Gregg Hartling

Enthusiasm

2012-01-09T00:00:00-08:00

Pulp Fiction is on television tonight. I was in UCLA film school when it came out. I saw it in a theater in Westwood with my girlfriend at the time. Watching it tonight I’m reminded what a miserable, pedantic filmgoer I was during my film school career.

I don’t know what my particular complaints about this film were at the time, but I’m sure that walking out into the afternoon sun I had a litany of “issues” to discuss. So immersed in the technical aspects of screenwriting, cinematography and editing was I during those years that I couldn’t appreciate films.

Now, since I went to film school, I’m intentionally not using the word enjoy, since I can still hear my professor chiding us that outside of the narrow realm of Hollywood cinema it’s completly acceptable to make an outstanding yet unenjoyable film.

What I’m saying is that even putting together a half-decent film is a significant logistical accomplishment, let alone something as impressive as Pulp Fiction. And I felt it was my duty as a film student, who had never produced any such thing, mind you, to nitpick and prove some kind of imagined superiority.

If all I ever did in life was write a script as good as Pulp Fiction’s – let alone produc

Where It's At

2012-01-04T00:00:00-08:00

One of the trickiest things about living a more nomadic lifestyle is tracking the location of our stuff. Seems like it would be straightforward, right? Because we’re operating out of about four suitcases and a couple of smaller bags. And it generally is easy enough when we settle in a place for more than a month. But it’s the in-between times that are challenging.

I tend to have a spatial memory. I remember something by where it is, not when I put it there. And I tend to trust that if I’ve put something somewhere, or left something somewhere, or simply am thinking that something is somewhere, that it will be there the next time I look for it. That’s where living with someone else complicates matters.

“Oh, I consolidated that into another bag about a week ago. No, I’m not sure which one.”

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

This may seem like a minor inconvenience, but when this happened to me today it was an hour detour away from things that I had on my agenda to search for it. And I didn’t find what I was looking for. Now we’ve moved on from the place where I’d last seen it, I have no idea whether it’s amongst our belongings or not.

It’s situations like these that make me feel like we’re slowly leaking possessions, drifting toward entropy, leaving a trail of our travels like the iridescent path of a snail on concrete.

We need to improve by making sure everything has an appropriate place to be stored, particularly during these times when we’re living out of our suitcases.

The Milk Frother

2012-01-03T00:00:00-08:00

Upon returning from Buenos Aires, we’ve had the good fortune to be able to spend the holidays in our own home, in between the departure of some sublettors and the return of our original renters. It’s been interesting to live in a house whose contents we liquidated prior to our departure, now filled with someone else’s stuff. Not bad, mind you – our renter has quite nice things.

One of those quite nice things is a Nespresso maker (which by the way is advertised by George Clooney abroad – not sure if they air in the U.S.). I’ve opted to use the French press instead, but one luxury in which I have indulged is the milk frother that comes with the Nespresso machine. Have you seen this contraption? It’s sort of like a thermos with a wire whisk in the bottom, and you simply press a button and a minute later the milk is heated and foamy, ready to pour.

After living the past 15 months with only what we could pack in a few suitcases as we traveled, the idea of having an appliance solely dedicated to the function of frothing milk at the touch of a button seems like the height of first world convenience and entitlement.

I’m not saying I don’t like it.

Money

2012-01-02T00:00:00-08:00

It’s been interesting being back in the United States for a few weeks about 15 months after my wife and I quit our jobs and began living abroad. Not counting rent income we receive from the house we kept in Los Angeles, we took almost a 70% pay cut to do what we’re doing, not including health benefits, bonuses and what-have-you.

Granted, living in Buenos Aires was a fair amount cheaper than living in Los Angeles, but coming back to L.A. and going out with friends, they kind of assume that we have the amount of disposable income we had before. So we end up splitting an outrageous dinner bill (just an average bill is more than we paid for any meal while in Argentina). But there’s a stigma, or a perceived stigma, to saying, “Hey, we can’t really afford that anymore.” I suppose it’s not that we can’t afford it, just that our priorities tend to lie in other directions – the cost of our next flight somewhere, for example.

We went out to a wine tasting with friends earlier tonight and got to talking about our experiences abroad and what we gave up to pursue them, and I realized (and said), “I would have paid what we gave up to have those experiences.” And truly, I wouldn’t trade them for anything. So money and wealth are relative. We lived fairly modestly in Argentina, but the fact we were doing it in Argentina made me feel like part of the 1%.

Weak

2012-01-01T00:00:00-08:00

In 2011, I posted to this blog what amounts to quarterly. That’s not blogging. That’s not even distant “penpalling.”

When I blogged in the late ’90s, I went an entire year without missing a day of posting. They say writing is a muscle – I was like one of those bodybuilders on Venice Beach. Today I’m the proverbial 90-pound weakling. I’m missing that sort of internal rhythm that allowed me to crank out quality work every morning without continually re-editing and second-guessing my work. I’d like that ability back, and the only way to do that is to get back into the habit.

I’m not crazy about new year’s resolutions, but starting something on the first of the year does make it easier to measure, so let’s just do that. I’m going to make an effort to write something each day.

Whew. I’m winded. Tomorrow perhaps I can start to catch up on some of what happened during the last year.

Steve

2011-10-05T00:00:00-07:00

Steve Jobs died today, and I took the news as if a family member had passed. Like so many people, I learned the news on an Apple device, and feel this world is a lot poorer for no longer having him in it.

I can very confidently say my life wouldn’t be anything like what it is now without Steve Jobs. When I was a kid, my friend had an Apple IIc, which we would play when I went over to his house. And it was cool for games. But what was a pivotal moment in my life was when my dad took me to a local computer store in San Diego in 1984 and I got my first glimpse of the Macintosh. I remember hamfistedly drawing some balloon-shapes filled with that gray diamond pattern in MacPaint and thinking it was the greatest thing I’d ever seen.

Since then, my life has been intertwined with Apple’s. Nearly every job I’ve ever had has been related to computers. From setting up Macs at a computer lab when I was 13 years old to doing rudimentary computer-generated graphics for the film and video magnet school I attended, on up through university. The last course I took at UCLA film school was called Digital Storytelling, in their brand new Media Lab. I wrote a HyperCard app that would randomly cut together pieces of video and audio, so that every viewing would produce a different work. That was on like an old Mac Quadra.

That class changed the course of my life, as I skipped Hollywood and the film industry and dove into computers. My first job out of college, at this really crappy direct marketing company, involved creating 3D animations and editing digital video on a PowerMac 7200 with 32MB of RAM. I would literally set up Adobe Premiere to render a preview and have a couple hours to kill, since there was only one Mac at the whole company, and MacOS didn’t multitask. So while waiting for my videos to render, I would read books on HTML and design.

