Merry Christmas

It's that time of year again.  I wish everyone a Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year.  In case your particular frame of belief doesn't include a Christmas, I wish youthe very best of whatever holidays and deities you celebrate, with a heartfelt wish for improvements in your situation in the coming year.

As usual, I'm not well prepared, but I still have a few hours in which to remedy that.  Tomorrow we all head for my brother's house in Virginia, and we're looking forward to the visit.  We're geographically close, but it seems our lives get so complicated we don't get actually to see one another more than once or twice a year, and now that our kids are grown, it gets even more seldom.

We have late church services this evening, and the Rudolph Grouplet will be singing at the close of the service.  With luck we'll stay awake and all the candle exhaust won't clog our pipes until we are done.  After that, it's head home, where I'll beg to open something and will be denied, then we'll go to sleep until far too early, get up and make a thorough wreck out of the living room, then get dressed and grumble about being late starting out for my brother's house.

Traditions are useful - they keep us grounded.

May your traditions bring you joy, and peace in this season. 

Cowards, Drunks, and other reprobates

This past weekend, a coworker suffered a loss that is hard to comprehend so close to Christmas.

Her husband, who was walking home, was struck by a hit and run driver of (probably) an SUV, and killed immediately.  I suppose one might say that the fact that he was killed immediately is a kindness, but somehow I don't believe that the family would find this particularly thoughtful of the person who ran.

I wonder what possible excuse there could be for so cowardly an action on the part of a person wielding a large deadly object.  As a gun owner, I have certain responsibilities as regards safety, concern for others, taking care that mu surroundings cannot be a contributor to others' harm - would not one believe that the driver of an automobile would be held to the same standards, particularly in light of the fact that we kill far more people with vehicles than we do with guns in this great nation.

Apparently, though, responsibility is only recognized for the odd among us - those who choose unusual means of transport, those who find firearms interesting (for whatever reason) and those who are over a certain age and grew up knowing that if an act of theirs had consequences, nobody else owned those consequences.

The family involved here is shattered - three children lost a father, a wife is left to pick up the pieces, and to bury her husband, and then rebuild a life at an age when life ought to be pretty sane and settled.  There is at present nothing to point to the driver of the vehicle that did this, so one has only to wonder - was it a drunk, was it an unauthorized driver, someone on dope, someone on a phone, someone having a fight with a wife / girlfriend - what possible excuse can there be for having failed so dramatically to accept responsibility for one's actions?

It is not hard to imagine accident circumstances - accidents do happen - but if it were an accident, why not stay around, explain that it was an accident and move forward?  The cowardly act of leaving does more than allow one to escape answerability - it leaves a goodly number of people with no closure, with nothing to understand, and no hope of justice, at least not in the forseeable future.

I have no answers for those that hit and run - I'd be tempted to shoot them on the spot, but that would be entirely too merciful - and one so devoid of personal responsibility could not be trusted to maintain the remnants of the family, see to their support and income, etc.

It is obvious to the casual observer that the potential penalty for this heinous act of cowardice is not great enough, or horrid enough because it continues to occur, and folks continue to try  to excuse themselves of responsibility for this. It won't wash - the responsibility is squarely on the person doing the fleeing.  A person so bereft of the basic concept of honor cannot be believed or trusted with anything - take the vehicle away and crush it.  Incarceration removes financial recovery for the victims - but there are those who might not understand anything less - although there are also those for  whom it could be considered a vacation, and that's scary.

I have no answers, no cures, no remedies - but I am deeply upset by this, and realize that I could have been the guy laying dead in the street.  Anyone reading could have been the dead person in the street.  I would wish better for my survivors than having to wonder how and why.

Have a great Tuesday, y'all, and think kind thoughts for a coworker whose Christmas has been so thoroughly disrupted and destroyed.  

Three more days...

Three more days until Christmas.  I think I'm allowed to say Christmas here - with all the PC BS flowing about these days, one is never certain. I have done part of my shopping, on-line of course, and have a bit left that must be done by standing in line, one of my least favorite pastimes.

I made coffee and looked outside at the thermometer and decided that being up was a mistake, but I can't do anything about it now since I am already up.  I forgot that my grandson is on holiday from his school, and started to wake him up, which earned me a bit of disapproval from is grandmother, who has Ronnie Duty all day today and really wanted to be asleep for a while.  Happily I had no luck at all getting him to awaken, so they're both sleeping the sleep of the just right now, while I am blathering on about Monday Morning.  Had I realized that he was already on holiday, I could have slept another 40 minutes this morning.  Oh well, as my cousin used to say in her own shorthand, "If dog rabbit."  If you wonder, when expanded that came out as "If  the DOG had not stopped to poop he might have caught the RABBIT."  I guess you had to be there.

I have mixed feelings about the Auto Bailout.  I wonder if it is not time to let something die, and let some lessons be learned.  The terms of the bailout include the stipulation that certain things must be done or a repayment of all funds falls due - and one is prompted to wonder just howthehell they are going to give back funds spent when they're broke?  I wish I could shed a tear for those fools that showed up for a handout in their corporate jets, but I find it hard to feel ufor someone so removed from reality.  I who have never had an executive jet at my beck and call cannot imagine being able simply to fly and let the accountants worry about the costs, particularly since I am my own accountant, about to start working on my own taxes for yet another year.

