Category: Culture

Hmm. None. I really don’t believe in them. I think I’ve done this rant before, but the basic gist is that it’s an arbitrary calendar date. If you think something is important, start doing it. Don’t wait until January first.

I’m a runner and I typically slack off in the winter. I hate the treadmill and the cold and the dark tends to minimize my outdoor runs. This year I wanted to try to stay in shape. So I decided to start swimming. We have a family membership at our local YMCA which has a very nice pool. I’m not a particularly good swimmer, but I am stubborn. So I started swimming.

Did I start in January? Of course not. It was late October when I decided this would be a good thing to try. So that’s when I started.

My point is that for New Year’s, people look at the calendar and decide they need to make a change. That just doesn’t work. You should decide that you need to make a change just because you do, not because you are suddenly writing 2009 on your checks.

I love the people who decide to diet as a New Year’s resolution, but to totally indulge over the holidays. It’s one of the more common resolutions, but totally goofy in it’s execution. You decide that moderation in eating/drinking is something that is important for your life. So to prepare for this life change, you do the complete opposite for a month. Oh yeah, that will work.

Have you ever been around someone who quit smoking? How often did they quit on January 1st? Most of the time something just clicked in their life that it was time to quit. The truth is that most resolutions are a bit hard. You have to be committed. The fact that you bought a new calendar does not equal commitment.

Anyone who goes to the gym regularly will tell how much they hate January. Because it’s the month when the gym is jam packed with people who you know will not be there in February.

Be honest. How many New Year’s resolutions have you really kept? …

I was ready a recent “top 10 jazz albums” article (funny that they still call them albums) and was surprised by one that I had missed. And a big one.

If you have no interest in jazz, music, or history, you should probably stop reading now.

Sonny Rollins is one of the great jazz musicians of all time.  He is one of the few that you can refer to in the present tense (78 and going strong). The jazz greats of the 40’s and 50’s (golden era of jazz) tended to have various vices, most common and deadly among them heroin. Many jazz greats died young (only the good, right?).

Sonny Rollins got busted for heroin in the 50’s and was sent to a (then) experimental Methadone treatment jail. In the 50’s John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins were the premier jazz tenor saxophone players (their only recording together, “Tenor Madness” (circa 1956) is a classic). Coltrane would die at 40 of liver cancer (believed to be caused by heroin use). Sonny would keep on going.

Sonny Rollins has always had a reputation for being better in concert than in the studio. I’ve seen him a few times and he is always awesome. The album released this year is a collection of live recordings that Sonny finally consented to be released (he is apparently hugely self-critical).

One of the things that I’ve always loved about Sonny Rollins was his musical sense of humor. In jazz there is a technique called “quoting”. For those that know little about jazz, in general the group plays the melody of the song (called the “head”) and then improvises using the same chord changes as the melody and then they play the “head” again. There are obviously many songs that  use the same or similar chord changes. “Quoting” means playing a different recognizable melody that fits the chord changes of the song you are improvising on.

You can be listening to Sonny Rollins doing a solo over some jazz tune and suddenly he’ll be playing the Looney Tunes (Bugs Bunny for those too young to know Looney Tunes) theme song because it happens to fit the chord changes and then he’ll go back to improvising. That is his sense of humor.

If you ever get the chance to see Sonny Rollins live, you need to go. It doesn’t matter if you like jazz or not. It’s like having the chance to see Pavarotti. Even if you don’t like opera, it’s a once in a lifetime chance. When Sonny Rollins dies, there are no more jazz greats left. Sure there are new jazz musicians who are great, but Sonny Rollins is a pillar of jazz history. Enjoy him while you can.

I posted a blog about the folks we lost on 9/11 a while back. It was before I moved the blog over to WordPress and I can’t find it anymore. That saddens me because I tried to remember the best stories I could and my memory generally sucks as it is, so after 7 years it only gets worse.

Regardless, I’ll try to remember my thoughts.

We usually say that CS STARS lost 12 people that day, but in truth CS STARS didn’t exist in 2001. Back then we were Marsh Risk Technologies, a division of Marsh. It wasn’t even entirely STARS. The areas that are now a part of STARS really lost 10 people. These are the folks I knew (I knew the other two, but not well).