My first major purchase from that job was a PowerMac 8500. This was back when a Steve-less Apple still made beige towers with the rainbow-colored logo on them. I would do the math on a weekly basis to figure out how many more paychecks before I could buy my Mac.

When Steve returned to Apple, the news was like something out of a movie. I had, like many, been preparing myself for an Apple purchase of Be, Inc., so had installed that OS on the Mac clone at my new job. The purchase of NeXT seemed desperate to me, the politics (as best I understood them from waaaay on the outside) seemed like Jobs had orchestrated a takeover of Apple.

Then the first iMac came out. I mirrored my childhood by going down to the local computer store (this was still well before any Apple Store existed) and waiting in line to play with one. I didn’t care for the round mouse, but you could tell this was something different.

When the iPod came out, I had some money in my brokerage account, and bought a number shares of AAPL. Adjusted for splits, that was at about $11/share. At the market’s close today, shares were selling at $378. Even without that investment, I would have rooted for Apple at every turn this past decade – the imagination and quality of their products has left everyone else in the last century.

So I sit typing this on my brand new MacBook Air, checking it on a Webkit browser from an apartment in Buenos Aires. My iPhone 4 is charging. My original iPad is within reach. I’m listening to music that I purchased legally over the internet because it was easier than downloading for free. You’re reading this in a non-standard typeface on a computer. All of this was because of Steve.

Picking up packages at the International Post Office in Buenos Aires

2011-04-10T00:00:00-07:00

This is an anecdote to provide a little help to those living in Buenos Aires who have to go to the Correo Argentino to pick up a package, so that you know what to expect.

Getting there

One morning we received a call in our apartment from the postman, who was at the door downstairs. Anticipating the arrival of a package for my wife, I hurried downstairs and put my name to his signature sheet. He proceeded to hand me a slip of paper. No package, but rather a receipt to take down to the international post office (Correo Argentino).

We had heard that it could take some time to retrieve packages, so we set aside a morning, leaving by Subte to a nearby stop and walking the rest of the way to the area surrounding the Retiro train station.

An important note about location: the claim slip said the international post office is located at “Artártida y Letonia”. No actual address, a delightful irony, coming from the post office. Correo Argentino web site lists the address as Artartida Argentina 1900.

Trusting in Google Maps (as well as a map embeddeded on the post office’s Foursquare page), we turned left, even though we saw a building with a Correo Argentino sign. “There could be two different buildings and what a pain to get sent to the other one we thought.” Foolishly. Of course when we arrived to the spot that Google Maps indicated, it was a vacant lot. The nearest business was a stand selling panchos and choripan.

We crossed the street and asked a soldier in front of an army building. Sure enough, he pointed back to where we had come from. We walked the long city blocks back, crossed the 12 lane road, and found our destination. And yes, there is a sign indicating Letonia is the cross street, though Google Maps prefers to call it República Federative del Brasíl.

What to expect: Waiting Room 1

Walk through a gate into a small parking lot, where there is a ramp up to the entrance. Probably when you show up there will already be a lot of people waiting around. This is just the beginning!

Don’t think there is a line or anything. You have to walk straight inside and pull a ticket. Note that the ticket numbers count into the hundreds, but the red LED sign indicating the current number only counts to two digits. For example, our number was 393, and we arrived the indicator read 30. Little did we know that they were only on 230! (We did sort this out immediately prior to going up to the window and embarrassing ourselves.) So it’s important to ask someone nearby what hundreds number they are on.

This is really the easy part, because the numbers are called sequentially and there are only 3 windows to go to. You can more or less keep track of where they are at and figure how soon you need to be prepared. All those people you saw outside are ahead of you.

When your number does get called, treat it like the Soup Nazi episode in Seinfeld. Walk quickly up to the window, hand the employee your package claim slip, and answer any questions helpfully. Remember, this is only the first step. All they’re doing here is kicking off the process of retrieving your package from what I imagine to be a warehouse on the scale of the one at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

They will hand you back a receipt with a six digit number. Do keep this handy. You may have to pay a small fee (ours was 6 pesos, or U.S. $1.50). I suppose if you’re shipping in something new or expensive that it could cost considerably more.

What to expect: Waiting Room 2

From there you walk into a second, much larger room. There are rows and rows of seats facing what appears to be nothing: the wall and doorway you just walked through. However, note a small turnstyle off to the side: this is where you’ll go when your six digit number eventually does get called.

All the chairs were occupied when we arrived, so we ended up standing for the duration of our time in this room. I would estimate perhaps 250 people were waiting there. The sunlight landing on the floor shifted from one side of the room to the other while we were there. Every ten minutes or so, a voice comes on the loudspeaker and very rapidly calls numbers. If you don’t speak very good Spanish, this may be a concern.

It would be easy enough if they called individual digits, like “ocho uno dos, cinco cuatro siete.” But they like to get creative with it. There’s no necessary pattern, and sometimes they’ll get cheeky and call the fully qualified name, like “ochocientos doce mil quinientos cuarenta y siete.” So you need to be on your game. Which can be quite tiring, considering these interspersed calls will in all likelihood go for a couple few hours before yours comes up.

Do they call the numbers again if you miss yours? I believe they do, eventually. But it may not be until they notice that a package has gone unclaimed for another half hour. I also heard them call individuals’ names occasionally. So there is hope if you can’t make out the numbers.

My advice is to definitely have something to occupy yourself during this waiting period: the director’s cut of Das Boot, an unabridged encyclopedia, or Angry Birds for iPhone would all be appropriate selections.

When your number finally does get ca…

Whoops, that wasn’t it you’ll have to wait just a little longer.

(…)

What to expect: Waiting Room 3

When your number finally gets called, you’ll have the privilege of walking through the turnstyle and inside a door to the left. This is the equivalent of going behind the Wizard of Oz’s curtain. It’s not so much a waiting room as a line to pick up your package, though it’s a little haphazard and you may end up waiting a bit longer here. We were fortunate enough to have a package that the employeed was able to pick out easily from the pile of parcels that had accumulated at the bottom of a conveyor coming down from the ceiling.

From there, you proceed down a corridor and sign for the package near the exit, which ends up being directly behind those rows and rows of seats of people waiting for their packages. The exhiliration of reaching fresh air might not make the experience fully worthwhile, but it is an enormous relief.

Is it worth it?

This is an important question to ask. We spent about four and a half hours waiting for our package. We know some people here who won’t bother to retrieve a package if they find out its contents and deem it not worth the time investment. The clear consensus is that the best way to get something into the country is to have a friend or relative bring it when they visit.

Global Tragedy Guilt

2011-03-14T00:00:00-07:00

Three days after the horrifying 9.0 Japanese earthquake and subsequent tsunami, there is still a very visible outpouring of concern online. It’s a mixture of shock at the devastation, sorrow over the deaths, well wishes for the survivors and tension over the elongation of the tragedy in the form of the nuclear reactor problems. I, like many, have clicked through the slideshows, watched the terrifying videos, and read reports on the nuclear power plant situations.

