Andy Boyer

Author: Andy

  • R.I.P. Lute

    It’s crazy to think how a person you never met could have a huge influence on your life.

    It’s spring of 1988 and I’m a high school sophomore. It’s just about that time for me to begin thinking of where I might want to apply to college.

    I knew I really didn’t want to go to UW (ironic since I ended up teaching there later), and WSU seemed really really really cold. Since I had grown up in New Orleans, schools in the south seemed like a reasonable option.

    Somehow I got tickets to the NCAA Sweet 16 weekend in the Kingdome. My friends and I went to the games, and this school I had never really heard of was clearly the class of the group. Steve Kerr was lighting up threes. Sean Elliott was doing whatever he felt like doing. And leading the whole charge was this older gentleman with white hair named Lute Olson.

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    I don’t know what it was about that Arizona basketball team that made me look into the school as an option. Why would a New Orleans kid living in the Pacific Northwest want to move to the desert? But something took Arizona from obscurity to a front runner, and it all started with that basketball team. And years and years later, the friends I made there are people I still talk to almost daily.

    So RIP Lute Olson. You personally had nothing to do with my life decisions, yet somehow the success of your team got me interested in the school I ended up attending and resulted in me meeting people I ended up having lifelong relationships with. Thank you.

  • The 2020 Presidential Race, in an Alternate Universe

    So, imagine for a moment, that you are the leader of the free world. You have made some mistakes, but you also have fervent supporters. As you enter your re-election year, an alien spaceship materializes out of nowhere and begins to attack the entire world, your country included.

    This is clearly unexpected. One might even say unprecedented. You would have to carefully consider what to do next.

    Now, as the leader of the free world, you have some advantages on your side. For example, if you wanted to, you could assemble the smartest collection of individuals on the planet to be your closest advisors. On a daily basis, you could be interfacing with intellectuals from around the world, who collectively are focusing on the most advanced technologies known to man. On top of that group, you could also assemble a “tiger team” of people whose single role is to disagree with your first-team’s initial analyses, creating a dialogue of debate based on facts and science. And then, after all of the math and logic has been debated, you might have a cadre of close advisors – long-time allies and confidants who you have shared success with. A group of people you trust to help you understand the words the intellectuals have thrown at you.

    So knowing that you have this all-star team of brainpower and creative ideas at your full disposal, and staring in the eyes of a global catastrophe, one might think to themselves, “Hmm. Well, this is going to take a while to solve. I probably should have my people pull together an 18-36 month plan. In fact, I should probably call all the leaders of other large nations, and coordinate how we want to work together. And then, I should probably assemble all the governors, and implement a national organization that will address the issues over the next 1-3 years.

    At this point, your campaign manager may come up to you and say, “Well do you realize that if you implement an 18-36 month plan to address a global crisis during an election year, you’ll basically be forcing voters to abandon a war-time plan if they vote for your opponent? The other candidate will literally have no chance of beating you. That doesn’t seem fair at all.”

    You might look at your adviser and say, “Politics be damned. I care about the American people. Let’s show our world leadership, and then unite the country so we all fight this battle together. If history says I didn’t fight a fair campaign because I united a nation during a campaign year to fight a common enemy, then well, I’ll just have to deal with those ramifications down the road.”

    In some parallel universe, this logic occurred. Unfortunately, in ours, these paragraphs are a work of collective fiction.

  • Cures for Insomnia

    Editor’s Note: I am not a doctor or psychologist. In fact, I’m not even a therapist with a degree from some private organization offering certificates from a mini-mall. So please do not take these recommendations as medical advice.

    So…..how’s YOUR spring going?

    Or are we in summer now, it’s hard to tell.

    Well, we’re a few months into this now. Are you starting to realize that this is a long-term thing? Yeah, me too.

    So let’s list the things we may be worrying about: Getting sick, keeping our jobs, managing our kids’ education, ever seeing friends again, ever seeing out-of-state family again, the stock market crashing and eradicating our entire retirement plan, our weight gain (maybe that’s just me), Proud Boys, Antifa, a presidential meltdown, and more. That’s a long list. How does anyone sleep at all?

