Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

It's my 5 year anniversary of blogging on Dreamwidth. Oh, I've been blogging longer than that.... I started on LiveJournal over 14 years ago. (My first post was very in media res.) And I do still blog on LiveJournal. I cross-post (manually 😡) to both.

Having a shorter history on Dreamwidth makes it easier to pull recent statistics from there. For example, I know from my profile I've posted 3437 blogs in 5 years and 646 in the past 12 months. That's an average of 1.77 posts per day this past year, down from 1.92 last year. Yeah, this year has been a bit slower for me in terms of writing than years past. I've remarked on various reasons why. Those reasons range from dispiriting things happening (including just being sick) to engaging in fewer activities than normal because of an injury to just not even caring. 😰 But hey, enough melancholy.

One thing I enjoy using these anniversaries to do is checkpoint what I've written about. For starters, here are the Top Five topics I've written about in 5 years on Dreamwidth:

Top Topics, Past 5 Years

Rank	Tag	Uses
1	In Beauty I Walk	537
2	Planes Trains and Automobiles	468
3	TV	279
4	Waterfalls	274
5	Weather	259

A few thoughts on this list:

• The tags "In Beauty I Walk" and "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles" remain at the top of the list. That's appropriate as those are the foundational themes of my blog.


• I feel a little sad that TV has rocketed up to #3. Last year it came in at #6. I have mixed feelings about it because I'm thinking, Didn't I have anything better than TV to write about? But on the other hand, I did watch more TV this year than in the past. Not that that's even a lot. More on that later...


• Likewise, Weather seems like a lame thing to have on the leader board. I mean, people talking about the weather is kind of insipid. Blogging about it seems like the same. But the Weather tag got a lot of use this year because there were simply so many times that weather became a factor in something I wanted to do— sometimes as an opportunity, but most often an obstacle. And many times it was extreme weather I was writing about— which I call out is happening more frequently, and will continue to happen more frequently, because of human-caused climate change.


• I am satisfied that Coronavirus has fallen off the list. Last year it ranked #4, by this year it dropped all the way to #9 on the list of what I've written about over the past 5 years.

Now let's look at what I wrote about in the past 12 months:

Top Ten Topics, Past 12 Months

Rank	Tag	Uses
1	Planes Trains and Automobiles	123
2	Job	77
3	In Beauty I Walk	71
4 (tie)	No Rest for the Wicked	67
4 (tie)	TV	67
6	Taking it Easy	66
7	Dining Out	64
8	Better Call Saul	51
9	Waterfalls	50
10	Sales	47

A few remarks on Top Ten:

• Planes, Trains, and Automobiles climbed from 2nd place to 1st this year while In Beauty I Walk dropped from 1st to 3rd. I'm not sure what this swapping of places indicates.... Perhaps that I spent more time flying/driving than actually walking the past 12 months. 😂


• Job leapt up 8 places, from #10 to #2. That's not surprising as I had more than usual to say about my current job over the past 12 months— which included not just one but two troubling layoffs. Though I wasn't dismissed in either layoff, both prompted my thinking about when it'll be time for me to bow out.


• Better Call Saul roared onto the Top 10 list this year, coming from zero up to 51 posts. That helped propel TV up to the #4 spot. I actually don't watch much TV overall. Other than finishing Breaking Bad and watching all of Better Call Saul I watched barely any TV the past 12 months.

Here's the Second Ten list. I'll detail it out to show some where some topics that dropped off last year's Top Ten list landed as well as some topics that almost made it this year.

Second 10 Top Topics, Past Year

Rank	Tag	Uses
11	Being Sick Sucks	46
12	Weather	45
13	Around Home	41
14	Family	39
15	Pool Life	37
16	Road Trip!	36
17	WTF?	35
18	Italy	34
20 (tie)	Canada	32
20 (tie)	D'oh!	32

Some remarks on Topics #11-20:

• Being Sick Sucks climbed 4 spots this year, to #11. If it weren't for all the problems at my job it would've made the top 10. 🤮 And that's sad because who wants to see being sick on a Top Ten list? But the tag got a lot of uses the past 12 months. In that time I got Covid, my wife suffered a month-plus of a stomach virus that might have been a case of Norovirus the doctors refused to test for, and just recently my wife had foot surgery. It's been a shit year, health-wise.