Right now I feel some sympathy for Barack and Joe, incoming president and VP respectively.  I saw a number of ads over the past few days indicating that they are all poised and ready to hit the ground running and Do Great Things in a few weeks, and wonder at their naivete, considering that Congress is like a train - it isn't moved or guided easily, and almost everything that they want to do will have to pass thru that august body, composed largely of folks who are dedicated primarily to the perpetuation of their own existance.

There's also a stirring in the local news from folks that want the Electoral College abolished in favor of a popular vote.  We've already done that with the Senate (originally its membership was decided by the legislatures of the states being represented - the House was there for all the people, the Senate intendd to look out for the interests of the States) and I remain convinced that it was a Dmb Thing to do, since we already had a popularly elected representing body.  The idea of a purely popular vote ought to terrify any minority because a purely popular vote would make it possible to legislate them to a state of subservience.  Of course, no thinking voter would allow such a thing - but all too many ought not to be accused of thinking, I fear.  Probably I should include myself sometimes in that category, since everyone has braindead days - but some folks seem to live that way.

But I promised myself I would try to stay apolitical today.

One of my coworkers lost her husband over the weekend, in a hit and run "accident" - which will I am certain cast a pall on the holidays for her and her three children.  Hit and run is something that ought to be classified as a hate crime, particularly when a fatality is the result. Nobody who is younger than I am plans on being dead, particularly not in such a meaningless manner - and life for her and her family is about to change forever.  I count myself fortunate any day I can wake up, look up and not see the roots of some grass.  

I just looked up at the clock and discovered that since I have to go to work today I must go and finish dressing, grab the computer that travels with me and head for the office.  I'd like to stay here today; there's more than enough to do around here, but certain unfortunate addictions (food, housing, toys [computers, motorcycles]) drive me to continued employment.

Happy Monday, y'all.

Commute rant redux

I have often been given cause to wonder if there is a special course  that is required of folks before buying a big Lexus SUV.  That course being, of course, behavior appropriate to assholes.  

I watched one this morning on my commute to work that about made me want to stop the vehicle and do grave harm to it - harm enough to turn it into a modern art stationary exhibit.

The driver rolled through a stop sign in front of me at some velocity in excess of the limit, about clipping my right front fender, then proceeded to run down the right lane for half a mile and cut in front of someone where the lane ran out, forcing three vehicles nearly to telescope whilst this person had space made - all this without a sign of a signal.  Even BMW SUV pilots are more thoughtful than this jerk was - but he seems to be typical of Lexus owners - particularly the large Lexus trucklets with a big chrome V8 on the back hatch.  Whenever I see one of these things, I wonder where is the cop?  I know cops don't make enough to own such a behemoth, so I know it's not a cop on a day off - but I really do wonder how someone can be so oblivious as to believe that nobody else out there has any right to safety.

Big Ford and Lincoln SUV pilots are not even as bad as Lexus folks, although they do come close - I watched the Lexus try to intimidate a Lincoln Navigator, and we nearly had bent sheet metal before the Navigator gave way, aolthough the Navigator pilot lost his cool enough that a number of obscene gestures were directed at the Lexus - not that the Lexus inhabitant took any notice.

Later on this morning before I arrived I had a BMW SUV come up a right on-ramp, and I carefully left space for him to move over - something he did not do.  Instead of taking the space I offered, he rushed past the four foolks in front of me and bulled his way into a line where there was no space when the ramp merged.  I always try to leave space for at least one person to merge, believing (perhaps naively) that it smooths the flow of traffic and helps heep everyone's blood pressure lower.  Am I really naive, or just being ignored by my betters?  Inquiring minds, etc....

I did eventually get to work without heightened blood pressure (something I arrange by heavy use of the AMESLAN asshole sign which makes me grin whenever I see such atavistic roadway behavior) and without any foreign paint on my old Volvo.  I sure wish I was important enough to behave like that, but I'm not capable of ignoring everything around me in order to endanger myself and anyone else on the road anywhere near to where I am.

What am I not understanding?

No longer Monday

Monday turned into a mental health day - by the time the morning stuff was done and the remainder was done in the afternoon, it was not worth spending two hours to travel downtown and back to work two hours - so it was 8 hours Medical instead of the four that I had planned.

If got cold overnight - it was still motorcycle-warm when I went to bed, and when I got up it was cold enough that I didn't even want to try to start one up.  I am sure that at least one will start - but there wasn't any real point since I don't really want to ride when it is that cold.  Must be my age showing through - there was a time when I'd ride no matter how damn cold it was.  But then again, there was also a time when I'd ride after ten beers to get a couple of cases to tote back to the barracks for those still thirsty.  Some of those adventures should have killed us all except maybe we just didn't know it at the time.

