Quanta Analecta

Oh! The Places You'll Go!

2009-08-07T05:47:00.003-05:00

In 2004 I was working for a trade-show display company; when things were busy, the work could be a bit frantic. When things were slow, they were really slow. So slow that I spent many long hours fiddling around in my office, trying to stay engaged. I could only do so much advance work for the clients, I could only winnow over the display details so much, until there was just not much to do at all. I started exploring the web, following anything that piqued my interest farther and farther afield. I got interested in the history of the Distant Early Warning system of radar bases in the far north, and found a website of remembrances and pictures from DEW line veterans; I read every page-it took almost a week.

After that, I got curious about live webcams, and started searching for them. Only five years ago, there were fewer than you would think, perhaps-or, maybe more than you would expect. One of the very first I found was Kitt Peak National Observatories north and south cams:

http://www.noao.edu/kpno/kpcam/

I had visited Kitt Peak in 1995, a wonderful break during a lazy drive from Tucson to Las Vegas, which trip is properly the subject of some later post. Suffice it for now to say I found the place a bit magical, the peak thrusting up from the surrounding desert, the views beautiful, and the thought of all the amazing astronomical science being done there a bit intoxicating, for a geek like me. Indeed, when I came home from that trip, I made it a point to periodically log-on to the site's BBS (the WWW was still a-borning then) to browse the posts of different grad students and astronomers working there (blogging was still a gleam in the eye of tech-types then, too). I even engaged in duplex chats with the occasional bored astronomer, sitting around while the telescopes compiled images.

Finding the cam link was sooo coool! And while I've never lost the taste for searching for public cams, Kitt Peak is the only one I have bookmarked on every computer I use-sometimes I just have it up on the little Mac laptop at my side while I read, or play guitar, or watch t.v. It's my window on a beautiful, exotic place from my travels, and I get a kick out of watching the sunrise, or sunset, or daily activities the cams show.

There are some wonderful cams out there, and many aggregators to help one search for them. I'm not going to load this particular post with links, but I think maybe I should take a page from Bet (of Betland fame) and start a "Cam of the Week" recurrent theme.

So let's start here, with my beloved Kitt Peak. I encourage all commentators and lurkers to send along suggestions for this feature--after all, it would be a full-time job to seek them all out, and evaluate for uniqueness or general interest!

The Summertime Hibernator

2009-08-05T14:15:00.003-05:00

I guess it's been about 7 years now since I became a summer hibernator. That summer was really hot and humid, and I was between jobs for the first time in 19 years. I would rise early, hadn't lost the habit (still haven't!) and job hunt online for several hours, while I drank my morning coffee. Then I'd hit the pavement for an hour or so, maybe get some groceries or such, and be back home before noon. It was incumbent on me to save money, so I just pretty much hung around the house; it was miserable outside, so I couldn't enjoy my no cost activities like hiking or camping, just wasn't much to do but read, work with the computer, play guitar, watch movies, things like that. As the summer wore on, I began to truly dislike going out in the heat. And when I had to, I discovered that I wasn't tolerating it very well. I was really grateful as summer changed into fall and the heat and humidity abated.

Ensuing summers came and went, and each year I grew less and less tolerant of the heat, and more and more willing to spend the hottest parts of the season sequestered in my digs. It was like hibernating; only instead of venturing out only occasionally, on rare warm days, I only ventured out in the wee hours, the cool of the day. Now it's pretty much my routine, to be broken only as schoolwork starts up next week. And next summer, I should be able to get back to REALLY hibernating!

The Saga of Racer X

2009-08-04T11:53:00.002-05:00

It was late autumn, my second autumn in White Hall, IL., the little town I'd moved to from St. Louis. While I'd been in town for over a year and a half, I hadn't made any real friends-mostly just friendly acquaintances, people I knew from their service jobs, friendly enough that you'd exchange brief pleasantries if you encountered each other in places other than the usual, not friendly enough to invite you home for barbecue. In short, I was lonely.

I filled a lot of time paying attention to the local fauna; I made friends with all the town's feral cats, made friends with several crows and thrushes, and made a hobby of watching the rabbits that hung out in the overgrown railroad easement that ran behind my place of work. Since I was the only smoker in the office staff, rather than step out the front door for a quick cigarette, I would walk to the back warehouse and smoke outside the loading dock, which gave me a great view of the hedgerow and open field beside the plant. There was a little colony of rabbits that hung around that part of town, in the verge, and foraged in our little field in the mornings and the evenings. I got to know them pretty well, hanging around that back door, smoking. I'd guess there were about 7 or 8; one I noted in particular, because of his distinctive white stripe along his flanks. It sorta looked like a racing stripe, so I named him "Racer X".

Late autumn turned into early winter, and that made it a little easier to see those rabbits, even when they crouched in the dried out weeds of the verge. I made it a point to look for them every time I walked back to the dock, every time I passed the windows looking out onto the field, every time I was around that part of the property. It was a snowy, icy winter, and as it deepened I wondered how they would fare. Forage was dying off, as was cover. Too, it was a rural town, full of dogs that could get loose, and boys looking to do a little varminting with their bb-guns and .22's. Around the end of December, I noticed several days in a row when I saw no rabbits at all. I began to worry a bit. Maybe the cold had just run them into their holes? Maybe they'd all migrated somewhere? Then, happily, right after the New Year, we had a break in the weather. The "January Thaw", old-timers called it. Surely those rabbits would show up now.

Through the week of warmer weather, one did. Racer X. Alone. I noticed him, morning and evening, by himself, in the field, sometimes in the verge. I took frequent breaks from the office, to walk to the plant windows and the dock door, to see if any others would appear. I only ever saw my little friend, Racer X. And I wondered, did the others migrate off while he stayed behind? Had something happened to leave him the only survivor of that little band in the verge? I didn't know, but day after day he alone appeared, and my sympatico for him grew; he was alone now, just like me. Solitary. I obsessed about him a little, and the next weekend walked the rails to that place behind the plant, and scattered some baby carrots along what looked like a rabbit-run thru the weeds. Colder weather was coming again, soon. It was a lonely weekend.

Monday morning I drove into work, early as usual, and it was just getting light as I approached the plant. At the edge of the ditch that ran along the field beside the plant, I saw a little hump, like a rabbit, maybe, and slowed down to look closer.

It was a rabbit. It was Racer X. He lay somewhat on his side, turned a bit, very dead. I paused only long enough to see the prominent stripe on his side, and then hurried into the office. I was a bit rattled.

I walked back to the dock door and lit a cigarette. I looked towards the verge; I looked at the field. No rabbits, anywhere. I smoked my cigarette, and looked at the gathering clouds. The world pulled in a little closer.

Racer X haunted my thoughts the rest of the day. Where had his cohorts gone? Had he survived some catastrophe? Had he, in his lonely solitude, run out into the road, for his own reasons, when he'd survived many, many months living right by that dangerous passage? Had he decided, hesitantly, that he had to move on, but, hesitantly, couldn't pull himself away, until, finally, in a fit of despair, moved to sudden action by a noisy, threatening glare in the night, run out to where he never otherwise would, and find himself relieved of worrying where the others were, and where he should go, or what he should do?

The people I worked for and associated with would never understand what was going through me then; I knew that. The farming folk I knew in that little town would not understand why this simple event shook me, deeply. Even my far-away friends would not understand why this impacted me so. In all that little, insular, remote, isolated world, my best friend was a rabbit, and he had died. I wanted to go and collect his small body, and put it into rest with some sort of memorial, but I realized his best memorial was to return to that world he'd come into, anonymously among humans, except for me. The beasts of the fields, the birds of the air, all come into this world, and depart this world, largely unnoticed by busy man.

He lives in my heart. That's the best memorial I have to offer.

I felt very lonely in the weeks that followed. When I went for my little smoke-breaks, I looked at the verge, and the field, and felt very isolated. When, a few weeks later, the owner took me aside and told me my services were no longer needed, I was actually glad, in a way.

Why does this come to me now? When I went out a little while ago, I saw two rabbits by the bushes that separate my apartment building from the houses up the road; they each had creamy white stripes along their flanks, like Racer X.

I hope I see them again.

"Do you like yourself?"

2009-08-01T12:03:00.003-05:00

What a startling question that was! Of course, I understood it was meant to be startling, provocative, essentially evocative; it was the first question my psychoanalyst asked me.

I was glad to be entering this process; it was part of my training as a therapist and counselor, and the analyst sitting across from me was still just interning herself. I knew she'd been told to start with this question, once I heard it, still, I have to admit, it's a good one.

For myself, I prefer to ask "what do you think about yourself?" That question is not front-loaded with approval or disapproval, but perhaps it was a mark of the times that psychoanalysis leapt to the assumption that whatever was going on in a personality, it surely had a great deal to do with working for the approval of one's authority figures and how that would factor in self-approval or self-loathing.

Still, I was happy to enter into analysis; it was not required, but as long as we were accepting of the fact that our analyst would be only an analyst-in-training, there was a lot of value in undergoing the process, and it was free. And I was fortunate, because my student-analyst was pretty, in a way I could recognize but to which I was not particularly attracted, and she was very, very smart. That would certainly help these hours pass pleasantly. And she was a bit younger than me; I'm not sure why that pleased me, but it did.

I considered her question; my first thought was to realize that she would be noting the time on her watch, or the clock on the wall, and that my response time would be considered in a factor-analysis way. My knee-jerk reaction was to say, "of course I like myself!"; but I took a second to consider why I liked myself, what I liked about myself. After about half-a-minute, I replied "Yes. I do like myself."

My second thought noted how different analysis is to the more immediate, problem or conflict mediation type of therapy I was trained in; this wasn't "tell me about what's bothering you" or "what brings you to me today?" This was not about situations or events, this was about me. This was about "what is at the core of you?" The analyst opened with a leading question, and then sat back to see what came up. Who knew? This wasn't about problem resolution, this was about self-discovery. This was about describing my self-view, and world-view, to someone outside of all my other associations, and I had the opportunity to see if I could benefit from their perspective, and they could learn about another person's perspective, and see if they could effectively get into another's world, and maybe provide a different view, maybe bring their thought-tools to bear on whatever might come up.

There's a lot more to mine from that experience, but for now, I suppose I'll just note that, ever since that first session, her first question is one I pose to myself from time to time.

"Do I like myself?"

Yeah, pretty much.

Why I'm okay with Sci-Fi becoming Sy-Fy

2009-08-01T10:13:00.002-05:00

This is pretty easy for me; the announcement of the Sci-Fi channel's creation I initially greeted with great enthusiasm. Then I saw the kind of drek they intended to broadcast; initially the schedule was full of made-for-tv monster and fantasy, stuff that made Xena and that ilk look like high theater. Every now and then they'd run something worthwhile; they prolonged MST3K's run for a couple of years, occasionally they'd go on a vintage Twilight Zone marathon, and they graciously ran a season of Firefly. It took a good friend's pleading to get me to watch Firefly, but after a couple of episodes I made the adjustments to accept Joss Whedon's milieu and actually liked the show, over all.

That being said, what was the obvious and inexcusable omission? SCI-FI! Why was it, only once in a blue moon, that they would run CLASSIC SCI-FI? I have a few recorded films to prove that they did that...VERY FEW. Mostly it was crap like Alligator II, Gremlins, and then, oh Asimov save us all, they got enough funding together to put out THEIR OWN DREK! Made-for-crappy-cable-network shite...it breaks the heart. Oh, the pain, the pain...

So the name change? GOOD! There was precious little Sci, and only crappy Fi, so they might as well brand this waste of a channel for the kind of gap-tooth knuckle-dragging mediocretins who think "Snake King" and "Dragon Fighter" constitute worthwhile cinematic experiences. And the poor souls who have to watch this channel for the Star Trek TNG fix, I suppose they won't care; I guess some of us can't afford to buy the DVDs, so there's one redeeming feature. Maybe the only one. Hell, even the Twilight Zone vintage episodes are out there for the owning...

More weird dreams

2009-07-31T02:40:00.002-05:00

Ok, where does THIS one come from!?

I was dumpster-diving in a dumpster behind the old factory building downtown, where I worked summer before last, and I started pulling out all these bizarre collages, full of kids and water-color scenery...it was HENRY DARGER'S WORK!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Darger

I looked around in amazement, and saw Henry sitting on the steps to the loading dock nearby. For some reason, I thought he would only talk to me if I brought him some food, so I went to White Castle for some burgers. When I got back to the factory, Henry was putting the paintings into my old '65 Impala (?!? how did that get in there?) and told me I couldn't have them he'd already given them to someone else. I tried to get him to eat some White Castles but he went on a long tear about how White Castle used child labor and it was wrong of me to give them my business.

After he drove off, I went back to the dumpster to see if he'd left any pictures, and he had, but they were all about some super-hero character called Mouseman, and didn't look too much like his earlier work. I started thinking of how I could convince anyone that they were real Dargers, and then remembered he was long dead....that's when I woke up.

WTF? Is this what I get for having hot mustard on my Sweet and Sour Chicken dinner??

Here Comes My Girl

2009-07-30T14:59:00.003-05:00

(To truly appreciate this post, please start playing Tom Petty's "Here Comes My Girl" now)

By springtime, 1981, I was really a working musician. I'd made my living almost exclusively by playing guitar and singing for almost 4 years. I'd sojourned across the country, from job to job, from Missouri to North Carolina, up to Canada, down to the Deep South, here, there, and everywhere, anywhere they would pay us to play, first in this band, and then in another. My motto was, "whatever it takes." Even in my home town I didn't have a real residence; sometimes I just slept on my friend's couches, 'cause I would surely be on the road again soon. Sometimes I took a day-job, only to leave again as soon as I had a chance to make my living as a guitarist again.

Then I met her. The girl who made me think, maybe, there was a better life to be had just staying put; maybe the sacrifices demanded by a life on the road were really too much. Maybe I could still be a musician without sacrificing every other part of my life to the pursuit of fame and fortune, maybe being a musician was something I just WAS, without demanding that I do nothing else. She made me think, maybe I should go back to college, maybe I could do something else with my life, maybe I'd be happy doing that other thing...

While I was still working as a musician, Tom Petty brought this song out..."Here Comes My Girl"...it was totally up my alley. I worked it up, pitched it to the band, got the nod, and we played it a few times. Then, unexpectedly, the band decided I wasn't being serious enough, and I was invited onward.

No worries; I didn't want to go their way, anyway...I had My Girl, and I was actually looking forward to staying home, having a home, staying with My Girl. Except, she was leaving town, going away to college. Okay, I could still make a home for us here, that she could come home to, except that's not what happened, either. I know I don't need to lay it all out for you, this is a story as old as boy-meets-girl. The soundtrack for my "Dear John" letter was "Here Comes My Girl".

How could I have been so wrong?

Was I so wrong? There are no guarentees in life; maybe when I was really ready to settle down, I managed to pick the wrong Girl. All I can say with certainty is, when I met My Girl, I knew I was ready to really change my life, no holds barred, and, indeed, despite her abandonment, I went back to college, got a degree, and moved on into the rest of my life.