    I certainly am not sleeping through the night, so I’ve had to come up with a few ways to cure my 3:00 am insomnia or deal with it. Here are some of my solutions.

    1. Read Marketing Whitepapers: In general, headlines and opening sections are exciting. But move to the body of these works if you need a literary sedative.
    2. MasterMind online: I swear this website must have been built in 1996, which actually makes it soothing. But if you played this game as a kid with your family, you’ll like the one-player Atari-like version of this game online.
    3. Read a book
    4. Write a blog post: I may actually fall asleep while writing this.
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    6. Sorry, fell asleep and my cat jumped on the keyboard.
    7. Read job descriptions: Even if you aren’t looking for a job, you can learn a lot about companies by reading what they are hiring for. I will not call any companies out here, but some of them have wild wild wild expectations for their new candidates.
    8. Watch CNBC: Remember when it’s 3:00 am in Seattle, the entire East Coast is ready to get rolling. The 3-hour CNBC morning show, Squwak Box, ventures between interviews that are mundane to fascinating. You either fall asleep or learn something.

    What are your ideas to cure insomnia?

  • Book Recommendation: Front Row at the Trump Show

    My politics don’t swing wide left or wide right. When there is a political event, I appreciate any media that provides a true and accurate statement of the facts. I also love the media in general, especially now. It’s a fascinating time for the broadcasting industry since ratings mean revenue and controversy brings ratings.

    That’s why I am enjoying “Front Row at the Trump Show” so much, and recommend it to everyone I talk to. It’s a fascinating, non-partisan perspective from a member of the White House Press Corps through four Presidents. It’s a great listen on Audible as well.

  • Don’t Drink Lysol

    As a reader of this blog, I trust you already know that cleaning disinfectants are for tables, not intestines.

  • Two Minute Exercises To Keep You In Shape During COVID

    The gym is closed, you don’t want to run at Greenlake, and your soccer season is canceled. How are we all going to stay in shape?

    For some people, a routine and discipline are the keys to exercise. So when every day is Tuesday and every hour is 1:00pm, how do you accomplish that discipline? How do you make that routine happen?

    I surveyed a few friends, and here are some ideas we’ve come up with. All of them take two minutes or less, and by the end of the day, you’ll have completed a decent amount of calorie burning.

    1. TV Pushups: We’re going to be streaming more shows, especially until the weather turns around. So before every show, throw down 10-20 pushups. The more TV you watch, the more pushups you do.
    2. Old school Jumping Jacks: Yeah, it’s cheesy. But two minutes of jumping jacks will make you feel like you earned that episode of Ozarks.
    3. The Jump Rope: It was your favorite exercise toy as an eight-year-old. 2:00 as an adult will have you breathing hard.
    4. Walking Stairs: We may not own Stairmasters, but we do have staircases in our house. Take two minutes a few times a day and walk up and down the stairs 10 times. See if you can get to 50 flights a day.
    5. Sprinting Streets: Greenlake and Burke-Gilman can get crowded. But we don’t need long trails for sprints. Measure out 100 yards in front of your house and do a few sprints a day. Sprint up, walk back. It’ll take mere minutes and get your heart rate up.
    6. Chin-up bars: Cheap, easy to set up, and super effective. Don’t be discouraged the first time you try it.
    7. YouTube Yoga: You can find a lot of exercise content online – even short stretching and yoga exercises. Stay flexible my friends.
    8. The Massage Gun: Not everyone agrees in their benefits, but for a relatively small price (especially considering we don’t have gym membership dues), we like Massage Guns for loosening up muscles. I don’t have an Amazon Affiliate account or anything, so you can read about them on CNN.

    You probably have your own ideas. Send me an email and share them, or just ping me on Twitter. Stay healthy everyone.

  • Tips for New Zoomers

    Welcome to the “Work From Home” Lifestyle!

    I know a lot of you prefer to have a 1/2 hour commute, walk in the rain from your car to your building, and then sit at your cube in a cavernous, fluorescent-lit room full of despair. But now you have to join us work-from-homers. And you’re going to be here a while, so you may as well get some best practices down now. Here are some basic things you need to know.

