Managing Expectations

I got a support call the other day from a customer -- they hadn't yet received their license file, and were wondering where it was. In these days of instant online purchases, I suppose I might wonder too. How come it takes so long to get a license file? For new readers, this might come as a surprise, but Quma is a one-man operation... and for most of Quma's existence, it's been a part-time operation as well. As a result, I have to make tradeoffs when it comes to running the business. Among those tradeoffs is the balance between development, and business process automation. Where will my time best be spent? So far, it hasn't made much sense to automate the order processing side of things because there are not that many orders. So, each order is manually entered into our order database, and each license file is created 'by hand' using tools I wrote to generate the license files. Since Quma is a part-time occupation, those orders get processed in the evening.

I hesitated to compose this entry, but one management activity that has merit is the management of expectations. From my perspective, I think I'm fairly accessible for support issues, and am responsive to support requests, etc. But my perspective may not be the same as someone who is expecting something that I cannot provide... so in the hopes of managing expectations...:

In general, I respond to e-mail support requests from anyone within 24 hours. Precedence is given to customers, but sales support is available. Orders are processed within 24 hours, with the caveat that I can only process an order after I receive it. Sometimes NorthStar and/or RegSoft are slow in forwarding orders to me which can lead to delays. If you need support, I much prefer e-mail to phone support. If you do call, you'll typically be reaching me at my day job. I won't be in front of a computer, and so may not be able to provide a useful answer from memory... so please use e-mail if you can. The forums are useful, but you need to email me in order get approval to post to the forums -- I do this to prevent forum spam, which would otherwise be a major waste of my time.

The predator is an optimist

Evolution almost requires that predators be optimists, and explorers. How else could they survive? This insight occurred to me after watching some nature show that had a lion of some sort chasing prey -- and failing in the attempt... only to try again, and again, until successful. The lion, by nature, must persevere or die. They must look forward to success and plan for success, even if they often fail.

This observation offers an explaination for human's possession of an optimistic nature. Often our optimism is completely unfounded, but it is our nature to be optimistic, because failure is an option, but continuous failure is not.... If at first you don't succeed, try, try again... look on the bright side.... etc.

A Vacation to the Greek Islands

For vacation this year, we went to the Greek islands -- Santorini (5 nights), Naxos (5 nights), and then Athens (3 nights). We thoroughly enjoyed it. The views on Santorini... well, check out these pictures. We'll probably go back again next year. On Santorini, we stayed at Anastasis apartments. Highly recommended -- the staff is warm and friendly, and the views are great. On Naxos, we stayed here. It's not as up-scale as the place on Santorini, but the staff is friendly, and the location is great -- a short walk into Naxos town -- yet far enough from town to be quiet in the evenings. Overall, a relaxing time... that we hope to repeat (with some different islands) next year.

Make it easy to do the right thing...

One of the goals of good user interface design is to make it easy to do the right thing, and conversely, difficult to do the wrong thing. So the goal at Quma is to always make the right thing to do the easy thing to do. I don't always succeed, but that goal is usually in mind when adding some new feature, etc.

This same rule-of-thumb can apply also to institutions: good institutions make it easy to do the right thing, and difficult (or costly) to do the wrong thing.

Things go bad when you make it easy to do the wrong thing since most people choose to do the easy thing whether it's right or wrong. In software, there are typically few horrible consequences if the easy thing to do is the wrong thing to do – though I'm sure there are counter examples. In an institutional setting, making it easy to do the wrong thing can produce evil results. Among the horrific examples of this – imagine that you're a German citizen living during the WWII era. You're not some leader type, you're just a common Joe, trying to stay alive. The Nazis come to power, you're drafted, and now find yourself assigned to guard duty at Auschwitz. You thank your lucky stars you don't have to fight the Russians on the Eastern front. And then you're given the order to herd the Jews into the ovens. Here is an institutional setting where the easy thing to do (obey the order) is the wrong thing to do. Very few of us possess the moral fortitude to disobey – How many of the guards in the concentration camps knew they were doing the wrong thing, but chose to do the easy thing instead? The easy choice was to commit genocide; the difficult choice was to disobey and face an uncertain future -- either immediate death, or a trip to the Eastern front. The institutional framework was all screwed up.