And, of course, there have been some other Girls in my life since then; that doesn't lessen the impact of That Girl, and the impetus that moves me to write about her now, because some musician friends have asked me to play "Here Comes My Girl" with them.

And I will, because, at the very core of me, some recondite part of me, still plays "Here Comes My Girl" for her. It always will.

Impotently ranting with bootless cries

2009-07-24T09:12:00.004-05:00

Arrrrggghhh!! Perhaps this warning will spare my friends from my current frustration. Who would've thought such a thing likely?!
I have been busily rendering my VHS tapes into DVDs, using a somewhat tedious and time-consuming process that I'm employing because, well, it's FREE, and I'm BROKE. That being said, everything has been going along swimmingly until yesterday, when I spent several hours rendering a tape, only at the very final stage of the burn finding that somehow the whole system was HUNG...completely stuck and unable to complete the burn. I was puzzled, but when I reviewed the iMovie project everything seemed okay, so I chalked it up to an anomaly and decided to try to reboot the system and re-render the project into iDVD for another go at the burn. Several more hours later, that attempt HUNG AT THE SAME SPOT. I scratched my head, and then, in a flash of insight, decided to check the media...AND LO! This supposedly pristine disc, the last on the spindle, was COVERED WITH GREASY FINGERPRINTS!
Now, I have to establish some bona fides; ask anyone who knows me and they will tell you I'm completely anal-retentive about optical media; I have literally hundreds of CDs and DVDs that have never had their read-surface touched by human finger. I shame and heap scorn on friends when I see them carelessly handling discs. I have been known to wash discs that I saw being handled carelessly, often right in front of the careless handler, all the while clucking my tongue and cursing silently under my breath the benighted fools who are so careless and lacking of appreciation of the miracle of optical media! I spent a DECADE waiting to be able to afford my first optical media player (CD, back in the day) and I'll be DAMNED if anyone is going to abuse my precious archives. So, I KNOW those fingerprints weren't mine. And no one around here ever approaches the rendering suite, so the only possible culprit had to be someone at the FACTORY. While I still think it highly improbable, given automation, that someone actually puts the discs onto the spindle by hand, SOMEONE had to handle that disc at some point; being it was the very last disc on the spindle, the assumption would be that someone picked up a stack of discs and did just that.
The only plea for forgiveness is the fact that by my count, it was the 52nd disc in a spindle of 50. So I suppose I should shut up...I'm still a disc ahead. BUT WHAT ABOUT MY TIME? What about my anguish?

And so the caveat, and a new element in my rendering process: CHECK THAT DISC BEFORE YOU START TO BURN. A greasy fingerprint can ruin your morning.

And, finally, some useful notes:
-while there are many disc cleaners on the market, I've yet to see one any more effective than dish soap and warm water. Work the dish soap into a thin emulsion with your fingers, and lightly clean the read surface, working from the inner surface towards the outer, and be very mindful of any grit that might scratch the plastic. Rinse well, and, if you're cool like me, use a micro-fiber fabric to blot the excess water off the disc.
-for truly filthy or scratched discs, I have actually succeeded in render many readable again with this process-first, wash the disc to remove any particles or debris. Once the disc is really clean, use a fine polish like diamond wax, or a veryyyyy low-grit car polish, and, again using your fingers, work the polish-wax from the inside to the outside edge, rotating the disc, and staying with it as you periodically rinse and examine the surface to see if the scratches are disappearing. The process is very similiar to removing fine scratches from an instrument's finish (where I got the idea) and the results can be amazing if done right. I have a CD that was found in the gravel on a street, and after diligent work (done for experiment) I rendered 5 of 7 tracks playable!
-In both cases, after the rinse has been blotted and air-dried there are still sometimes water-spots; remove these with a drop of optical glass cleaner and an optical polishing cloth-the same as you would use for eyeglasses is fine. Then, savagely excoriate anyone in your vicinity that would be so cavalier as to abuse this precious gift of nearly-permanent data storage. Just because replacements may be cheap doesn't mean you shouldn't care!

Back in the early '90's, some friends and I decided to try to calculate the potential life-span of CDs and DVDs. Assuming archival level treatment, we determined the two key dynamics were oxidization of the actual recorded metallic media, and hazing in the plastic surrounding the metallic media. I think the first part was used as a gimmick-pitch in the whole "gold-disc" boondoggle of the 90's. Of course, there is a kernel of truth there, since the more-common aluminum substrate can eventually oxidize by action of the oxygen molecules in the plastic stratus; however, we all know, now, that that plastic will long-before molecularly cross-link into a hazy layer that will just as effectively as oxidization confound readability. Now, how long would it take that plastic to degrade to the point of unreadability? Again, assuming the disc was properly protected from accelerating variable components, like sunlight, free exposure to airborne agents, etc, we had a chemist friend do some calculations and we came up with something like 50-150 years, plus or minus about 10 years.
My earliest CDs are just now 20 years old, and play perfectly. Properly treated, my media should outlive me by a very comfortable margin. Of course, player formats are still evolving, and rather like the end-of-life experience of magnetic data-storage and playback, the ultimate issue will become having a player that can render the media in question. And so, I have determined to create the QMech Museum of Still-Operable Obsolete Technology. So far, I have two VHS recorder/players (one a broadcast-quality machine), three stand-alone DVD players (I'm not counting DVD or CD playing computers...that will be a separate wing for Computers), two CD players (one a really sweet Sony single-shot that I just cannot turn my back on) and three cassette players (two deck-types and one portable, but, hey, it's a NAKIMICHI!). And while I'm shedding magnetic tape media as fast as epithelial cells, I'm currently putting those machines into long-term storage conditions, 'cause, HEY! why not?

Please note: I am not accepting donations of hardware for the museum. Bury your own dead. And especially, NO eight-tracks! I've already turned down the only one I would've considered, and it was a Marantz! I will eventually look for a nice reel-to-reel, but I'm spoiled, so I'll only consider a Teac 3340, 'cause when it comes to reel-to-reel, I'm gonna stick to what I know, and I really liked that 4-track. So if you got a 3340, we can talk.

Random thoughts to Move the Project Forward

2009-07-23T09:15:00.002-05:00

I'm just tired of the post that's occupied front-and-center since last week, and while I have a host of thoughts I might blog about, they're all either too banal, or too involved, to feel like working on any of them. So here's a grab-bag of what's been on my mind, none developed too thoroughly, just skipping across the surface of my mind.

The Apollo 11 anniversary, while impactful for me, a bit, not nearly so important in my memory as the sheer nail-biting drama of the near-disaster of Apollo 13. I will have to eventually fully blog about my Apollo 13 experience; as a space-obsessed kid I was still fully committed to following our exploits in space, and I remember being angry and frustrated when the networks failed to broadcast their "live from space" TV broadcast. Like the scene in the movie, I was waiting for the broadcast and wondering what the heck was going on; I remember turning on the radio when I woke up the next morning and hearing the report of problems with the spacecraft; I was worthless that day at school, I couldn't get my mind off the situation up there. I knew enough to understand how slim the chances of their getting home were. As the days mounted I became more and more obsessed, to the point that, by the last 36 hours or so, I couldn't even sleep. My mom let me stay home from school to watch the return, mostly because I was so sleep-deprived I wouldn't have been able to do school work anyway. All of this for another time.

The passing of Frank McCourt. I'd heard some of the buzz about Angela's Ashes, but it wasn't until I'd heard McCourt on NPR that I realized this was a book I'd probably like. What a memoir! What a life! I read it twice in one go, was thrilled with how good the movie was, and rushed to buy 'Tis and Teacher Man as soon as they were published. They were every bit as good as Angela. Although I'm two generations removed from the old sod, I've always identified with the Irish, and the Irish experience; and it seems to me there really is something to the Irish stereotype in me, introspective and a bit melancholic, reflective, always feeling a bit out-of-step with the rest of European-derived American culture, feeling sort-of disenfranchised from the whole American middle-class experience, even though I was born into it.

The Irish are the race that God made mad;
their funerals all are merry,
but all their songs are sad.

I remember my father's mother, who was VERY German, telling me "you've got too much of the Irish in you; you'll never be happy if you're not sad, too." I was just a little kid, I had NO idea what that meant, until many years later, when it started to make sense to me. Because I was a bit in my cups, and feeling very sad about a rejection, and feeling the weight of my life and the world and all the sadness and melancholy of emotion, and longing, and love, and realized I was actually pretty happy about it all, that I was happy that I could feel so much, and maybe this was the bitter that gave savor to life, and balance to the times of sweetness. Maybe only an Irishman could find solace in that way; I don't know, but that's how it felt.

The broken-down wreck. That I am. Where went my youth? How did this all come to pass, sneaking up on me like an apache? One minute everything seems fine, and the next I know my hip hurts if I sit too long, my knee hurts if I stand too long, my guts hurt if I eat too much fat or drink too much beer, everywhere I turn it's this-hurts or that-hurts this-is-stiff that-is-stiff, today my glasses seem fine, today both, or should I say all four, prescriptions seem off: just what the hell is going on?! Why am I tired all the time? Except when I have some gratifying work to do, in which case I'm not tired at all, even after I've worked my *ss off all day?

So many thoughts now crowding into my mind, I can't seem to sort them all out. I'm not even sure I want to try.

I know what to do when this happens to me: start counting my blessings, and get involved in some trivial project that I've put off time and again. That usually does the trick.

Funny, the things we dream about

2009-07-17T08:19:00.002-05:00

Dreamed about the print shop in Illinois again, last night. It's been almost 4 years since I was up there, and I was only there for about 20 months, and yet I've dreamt about it many times in the last four years--something like once every month or two. I suppose it has to do with unresolved feelings about the whole thing; I'd gone up there thinking I would work there until I retired, and, initially, I had every reason for thinking so.
I'd known Jim, the owner, for about 15 years, having been his customer service rep at the envelope plant for that whole time. I'd known his oldest son, Steve, for about 12 years, ever since he began working with his dad. I'd formed pretty strong friendships with both of them over the years, and, when they asked me if I was interested in coming to work for them, to help Steve run the company after Jim retired, I thought it was a match made in heaven. I enthusiastically closed up my affairs in St. Louis and moved the 90 miles north to White Hall, IL, expecting to be there for quite a long time.

What was left out of my calculations was Bev, Jim's wife, and, ultimately, the real owner of the company. Unbeknownst to me, the company had been funded with Bev's inheritance money, and she maintained the ultimate say-so, dependent not on business acumen but rather her feelings about things. And, unbeknownst to me, she viewed me as a threat to the #2 son, her favorite, and a world-class shirker of the highest order. It only took a couple of weeks for me to realize that she didn't like me, wouldn't like me, and wanted me out; I'd been brought on board against her wishes, a fact I only learned after I'd been there a year.

Let's just cut to the chase and note that it took her almost two years to work up the righteous indignation sufficient to force her will on Jim and Steve. On the day of my dismissal, Jim began with an attempt to justify what was happening based upon mistakes I supposedly made; when I challenged him for specifics, he ended up abandoning that course and just stated that they had to make more room for Eric in the running of the company. As with my departure from the envelope plant, I took the highest road I could manage, and told him I'd enjoyed my time in his employ, and that I was sorry to see things end this way, wished him well and took my leave. Part of me was devastated, but part of me was very glad to be done with Bev and her dismissive sniping, her pettiness.

And still I dream about that place; I'd made friends with the work-force, and, being the sort that likes pulling in double-harness, I'd really bonded with Steve. I was saddened by the fact that he wouldn't return my phone calls, but I understood. There was nothing he could do, and in a way, I think he was as hurt as I was. He'd had his right arm cut off by his own mother, who didn't seem to care that he'd now have to shoulder all the burdens that I'd gladly carried. Oh well.

Moving back to STL was actually a happy thing; I was really glad to move closer to my friends and family, and all the amenities of a major metropolitan area. I found a roommate and an apartment in my old haunts, and eventually another job, and got busy reforming my life again. Ultimately, I know I'm happier now than I was back then; if I hadn't had to move on, I wouldn't have found the job I have now, better than any I've had in decades.

But still I dream about that place. Why is that?

Pulling the plug on the summer job...

2009-07-15T09:42:00.002-05:00

Well, I just had to; the long hours of constant sitting were giving me hip-pains, and getting up to walk around the building every hour or so was providing less and less relief. Finally, having eclipsed my calculated "drop-dead" date for summer earnings, I went in this morning and submitted my final time-sheet.

They are great folks, and very cool to work for, but that hip (and other problems arising from long hours sitting, best left undescribed!) compelled me to stick to my guns and give it up. And they were totally cool about it-I was just summer temp help, I was due to leave very shortly anyway, so they just wished me well and shook my hand. Good people.

Now, as long as I keep my head on straight and my belt a bit tight, I should be free to do as I will for the rest of the summer break. And there are plenty of no-cost options for summer entertainment for me; I've been missing some free training at the district's Learning Center that I'll be going to now, and I've got a boat-load of hobby-work here at home to perform, plus more tape-rendering, writing, and assorted projects.

As Don Juan said, "Life is sweet, the little price we have to pay for it is a joke."

Heck, I'm even going to go into the school a few days and help my full-time partner in getting things ready for the start of classes...why not? I'll be doing it for the fun of it! That says a lot about my job with the school: I love it so much, I'm going in just for the pleasure of being there and doing things on my own time, the way I want to do them, so I can enjoy things being right when I have to work on them this fall. *sigh* I've waited all my life for a job I like this much!

On the perils of the photo-bag

2009-07-12T08:42:00.002-05:00

I had a dream last night, set in the old mobile-home I lived in during the last couple of collegiate years; funny how I dream so much about that place. I only lived there for about three years, but they were important, impactful years that probably have a lot to do with who I am now, so maybe it's not too strange. I spent a lot of time alone there; in fact, I was only half-joking when I referred to it as "the Trailer of Solitude".

I wanted to blog about the dream, so I dug into the unsorted bag I keep all my photos in, and that's when I realized the peril I was in. There's nothing for getting one derailed like trying to find a particular picture in a vast heap of unsorted photographs from all times of one's life. Still, I mustered all my steely resolve and dove in. I knew just the picture I wanted, and so I plowed resolutely through handful after handful, until the inevitable happened, and I discovered a whole sleeve of photos I couldn't even remember taking. From my marriage. From the good times.

NO! I will not be stayed! But I shoved them into a corner of the bag to be perused later. And dug back in, past the back-packing trips, past the college shenanigans, past the parties and band-jobs and pub-crawls and, ever more slowly, through the pictures which I didn't take, gifts from friends, showing me, younger and younger, until I came to a full-stop on a picture in the music store where I grew up, me behind the counter, long, long hair, in full late-70's regalia including silver and turquoise jewelry, wristband and LOOK! even my long-gone senior ring, hocked to buy a birthday gift for a girlfriend who broke up with me only hours after gifting her...

That Trailer of Solitude pic wasn't rising to the surface...if I wanted to think about that dream, write about that dream, write about the perils of the great bog of photographs that live in the closet, I had to pry myself away from all of this. No pic for the blog; in fact, now totally and completely derailed from the dream, the trailer, almost everything except thinking about how I, who try hard to not spend too much time in deep reflection, can be so easily pulled into the swirling downward spiraling drain deep into myself, my past, all the things that were and could've been and maybe, in some ephemeral thread of reality, are.

