On kissing.

A question was posed today, on an internet group that I regularly check in on, of what was your most romantic kiss. I've been thinking about it all morning. I've been married twice. There really is something special about kissing your spouse for the first time in front of all your friends and family. I wouldn't exactly say it's romantic though. When Jen first kissed me after saying yes to wanting to marry me, despite the unromantic setting of the nightclub where we met, that was pretty romantic. But probably the most romantic kiss I had was in France, New Year's Day 1991. For the record, all kisses in France are pretty romantic.

This one particular one stands out though. This girl who I adored came over with my Mom and Mike to see me. It was New Year's Eve and she and I were at a party in Grenoble. They played the song "New Year's Eve" by U2, because of course they did. We kissed. I don't know if it was at midnight or something else. What I do remember is thinking that I felt like things couldn't really get much better. I was young, in love, in France, and kissing a beautiful girl. It doesn't get much better than that, right?

Actually, it does. The romance there in France didn't exactly carry over back to the States. Not being in France has a tendency to eliminate a lot of romance. Like, I said, I've been married twice and there has been a lot of romance in the meantime. That kiss, though, carried with it the lesson that kissing means a whole lot. Ironically, it happened in France where I learned to kiss every acquaintance on each cheek practically ever day (which I do wish we would adopt as a habit in the U.S.!). But a kiss truly carries with it so much more of a message than "Hey, I kind of like you." It has the power to change people, maybe for the moment, maybe for the day, or year. Or maybe they'll think back on it 25 years later.

At the very least, good kisses make for good stories. The best kisses, of course, come from my wife's lips and the most romantic moments I have spent have probably been on our front porch swing. If there is any bit of a romantic in me though, in a small part it comes from kissing a girl in the earliest moments of 1991.

Been a While

It's been a while since I posted here. Lots has happened. I'm in a new job at Nordstrom. Jen's in a new job at Southwest. The Broncos even won a Super Bowl since I last wrote. You would have thought I would have posted a bunch about that. I should have. I'm regretting having been away. 

When I post here I want to post things that others will find interesting. Maybe I should pay attention to those things that I find interesting, because it is times like now that I sort of wonder what I've really been thinking about through last fall and the past winter. Ah well, life springs anew.

What I'd love to do is detail some of the cool things we're doing here at Nordstrom regarding creating software solutions in the cloud, Amazon's AWS to be specific. In the past, the posts here that got the most attention were those regarding Wix. I think that is because I was doing things using Wix that hadn't previously been very well documented before. Not that I documented a whole lot that was new. However, I figured every small problem that I had to scratch out meant someone else would run into it at sometime or another. So I blogged about it.

I'd love to do the same with the AWS things we are doing. We're doing things with AWS that I'm sure not many other people are already doing (in the relative sense), particularly because much of what we are doing is still using Windows and Microsoft tools. (The documentation for using AWS with PowerShell is particularly lacking.) In fact, I will be blogging about it, but most of the details I will be keeping from public eyes, so I'm not sure just how useful it will be outside of Nordstrom. Still, if you are interested in particulars, hit me up, and maybe I'll be able to share.

Jen and I started watching season one of Mr. Robot, and it has me even more paranoid about cyber-security than when I was programming election software. I don't want to give too many details about how we're building an application knowing there are people out there who are after whatever tidbit of information they can get in order to hack credit cards. Not that I don't think what we are creating is secure. It is; perhaps overly so. But no use in giving out information that isn't necessary.

All I'm saying is that I'm dying to blog about these things, but they will necessarily be in rather general terms.