Jay Littlepage: Life In Balance?

Sketchy Wood My main hobby is woodturning. My first experience with a lathe was in 8th grade shop, back when there was such a thing. I loved it. My mom still has the lamp I made here then (luckily it is no longer on display). When we moved to Colorado in 1997 I gained a basement and finally had room for a shop. The first tool I bought was a lathe. I've since upgraded to a Oneway 2436 which has the mass and swing for the type of turning I like doing now.

I like turning sketchy wood . The dictionary definition of sketchy is " Lacking in substance or completeness; incomplete.". Trees react to insults (wind, beetles, decomposition) in pretty amazing ways. Turning wood that has lost much of it's structural integrity is high risk/high reward than turning something with nice, even grain - but when it works you get much more than you possibly could have otherwise. It's really worth the extra effort. It's cool to get something successful out of wood that other turners wouldn't even consider.

Disruptive moves like Solaris Enterprise System are like turning sketchy wood (work with me on this). Sun could have kept selling software licenses and attaching services (which in fact, we still do). But now we also have a model that eliminates barriers to entry, gets services involved early to ensure success at every step in the software lifecycle - all leading to successful suite implementations that otherwise might not have happened, with customers Sun and our partners may never have had the chance to consider otherwise. You've got to take the risk to get the reward...

Posted by jaylittlepage ( Feb 05 2006, 05:11:25 PM MST ) Permalink