Ah, that photo bag is a perilous thing!

Platforms and OS and apps...oh, my!I

2009-07-09T15:13:00.003-05:00

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/07/08/google.chrome.challenges/index.html

The link above is about Google's proposed "Chrome" operating system; probably the first major new offering for OS's since Linux and it's various iterations. I've had exposure to a fair few OS's, from my early TI-99-4a through PC-DOS and AmigaDOS and all the stripes of Windows and Mac OS7, then Mac OSX; and I worked with some bigger machine OS's but never at the programmer level or anything. Still, I think I understand a bit about how all this stuff works, and how OS's and architecture work together to allow softwares to launch and run and do all the cool stuff we want to do.

I think we're looking at some paradigm-shift sort of dynamics here; I can see some value to a stripped-down OS designed to hook-up to and run apps that are never machine-resident; Windows already does that with the OS that's used on hand-held RF scanguns and such. In my opinion, it was a bit of overkill, but the scangun manufacturer obviously found it financially expeditious to license and use that OS over rolling up their own OS and then having to render it compatible with all the different softwares that it might be required to interface with. There are so many new uses for personal computing power, it's probably time to approach the situation from a whole new perspective. Still, that's a daunting prospective, and the folks who get it right are going to own the turf for a little while.

For myself, I find it all very interesting and exciting; I grin like a ninny at the chance to fiddle around with the new things coming out, especially as all these other platforms of mine continue to work and do what I want them to do. And I'm still blithely skating along, well behind the cutting edge. I really do need to get that Linux machine built....

Holiday Fun with some of the toyz...

2009-07-03T11:12:00.003-05:00

Yay! What a fun day! It began with the phone and internet being down; now that I actually have a cell-phone, I was able to call tech-support and verify that my diagnostics were correct, and the problem was up the pipeline and outside of the walls. Thank goodness I'm an early-riser, I'm sure that's the reason I got a technician on-site in about an hour. And, indeed, the problem was up the pipe. Poor guy, service was back by the time he knocked on my door, but it was nice to verify everything was good inside the walls, and we got to chat enough so that he said, "you're pretty savvy-if you get a problem like this again, here's my cell number. Call me and I should be able to tell you if there's a service issue in the area and save you all that checking." Pretty cool.

Then, I ended up going onto e-Bay to look at a guitar pedal I was following. The short story is this-notice the beige pedal in the pic above-that's a Danelectro Daddy-O Overdrive pedal I bought about two weeks ago for $38 off e-Bay. My friend John and I had been looking at these with an eye to doing some modifications and seeing if it wouldn't be a good mate for the pedal next to it, my vintage Electro-Harmonix Big Muff. That Daddy-O just happened to have the exact mods John and I were planning on doing, and the seller offered it for $38 delivered. I bought it, got it, and have totally fallen in love with it! I was talking with John the other night, and mentioned I liked it so much, I thought it would be cool to get another one, while they're still available (it's been discontinued); John said he'd seen some on e-Bay, and a little research showed there were several and they weren't getting much action. I bid on one this morning, and won the auction for $12.50! Hoo-ha! Modding it to match the first will be good fun in a week or so!

The ensemble pictured above actually represents a concept I and another friend, Don, kicked around a couple of years ago-we called it "the C-note Rig". The notion is, a guy can put together a pretty fun guitar rig if he discounts label-conscious snobbery and buys some inexpensive, but good, stuff. And here it all is: beneath that black-face Vibro-Champ (vintage, and stupidly costly these days!) is a very cool Epiphone Valve Jr. tube amplifier that I bought for $90, delivered, about two years ago. The telecaster guitar is a chinese knock-off I bought for about $95, delivered, about the same time. Beneath the pedals is a floor-monitor I built decades ago, the materials for which cost less than $25; it has a nice Celestion guitar speaker in it that I paid about $50 buck for, again bought online. The finally piece to the puzzle is a tasty little stomp-box of some ilk, depends on what you want, that, as I've shown, can be had for considerably less than $100. Our vision was, $100 for guitar, $100 for amp, $100 for speaker cabinet, and $100 for stomp-box. Again, I've shown you can considerably beat those prices with judicious shopping and a little ingenuity.

Now, I'm just gonna fire up the grill and do some chicken, drink a cold brew and play with my toyz. Y'all have a great holiday weekend!

It's Hell Getting Old...but I suppose it's better than the alternative...

2009-07-02T14:28:00.003-05:00

I had to bail early from the summer job; it involves sitting for long, long hours making call after call, and my hip just can't take it anymore. I consider myself lucky, since it's staying active that keeps me feeling physically good; I have friends my age, and some younger, who suffer when trying to stay active, and for me it's just the opposite. The more I stay on my feet, running hither and yon, the better I feel. When I have to sit for long periods, unless I can sort-of do the chaise-lounge thing, almost lying down, my left hip starts to complain, and eventually it turns into a burning ache that I just can't relieve without getting up and moving around. If I get up and work it out, I'm good for a little while, but the relief becomes shorter and shorter until I just have to either stand up for a couple hours or just lay down.

Among my ex-wife's various physical ailments was exactly the same thing I'm going through now, and, with her, the condition ultimately called for surgical intervention, to relieve congestion in the channel the sciatic nerve takes through the pelvis. It's quite a surgery, with a long recovery period, and I'm really not interested in going there myself. Especially since I know my usual practices, and my usual work-conditions, won't exacerbate things. I think I'm just going to have to pull the plug on this temp-job and mind my pennies through the rest of the summer.

I've resisted the changes age has brought on fairly well so far; I've studied Tai-Ch'i and Qi-Gong and Yoga, and I practice a fair bit, and it serves me well to maintain my flexibility and joint and muscle tone. One can only stave off these changes for so long, however, unless one makes it the whole business of life, which I'm disinclined to do. It's not all about living forever, you know.

Glory Days...they'll pass you by...

2009-06-27T08:26:00.002-05:00

I was casting about for something interesting to post about and, while looking for a different image, came across this. It's from the contact sheets for publicity pics for our band Metropolis; circa 1982 (?). Your humble bloghost is to the far left, apparently rating a "10". (smirk)

My colleague at the school job, Pat, is on the far right, sporting the super-tasty Gibson Thunderbird bass (an original, 1963 model). I'm holding my '66 Fender Musicmaster, which I'd modified with a hot humbucker in the bridge. It was a fun little guitar, but I mainly played my "big-boy" strats. Note the "flair" on my strap! That was a common feature for me back in the day, before I went all plain-jane. I'm wearing a girl's satin blouse that I'd dumpster-dived from the apartment complex I worked at-it had a matching scarf that I wore sometimes.

Next to me is my friend Tim, our keyboard player, and the only one in the pic that's still making his living as a musician-he does what he calls "the Geritol Tour", playing at retirement and nursing homes. It is apparently a going concern. The last character is our drummer, Don; last I heard, he was a cop! Funny story: to get Don, Pat and I, who were trying to create a new band, joined up with him and a couple of guys he'd been playing with for awhile. We didn't think too much of the other guys, but Don was a decent drummer and had a very good voice (singing drummers aren't exactly common!). We drafted Tim and had a six-man band, more than we really wanted; splitting our small wages 6 ways didn't exactly make anyone flush. One day before rehearsal, after we'd played about 4 jobs as a sextet, Pat, Tim and I managed to talk to Don alone. As we began to broach the subject of letting the other two guys go, Don looked at the ground and then looked up at us with a shit-eating grin and said "thank God you guys brought this up-I've been trying to think of how to propose the same thing to you!"

In true cheesy musician fashion, by the time the other guys showed up, we had most of our gear packed and just told them "this isn't really working out, we're gonna disband and sort things out for awhile." It was pretty awkward, with the other guys trying to persuade us to stick together, but we were firm. I even got a little prima-donna-ish, to try to help things move along. We helped them pack up their gear and load out, making mouth noises about maybe trying again a bit later, and kind of shuffled them off. Then we set up our gear again and started rehearsing the "new" band.

A couple of weeks later, I ran into the dismissed guitarist at a club, and he told me after they left, he and the other guy went to a bar and pretty much figured it all out. To their great credit, they didn't really feel that bad about it, or so he said. They could see we were working on a different level than their previous band, were more committed, more serious, and they knew we could've just told them "you're out!" instead of trying to preserve their "face".

I appreciated that more when, about 8 months later, I was "invited onward" by my bandmates; we'd come to some pretty serious differences in opinion, which I won't bore you with now. Another party had been added to the band, and by ousting me assumed much greater influence over the band's direction. Metropolis went on for several years after I left; for my part, I entered into the most lucrative and productive period of my life as a professional musician. As I was putting my next band together, I had a bizarre accident and lost the tip of my little finger on my left hand-my "neck" hand. I trashed that effort and spent a couple of months recuperating and figuring out how to adapt my playing from being a real four-finger player to being mostly a three-finger guy--and, while that was one of the most depressing times of my life, I discovered that a lot of folks in the STL musician community didn't care about my "handicap", and were interested to see if I wouldn't focus more on singing after the accident. I did, and that really transformed my career. In a way, good guitar players were a dime-a-dozen, but good guitar players who could sing well were more desireable. I got almost all my subsequent jobs on the basis of my singing, more than my playing.

And so your humble narrator was launched onto the road in a succession of lounge and Holiday Inn bands; I made a lot of money, and had a lot of fun, and really got to work thru my "I want to be a professional musician" angst. After several years of that, I realized the sacrifices to try to make it in the music biz were just more than I wanted to make, so I sought out and found a day-job and enrolled in college. I still played music, and indeed, had a sort-of second career running sound for friend's bands; I'm still a dedicated guitarist and spend a lot of my time tinkering with gear and playing. I'll always be a musician; I'll always be a guitarist. It's a big part of who I am.

And I'll always cherish those glory days.

Busy boy, busy boy!

2009-06-22T21:45:00.002-05:00

Yes, I've been a busy busy boy. Refreshed enthusiasm from the school gig has had me working on a bunch of musical gear, and actually buying something, and actually fixing something, all too involved to talk about just now, except to say that's it's been fun. And the summer job, and the movie-rendering, and helping the roomie with his car; plus it's been absolutely unbearably hot and humid here in STL, so when I needed mental refreshing it was pretty much down to watching some movies or catching a nap.
I really need to put some thought into some cool posting but right now I'm, again, all shagged out after a long squawk. One more day of the phone-job and then it's a nice two-day network administration seminar for the school, a very pleasant break from sitting on the phone. I just hope I don't melt over the next couple of days-they're predicting 97+ with heat indices in the 100's; I am just not cut out for this!

Oh well, thank goodness we have a/c! I remember doing without, not all that long ago. Air-conditioning makes life bearable in the summer, when you live in St. Louis.

First Principles in writing

2009-06-14T15:04:00.003-05:00

The first principle of writing is be in a peaceful state of mind. This seems counter-intuitive, since a good deal of good writing occurs in the heat of the moment, impassioned, as it were, by the exigencies of that immediate experience. The trick is, it seems to me, to hold onto that passion until one is prepared to write clearly and succinctly about whatever it is that is moving one to write.

I have an example here at hand; for yesterday afternoon I had a surprising emotional moment, the sudden passion of which might have easily roused me to write about it, except that I knew, in the heat of that remembrance, I would've probably failed miserably to relate that which I really wanted to say about it, and instead have devolved onto merely describing it, with no insight or reflection. The mechanics of the situation are this, and such that I expect many people will be able to relate to: I was listening to a song on a CD which I hadn't listened to for some time, and, suddenly, a song that was very closely identified to the end of my marriage came on. In a sudden rush, all my thoughts and feelings from that time came over me, like a flood, and as I was sitting my living room chair with my roommate next to me, watching a movie as I sat with the laptop and headphones, I decided to move to the deck to finish listening to the song.

It's not revealing too much to say that the song was "If I Ever Lose My Faith In You" from Sting's "Ten Summoner's Tales" album. In keeping with first principles, I can say that there are two parts to the significance of this song to me: the first, a temporal consideration, in that I had really gotten into this album around the first summer of my marriage, and, at the time I imprinted the devastating associations that follow it now, I was on vacation and had the house to myself, so I could totally crank up the stereo I had been building since my return from Detroit and had actually gotten married to the gal I'd pursued off and on for over 11 years. I was finally living in a mostly-happy home with someone I'd given my love to more than once, only to suffer from unfortunate break-ups.

The second aspect is a lot trickier to pin down, because of course, if you listen to the lyrics, there is a central theme of "if I lose my faith in you, there'd be nothing left for me to lose". This concept is quintessentially important here, because it's one of the things my wife said to me after we got back together after a 5 year break-"I can't believe you came back to me after all that." And I told her, "you should never lose your faith in me-if you'll just let me be there, I will be there for you." We had about four good years; then, her old problems, having never been resolved despite my support for that, resurged. After an evening of inexplicable, horrible recrimination that mostly had to do with things in her head and not on-the-ground reality, she demanded a divorce and I told her "I won't fight you to stay married to me." And so, eventually, we moved apart and I petitioned the state for, and recieved, a divorce.

And as I stood on the deck last night, listening to a song that at one time had expressed everything I felt about my happiness in finally having the woman and home that I'd always longed for, I started crying. Crying for that guy back then, so happy and thinking he'd found his place, crying for me now, much older, lonely, sure that all that aspect of my life is pretty much over forever, reminded of all the former loves who are all gone forever too, knowing full well that I just don't have it in me anymore to dive into that great pool of emotion and utter commitment, unbelieving that all my best was never enough, ever, anywhere, anytime.

I cried when I wrote this song; sue me if I play too long. Call me Deacon Blues.

And what does all of this have to do with First Principles in Writing, you ask?

Write what you know, and never fear to tell the whole, personal truth. No writing is better than that which unflinchingly reveals the writer's very soul.

For that, one must have great peace of mind.

11th Annual Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure draws over 66,000!

2009-06-13T13:46:00.002-05:00

I've got some other images I might work on and post, but this is a view of the participants of the 11th annual Komen Race for the Cure against breast cancer here in STL. Looking west down Market Street, approaching 18th street.
I've been a supporter since the early days, but this is the first time I actually went down and did the walk with the masses; as a rule, I dislike being in crowds, but my friend Steve walked last year and really wanted someone to walk with him this year, so I thought, "what the heck." I was curious about a few things, not the least of which was how I would feel packed in with all those people, so Steve and I hooked up early and went downtown for the walk. Man! What a crowd! Now, I've been in some pretty big crowds in my day--I was actually working backstage artist services at the VP Fair Fourth of July when we had 1 MILLION people estimated in attendance! But that figure covered the entire downtown area and Laclede's Landing, a much larger area than the several blocks cordoned off of the race today--so the sheer mass of moving humanity seemed denser today, but I did okay. As we walked, when the pack got a little pressed, I just kicked it down a gear and moved into a clearer space.
Three miles is not much of a hike to me-I usually go 6-8 miles when I get out and really do some hiking. So the physical effort was pretty much inconsequential; two things surprised me in it all, however; the first, that 66,000 people could look like so many, and second, that after 48 years of life in St. Louis, and three hours spent in the mass, I didn't see a single soul I knew. Steve and I talked about that a bit on our walk-looking to see if anyone we knew would turn up-and it still surprises me that neither of us saw anyone. I realize there's just under one million people in the metro area, but still, I really would've thought I'd see SOMEONE I knew.
Anyway, they managed to raise around 3.2 million dollars for the cause, just a tad under what they did last year, and that's a really cool thing. I'm not a cancer-survivor, in fact, there's low-incidence of cancer in my family, as far as we know (medical records being rather unreliable more than 60 years back or so), so when participants asked who I was walking for, I just said "for everyone who can't be here to walk today."