I have decided I need two more days in the week.  One to play poker and/or bridge, the other to bury myself downstairs in my house and fix the mess that is computers.  Procrastination is great stuff, but it can be overdone, and I've been proving that for a couple of years now.  I have a really nice IBM super workstation (dual 3 gigahertz Xeon processors) down there that I bought a year ago to replace the machines now doing mail server, file server, desktop and DVD/CD burning duty - and it still hasn't been fired up.  I'm going to be really pissed off if it won't start up.  I ought to go and get a one of the virtual machine systems except I don't feel like taking the time to learn it just now, so it will end up an XP machine doing everything that is currently done by three machines over in the work side of the basement.  I have a couple of terabyte drives for it that I intended to store all my MP3 and video stuff on - until the 250 and 300 gig drives in Alfred (that's the server's name - all my machines get names....  There's Alfred, Wallis, Rabbit, Howard, Charles, Golem and Andrew out there) started going bad.  Now I have most of a terabyte on failing/failed drives, and am pissed at myself for not taking hold of them when the failure started.  I'll probably have to go out and find all the stuff I had again.  This time, though, I think I'll do a RAID array and lay in a couple of extra terabyte drives against the day one decides to croak. They're cheap enough right now - if you look around they can be had for $100 or so.  If I can find the right motherboard, I may have to twin the super desktop just to keep from stepping on myself.  When Jamie left, he had cleared off what he wanted gone from the downstairs machine, so I can remove it and maybe replace it with something bigger and faster.

There's always something that needs done - I just hope I can recover enough of the web site and FTP site to make their rebuild just a matter of recollecting data from the binary newsgroups.  I'll also have to get a new Newsbin, since mine is on one of the fail3ed drives, and I'll have to go and make nice with Giganews, since my contract with them ran out when I let the credit card die that was used so they cut me off - but that was a year or more back, so they've probably forgot all about it by now.  Maybe I'll start on this tonight if I can find a piece of cat5 to reach from the switch to the table out in the other room.  Sounds like a good project for this evening provided I don't get sucked into a CSI:Miami marathon or something like that.

And of course I still have Christmas shopping to do - just about all of it, and I gotta call my brother because I don't have a clue in hell about what I should surprise him with this year.  This was a whole lot easier when he was only 30 and didn't already own everything that I could afford to get him.  I know - I'll call his wife and see if she has any ideas - although they've been married long enough she's probably as out of ideas as I am.

I think I've had enough fun for today, so I'm going to close up and go home.  Maybe I'll hear from Jamie tonight with more adventures from Australasia.  He's putting up his pictures at http://picasaweb.google.com/ijam357 if anyone wants to look.

Happy Tuesday, y'all.

Monday Morning

Well, it is Monday morning again.  We have something to do before I head for the office, so I won't be in much before noon or so.  To balance, I'll end up downtown until around 8 or so in the evening, but I may actually Get Something Done today.

Jamie is now in Australia.  It took a bit - he went from Timaru to Wellington to Auckland to Sidney, and apparently picked up a tour guide, because he spent yesterday on a whilrwind tour of Sydney, including some parke he didn't know existed, and now is shopping for a GPS.  He even got a new telephone number afer leaving New Zealand.  Text messaging, FaceBook and Skype all come into play for information transfer.  We may yet get his Mom out of the 60's as far as electronic thingies are concerned.

I was hoping for a motorcycle day today, since it is supposed to get into the mid 60's but it is also supposed to rain - and I do not like riding in the rain.  Still, it is beautiful out right now.

Ten days to Christmas - don't even ask about my shopping - it is not only undone, it is practically devoid of ideas.  Never have I felt so far behind.  Yesterday I never even got dressed - I spent the day online and sleeping (not simultaneously) and am still tired.  Retirement is starting to look pretty good - it is a shame that I can't afford it yet.  I think Phyllis is probably glad I can't afford it - having me under foot all the time would probably make her crazy.  In the summer I could ride but in the winter maybe I'm better off going to work.

Well, it's time to go and see Joe, so I'll get ready and do that.  Have a good day, y'all.

Social Networking

My daughter Elizabeth finally harrassed me into joining FaceBook - if only to get access to some pictures I seem never to be able to get her to email to me.  Along the way I looked over MySpace, and have started playing with Skype and a webcam.

Now I need a 40-hour day just to pay visits to all this stuff along with all the stuff I should be doing.

Interestingly enough, both FaceBook and MySpace have found for me people that I have known over the years but could no longer find.  Of course, most of my generation won't be represented there because we tend to be Luddites - but it was surprising just which ones I could fine.  I also discovered a bunch of folks overseas who may be related to people with whom I was close, so a bunch of messages went out this afternoon while I was supposedly working.  

I should explain that part of what I do involves fixing things that break, and when nothing is broke and everything else is on schedule, I don't really have that much required of me, so I can cheerfully do other things as long as I am not too obvious about it (playing Solitaire will get me yelled at....)

I showed FaceBook to my wife, and she was horrified at the amount of personal information that she was able to see there on various people - but it is a new day, I explained and much of this is put out there to find folks of like mind with whom to converse.

I'm not all that thrilled with the search capabilities, however - I would love to be able to use more of Google-like searches, with phrases and separate words and groups to narrow the search.  Looking for Lang brings over 500 names - if I could look for Lang in Germany, the list would be smaller.  Maybe if I complain they'll fix it?  I dunno.

It has been interesting looking at how some members have customized their pages (some to the point that their color choice makes reading their information impossible, at least to my ancient eyes) and just how artistic some are.  I also stumbled into some pretty crude sexual stuff, but it seems that these wallwriters are ever among us, and to do anything besides ignore just encourages them.

Facebook and MySpace have interesting possibilities - I just wonder how long they can stay free of charge?  Someone somewhere is spending a lot on servers and disk space, and I wonder what their return is (besides advertising dollars, that is...)

