM team, rock it.

Anyway, the point is that this was day one back. It was a nice and relaxed day with time to catch up with friends I haven’t seen in more than a month. Ah, and lunch and coffee breaks with friends!

And to cap it off I got to catch up with Geis after work. Good living.

Oh! And I ran into Nathan this morning at Starbucks and he let me see his iPhone. It really is beautiful and the thing just looks like the commercial. Yes, I know all the negatives and why it wouldn’t be a good replacement for my blackberry but dang… it is pretty.

We had a pretty relaxed 4th including a cookout for lunch. I got a bottle of wine for the holiday and opened it for lunch. My oldest nephew said, “you have to put the top back on your drink” so I explained about letting wine breathe. At dinner that night he looked across the room, saw the cork in the bottle, and asked my mom, “I thought wine was supposed to breathe?”

He’s a sharp kid and picks up quite a bit. Now we’re just counting the days till this gets recounted as part of a school show and tell.

Everyone wants kids and puppies to like them and for me a visit to the family is a good example. When I get there I watch to see how long it takes the nephews to warm up to me.

We were waiting at the Desert Inn and my brother and his family came in. My younger nephew warmed up to me immediately but the older always takes a while longer. This is especially true since I grew my hair out. As he said the last time I was home, “you have long hair… you’re not supposed to have long hair.”

Before long both were warmed up to me and we had a good visit.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List show but I love her. Yes, it is “adult language” and topics so those of you who don’t like that would really not like this show or her act in general. But if you have a chance, this episode where she prepares to go on a Rosie O’Donnell cruise is very touching.

Her parents have been a big part of her D-List show and in this episode, it feels odd to call it that when it is so raw and personal but it is reality TV, her father passes away. He was a funny funny guy and reminds me a bit of my grandfather with his say what comes to mind approach and his upbeat personality. Even when he passed he asked to have golf on the TV and to have control. The thing that is so hard is watching Kathy deal with it on camera. The performer side of her has to go on but the pain is just so real.

I’ll be honest… I’m heading to see my grandfather tomorrow and this is one of my worst fears. What’s going to happen on the day I get that call? He’s had a great run (he’s ~94 yrs old) but if I could trade 20 years of my life to have him for another 20 it wouldn’t even be a question (as long as it didn’t require surgery… you know, I’d want that pill that takes from one and gives to another… ).

As a side note- I lived with my grandfather for 10 years after college when I was spiriling out of control, had no idea what to do, and no real aspirations. He was there for me and we became really close over the years. I was lucky to have that kind of time where before I thought it was great to see him for a bit each summer and maybe at Christmas. It became so normal to have him around that when Alice and I bought a house we picked one about 7 miles East from her folks and 7 miles West from my grandfather. It was really cool for me as an “adult” to have that sense of family all around. Sunday dinners with her folks at our place and weekly dinners and all the holidays with grandfather.

Anyway- I hate the whole topic of mortality. I don’t want to think ahead to any of this but it is a reality. But, I’ll just make sure and tell people I love them and never leave with unsettled issues.

I also need to try and do more than just focus on work. Yes, I want to work hard and I know that makes my family proud to see what I do but in the end, the job will just have been a job. They give vacation time for a reason and I need to take advantage fo that to get back home and see the family and to see my nephews grow up!

The 1k connections on LinkedIn and all the friends on Facebook won’t buy you another minute. (But if you want to add me to either network I’d be happy to accept the link!)

Hanging out at the Fess Parker Inn (Santa Barbara) with Alice on her mini-vacation that she’s taking between her wrapping up at eBay and starting at Chordiant.

We got up early-ish this morning and headed down to Santa Barbara. The views going down the 154 were amazing and there were lots of up and down the mountains where we got to see for miles. After the views the best part was running into 3 Starbucks in 4 blocks. Felt like we were back to civilization.

I got a ton of well wishes today, which was really nice and appreciated. I even got one poem! Granted, I was also called bad names by both Woodworth and Hikade so some things never change. Thanks to the rise in popularity of Facebook I also found two others guys with the same birthday.

