Lutfey.com

  • Assuming that I am not going to get hit by a meteorite or trampled to death in some freak Y2K riot, I have made it through another year to write my fifth Christmas letter. I’m quite impressed with my ability to stick with the program for five years now. I can’t really think of anything else off the top of my head that has involved such a level of commitment. I left my “Tamaguchi” in a restaurant a day after it hatched, college only took four years, and my longest romantic relationship was wrapped up in a little more than three years. What does all this mean? Not a thing. Now that I think about it, I took care of my dog for more than a decade, and I have stood by the Denver Broncos for even longer than that. Heck, I’m still waiting for that Haley’s comet thing to come back again. Perhaps my level of commitment is not as underdeveloped as I first imagined.

    In any case, it’s been a rather eventful year for me. As you may or may not know, I spent the first six months of the year working and playing in various parts of Europe. I wrote a letter about that way back in June, so feel free to read “Six Months in Amsterdam” if you haven’t done so already.

    Getting back to Boulder was an interesting affair. For some reason that I don’t quite understand, it takes roughly 5 times longer to fly from Europe to the US than the other way around. I think it has something to do with the fact that the pilots have to convert all of their calculations from the metric system back to our way of doing things. I walked by the cockpit during the flight where one of the crew members was asking “Now how many gallons are there in a kilogram? I always get that mixed up.” Regardless of the reason, I have to say that I have never had the chance to watch four complete movies in an uninterrupted 16 hour period. It really wouldn’t have been so bad, except that United Airlines picks out all the movies they show during the flight from the “Goober Bin” at the local video store. You would think that with all the money they spend on in flight video equipment they could find something more interesting to show than sappy B movies and old episodes of “Home Improvement.”

    Coming back to Boulder was a mixed blessing. I can’t really say that I like one city over the other, so I made two top ten lists about what I miss and don’t miss now that I am back in Boulder.

    Top 10 reasons for coming back:

    1. I’m afraid of the Euro.
    2. Electrical outlets are all weird.
    3. Company apartment has temperamental hot water heater.
    4. No 24-hour supermarkets in Holland
    5. I hated the “revolving door of death” at the Amsterdam office.
    6. You think parking is bad in Boulder!
    7. Cricket is just too hard to figure out.
    8. I like seeing the sun every now and then.
    9. No Taco Bell in Holland.
    10. Poor news coverage of the ongoing Ramsey investigation.

    Top 10 reasons for staying in Amsterdam:

    1. I was just starting to get the hang of snooker.
    2. Everyone sounds so smart on those BBC channels.
    3. Chocolate eggs with the toys inside.
    4. Eurodisney!
    5. Nobody cares when you urinate in the canals.
    6. Color coated money and coins that are actually worth something.
    7. The novelty condom shops.
    8. Numerous bars within walking distance of the apartment.
    9. The Chunnel.
    10. Public Transportation that doesn’t suck!!!

    After watching various Initial Public Offerings increase the value of a select few individuals by a couple of billion dollars (give or take a few hundred million), I’ve decided to form my own company with the intention of taking it public in the future. In order to capitalize on both the current Internet craze and the recent success of Martha Stewart’s IPO, my new company is going to center around a web site devoted to food recipes that focus primarily on the wants and needs of men. Feel free to check it out at www.boxostuff.com. My personal favorite recipe: Box o’ Cheeze Its.

    Well, every year I comment on my increasingly pathetic attempts at working toward my Master’s degree. I am proud to announce that this year I spent an all-time low three weeks attending classes. While still living and working in Amsterdam, I went through all of the trouble of applying to the Graduate Business program at CU. I started my Financial Accounting and Numerical Analysis night classes in late August. By early September I realized that neither subjects are very interesting in my own little world. I also discovered that as a reward for throwing in the towel quickly, the University gives back most of your money when you drop your classes in the first couple of weeks. At this rate, the only hope that I have of actually finishing a Masters degree is if scientists develop a computer chip that I can plug into my brain with all the relevant knowledge that I would have otherwise gained from sitting in class for two years.

    December has been a pretty busy for me as I have been feverishly preparing for any and all Y2K issues that might arise at the end of the year. While most people are checking flashlight batteries and chopping firewood, I am busy watching a lot of TV. I don’t know what the future will hold in the brave new world of the upcoming millennium, but I want to start it off with the reassuring feeling that I have committed every episode of “Charles In Charge” to memory. OK, in all honesty, I have bought into the hype just a little bit by going to the grocery store and buying an extra box of “Cheeze Its.”

