Today’s Globe featured an article about new guidelines from the federal Department of Education requiring public elementary and secondary schools to make reasonable accommodations so that disabled athletes may participate in sports. Nicolai is arguably the poster child for such participation having blazed this path before it was mandated. Many believe these guidelines will do for the disabled community what Title 9 did for women.
It has been more than 25 years since I co-founded a company called Truevision. That entrepreneurial endeavor remains the highlight of my professional career both because I was part of creating a truly great company and for the financial success that followed. This evening I was thrilled to see my former colleague and good friend Cathleen Asch. Together with Joseph Haaf, now deceased, we orchestrated a management buy out to form the company and ran it for several years using what we called the “three-legged stool” leadership model. Cathleen was responsible for finance and operations, Joseph for sales and marketing, and I was in charge of product development. I have not since seen this co-CEO model in any other company and I feel it contributed to the success of what was a genuinely unique and special company, one still fondly remembered by all who were involved. I have not seen Cathleen since our 20 year company reunion in Indianapolis more than 5 years ago and it has been more than a decade since the whole family visited with her at her home in Barrington Hills just outside of Chicago. She is in town on business and we were delighted to host her for dinner this evening. It was great reminiscing about Truevision and catching up on all that has transpired since. With any luck, Cathleen will be travelling to Boston with greater regularity and we will have many more opportunities to reconnect.
One of the most important things I do at work is to make sure people get paid fairly. It never ceases to amaze me how out of whack compensation can get when managers take the easy way out and simply “peanut butter” (spread out uniformly) their merit increase pools. I am invariably the hero to some and villain to others who ensures that we operate as a meritocracy, rewarding our top people with the highest compensation. This week I am in the thick of the process and one of my favorite tools are sticky notes. In a meeting with my direct reports that went well past normal business hours, we stack ranked a group of employees from across the Engineering organization as a quality control check. Having integrated two divisions into a single organization this year has amplified the magnitude of the challenge considerably. This is some of the hardest work we do as a team but it is also extremely satisfying when we arrive at a fair outcome. For all the grousing I hear before, during, and after the process, I think folks appreciate the level of rigor and effort we apply to something as important as salary administration.
I generally do not feature images by other photographers but felt compelled to share this one by Erik Johansson. He is a photographer and retouching artist from Sweden whose imagination and the ability to translate his ideas into pixels is quite amazing. More of his work can be found on his website.
With outdoor air temperature in the teens, I thought the better of venturing out to play soccer this morning. Instead, I spent some time cleaning up my photo archive. In the process, I discovered that this photo and its associated blog post have been sitting in my draft folder since July 21st of last year. I went ahead and posted the original in color and then decided it would look good as a black and white image as well.
Maya would like to attend a summer ballet intensive program in Philadelphia this year. When distance precludes an in-person appearance, prospective students must submit audition photos and videos of their dancing. This afternoon I spent several hours with Maya, her friend Maddie, and their ballet teacher shooting the mandatory still photograph poses. I got a great workout moving the necessary lighting equipment and background, which filled every cubic inch of my SUV, from my basement photo studio to the second-floor dance studio on the other side of town and back. As their teacher suggested ways to improve each pose I gained a new appreciation for the difficulty of ballet. Both girls did a great job and we will follow up with a video of the required dance combinations later next week.
A sports facility close to my work has just completed the construction of a domed soccer arena which can be configured as one full-size 11v11 field or four 8v8 fields. For $8 they are offering a 90-minute, Friday noon pick-up soccer game. I decided to play instead of eating lunch today. Although I was the oldest player by a long shot, I held my own (at least for the first 60 minutes) and got a great workout. I plan to make this a regular part of my training regime in preparation for the outdoor season.
My soccer game this evening was considerably rougher than normal. It ended with one of my teammates being driven into the wall resulting in a serious scalp laceration that bled profusely. By comparison, the damage to my glasses resulting from an earlier collision between myself and an opponent seems hardly worth mentioning. I used athletic tape wound about my head to secure the lenses in approximately the correct position so that I could stay in the game. I scored three goals before the incident and none after so I think it is safe to say that the damage to my frame pretty much rendered me ineffective for the remainder of the match.