I’ve also seen a number of tweets talking about how any tweets not about the Japan situation right now are “really, really shallow & unimportant.” Well, the citizens of Libya or Cote d’Ivoire might disagree. Or the family of 33 Afghan recruits killed by a suicide bomber. Or the protestors in Wisconsin. Or any number of the billions of people on this planet that have more localized problems than the Japanese tragedy.

The fact that cable news and now the internet have brought us a 24x7 news cycle, and that these young news distribution mechanisms can inundate us with up close and personal views of the horror doesn’t mean we have to spend all of our time tweeting or even thinking about it. The benefit of having so many people on Twitter is allowing those who are knowledgeable of a situation inform us. It doesn’t require that we ourselves be constantly monitoring and adding to the echo chamber.

200 years ago, news of the Japanese earthquake would have first reached the United States in the form of the tsunami hitting the west coast – only nobody would have known it was coming, or why. But this disaster would not have had any effect on the majority of the world’s population. They would have gone about their daily lives oblivious to the death and destruction.

Certainly 200 years ago they wouldn’t have had the concerns of a partial nuclear meltdown, but I don’t believe tweeting minute-by-minute updates on the situation is helping to cool the reactors. I also find it ironic that people who are so focused on tweeting about the ongoing Japanese crisis appear to have some overlap with those who complain about the television news media’s treatment of these types of tragedies. The fact that the networks have video and audio only makes them seem more shrill.

So let’s maybe ease up on ourselves, and not indulge in guilt over a situation that most of us geographically have no way of improving. Yes, donate to aid organizations. Yes, prepare locally for whatever natural disasters are likely to occur. Let’s take what we can learn from the Japanese — and the consensus is that without their safety precautions and infrastructure things could have been far worse — and apply those lessons to our own more immediate circumstances. But don’t be pressured into feeling guilt over a natural disaster like this.

You have my permission to tweet about what you ate for lunch again.

First thoughts on returning to the US

2011-01-05T00:00:00-08:00

Granted it’s been less than a day since arriving back in Los Angeles from our three months in Spain, but I figured it was worth writing down some initial impressions.

Everything is so far away

We’re staying at a friend’s apartment in North Hollywood, and there’s even a Target the next block over. But in Madrid, everything we needed was on the same block or two. And they were small blocks, not these industrial-sized suburban divisions in L.A.

With my wife sick, I went out to pick up some dinner for us tonight, and it took an hour and a half. Driving! In Malasaña, I could walk two or three blocks, choose from a range of options para llevar (carry-out), and be back at our apartment in 15 minutes.

Consumerism at its largest

Walking in to the aforementioned Target this morning, I was overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of space consumed. What seemed like mile-long aisles with an endless range of product options. I couldn’t even find hand baskets to carry — it seemed that everyone had an oversized plastic shopping cart.

Even the Corte Inglés store in Madrid had narrow aisles and a limited selection. The two brand-name grocery stores we shopped in had little baskets with two wheels and retractable handles (not unlike a small suitcase) that you could pull behind you — no carts, because there simply wasn’t room to maneuver.

At the nearby Starbucks, the grande size seemed enormous. Having just spent 3 months with a café con leche habit, which is poured into a cup a little smaller than your average American coffee mug, the grande seemed to go on forever. Let’s not even talk about a venti.

Sarcasm & Humor

It’s entirely likely that my still-limited grasp of Spanish didn’t allow me the nuanced interpretation of interactions there, but I’ve been overwhelmed by personalities back in the states. Sarcasm is quite prevalent, and I just get this sense of people trying too hard that I didn’t have at all in Spain. Any humor that I actually understood there felt pretty earnest and goodnatured.

Riding the train from Palma to Sóller in Mallorca

2010-10-08T00:00:00-07:00

We had stayed for two nights in Palma de Mallorca before the wedding, but the time came for us (and the wedding guests who had arrived early) to make the trek from Palma to the mountain town of Sóller. This can be done by automobile, but the unique opportunity of entering the town by historic rail car could not be missed.

It took several taxis to get our party from the hotel in Palma the relatively short distance to the station for the train to Sóller. Luggage and timing were the biggest obstacles, as we had arrived at the station mere minutes before the train’s departure, and a number of suitcases were too big to fit inside the crowded train cars. So we left them on the landings between each car and hoped for the best. I had gotten separated from the rest of our party and so found myself sitting amongst some bemused Germans, sweating like future bratwurst.

The train ride itself was spectacular, starting from relatively humble surroundings as we pulled out through city traffic and moved toward the graffiti-covered outskirts (as any good city should have). Then it was some lowlands with various businesses. There was a British couple across from me with a toddler, and the man gave off the vibe of not being the boy’s father and thus trying too hard to engage and impress the child. He pointed out a power station that the boy ignored.

On up to the foothills, where the houses started to improve in size and stature, and then we were in the mountains, looking down on what must have been the companion road to Sóller and various larger houses and estates. The rest of the hillsides were covered in evergreen trees.

We went through several tunnels, the train’s clackety-clack redoubling on itself, and after emerging from a particularly long stretch, we stopped so that everyone might get down to take photos of Sóller from a particularly gorgeous vantage point. My as the city dweller worried that an indifferent German might deposit one of our bags sitting on the landing on the ground and we would take off none the wiser. Of course they were too indifferent too be bothered.

We winded our way down the mountain to the idyllic town, and then it was a mad scramble to retrieve all of our bags and form a small group to get to our hotel. Once we had exited the train station, we tried to engage a number of cabs to take us there, but the taxi drivers insisted it was so close that it would be a waste of money not to walk. Apparently he hadn’t seen the four bags I was carrying, balancing, toting and pulling, because the walk almost did me in.

Eventually we made it to our delightful Hotel l’Avenida and were able to deposit our luggage, sweating and huffing from pulling tiny rollerwheels down narrow cobblestone streets, trying to avoid both pedestrians and the cars that whipped through the town. We had reached our wedding destination.

Taking in Palma de Mallorca in an afternoon

2010-10-08T00:00:00-07:00

With my girlfriend off to another part of the island of Mallorca for a pre-wedding hair and makeup trial, and having spent the morning working on a project from our hotel’s wifi-enabled lobby, I found myself with a couple of hours free to wander about the main city of Palma.

We were staying at Puro Hotel, tucked inside a series of winding alleyways in the old part of the city. From there it was a couple blocks to the Plaza de la Reina, which you could consider the center of the touristy part of Palma. I climbed some cobblestone steps and came upon the great cathedral, which dominates the city and is its most visible landmark.

I didn’t enter the cathedral because those in my party back at the hotel had expressed an interest in visiting. So I covered a good portion of the grounds outside, looking for a good vantage point from which to photograph it.