A less horrific example from today's economic headlines – many bankers/lenders were aware of the sub-prime lending problem, and yet many of them chose to do the easy thing – continue to make bad loans. The bankers are not particularly stupid or evil – they are like most of the rest of us: when faced between a choice to do the right thing, vs. doing the easy thing, they chose the easy thing. The thing wrong with this picture is that the easy thing to do is the wrong thing to do. I'm not sure I could articulate all the wrong turns made that have put our instutions in their present state -- where in so many instances the easy thing to do is the wrong thing to do -- but it bears thinking about. If we're to ever get out of our current mess, one important step on the road to recovery will be to alter the design of our institutions so that doing the right thing is the same as doing the easy thing.

Kindle 2.0 first impressions

I got my Kindle 2.0 today. It was supposed to arrive on Monday, but the Post Office did something wonderful -- they delivered it a day early. I am pleased.

Some first impressions:

1. It is smaller than I expected. I know I could have taken the published dimensions and created a cardboard cutout to mimic its size to see what to expect -- but who has time for that. No complaints about the size -- just that it really is only a little bigger than your standard size paperback book.
   
2. It has a nice heft to it. It feels sturdy.
3. It takes some getting used to the difference between reading on the Kindle vs. reading a real book. Well duh.... but it will take a while to get used to the differences. My current expectation is that there will be some changes to the way people read a Kindle book vs. the way that you read a paper book.
4. The text-to-speech is the best I have heard.... not that I have made a study of products in that category, but the speed is good, and it is easy to understand.
5. At this point, I think the biggest thing I will like about the product is that it will let me carry around a whole bookshelf of books. The navigation between books is an area that could be improved -- ideally the device would have a touch screen -- but I think I'll be able to learn navigation tricks to make it second nature.
6. I put a couple of .pdf books on to the device (an easy enough thing to do, though it does require an e-mail round-trip to amazon) and -- aside from the footnotes -- the translation to Kindle format worked well.
7. For avid best-seller readers (I am not), I can imagine the immediate gratification of being able to get your hands on a bestseller in just 60 seconds will be the most addictive part of the Kindle experience.
8. My Kindle came pre-configured with my Amazon account, and a 'personal' thank-you letter from Jeff Bezos on the device; along with a book that I had ordered while the device was being shipped. Pretty cool, and pretty painless. Nice that they pay attention to those kinds of details. It's like a book appliance.... you just turn it on, and it works.
9. What will the secondary market for Kindle's look like?

Conclusion -- it's a thumbs up...

The Jean Dixon Effect

As our economic meltdown continues, it's worth stepping aside for some perspective.

I have no idea where the markets are heading. Professional pundits are paid to make predictions about where the markets are headed. Some of those pundits will actually be correct. Does this mean they genuinely understand the dynamics of the situation, or are they no better than the broken clock that is correct twice a day? I don't know the answer to that either.

I find it helpful to put pundits in perspective by invoking what I have come to call the 'Jean Dixon Effect'. For those of you old enough to recall, Jean Dixon  was a psychic who predicted the assassination of Kennedy. She became famous after Kennedy was shot, and some folks then began to think that she actually knew what she was talking about.

When markets move this way or that way, there will always be some market analyst who was on the correct side of that move. The talking heads then trot out their new found expert to get that expert's opinion on where the market will go in the future. Will that new expert be correct or incorrect? The Jean Dixon Effect causes us to view that expert with a less critical eye than we otherwise might.