If you have not looked into FaceBook and MySpace, by all means do it - give it a few hours, and then see who shows up to talk with you, and who you can find that disappeared from your area years ago.  You might reap a pleasant surprise or two.

As for Skype, well, the technology works - my wife and I chatted with our son who's in New Zealand (although he may be in Australia by now) and watched his face as we chatted (and he watched ours) using a couple of cheap webcams, our fast connection, and Skype - which at that time had in excess of 12 MILLION active users on line. 

And to think that when I started working on computers they all had tubes in them.

Amazing stuff out there, but you gotta mess with it to see its worth - just hearing about it or reading reviews is not good enough.

Happy Friday, y'all....

Wednesday, December 10th

Less than 15 days until Christmas - and I have nothing for anyone.  This seems to happen all the time.  I thought of a few really clever things on the way into the office this morning, but was busy driving and didn't want to look for a pen to write myself a note to myself to tell me what I had thought would be good for someone.

Of course, at the office lunacy abounds - folks are going out on leave, others are trying to squeeze the last bit of knowledge out of those going out before they go, just in case they get a brain wipe whilst they're away and have to be completely retrained upon return, I guess.  I've been doing this stuff for so long I don't know any more what i know, and am constantly being surprised by the things I remember only when I need them - any other time I would swear I didn't know these things, and it seems like I forget them as soon as I'm finished using them.  Maybe it is a part of the brain whose job is to keep my head from getting too cluttered by hiding the indices to the knowledge, bringing them out only in extremis.

When I got up this morning, it was just over 60 degrees and I thought "Hot damn, I'll motorcycle to work today!" - and then I looked out the window into a monsoon and determined that the old Volvo had to be stirred from its rest again today.   The drive in was horrid - what takes me 25 minutes ad night can take 95 minutes in the morning, and I really hate it.  Much of this is caused, of course, by the large number of anal sphincters that one encounters when commuting.  Today, I met the guy who runs down a half-mile on-ramp to the end and then forces his way into traffic, rather than taking the hole I carefully left for him to fit in without causing anyone to become upset.  Maybe he was talking on his telephone and didn't notice all that open space, or maybe he's just too important to bother with the normal courtesies - but I gotta tell you, someone up in front of me must've had some words for him, because he stuffed his way in where there was no room.  Where's the cop when you need one?

There was another that cruised in a marked exit-only lane for a mile or more and then stopped when it turned off and made everyone wait while he found someone he could intimidate into letting him in.  

'm just not important enough to pull this crap, and I'm entirely too fond of nonstress approaches to things - and I gotta believe that behaving like that induces far more stress than I'm likely to want at any given moment.

I had a nice "visit" with my son in New Zealand last night, using Skype with a webcam - the quality was better than I had a right to expect, and the hookup was clear and the sound really good.  I was pleasantly surprised, and spent another hour or so looking for otherpeople to Skype at/to but couldn't find that many familiar names - and the names that I did find were all asleep where I should have been.

But it is a neat technology, webcams are pretty cheap (I bought 4 for around $40 on eBay and gave one to my daughter, one to myself, took one to work, and still have one on the shelf) and work pretty well.  Last night, I hooked up with Jamie and let his mom chat with him a bit, and then drove her a little nuts walking through FaceBook to look at some of our kids' pictures, and see who we could find there that we knew.  She still won't touch a keyboard that doesn't consist of white and black keys, but she's getting closer....

Choir rehearsal tonight, and I need to be there, so I'm gonna run.  Hope y'all are having great days.  Tomorrow will be another day.

Patriot MicroChip

THE PATRIOT MICRO CHIP is intended to be implanted in terrorists. 
 
The implant is specifically designed to be installed in the forehead.

When properly installed it will allow the implantee to speak to God.  

It comes in various sizes.

The exact size of the implant will be selected by a well-trained and highly-skilled technician. The implant may or may not be painless. Side effects, like headaches and nausea are temporary. Some bleeding or swelling may occur at the injection site.

Motorcycle Vandalism, redux

Way back in October I babbled on about an incident in the garage where I work involving my motorcycle and a guy parked in my parking place, said guy finding himself blocked into that place. Rather than do what was required to find me, he muscled the steering until the lock was buggered. then left the motorcycle in front of another car.

It is all on video, and when it became apparent he was not going to be nice about it, I just filed a comprehensive insurance claim and had the report of his deliberate destruction of my property go on to Internal Investigations.

IID determined that since I had filed a claim with my insurance, it became a civil matter and did not merit any more investigation on the criminal matter of the deliberate and malicious destruction of my property. This irritated me greatly because it gave the guy a free pass on what ought to have been treated as a crime. I was advised to let it go and let the insurance companies wrangle.

Today I got a note from my insurance advising me that this guy was uninsured.

I was flabbergasted - Maryland is particularly crappy about insurance being required, and can make it really expensive if you don't play by the rules. Add to that the fact that the other guy was driving $85,000 worth of BMW, it boggles the mind to imagine that such a vehicle would be allowed out of the garage uninsured - not to mention that, lacking insurance, the vehicle was not legally tagged and should never have been on the road.

This guy is a cop - he ought to know better.

So Monday my boss will go back to IID and ask that the incident be reevaluated. I'm thinking that it is no wonder they guy was uncooperative, and that he has to have oatmeal for brains or a hidden limitles source of dollars, to be driving around an automobile so expensive without coverage.