    1. Always wear pants – Yes, the temptation is there. You want to sit in pajamas (or less) from the waist down. Resist the urge. Comfortable sweat pants are fine, just make sure that if your cat somehow readjusts your camera for you, you’re ok with what your co-workers are exposed to.
    2. Figure out your two-monitor setup – For whatever reason, Microsoft, Apple, Zoom and all the monitor companies seem to have conspired to make sure that the default setting for your two-monitor set-up is to have the camera broadcast from whichever one you don’t want it to. This is fixable, just takes a little time. Do a practice run with friends and get it all situated.
    3. Lighting is important – You know when you want to take a picture of yourself standing in front of an awesome sunset, and you get the sunset but you are just a shadowy blob in front of it? Same concept with Zoom. You can shoot with a window as your backdrop, just invest in a decent lamp that brightens your face.
    4. Warn your roommates when you are on a call – Many people have a story similar to this one I heard recently. “I was on a Zoom call with my whole team. When suddenly, in the background of one of my team members, I see his wife walking around the kitchen buck naked. Not a stitch of clothing. Now, he had his headset on, and someone else was talking so she would have no way of hearing he was on a call. And I didn’t know what to do. Do I interrupt and tell my employee to turn around and tell his wife to get out of the frame, calling MORE attention to it? Do I just ignore it and hope no one sees it? Well before I could decide, the wife turned around and realized she was on live TV, screamed at the top of her lungs (alerting everyone who hadn’t noticed it yet), and ran out of the room. So we went on with the meeting from there.”
    5. Backgrounds are cool, but... – If you are new to Zoom, the background features are pretty cool. “Look, I’m at a mountain or on a beach!” There are reasons and times to use these backgrounds. For example, if your spouse and kids are all working and learning from home at the same time and your only available spaces to broadcast from are the bathroom, car, or garage, use a background. Or, if you have a calm and professional customized background of an office environment, that is better than the view from your kitchen table. And if you have kids that like to run in the background of your Zoom calls, the background can mitigate that risk. Just keep in mind that the “floating head phenomenon” will probably happen at some point and it’s hard for people not to get distracted away from the brilliant point you were making.
    6. In large meetings, default to “Mute On.” – I find it helpful to think about how much I expect to be talking in any given meeting, and if I’m not going to be the majority presenter, I go to “Mute On” right after salutations. There’s an added benefit to this, in that instead of just blurting your genius thought of the moment over someone already talking, you have to think, prepare yourself by taking off the mute, and wait for a proper place to jump in. And if you are at all like me, often you’ll realize that what you were about to say added little in the way of a contribution and was better left unsaid.
    7. Not everything needs to be a Zoom call – Zoom is addictive. It’s the best way to replicate a face to face meeting. But remember, sometimes you don’t need face to face. Even if Zoom is an option, there’s nothing wrong with picking up the phone and calling someone for 5 minutes.

    If you have your own Zoom tips, send them over,

  • This Break Will Be Extended

    So back in January, I thought that by March, I’d ready to share more nonsense, silly ideas, curious questions, and wild speculation.

    But, I’ve started a contract gig with a consulting firm, producing loads and loads and loads of content for a Telecom company that really likes the color pink, I mean, Magenta. So sadly, I think this blog will stay pretty dusty for a while. But if you have any questions about 5G, shoot me an email.

  • Happy New Year

    2018 is in the books! Cheers to 2019!

    Just a quick note that the early part of the year is probably going to be pretty busy for me. So, if you enjoy this blog, I have some good news and bad news for you.

    Bad news first: I’m going to just be too busy to write anything, unless you have some sadistic need to hear grueling details of wedding planning.

    Good news: While I’m away from the keyboard, I highly recommend the blog from my good buddy Steve Banfield – SteveBanfield.blog: Thoughts on innovation, startups, photography and bourbon since 2007.

  • Why I’m Not an SEO Expert

    I don’t think I’ll ever be able to truly understand SEO if this is the title and metadata you need to use to rise to the top of 296,000 results for the Google search, “Mariners Ticketmaster Account.”