As I think about this some more, we are also victims of the converse of the Jean Dixon Effect -- we ascribe misplaced expertise to those whose actions have demonstrated failure after failure. It's almost embarrassing to look at the predictions of soundness and stability earlier offered up by some of our leaders. Witness the early testimony of Paulson and Bernanke (say back in March of this year) on how fundamentals were just fine, etc., etc. The converse of the Jean Dixon Effect allows us to listen to these guys and still grant them some level of credibility.

The big question that I don't know the answer to: What will the Chinese do?

Back from Japan

Hmmm. I don't usually go 3 months between entries here.

In any case, we're back from a 15 day vacation to Japan. Most folks don't think of Japan as a vacation destination, and we didn't either. But our daughter was completing a semester abroad program in Nagoya, and wanted to finish up her stay over there by touring the country. So we headed to Japan to see the sights, and discover.... Heated toilet seats!

We flew into Nagoya, where we spent 3 nights at the Hilton. We visited with our daughter's host family -- they were gracious enough to treat us to a genuine Japanese eating experience at a Japanese restaurant -- complete with kimono dressed waitresses, grass mat floors, cook at the table boiled beef, and food, and food, and food.

Nagoya does not really cater to the tourist, but it was a good place to recover from the 13 hour direct flight from Detroit. We went to our daughter's 'graduation' ceremony -- and understood not a word of the presentation.

From Nagoya, we took the bullet train to Kyoto. The bullet train was kinda cool. They didn't have any kind of speedometer so there was no direct way to tell how fast the train was going, but it seemed really fast. In Kyoto, we rented a small 2 bedroom apartment that was less than 100 meters from the bus stop. The bus stop was just across the street from the local grocery store. For our typical day, we'd eat breakfast at the apartment, then head out to explore the various shrines/temples that Kyoto is famous for. We'd eat lunch out, then head back to the grocery store where we'd buy our evening meal to eat-in at the apartment. The bus system in Kyoto was easy to navigate and convenient.

From Kyoto, we spent almost an entire day traveling to the Japanese Alps, where we stayed at a 'Japanese plan' hotel in Kamikochi -- they provided breakfast and dinner, and we were on our own for lunch. The mountain view from our room was excellent. I'm not a big fan of Japanese food, but the hotel's efforts were worthwhile -- I ate sushi for the first time. Japanese breakfast is quite different than western fare.... lots of fish and rice. By the 3rd day I'd grown accustomed to it, and had grown much more proficient with chop sticks. The mountains at Kamikochi are beautiful and rugged. The biggest surprise while there were the crowds. Bus load after bus load of Japanese tourists traversed the 1-hour ride up the 2-lane road to Kamikochi where they would then flood the hiking paths along the river. Imagine being in the wilderness of a Yosemite with crowds like those of a Time Square and you're getting a partial picture of what it was like. The crowds weren't really that bad, but there were many, many more people there than I expected -- especially given the challenging drive up to the base of the mountain. We were there mid-week. I'm guessing that weekends are even more crowded.

From Kamikochi, we took the train to Tokyo, where we spent 6 nights. Tokyo is a huge world class city. We stayed at a small apartment west of downtown -- it was a 15 minute train ride from the apartment to Shinjuku train station -- the busiest train station on the planet. For scale, Shinjuku has as many people go through it on a daily basis as the entire population of Baltimore, and then some.... some estimates have as many as 2 million people through that station on a daily basis. Our apartment was right next to the train station, and also right next door to a large 24-hour super market. Though small for Americans accustomed to larger digs, the apartment was very convenient and workable.

In Tokyo, we discovered a great French restaurant: Tete a Tete. I don't remember the train stop as I write this, but it was along the 'Yellow' line, which was the main train that we'd use to go from our apartment to anywhere we wanted/needed to go. The prices were cheap (around $11.00 per person) for a 3 course lunch, including dessert.