I'm thinking that the local newspaper might love to know about this, but I'll wait a while before pursuing that venue. Meanwhile, though, once again I am irritated.

Oh yes, and along with that letter was one from my other insurance company telling me that they are still working to try and get my deductible back after a parking lot incident last February!! Apparently the Hartford Group doesn't like to play nice. AARP keeps telling me that they have insurance at a cost benefit to me - but it is Hartford, and somehow based on this experience I don't think I want to deal with that group under any circumstances.

I'm too old for this crap!

End of the Week - Again

 is almost time to go home again for a couple of days.  This has been a week - spent a lot of time with photos (visit http://picasaweb.google.com/rar1942g if you are curious) and more time with little computers.  Some of it paid off - I finally got my little tablet PC working, although I haven't yet got the little ToughBook to talk to me - it might have to be relegated to doorstop duty.

Jamie and I haven't connected - I put Skype on a bunch of computers at home, and brought one with me today just so I could watch and see if he came online.  Of course, if he did it was while I was in the john...

Skype has turned into a pretty nifty tool/toy - the basic form is free, but allows for video (I just have to find someone besides my son to test it with...) calls, conferencing, chats, and all kinds of other stuff - and even seems to work pretty well.  If you call all over, and are looking to spend less money, Skype could do it for you - provided you have a computer and reasonably fast InterNet (which you can get at any internet cafe that's wireles)  and the folks you wish to call have computers and reasonably fast connections, you can talk 24/7 and not spend any more than the computer uses in electricity.  If you don't mind paying a little, you can even call cell phones and landline phones with it - but the free part with the video is quite enoough excitement for me, thank you.

I know - I'll set Jessica up with it tonight, and we can videoconference between the kitchen and the living room.  Of course she'll hve to hide under a blanket or I'll hear her without the computer - but it should be fun - and maybe even useful when someone is downstairs....

Come to think of it, it might work really well with that Media Center PC I have in the living room feeding the big HD set.  Maybe tomorrow, unless I get called to work.  There's a major power change tomorrow, and something is bound to get hosed up.  I was going to come in and just work on some stuff I have to do, until I realized hat the power outage was in the server farm - and without servers all I can do is sit around and grumble.  

And of course Christmas is in just over 2 weeks and I am as usual unprepared - don't have a clue about what to get anyone.  Maybe I ought to go shopping this weekend, except that I hate shopping and I hate crowds - and crowded shopping leaves me needing a drink after about seven minutes.   If I am doing it online again, I have to get about it.  How does the time get away?

The bosslady stopped by late yesterday and asked if I would work another 20 years - and she knows how old I am since she's only 4 years younger.  Her reasoning was that money was so worthless nowadays hat we'd have to work until we died.  I told her that wne I died it would be my kids' problem to get me planted, and she doesn't have any, and her damn dogs are all too old to be of much use.  Shortly thereafter I went home and pondered it all a bit, wondering what it was all supposed to mean....  Does it mean I'm safe for 20 years?  Does it mean I will get her dogs?  Inquiring minds etc.... 

Got a couple of new cute pictures - I'll have to set up a separate area for the latest bits of foolishness so I can share them with all comers - some are really finny, some truly outrageous, and some just make you want to look twice and say "huh?" once.

I gotta go home - I've had all the fun they permit today.

Be well, y'all.

I.T. and the Peter Principle

If there is someone reading this who doesn't "get" the Peter Principle reference, the short form is In an organization, supervisors will rise to the level of  incompetence.  

Any place with an IT organization whose IT folks are not too paranoid to speak of it will tell you that this is always the case with IT folks - they people that run them are not IT-savvy, don't want to learn, and generally just want what they want when they want it.  The messenger who brings a no will be fortunate if that does not occasion an opportunity to work elsewhere, regardless of the practicality, feasibility or possibility of the unreasonable demand.  If the boss is paranoid or tends to micromanagement it gets even more painful.

I spent the morning in a meeting, mostly watching someone draw on a whiteboard.  I had to explain a thing or two, which I did - several times, using different words each time.  I was directed to telephone someone to ask something after discovering that there was a problem, it wasn't ours, and they were working on it.  When asked to telephone this person, which I knew to be working on the problem we had discovered, I expressed a reluctance to interrupt - the problem would need fixed before the person could begin to work on what I was asked to pursue, and it struck me as counterproductive to interrupt progress with something that would only cause mental overhead for this person, possibly keeping something broke for longer than necessary.  This was not an answer that anyone wanted to hear, so I ended up taking time to phone someone who was busy, thereby keeping two people from useful work - but that was what everyone seemed to think was needed.

I think I need to pull the plug and get out of here for a while, go to choir rehearsal, and spend several hours not thinking about what I do for a living - maybe even start up a motorcycle and see how long it takes to get numb riding in 40 degree weather....

Sorry, I'm frustrated and irritable. 

I'm certain that everyone has a similar tale.  If you happen to be everyone, let me know what your tales is - comments are open.

Roswell Fanfiction

This is one of my secret vices.  But it is a big one.

The Internet is a marvelous place - you can find all sorts of stuff there if you are not in a real hurry and don't mind that searching is a lot like free association.  Among the things one can find is what amounts to fan clubs for various TeeVee shows, some long defunct.