Taken earlier this month during my travels to the west coast, I decided this would make for a more cozy image than one of the current outdoor scene in Concord which is dominated by ice and snow.
In past years the photographically monotonous month of January has been dominated by Nicolai’s wrestling exploits. This year he wisely chose to enter physical therapy for his shoulders (which took a beating during soccer season) rather than suffer additional damage. As much as I looked forward to seeing what he would accomplish as a senior, I think he made a very mature decision, especially in light of the bulging disks in his spine (C4/C5 and C5/C6) that we discovered last year. I have been very busy at work (performance review season) and daylight hours are short providing few opportunities for photography so I have selected this photo from a year ago for today’s blog entry.
With the outdoor soccer season just around the corner, I joined other hard core players for an outdoor practice session this morning at 8am. Air temperature was 15F with a wind chill at least 10 degrees cooler. Getting started was admittedly hard but after 15 minutes I was no longer aware of the cold. The morning exercise helped offset the caloric damage I did at Nancy’s Airport Cafe in Stow where we took my nephew John Quinn to celebrate his 20th birthday. His classmates at Babson “cheered him up” by pointing out that he is now half way to forty which I guess is a hell of a lot better than more than half way to dead which is where I stand. We had a rather long wait at this popular breakfast spot so I occupied myself by making portraits of Maya and Nicolai.
Nicolai is far more likely to borrow my djembe (West African drum) than to use his drum kit which is set up in the basement. This morning, however, I found him drumming up a storm and managed to get this low-angle shot before he wrapped up his practice session. Ever since my first exposure to African drumming, some 15 years ago, I have enjoyed playing the djembe even though I have little intrinsic talent. Where Nicolai obtained his rhythmic genes remains a mystery to me but I am so glad for the opportunity to live vicariously through his playing. Later in the day, we spent time setting up a video editing computer in his bedroom. Part of his job with SideStix is producing videos and this has been very tedious without the right equipment. Once we had set up the reference monitors (high-quality speakers), I introduced him to Chuck Mangione and he introduced me to Lettuce. Hard to say who got the better deal.
I finally replaced the vent cap for our downdraft kitchen exhaust without which cold air was coming into the kitchen from outside. Jeanine has been after me to do this for some time now since she is the one exposed to the cold draft every day. I was happy to get it off my honey-do list.
Whenever I acquire a new piece of photography equipment, family members have learned to make themselves scarce, lest they become the subject of countless experimental photos. One of Nala’s few redeeming qualities is that she will tolerate being my subject for hours on end. In this case, I was learning the ins and outs of a new flash controller which allows me to wirelessly adjust and trigger remote flash units from my camera’s hot shoe. My only goal was to gain proficiency in quickly navigating the user interface and I gave no thought to making an artful photo. Nonetheless, we have not seen Nala featured on the blog for some time and I have nothing better to post.
On the way into work this morning the outside air temperature was 3 degrees Fahrenheit as measured by my Audi. My wool long underwear helped to take the edge off.
For the first time since his passing, I found myself wishing that my dad could have been here to witness an important moment in his grandson’s life. Since the beginning of the school year, Nicolai has participated in a pilot program of study called Rivers & Revolutions. The interdisciplinary and experiential approach to learning is the brain child of local teacher and education innovator, Michael Goodwin. Students attend a school within a school spending the entire day in one class room or together on one of many field trips. The subjects of English, Social Studies, Math, Science, and the Visual and Performing Arts are integrated into a single curriculum offering a cohesive approach to the material and a continuous conversation where everything ties together. Look for the good! This evening, parents and family were invited to the deCordova Museum for an art exhibition of the student’s work and to celebrate the end of the semester. In his address to the assembled group, Goodwin thanked all who had contributed to the success of the program and the students in particular. Nicolai followed with a testimonial to the program and to the teachers. His heart felt and eloquent words left no doubt in anyone’s mind that something very profound had taken place in this class. Jeanine and I could not have been more proud of him and my dad, a college professor, would have been moved to tears when Nicolai explained how this experience had helped him to realize that he wants to pursue a career in teaching.