From there I walked out to the port area and northwest along the harbor. I found the restaurant whose name our photographer couldn’t remember the day before: El Pesquero, which looked like a nice place to have tapas or drinks or dinner. I continued on, looking at thousands of small boats moored in the harbor.

I reached an intersection that felt like a good point to turn around and was surprised to see a Hard Rock Cafe protruding from the series of businesses across the street. Walking back the other direction I found a tapas bar with windmills perched on the hillside above it. I turned up the hill on one of the main thoroughfares of the city and found a number of fountains and monuments. Most of the tourists in Palma appeared to be either German or some sort of Scandinavian.

I stopped for a bottle of water, sweating from the trek in the heat and humidity. There was a sculpture of a church house turned upside down. From there I wended my way through the narrow cobblestone streets, taking care not to get run down by the cars expertly traversing them. It was a couple hours of solitary sightseeing, but I felt I had a better grasp on Palma.

Flying to Spain

2010-10-07T00:00:00-07:00

After moving out of our house, we spent a pleasant (if harried) few days in Marina del Rey before our departure. A friend picked us up early in the morning and drove us the short distance to LAX, and we were off on our adventure.

The first leg of our trip was an uneventful flight from LAX to Washington D.C., with just enough of a layover to stretch our legs. Our second flight was to Madrid, but operated by Aer Lingus, and it was entertaining to hear the brogue of our blonde-haired Irish stewardesses interacting with Spaniards heading home. The flight was shorter than I had prepared myself for, clocking in at just over 6 hours. Somehow we touched down an hour ahead of our scheduled landing time, so early that due to noise ordinance rules at Madrid’s Barajas airport, we had to land and stop far away from the terminal and ride a shuttle bus in from the plane.

Immigration was fast and easy (owing to the fact that no other flights were landing at that time), and we were quickly wheeling a cart with our 5 bags from Terminal 4 to Terminal 2, where our smaller connecting flight would be. Though not for 6 more hours. We walked my sister, who was on our two earlier flights, to the gate for her flight to Barcelona, where she would rendezvous with my parents.

What made the layover difficult was the fact that Barajas did not have free wi-fi. And AT&T’s international data roaming rates on the iPhone are prohibitive (though I am shelling out $25/mo for each of our phones to cover emergency map lookups and such). I didn’t want to sign up for the wi-fi account at the airport because I don’t yet know what the service in the rest of Madrid will be like. It might turn out to be worth it if much of the city’s other hotspots are locked down.

We met a friend who was joining us on our flight with enough time to eat a couple of bocadillos before catching the smaller SpanAir jet to Mallorca. I slept for the entirety of that one hour flight, having not gotten much rest in the earlier flights. I woke up during the landing, in time to see a suprisingly large island with parceled out into little farms and vinyards. The Palma airport is thoroughly modern, and grabbing a taxi to our hotel couldn’t have been easier. So far there have been no hiccups in our travel experience.

The weather here in Palma is perfect. Maybe 80 degrees with sun, down to the mid 60’s at night. It’s all a little surreal so far, but that may be an effect of the jetlag.

Out of Time

2010-10-04T00:00:00-07:00

It’s the night before we leave on our adventure to Spain. I’m writing this from a friend’s apartment in Marina del Rey, where my girlfriend and I have been sequestered since rushing to get all our belongings out of our house in time for the renter to move in on Saturday.

There’s nothing like hard deadlines to make you aware of how quickly time moves. We fudged a bit on the renter deadline on Saturday — didn’t get fully out of our house until the afternoon, what with dropping off our second dog at her new home, packing, stowing or throwing away everything we own. The odd thing about vacating this house is that we didn’t have anywhere to move the stuff to. It was more like a vanishing act. In the end, we reduced our belongings to no more than would fit in my sister’s Volkswagen Jetta.

On top of that deadline, I had a self-imposed deadline for a project I (somewhat foolishly) took on during the build-up to our departure. It was today, and I thought, after some solid progress staying up until 2am multiple nights last week, that I’d be able to knock out the rest in a day and a half. Not so. So a little more fudging of deadlines.

The deadline we can’t push back is our flight out of Los Angeles tomorrow morning. Nor can we fudge on what we’ve packed. It either fits in the suitcases, or it goes away. We did this whole thing without paying for any storage. And while you’ll hear a lot of lip service paid to the “cult of less”, we’ve done it for the practical purpose of being mobile. The goal wasn’t to minimize for its own sake or to some ridiculous extreme (under 100 items seems ridiculous to me). The goal was to get to a manageable level of “stuff” that the planes will be able to accommodate.

Now, as time dwindles before departure, I’ve only got a few things more to take care of before getting a little bit of sleep. Unfortunately, the size of my to-do list manages to remain constant, regardless how many tasks I check off.

Minimizing

2010-09-30T00:00:00-07:00

As we work to clear out our house prior to flying to Spain to get married and live for several months, it’s been a real exercise to get rid of everything. I’ve moved eight times since arriving in Los Angeles, but this is the most difficult, because we’re not moving things to some other place. We’re straight up getting rid of as much as we can. The goal is to not have to pay for storage.

I’m not really attached to things. There are two pieces of furniture that we wanted to keep “in the family” — both were delivered to friends to hold on to and use while we’re away. Frankly, we may never see them again, but it’s comforting to know where they are, rather than the dozens of pieces of furniture and electronics that we’ve sold on Craigslist or eBay, or all the books I’ve sold on Amazon.

Two things that you should never get rid of early in the process of vacating your place: a power drill with screwdriver attachment and a paper shredder if you have them. In moving our Tempurpedic mattress and Case Study platform bed, we needed to unscrew the minimalist headboard from the bed, but had no power drill and couldn’t manage to do it with manual screwdrivers. Then, while going through 12 years of old pay, credit card, bank statements and more, I had to manually tear up all the papers before putting them in recycling to be sure they weren’t some sort of security or identity theft risk. I think my paper shredder sold at our last garage sale for about $8.

Another lesson learned: don’t hold on to obsolete technology for too long. The $1200 Sony WEGA 32” television I bought 10 years ago still has a great picture, but doesn’t do HD. It’s also a huge tube television and weighs over 200 pounds. I gave it, the TV stand and a DVD player to a guy on Craigslist for $25. Meanwhile I got $250 for the 32” flatscreen Samsung I bought for $400 last year. There’s a supply and demand lesson going on there, mostly about demand.

The sort of things I can’t bring myself to sell, donate or throw away tend to be more sentimental or historical in value: a box of hundreds of letters an ex-girlfriend and I wrote during our long-distance relationship, journals filled with daily writing I did 15 years ago, photos from the past, yearbooks, concert ticket stubs, etc.

But the other stuff is just that. I believe Ruth Gordon in Harold and Maude calls the stuff “incidental, not integral,” which is a fair way of putting it. The stuff doesn’t define us.