• Weather actually dropped 8 slots this year, from #4 to #12. The sad thing is that's not because extreme weather and its harmful effects, driven largely by climate change, have lessened this year vs. last, but because with us Being Sick so often we've been less impacted by weather as we've sat inside. 😓 Notice also that Around Home made this year's list. Last year it didn't even place.


• Two country tags made this list. Canada I've visited before but not for a few years. This year we spent an enjoyable week in Canada. And this year we visited Italy for the first time! (I also visited Spain for the first time but so briefly that its tag only got 1 or 2 uses.)

Finally, what happened to Coronavirus? Not only did it drop out of the Top Five Overall, but in the past 12 months I tagged it to a paltry 9 blogs, dropping it all the way down to a tie at 69th place for the year. I'd say "Good riddance!" except most of those 9 posts about Coronavirus were about me getting Covid-19 last December. 😳 So now hopefully it's good riddance!

Napa Trade Show blog #4
On break in my room - Tue, 9 Sep 2025, 2pm.

Today the vendor part of the trade show kicked off. Yesterday was arrivals and was also a training day for people who wanted classes from the main sponsor. Plus a chance for our team to enjoy dinner together before everyone's worn out from long days.

I was up early today for internal meetings from 7 until 8:30 then walked over to the trade show at 9. It's so convenient being in the same hotel as the show— and that hotel not being a Las Vegas mega-resort with 3,000 rooms in multiple towers where getting from a sleeping room to a conference room entails a walk of a mile engulfed by clouds of 25 years of accumulated second-hand cigarette smoke.

Right now I'm back at my room taking a break after lunch. It's been a slow start at the booth today. Why slow? Frankly, because of poor planning by the conference organizer.

I got to the booth at 9 today... and it was pretty much dead. It was dead until after 12pm because the keynote speeches were running. We knew the keynotes would be going and they'd suck all the attention away from the vendor area. But the keynotes all ran long, gobbling up the breaks between sessions when attendees might come out to visit us. The physical layout of the show disfavored us, too.

Yes, it's important for a show to support its vendors. We vendors help sponsor the show! We're all paying money to be here. ...And I don't just mean spending money on salaries and travel costs. We're paying fees in the five figure range directly to the host company just to be here. That's in addition to what we pay the hotel for our rooms, the construction team for assembling the booth, and all the travel costs of the staff. In return conference organizers need to treat the vendors well.

What does it take to treat vendors well? Give the attendees reasons to visit us. Put ample break times in the schedule for attendees to browse the vendors exhibit area. Put the free snacks and drink in the vendor area, so there's extra reason to come by. Put the lunch and dinner either in the vendor area or on the other side of us, so attendees have to walk past us.

So far today these show organizers have not done the above. There have been no breaks for attendees to come visit us. Everyone's running long on presentations— one ran 30 minutes over— and they're just slotting the next speaker immediately after the previous. Then at lunch today, lunch was in the opposite direction from where we vendors are. People had no reason to walk past our displays. In fact, worse than no reason they specifically had reason not to go near us— because we were in the opposite direction and nobody had extra time because the schedule was still 15 minutes behind.

Now, you might scoff at supporting vendors at the show as the tail wagging the dog. People are here for the show, right? We're just the advertisers everyone would be happier ignoring. But like advertisers in commercial TV, we're paying to help support the show. We're here because we want the opportunity to talk to prospective customers. And we have metrics. We measure the number of contacts in the booth ("raw leads") as well as the quality of conversations ("qualified leads"). And when those metrics are low, especially the qualified leads score, we stop sponsoring the show.

This is our third year at this show. The past two years it was very productive for us. This year, unless things turn a massive 180° later today, may be our last at this show.

Every year around the new year I do a variety of retrospectives about the year just finished. Several of those are about travel, as that's the main theme of this blog and one of the things I most enjoy in life. My travel for 2024 ran right up to within a few hours of the New Year... when I returned from a great both fun and frustrating trip to Panama in the evening on December 31.