We went to a Tokyo Giants baseball game. It was an indoor stadium. Very similar to a game in the US; very family friendly. We visited Akihabara -- a shopping district for electronics that just goes on forever. We visited the National Museum -- their analog to our Smithsonian. It was big, uncluttered, and busy... We took a day trip down to see some shrines in a town south of Yokohama... and we just bopped around Tokyo.

Some cool things that would be good to export from Japan:

1. I really could get used to heated toilet seats.
2. Their trains and public transportation are generally superb. The only delay we ever experienced was the result someone committing suicide by train -- i.e. apparently getting run down by a train is a fairly popular way to commit suicide in Japan... and our trip from Kamikochi to Tokyo was delayed for an hour by one of these suicides.
3. Japanese restaurants have a nice tradition of giving each patron a wet towel before the meal in order to clean your hands.

Another astounding 'good thing' in Japan is the safety and respect for property. This isn't something that can be exported, but to American eyes, it's just amazing to see elementary school kids traveling by themselves on the train system. People park their bicycles without bothering to lock them. The US used to have a culture that provided that kind of environment, and it would be great to see it return, but it's not so simple as installing a heated toilet seat.

Things that could be improved:

1. The Japanese have a completely inscrutable way of composing addresses. On one occasion, we were trying to locate a restaurant described in one of our guide books. We took the train to the general area of the restaurant, and then used the address from the guidebook to ask the locals where to find the restaurant. No one could tell us where the restaurant could be found... we kept trying for perhaps a half hour, and had to give up. All wasn't lost because the restaurant where we ate ate instead more than satisfied... but it was just hugely frustrating to discover that the 'street' address wasn't really very useful in identifying the restaurant's location.
2. Street name signs are scarce. Some American cities also suffer from this problem. In Tokyo, you can walk up to a major intersection, and find that neither street has any kind of sign to tell you the name of the street. This adds to the difficulty in finding your way around.

Overall, I think our trip to Japan was a success. The country was much less foreign than I expected. The people were friendly, the cities were clean, unpolluted, safe, and easy to navigate using public transportation. We've now marked off 'Japan' as a place we need to visit -- it was worth doing.

It always happens with a new release...

Whenever I publish a new product release, I get bug reports that point out problems that have existed for a long time. I suppose this is partly due to the closer scrutiny that a new release gets as users test it to evaluate whether it's worth their time or not. In any case, there are 2 problems that the new 2.1.10 release of QVCS-Enterprise has brought to light:

• In the 'checked in before' and 'checked in after' file filters, things work fine immediately after defining a filter collection that uses either of these two filter types; but fails with a null pointer exception if you try to use that filter collection after restarting the client application.
• In the built-in visual compare tool, the 'ignore case' flag was always ignored... i.e. while you could request that the visual compare ignore case in the compare, it would never ignore case.

Both of these bugs are now fixed in the code base, and the fixes will appear in the next build.

Googling Jim Voris

Occasionally, I'll 'Google' my own name to see what turns up. Lately, when I do this... yikes. (I won't supply the link, but you can try it yourself).

I don't live in Indiana , and as far as I know, I have absolutely no relation to the 'Jim D. Voris' listed as the first hit on Google's search.

The results point out some of the biases built in to the way Google sorts its search results: apparently government sources have a higher ranking that other sources, though it may just be that the page rank of that government site is higher than any of the other lower ranked sites that return hits for 'Jim Voris'.

In any case, for anyone who cares, my middle initial is not 'D'.

Web site refresh

We just refreshed the web site again; the biggest change this time is that the QVCS/QVCS-Pro manual is now online, in .html. You can get to the online documentation from the documentation page.

The plan going forward is to maintain the online documentation, and the product help file. We won't bother to maintain the .pdf file.

Web site refresh

We just refreshed the web site. Please take a look and let me know what you think.

We still have some tweeks, but to my eye, this is a big step in the right direction. A big thanks to my daughter who did most of the work.

Web site refresh coming soon

We're working to create a new look for the web site. I don't have any screen shots that I'd like to share, but I'm guessing the new look will ready sometime this weekend, or next weekend. I'll announce it here of course, and look forward to your comments.