On the Importance of Taking Breaks

2010-09-24T00:00:00-07:00

I had been banging my head against a particular problem with a massive JavaScript refactoring I was doing. I’d spent the entire day doing the very early stages of a move from a lot of quick and dirty copy-and-paste JavaScript functions into an object-oriented class system with inheritance, and for some reason, instance variables were not ‘sticking’. I spent two hours trying a dozen different things to narrow down the source of the issue. Made some progress, but mostly to no avail. My girlfriend was asking me questions that I wasn’t hearing, so intent on solving this issue was I.

Finally something came up that couldn’t be ignored. The dogs needed to be walked. So I set down my laptop, wondered where the afternoon had gone, and pulled out their leashes. On our walk, as the sun was setting and I got my first breaths of fresh air all day, my girlfriend asked if I wanted to describe the problem to her. I didn’t roll my eyes, but that’s because I’ve learned not to. My brain wanted to say “it’s programming stuff” and blow the question off.

Instead, I described in layperson’s terms what was happening, and why it wasn’t what I expected. Further questions were of the variety of “how long do you thing it will take you to figure out?”, the kind there’s no simple answer for. But talking about it was enough to plant the seed. We walked on through the neighborhood.

A minute later, it hit me. A minor epiphany. The instance variables weren’t sticking because each time an event occurred, I was creating a new object, not reusing the original one. This was sitting in a throwaway part of the code base, an area I had assumed was fine and would be removed soon anyway. So I hadn’t bothered to look.

Though I have read it in innumerable places, one of the basic tenets of doing this sort of technical work had crept up and bit me: take breaks. Talk it out with someone. I realize now that the same kind of situation had resolved itself in my head while I was sweeping the floors of my house earlier in the week. Others have talked about problems resolving themselves in the shower. Basically the brain does some of its best work when not focusing intently on a problem, but churning on it as a background task.

First Days of Freelancing

2010-09-22T00:00:00-07:00

Discipline. It’s clear that this is going to be one of the biggest factors in success and happiness as a freelancer. Not that my previous BigCo job didn’t require discipline, but the difference is that even though I didn’t have someone directing me on my tasks each and every day, I had structure in place: a boss or my team or a colleague had expectations of what was being worked on and the timeframe in which it would be completed. There were the natural, implicit bookends of going in to the office and leaving the office. People scheduled meetings that I attended.

Some of that remains in freelancing — the schedule and deadlines are there. The obligations to another party. But working from home, it’s easy to both get distracted and work many extra hours. On my first day, I had laid out a number of tasks that I wanted to accomplish at the beginning. I decided to use the Pomodoro Technique (or at least my understanding of it) to break things up into chunks. And it worked.

Yesterday, the second day, I had an urgent, unbounded issue to resolve, and I totally forgot about the technique. I simply pressed forward without a very clear plan or even a good idea of what success would look like. And it took a lot longer than it should have. So one of the qualities I will be focusing on today is organization, planning and deliberateness.

Of course, there are perks. On Monday I was able to pop out to the bank in the mid-afternoon to do a wire transfer, and the line was substantially shorter than I normally found it before or after work. Today I’ll be able to go to the post office to send a package pretty much whenever I want.

I also tried to follow other bits of advice I’ve collected over the years:

Get dressed: Dress as though you’re going to an office job, or at least get out of your pajamas, and it puts you in the right mindset to work.
Relocate: Though in my case this meant moving from my normal perch on the sofa in front of the television to the kitchen counter to work, it was enough to shift my perspective.
Take breaks: This was more structured on Monday when I was using the Pomodoro Technique, which prescribes 25 minutes of work and a 5 minute break. Yesterday I did a poor job with this.
Stay social: I can see this being a tough one. I literally didn’t speak to anyone until late afternoon yesterday, and that was to order a latte when I went to work at the local coffee shop. This was a lot easier to do with a little thing I like to call coworkers.

Because Monday felt like a more productive day to me, my plan is to continue with Pomodoro, even though I loathe the thought of calling the 25 minute blocks “pomodoros”.

Dear Tribune, on my last day working for you…

2010-09-16T00:00:00-07:00

I’ve left the building, but rest assured that it’s me, not you. A couple years ago, I might have thought otherwise, but since then I’ve come to appreciate the fact that your organizational quirks, the idiosyncracies that would frustrate me were not your fault. At some point I recognized the pattern of organizations that have grown too large to enable the type of development team that I feel most comfortable and effective running. And so rather than beat my head against one of your miles of identical halls, I’m leaving. In fact that makes it sound as though I’m leaving in reaction to something you’ve done. Not so. You and I just have different ideas on where we want to be in life.

Please keep in mind that it’s nothing personal. The individuals that I’ve worked with over our past three years together have been generally well-intentioned people who want to do a good job. I still call many of them friends. If it’s there, I haven’t been privy to the sort of organizational infighting I’ve seen really hinder other large companies. I simply realized over time that there were a few things missing from the eyes of people that have worked for you a long time: imagination, passion and ambition.

I feel like I lost a lot of those qualities working for you, after the LA Times-centric team I was a part of disbanded and the tattered remnants of my group got absorbed. It was like taking a wrong turn off a grand prix track and finding oneself stuck in commuter traffic. I went from pursuing a shared vision to punching a clock. And it’s not your fault. To me it was simply the nature of the change — going from working for a small, rebellious “startup within a 150-year old company” to getting absorbed by a behemoth focused primarily on uptime, cost-cutting and organizational efficiencies will do that. And that’s okay. I’ve come to understand why you are that way, and I love you for it. I realized a while ago there was no use fighting it. One either marches in step or goes a separate direction. I reached the point where I wanted that other direction.

People from the outside ask what it was like to work for a bankrupt company. To your credit, I didn’t notice. Sure, maybe annual pay raises were frozen or diminished, but this was also happening during the economic downturn, so what could we expect? Like a good parent, you sheltered your children from what must have been some difficult and stressful times. Well, at the time of this writing you’re still in bankruptcy, so let me extend my wishes that you pull through. Maybe not unscathed, mind you, as you could use a little scathing. Shake things up a bit.

At any rate, I wish you well, hope to bump into you sometime in the future, and thank you for providing me the learning experiences that you have. Oh and one more thing, don’t try to call that waterfall development process bullshit you’re reintroducing “agile”. Everybody realizes what it is.

Love and best wishes,

Gregg.

Start the Countdown

2010-09-05T00:00:00-07:00

Today is one month from the start of the biggest adventure of my life. In 30 days, my girlfriend and I will be on a flight to Madrid, Spain. From there we will travel to the Ballearic island of Mallorca, where we’ll be joined by a small group of family and friends for our wedding. After that, we’re just going to stay in Spain for three months.