And while I found out that I still dislike being in crowds, I really do like seeing all those people united in common cause, and as my eyes walked on the masses all around me, I was really glad I went. I intend to walk this walk again, next year, and hope to do so for as long as I'm around.

Scary depths, Scary breadths

2009-06-12T21:16:00.000-05:00

So, I know going into this kind of reading I’m opening a whole can of worms for myself; I’m the kind of person who gets profoundly affected by things I read, and while I read a great variety of things, I do spend a fair bit of my reading time on books of real significance. When I began rereading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I knew what to expect from myself. ZMM has always affected me very deeply, as has Pirsig’s follow-up, Lila. So even though I’ve been through these works before, and have been profoundly affected by them before, each rereading brings to the fore all the thoughts and reflections I had every time I read them before, and completely color my thinking for days, if not weeks, afterwards.

So, I’m deep into this now. I suppose it doesn’t help that I’m very busy reading this deep, reflective, introspective work at the same time I’m busy doing shallow, meaningless, inconsequential work in a call center that, thankfully, at least let’s me read when there’re no calls to be made. But all of that is really okay; Pirsig’s message of Quality and the nature of reality sort of help me accept that I’m doing this work because it will pay me to keep moving forward towards work with much higher value. And unfortunately I do feel competent enough in my own critical thinking that I find myself, yet again, working to integrate Pirsig’s ideas into everything else I know about philosophy, consciousness and the ultimate apprehension of reality. My own experience. There’s just so much to reconcile here; our personal experiences are so profoundly unique and yet, if we want to believe they are integrated into some sort of overarching, all-encompassing reality we have to try to reconcile the discrepancies between everything we’ve been taught to think and feel, and everything we DO think and feel. There’s many a slip betwixt the cup and lip.

Maybe I’m getting a bit deep here, but for myself, this is what I value most about putting these thoughts out there for whoever cares to read them. I really enjoy reading the blogs of my new-found friends and we all seem to keep it a bit on the lighter side, sort-of cheering each other along on our way, but I can’t help getting deeply reflective when I read works like ZMM. I know if folks don’t care to read or comment on these musings, it’s okay. Somehow, it just feels a bit better to think out loud about it.

Robin Meade skydives with GHW Bush

2009-06-12T07:39:00.002-05:00

Now, I just gotta say this here-I've said it many times elsewhere-TANDEM SKYDIVING DOES NOT QUALIFY ONE TO SAY THEY'VE PARACHUTED! Granted, you do exit the plane, freefall, and land. But you are strapped to an experienced parachutist and are never in control of your dive.

As a veteran of 3 static-line dives, I think I know whereof I speak. In a static line deploy, while you do not pull your own ripcord or toss a pilot chute like experienced divers, you still have to get out of the plane, get stablized hanging onto the wing-strut, and then let go in a manner which will keep you level as the line goes taut and deploys your chute. After that, you are in complete control of your canopy and fall, completely responsible for your own navigation and landing. NOW THAT'S REAL SKYDIVING!

I suppose it still takes some nerve to exit a plane strapped to an instructor, but in my opinion it takes waaaayy more to get yourself in the door, on the step, all the way out, hang on the strut until you're cleared deploy, and GO. On my first dive, because of unpredictably shifting winds, my jump-mistress held me on the strut for about a minute-and-a-half; it seemed like days. My hands were perspiring freely and I was slowly getting blown off the plane! I was clinging by my fingertips when she finally gave me the thumbs-up. Letting go of that strut was one of the greatest sensations of my life...AT LAST!!

I would've kept skydiving but for the cost.

Anyway, good luck to Robin! GHWB, feh, whatever....

Zen and the Art of Time-Filling

2009-06-11T20:17:00.001-05:00

One of the things I really love about this summer job is the time it gives me to read. Oddly enough, sitting at my desk with a book is not something the school particularly likes, but at the call-place it's something they greatly prefer to people surfing around. Some of that probably has to do with the fact that, when I'm killing time at school on a computer, it IS sort-of related to my work. At the summer job, there are data security issues so they really don't want people surfing around on the computers, but hey, reading a book is just hunky-dory. Last summer I revisited some really great books-since the reading is constantly interrupted, it's best to read books you've already read, and I'm a world-class rereader. There are books I've reread so many times, sometimes yearly or even more, that I can wholesale quote them, page after page. To me, it's something like admiring a painting you love, I just never get tired of examining it. Last summer, I was ongoingly entertained by things like Watership Down, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, The Name of the Rose, a lot of my favorites.

This summer I'm revisiting weightier fare; I'm almost done with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and will plunge right head-long into Lila. Robert Pirsig's first book really changed my life in many ways; his second book is the reason my cat is named Lila. I'm going to have to do a lot of thinking about this, because I would like to talk some about Pirsig and his philosophy, but maybe not right now.

Soon, though.

Say Hello to my Little Friend!

2009-06-07T14:06:00.003-05:00

There are several principles which guide my life; "form follows function", "conserve your resources", "find the greatest utility at the least expense", "reduce, reuse, recycle", and, of course, "never invade Russia unless you can be in Moscow before winter sets in".
In the spirit of these guiding light principles, allow me to introduce my little friend. She's a Mac PowerBook G4-867 meg PowerPC, 256 megs RAM (fully populated!) and a 40 gig Fujitsu hard drive. In other words, she's not too smart, not too fast, and doesn't have an impressive memory (at least for these days). BUT! She possesses charms that might escape the notice of those determined to always be on the cutting, if not bleeding, edge; and, she has been so good to me, my little Steely Mac, that I can no longer resist extolling her virtues.

First, let me reiterate for any who might not already know, I'm NOT a Mac aficianado; I cut my teeth on TI-99-4A's and Amigas, finally bowing to the inevitable with my first (home-rolled) PC and hot on it's heels a Toshiba T-1000SE laptop (no hard drive!), all the while getting versed a bit on IBM mainframes and AS/400s and that ilk. When my school job required me to get reacquainted with the Mac family, I hadn't touched one since OS7, and even that exposure had been rather minimal. Needless to say, the last several months have been verrrry interrresting! Fortunately for me, my experience has been so all-over-the-boards that, for the most part, it's been more like learning a proprietary software than getting broken-into yet another platform.

When I started with the school, I was assigned a big-guns-full-bore Macbook to be my main computer--2 gig processor, over a gig of RAM, 180 gig hard-drive, etc etc. Quite a tasty little laptop, and I've enjoyed using it. After a couple of weeks dragging it home and back every day (after all, I was trying get totally immersed in the Mac environment) I started getting a bit tired of the effort, and my thoughts turned to looking for some sort of solution. Then, I found my little friend. She had been purchased years ago to travel around with a projector on a cart and, when the district rolled out laptops to all the teachers, became redundant and a bit outdated, and got shelved. When I first powered her up, she hadn't been turned on for about 2 years.

At first, I just kinda liked her look, and maybe felt a bit sorry for her, stuck in a drawer for a couple of years. So I powered her up, recharged her battery and updated the software, just fiddling around with her for my own amusement. And then I started noticing some things; for one, she was full-featured: a couple of USB 2 ports, Firewire, ethernet, DVI, heck she even had a 56k modem! And an airport card, and a CD read/write, DVD read-only drive. Not too shabby for a little laptop. She was trim, too--a good two inches narrower than the Macbook, which, while shaving down screen size, also made her fit my lap very nicely. She's not really proportionately lighter than the Macbook (that titanium case, after all!) but I really sorta liked the "steely" look. Being basically abandoned, after all, I couldn't resist taking her home for a weekend of playing-around. And that's when I discovered her real attributes!

I have been a writer my whole life. I learned how to type when I was 16, and since then, I've written on a host of typewriters, and, eventually, computers. I'm pretty picky about that tactile interface. In fact, I use a remote keyboard with the Macbook because I just cannot stand the little plastic tab keys they feature. BUT! Steely Mac has nicely contoured, edge-to-edge placed keys and I quickly found that I could write faster, more accurately, and more comfortably on this little laptop than any computer since my pobrecito Toshiba T-1000SE, which machine had, for me, previously defined comfort! I spent quite a few happy hours messing with her, and ultimately realized that I might have found my Mac-toting solution. I decided to make her mine.

First, I thought about her capacities and limitations. She could serve as a pretty good netbook; kinda slow on accessing videos, true, but just generally surfing the web she ran fine. While she didn't have a lot of memory, that was ameliorated by stripping off all but the really useful and generally used software. I recovered about half of the hard-drive space that way, so you can tell I still have a lot of useful software installed. What drive space persists I dedicate mostly to temporary file space, so any files I want to maintain long-term get moved off onto flash-drives or my big-guns PC. The software retained is optimized for interfacing with that platform; too, I've been busy over the last year exploring net-apps, to reduce the apparency of which platform I might be using at any given time. Since I set up an 802.11G wi-fi for my roommate, Steely Mac's airport logs right on and I have zero connectivity issues-except for that not-too-big RAM.

Finally, this little goomer fits in my lap perfectly. I can type for hours without getting fatigued, the screen is plenty big enough and pretty enough for my needs, I suppose my biggest complaint is the crummy audio output. Still, put the 'phones on and it's good enough. It gets surprising battery life-I've run it over four hours on the batts with no real issues, although I tend to leave it plugged in, even in the lap, unless I'm not sitting in my chair, but then again, that's where I mostly use it. Virtually all of my blogging and blog-responding goes on with the ever-capable assistance of my Steely Mac.

While there are plenty of reasons to call it out-of-date, it's certainly not without value! I really like my little friend, and, especially since it is so pleasant to sit and write on it, cannot envision when it will become so obsolete that I cannot do without replacing it.

That being said, I've been noticing those tasty little netbooks lately.........

Need old habits die?

2009-06-07T06:04:00.002-05:00

The first two days in the new old job went well, though things are a little bit different than they were last summer; a bit more structured about breaks and such, more like the usual call-center than the relaxed place it was. They've changed the responsibilities of the position some, too, in ways making it easier, but those changes make it a bit duller, too. Oh well, it's not to be helped.

More troubling than anything is the change to my working hours-they've scheduled me 9:30 to 6 p.m., quite a change from what I'm accustomed to. I have the habit of rising very early, usually between 4 and 5 a.m., and therefore I tend to retire early, around 9 p.m. or so. Last week I tried to get my internal clock to reset, but it was a bit futile. A couple of days won't suffice, and as I thought about it this weekend, I began thinking, "why bother?" I'll only be in this job for about two months, and then I'll be going back to school. There, I go in around 6:30 a.m. and leave about 3 p.m., hours that suit me fine. And it's not like I have any kind of social life in the evenings; I suppose the only downside to keeping my early schedule is the tediousness of waiting around in the morning to go in to work. Once I'm there, it's just a matter of dealing with my readiness to call it a day around 3 p.m.

Back in my collegiate days I had to contend with a various and ever-changing schedule. Originally I worked nights, went to school during the day, and snatched what sleep I could whenever. My employer confounded things somewhat by changing my shift assignment periodically, throwing me onto first shift, requiring I change my classes to nights and weekends. Over the course of my degree work I got bounced from first to third and back again about 5 times; it always took a couple of weeks to get acclimated to new hours. I recall reading a study done about adjusting circadian rhythms and as I recall that week or two was about average for most folks to make a major adjustment in sleeping-waking cycles.

So, why try to kill my old habit of early-rising, when I would just need to start readjusting in a month or so? Perhaps I would be better served by trying to find things to keep me engaged in the empty morning hours until my shift begins?

Back in the saddle at the new old job

2009-06-04T16:05:00.002-05:00

Spent my first day at the new old job; after a couple hours being acquainted with the new interface and getting some briefing on policy changes, I got to spend the afternoon pretty much doing the job, just like last summer. It was good; I like the gal they placed me with for refreshing, she was sharp and skillful. I guess the only frustration to manage now is waiting for IT to get me set up with my log-in, password, and get me a security i.d. so I can come and go. These things always take a bit of time.

It's cool, too, since I know this is only for so-long; and while I've always disliked transitions, this went really smooth, since I spent a few months there last summer, and some of my pals are still around. They were all really glad to see me and very friendly. I really look forward to catching up with them. I am, however, in a very different place than I was last time; I know I have somewhere I'll be returning to in not-too-many weeks, and while I really like these people, I can hardly wait to get back to school.

Ah, Life. It sure is an interesting proposition.

A sweet day for the ol' QMech

2009-06-03T09:42:00.002-05:00

Happily I've reached the point where I'm digging into my VHS conversion project, and it's rolling along nicely. I've cataloged my MST3K's (80-ranging from early Joel to late Sci-Fi channel offerings) and I'm in the process of reviewing my bad sci-fi captures to weed out things that aren't of sufficient quality to convert...unfortunately, there are quite a few of those.

My criteria for conversion are:
-is it hard or impossible to find already on DVD?
-is the image worth the effort?
-are there ancillary qualities worth preserving (commercials, additional materials, some special quality?)
-just plain worthy of keeping?

I had a hoot yesterday, ripping and rendering my copy of "This Island Earth"; granted, it's available, but I have to mind my pennies these days. Too, I have a nice-looking copy sans commercials, AND it calls back for me the night I recorded it from broadcast, for personal reasons best not discussed here. However, we had some terrific thunderstorms moving through the area, which cut the power, which corrupted the project, which meant I ended up doing the whole thing three times before I had something I could burn! In the long run, I might've saved a lot of effort by just waiting until I could buy the thing.

Today, however, is my very favorite kind of day for this kind of project. It's a bit chilly, drizzly, a perfect day to make some chili (!) and dig through tapes. I've spent the morning making lists and reviewing tapes-an effort I will spend the rest of the day on-and putting the rendering studio through it's paces. It does a good job, for a suite of gear I have no investment in, and as I go through the process repeatedly it gets faster and easier.

In the background I'm reviewing tapes, while the suite is processing; hell, I've even finished scrubbing the shower-I'M ON FIRE! and tomorrow, I go back to work at the temp-job; at least, I'm supposed to-I'm still waiting for my agency rep to give me my hours, etc. I suppose I should just be "chill" but, dammit, I'd like to get on with it!

Oh yeah, gotta do some laundry (new work clothes!)...more later.

I Promise, one of these days I will Stop Procastinating!

2009-06-01T10:03:00.002-05:00

Just as I've told myself 800 million times to stop exaggerating!

What can I say-procrastination is the final refuge of the able who just don't feel like doing that thing right this minute. It drove my ex-wife crazy, this habit of mine. She would concoct some project for me, present it, and expect immediate action. And then quietly fume while I approached the whole thing crab-wise, thinking about it, musing upon it, researching, studying, considering and reconsidering, sidling up to it in the way I best like to approach problems which do not require quick and immediate resolution.

