We got the condo! We’re moving the weekend of the 27th. w00t. It still kills me that we have to move, but the money saved, and being closer to work are both big plusses. This makes me happy.
Got my battery grip for the 5D which should make portrait shots a lot more pleasant. It’s heavier than I thought it would be, and huge, but it definitely gives the camera a “I’m a pro camera, you should steal me” look. Now on to that $800 lens (it’s cheap really, it’s alternative is $1200).
I flew to Seattle this morning, and attended a Focus group of our agents in the northwest that I did all the logistics work of setting up. I actually did the logistics work of setting up around 20 meetings of various types across the country for the research phase of the project that I’m managing. Flew back this evening. It’s been a long day, but very enjoyable.
On the flights and travel, I read Moneyball by Michael Lewis, and was very impressed. I’m not a baseball fan, but I was riveted by the story. Essentially it’s about how the Oakland A’s took a serious scientific look at what made a winning baseball team, realized they could do it on the cheap, and created the second winningest team in baseball in 2002 on almost no money. It’s a great story about bringing science into an extremely closed and superstitious sport. The parallels between this book and the intelligent design debate really kept hitting me, and the realization that there’s still a great deal of resistance to taking a hard, impartial look at ourselves with an eye towards results. Read this book. There’s some other stuff that forms an important subtext, like the value of a balanced team instead of superstars, and its flattening of aspect that knocks down the value of “heros”, but I’m way to tired to get into it.