Jeff Barr’s Blog

• BBC News: Work Starts in £15m Plan to Get Concorde Flying - “It is hoped the jet will be able to fly as part of the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. “
• Gnomedex 10 - “Hundreds of the world’s leading bloggers, podcasters, videobloggers, and tech-savvy enthusiasts will once again descend upon the city of Seattle, Washington from August 19 – 21, 2010.“
• The Heart of Innovation: 20 Ways to See the Invisible - “Given our tendency to miss what’s right in front of us, is there a way to increase our ability to see the invisible?“
• The Automatic Earth: Lent, Spent, and Guaranteed - “This thing can blow up in our faces any moment now, with one fire igniting another across countries and within them. There’s just too many people falling by too many waysides, and too many of them will very simply not go gently into that night without a fight. “

Everyone in my family loves to cook. Our Sunday evening dinners have grown increasingly complex and correspondingly delicious. Friends and relatives far and wide clamor for invitations. Hungry strangers show up and beg for a seat at our table. The smell of garlic reaches out to the street, and the sound of sharp knives hitting the chopping board sets the pace.

We love to make pizza from scratch. For years we’ve looked at pictures of various wood-fired pizza ovens and told ourselves that we’d buy or build one sooner or later. Well, it is now later and we really want one now (in time for the summer of 2010). We want something like The Pompeii Oven, large enough to let us cook pizza, bread, and other goodies.

If you are in the Seattle area and if you’ve built and used one of these before, I’d like to talk to you ASAP. I’ve got the cash, the backyard, and the appetite. I’d like to see some pictures of your work and I’d like to talk to one or two of your clients.

Email me (jeff@vertexdev.com) and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

I know that there are plenty of “build your own oven” guides online. I’ve read several of them and I’m positive that I don’t have the necessary mechanical or artistic skills. I want the finished product to be sturdy, functional (from what I’ve read it is necessary to get the proportions just right), and attractive.

Feel free to pass this along to anyone who might be able to help me in my quest.

I’ve been thinking about going back to school for a couple of years. I didn’t have a specific goal in mind at first, but I do think that it is important to keep learning over the course of one’s life, and I do enjoy being on campus. I also like the rhythm of the semester — start a class, meet the professor and the other students, go to class each week, study, learn, succeed (hopefully), and then wrap it up at the end.

I looked in to the University of Washington’s Technology Management MBA program last year. It is a good program, but it wasn’t quite what I was looking for. I decided that I was more interested in enhancing my existing skill set than in learning entirely new skills.

A few years ago I was invited to join the advisory board of the Master of Communication in Digital Media program at the University of Washington. The advisory board met each quarter to review the state of the program and to make recommendations to the staff and faculty.

As part of the planning for each quarter, program director Hanson Hosein would send around the course list. Last fall I looked at it and thought that every last one of the courses looked interesting. Hanson said that I was welcome to sit in on a class or two and I considered doing just that. However, I gave the whole matter some thought and decided that it was time to go back to school, and applied to the MCDM program!

I spent some time going through the application process — getting letters of recommendation, ordering transcripts from schools that I’d attended over 25 years ago, and writing a statement of intent. I got it all in by the deadline, and awaited the response.

I received notification last week that I had been accepted, and I am really looking forward to becoming a student at the ripe old age of 50.

My son Andy is already at student at the UW, and my daughter Tina is awaiting word on her application. With any luck, all three of us will be on campus at the same time.

Wish me luck!