Here are Five Things about my travel in 2024:

1. I traveled 94 days and 81 nights in 2024. At times this year I fretted I wasn't getting out enough, that I was traveling less than last year, but these overall figures just slightly edge out 2023's totals of 92/81. It's not at the level of the 115 days I traveled in 2019, the last full year pre-pandemic... though the difference is largely in work travel. More on that below.
2. Over 80% of my travel was leisure. That's up even from last year's 75% and is a huge shift from 10-15 years ago when job travel was the majority of my time away from home. The shift in the ratio is due partly to fewer business trips and partly to making more leisure trips. There's a big element of intentionality in the latter; we've got to plan to spend time traveling. And generally we do, though not always as much as we'd like. For example, we didn't travel as much in the summer this past year as we usually do. It's not just that there was no big trip but there weren't even many weekend getaways. Partly that was due to weather patterns but also partly it was due to us being less aggressive about making trips happen for a few months.
3. Business travel patterns have fundamentally changed. Business travel has only partly came back after Coronavirus. Trade shows are in full swing again. That's what most of my business travel this year involved. In-person visits to customers remain much slower than pre-pandemic. It's because people just don't work in the (same) office anymore. Despite widely publicized "RTO" (return to office) mandates, the kinds of customers I call on work in-office maybe one day a week. They prefer not to make a special trip into the office just to meet a vendor when they feel they can get everything they need in a videoconference. Moreover, with highly distributed teams being the norm, us traveling to any one customer site for a meeting means there are almost always key people who need to join remotely from across the country— or halfway around the world. Thus most meetings are virtual by customer request.
4. I flew 54,559 miles in 2024. That's a step up from last year's 47,500 and the most since I've flown since 61k in 2017 though nowhere close to the 150k+/year I flew back in the late 00s/early 10s when I was a globe-trotting business traveler. Still, with most of this year's miles being leisure trips I'm content being slightly less of a globe trotter. Though as I shift into semi-retirement mode imminently I hope actually to do a bit more globe trotting— but now for leisure!
5. Bucket List items checked off: 3 🪣✔. In the past 12 months I made progress on all three of my travel bucket lists. One of them I completed: visiting all 50 states and DC. I finished that up with our trip to Alaska in June. While in Alaska I also visited one more US national park, Kenai Fjords National Park, upping my count to 53/63. And I visited two more foreign countries, New Zealand and Panama, bringing my tally to 23 countries.

More 2024 retrospectives to come.

Recently I've been writing about the use of metrics in the workplace, especially the pitfalls of using them poorly or simplistically. The pitfall I'm writing about in this chapter is how when a measure becomes the objective it ceases to be a good measure.

This is often called Goodhart's Law (Wikipedia link), based on the writings of a British economist who challenged UK economic policy in the 1970s:

"Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes."
-- Charles Goodhart, 1975

The adage was later generalized to other areas of policy, especially once stated in the less dry terms I used above. (That restatement was published by Marilyn Strathern in 1997.) But as it applies to the use of measures in business, or even in government policy, there's an earlier observation that states the problem even better, Campbell's Law:

"The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."
-- Donald T. Campbell, 1969

Campbell's formulation is a bit dry and academic, too, so let me offer my own restatement: When a system focuses on simple measures, there's risk people will game the system.

Gaming the system is what happened when salesperson "Missy" scheduled bullshit sales calls to earn bonuses and accolades, as I described in a previous blog. Her behavior was a corruption of what the company intended to achieve, which was to increase sales and reward people who contributed to that. Instead Missy contributed nothing to sales, and wasted other people's time in the process, and collected extra pay for it.

It's worth noting that not all instances of gaming the system are as harmful as Missy's. Sometimes employees game the system but only cheat themselves. I've seen plenty of instances in sales, for example, where employees are asked to complete a small bit of training and fake their way through it. This has often happened when pressure is applied through management. Managers are held to account for 100% of their staff completing the task. It becomes a statistic displayed on the screen at weekly meetings of the management team in front of senior executives. Managers then turn to their employees and say things like, "Just get the green check-mark" -- putting the emphasis on securing the indicator of success instead of absorbing the training and learning from it to actually become more successful at the job.

So, do witty sayings like Goodhart's Law and Campbell's Law mean that all metrics are doomed? Hardly. They're really arguments that poor or simplistic metrics, and excessive focus on single metrics as indicators of success, cannot replace comprehensive understanding of actual success.

I'm thinking again about metrics in the workplace. I'm specifically referring to metrics on human work. For example, "How many tasks did each person on the team complete last week?" "What's the average time for a person to do X?" "What percentage of their time is this person/this team spending on category Y?"