Alice had a massage at the spa and then took a nap so I used the time to head over to the driving range at the River Course at Alisal. I hit about 80 range balls and was happy with about 15 so I have some work to do this summer. The I came back and was annoying Alice by being chatty so I went next door to grab a beer and read the latest Economist. I love people watching. After 45 min I came back and napped as well. So nice.

We had a great dinner at Brothers Restaurant at Matteis Tavern. It was right around the corner from the Inn and was super relaxed and comfortable. Good meal to be sure.

Jason wrote up a good review of our dinner at this place. Check out his Yelp review but I’ve copied the text here since I’m unsure of how to link directly.

After reading the other Yelp reviews, I was excited to dine at 180 Restaurant last night, looking forward to what was no-doubt going to be some great cuisine and nice atmosphere.

Well, I was right about this cuisine…not so much about the atmosphere.

Let me start with the big negative.  At about 8pm, just after we had ordered, the band started playing.  And not some cozy background music that improved the experience and lightened the mood.  The band was a couple 50-year old guys who obviously had a lifelong dream of playing crowded nightclubs, mingling with the patrons during their set, and being the center of attention.  

The lead singer walked through the restaurant with his microphone and saxophone “serenading” the dinner guests, and encouraging them to join in the verses.  While it was bad enough to have the loud background music, getting an earful of sax while trying to eat and having to listen to random folks in the crowd singing parts of the song just wasn’t the dinner experience I was hoping for.  On top of this, the band continually brought up a 14-year-old girl — who no-doubt had aspirations of being the next American Idol — to sing.  I’ll be curious to watch next season to see if she makes it to L.A.  My money is on “No.”

That said, the food was superb.  We started with the “Chef Sampler,” which consisted of pork ribs, spicy grilled shrimp and crab cakes.  The ribs were tender and juicy, the shrimp were well-spiced and tender, and the crab cakes were typical California crab cakes (I’m from Maryland, so you’ll be hard-pressed to get me excited by any crab cakes around here).  A couple people in our group ordered salads, which looked great and were well-portioned.

For the entree, I ordered the Angus Filet Mignon topped with cheese and a veal demi-glaze, along with asparagus and Yukon Gold mashed potatoes.  The filet was perfectly cooked, tender, and delicious.  The asparagus — which is far from my favorite vegetable, but seemed to be the most-common side-disk on the menu — was also quite tender and very flavorful.  I had actually asked to replace the asparagus with broccolini, but the server forgot to put that request into the kitchen, so she brought me the broccolini on the side.  It too, was perfectly cooked and delicious.

As I’m currently trying to lose a couple pounds, I choose not to try the potatoes or dessert, but if the rest of the meal is any indication, I’m guessing they would have been superb as well.

Let me also note that I was able to find a coupon online for a 1/2 off any bottle of wine.  The server accepted it without hesitation, and we used it to get a wonderful bottle of Silver Oak Cab.

Overall, while the background “music” was horribly annoying and made it very difficult to hold a conversation, the food was fantastic, and I’m still giving this place 4 stars (I’d probably give 3.5 if possible).  Without the obnoxious band, the place would have gotten at least 4.5 stars.

The day started pretty early since I had to make my way to the underground, find my way to the Heathrow Express, and then get checked into Virgin Atlantic. The first two steps proved very easy with the underground stops very close to the hotel. Turns out there were some problems with the underground that were between me and Heathrow. This meant people who would normally just take the underground to Heathrow had no option but to take the Express (which costs more) so they were only charging the underground rate for the faster route. Not bad and saved like $20.

I got to the airport fast enough but checkin was slower than I expected. Thankfully I’d left early enough to be in advance of the crowd that surged after me. Once I got checked in I found a Starbux and settled down to wait for my flight.

It was a good flight, 10 hours + is a long time to be seated. The DVD player + ipod thing was great and I watched Grosse Pointe Blank, which is still one of my favorites, and several shows I downloaded from itunes. There were also some good UK shows that I hope make it to the states at some point.

OK, enough about the hotel. On Thursday I just chilled and walked a bit to get my bearings. Friday was my day in the British Museum (wiki reference) and a chance to see all my favorite pieces including the Rosetta Stone. I’ll have to dig up the pic of Corinne standing next to it from the last time I was there in 1991.

