The Trixie Update

It’s hard to start writing again. After almost nine months off, it’s taking a while for the story juices to start flowing. So the best thing to do is doodle. Just write something until you get where you want to be. Clean it up later, or throw it out. The important thing is just get something down.

Trixie is pretty good at getting something down. Better than I am and most adults I know. This is not a Trixie thing, but something I’ve noticed with all toddlers. In general, they rock at arts and crafts.

I love stuff like that. It’s pretty awesome to watch kids get so absorbed without worrying about the consequences of what they are making. It gets a lot harder once you start learning the rules of art and social pressure starts creeping in. Or even worse if you study art and end up paralyzed because you realize everything has already been done before. Thankfully, 2-year-olds are protected from that kind of knowledge.

Trixie is a machine when it comes to doodle time. I have sometimes just taped down a bunch of sheets of paper to the table and she’ll draw on one, advance, draw some more, advance and so on. Who knows what criteria determine the completion of a sheet? Sometimes she claims she’s drawing something specific, but more often it’s just an exercise to consume resources. The pressing issue for her is not “how does this fit into the social construct of post-modernism”, but rather, “how much glitter glue can be squeezed onto this paper when Daddy is not looking?”

I’m definitely proud of her, and I’ve included two pieces I really like. I forgot to date them, but they were done in the last 2-3 months. (that’s how long I’ve been procrastinating this story). They aren’t necessarily typical pieces. For the handful I’ve kept, literally hundreds (and probably thousands) have been thrown away.

If she saw me dumping them in the trash, I suspect she’d get upset. Otherwise, she doesn’t care a bit what happens after she’s done. We might hang one or two for a while, but it’s not the result that matters. It’s all the process — just being able to zone out and grind a crayon into oblivion for an afternoon.

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Two things I’ve learned in the 23 months since starting Trixie Telemetry LLC (in April of 2004):

1. It’s really hard to do anything else when you’re taking care of a baby/child/toddler
2. I’m extremely bad at estimating launch dates

For almost the first year of the company, I was still taking care of Trixie all the time. That’s when the real progress was made. I could reliably count on writing about 3 or 4 lines of code a week. Extrapolating this work schedule would mean completion of the software some time after Trixie finished college, got married, lived in the Bronx for a couple of years, moved back down to NC, and then had a kid of her own. Add a few more months, say when the kid was 10-11 months old, and then the beta would probably be ready. Probably.

Instead of projecting a launch date in late 2020’s, I clung to the following rather optimistic estimates:

Actual launch March 8, 2006

Some of these launch dates were public, some internal. I stopped projecting after February, which is really too bad because it was fairly close at that point.

Things started moving a little faster after Trixie started part-time, morning school in Feb 2005 (at 18 months old). We launched the Beta two months later in April. I loved the concept of working on the Beta. It’s a constant design-in-progress with real time feedback as soon as you roll out new features.

That’s about the time that stories stopped here on the Trixie Update. It was just too much to juggle, and the dirty little secret is that I was managing another blog — the company beta blog — which racked up hundreds of stories and thousands of comments on its own. I couldn’t do both, so TTU took a hit.

By summer we had moved Trixie up to three-quarter time at school, and things started moving much faster again. Fast enough to fuel more wildly inaccurate launched date estimates. It was at this point that Jenn took a somber tone about the whole project. I acknowledged her tone and solemnly promised we would launch in November.

I’ll spare the excruciating details of the dark months of November and December. But January was a new month in a new year. An excellent developer (James) came on board the project, and started cranking out the missing code we needed to launch. He knocked out a permission based user management and public/guest access scheme which allowed our beta testers to finally share their sites with their friends and family. We wrapped up all the loose ends the next 2 months and finally launched last week.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around the whole thing (and catch up on sleep). I’ve been working on this thing for so long, it’s hard to come down off the programming high. I’ve also been extremely irresponsible in my personal correspondence. I have a stack of letters and emails that date back to last summer. I kept putting things off because I always thought I’d be launching in the next month. I’m going to be working on all that stuff now, but if you emailed/wrote me and didn’t hear back, that’s why.

Thanks to you folks that still visit. I really appreciate it. Even though I wasn’t writing stories, I did feel pressure (good pressure) to do the TPODs. I’m glad I did, because I like looking back on the picture record. And there were times when I was ready to drop the TPODS too because they take about 5-10 minutes to prep every night. And sometimes 5-10 minutes seems like too much time.

Anyway, I think the Trixie Update is back. Thanks for sticking around!

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