Yesterday morning she passed way - Sarah Leora Tolman Hinton - she lived a long and wonderful life - 86 years. How grateful I am for her and the wonderful legacy she has left for me to look up to. My grandpa passed away just a little more than 6 years and she hasn’t ever truly been the same since.

As I have thought about her and my grandpa over the last day I have been trying to figure out how to describe them and their lives and do it any kind of justice. Last night I went to a Church fireside about “Simple Abundance” - in today’s world of never having enough stuff - simple and abundant rarely go together - we always want more stuff and that satisfies us for about two minutes and then we are ready to move on to something else. And usually someday at some critical point in our life we realize how worthless that effort has been and how we wished we have spent more time on the stuff that really hangs around - family, memories, people. My Grandpa and Grandma must have realized that early on because they lived the good life for seemingly their whole life - family, people, and experiences were always more important than possessions.

Another phrase that came to mind was “Quiet Magnificence”. Their lives were spectacular in a seemingly unspectacular way. My Grandpa was a store manager, postmaster, served in WWII, gardener extraordinaire (how we loved coming to his house in summer to can peaches, applesauce, etc…), and plenty of other things I am sure I just haven’t read about yet! My Grandma was a teacher, mother of 8, served faithfully in a variety of church responsibilities, and family genealogist. They raised 8 wonderful kids who married 8 wonderful people. Their kids became Educators, Accountants, and Engineers. Those 8 kids have raised some 50 grandkids that have started to become Educators, Doctors, Engineers, Teachers, and a host of other things. They were moral people - they loved America and my Grandpa served in the military as did some of my uncles. They believed that America stood for freedom and morality. They were concerned about the moral abyss that we seemed to be sliding into where we tolerate everything and stand for nothing. They were kind, loving, caring people who believed in community. They are the epitome of what made America good.

My grandma and grandpa were good at keeping journals and wrote their life histories. They compiled the life histories of their ancestors as well. So I have access to a treasure trove of information about my heritage that tells me what it means to be a Hinton, Durfee, Cox, Tolman, and host of others. So now the quest is mine they have fought the good fight and truly lived spectacularly - what will I do with their legacy? I simply hope to live worthy of it.

It is a common joke at Intel about how Excel is used to run the company - in my experience that often doesn’t seem to be very far from the truth. I have been evaluating Office 2007 recently and have found a lot to like about it. The new UI was expecially nice and it seemed in my limited use to make it “easier” to do things. The only downside was that while I love the enhancements to Outlook - the thing isn’t stable enough to use for long periods of time - at least for me.

Okay - back to Excel - in 2007 - they are introducing the concept of tables in Excel - this link has a great screenshot tutorial/overview of the capability. Basically the idea is that when building formulas and calculated columns you no longer have to use cell references, but you can use columns names outlined in a header row. So if you have two columns named Out_Date and PrevOut_Date - you could add a third column called Cycletime which took Out_Date - PrevOut_Date as the formula - no A3, B7, etc.. References.

 Working for Intel has been a lesson in humility the past year or so especially as AMD has really kicked sand in our face. It was great to read Tom’s Hardware ‘s review of the soon to be released Conroe processor - http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/07/14/core2_duo_knocks_out_athlon_64/ . Now I realize the fight is far from over and hope that our chip designers (I develop software for the manufacturing side of the house) continue to crank sweet new processors out. But the bet the company made over the last two years to move to the Core architecture is starting to pay off. You combine that with a much needed repurposing (and resizing) and hopefully we’ll be better positioned to be the tech leader going forward.

David Anderson has an interesting post about a book he recently read that suggests “In flat structures with highly empowered, self-organizing teams (Farson calls these highly participative teams) the team members will tend to attack and weed out the strongest (or stronger) member(s), often the leader. In hierarchical structures, with command and control structures, the members will tend to attack and weed out the weaker members.” David then makes some conclusions about what this would mean if it were true for Agile development teams (which tend to be more flat than hierarchical). He suggests that if the book’s author is correct than team membership would be better served to be grouped according to technical ability (with the groups being based on like ability) rather than spreading the weaker technical members around.

At Intel I am not sure how I see this playing a part – our culture is hierarchical by nature and so even in the Agile teams command and control structures exist. Also it becomes a little more difficult because you always have to factor in politics into team dynamics at companies as large as Intel. Weaker technical people may be much better at playing the politics and that muddies things because in a lot of cases weaker technical skills can be masked by playing a good political game.