That might not sound so significant, but consider all the pieces that have to come together for that to happen:

We both quit our jobs
We need to rent out our house in Los Angeles
To rent it out, we need to significantly minimize our belongings
We need to sell our cars
We need to find homes for our two dogs
I need to quickly spin up a freelance web design and development business
We need to find a place in Spain to base ourselves until the beginning of 2011

Jobs

The easiest on the list was terminating our employment, because it’s the thing we actually have complete control over. After three years of employment at the LA Times and its parent company, Tribune, I gave them one month’s notice. I did so because my development team is in the middle of a product launch and I didn’t want to skip out on them or disrupt the schedule. I think my management has been happy with the continuity I’m trying to provide, as the three levels of managers above me have individually expressed that should I want to return, they would have me. I’m not burning any bridges.

Also worth noting is everyone has been a lot more receptive to my departure once they found out that I’m not just skipping over to another big company. When they find out about the plan to live in Spain, the universal response has been, “I wish I could do something like that.”

I used to say that too.

Renting the House

Why am I renting the house I own if I’m only going to be in Spain for three months? Well, let’s put some emphasis on that sentence: I’m only going to be in Spain for three months. After that, my girlfriend and I are looking at moving to Argentina for a year or more. Honestly, this is the one that scares me the most. I bought my house in Los Angeles just before the height of the housing market in Los Angeles, and the mortgage payments are significant.

Is it underwater? Maybe, though not if I were to factor in the equity I have as well as considering that I’ve lived in it without paying anyone else rent for the past 5 years. If I sold it, let’s say I’d break even. As someone who’s trying not to get too tied down by possessions, this is an attractive option. However, if we ever want to move back to Los Angeles, chances are we’ll be priced out of our awesome neighborhood. So we’re keeping the house, and trying to find renters to pay a good percentage of my monthly mortgage cost.

Minimizing Belongings

This is a lot of work, but not as difficult as I had anticipated. Between Amazon for selling my books, eBay for electronics and collectibles, and Craigslist for furniture, the internet makes this relatively straightforward. We’ve already had one yard sale and are planning to do one or two more before we move out.

In selling our possessions, I haven’t felt much of an emotional attachment to most things. Furniture, books, gadgets – I don’t regret giving up any of it. What I am having trouble with is keepsakes and memorabilia from friends. Not that anyone would buy any of it, but I don’t want to throw any of it away. This includes a ton of [really bad] writing that I did earlier in life. So I’ll probably pack a box or two with this stuff and look for some place to store it.

iOS 4.0.2 Update Bricked My Phone

2010-08-18T00:00:00-07:00

Last night I came home from work prepared to continue my recent string of productive nights on a personal side project. I plugged in my beloved iPhone 4 and iTunes notified me that a software update was available and asked if I would like to install it. This would be the iOS 4.0.2 update. I said OK, and that was the beginning of my troubles.

It was more than a 500MB download, so that took quite a while to retrieve. Then, during the installation, iTunes alerted me that something had gone wrong, and it could not perform the software update. Well, that’s frustrating…

Suddenly my iPhone was in a “recover state”, where it would only display the oniginal “Connect to iTunes” screen. iTunes prompted me to restore from an old backup, which was my only option. So I clicked the Restore button. It went through the process of restoring the software and the information from my last backup. Then it hit a final phase that said Restoring the firmware. This portion of the process took exceedingly long, and then failed with a cryptic Error 9 message. No details, just that it had encountered Error 9.

Apple’s Support site suggested a number of fixes, which included:

Restarting my computer
Switching USB cables
Switching USB ports
Restoring on a different computer

I tried all of these. Well, I didn’t complete the last one because while trying to download the software on another laptop (this was late at night), the download was crawling so slowly that it estimated 5 hours to complete. In fact, I went to bed after I saw that, and when I woke up this morning, there was a helpful message saying the download had timed out. Clicking the Resume button started the download from the beginning. I know this stuff isn’t easy, but as the center of your Apple-branded device and media world, iTunes software feels pretty rough around the edges.

This morning I moved on to other options, including these detailed by AppleToolbox, none of which had any effect. I was resigning myself to having to call Apple (oh wait, on what phone? I don’t have a land line), or going in to the Genius Bar, when I happened upon this Apple Support discussion thread. Buried a couple of pages in, somebody recommended a little 3rd party software utility called RecBoot.

3rd party utility? For something so draconianly controlled as Apple’s iPhone software, I was a little dubious of this working. But sure enough, after downloading it, opening it and clicking the one button, marked “Exit Recovery Mode,” my iPhone was functional again. It required a restore from the previous backup, but suddenly I was on iOS 4.0.2 and everything was fine.

I’ve already sent a small donation to the developer of RecBoot in thanks for the time and aggravation he saved me. It’s a shame that Apple’s software update requires the existence of such a utility, but I sure am glad it was there when I needed it.

Yard Sale Lessons Learned

2010-08-16T00:00:00-07:00

I held my first ever yard sale / garage sale this past weekend, which is a little shocking. I’ve lived in Los Angeles for 18 years – since college – and had never held any kind of public sale of my possessions. My mom is an expert, having held perhaps four within the last year alone, so I listened carefully to her advice. Here are some of my own takeaways from the experience:

Have plenty of change at the beginning

I knew this going in and so went to the bank and passed the teller a note asking for a lot of small bills. It’s simple, really. All the serious earlybirds have gone to the bank and pulled out $20 bills. We actually had someone who bought a 50 cent item with a twenty. Even thought we’d gotten 25 single dollar bills, they were gone in the first hour. I ran out to the bank and changed $40 into ones, but by that time, we had too many. That’s because the people who showed up later to our sale had already bought items at other sales and had smaller bills.

Signage: Double the size and halve the information

I made signs out of bright yellow posterboard, each in the shape of a directional arrow that could be pointed down the street. What I thought was big bold text was barely visible from across the street. So make everything twice as large as you think it should be.

I included the following information:

“YARD SALE” title
My house address
Date and time

If I had it to do over, I would exclude the date and time. If you’re doing it right, the signs are up only during the sale anyway, so no need to say when the sale begins and ends. Also, if you still have stuff left over, you can reuse the signs if there’s no date on them.

Having a consistent, distinctive look (bright yellow arrow shapes) helps people find it by just following these “breadcrumbs”. They didn’t even need to know the address — just followed the signs until they found our sale.

Price items high enough, but not too high

If you feel remorse when someone buys something from your sale, you may have priced it too cheaply. That happened to me with a number of books that I know I could have sold on Amazon for more money (we priced it $1 for hardcover and $0.25 for paperbacks, with just a few exceptions). You can always let your customers negotiate the price down, but you’re not going to be able to ever raise it on them. So start out a little higher. The benefit of this is that a lot of people just don’t like to negotiate at all and will simply pay full price.

