Entering the Lion's Den

Obama's State of the Union speech this week had moments that were reminiscent of his 2008 campaign. He had that same fiery tone and determination, and used history as a great motivator for why we must act. If you listened to the media, his campaign and the Democratic party was in trouble. Obama's poll numbers have definitely dropped since he took office, but the decline was more a reflection of reality than any failures on his part.

At the risk of stating the obvious, Obama is at his best when he delivers a live prepared speech directly to the American people. This is not to say he's only a good speaker or that he's all talk and no action. Speeches give him a platform to present his vision unfiltered from the media. His State of the Union was a great example of him portraying his perspective of the past year. He did a great job of mixing new policy initiatives with a fiery inspirational beginning and end.

Past presidents have put a positive spin on bad years ("The State of the Union is strong" when it was anything but), but Obama from the very beginning of his speech never once tried to pretend things were good. He laid out the facts and basically put the ball in Congress' court to get things done. He specifically went after the Republicans, challenging them to come up with practical alternatives instead of just voting down every single Democratic proposal.

Which brings us to the video in this post. I remember him saying he'd meet with the Republican caucus, but it seems that engaging with them in an outright Q&A is about as ballsy as dissing the Supreme Court when they're a few feet away (which he did on Wednesday!).

Many people expect the economy to take a turn for the better in the early part of this year. If that happens, Obama will have a lot more leverage to get some things done and the Democrats may even win some more seats in Congress.

It's interesting that after a full year of Obama's presidency, we still don't really know how it will turn out. He's trying to make decisions that won't see results until the next generation, but he was elected in a generation that uses Facebook, YouTube and text messaging - a generation that demands instantaneous gratification and instant results.

Let the madness begin

I've been helping my parents a bit with the planning for my sister's wedding.

The first big task (after getting over the shock/realization of how much you have to spend to host a somewhat decent event) was to find a venue.

It's pretty interesting to see the wide range of venues available. We saw everything from a small hall inside an office building off the side of the highway to a massive 600-person ballroom. As with most things, you have to look around a bit to see how you can spend money in the best way. It's even more true for weddings though, as the unit of currency seems to be $1000. One venue even charged $800 if you wanted a dance floor! She claimed that presidents had danced on it (but she was also kinda crazy - who shows the bathrooms as the first thing?!?)

My sister came last weekend from New York to see the venues in person. I think we ended up seeing something like 9 venues on Sunday as part of a whirlwind weekend. We drove from DC to NYC on Friday night to meet the groom's parents on Saturday, and then came right back from NYC to DC on Saturday night in time for dinner! I felt like I had jet lag for a good part of Sunday.

We finally settled on this nice, house-like manor just outside of town. It's far enough away to feel like you're on a farm in the middle of nowhere, but close enough to the outlet malls and IHOP to know that you're not. Not sure how I gave off this vibe, but the salesperson at the manor thought I was the groom the entire time! He seemed to be making more eye contact with me than with my sister or parents! And sadly, this wasn't the first venue where that happened.

When work meets real life

I'm used to working for companies whose products never see the light of day. Products whose ideas are great, but the company itself has very little direction or focus and so customers are few and far between.

It's been an interesting transition to work for a company where the product not only matters, but is an important part of people's lives. In a nutshell, one of our main products is the pivotal component used by a major telecommunications carrier for routing all SMS/MMS (picture messages).

So, an interesting thing happened at work today. We received a customer complaint from a small telecom provider that "close to 100% of their queries failed in the first hour of January 1."

Yup, you guessed it. All those texts/picture messages that everyone sends at exactly midnight on New Year's caused our application to stop working for other customers since the traffic was so high for the major telecom company. We're still trying to figure out (from an application/infrastructure point of view) what exactly happened, but the increased traffic is something we've never seen (at least not to that degree). Personally, I'm surprised that the application didn't crash.