[cdcox]

I find it worthwhile to reflect back and look forward. Recording it here will allow me to access it at a later time.


1. What's the biggest change in your life since 1/1/00? What parts of your life haven't changed at all?

The biggest change has been the development of my daughter. She was 9 at the time and is 19 now. The first 5 years of the decade were pretty easy in this regard, but the last 5 years have been tough.

Still working at the same institution (at a much higher level of responsibility), same family, same house.

2. What are your top three accomplishments since 1/1/00?

I tend to strive toward work accomplishments.

1. Being promoted to full professor and associate department head. I was kind of struggling in my career at the beginning of the decade. I had made tenure in '97 and went into a slump. I made some deliberate decisions to work my way out of the slump and started working my ass off. I got one very good break in connecting with a very good collaborator. A lot of the more senior people in my department retired. A couple others took different positions outside the department. I've always been a team player and someone known for getting things done. All of the sudden, I was the number two guy in the department. I get to work closely with students outside the classroom and make a real difference in their college experience.

2. Getting a paper published in Nature. Nature and Science are the two top journals in all of science. They are Carnegie Hall and the Met for scientists. We worked really hard on that paper for about 9 mos. The core group was me and another senior faculty member, a post-doc, and three really good graduate students. I'd call all of them friends. Really good memories associated with working on that paper.

3. My immediate family (wife, daughter and me) still all love each other deeply. Family life has been extremely difficult, but we're still together, we still trust each other, and we still have hope for the future.

Runners up:

Travel: London three times, Scotland once, Cancun twice. I like to travel. I need to do more of it. One advantage of my job is that with a little planning, I can travel internationally and tack on a couple of personal days. One challenge to more travel is that I like to travel lite, while my wife likes to take every creature comfort of home. I did the London and Scotland trips solo and took her on both the Cancun trips. I'd like to do more travel with her.

nfl-forecast.com - one of my hobbies. The growth has been gratifying. Maybe I'll find time to improve the statistical routines that predict Denver has a 99.99999% chance of winning the division in week 6.

3. What are your top three disappointments since 1/1/00?

1. My daughter's physical/psychological/emotional issues. She dropped out of HS after 10th grade. Still needs to earn her GED. Uncertain future. Lots of other issues I won't go into. Never saw it coming. My wife and I have invested tremendous effort, emotion and $ toward helping our daughter move past this. Maybe we are making progress, I don't know.

2. My mom developing Alzheimer's disease. Thankfully, dad is still in good health and can take good care of her. Really tough to see.

3. The promotion to associate department head has been great. I love the responsibility and I think it is helping me develop as a person and professionally. The bump in pay is a nice bonus. But I've been working too many hours and not keeping up enough with my regular prof stuff. I have some ideas how to become more efficient. I hope they are enough to make a difference.

Runners up:

With everything else going on, we haven't been able to keep the house up as much as I'd like, both in terms of repair/remodeling and overall cleanliness.

Medical bills have eaten up a lot of the income gains. We aren't struggling, but I feel like we should be living a little better given my income. Not a biggie.

Retirement not coming as soon as I had once hoped. I'm re-evaluating my expectations.

4. On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your personal experience since 1/1/00? In other words, how did the decade treat you?

6 - Yeah, my family and I have problems. But we live in a great country, I have a very secure job that I enjoy and provides a good income, and we have the means to address the problems that we have. We are much more fortunate than most. I'm counting it to the good.

5. What was your biggest fork in the road since 1/1/00? Knowing what you know now, would you have chosen the other path if you could go back now?

Career -- A key moment was when we had a new dean around 2003 or so. He was implementing a massive culture change in the college. He was talking to our department about his plan to bring in new, younger faculty at higher salaries because they would be the ones who could make the college better. Basically everyone in the room was being dissed -- diplomacy wasn't one of his strong points. Despite this, I asked, "What about those of us who are already here, and want to participate in making the college better by increasing the level of our productivity? Will you reward us for our contributions?" It was a rare moment of shrewdness on my part because I knew that I was in a good position to have better productivity in the years to come. Every time I spoke to the dean after that he would remind me of that comment. He even brought it up in meetings from time to time. The important thing was that I got on his radar screen to where he kept his eye on me. And based on my accomplishments, he rewarded me with a couple of merit raises. I'd definitely step out and make that comment again.