Don't get me wrong, I'm capable of quick and decisive action and I'm good in a pinch; in fact, I do some of my best work when everything's on the line and a solution was needed 5 minutes ago. But in a sort of husbanding-of-my-resources way, things that don't require such immediacy often quietly tick away on idle as I slowly formulate my approach. She, on the other hand, rarely gave careful consideration before just diving into a project, often only to find that she didn't have the needed materials or tools or plan to complete whatever it was she was attempting. And that sort of roadblock is just the thing to completely derail me.

So, you may ask yourself, what is it that I'm procrastinating on today? Well, in my crab-wise, sidling up to it way, I've gotten about 1/2-way thru cleaning the apartment, reorganizing my music gear, setting up the rendering lab for my VHS-to-DVD conversion project, sorting a whole bunch of clothes into keep or donate piles, finally deciding which of my kitschy collection of old audio and electronic gear to keep and which to pitch, oh my, the list can go on for days! And instead of doing any of that (I DID, after all, spend several hours this morning poking most of those projects with a pencil, after all!) I'm listening to my old Nektar CDs, having a cold beer and writing in this blog.

After all, it's GOOD to be the king! In fact, I think a plan is formulating even as I write-more slacking off, a mid-day nap (hey, it's going to be 90 degrees today! heck with going out...) then maybe a bit of early evening supper, read or play guitar a bit, and then one of my very favorite things-GO SHOPPING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT! While I try not to patronize Wally world too much, there are some things I need which I just cannot spend more than the barest minimum on...slacks and shirts for the new job, stuff like that. I love going to 24 hr. stores in the middle of the night, when there's no traffic in or out of the store, and I can just piddle along amusing myself looking at the things people spend money on.

Sounds like a plan.

Audiophilia

2009-05-31T12:10:00.002-05:00

Okay, so I don't even begin to qualify as an audiophile. But, I DO listen to my CDs on a carefully selected DVD player that has a really nice ADA convertor through my 1974 Pioneer Quad receiver feeding custom-voiced CMC speakers...and I'm here to say, I'm thoroughly disappointed by what my Macs do to my disc's files. I suspect that iTunes renders them into some sort of sampled Mpeg format that plays what PASSES for the real audio file. I've noticed this with friends iPods, that the music files don't sound right to me. I spent some time today A/B-ing the Macs and the player, and the difference is HUGE!

You know, sometimes I think we're too involved with making the circle ROUNDER. Having been through the battles to get to a better audio format from vinyl thru magnetic tape to optical tracks, MAYBE WE GOT IT RIGHT NOW. Now, I'm all about BACK OFF, tech-boys...this stuff sounds GREAT RIGHT NOW! I'm listening to AJA (Steely Dan) and the difference between the old-school set-up and the Mac is MORE THAN OBVIOUS!

Point in case, HOME AT LAST; the air in between the piano chords at the opening are completely lost in the iTunes version...and yet, SUPPOSEDLY, iTunes is PLAYING MY DISC!

Leave me alone; I don't care about your format changes, I'M HAPPY WITH THIS, DAMMIT!

And, in fact, it sounds WAY BETTER than the iTunes pablum you're trying to push off on me...that stuff may be good enough for the inconigscenti you're preaching to, but it will never sell to me!

A day for Random Musings

2009-05-31T08:36:00.002-05:00

There's a part of me that hates transitions. Perhaps because I have engineered my life in such a way that most of it revolves around things I'm particularly interested in, I rarely feel stagnated, in desire or need of change. I enjoy having the somewhat non-volitional aspects of my life (the need for gainful employment, the exigencies of bill-paying and infrastructure maintenance) be rather constant and predictable. Perhaps this is the result of my tumultuous young-adult years, when minding many irons in many fires was requisite, years when I was trying to make good as a musician, and in service of that effort held many part-time jobs, rehearsed, traveled to band-jobs and tried to keep body-and-soul together all at the same time.

That was a time in my life when no minutes went unaccounted-for; when I snatched sleep and meals and showers as I could. When I ultimately decided that I was not going to continue to pursue a career in music, I found a day-job that would support my effort at higher education and enrolled in college. The next five years were, if anything, more stuffed with necessity and obligation. When I finally graduated, I decided I would forevermore make time to just sit, and think, and read. I have honored that decision all of my days since. I sleep when I want to, eat when I want to, and if I have choice in the matter, decline to attend to anything I do not choose to attend to. I accept no obligations which do not please me.

Does that make me selfish? Perhaps. I don't particularly care what others may think. I give of myself, freely, as I am moved to; I ignore obligations that others might press upon me, if they do not please me. I am the architect of my fate, the captain of my soul. And the love I give is free from expectation, the good I do is done without thought for reward, and the time I spend on myself is mine to spend as I will.

Mine is a course that may not satisfy others, but it is my course, and as I steer by my solitary star I am content.....

The school year ends tomorrow

2009-05-28T15:35:00.002-05:00

It's been odd for me, the last few days. The teachers and most of the staff are all excited, the year is ending, most of them starting vacation (2 months worth!) and the ones that are working are mostly doing so by choice, not necessity.
I've been kind of down; I'm glad I've got summer work, I'm glad I'll be coming back to school in August, but I'm not really looking forward to going back to the call center. Now, mind you, it's easily the best phone-job I can imagine, no selling, no pressure, but still, I would so much rather be either working on the infrastructure at the school, like my compatriot, or taking the summer off like the faculty. Were it not an economic necessity, I would not work over the summer break-I think part of it might be that I dislike shifting work-roles. I've had to do that a lot over the last seven years, and even though I know this is a temporary shift, I like my role as tech-guy fixer-of-all-problems so much more than pleasant-voice-on-the-phone-soliciting-information.

*sigh* I need to keep focused on the fact that the bills are going to get paid!

And, if things go as predicted, one way or the other I'll probably get to either work in the school next summer, or take the break off. Gotta keep countin' them blessings.

The Buttermilk Launch and the end of a year...

2009-05-21T17:27:00.002-05:00

So of course, after going nearly insane over a week and half, we came to the final virtual space station mission. All I can say about the Wednesday launch is, we had to set up in virtually no time due to a library space scheduling conference but, having "solved" all the power-outage issues Tuesday I was very confident the launch would go without a hitch, at the last minute. WRONG! One of the student computers REFUSED to log on, even though it was running under exactly the same conditions as the computers that had no problems. Again, I worked furiously trying to get the thing logged onto the website, and, without boring you with the details, finally succeeded through sheer arcane network trickery.
Thursday was, actually, the first day in the series that we had adequate time to get everything up and running, had no scheduling conflicts, and had no power-outages.

It was the Buttermilk launch. At the end of the mission, I spoke briefly with the mission Commander, who had been on the other end of the line Tuesday and remembered our problems; I thanked her for her patience and she remarked "you know, usually when these things don't come right up the folks on the other end just start throwing their hands up. We were impressed by how hard you guys worked to get the mission running, even with reduced time. You guys did a great job." That was all the praise I really needed.

And now the school year is winding down...I'm totally sad about that. Glad as I am to have summer work, I will miss going to school each morning and wait with greatest enthusiasm getting back into the saddle in August. Hopefully that will change soon; there is so much I would like to do over the summer, but my compatriot Pat will have to do those chores without me....for now.

Any launch you can walk away from...

2009-05-18T15:25:00.002-05:00

(being the completion of Bandwidth Battles in the service of the State)

Last Friday, having determined that bandwidth issues were conflicting our attempts to launch the virtual space mission at school, we scheduled an early test of the full system, before the state-mandated tests would again choke the datastream.

And, that test failed. AAARRRGGGHHH I was losing my mind, again two phones to the head and trying to navigate tests on the system, this time my partner was there to keep hacking on the Skype connection while I started running speedtests-we quickly determined that there was still something severely limiting our upload bandwidth. I dashed up to the headend room and jacked into the first switch out of the server-THEN I got decent download speeds but STILL had next to nothing upload. We called the school's network administrators and, lo and behold, found out we were getting terrible bandwidth on the upload from our ISP-they were already working on it, but our Friday test was dead in the water. We were going to have to go naked into the breach Monday morning.

Monday morning I ran a speed test at 6:40 a.m. and got better-than-nominal down and upload speeds. Things were starting to look better, but we weren't going to be able to really test the connections until 1/2 hour before launch--I had my hands a bit full anyway, since we'd decided to move the whole mission up to the library, closer to the headend room, where we could count on the best connectivity in the building. I still had to create and implement a layout for the 5 flight control teams and assure there would be no issues with that. Got that done and awaited the 10 a.m. test.

As we started the test, got the Skype connection up but immediately started dropping the call again. I got the University tech on the line and we started hacking away again; several tests into the problem-solving we were able to determine a key port was being restricted by the network firewall and filters. Pat got the net admins on the line and got that fixed and voila, I got the student machines onto the website and fully operational. Still having Skype problems, though. And the clock was ticking, ticking, ticking...we finally persuaded the net admin to blow our Skype computer's I.P. past the firewall completely--NOT SOMETHING I WOULD DO OTHERWISE, I ASSURE YOU! but THAT did the trick! We got Mission Control up and linked right as the kids were walking in to start their mission.

And after that, the mission flew smooth as buttermilk. It's a really cool e-mission, taking the kids from launch to docking and then SURPRISE! a solar flare erupts and the lesson starts-you guys have to work the problem and save the ISS crew from deadly radiation from a solar flare! And the kids got right into the spirit of the thing, manning their posts, working the math, working the problem. It was totally cool, totally worth all the effort.

Now, if the next three missions just launch a bit smoother......

Systematic suspension of disbelief explained

2009-05-16T10:55:00.002-05:00

I've been asked by some friends to explain what I mean by this; it's basically pretty simple-one practices "turning off" any critical thinking while examining a curious belief or puzzling event, one attempts to resist our innate tendency to reach for explanations based on what we believe we know, and merely accept the information being presented as though it is literally true, regardless of what we might otherwise think. We "suspend" our tendency to disbelieve. Concurrently, we do not particularly believe, but merely take in, uncritically, the relation. It's sort of the polarity of exercising critical thinking in a skeptic's fashion.

Now, why would one want to do this? Well, for starters, the notion is grounded in a taoist understanding of balance and polarity; might there not be some benefit to stretch the mind and imagination in the opposite manner we normally employ them? In SSD, we are exercising that part of our mind that is rarely employed. Too, we are dispassionately considering that, perhaps, there's something in the previously unconsidered that we might want to examine more closely, uncontaminated by our habitual understandings. And, ultimately, I find it fun.

Now, here's a link to an important skeptic site:

http://skeptoid.com/episode_guide.php

Brian Dunning does a yeoman job critically assessing pop phenomena and ephemera; I don't always agree with him (in fact, somewhat rarely) but in the service of SSD, it's only right to employ the same discipline to skeptics that we apply to "true-believers". In fact, it's downright enjoyable to systematically suspend disbelief in disbelieving-it turns the whole thing into a delightful Ourouborean twisted knot of what-do-I-think-and-why-do-I-think-it? And, dispassionately examing our beliefs and disbeliefs reveals amazing things about ourselves to ourselves.

Robert Anton Wilson promoted a more-active SSD, wherein the practicioner would actively believe the previously disbelieved or unconsidered. And while that's a worthy exercize (his spelling), I find that a bit taxing-I seem to get more out of merely suspending any belief or disbelief by thinking, "who can really say? Isn't Universe far too huge for me to totally apprehend? Maybe this view is right?" And then, that little bit of my mind that stands outside of all of this, gets to go tee-hee-hee. And, ultimately, I come away from it all knowing a bit more about what I, at the end of the day, really do believe.

Lila's Story...in part.

2009-05-15T11:47:00.002-05:00

I had been bereft of cat for about two years when my then-girlfriend and I moved into an old farmhouse. We'd only been in the house a few weeks when she discovered that we had field mice coming in. "You've got to put out traps!" she implored. "No, we need to get a cat," I replied. At the time, she was not a "cat-person", but, in her defense, she was pretty much carrying her father's attitude about cats-"they're sneaky, they're aloof, they're a lot of trouble."

I'd had cats since I was 12 years old-in fact, I was the reason my family ever had cats at all. So I insisted to her, "if we rely on traps, we'll be setting them all fall and winter; if we get a cat, that'll be the end of the mice!" She relented, and I set about finding my kitty. Now, it's true, some cats are sneaky and aloof, but my experience has borne out that a cat's personality very much reflects the way it was nurtured when young. I'd learned from experience, that if I was going to be happy with a cat, I needed to get her young and pliable; after about a year, that cat's core personality is set, and then there's only so much you can do to moderate it's behavior.

My search began in the area we lived in, but after several weeks I began to despair of finding my kitty. The search was complicated by the fact that my last cat had been the best to date-smart, sweet, loving, funny, energetic, friendly-a perfect feline companion. I will have to tell her story some other time, but for now, let's say she set the bar pretty high. And I admit I get a little Zen-mystical about something like selecting a cat-I knew, in my heart, that I would know her when I saw her. My then-girlfriend was getting impatient; "are you ever going to bring home a cat!?" It was getting late in October, and the mice were getting pretty bold. I had some time off work coming up, so I took a day and drove the 90 minutes to the place I knew I would be likely to find my cat-Open Door Animal Sanctuary in House Springs, MO. Back when I'd been a newspaper reporter and lived down there, I'd covered the opening of the sanctuary and I've been a supporter ever since. And there's a cute story about Open Door, and my then-girlfriend, but that must come later.

When I arrived I was surprised and gladdened by how much it had grown. I went to the desk and explained my purpose, and the gal I talked to asked if I knew what kind of cat I wanted. She was a bit abashed as I reeled off my list: "American Shorthair, tortoise-shell, female, preferably the runt of the litter." "Female torty shorthair runt," she noted. "Well, we've got a torty litter that's just barely old-enough to adopt, if you don't mind a really young cat." I just smiled.
She led me back, through room after room of spacious and clean cages; every room also had a play-area, for prospective adoptees to check out the kittens in a homey enviroment. Open Door has always been a class-act. Finally, we came to the last room, with the youngest litters. She walked me over to a spacious cage with about 6 torty kittens; as we approached the cage, all the kittens surged to the front, mewing for attention, patting at the screens-all but one. There, huddled off to one side, was the tiniest one, mostly black but with a painted foot and a tan streak down her nose. She looked up as I stood there and the look in her eyes said, "Are you just looking, or are you buying?" Then she turned her head away. I turned to the gal with me and said, "there's my cat. Right there." She sort of glanced at the more boisterous kittens and then looked back at me. "Well, let's take her out and let you hold her." She barely filled my hand, but, held close to my chest, after a moment, she leaned her head against me, still not purring, and looked into my eyes.

"Yeah, this is my kitty," I told the gal. And the little kitty pushed her head into my chest, and started to purr.