Have a gimmick

We put cut-out pictures of the Kool-Aid Man (you know, the guy who busts through your wall saying, “Oh yeeeaaaahhhh!!!”) on our signs. Then, when customers arrived, we gave out free cups of Kool-Aid. Perfect for a hot day in Los Angeles. We also had a friend bake several dozen mini cupcakes, which we also gave out for free. This immediately made them feel like they were getting value from showing up. Sure, some people simply took the refreshments and left, but I bet we had a lot of people more willing to open their wallets from the good will we were projecting.

Several people said they came to the sale solely based on seeing the picture of the Kool-Aid Man.

Speak your customers’ language

This isn’t a metaphor. I’m saying that if you have people who speak another language in your neighborhood, either know it or have someone who speaks it helping you. I speak enough Spanish to get by, and so surprised more than one customer who was speaking it to their companion when I understood what they were saying. It helps with negotiating and conflict resolution. Plus, even though I wasn’t always able to express myself fully, they appreciate the effort.

The Perils of a First Name Twitter Handle

2010-08-08T00:00:00-07:00

As an admitted early adopter of web applications, I tend to rush to claim my preferred username whenever a new one comes out. I like to use my first name, gregg, for the informality and terseness. I was early enough on Twitter that I managed to snag it.

But Twitter is different from other Web 2.0 applications, because your username has become a fundamental part of the way people interact with you, via @replies and retweets. So what seemed an innocuous username choice has for me had the side effect of pulling in a lot of tweets that weren’t meant for me:

The screenshot above contains absolutely no tweets that were directed at me. But they show up in my @replies for a variety of reasons:

Incorrect Twitter handle, assuming their friend Gregg is @gregg
Mistakenly thinking Senator Judd Gregg is @Gregg
Believing that somebody named Greg whose last name begins with ‘G’ is @GregG
And the worst of all: inserting a space between first name Gregg and a last name.

Had I chosen a more obscure Twitter handle, like my last name, this wouldn’t be a problem. And there’s not much to be done with it. It’s the type of spam that you just have to let flow by in your Twitter stream. I thought it was worth pointing out that it’s something much more likely to happen to so-called Twitter “first-namers” than others.

Institutionalized Overtime

2010-07-30T00:00:00-07:00

Institutionalized overtime for salaried employees at big companies is a problem.

In a meeting yesterday, the project manager asked me what type of overtime policy I had planned for my development team during the next month before our product release. I was a bit dumbfounded. Overtime policy?

I’m a big fan of scoping releases based on available time. But that available time does not include my nights and weekends. Why not? Aside from the fact that I burned myself out ten years ago working 12-hour days for a month straight without a single day off, I find that significant overtime is a factor of primarily poor planning and definition, and secondarily of the fact that estimating is hard. A date provided three months out becomes written in stone regardless what problems or issues or new requirements come up along the way.

I’m not against working the odd extra few hours on a night or a weekend ahead of a critical date. But when management asks salaried employees to give up evenings and weekends a month before delivery, there’s something wrong. And it’s often ingrained in the corporate culture. The expectation is that employees will give of their extra time with a nominal promise of “comp days” that often never get taken later on.

Let’s take the example of a developer who is earning a $100K/year salary. That translates to roughly $50/hr. If I ask them to work an extra 2 hours a day plus a day out of their weekend (only 8 hours on Saturday – let’s be generous), that’s like asking them to give me $3600 for the month. Okay, that’s not exactly right because they wouldn’t be earning that money with their free time, but how do you put a price on free time? Not to mention the documented issues of burnout and ineffectiveness when working long hours. Scheduling people for overtime makes it about the time and not about the deliverable.

A more palatable approach might be to say, “We really need X feature completed for our users by the end of the month. Is there any way we can get this done?” Then it becomes about a tangible deliverable. It may not even require overtime. I’ve seen cases (looking in the mirror) where one’s sense of urgency diminishes significantly knowing you’re going to be working longer hours.

The really nefarious part of the whole thing, though, is when it becomes an organizational expectation. I had a different project manager (who I didn’t even work with) suggest three months ago that my team start working overtime. When I told him that wasn’t going to happen, he berated me over the phone. On a conference call. With half a dozen people. No one spoke up.

Where they get you at a BigCo is not necessarily the pressure from management, who are perfectly willing to stay late with you at the office, updating their Facebook and ordering the team pizza. It’s the guilt that arises when people from other teams who have been suckered into working deathmarch hours look at you. That’s when overtime hours become institutionalized, when management starts to have real leverage over you.

Account Suspended

2010-07-28T00:00:00-07:00

My iPhone rings. It’s a number not in my address book, but I know the area code, so I answer. It’s a representative from 24-Hour Fitness (we’ll call her Stacy), asking to speak to my fiancée. I explain that this isn’t her phone.

Stacy: Well, I’m calling to let you know that her account is suspended.

Me: How is that possible? I canceled our joint account last month.

Stacy: I just need her to update her credit card info.

Me: Um, no. We’re not paying any more. We closed the account.

Stacy: I have here that you closed yours, but her account will be suspended until we have a valid credit card number.

Me: I’d like you to close her account too.

Stacy: I’m not authorized to do that. If you want to cancel, you’ll have to come in to the branch. Or you can do it on the website.

At this point I’m imagining trying to log in to the web site with my canceled account and a username/password combo I probably never set up.

Me: But I canceled my account over the phone. Why can’t you help me?

Stacy: Did you talk to corporate?

Me: I don’t know the difference.

Stacy: You were probably talking to corporate.

Me: Well can you transfer me to someone at “corporate” who can resolve this?

Stacy: I can give you the phone number.

Me: Thank you and goodbye.

Now I’m trying to decide if it’s worth the trouble to cancel the account completely, or whether a suspended 24 Hour Fitness account actually means anything – other than not being able to use their facilities, which we weren’t anyhow.

Reddit vs. Digg - Don't Call It an Infographic

2010-07-27T00:00:00-07:00

An infographic put together by RateRush has been making the rounds today, getting Liked on Facebook and Retweeted on Twitter. The data points they have collected and released are useful, but I bristle when they call it an infographic. It’s really applying so much artistic chartjunk to a nominal amount of data. The graphics do very little, if anything to help interpret the data. Let’s examine:

Top 10 Domains Hitting the Homepage

This is a basic pie chart with the saturation boosted. The problem is that 100% of the pie is dedicated to only the Top 10 domains, and does not show any percentage for Other.

For example, the Reddit chart makes it look like more than half of all front-page links are to imgur.com, but what the chart really says is imgur.com makes up half of all links to hit the front page that are in that list of 10 domains. There’s a difference.

What if these top 10 represent only 20% of front page links? That’s a potentially significant shift between homogeneity and heterogeneity that isn’t represented. There should be another pie slice for Other Domains.