Upgrading to FiOS

I upgraded to Verizon FiOS today. The speed is a bit better than Comcast cable -- one rough test showed a download speed of 7.4 mbs with FiOS versus 2.4 mbs for cable... and FiOS is $10 cheaper per month to boot. A friend has had FiOS for over a year, and heartily recommended it as reliable and fast. The fast part seems to be there -- though it doesn't honestly seem to be that much faster than cable. We'll have to see about the reliability. The guy doing the in-home install noted that there's no power on the stuff outside -- it's just glass, so there's nothing to short out, etc. It comes with a wireless router which was easy to set up... overall a positive experience. Imagine that.

Ignoring Sycophants

Suppose you're some rich/powerful person. How do you prevent being surrounded by sycophants. Communication between two people is difficult and often leads to misunderstanding. Effective communication between different levels of a hierarchy is even more difficult. How does a Bill Gates or a George Bush get an accurate picture of what is really going on?

Almost by definition, they can only talk to people who are already in their orbit... people who may be just as much out of touch with reality. I suppose they must come to rely on gathering information from more impersonal sources -- e.g. reading articles, books, etc. where the author isn't affected by the inclusion of a Bill Gates in the audience. If they rely on advisors instead of impersonal sources, they're likely to be told what they want to hear instead of the truth.

For impersonal sources to offer meaningful criticism, the target of their commentary must be transparent -- i.e. only if they have access to the same general body of data as insiders can they offer informed observations. Whether in government or large corporations, secrets serve to arm insiders with knowledge hidden from general view. Insiders have a vested interest in preserving the shroud of secrecy, since this gives them power to control the debate. A leader surrounded by secrets can rely only on advice from people in on the secret -- a population with a viewpoint guaranteed to be warped by the sycophants it contains.

Effective leaders have figured out this dynamic; less effective leaders have not.

UPDATES: Fix punctuation; fix spelling.

Back from Austin

We're back from a spring trip to Austin, Texas. Spring is a good time to visit Austin -- though I could have done without the tornado watches we endured on our final night in town. We stayed at the Brava House Bed and Breakfast. It's a superb location in a quiet neighborhood just minutes from downtown. The 6th street music scene is a long, but pleasant (1.5 miles) walk. The new marquee Whole Foods market is just a few blocks away, and other eateries are just as convenient. We had a great time exploring Austin, and the surrounding 'Hill Country' area of Texas. Summers there are brutal (all the local admit this to be the case), but this time of year, the weather was perfect.

Austin has Verizon broadband wireless coverage, so it was easy to keep up with e-mail and tech-support issues...

Now it's back to work on the QVCS-Enterprise 2.1 release. I've made the transition internally to using the new 2.1.4 release. I won't be making it public as it is still missing some key features (file delete, directory delete, directory rename, and directory move); but it does have the skeleton of views implemented, and I want to get some mileage on that before the public beta. I want to get file delete implemented before making anything public -- and for that, my current thinking is I'll have a 'technology preview' before the beta. The 'technology preview' will not be feature complete, but it will have the view stuff in place. I'd like to get some user feedback on 'views' sooner rather than later. Will users see it as confusing, or intuitive?

Stricter QVCS forum access

If you want posting access the QVCS support forums (http://qumasoft.ipbhost.com/ ), you'll need to jump through more hoops than in the past (Users who are already forum members won't see any change). For reasons that defy my understanding, QVCS support forums have undergone a sustained spam attack from folks who either want to waste my time (which may be their intent), or have some wild misunderstanding of what kind of message traffic I will allow to appear on a Quma support forum.

If you want to become a forum member, please drop me an e-mail (jimv at qumasoft dot com) as forewarning so I can let your membership application go through. If you are a registered user of any QVCS product, you'll just need to provide your registration ID. If you are not a registered user (why not?), then I'll be happy to let you on the forum if you can persuade me that you are not a bleep bleep spammer.