As we started the long drive home, she crouched in the perforated box, she began to mew, plaintive and uncertain. I talked and sang to her, and started trying out names; her adoption papers showed the folks who'd brought the litter had named her "Mud", and the sanctuary people had christened her "Margaret". Of course, neither of those could possibly do. But, being Zen-mystical weird and all, I wanted her input on her name, so I tried different notions I had, calling them softly, singing them to her; when I said, "is your name Lila?" she suddenly mewed more loudly, and as I started singing that name, she started mewing in reply. I'd picked that possible name because I'd just finished reading Robert Pirsig's book Lila and I liked the fundamental question posed, "Does Lila have Quality?" Okay, Lila it would be.

And what a Lila she has been, and is. For almost seventeen years now my constant companion, my closest friend and dearest love; if any of what's about to follow is off-putting to anyone, let me state now and emphatically, I don't care. If you have never known the love of a pet, I pity you. If you have never known the love of a loving cat, I pity you that as well. Lila's devotion has been a constant source of comfort and joy to me; at times in my life when I've been alone and far-removed from my family and friends, heartbroken and desperately sad, she has always been there. No matter how lonely I ever was, I was never too alone to bear, as long as she was with me. She figures preeminently in all my plans and actions; I have passed on dwellings otherwise ideal, because NO CATS ALLOWED. I declined a relationship with an otherwise wonderful girl because she was allergic to cats, and was offended that I suggested she take allergenic treatments just so I could have that cat. In the darkest moments of my most fractious years she was the perpetually-blossoming flower that told me Life still had joy in it.

I can wax eloquent for days about her, and feline pets in general, but I must not try to pack too much into a single post. I will write more about her, and her predecessors, and many others, in other posts. But I should perhaps include the ex-girlfriend Open Door story. Terri, having never been a cat-person, was converted by the charms of Lila. When we separated, I was very clear that the little kitty had to come with me, and she understood and agreed; there was a bond there she would not try to break. But she missed having a kitty, and not long after our parting asked me about getting one of her own. Of course, I directed her to Open Door. She, her new boyfriend, and his 4 year old daughter drove down to find a cat; when Terri walked into the converted house that was the cattery, she exclaimed, "My God, it's Kitty City!"

And when Terri's mother visited a few weeks later, she asked the little girl where they'd gotten their new kitten. With the solemnity of a four-year-old, the little girl replied, "Oh, she comes from Kitty City."

St. Compulsory's Day, Redux

2009-05-14T13:52:00.002-05:00

Yes, I'm still burning off comp time. However, I had some useful things to do with this 1/2-day off; I went to the agency and filled out my paperwork for my summer temp job! Huzzah! I've got a job!

I feel like Harvey Pekar, when, in American Splendor, he awakes from a troubled dream with a start, exclaiming "I've got a job! I've got a job!" So when I left school I went to the agency office and filled out the same forms I've filled out again and again and again; then, I went to another location and peed in a cup. (No worries there; I've been a very good boy!) Kinda sad that this has become so much the paradigm-I've been in that place where, due to a relatively innocent indiscretion, I had to worry about whether I would pass that test. And while I understand employers don't want the indemnity of having meth-heads or junkies on their staffs, I think it's pretty sad when decent folks can't get a job because they took a puff off a joint at a barbecue. And that really happens-you don't have to be a regular user to get contaminated enough for rejection. Sad, sad.

So now we're back home and happily frustrating the kitty by having a laptop in the lap. Having written about American Splendor, I think I might drag it back out for a watch. Tomorrow we run a full-bore test for the rescheduled virtual space mission-I'll be in school early to set that up-then it'll be another 1/2-day. Hope to get to work on some video projects, maybe play some guitar, and fire up the grill! I think it's time to grill some chicken....

Bandwidth battles in the service of the state

2009-05-12T15:37:00.002-05:00

So this morning started with a lot of excitement for me-I was supporting a virtual mission control working a virtual mission to the International Space Station for a science class. What this entailed was running a video-conference and four laptops serving the various mission control teams interacting with the presenters at a college in the east. Unfortunately, up until two days ago I was only involved with prepping the student laptops-then my tech associate and I found out the state has mandatory end-of-course testing that had to be completed in the same timeframe. This required prepping two of the computer labs to run the proprietary state browser and support the testing of approximately 200 students. The test would take about 50 minutes, and would run in the same timeframe over the same days as the virtual mission. Pat, my associate, shouldered that burden while I assumed his duties on the mission.

I'd spent some time planning the instrumentation for the mission, and was in early to lay everything out and secure the cable runs, etc, the way we'd planned a few weeks ago when we did our live-test of the video conference. The first swing at the test revealed some issues, but the second attempt ran smooth as silk and I was pretty confident, even though I hadn't manned the vid-con end of things in either test.

Can you see where this is headed? About 1/2 hour before the mission was to begin, I dialed up the Skype connection for the video-audio link; that's where the problems started! After a couple of attempts, I called the tech at the university-we started trouble-shooting and got everything working; I had the student stations up and sitting on the log-in page-everything looked okay. Then we started losing the vid-con call. We kept reestablishing the connection and I could see and hear them, but they could only SEE me-no audio. We started chewing into the 1/2 hour prep-time pad before mission start troubleshooting that-Robert, the university tech and I, worked both ends with increasing urgency, until we finally had a survivable link and full connectivity-the flight director came online and we started trying to get the student teams logged in-and more problems! We ironed out the mission profile and password issues, everything looked good, but the laptops seemed to be barely getting the data from the website. Robert looked things over on his end and could see that we were connected but the throughput was running slower than molasses! At one point I had Robert on my cell in one ear, and one of our district's network gurus on the classroom phone in the other!

Suddenly, both Robert and Nathan figured it out-we were getting almost no bandwidth! The sixty or so computers up in the labs, running the state-mandated browser to conduct the state-mandated tests, were sucking up all the bandwidth-we had to abort the mission. There was nothing we could do. I'd just spent about 40 minutes with my brain working at max speed, scrambling desperately, thinking there was something I was doing wrong, something I'd overlooked--but it was out of my hands the whole time.

There's nothing for it-the tests are mandated. We're rescheduling the mission to run next week; at least I know a lot more, now. And the kids actually appreciated the lesson we got-sometimes things go wrong, and you have to abort the mission, back up, figure out what went wrong, and come back for the next attempt. All in all, I think it might've been a pretty good lesson.

And I am sooo looking forward to getting right next time!

Paper, power, and the politics of The Office

2009-05-10T07:35:00.002-05:00

Just caught up with the latest season of The Office; as a 23-year veteran of the envelope business, I've been enjoying this show on a somewhat rarified level. As you might guess, the paper, envelope, and printing industries are closely linked, and it's been a delight to see how accurately the writers on The Office portray the paper-biz dynamics. Of course, most of the jokes translate to nearly any business office, but there are some funny dynamics to the paper business that outsiders probably don't get, and yet the writers seem to capture them very insightfully.

I was a bit disappointed when I first started watching The Office, as I have about 120 pages of a novel set in an envelope factory and office (write what you know!) and my story was a very absurdist treatment, a lot of buffoonish characterizations and ridiculous situations, and the same sample chapters which recieved so much dismissal by the agencies I sent them to read now like Office episodes. The most consistent observation I got in my rejection letters was "we doubt the reading public will be interested in the minutae of your setting."

Guess I should've been writing spec scripts.

Particularly telling is the story arc of "The Michael Scott Paper Co."-the companies selling paper, by and large, are not subsidiaries of the companies making paper-they are merely distributors. I've always felt funny about that, that a company could be founded on the principle of merely distributing the products of actual producers. When my envelope career was brought to an end, I had offers from paper distributors but I could not bring myself to move into distribution-I enjoyed being involved in manufacturing, but I had no interest in a career wherein I was purely a middle-man. I've wondered if Ricky Gervais picked paper-distribution for his setting partly because it is such a "non-industry".

I could go on and on about the minutae of paper and printing; the decades I spent with it have front-loaded me with information that's a bit alarming when I really start revisiting it. I sort-of wish I could reclaim all that brain-space, but, oh well. I have to say, I'm pretty glad to be done with it all.

By the way, look for the brass eagles in the background of The Office-those were give-aways from National Envelope, my old company. First time I saw one I about bust a gut!

as suggested by Bet...

2009-05-08T17:27:00.003-05:00

TAKE THE DAY OFF!!

IT'S NOT A SUGGESTION!

Happy St. Compulsory's Day

....from your anal-retentive friends in Payroll

Happy St. Compulsory's Day!

2009-05-08T07:25:00.002-05:00

So I have to take the day off from work. Over the school year, I have earned about 13-1/2 hours of "comp" time: the school district won't pay overtime, instead you are awarded "comp" time for hours worked outside of your normal schedule. As a computer "assistant", I'm classed like a teacher's assistant, so my normal schedule obtains only when students are in class; ergo, I cannot cash in comp time for unpaid school holidays or the like-I can only use them to be out from work when I would otherwise BE at work.

Sounds a bit crazy? It gets better-due to the way the district budgets for things like "assistants", they don't like to pay out accumulated comp time at the end of the year. It becomes Payroll's mandate to hound those with accumulated comp time to take time off from their regularly scheduled hours and so use the comp time accrued-WHETHER YOU WANT TO TAKE THAT TIME OFF OR NOT! In fact, they get so pissy about it I finally decided to use my time, just to get them off my back. Hence, I officially declare this "St. Compulsory's Day". Henceforth, a yearly holiday I will be forced to honor if I don't want to be harassed by Payroll.

The truth is, I'd much rather be at work; assistants are not paid very much, get only 30 hours per week, lots of unpaid days off (teacher work days, nearly the entire Holiday break and Spring Break, etc) and I'm staring down the barrel of two months unpaid summer leave. I can't file for unemployment (it's part of my contract-I have a job, I'm just "on leave") and this economy has made finding summer employment a difficult if not impossible mission. I could really use that comp-time money; and, true, they'd HAVE to pay it out if I don't use it, but that would earn me the enmity of Payroll (for tweaking their budget) and those are some folks I don't much want to irk.

Of course, going forward, the plan is to just not work "overtime", but some things can't be helped-providing support for Parent-Teacher conference nights, even alternating with my superior, will net me a day or two's worth of comp time. I'm hoping I might get reclassed eventually to 12 month 40 hours as a computer specialist; a strong case can be made that a school of our size should have TWO full-time techs, but school districts make changes like that on a sort of geological time scale, so who knows how long I will be in my current conditions?

Anyway, Happy St. Compulsory's Day, everyone! Guess I'll spend the day blogging and webbing-gonna be rainy all day.

All shagged out after a long squawk...

2009-05-05T16:56:00.002-05:00

Got a happy little training day at work-an Apple seminar on the tech aspects of iLife '09. Now, folks who know me know I've been on a bunch of different platforms over the years. My first computer was a TI-99-4a, then I went to Amigas, then onto an AS-400 running RPG programs and J.D. Edwards cadcam software, and concurrently getting into PCs running Win 95, 98SE, and ultimately XP, and finally getting into the educational paradigm and finding myself in a world of Macs. When I finally got exposed to Macs again, I had not touched one since the days of OS7; currently, I support machines running 10.3, 10.4, and 10.5. The differences between iterations of OSX are sometimes as profound as the differences between Win98SE and XP, so it's like having a foot in each of three different games, and now some of the PCs are migrating to Vista.

Happy, Happy, Joy Joy. Ultimately, I keep my sanity by remembering that they are all just platforms. Some run this software, some run that. Some running a particular software look and act like this, while their kin, running a later OS, look like that, within the same software. Thankfully, I'm not really expected to be a software guru for every package; while I sometimes encounter disappointment when I can't provide an instant-answer to a software question, I feel like the staff I support understand that mission one for me is making sure the machine itself works, talks to the network and peripherals, and is CAPABLE of running the software. After all, THEY use the apps everyday-I do not.

Still, my zeitgeist is, if I don't know the answer, I will try to help YOU find it. I maintain this posture with staff, faculty and students. The cool thing is, the students seem to respond to it best. I think it gives them a feeling of competency, when the tech guy says "I don't know-let's see if WE can figure it out." And often, it IS a collaborative effort that achieves the solution, and now we have BOTH learned something useful.

These are some of the reasons I love my job.

Reliving the Glory Days....

2009-05-01T13:25:00.002-05:00

Wow. I'm so glad my cohort Pat talked me into performing at the school's variety show today. We talked about it early in the year, but as the time got short I wasn't confident about my voice and was fully intending to back out; Pat suggested we do an instrumental, "Hideaway" (Freddie King, but pretty much the Eric Clapton version) and I agreed. We had another teacher playing drums ( a working musician) and another on 2nd guitar. Pretty minimal rehearsals-I wasn't feeling very comfortable. I mean, I worked as a professional for years, but I really like being rehearsed, and we only had a couple of sessions, and those were pretty short.

Then, at the 11th hour, we got drafted into another "teacher band"....I had about four days with the song on disc, and we never really had a full-participant rehearsal.

Too, I agonized about what rig to play. I mean, I have 5 guitars that could've served, and wasn't sure about which of several amps to play. I ultimately decided to keep it as simple as I could, playing my most robust amp but ditching the sophisticated modeling unit and just used a chorus pedal for the "teacher" band, and my old standby 1974 Big Muff for "Hideaway".

I shouldn't have worried. The old confidence rose to the challenge, and the old instincts kicked in fully. We got to play "Hideaway" twice, and both times, the robust, reactive and totally responsive Muff, and the hardtail Strat, and the '67 Showman amp came through and just completely inspired me! I was like a spring-lamb, I couldn't help but dance and show and just be the same old me I had always been on stage. Even on the "teacher" band song (also played twice), clean and jangly with just the chorus and turned down enough so I could just really spank the chimey chords, came off great. I had soooooo much fun!

But I really don't want to start playing out again...it's soooooo tiring to drag the gear around, and even though it's the Non-Performer personality that gets nervous, the Performer personality gets so keyed-up that afterwards I experience a kind of let-down that makes me feel just drained.

Still, good times!

When Pigs First Flu

2009-04-26T07:11:00.001-05:00

I've been following with keen interest the news of the outbreak of swine flu in Mexico, and it's reported spread; I have a personal connection with swine flu.

In 1976 I was a young newspaper reporter on a community "shopper" newspaper, the Meramec Community Press. An outbreak of swine flu at Fort Dix had alarmed the CDC; the strain seemed very mutated from the original H1N1 virus and suggested a potential for a pandemic. At the time it was thought that the 1918 pandemic was a swine-flu mutation. In 1976 we did not have the genetic science to exhume 1918 victims and determine the exact strain-that science came a bit later and it was proven to be an avian flu strain that caused that devastating outbreak. At any rate, the government decided it was urgent to create a vaccine and distribute it to the American populace as a preventitive. A crash program was implemented and the CDC was charged with eliciting the support of the press in getting the word out. And that is where my story comes in. I was assigned that story by my editor, and so began educating myself on influenza and the means proposed to forestall epidemics and pandemics.

