It’s been an inauspicious birthday week for him; our third child had surgery a few days ago, I am sick as a dog and so is he, and he’s been really slammed at work for a couple weeks now. There won’t be a ton of celebrating this weekend I’m afraid, but we are looking forward to some downtime and rest together as a family.

So, in addition to cooking him his favorite meal – lasagna – I am offering up the following list in honor of his special day. Here are, in no particular order, 39 things that I dearly love about my sweet, wonderful husband.

39 things I love about Jay…

1. that he’s mine

2. that he loves my cooking and tells me so, often, as well as anyone else who will listen!

3. his fierce love for each of our children

4. that I always feel safe and protected with him

5. the fact that he actually thinks I am more beautiful today than the day he married me

6. his amazing patience

7. his ability to just sit down and talk to most anyone, anywhere, anytime

8. that he likes to cook omelets in a plastic bag in a pot of boiling water

9. and somehow also finds time to make his own homemade yogurt for us

10. that he works hard for our family

11. that he loves to practice hospitality

12. the way he dances

13. his mind

14. that he can fix anything, and if he doesn’t know how, he will work on figuring it out till he can

15. his guitar playing

16. that he’s a gentleman: opens the doors, carries all the groceries, etc

17. that he loves to organize closets and cabinets

18. the way he lives out his faith every day in front of me and our children

19. that he buys me chocolates

20. that when I married him I got the best mother and father in law in the whole wide world

21. his amazing relationship with his parents

22. his humility

23. that he loves to fish

24. his innovativeness

25. that we share the same hopes and dreams

26. that he likes the beach as much as I do!

27. that he cuts his own hair

28. that he cuts all our boys’ hair

29. his love for family

30. his appreciation for so many different types of music

31. his attitude in the face of adversity

32. how much he loves to eat leftovers

33. that he regularly tries to send me out for some quiet and/or “girl” time

34. his wisdom and sensibility where finances are concerned

35. his affection for animals

36. his sense of humour

37. his generosity

38. that he loves God with all his heart soul mind and strength

39. that he doesn’t mind growing older…

Happy Birthday, Sweetheart! So glad to be alongside you in this journey we call life!

As if that weren’t enough, he also took it upon himself to continue my cleanup efforts – what a guy!. Toward that end he tackled four horrific junk drawers in the kitchen, my messy desk, and the top of his own dresser (which was also not looking so pretty).  He might have spent some time ribbing me about all the long-lost household goods he discovered on these little adventures. And we might have thrown away about 80 pounds of trash after he culled through everything.  But either way, it’s progress, don’t you agree?

I don’t have before pictures of everything to show you, but the desk looked like this:

and afterward:

The drawers all resembled this:

And after some careful attention from Jay and his young assistant,

they merely store phone books and office supplies once more, and look a whole lot like this:

So, many, many thanks, Jay for entering my Cleanup Contest.

Readers, for some reason, he doesn’t feel a need to be entered into the drawing for an organizational book of his choice.  Ah well, all the better chance for one of you to win!

Remember…….There’s only one day left!! I will randomly draw a winner at 8pm CST, tomorrow.  Get those cleanups done, and leave me a comment so I can put your name in the hat!

I think it is a fantastic way to search recipes, and was really excited to show it to Tricia. After about a minute of looking at it, Tricia asks, “Does it have Southern Living recipes?” Well no, as it so happens, it didn’t.

Hmmm… turns out Southern Living hosts their recipes, along with several other magazines, on myrecipes.com. It also turns out myrecipes.com has the sort of data that we need for this particular View (a rich picture contained in a well-labeled div). So now we have Southern Living recipes.

There are advantages to being married to the product manager (that is, the guy who helps decide what gets built next).

It has gone fantastically! All the new platform code, some of which was written just days before launch, worked flawlessly and the site absorbed a massive increase in traffic without so much as flinching. At 8 p.m. last night, a huge group of us (well, huge for a company of 12) met at Kenichi and celebrated the success with wives, husbands, and even a set of parents. What fun! There’s pretty much no better way to enjoy your success than to eat some raw tuna.

Now go use the coolest search on the internet to find something fun.

May God bless us with many more decades together. I love you, sweetie!

Yesterday around 4:30 p.m. a news-team of two showed up at our offices to put together a story on Viewzi’s upcoming live launch. Stephanie Lucero interviewed several of us, got her footage, and had a story run on the 10 p.m. news. We were on the air at about 10:15 p.m. The end of the story included a teaser for a referral code found at the story’s accompanying web article. At approximately 10:22 p.m., our servers became a giant molten blob that sank into the earth’s crust…

Actually, the platform did amazingly. And the story had a fun “local boys try to make good and take on the big-bads of internet search” angle to it. You’ll see me briefly. If it was a movie, I would be listed in the credits as “Man 1, 3 men at a table”. Here’s the video. Enjoy!