These are the stories that come to mind as I think of them:

Scott Bart: First alphabetically and the closest person to me. Scott was the first manager of CSG. He created the business and was a perfect fit for it. Brilliant, loud, incredibly dedicated. We usually talked early in the morning before most folks were in. He would often not be wearing shoes.

The best work line that ever came out of Scott’s mouth was the night before a STARS client conference. He was explaining the CSG group to the rest of the STARS folks because it was a fairly new thing. He said something like, “we’re the prostitutes of STARS, we’ll do anything if the client pays for it”. Vintage Scott. He shocked some folks because he had no filter when he talked. But he was smart and always delivered. We talked about the ring he was going to buy his girlfriend and about the house they were going to buy. I went to his wedding about a month before 9/11. There are a million more stories. Just a great guy.

Michele Coyle: Michele hired me at J&H back in the day. A “one L” Michele, she was a motherly development manager. I was completely unqualified when she hired me, but they gave that programmer test back then and I did ace that. Oh yeah, and I knew Bob Petrie, that might have helped a bit.

Michele and I went through the transition of one reporting to the other and then switching as I rose up. It was never an issue. One of the sweetest people you would meet and the mother of three boys. She became a contractor so she could work only 4 days a week and spend an extra day at home. If there’s anyone that I ever thought “why not me instead of her?” on 9/11 it was about Michele.

Mike D’Esposito and Peter Klein: I have to list them together because they always were. They started STARS Audit (then called TrendTracker). They were it. Peter was first and then Mike came along. Peter was super smart and a bit of an ass (I mean that in a nice way). Mike was always the nice guy. They did everything together. They were always in early so our one hope for them was that they might have gone down to the lobby of the Trade Center for a bacon/egg/cheese sandwich when the plane hit. Unfortunately that would not be the case.

Chris Dunne: Our first head of QA. A super nice guy and one of the ones I miss the most, so I’m surprised I can’t remember more good stories. He got nicknamed “Khakis” because that’s all he wore. Just a big, tall, lovable guy.

Leah Oliver: One of the ones I knew the least. She had just started a month ago and she was in Service so I didn’t work with her. Very young, very nice, very unfair…

Mark Rosenberg: Another one who had just started, but one I knew fairly well. He was a talker and an early morning person. He was amazingly intellectually curious. He just loved figuring things out. That is a lot like me, so we got along well.

My favorite story about him concerned the hot dog stand outside the World Trade Center. Mark was an orthodox Jew and the hot dog stand was kosher. Mark loved hot dogs, so he had a vested interest in the hot dog stand’s success (it was a pretty convenient kosher meal). But the stand always had a huge line because they had the worst process in the world. They were making one hot dog at a time. This is New York, you can’t do that.

So Mark watched and analyzed the process. He finally went up to the owner and explained exactly how many hot dogs he should have cooking at any time to achieve optimal hot dog throughput. The guy adopted his process and business boomed. Mark was so proud telling this story…

Brock Safronoff: A very smart guy and one of the early STARS Web guys. He got married the same day as Scott Bart (one month prior to 9/11) which was a potential conflict for the team. But only Tim Cope was invited to both and I think he actually managed to start out at one and end up at the other.

Jeff Weiner: Jeff was the head of Service for the NY region. A super smart guy and a ridiculously hard worker. I’m struggling to remember good stories which is a shame because there were plenty.

Jennifer Wong: I didn’t know her very well because she was a relatively new person in Service. We were actually very confused about her status on 9/11 because she was very smart. She was on vacation the week before and told her clients that she’d be back on the 12th, but that was so that she would have one day free from phone calls when she got back on the 11th.

The thing about the STARS team in New York was that most folks arrived late. It was a typical developer team that would rather get in at 10 and work late. But there was a small group that consistently got in early. Take the list above and add Tim Cope and myself and you have the early crew. Tim was on a business trip and I was with my wife taking her father to the doctor the morning of 9/11. So while there was a lot of uncertainty at the time regarding who was lost, it was pretty clear to me because the same people were always there at 8:46. And nobody made it from the 96th floor.

We will always remember them.