I learned that influenza viruses of all types ongoingly mutate; most of these mutations are of insignificant impact, but occasionally a mutation occurs that is sufficient to render previously established antibodies in the organism ineffective at staving off infection. This mutation then has the potential for wide-spread impact, an "epidemic" is possible. If an epidemic spreads very widely, it becomes a "pandemic". This happened in 1918. The scope of the 1918 pandemic was bolstered by a couple of compounding dynamics: there was a world war going on, which created conditions of great crowding in many areas-military bases, artificially densified urban centers, transportaion depots, etc. Too, there was a great movement of people ongoing-soldiers moving between bases and depots, refugees travelling long distances to escape the war and it's effects, or moving from one part of the country to another for war-related industry. Many dynamics coincided to create a sort of "perfect storm" for viral transmission. I believe the U.S. alone suffered something like half-a-million cases. Estimates world-wide range from 20 to 100 million cases.

So, in 1976 the CDC and the government regarded this situation very seriously. A public-vaccination program was implemented, with a target stockpile of 200 million vaccine doses. Achieving this goal was confounded by the discovery that the vaccine-production process was incapable of producing the kind of two-for-one vaccine yields previous vaccine processes (like that for polio) yielded. In essence, the operation was only capable of 50% production efficiency. Nonetheless, a public campaign promoting widespread implementation was begun.

I spoke with several CDC press liaissons in the following weeks, and recieved a ton of literature; I spent many, many nights poring over the materials and trying to decide exactly how to boil it all down for public consumption. Too, it was not a foregone conclusion that the entire press establishment was in support of such a crash-course of vaccine development and dissemination. I had plenty of press corps colleagues opposed to the program. Ultimately, I decided to support the CDC's effort, with the approval of my editor and indeed the direct support of our publisher. One of only three meetings I had with him in my time on the staff resulted in my being appointed lead-writer on the subject for the whole chain of papers. Heady stuff for an 18 year old.

As the approved vaccine became available, the CDC decided to capitalize on favorable press where such existed, and some of the very first stocks were shipped to the Department of Public Health in my little community, Jefferson County, Missouri. Over the course of my three article story I had made friends with that staff, and they invited me down to witness the arrival. The director of the department opened the shipping container and asked me if I wanted to go first.

So I did, and the CDC staffer who'd accompanied the shipment told me I was likely one of the first people west of the Mississippi to recieve the inoculation. I was given the standard pamphelet advising about possible side-effect symptoms I might experience, and I took pictures of all the staff getting their shots. Then I went home to write my final article.

I'm sorry if this will disappoint, but I experienced no side effects-no aches or pains, no low-grade fever, nothing. I could've been given a placebo for all I knew. And no epidemic, much less pandemic, occurred. Only about 24% of the nation's population had recieved the vaccination by the time the government called it all off.

Interestingly, this pretty much marks the advent of the public influenza-vaccination paradigm that exists today. I think the CDC and the government were unwilling to dismantle the instrumentality they'd created to distribute the swine-flu vaccine. Every year, the CDC cooks up a vaccine representing the most-likely strains expected to spread during the flu season, and everyone's welcome to get the shot.

Before we proceed to my final thoughts, however, we should take note of a few important facts:
-the vaccination cannot encompass every strain in circulation. Much study has shown that, to contain a significant portion of the killed-virus of each target strain in a single dose, the maximum number of strains covered can't exceed 5, and indeed, usually only covers 2-3.
-each strain represented is a specific mutation, and may provide only small protection should that strain further mutate.
-epidemiologists and other immune-system researchers are quick to point out that the human organism has at any given time somewhat finite resources to devote to producing antibodies-our bodies cannot just devote themselves entirely to producing antibodies against every viral possibility in the world.

And therein lies the crux of my biscuit: I haven't had a flu shot since that innoculation in 1976. One of the epidemiologists I spoke with a great deal had impressed me with a statement I still think about; to his way of thinking, he said, it was better to be ongoingly exposed to the great realm of potential viral mutation and, by natural exposure to varying iterations of viruses, develop a base library of antibodies most likely to suppress the strains most often encountered, and to be predilected to the most recently encountered mutations of those strains. He pointed out that the original proposition for the innoculation campaign had been to only target those most likely to be unable to recover from sickness: the very old, the very young, and those with compromised immune systems. This ideal seems lost, although it's still part of the rhetoric in the press releases each flu season even today.

So there's lots of meat to chew on here. I suppose if a "Captain Trips" virus pops out of the jungle, or escapes some weapons lab, or just percolates up out of nowhere, there won't be a lot anyone can do about it. Too, another recent epidemiologist acquaintance advises me that influenza vaccination only has an expected efficacy for about 5-12 years. She notes, too, that that is merely an informed guess-ultimately, the coding for a particular antibody (once learned) should be permanently in the body's "library", the real question being whether the particular body will recognize the latest iteration of mutation and start producing the best-fitting antibody.

Finally, I should note that since 1976 I have had two occasions of significant flu-one in 1984 and one just last year. Otherwise I seem to float through the flu season experiencing nothing greater than run-of-the-mill colds and the like.

I wonder how effective that old H1N1 vaccine really was? I wonder what the coming weeks will bring?

I can't get a....quanta of Satisfaction....

2009-04-24T15:28:00.002-05:00

I spent a good part of my morning thinking about satisfaction. We had a particularly trying morning at the school, problems with websites and computers and switches etc. etc. I was pretty frustrated by the time of my usual morning walk, so as I walked my thoughts naturally gravitated to frustration and satisfaction.

It occurred to me that I walk in and solve problems almost immediately all the time; that gives me some satisfaction. And then there are problems that come up that never really get resolved; that makes me frustrated. It's funny, but the easily obtained satisfactions don't seem to balance out the frustrations.

Now, it's true, when I solve a frustrating problem after long periods of effort, THAT satisfaction is more is more gratifying than those quick and immediate resolutions. But though there's been quite a few of those, even the remembrance of those little victories doesn't weigh up enough to offset those ongoing frustrations.

I realize it's all a matter of perspective, and if I really give myself some credit the victories and the losses all really do kind of even out; still, I suppose it's part of my nature to disinclined to accept defeat easily.

Nothing wrong with that in my eyes.

A few thoughts on another topic...intermission, so to speak

2009-04-18T10:02:00.002-05:00

In preparation for our June 6th remembrances, the roomie and I have been watching "Band of Brothers" again. We've both been through the set a few times, so it's not like a new revelation.

I'm always in awe of the real people these stories represent. War ceased being any kind of "noble enterprise" about the time gunpowder hit the scene, and impersonal death at a distance became the new paradigm. The commitment men and women in combat show to each other has so much impact on me. Thirty-three years ago I declined to participate in the military milieu, mostly because I could not accept being placed in a position where refusing to obey someone who's logic I did not agree with could be a federal offense. In the private sector, if my boss was an idiot who tried to make me do something unwise, I could just quit. Can't do that on the field of battle.

These folks were working in a different environment; I believe the fight against the Axis powers in WWII was a worthy fight against a dictatorial, expansionistic regime, committing atrocities we hardly knew of. So many answered that call, to provide the ultimate sacrifice; which sacrifice, in the heat of battle, was not made so much to great ideals as it was to the preservation of their comrade's lives.

I am so humbled by that.

I know, too, that many of those adversarial combatants were themselves victims of their regimes-many did not fully understand what their governments were trying to accomplish. Many were just trying to do their duty as they saw appropriate. That combatants on both sides have been able to reconcile their roles between themselves proves their genuine humanity; I only hope we can find that reconciliation between the combatants still engaged in the conflicts of today.

The challenges that face us as a species, to assure our survival, far outweigh our ideological differences...I only hope we all realize that and act upon it, before it becomes too late.

Some Damned Thing-the beginning

2009-04-18T07:36:00.000-05:00

I have had a lifelong fascination with the unexplained and the unexplainable, the unknown and the unknowable. I’ve always been fascinated by the difference between the elements, i.e. can the unknown become known, or is it truly and completely unknowable? Can the unexplained ultimately be explained? It seems to me that there are, in Universe, some things which are totally unavailable to human apprehension. Since our conceptual ability is limited by our physical capacity, our truly vast brainpower is obviously still ultimately inadequate to hold the totality of reality. Though our brain’s capacity is seemingly vast, Universe is undeniably even more vast. So, I don’t find it implausible that we might encounter things that cannot be fully known; that being said, it also stands to reason that we might encounter things that could be known but will require a great deal of effort, a long and arduous pursuit, to understand with any degree of completeness. We are remiss when we too lightly dismiss a puzzling event as inexplicable; it behooves us to make great effort before such dismissal. Likewise, we cannot rush to employ Occam’s Razor too quickly, especially if we find ourselves restricting our attention to only certain details in order for the Razor to satisfy.

For those unfamiliar, Occam’s Razor is the philosophical proposition that, all things being considered being equal, the simplest explanation is usually correct. That’s a bit of a gloss; actually, Occam proposed that the simplest explanation was the most likely. A fine distinction.

So I have prefaced this consideration of an enigma with a bit of my personal inclinations, and a little discourse on human capacity and a powerful philosophical and investigative tool. I hope I have not bored you.

The question at hand is popularly known as the Dyatlov’s Pass Incident; I am amazed that it has taken so long for this to come up on my radar. I came across it when idly surfing the ‘web, just poking around looking for enigmas to entertain myself with. Here is the wikipedia link, a good introduction:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyatlov_Pass

I have followed every link in this article, even those in Russian, which I unfortunately cannot read. I mined those entries for maps and pictures, and there are some things buried in them not found in English language articles.

So I have chewed on this enigma for about a week and half so far, and find I cannot go long before my mind returns again to puzzle over the evidence and try to consider all possible scenarios. I have spent hours reading every thread of discussion and considered every proposal presented and as of today still feel the best explication I can believe is that Some Damned Thing happened to these people, Some Damned Thing set into motion actions which are difficult to understand and which seemingly contradict themselves within any particular proposition.

(Author’s note: I capitalize Some Damned Thing to suggest the distinction made by Charles Hoy Fort, to characterize a mysterious agency; I will probably start abbreviating it as SDT, for the sake of brevity and ease my poor typing fingers.)

This post thus prefaces what I hope will be a lively discussion. I will be following up with further posts to consider the various scenarios proposed and their ability, or lack, to satisfy Occam’s Razor. At this point, my Razor proposition is:

“Nine people died under mysterious circumstances; there are things in Universe beyond our ken; ergo Some Damned Thing happened on Feb. 2, 1959 in the area now known as Dyatlov’s Pass.”

It remains to see if we can render this SDT knowable.

It's a Paradigm shift, It's a Paradigm shift..

2009-04-17T17:40:00.002-05:00

It's a put-on...(you're reading this and hearing Pete Townsend's "Eminence Front" in the background).

I realized part of my blogging issue is that I don't care to compose on the fly much. I'd rather work in a WP and then paste it in. Mostly because I can't post to my blog from work, but there's lots of time to write AT work. So, I got all snuggly with a flash-drive to move things back and forth and was all prepared to really start writing this week and THEN ALL HELL BROKE LOOSE. Figures.

There's a couple of things that have been on my mind of late and I want to talk about them here, but that's going to need a bit of prefacing, so be prepared for a long piece with some links to follow, without which NONE of it will make sense. Let's just say I'm off on one of my "weird-damned-things" pursuits...those who know me well will tell you, "sometimes he gets onto something and will just not LET IT GO."

And that's pretty much true...I can get a little obsessed with the unknown, and the unknowable.

You've been warned.

Want a taste? Go here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyatlov_Pass

and thanks to all who responded;
I have gotten bent,
and the mayonnaise was good.

Is anybody out there?

2009-04-14T16:15:00.002-05:00

Just nod if you can hear me...

Actually, leave me a comment. I know "following" can be a bit labor-intensive if you don't have a gmail account, but I just want to get a little feedback so's I can know whether or not to feel guilty if I pass on writing here at times.

So leave a comment: "get bent" would work just fine, or "Mayonnaise" is good, too.

I hear, now and again, that someone went to my blog, but no message=I don't know, at all, at all.

So take a sec and drop me a comment.

Some things cannot be fully expressed

2009-04-06T17:59:00.001-05:00

This is really difficult. I'm trying to reconcile some temporal discrepancies in my personal history, and even after a couple of phone calls, I'm sort of at odds in getting everything to line up. Have I been in two places at once? More later.

Holy Moly what a world

2009-04-05T10:37:00.002-05:00

It has certainly been an interesting week! For over a month the roommate has been driving my van whilst saving up money to get his car's transmission fixed. Then, startlingly, as we prepped it for the drive up to the transmission shop (forward gears worked, but no reverse) we discovered that our previous efforts at recovery had been a tad deficient-adding a couple more quarts of tranny fluid brought reverse back to life!
UNCANNY! We will still have to monitor the situation-there seems to be a bit of a leak-but this changes everything for him! And I've proposed that he and his girlfriend learn to drive a standard (stick) transmission; once I learned how, I've tried to always buy a stick. There's just so many advantages, not the least that repairs are invariably cheaper! And that will certainly broaden his options for eventually replacing his aging car.
I've been a bit slack about posting here-probably 'cause I'm spending a lot of time at alt.slack! A usenet group for the Subgenius in all of us. And a terrific source for hearing about great Badfilms, weird news, and general snarky social commentary.

Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School

2009-04-04T16:37:00.002-05:00

Well, Life sure keeps things interesting! Had major car problems on both my and the roommate's part and they suddenly resolved without real effort. More later.

Spring break ends today

2009-03-29T10:10:00.002-05:00

So, Spring Break ends today; have to say, I'm just fine with that. I haven't been able to do much to enjoy it, with the tight monetary situation I'm in. Pretty much just hung around the house and fussed with my toys. I did get a fair bit of writing done, but actually I'm looking forward to getting back to work. I'm the sort who thrives on structure; I like going to work, and I like when the work-week ends. It will be cool if/when I get that better position, and have enough money to actually make plans for free time. I mean, it was tight enough this last week that I basically had to spend every day mindfully NOT spending money or using resources I would need the following week, like GAS. And I pretty much succeeded; I used MAYBE a gallon of gas over ten days. I did spend about $30 on food and such, and today plunked down $20 to get my hair cut. Other than that, el-zilcho.
And it looks like we've gotten the last gasp of Winter; at least, a couple of inches of snow to remind us that it isn't Spring yet! This is the very best kind of snow; piled up on the bushes and trees and grassy areas, but the roads are clear.

2009-03-24T12:38:00.000-05:00

I HATE POETRY

It’s true that I hate poetry.
From the very beginning, to me it seems
Contrived
To try to express oneself through such
Arbitrary means, playing with meter, and rhyme
All for what point, really?
Can’t you just say what it is that you mean?
All this agonizing over meaning and symbol
All this subterfuge, suggesting there’s more to your thought
Than just simple image and it’s expression
Sad, really, the attempt to make eloquent and profound
Things which are eloquent and profound
In simple relation.

No good deed goes unpunished....

2009-03-14T09:41:00.002-05:00

Well, I'm about to be off to run sound for a charity event. It's in a little Illinois town about 2 hrs from St. Louis, and since I'm riding with one of the organizers, I'll be stuck there from about 1 p.m. to god-knows-when. Think I'll bring along one of the laptops just in case I can find an open wi-fi, or at the very least write and read some of my e-books. I spent some time talking to the headline band; they seem like nice guys, hope I like their music.
It's been a weird and depressing week. Cigarette taxes are going thru the roof, seems like I'm going to be denied my stupid simple pleasure-vice for the sake of underwriting health-care for everybody else. It's pretty pathetic; they'll tax cigarettes in the name of recouping health care costs due to smoking, but nobody thinks to tax the fattening, unhealthy fast-food that makes so many people obese and undoubtedly contributes more to ill-health in our society than cigarettes do.
Oh well, that's it for now.