QVCS-Enterprise 2.0.18, and new box shots

QVCS-Enterprise 2.0.18 is available. You can find more details here. It's been out for a while, but I've only now gotten around to annoucing here on the blog... sorry for the delay, but I've been preoccupied with work on QVCS-Enterprise 2.1, and a short-term consulting gig that I've taken on.

Along the way, to the 2.1 release, I want to dress up the web site a bit, and to that end, a first step is to create some cooler graphics that I can use to represent the 3 QVCS products. I've always liked web sites that show their software products in 'box shots', even though the product is sold electronically... so I began to play around with a tool that would help generate nicely shaded box-shot pictures for the QVCS product line.

In a web search, I found an affordable, and simple to use product called (appropriately enough) Box Shot 3D. The only problem with using this product is that you have to have some artistic talent to create the images that it uses for the front and side of the box.... so I asked my daughter to put together something, and was major league pleased with the results:

How cool is that?

Hopefully, customers will understand that they'll never actually receive a box containing software...

These new box shots will be part of the new look to the web site -- and though it will be a while before the web site update actually happens, I couldn't resist showing these off.

Back from Florida

We're back home from a nice visit with my wife's family. This is the time of year to go to south Florida -- the weather was pleasant, and for whatever reason, the roads were not as crowded as they sometimes are at this time of year.

While there, we goofed off -- enjoyed Charlotte's Web and Dreamgirls.Charlotte's Web was a quiet/good kind of movie. We have the books-on-tape version of the story as read by the author E.B. White -- which is very good. The movie is faithful to the book, and does a good job of capturing the same tone as the book.

Dreamgirls was excellent. The only complaint is that the story would have been even more powerful had it been the true story of the Supremes instead of a fictionalized account. The music was good, but including some of the original tunes would have been real icing on the cake. My suspicion is that the authors/producers of the Broadway version couldn't afford, or couldn't acquire rights to the original story, or to the original tunes. In spite of that, the movie is superb.

I also took the time to read several paperbacks: Roses are Red, Violets are Blue, and The Eternity Artifact... all decent enough, but they don't stand out as books that I will remember.

More American history

The Wall Street Journal recently reviewed and recommended a new World War II historical novel by Jeff Shaara. Our local library bought lots of copies, but they're all checked out... so I opted to try out his 2 volume historical novel about the American revolution. I've finished the first volume (Rise to Rebellion) and have mostly finished the 2nd volume (The Glorious Cause). Both have been well worth my time. I'm not an expert on the facts, but reviews and other books I've read confirm the historical accuracy of the events portrayed in the books. What makes them different from most histories is the novelization of the main characters. This is where historians might have issue with the books' contents: an historian doesn't really know what Washington was thinking when trying to figure out what Howe's next move might be... but Shaara invents those thoughts and weaves them into the events that we do know. The result is something that is much more readable than a standard history book.

My current progress has taken me up through the beginning of 1780. As with other histories of the revolution that I've read, this one confirms the almost miraculous confluence of (now famous) men and events. Would the revolution have succeeded had we not had a Washington, Franklin, Sam Adams, or John Adams? Or on the other side, the mistakes made by Howe, Clinton, King George, et. al.? We'll never know, but the course of human affairs at the time was balanced on a very fine point, and all these actors had a huge impact on the way things turned out.

Technorati tags: Jeff Shaara, Rise to Revolution, The Glorious Cause

California Vacation

Here are a few pictures from our California trip. Click on the thumbnail here to get a bigger version of the picture.

This is from outside Sonoma. There are a lot of grapes in the area, and many wineries. Wine tours and wine tasting is a fun and relaxing diversion. We visited two different wineries in the area, and bought some wine. Because of Maryland's bizarre alcohol laws, we were not able to ask the wineries to ship any wine back home... so we carted a couple of bottles (all we could really manage for transport on the plane back home) with us for the rest of the trip.