    I’ve decided to start a new tradition of bestowing “Web Site of the Year” to the corner of the Internet that has arbitrarily provided me with the most laughs over the past year. This award goes to www.witcity.com. One section, called “The Lying Game” asks a new question every day and the top 10 most entertaining, insightful, or otherwise unique answers are posted the next day. It took me a while to get the hang of it, but in the past couple of weeks I have gotten five or six of my entries published the next day. I am not exactly sure why, but I’ve developed a knack for making fun of Sony’s latest high tech toy, the “Robotic Dog.” Here are some of the questions along with my winning entries:

    Q: What features are part of Sony’s new Robotic Dog?
    A: Docking procedure no longer requires human leg.

    Q: What are some of the merchandise spin-offs from “Toy Story 2?”
    A: “Toy Story 3” trailer: It’s Buzz Lightyear vs. Sony’s Robotic Dog.

    Q: What’s the most appropriate holiday gift to get for your boss?
    A: That Sony Robotic Dog, set to “Evil.”

    Q: In the Year 3000, what will be remembered about New Year’s 2000?
    A: Who would have imagined those Sony Robotic Dogs were going to evolve and enslave the human race?

    Of course there is a lot more to me than an endless string of Robotic Dog jokes. For example, here is the very first Lying Game Entry of mine that was published:

    Q: What is the plot of the new film, “Charlie’s Angels: The Movie?”
    A: Instead of working for the mysterious man on speaker phone, the Angels start a new job investigating questions submitted to the “Ask Jeeves” web site.

    That pretty much wraps things up for this year. All that is left to do is to wait and see how life is going to be different now that the year odometer is making the big flip. I’ve done extensive testing and I am cautiously optimistic that my lava lamp and drinking bird are both going to operate correctly come January 1st. I don’t think anything bad is going to happen, but if it does I’ll be able to relax a little bit knowing that even though I didn’t send out my Christmas letter until after December 25th, all of my friends will have gotten at least one good laugh before the world comes to an end.

  • Now that I think about it, the title sounds like a good title for a song. It would be kind of like “One Night in Bankock” but with less of a techno beat and more references to sex and drugs. In case you didn’t already know, I spent the first half of 1999 living and working in Holland. Here is my trip report.

    Technically, it’s illegal to buy and smoke marijuana in Holland. Of course it’s also possible that you will sleep walk into the nearby woods in the middle of the night only to be awakened by the sound of your leg setting off a bear trap, but most reasonable people don’t stay up at night worrying about getting caught. You can also go into special “herb” stores and get whatever other goodies that you feel the need to put into your body. Is this the best way to run a society? I really don’t know, but my experience has been that the number of people on the street that you don’t want to have anything to do with is comparable to any other large city I have ever visited. It’s way better than New York City.

    The other “selling point” of Holland is the legalized prostitution. If you go into the Red Light District you can shop around for women conveniently displayed behind the glass windows of their “shops.” Provided you have the money and you don’t have any visible open sores or other odd physical defects, you can have the woman of your dreams in convenient fifteen minute increments. Is this the best way to run a society? Once again, I really don’t know, but it doesn’t appear to be destroying the city. As one of my friends who came over to visit from Colorado said, “They still have pimps in Holland, but it’s more of a desk job.”

    Holland is chalk full of first rate public transportation. Based on my experiences and some information that I pretty much just made up, here is my advice on how to build a city without having to depend on automobiles: First of all, start building the city in the middle ages when people are too busy with things like neighboring armies, crusades, and the plague to ponder ideas like the internal combustion engine, traffic flow patterns, and the needs of the middle class. Combine this with a series of interlocking canals and you have a city that just isn’t very friendly to automobiles.

    There is actually a law in Holland that forbids the construction of parking spaces in the city limits. OK, OK, they don’t REALLY have laws in Holland, but it is almost impossible to find a parking spot in Amsterdam. The only vehicles that you see on the roads are taxi drivers and tour busses. Since their job is to just drive around all day it really isn’t a problem. Occasionally a lost tourist from a neighboring country will accidentally drive into town. The desperate search for a parking space ends when their fuel supply runs out and they are forced to stop in the middle of the road. When this happens, the angry taxi drivers and tour bus operators stuck behind the vehicle work together to push the car out of the street and into the closest canal.

    As difficult as it is to get around Amsterdam with a car, it’s quite simple to get around with the public transportation. Intercity trains, subways, trams, and busses all work together to get you where you need to go. After a long day at work it is a lot less stressful to get on the train than to have to drive an automobile. I think it has something to do with the fact that you don’t have to actually drive the train. They have people for that.