2009-03-08T09:48:00.001-05:00

Oh, the times they aren’t a-changing! So much rumination rolling around in the back of my mind. I really need to get my mind off the parlous times and my precarious position and think about other things for awhile.

Well, let’s see; I’m going to spend Monday morning fetching some satellite t.v. dishes a fellow is donating to me for a project-I want to see if I can build a cellphone/wi-fi reception enhancer, based on some designs I found at the Instructables DIY site. That’ll take about two hours, as the fellow lives almost an hour away from me. Unfortunately, my cellphone doesn’t sport an external antenna jack, and my laptop uses an internal wi-fi card, so I can’t really move forward on the project until I can afford to get another cellphone and a USB wi-fi adaptor. At least I can start calculating the FP of the parabolic dish, and work on the mounting armatures; eventually I plan on being able to mount and orient the dish on my van, so when I go traveling I can pull in signal in remote locations (hopefully!).

And I’ll spend some time taking pictures of the gear I’m going to try to sell. For ease of operation, I’m going to offer the stuff first on local Craigslist, and if I don’t get a sale there, I’ll have to resort to eBay. We’ll see.

I suppose I’ll spend today as I have most of the recent Sundays, making a nice meal, and some meals for the week to come, and watch some old movies and surf the interwebs and read and write. At least I can do all of that without spending money.

Cheers to a happy day for all!

A World of Free Entertainment!

2009-03-07T09:35:00.001-06:00

It's all available on the interwebs! Free movies, books, music, etc etc. I've found lots of public domain stuff that costs nothing to download-Golden Age comics, Project Gutenberg (especially the Australian site!), alt.binaries, this list goes on! There's great websites to browse (I love lileks.com-check it out! James Lileks provides days of entertaining scans and blather!) and lots of forums to find friends to chat with, hobby sites like Instructables and a raft of diy sites, and of course our gracious and beloved host Blogger.
These may be parlous times, but at least there's plenty to do!

2009-03-07T09:15:00.000-06:00

Oh, the perils of poverty! I'm fortunate to have lived through very tight times before, so this go-round I'm well equipped with survival strategies. Since August I have:
-stopped eating out, stopped ordering delivery
-cut-down and limited enjoying my "guilty pleasures" like beer and cigarettes
-basically eliminated discretionary spending; no books, cds, dvds
-focused my cooking on economical meals that stretch out
and these things have helped a lot, to keep my budget as balanced as possible with such reduced income.
I appreciate how fortunate I am, in that I have a wealth of opportunity for little or no cost entertainment; considering that telephone and internet connectivity is nearly a requirement for life these days (especially if you're actively pursuing employment opportunities!) and ISPs like Charter offer a pretty good deal for the "bundle" that even scores you television, it's a reasonable expense, if you can afford it. I imagine I could save that $70 a month (I split the bill with the roomie) and just rely on cell phone and free wi-fi, but my cell plan is the cheapest, most limited I could get, and I'd have to drive to get wi-fi (using service provided by restaurants, coffee houses or libraries, for example). All of which introduces the likelihood of losing the savings achieved in gas, impulse buys, and lost opportunities.
Now, however comes the toughest part-trying to sell off possessions to gain that so-needed infusion of cash to pad the budget as much as possible. I'm so loathe to sell any of my guitars or vintage amps, but I think it must be done. Even if I just get what I paid for them back, a couple of key sales could make all the difference. And I'm going to sell off my jewelry-not that it will bring all that much, but I really never wear any of it, and only 1 ring really has any sentimental value at all, and that not very much. Again, if it brings in scrap-gold value, it's another $100 and change into the bank.
I'm despairing of finding supplemental employment, and I'm getting fearful about how I'm going to be able to hold on over the summer, when school's out.

I guess it's time to dig in the fingernails, grit the teeth, and hold on tight.

2009-03-04T17:53:00.000-06:00

Well, I guess I think this is a little messed up. It's March 4th, it's 50 degrees outside, and there's an ice cream truck toodling it's way through the neighborhood. I started thinking, "what's up with that?" when I realized what was up with that. In tough times, I suppose if I had an ice-cream truck franchise, I'd be hittin' the streets as soon as I thought I might at least make gas money back.

Little bit scary, that.

2009-03-01T12:06:00.000-06:00

Twenty years now since my home-brew baby was stolen. After 20 years, he still grieves....

Difficulties

2009-02-21T16:06:00.000-06:00

All the difficulties of life

All the difficulties of life are present every day; it is only the exigencies of the moment that call to our attention one or the other. When you have a sandwich, your thoughts do not dwell on hunger; when you know the bed awaits you at the end of the day, you don’t think about how tired you are, and where you will rest.

Most of the young people I am surrounded by do not understand this; for them, sufficient unto the day is the money in their possession, to spend willy-nilly on the engagement of the moment; then, when a difficulty presents itself, they seem astonished that they must provide for a situation they did not anticipate. For this lack of appreciation, I blame their parents. For god’s sake, if you didn’t plan to spend your whole life doing for them and providing for them, why did you never prepare them to look after themselves?

Is it my place to instruct them? I chose not to procreate precisely because I did not want the obligation to instruct others how to live in this society, one I find myself at odds with. And yet if I’m to be a good friend to my young friends, I find this is what I have to do.

Hard Times

2009-02-21T14:05:00.000-06:00

I wrote the following in Summer 2002 for a friend's 'zine; funny how relevant it seems now, in Winter 2009. Anyone else think so?

Hard Times Don’t Last…Neither Do Hard People

Anyone who has been looking for employment in the last year knows these are hard times. No amount of statistics about “new jobs” or “economic growth indicators” refutes the fact that money is short, costs are up, value is down and, plain and simple, these are hard times. Jobs are being moved overseas, companies are down-sizing, and it seems, in every way, opportunities are shrinking for people to have and keep the means to afford even modest standards of living. It can be difficult to maintain a positive outlook under such conditions, especially if one has heretofore had those means for many years, and now cannot find new work and new security. This is a situation that many of us find ourselves in, and it presents a challenge to things deeper than just our day-to-day needs: in many ways, it threatens our humanity and our ability to have hope for the days to come. It threatens our belief in goodness; it threatens our belief that we are worthy of happiness. But difficult as it seems, we need to resist the temptation to harden our hearts; we need to work to maintain our belief in each other’s basic humanity. We need to resist the pressure to become hard in our thoughts, our beliefs, our hearts.

It is easy to say these things, but they are not easy to live; repeated rejections, repeated failures to gain even the opportunity to interview, or work on trial basis, press us ever closer to the conviction that the world, or society, or the climate of the times, will not give us opportunity to prove our value, our worth. These rejections score our very being, inflict on us the death of one thousand cuts; what lotion can soothe our pains, and help us remain flexible, pliant and resilient?

Only our belief in each other, and each other’s innate goodness.

How do we maintain our flexibility? Why would we even care to struggle against the hardening effects of hard times? A metaphorical story from the past can help: the tale is told in ancient China that an oak and a reed were talking one day, and the oak asked the reed, “do you not envy me my height, my size, my massive presence?” The reed replied, “no, I don’t. I am happy as I am.” The oak scoffed at the reed, saying “you will never amount to as much as me.” The reed merely repeated “I am happy as I am.” That night a great storm arose, and high winds whipped the trees and grasses all around. Ultimately, the pressure of the wind against the oak was too great, and it cracked and fell to the ground. As the winds grew stronger and stronger, the reed bent and lay upon the ground, and let the punishing winds blow over it. When morning came, and the warming sun, the reed rose again. It leaned to the oak and said, “all your great strength didn’t help you weather that storm. Perhaps it would have been better, had you known how to give a bit.”

It isn’t easy to give up the height we may have risen to, but if we can maintain our flexibility, our resilience, we have the opportunity to rise again after the storm. If we acquire the rigidity of the oak, we may not have that hope. And while we may not attain the great height of the oak, we may be assured that such heights as we attain we can attain again, and again. We should as well note that the oak, in growing great, stands alone, separate from its fellows, while the reed is happy in the midst of its kind. Together they weather the furies and ultimately, together, rise again.

Let us not harden our hearts against each other, even to stand above the rest; let us rather think of the reed, and the strength of flexibility, and the strength in community.

Hard times don’t last, and we do best to not let them harden us, either.

Ya just can't be a nice guy...

2009-02-15T08:31:00.000-06:00

Without someone taking advantage of it. After a series of hiccups in our power my wireless router lost it's settings. I had trouble getting my roommate's PC back online when I set up the security, but had no problems when I left the default, open settings applied. So I decided to try a little experiment and leave the wi-fi open. And for a few weeks it seemed fine.

Then somebody found the network and started using it. Well, that was the initial idea, that others in my little apartment complex could hop on and check mail, do a little browsing, etc. But within a couple of days, this jerk was streaming video and downloading huge files, it seems, because all of a sudden we had no bandwidth at all. I tried periodically denying service by turning off the router, to see if whoever it was would get the idea and limit their consumption. No such luck; the bastard just seemed to get more insistent, apparently leaving his or her computer on all the time, to wait for return of service and resume downloading.

So security has been reapplied. I'll just have to work on the roomie's PC until we get it's handshake issues resolved. Too bad; I know I really appreciate it when I'm roaming around and find an open network for my laptop. I try to be a considerate hitchhiker and keep my consumption minimal, but sorry, dude, I'm the one paying for this bandwidth and if you can't be reasonable you'll just have to go elsewhere.

My friend Adam

2009-02-13T12:43:00.000-06:00

My friend Adam is amazing. He’s really an inspiration in these parlous times; he’s had to do so much, for so long, with so little, it’s like he can do everything with nothing at all. The story of our meeting will come another time; right now, I just want to describe him and his life a bit.

Adam’s not a big guy; his hair is usually a bit unkempt, his clothes are clean but frayed. He doesn’t spend much on clothes, seeing how his wardrobe is mostly jeans and t-shirts, hoodies and the like. His hands are small, but strong, with clever dexterous fingers. There’s an air of calm confidence about him, a man at peace with himself, comfortable wherever he goes. That’s a good quality for him to have, looking at the way he earns his keep. Adam doesn’t have a full-time job, but makes his money in a variety of parttime ways. At last count, I think he had five part-time jobs: minding a parking lot downtown some nights, mucking out a mechanic’s garage on Sunday mornings, working the counter at a consignment store a couple afternoons a week. He cleans the offices at the suicide hotline every other week, and he gives the overnight staff the night off every last Saturday of the month down at the juvenile center.

Through these pursuits he makes enough to manage his modest lifestyle. He lives in an apartment over a storefront that’s been used as a warehouse for a heating and cooling installer for decades. The company owns the building and doesn’t charge Adam much rent; he says they like someone being around to discourage vandalism. The neighborhood is pretty run-down. Once it was the retail district of a small town that eventually got swallowed up in the urban sprawl; now most of the buildings house small industry, or warehouse space, or are vacant and crumbling. It’s an old brick building, two stories tall, two storefronts side by side, each with an apartment above. Both storefronts are full of ducting and hvac components, blowers and motors and coils of wire; the other apartment is full of boxes of company records and heaps of odds and ends.

That's enough for right now; I'll have to come back to this topic later.

02122009

2009-02-12T19:31:00.000-06:00

It's good to see young folk who aren't content to pretend to play guitar but want to learn how to play the real instrument. I have a nephew who first got interested in playing guitar by playing Guitar Hero, and moved forward to learn the real instrument. All of his instruction has come from searching on the internet, and me. And he's turning into a good little guitar player.

It makes me feel good.

I just keep finding out more things I don't want to know!

2009-02-11T17:37:00.000-06:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Ewen_Cameron

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Sargant

Read and weep...I have a lot to say about this, and Jose Delgado, but it will have to wait until I have time to really put my thoughts together. No pun intended.

02102009

2009-02-10T17:16:00.000-06:00

Boy, howdy! Lots on the plate tonight. Maybe better do bullet points and explication:

1) Oh Lord, please don't let me become an old curmudgeon! One of the things you have to deal with as a public school tech is the tendency bored kids have to pick at and play with the computers. So now I have several laptops missing keys, and not only the keys, but the clips that hold the damn keys in place! So we'll probably have to replace the whole keyboard. I know it's not my money, and it's not the time involved, but, DAMN IT, I wish I'd had this kind of gear when I was a kid in school! The last thing I would've done is screw around to see if I could pull the keys off! I keep telling myself, they're just kids, they don't think about the ramifications of the silly things they do, but it does get hard.

2) Money is going to keep getting tighter...(see previous post)...I love my job, but it barely pays enough to meet the bills. Trying to find supplemental income puts me squarely into the vast population of newly unemployed in my city. It makes me worry about all those newly unemployed...who do those people in top management think are going to be able to pay for their goods and services if they keep sending manufacturing jobs overseas? I'm all for helping the third world improve their standards of living, but we can't help them if we can't afford what they're making!

3) Now I'm just tired of thinking about #2. I've got to clear my head before I blog about anything else.

Credit companies want you to bail them out!

2009-02-09T15:44:00.000-06:00

Well, isn't this interesting. Now that the holiday spending season is past, seems the credit card companies suddenly feel justified in jacking my APR. And with the economic downturn, remittances are at a marked low point. Of course, if you read the fine print in your agreement, you'll see they reserve the right to adjust your finance rate as they see fit, although there are some provisions for oversight and challenge. It's up to you to call them on it, which is what I'll be doing over my upcoming long weekend.
Long weekend, you ask? Yes, as an educational employee, I have President's Day off; and that's okay, seeing as how they'll pay me for it. Friday, on the other hand, is a "Professional Development" day for the educators, and since I'm Tech Support, there's no hours for me, and hence no pay. Still, I can use the day to challenge my credit card company to show me some love.

Wish me luck!

On the day of my parade

2009-02-08T14:11:00.000-06:00

ON THE DAY OF MY PARADE

On the Day of my Parade

There won’t be flowers in the lane.

There won’t be rainbows in the sky,

Or the Fourth of July;

On the Day of my Parade

Chill rains will gust the leaves,

Skyfull of chasing clouds,

‘cause, get over it already!

There’s just not going to be any rainbows and flowers

On the day of My Parade!

I know that! Don’t you think I know that?

Why are you always raining on

My Parade?

02082009

2009-02-08T11:17:00.000-06:00

Welcome to the fragments. How much, what kind, how often are all questions the answers to which will be revealed in time. Most of this will exist unseen by the many. Even the Latin is corrupt. I was born a middle class beige child in a middle class beige time. That's as may be. I'm no better than I ought be, worse than a few. If I'm accused of having too much time on my hands, I reply, perhaps I have too much mind on my hands. Whatever.

This is merely introductory. Creed and dogma to follow.

Everything is beautiful, and nothing hurt. (too much, anyway.)