Fanfiction is fiction that takes the characters and sometimes the circumstances of a show series, a book series, or some other grouping and creates new stories, story lines, and story series based loosely or tightly on the information already present.

Some of this stuff is really well written, some is crap - just like everything else in the known universe.

I was a fan of the Roswell series when it was on TeeVee.  It lasted only three seasons (resurrected twice by fans who drowned the production company in tabasco sauce...) and had its ups and downs depending on who was writing - but the young actors in the series had chemistry such as rarely gets observed.  The Pilot and the first 5 episodes were probably where the show peaked, and after that it sometimes got gimmicky and appealed to folks looking for outlandish or outrageous anachronism or science untruth.  

For those who don't know, Roswell centered around the lives of four teenagers that had been foundlings at around the age of 6 and adopted in Roswell - and the four other teenagers who were schoolmates, playmates and soulmates some of the time - and the attempt by the first mentioned group to keep secret that while the looked like other kids, they were not at all like other kids, having been created from a mix of terrestrial people DNA and the DNA from elsewhere.  Sounds kinda uninteresting, but the relationships between the aliens and the natives were convoluted, and the analysis of what sorts of paranoia might rest in the aliens was well done, along with the interplay of the two species after the natives became aware of the secret of the others.  

In any event, the relationships were well done, the chemistry between the player pairs was so great that I've not seen the like before or since, and I could identify with one of the aliens - the alienation in school, the need to stay private - I've been there, and it is hard.

Anyhow, even before the show was taken off (and there was still enough interest that DVD's for all three seasons were released before the show had been gone for a year; and I own all 3 sets....) there were a large number of web sites collecting fiction written to the Roswell characters and legends - and there was an incredible load of it, and a surprising lot was really good.  Of course, some was absolute shit, and some was borderline pornography, but a surprising amount was very well crafted stuff, and over the years I have developed a list of writers whose every word I will read - as well as a list from whose stories I will run.

I check on some places several times throughout the day looking for new stuff from "my" writers, and have a pretty steady diet of new approaches to Roswell characters and circumstances, some of which might have allowed the series to run much longer.  The depth of understanding of the human condition that some of these writers have is amazing.  Many are young people, but many are not - the age spans high school to late 60's / early 70's - student, worker, retiree, retired military - everyone is in there writing for all they're worth.  

When I started reading this stuff, I had over 200 sites in my bookmarks.  Some have closed, some have gone static (nothing new, but site still there) but many still remain.  Most of my reading occurs over at RoswellFanatics.net - it is active with a good slate of good authors, and a large number  of finished stories.  Some of the writers are quick, some are not, and some never finish anything, so you take what you can get and enjoy the stuff that flows.  Right now my favorite writer over there calls himself GreyWolf and from what I gather, he's probably around my age, retired carreer Air Force officer, and pretty bright - and he really does his homework!

I have always been one to read, and read a couple of books a week, in addition to trade magazines, email and my beloved FanFic - but it is amazing how good a lot of what is out there is. Another site is FanFiction.net which has 3477 Roswell stories, and a huge number of other stories written around a couple of hundred show characters sets and stories.

If you like to read and are searching for new sources, google FanFiction and pick some places to try out.  It's cheaper than paperbacks, and you get the added treat of watching the story grow, and even of shaping it by your feedback to the writer.

Try it - just be advised it can become quite a large part of your day if you let it.

December 1, 2008

This day will never recur.

That will be a comfort to some, I am certain.  For me, so far it is not a bad sort of a day, coming off a four-day weekend that did not require that I work until Sunday afternoon, and  even then I could do whatever was needed sitting in my recliner in the living room with the office laptop on my lap, using a nice fast fiber connection to a VPN.  

I had thought I would get a motorcycle day in, but it was not to be.  Maybe this week or the coming weekend.

Christmas is 23 days away - I wonder if everyone is as ill-prepared as I am this year. Seems almost as if I decide in July to go shopping in October - and no sooner do I decide that than we're at Thanksgiving and I have no ideas whatever. 

Now, my wife and I have only been together for almost 41 years - you'd think by now I'd have some ideas.  It's easier to just hand out checks - but it's more fun to get something that surprises and delights.  Unfortunately that requires a lot of work and research - something I no longer have the patience for (if indeed I ever had the patience for it.)  What she needs is a week away without even me, but she won't take it.  I'm not quite so noble;  I'll take away time if I can get it.

I got my little tablet PC working last week and by the weekend it was hosed again.  Dunno what I did, but it surely does tick me off!  Maybe it is trying to tell me my fingers are too fat for a thin tablet PC.  This week, I'll reload it as I get the time, and see how long it lasts this time - if it goes to crap again in a week or two, I'll get rid of it.

Thanksgiving was lightly attended - my youngest brother was out of town and his son has a 12-hour shift (he's a cop); my kids were there except for Jamie, who called us on Thanksgiving day to tell us he had arrived in New Zealand safely, and promptly found a 200-meter tall building off of which to jump.  His mother really didn't need to hear that but he's OK, so there must have been parachutes, ziplines or cables involved that he neglected to mention. He just loves to light up his mom - and some days she's so easy to light up.  At any rate, he was not with us, but the rest of our kids (and their kids) were with us.  Usually there's someone from outside the family there, but this year we did not have anyone, at least until Sunday when middle daughter brought around her new boyfriend.  He seems to be nice enough.