Family -- I remember the first time my daughter was hospitalized, about 5 years ago. There was no clear diagnosis, and the first hints that her problems might be as much psychological/emotional as they were physical were being mentioned by some of the doctors. I made the comment that I'd pay $10,000 this instant to make these problems go away. That was a crossroads and I recognized it as such at the time. At every step of the way we've listened to the various doctors and other professionals. I see in retrospect where they have made some mistakes along the way, and clearly we have made some, too. Looking back, given my knowledge at the time, I'm not sure where I could have changed things for the better. Sometimes you do as good as you can, you are disappointed with the outcome, and you just have to move forward to make things the best they can be in the future.

6. Compared to your expectations on 1/1/00, how is your life different on 12/31/09 than you expected? How is it exactly as you expected?

It's funny. I was just kind of going with the flow at the time. I'm not sure what my expectations were, especially professionally.

I think I'm much better off professionally than I thought I would be at the time.

As far as family goes, I definitely did not foresee us heading to these kinds of problems. I figured my daughter would be in college by now and well on her way to becoming an independent, well-adjusted, productive adult.

7. What are your three strongest memories of the 00's? Three best memories?

Random memories. None particularly stronger than the next:

9-11: Ed McCaffrey had just been hauled off the field the night before. One of my grad students came in and asked me if I'd heard about an airplane crashing into the WTC. I tried to follow it on the internet, but all the websties were jammed. Later that day I went to a colleague's office to talk about Bayesian statistics.

DT. I refreshed the Star page to get an up date on his condition, and in giant font they had an announcement that he was dead. What a shock.

The night that Gunther got fired over the internet. Repeatedly refreshing chiefsplanet at 2:00 AM in the morning hoping for an update. Heady times.

Boo coo summer salary in 2003. Bought a large screen TV and Sunday Ticket. That was the last time we really had to live paycheck-to-paycheck.

My trips to London. What a great city. Lots and lots of memories. One relevant to Chiefs fans: checking the outcome of the Steelers game in 2003 at an internet cafe -- we won! Holy shit, this team is good!

Walking across the Brooklyn bridge with my family. Eating a great meal in NYC on the same trip.

Our research group was part of a large government-funded project in the 2002-2006 time period. We had these big meetings every 6 mos or so. We were one of the groups with a smaller amount of funding. All of the groups were supposed to make individual software components that interacted with software components made by other groups inside this larger piece of software called "the dashboard". When they were demoing the dashboard, the first component they used in the demo was from our group. This was a big win, since we were one of the smaller groups. The second component they used was also from our group, as was the third. By now we are doing the thumbs up to each other and doing the silent laugh in the middle of the meeting. The program manger asks, "Why are all the software components from these peons that I gave hardly any money to?" (those weren't his actual words). "They are the only group who's software works in the dashboard." The program manager was pissed. Hilarity ensued. The program manager told everyone that they better have their software running in the dashboard by the end of the meeting or he would cut their funding.

My cousin asking me about my mom's memory problems. Her mom had had Alzheimer's for a few years by that time.

My daughter's first panic attack.

The blue screen of death on my laptop when the hard drive failed and my files had not been backed up for 6 months.

The feeling of making full professor. It's similar to winning the Super Bowl in that they can never take it away from you (barring a complete fu).

My wife and I celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary at the Ritz Carlton in Cancun. Great meal, great celebration.

Beginning the epic bathroom remodel.

8. What is your prediction of your life on 12/31/19 (ten years from now)? What will be the same and what will be different?

I'm going to be as hopeful as possible and say that my daughter will be happily married and maybe have a kid. She'll still struggle with her issues, but will mostly have a normal life.

I think I'll have reached another promotion milestone, either at my current institution or a another one. I think I need to move up a level on the food chain to have a more balanced life. Too much responsibility and not enough power to do my current job for another 17 years or so till retirement.

I have great plans for the house, including the best outdoor living space ever. Finances and time to do the work are limiting. At the least, I'm confident that the epic bathroom remodel will reach a conclusion sometime this decade though.

The wife and I have begun to toy with the idea of getting a houseboat (recreational, not full time).

9. What are the three most important events in the outside world since 1/1/00?

Technology. The internet and mobile devices have been obvious. But advances in molecular biology are also huge, though less visible. They will become extremely visible this decade. The energy/environment nexus also began to emerge as a permanent issue this decade.

Geo-political. The emergence of Fundamentalist Muslims vs. the West as the major geo-polictical conflict. 9/11 was the Fort Sumter event.

Globalization of the Economy. The advantage of the US in manufacturing is long gone. Even an advantage related to value added through technology seems to last only a short time, since other countries can quickly adapt. I believe the economic advantage of this country over others will continue to shrink. Americans are going to have to work harder and do with less. Wish I could be more optimistic about this one.