I couldn't resist taking a picture of these signs, which welcomes visitors arriving on the ferry from San Francisco. I'm not real sure what a Cholesterol Free Zone is, but now I've been to one. We had a nice lunch in Sausalito overlooking the San Francisco bay. Lunch included good bread with butter (last I checked butter is a good source of cholesterol).... apparently the requirements of a Cholesterol Free Zone don't extend to restaurant menus.

This is the obligatory picture of the Golden Gate Bridge.We took the ferry from San Francisco to Sausalito, and then walked across the bridge from Sausalito to San Francisco. The day was clear and pleasantly cool.

From San Francisco, we headed over to Yosemite. This is me in front of some other folks who are standing on the precipice of a cliff that has a sheer drop of some 1,000 feet or so. When we first approached this vantage point, I crawled on hands and knees to the edge to look over -- and didn't do that again. These are the most impressive cliffs I've ever visited, and quite demanding of respect.... one slip, and you're dead. You can just make out a much needed railing on the edge of the cliff in the distance. You do not want to bring small children or unleashed pets here.

On the trail to Cathedral Lakes (in Yosemite). It had snowed maybe 1/4 inch the evening before. Yosemite is a beautiful park, but their trails are poorly marked compared to other parks I've been in... and their trailheads are not always easy to find. I'm not an outdoors expert, so maybe they make this stuff more difficult to discourage trail use by novices. Seems kinda counter productive. On one evening, when I was checking e-mail in the lodge lobby (where I had 802.11 access), I overheard the increasingly frantic efforts of one member of a group who was trying to determine whether other members of his group had made it off the trail yet. It was already dark, and his friends had apparently taken a wrong trail branch on their way down....easy enough to do since the trails are poorly marked. You've got to have a lot of respect for the wilds when out hiking, and I would not want to be caught unprepared to spend a night outside...

Here I'm pacing off the circumference of this giant sequoia. It was some 60 paces, which translates to 120 - 150 feet, or roughly 40 - 50 feet in diameter. That's a big tree. The giant sequoia's are a natural wonder. If you've never seen one, then put it on your list of things to see before you die. They stand as silent sentinals. The really big ones are old and gnarled and look eternal. After seeing them, it's still really hard to get my head around how big they are. Most impressive.

From King's Canyon and Sequoia National Park, we headed to Death Valley. Here I am at the bottom of Death Valley -- the lowest point in North America. Death Valley is aptly named. It's hard to imagine how anyone during the push west could have survived traversing this place -- yet they did. Thank God for air conditioning. In the summer, the average daytime high temperature is something like 116 degrees (Fahrenheit). The soil temperature gets over 200 degrees. It was actually pretty pleasant for this picture -- in the 70's.

This is looking down on the bottom of Death Valley from a place called Dante's View. From this spot, you can see both the bottom of Death Valley (at some 280 feet below sea level) and Mt. Whitney -- the highest point in the contiguous 48 states (at 14,494 feet). Dante's View is over 5,000 feet so the view you see here is like one you get from an airplane flying 1 mile above the valley floor.... that's a road down there.

From Death Valley, we headed to Las Vegas. I have pictures of Vegas, but won't bother posting them -- Vegas is a well known destination. We stayed in a hotel room on the 35th floor. The room had a balcony, with a decent view of the strip. Our hotel was connected with the MGM Grand casino -- so we could walk from our room into that casino without having to go outside. I'm not into gambling at all -- I just don't see the point, though I can understand how some other folks might find it entertaining. On our last night, we went to see a Cirque de Soleil circus show. I enjoyed it -- there was one act that had these two muscle bound white guys doing slow motion power lifts of each other. My wife and I were impressed -- we could both imagine how much strength was required -- a LOT... and they were smooth, no muscle tremors at all.

California is a big place -- and we just scratched the surface. We'll probably go back again sometime.