The happenings in India made me angry and disappointed.  It was only made worse when I learned Sunday morning that one of the other tenors that sings with me in the choir that my wife leads had family in that hotel over there who were now newly dead. The world is a small place - about the farthest you can get from home is a 12 hour trip by large jet aircraft - and apparently that might not be far enough to escape some of the foolishness that there is around us in the world today.  It is a scarier place than the world in which I lived as a child.  I wasn't more than 9 or 10 and rode all over parts of Pittsburgh by myself on streetcars, and nobody thought it odd or unsafe.  We had no cell phones, and kids would leave home in the morning and not show up again until dinner, and nobody called out the searchers.  It seems that each new technological change that allows us more timely communication is accompanied by a social change that makes use of these abilities necessary for continuance of life - and somehow I don't think that that's what the folks who bring us these magical things have in mind when they first create them.   Vehicles do everything at least ten times better than they did in the 50's - yet we have lower speed limits.   Families no longer routinely have guns around to use for shooting targets or for fathers to use to impress safety on kids while they're instructed in appropriate and proper use - and yet we seem to be killing folks a whole lot faster.

Something has changed.  Now I do not mean to suggest that we go back to the good old days because i would be loathe to part with some of what those days have produced for us to make our lives better, easier, or more interesting - technology has done lots to improve my work experience and general life experience.  But it has also given the means to do without personal contact - and apparently because of that (at least in part) folks are not learning politeness and compassion as they once did - it is far too easy to remain isolated from human contact, to fail to learn politenesses and social rituals that make it possible for a bunch of disparate creatures such as we to exist side by side and to learn from our own otherness to tolerate and learn from those who are not the same as we are.  I do live my on-line banking - but I've never seen a branch of my bank, know nobody on the staff and haven't a clue who the branch manager is (if, indeed we still have such persons) and this may well not be  an improvement overall, as it narrows my circle of people that I know, and diminishes my opportunity for interpersonal contact and the learning that goes along with it. 

Of course, I may have it all wrong - but today I have less of a chance to encounter someone who'll disagree and guide me - unless someone who reads this is moved to leave me a note.  

Anyhow, the state of my world today is pretty good - the Prozac works, the office queen isn't making life hard (yet) and I'm looking forward to getting home this evening and getting some sleep.  Last night I stayed up too late watching a movie, and working on the Tablet PC trying to convince it to behave.  My reward was going to bed after 3 AM saying something like "I gotta quit doing this!" 

I'm listening to a GotRadio shoutcast of piano music - very nice.  Maybe tonight I'll remember to get the Skype toys out and set up our household for videophone to Australasia, for the next time our son calls.

Happy Monday. 

Friday Morning, post-Thanksgiving

Well, I have worked or slept off my Thanksgiving torpor.

Thanksgiving was a most pleasant day, even though we were small in numbers - Liz and James (and, of course, Sammy) stopped in for a bit and helped us dispose of some food, and visited. I played with Sammy, and generally did not much else useful - but it was a most pleasant day.

We heard from Jamie, who is/was in Auckland, New Zealand when he called to give us his over-there phone number, and informed us that he had started his visit by jumping off a building that was over 200 meters tall. You'd have to know Jamie.... He told that to me, I told it to Phyllis, who promptly got pale and then realized if we were talking about it that it was either a very small building (like a doghouse) or it was some sort of adventure supported by cables or parachutes or some mechanism to assure that he did not impact the ground with a velocity greater than healthy.

He has a rental car, and is meeting a high school friend (and his family) in a place that is several hundred miles from Auckland in a few days to reclaim some stuff he left there when he left the last time he was in New Zealand. After a suitable visit and rest, he'll be headed to Australia - because it's there, I suppose, to look around, wander around, and take pictures until money runs low, then he'll work somewhere at something until he doesn't need to for a while. Maybe he'll be like my cousin John and get lassoed by some Australian lady - we shall see.  Having met Tracy (John's lovely wife) I for one wouldn't mind that at all. Meanwhile, he promises to keep his PICASA site updated with photos each few few weeks. Anyone curious can go to http://picasaweb.google.com/ijam357 and check it out. Right now, it has only a bunch of stuff from his trip across country, since flights to Australia leave from LA or somewhere out there and he was living here. He drove out, sold his car the day before he left, to someone who passed him on a freeway, stopped him and paid cash for it. Such luck we should all have - but that seems to be the story of his life.

I'm doing a little work this morning for a small credit union that I have served sporadically throughout the years - and this afternoon will be open, so I'll probably do some computer cleanup at home, or go over to church and install the ZIP drives I got for their newest computers. Phyllis and I have to decide what we're going to use the newly vacated space downstairs for, but we'll find something....

Otherwise, it is nice to be off until Monday.

Computers can be a PITA - I just got my Toshiaba Tablet working, and it decided it needed to put on some updates - which promptly broke Microsoft Explorer enough that I can't get a desktop up on it. Damn Bill Gates anyhow. So I guess I'll have to regress it as soon as I figure out how to regress a tablet (They are different....) I also discovered that when it is in tablet mode that the digitizer (the thing that makes the cursor follow the pointer on the stylus) has a quiet band on it - probably a loose cable connection which gets stretched when the display is rotated into tablet mode - so I will have to figure out how to get the display apart far enough to see how the cables are, and then figure out what to take off the bottom to see how the cable connections there look. At least, the tougbbook is working OK, although I still do not have the tiny toughbook working again. I fear I may have toasted its motherboard, so it may not come back for a while.

