So, I'm in Denver.  It all started about a month back, when one of my friends from Flickr decided to crash the local meet-up.  During that, she made the suggestion that I go crash one of her local meet-ups.  So, we coordinated, I requested some time off work, and now I'm in Denver.

I'm not from Denver, I don't know Denver.  The whole of my experience with Denver before this weekend was a layover in the airport.  And that's as far as I got, too -- the airport.  I asked a co-worker who used to live here what the cool places to be were, he basically said "The 16th Street Mall.  Everything's there."  Okay, fair enough.  I fully expect to spend entirely too long walking up and down the mall the next couple days.

But, he didn't suggest any good breakfast joints, so I turned to the Internet. I found a list of a score of places, most of which seemed to focus on brunch or were too far to walk to.  But there were a couple on there that sounded interesting and close.  One of them was my breakfast stop this morning: The Delectable Egg.

It's definitely a local joint, located in some older building.  It's surrounded by other food joints and a tattoo parlor, and it's only a couple blocks from 16th Street.  Walking in, I notice it's very quiet for 8:00 on a Saturday morning.  A couple here, a man there, not really too many people.  Maybe that's just the kind of place Denver is -- everybody's a night owl.  Photographs and other art line the brick walls, making it a gallery in addition to an eatery.

I was seated, then the waiter greeted me with a carafe of water.  Considering I'd been walking for a good 20 minutes to get there (I wandered a bit), this was welcomed.  I then took to the menu.  Many standard things: french toast, omelettes, waffles; you know, all the standard breakfast fare.  There were some lunch items, too (I think there was a burgers section, but I wanted breakfast, so I didn't pay too much attention to it).

I ended up choosing the California Benedict.  It's like standard eggs Benedict, except that the ham is replaced with tomato and spinach, and they add some avocado slices to it.  It also came with potatoes, just the standard cut-up-and-pan-fry kind.  So I set in to wait for my food.  Drank some more water, played around with a self-portrait, admired the art on the walls, and just kind of waited.  Eventually, the waiter comes to tell me that they had a mix-up in the kitchen and that it would be just a little while longer.  That's fine, everyone gets to make mistakes some times.

A few minutes later, I'm presented with a plate.

The food was good.  The potatoes could have used a little more seasoning, but other than that everything was great.  The tomatoes were fresh, the hollandaise pulled all the flavors together.  After I was mostly done with the eggs side, I moved the potatoes in with the sauce and such to give them a little more flavor.

It was a decent meal for a decent price.  I'd probably go back, but I'm not scheduling a return tomorrow.

David Salaguinto, a writer for Microsoft's Office Online has a great web-comic called "Office Offline."  Go check it out, he's much better at it than I am.

It's easy to get caught up in yourself.  After all, there's no one you spend more time with.  But, once in a while, stop to consider how your actions are affecting those around you -- at work, at home, with friends, wherever.  And I'm not talking about the obvious here (if I kick you in the shin really hard, you'll have to go to the doctor-type obvious).  No, I'm talking about the more subtle interactions.  Because you'd be amazed how easily one small mistake on your part can ruin another person's day entirely.

Last night, we had a goal in mind.  One of my team members was going to handle some hardware installation, then I was going to take over and do some of the software-side.  This is client-affecting, so our work has to be done in the middle of the night.  He was supposed to start around 8:30 PM, then call me when he was done.  I figured his part would be about 3-4 hours of work, between everything that had to be done and adding in a gap for the inevitable "Something went wrong" phase, and I wanted to leave myself at least 3 hours to finish up, with a drop-dead time of 6 AM.  This leaves plenty of time to work with, and we had a reasonably speedy retreat plan, in case something we didn't expect came up or we couldn't finish in time.

So, I prepared myself for the late night ahead.  Left a little early, grabbed a coffee on the way home, switched into something a little more comfortable than my stuffy work clothes, and set in for the wait.  I gave him a call around 9:30 to see how things were going, only to find he'd got side-tracked and hadn't even left yet.  That was fine, there was still plenty of time to work with.  I finished up my evening's browsing (yay, Flickr!) and fired up the xbox for some nice distraction.  After a few more hours (around 1), I gave him another call.  He'd run into an issue with something or the other, but he'd worked through that and was ready to really get rolling.  By this time, I figured we wouldn't have enough time for him to finish his part and for me to finish my part.  So, I told him to do his part and execute our rollback plan, and to call me if he ran into anything else.  He finished that up a little before 4 this morning.  This means we did accomplish something, but not everything we'd hoped for.

So, what was the mistake?  Well, the first mistake was in getting side-tracked.  This cost us a good hour and a half or so, which would have been the difference between finishing his part and finishing my part.  The second was in not calling me to let me know he'd run into a problem.  This one doesn't affect the times any (he'd still have to work around the issue, whether he'd called me or not), but it does mean that I could have known staying up longer was a likely pointless activity, only to be repeated the next night.  Maybe I should have called again around 11 or 12, but I was trusting him at least until my "expected time" was up.

But, that's fine, right?  Just a part of the job?  Well, yes, that's why I'm not angry, and why I'm writing a blog nearly no one will read as opposed to bringing it up in front of the office.  I know it made him feel awful, because he hates to fail, living in constant fear that he isn't good enough (if he could get over that, he'd soar), and that's without knowing how it affected me.  I have been sacrificing sleep for the past month and a half already, plus I have challenged myself to limit my coffee trips this year.  So, I've burned sleep and wasted a coffee run.

But, as I said, he feels bad enough already, telling him this won't actually help anything.  Neither will telling the rest of the office.  But I want to vent, and this seems like a good lesson to learn -- every once in a while, look at how your actions affect those around you.  See if there's anything you could have done different, then use that understanding to guide your actions in the future.  I just hope I can live up to these words I've written.

This is probably the last day I'll even be able to consider not being at work for a month.  Yet, here I am, sitting in a meeting, discussing how best to present our product.  I'm almost in tears here.

It's a fairly simple concept - I need a place to dump my thoughts and ideas.  I use Flickr for this a fair amount, but this tends to target more of my photography thoughts than my normal thoughts.  So, here's a place for me to truly rant.  Hopefully, one day, this will be more of a happy place.  For now, it will read more like a vent.

Sadly, I don't have anything more concrete to put up today.  It's late and I need rest before my meeting tomorrow morning.  Go check out my pictures.  Somehow, I got involved in a daily self-portrait project, so there's always fresh content.  There will be more here soon, including a non-default skin.