It's not a new thought, as I've dealt with business metrics for most of my career. I've even studied them in school as far back as the late 1980s. Plus, the idea of applying modern observation and statistics to how people do things in business dates back to the late 19th century. Metrics aren't exactly new.

But while metrics in business aren't new, often it sure does feel like everybody's just figuring them out for the first time. That's surprising to me because when I was learning about the science of process measurement in the 1980s, a lot of the pitfalls of collecting statistics on people's work were already known. They'd already been known of, and studied, for 50 years. But here we are 30+ years later and it seems 98% of everybody clamoring for metrics has no idea.

I figure the reason for that is that collecting metrics and viewing analytics reports is trivially easy now. So much of our work is managed through computer software. With the computer already in the loop, metrics fall out practically for free. Anyone can suddenly get reams of data and colorful charts. But what do those charts mean? What are the limits of usefulness, accuracy, and predictive power behind the colorful lines, boxes, and pie wedges? When metrics were kind of a specialty, you'd have a person educated in the field to set up, collect, and interpret the data. You'd have an expert with the numbers. Now any noob can get numbers, which means any noob can suddenly feel confident their novice opinion is correct because they've got data.

It's like a case of "Ask, and ye shall receive." After I posted earlier today about the increasing number of 401(k) millionaires and noted that that widely-reported news story only describes the top 2% of the population and doesn't say anything about how well the average American is saving for retirement, I see another article pop up in my newsfeed— this one also from Yahoo! Finance— about the median 401(k) balance (29 Feb 2024). This article shares data from another big brokerage, Vanguard, about the mean and median retirement account balances in 2023, broken down by age range:

Age	Average Account Balance	Median Account Balance
Under 25	$5,236	$1,948
25-34	$30,017	$11,357
35-44	$76,354	$28,318
45-54	$142,069	$48,301
55-64	$207,874	$71,168
65+	$232,710	$70,620

* I've copied the numbers directly from the Yahoo! Finance article cited above and cleaned up the formatting with a table

These figures, especially the median figure, are much more insightful into how the average American is saving for retirement. (As an aside, it's not surprising that the mean average is much higher than the median. I've noted before that mean and median are often very different when discussing wealth.) The news is way different from any kind of champagne cork popping about how many 401(k) millionaires there are. In these numbers we see that ordinary Americans at or near retirement age lack even one-tenth that much wealth.

It's been a while since I've checked in on stats about my blogging. I track metrics mostly out of curiosity but also because long ago I set goals and I like to see how I'm doing compared to my own predictions/expectations.

One thing about setting goals is that I rarely set just a goal. I set a multiplicity of goals. Sometimes it's based on multiple time intervals, like "In 3 months", "In 6 months", and "In 12-18 months". Other times it's a bracket of expectations; low, medium, and high. I used a bracket for my blogging goals:

• Minimum: Blog at least once a day
• Target: Average 1.5 blogs/day
• Stretch: Average 2 blogs/day

How have I been doing recently? Let me start with a chart since I haven't shared one of these since last July.



The chart shows the average daily number of blogs, month by month for the past 14 months.

As you can see from the chart I've been well above my minimum goal of 1/day the whole time. ...Well, if you read the goal as averaging 1/day I'm well above it. What the chart doesn't show is whether I actually blogged every day within a given month. A glance at my monthly table of contents for February shows that I missed 2 days this past month. Those were because of my bouts with sickness— yes, bouts, plural— when I just didn't feel like writing.

You can see in the chart I'm also steadily above my middle target of 1.5/day. A few months, including February weren't far above that mark, while others were. I've beaten my stretch goal of 2/day half the time— 7 out of the past 14 months.

What makes one month busier for blogging than another? Mainly travel, as I've noted before. Last September my gonzo tally of 84 posts (2.8/day average) was because of not one but two adventuring trips. In January I came close to the 2/day average on catching up with blogs from our fantastic trip to Australia in late December. In February I haven't traveled much; just a business trip, and business rarely inspires as many blogs as adventure. Thus it's been a slower month.

It's time to get our Nissan Xterra 4x4 smogged. In California all vehicles have to pass an air pollution, aka smog, check every 2 years starting at 8 years of service. (There's an exemption for cars produced before 1976.) Our Xterra is now almost 12 years old. I drove it to a test station today.