Number of New Front Page Links by Hour

Data points here are set on a clock. But wait, there are only 12 hours in an analog clock, so they have to put two separate data points, one for AM and one for PM, next to each other. Does that mean they’re trying to compare the differences between these 12 hours? I have no clue. A very simple line chart plotting these numbers on a 24-hour length x-axis would tell much more about hour-to-hour fluctuations and provide a better visual comparison between the 2 sites. Here’s something I threw together using Google Charts:

Interestingly, it looks like both services experience a spike in new front page content at 9am, something that was not revealed by the clock.

Number of New Front Page Links by Weekday

This is a table of numbers that does nothing to, for example, highlight which are the high and low days for each site, or where there is typically a huge drop-off. Digg’s numbers between Thursday and Friday drop by over 20% while Reddit’s drop by only 8%.

Top 10 Most Common Words Appearing in Titles

What does breaking each list into 2 columns and squeezing them into a chalkboard graphic add to the visualization of this data? My takeaways from this are that Redditors are obsessed with themselves (#1 overall term), and Diggers are fond of sex and “infographics” (#3 & #5 terms, even if by infographic they mean “pretty pictures with a few data points”).

But really, this simply highlights the fact that Reddit supports self threads where the community has a discussion hosted on reddit.com itself, and so Reddit will often appear in the title. I don’t think that’s the way Digg works.

Number of Links Appearing on X First, Then Later Appearing on Y

This infographic is comprised of single numbers placed on the sites’ respective logos. That’s it. But the definition of each data point includes both sites (a link first appears on X site, then later appears on Y), so having only one logo doesn’t convey the idea behind the data. You could also do something like this and be clearer, in plain text:

Digg → Reddit: 6
Reddit → Digg: 22

Even better would be to dive into which links made it onto the other site to see if we can draw some conclusions from those specific instances. At this point the data serve only as fodder for Reddit pride. (“Digg is copying our links!”)

Summary

This graphic may be nice to print out and tack on the wall of your cubicle — it’s eyecatching and contains some useful data points. But as an infographic I don’t think it does anything to aid in the interpretation or understanding of the data it presents.

Also, if you didn’t take the time to read the fine print at the top of the graphic — and you likely didn’t with all the eye candy shouting at you below — you wouldn’t have noticed the two different methodologies for determining popular links. On Digg, they gathered links that hit the front page. On Reddit (I believe due to personalization factors and subreddits), they took links that reached 100 upvotes. This may be the reason why in charts like Number of New Front Page Links by Weekday Digg appears to get more than twice as many links on the front page as Reddit.

A Lump in My Throat

2010-07-26T00:00:00-07:00

It felt like I had a lump in my throat. Not the kind where you get choked up with emotion, but a real, physical lump. An obstruction.

The first hint of it came two days after a bout of food poisoning, in which I had vomited a dozen times during an afternoon and evening. Later I was out for a walk when I felt a little tickle in my throat, like something I couldn’t swallow away. My overactive imagination immediately jumped to the diagnosis of throat cancer.

I gave it a few days to see if it improved, but the feeling got progressively worse. The lump started to feel bigger. Swallowing became difficult, though paradoxically I could eat and drink with no trouble. In fact, the feeling went away while I ate. But between meals it was a continual distraction, if not quite actual pain.

I visited my physician. After a cursory examination, he decided that nothing was wrong, and told me to just wait for it to go away. Two days later it got so bad that I tried to go to urgent care, only to be turned away because they didn’t accept my insurance. After searching fruitlessly for an alternative that was open on a Saturday evening, I decided stress was aggravating my symptoms and opted not to go to the emergency room.

There were other strange patterns: Fridays were not nearly as uncomfortable. For whatever reason, the feeling went away to the extent that I would forget about it, only on Fridays. To me that only reinforced the idea that stress compounded the problem, as Fridays at work were typically low-stress. Three weeks into the symptoms, I made an appointment with an otolayrngologist (that’s fancy talk for an Ear, Nose & Throat doctor, or ENT).

My ENT spent twice as much time listening to me describe my ailment as my physician had spent in the room during my entire visit. She examined my throat and said the vocal cords looked a bit irritated and slightly discolored, but that there were no nodules or growths inside the throat. Relief. She proposed that acid reflux might be causing the feeling of the lump in my throat, that maybe my episode of throwing up had triggered the reflux, which was irritating my throat. It sounded semi-plausible.

The doctor suggested I minimize my speaking (I’m not especially loquacious as it is), and adopt a diet to minimize acid reflux. This meant cutting out acidic foods, red meat, caffeine, alcohol, fried foods and sugars. In other words, eating healthily. She also suggested I try over-the-counter Prilosec for a few weeks.

All of this helped. By the time I went back for a check-up three weeks later, the symptoms had subsided significantly, though there would be good and bad days. Her re-examination of my throat indicated that my vocal cords were a more normal color. I still wasn’t fully convinced that it was solely due to acid reflux, but I wasn’t complaining about the 9 pounds I lost during the diet.

It wasn’t until searching the internet a week later that I came upon a Wikipedia page describing precisely my symptoms: Cricopharyngeal Spasm. I wasn’t comforted by the fact that they didn’t know its cause, but in reading further I discovered that the spasm goes away over time — often taking as many as 3 or 4 months. And now I had a name for it, an impressive-sounding medical name for it: Cricopharyngeal Spasm.

Sure enough, the lump in my throat disappeared after about three months. If you have a similar feeling, there’s a good chance this is what you have. But, I would still recommend seeing an Ear, Nose & Throat doctor to be certain it isn’t something more serious.

Items For Sale by Gregg Hartling (Los Angeles, CA)

2010-07-24T00:00:00-07:00

I'm selling the following items, available for pickup in the Silver Lake / Los Feliz area of Los Angeles. You can contact me at harnulltling@gmsee this$ail.co.ukm or leave a voicemail (Google Voice) at (213) 222-8230.

Electronics

$100 - Amazon Kindle 2 - Like new
$100 - TiVo Series 2 w/remote - includes lifetime service
$60 - Samsung DVD player - HD860
$80 - Sony WEGA 32" Trinitron television
$25 - Wii Balance Board - game not included
$120 - Panasonic DMC-FZ5 digital camera - 5 megapixel, 12x zoom with charger & cables
~~$40 - Sharp 27" television~~
$100 - Fujitsu ScanSnap S500M - efficient document scanner
~~eBay Auction: iPhone 2G 16GB~~

Furniture

~~$60 - Black faux leather vintage love seat~~
$65 - 3 curved light wood bookshelves - from Crate & Barrel (or $25/each)
~~$40 - White bookshelf~~
~~$200 - White table & chair set~~

Musical Instruments

$120 - Yamaha APX-4 acoustic/electric guitar - black, narrow body
$200 - Fender Stratocaster Squier - w/case and Squier 15 practice amp