Viewzi’s got several great ideas all rolled up into one product. Ask yourself, should search results always look the same (e.g. a text list)? No! The display of results should merge two things: the intentions of the searcher and the results. I may enter “Madrid” as a search term, but I likely have a goal in mind such as “I wonder what it would be like to stay in Madrid?” or “I think that song I heard on the radio had ‘Madrid’ in the title”. Should travel information and MP3s be presented in the same way? Not to humans. Viewzi solves this need. It’s all about the Views.

Also, should everyone be forced to use the same means of traversing search results? No! Even with multiple Views, you still need to be able to customize your experience. Viewzi is currently hard at work on the first wave of enhancements to support user customization.

What about the long tail of niches? If you know you are searching for recipes, why get song titles or travel destinations in your search results? Why even search sites other than recipe sites? Why indeed? Viewzi tailors niche Views to appropriate data sources. So for general search Viewzi uses the big 4 and others. But for all the other Views, it pulls from a rich diversity of specialized sites and data sources.

And all this is built on an open platform that (eventually) allows anyone to build their own View. Viewzi isn’t trying to figure out the best way to search automobiles. Instead, Viewzi is building a platform that will allow the wisdom of crowds to settle that issue, and even come up with a diversity of answers.

If you are interested in joining the beta, I’ve set up 50 referrals for our steadfast readership. Go to www.viewzi.com/invite and enter the referral code “hornes.org” and you are in.

When I opened the door to the garage, I noticed a smell. An evil smell, but I was thinking about other things and hustled the kids into the car so I could get them to school on time. Next I was off to the outplacement office for several hours of solitude and job searching. Then back to the car to drive home for a very late lunch. And when the AC kicked on, there was that evil smell again. “It’s soaked into my car!” I thought to myself, dismayed.

I chatted with Tricia while driving home, and she thought she had smelled something in the laundry room. I figured the smell had come in from the garage, which meant I had probably caught a stray mouse in one of the many traps hidden around the garage (leftover from the war that took place a couple months ago). When I got home, I checked it all out. Nothing. And the smell wasn’t very strong in the garage. Strange.

I ate lunch and then headed to my car, intending to drive to the library to work for a few more hours before dinner. The moment I opened the door to the garage, I was overcome by THE smell. The garage was thick with it. Hmmm… that meant whatever had died had to be… IN MY CAR! I drove to the library, parked in the parking lot, popped the hood, and started looking.

It took a few minutes, but I found it. I could only see the middle part of the body buried deep within the interworkings of a packed in import engine compartment, but I’m thinking rat. Either that, or squirrel, but my money is on rat.

It’s still out there, stinking up my car. I’m in here, trying to work, and thinking that this is one expense we will just have to bear. See, once I use our grill tongs to remove the critter this evening, those tongs are going straight into the garbage. And since we will be grilling for company this weekend, I’ll have to replace them. Some things are not meant to be washed and then used again for food prep.

I have continued to find this whole process of finding a job extremely time-consuming. However, with the kids on spring break last week through this Monday, I did largely take a break from it Friday morning until Monday evening. Instead, I built a picnic table with the kids on Friday (still have to finish the sanding and sealing), and then we all went to the Arboretum on Monday. Our family was treated to free parking and passes courtesy of a wonderful neighbor who loaned us his season pass (good for up to a family of six… just right). Oh yeah. There was also the small matter of the lake.

I’ve actually felt pretty good this past week. I don’t really notice intense, almost dizzy bouts of panic like I did that first week. However, my body is sending different sorts of signals. As I previously mentioned, I had my first real migraine in a couple years a bit over a week ago, and it was huge. Then I had a smaller one a couple days later. And I can’t seem to sleep very much, which is making me feel more and more fatigued. So I figure I’m still not yet “anxious for nothing”, and there’s more to learn from this whole experience.

I’m on my, oh, I don’t know, let’s say eighth version of my resume. I’ve been focusing on patiently working connections rather than simply submitting my resume via job posts. And that brings us to our good news. I had spotted a job at TI that looked interesting, and then ended up making a connection with the husband of a former colleague who was in that very group and knew the hiring manager.

Which led to my first interview yesterday. A phone interview, but an interview all the same. It went well, which was gratifying. I was startled by how nervous I felt. Normally, I’m fairly confident and have a decent track record in interviews. But yesterday I was feeling more like a guy who couldn’t keep a job and a lot less like the up-and-coming leader I’ve felt like in previous interviews. So I spent the final few minutes before the phone rang on my knees praying, which was probably a good thing to do even if I hadn’t gotten a bit wobbly in the legs.

Success in a job search feels very binary. You succeed when you get a job. But large goals are so much easier to manage if broken into a series of smaller steps with attendant celebrations (or recriminations). So I’m celebrating the interview and wanted to publicly acknowledge my thanks to God for his provision.

He (and his trusty assistant, Nicolas) worked many long hours yesterday and today,

and just before dark this evening, the table was finished.

Finished except for a coat of protective stain/sealant to hopefully help it last through many ridiculously hot Texas summers.

We celebrated the table being finished…

by eating our colored Easter Eggs on it this evening

just before putting the children to bed for the night.

What a wonderful table!!