    While the trains in Holland are, on the whole, pretty safe, every now and then you will see things that make you wish you had waited for the next train. The most disgusting thing I saw on the trains was a guy who picked up a crumpled Heineken beer can from the floor in an attempt to extract the last precious drops of alcohol that the previous owner missed. There were also the two women on the train late one night who were shooting up heroin. The really strange thing was that nobody else on the train seemed to care.

    Whenever I hear the phrase “stick it where the sun don’t shine,” I always picture Holland in the winter months. Between the extreme northern latitude and constant cloud cover, the sun doesn’t make much of an appearance until the spring. Combine this with cold temperatures and a fairly constant drizzle of rain and you have a nation that doesn’t receive many tourists for half the year. The popular joke for the Dutch to say to foreigners goes something like, “Of course we have summer in Holland. Last year it was on a Thursday.”

    One of the most difficult aspects of my trip involved the language barrier. While the majority of the natives speak English, you never know when you will come across someone who can’t speak your language. Of course there are times when body language is more than enough to communicate information. A lovely example of this phenomenon occurred after a rather odd series of events put me in a unique situation with a young woman at a local restaurant. Our nonverbal conversation, insofar as it can be expressed in words, went something like this:

    Me: “I know that I am in the women’s bathroom in a busy McDonald’s restaurant. I’ll leave now”

    Her: “I don’t know why you are in the women’s bathroom in this busy McDonald’s restaurant, but I’ll let you save whatever small amount of dignity you have left at this moment in time by not screaming or otherwise drawing attention to the situation. I hope the rest of your day goes better than this.”

    Here is an interesting concept that is worth mentioning: in Europe, they play music videos on MTV. Sure, they play commercials and they have occasional news updates, but it’s mostly just videos. It seems like the producers of MTV in Europe realized that constantly broadcasting footage of a bunch of twenty-year-old college dropouts driving around the world in a Winnebago just isn’t very entertaining.

    I generally don’t keep track of any kind of vital statistics about myself beyond the usual, “my heart is beating,” “I’m hungry,” and “I’m currently standing in the women’s bathroom in a busy McDonalds restaurant,” but the past six months have seen some rather significant changes in my lifestyle. Here are some of the more interesting numbers that I came up with.

    Taco Bell franchises I found in Holland: 0
    House plants I killed: 1
    Different countries in Europe I visited: 6
    Number of fruit stickers I put on the phone in the apartment for no particular reason: 10
    Most consecutive days I was forced to wear long pants: 89
    Most consecutive days I didn’t eat at an American franchise fast food establishment: 121
    Days I didn’t see a “Saturn” brand automobile: 183
    Days I preserved the natural ecological balance of the back yard of the company apartment: 183
    (or, the number of times I mowed the lawn) 0

    I can honestly say that I enjoyed these six months in Amsterdam. For someone who hasn’t spent much time outside of Colorado, I have come to realize that there is a whole different world out there where people aren’t very tan, don’t wear sandals, and don’t have much interest in who killed JonBenet Ramsey. Sure, they get the words “soccer” and “football” mixed up most of the time and have adopted darts as their new national pastime just because a Dutch guy won the world darts competition last year, but these are small problems that can be easily overlooked. To quote the most commonly spoken phrase on any American talk show, “Can’t we all just get along?”

  • Welcome to my fourth annual Christmas letter. Well, I can’t pretend my life wasn’t drastically changed this year when my dad died. I’ve tried not to dwell on it too much, but I don’t think that I could write my annual Christmas letter pretending that it never happened. Don’t worry though– that isn’t all that has happened to me this year.January 6, 1998 was the date. I’m not going to explain what happened in any kind of detail, but I will say that he went to the hospital with Pneumococcal Pneumonia and died two days later from complications that followed. His down fall was very quick and relatively painless– not a bad way to go.The one piece of advice I have when someone is forced to deal with the loss of a loved one is to ask how to help instead of assuming to know what to do. Some of our neighbors brought over a bunch of greasy Chinese food and had dinner with us the night after my dad died. While I am usually a big fan of greasy Chinese food, that night I just wasn’t in the mood. They meant well, but it just didn’t really help much. On the other hand, I asked one of my best friends to drive me up to my apartment in Boulder so I could get some of my things. There is no better feeling than being driven across town in rush hour traffic so I could change out of the underwear I had been wearing for the past three days.

    OK, I guess I can go on to talk about the rest of the year.