Unlike last time (2 years ago) there was no drama this time. The test was done in about 5 minutes. We passed on the first try. I've reused the pic from 2 years ago, though. 😅

Our Xterra turns 12— that's the anniversary of our purchase, anyway— in August. Currently the car has just shy of 120,000 miles on the odometer. It'll be a little over 120k by the time the anniversary day rolls around.

10k miles per year (120k ÷ 10 years) is not a lot on average. Federal Highway Administration statistics suggest the average car is driven about 14,300 miles a year. Sure, many vehicles in the US are driven way less than that, including way less than our 10k. But those are typically cars that are driven only on occasion. They're third cars, collector cars, recreational vehicles, cars owned by people who live in cities and rely mostly on transit, etc. Our Xterra is a daily driver. It's just that with mostly remote work for 7 of the past 8 years I haven't logged many commuting miles. Indeed, our mileage in recent years is below the car's 10k lifetime average. In the past 2 years we've driven it only about 15k.

This month I've set a new blogging record for myself. I posted a whopping 84 entries in May, a rate of just over 2.7 per day. That eclipses my previous record tally of 81 in August '22 and edges out my old posts-per-day record of 2.67 in September '20.

A few reflections on this 84 post blitz, in the form of Five Things:

• As usual (for when I blog heavily) much of it was driven by travel. Two-thirds of my posts were related to trips I took in May... or was catching up on from April.


• Yes, May was a gonzo month for travel. I came off a big, triple-jump trip at the end of April and had four more trips this month. Yes, I'm tired from all the travel. Also yes, I want to go out again soon because the prospect of working from my desk for several weeks seems mind numbing. 😰


• Posting an average of nearly 3 times a day takes planning. On days when I posted 3 or even 4 journals I had written a lot of the material ahead of time, often the day before but sometimes more. For example, I started writing this post 5 days ago.


• Writing posts in advance is easy on LiveJournal but not on Dreamwidth because Dreamwidth doesn't support scheduled posts. I still had to click 'Post' every time. That's a nuisance. It makes it hard to spread out posts across the day. I try to avoid posting them too close together in time but sometimes it's unavoidable.


• In terms of most used tags, coronavirus still holds the #2 spot on Dreamwidth (2.5 years of history) and a distant #3 in my fuller, 10+ year history on LiveJournal. Though with this month's strong return to traveling vs. thinking about disease, Coronavirus could soon drop a notch in both rankings. We can only hope it continues to fade into the distance in the rearview mirror.

A few news organizations this week have picked up the story that smoking rates have dropped in the US. The source of the story is the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) from 5/5/23. The MMWR is a fairly wonky weekly report. It sport no pretty charts or infographics. It's fully of stuffy, stilted language. The references it cites are research papers or abstracts that are even harder to read. But the MMWR can't be ignored because it's where important health news breaks. For example, it's where national awareness of AIDS started 40 years ago.

Alas the good news on smoking is not earth shattering. Rates are down only very slightly— and that's for smoking cigarettes. Use of e-cigarettes actually increased. And the "new" data reported are from 2021. Still, it's interesting to see what the picture of smoking in the US is. Here are Five Things:

1. Overall the use of any tobacco product (include e-cigs) is 18.7%. Use of lighted tobacco products (cigs, cigars, etc.) is 14.5%.


2. The breakdown by sex is startling. Tobacco use is far more prevalent among men than women. Use of any tobacco product is 24.1% for men, 13.6% for women. Lighted tobacco use is 18.2% of men, 11.1% of women.


3. Older adults seem more likely to smoke than younger adults... though some of that could be that the smoking age was increased to 21 by federal law a few years ago. And among seniors (age 65+) the rates are basically half those of middle-age adults.


4. Smoking tracks inversely with education level. Those with only a high school diploma or GED are 3-4x as likely to smoke as those with a post-graduate degree. (This is not at all surprising to me.)


5. Per a separate report linked in the MMWR that breaks out smoking rates by state California remains the second least smoky state in the US. Our rate of 11.2% is beaten only by Utah's 9%. Go Mormons! The smokiest state is West Virginia, at 25.2%. Note: these state level numbers are from 2018.