Here’s the truth about me- when I’m in a place like that it makes me wish I had worked harder in college and done something big with my love of History. Teaching, museum work, archaeology… something. It is at these moments I have my biggest delusions of grandeur. Well, it is nice to let my mind wander when I’m in a place like this and think about what might have been. Sadly, the 80/20 rule works well for the start-up world but I never thought it would work for teaching.

I left the hotel at 8:30 and made it pretty quickly to the museum. Happily there is a starbux right across the street so I went in and grabbed a coffee and a muffin and did some reading. They open the doors earlier than they allow you into the exhibits so I wandered around the main area for a bit and mapped out all that I wanted to see. Once the exhibits opened I just wandered for 2 hours or so. The Rosetta Stone was right inside the door to the gallery I first entered and it is still impressive to me even after all these years. To think that this one message carved in 3 different languages provided the key to understanding hieroglyphics is really impressive. Thinking about the potentially equally impressive finds being destroyed in the Middle East right now saddens me (and I know it is an Argument from Silence… allow me this one).
The mummies are still a big draw and I had several folks stop to ask me if I’d seen them and how to get there as I wandered other parts of the museum. I find it really interesting how they lay out the technologies used to inspect mummies and what they can see inside with CAT scans and what not.

I still get the excited feeling inside when I think about what could be done to modernize the exhibits and how to make it more interesting to kids growing up with web 2.0 understandings. The Technology Museum in San Jose had a really cool intereactive element that would be really interesting to tie into these more traditional museums. For instance, in San Jose you get a tag that looks like you’ve checked a bag and each time you go to an exhibit you scan the bar code on the exhibit and it logs your interest for later viewing. No personally identifiable information is collected but the viewer can acess the museum website later and see the list of exhibits they liked, customize the order, and do some simple presentation editing if they’d like to make their interests public. The user can also get a link that they can include in a blog or other site that could be a really interesting way to get people back to the real world museum.

Think about a world where each exhibit has display screens and when you scan your bar code you’ve told them your prefered language and the associated commentary displays in that language. With the world of outsourced translation all the text could be localized and displayed in many languages instead of just English, French and German.
See, told you. Delusions of grandeur.

Mangelo- lest you worry that I was all touchy feely on this excursion, I did stop a few folks who were touching different exhibits. I love that the British Museum has guided tours where people who can’t see are able to touch some of the exhibits to experience what the rest of us see. The signs clearly say the rest of us should not touch because it wears down the stones over time. It drives me nuts when people think they are above the rules like that.

On Thursday I bid goodbye to Luxembourg and flew back to London on LuxAir. I found the Grand at Trafalgar Square on Expedia for a relatively cheap rate (considering the pound is 2 to 1 to the dollar). I didn’t do much in the way of review because the star rating was good, the price was great, and the location seemed ideal. I was prepared to be let down actually but when I got there everthing was awesome.

Let me be clear, in terms of what I look for in a hotel this place is trying to do it all right. The place was very clean, the staff was there but wasn’t in my face and there were a number of self checkin and checkout machines available so I could just do what I wanted and not wait in line. Since I booked via Expedia they didn’t have my credit card and while I was looking up my confirmation number on my laptop the person at the desk walked over and made it all work for me. That was the right level of attention for me.

The room was really clean, the bathroom was a little odd especially given the rest of my European stays where the bathroom was generally the same size as the rest of the room (or the room was the same size as the bathroom… whatever your perspective). There was no tub so you just stepped over a small lip and pulled a curtain whihc made it feel like a locker room but since I was the only one there it wasn’t such a big deal if a little water made it over the lip and onto the bathroom floor.

This hotel is part of Club Quarters, which I had never heard of but friends of mine are apparently members. It had some interesting ammenities and would be worth checking out if you travel to any locations they serve. It isn’t high on posh ammenities like the Westin but it was hundreds less and had everything I was looking for in a hotel. The service was friendly, the bed was big, the TV had quite a few options and the Wifi was ok.
While there were many things I liked about this hotel one of the best was the location. It was so easy to find and I had two big bags so I wanted to find my room and stop lugging them ASAP. Then exploring was a piece of cake because I was literally 500 steps from 2 underground station and Trafalger Sq. All the places I’d walked with Ryan and Megan were incredibly close.