    The next Saturday morning I tried to put the events of the previous week behind me by going on my company ski trip. It started out innocently enough when I boarded one of the two busses Rogue Wave chartered for the day. Once everyone was settled the busses headed up I-70– destination Summit County. A light snowfall greeted us as we arrived at the base of Copper Mountain. After making a not so quick stop in the ski rental shop I hit the slopes. The light crowds and constant snowfall made for excellent ski conditions. A dozen or so runs later I climbed back on the bus wet, sore, and immensely satisfied from the day’s activities.

    Instead of commuting straight back to Boulder the plan was to stop in Silverthorn for dinner and drinks. The idea was to enjoy a relaxing dinner and miss the evening ski traffic returning to the metro area. The intentions were good, but the results turned out disastrous.

    After a hearty meal at Old Chicago’s we got on the busses to head home. The only problem was that I-70 was closed by the highway patrol minutes before we arrived. Instead of preparing for hot showers and comfortable beds we patiently waited near the on ramp to I-70. Information was scarce and the mood quickly changed when we realized the busses were not moving anytime soon. To say that everyone handles stress differently would be a monstrous understatement in this situation. Most people slept, talked, or played charades. Some people, however, didn’t handle the situation quite so gracefully. The names are not important, but I honestly believe the threat of legal action was the only factor preventing some of the occupants of the bus from being physically restrained and placed in the under carriage storage compartments for the duration of the trip.

    In February I had the honor and privilege of representing Rogue Wave Software at the 1998 Software Development West conference held in San Francisco, California. My only responsibility for the week was to spend several hours a day at the Rogue Wave company booth answering whatever questions the attendants would throw at us. I answered a lot of questions during my booth duty, but the most common question by far was “What is the coolest thing I can get from you guys for free?” It was kind of sad to see people who make a good living as computer programmers going from exhibit to exhibit begging for cheap pens and crappy T-shirts.

    The coolest thing about going to trade shows is having an expense account and a whole lot of free time. Despite the week long cloud cover and constant drizzle, we sampled quite a few lovely restaurants and bars in the downtown San Francisco area. The most exciting evening started out at what was called the “Vendor Bender” party. As a reward for countless hours standing on the concrete floor of the convention center, the organizers of the convention hosted a party that included a dinner buffet, two open bars, a DJ, and a live band. As best I can remember, we stayed at the party for the entire time and didn’t leave until the bouncers started kicking people out. After a quick cab ride back to the hotel there were still quite a few of us that just weren’t ready to go to bed. We had a lot of fun in the wee hours of that morning, unfortunately I can’t reveal any more of the specific details of the night as a high level company executive reminded everyone that the events of the evening were not to be made available to the general public. I was kind of worried about waking up my roommate by coming in at such a late hour, but it turned out to be a non issue as he was already up and getting ready to go downstairs to eat breakfast. Needless to say I didn’t join him.

    When the spring rolled around my mom decided that she wanted to move out of her big house and into a townhouse. Of course before that could happen we had to sort through the belongings all four members of our family had accumulated over the past 21 years. It’s easy to say that you love someone when things are going well in life. It’s even pretty easy when things are going bad. The true test of love is when you have to spend countless hours in the basement trying to decide what you want to keep and what to throw away. The whole thing was so stressful that I ended up getting in a big fight with my mom when I thought she was putting too much tape on the packing boxes. For a woman in her early fifties she put up quite a struggle when I decided to take matters into my own hands and wrestle the tape gun away from her. There were a few tense moments, but we somehow managed to survive the whole moving process.

    In my continued half hearten attempt to earn a Masters degree, I enrolled in a graduate level mathematics class during the summer session at the Denver campus of the University of Colorado. It turns out the class was taught by the same teacher and convened in the same room as the class I took last year. This year, however, I had to deal with a full time job in addition to the demands of the class. This drastically reduced the amount of time I could allocate to my homework. Sometimes I could work on my assignments after work on the nights I didn’t have class. When that wasn’t an option I employed the time honored tradition of doing my homework on the bus on the way to school. At the rate I am going I will have all the required credits for my Masters degree in the year 2007.

    That pretty much describes the important and/or entertaining events for 1998. The year didn’t go anything like I imagined, but I guess that is what life is all about. As I am writing this I am getting ready to spend the next 6 months in Europe on company business. I’ve never been out of the state of Colorado for more than two weeks at a time or out of the United States at all, so traveling half way around the world will be an exciting experience. Since I am leaving the beginning of January it will have to wait until my 1999 Christmas letter. Until then, I’ll end this letter with one of my favorite song lyrics:

    Old man look at my life,
    Twenty four and there’s so much more
    I live alone in a paradise
    That makes me think of two.