Computers are a curse. But I shouldn't schimpf at them because they pay my salary, too, and without at lest one that works, I'd have to talk to myself instead of scribbling for random visitors.

I just got the first ZIP drive in a chrurch and discovered a motherboard so new it doesn't know how to do IDE interfaces, so it is off to eBay to buy a couple of SATA motherboard to PATA device adapters to make these things functional.  Every time I think I'm almost there, someone moves there to elsewhere.  Keeps life interesting, not to mention occasioually infuriating.

Happy Day-after-Thanksgiving, everyone.

Jamie is in the wind for Thanksgiving

Our oldest child, son James (Jamie to everyone who knows him) left LA this morning for New Zealand for a couple of weeks and then Australia for an indeterminate period.

He drove to the west coast, sold his car there yesterday, and I guess all is well. He kept his PICASA page well loaded with photos as he traveled cross-country, including some from Chicago, where he'd never been before.  If you are curious, his cross-country travel pix can be found at http://picasaweb.google.com/ijam357 and some are really outstanding.  He got involved with digital photography, bought some good expensive Nikon gear and learned to use it - and these are some of the results.  He says he'll keep the pictures coming as he arrives various places, and we are hoping he remembers.  I have some from his previous trip that I'll make available as soon as I get a round tuit.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving and for us it will be the smallest gathering in years.  I don't know of anyone outside the immediate family that will join us, and usually we have someone from outside the family to supply a  little balance.  There'll be plenty of food - I just talked to Phyllis, who was out picking up the bird.  She thought she was lots, but is just unfamiliar with the principle that states that the trip up always seems either much longer or much shorter than the trip back - even if you just reverse course.  But she got home, now all that needs done is about a day and a half of cooking various things.  I'm glad to have taken Friday off....

There's plenty for which we are thankful this year.  Our kids are all well and healthy and still with us, likewise our grandkids.  For too many people, this is not so.  Phyllis's and my parents have died, but at least not in great distress - so we're orphans, I guess, but there is still other family scattered around the nation.  I can still work, and still want to work, so that's a Good Thing, and Phyllis continues to direct choirs and teach, and shows few signs of wishing to hang it up.  We don't have a whole lot of time, but we do live.  We have our health, mostly, and have no truly crippling physical stuff with which to contend.

Hmm.  I guess I have to get to work on the Christmas Letter - maybe we'll actually get it sent this year.  I could stand to lose more weight - it's a constant batle for me, and some months I do better than others - but right now it doesn't pose the threat to my well-being that it did before I had the surgery.  Another thing for which to be thankful.

Happy Thanksgiving to all out there, whether you read this or not.  We've been blest.

Guns, Gun Laws, Fools & Knaves

Anyone that seriously believes that the militia mentioned in the Second Amendment is a reference to the National Guard might as well stop reading right here - they're wrong and mostly don't want to know what the actual reference means.

That having been said, I read a letter to the editor this morning that set my hair on edge.  Someone somewhere wr0te, apparently totally seriously, that in order to protect the youth of Baltimore we need some more laws to make guns unavailable - since our youth are spending a lot of time shooting at one another.

I don't know where this person lives, but apprently the concept of criminal behavior having as a characteristic the refusal to adhere to laws is foreign to this person - she apparently thinks (or thinks she thinks) that laws result in instant compliance by all who live and breathe.  This is demonstrably false, but never let reality interfere with lofty ideals.

The problem, dear readers, is not that guns exist, it is that people find it somehow useful to misuse them, or to use them in ways contrary to existing laws.  Why should anyone believe for a moment that a felon in possession of a gun (which is against any number of laws) will pay any attention to another law that makes his intended activity illegal?  Criminals do not necessarily choose laws to disobey - they simply disobey whtever laws contradict whatever it is that they plan to do.  

Indeed, all that added laws do is make life harder on the legitimate gun owner who tries to obey a large number of occasionally contradictory laws.  This is particularly true right here in Maryland where, for reasons known only to lawyers, it has become an onerous task to gain permission to carry a gun.  Permits are expensive to get, expensive to renew, and do nothing more than give the police a known subgroup of citizens to bother when someone does something with a gun that contravenes existing laws.  

There is no requirement that criminals have permits - indeed, the Constitution guarantees exemption form any such requirements for criminals because to spread knowledge of their illegal activities contravenes the right to avoid self-incrimination.  That's right, folks - if you are a criminal, you don't have to pay any attention at all to any law requiring permits to own or carry guns - because to record this would require that you supply incriminating evidence on yourself.

I own guns.  I grew up around guns - took safety instruction as a child, shot targes (and rats) practically from the time I could hold  gun.  Even though several different girls dumped me in high school, I did not shoot any of them - I already knew it was a misuse of the firearm, and could get me talked about in unfavorable terms and was generally supremely uncool.  

I know people who never saw a gun until entry into the military - that's OK, because the military generally does a pretty good job of teaching gun safety, and you can really end up in deep poo if you use your issued weapon for anything not specifially ordered - like shooting a superior, or just shooting up the barracks.   

I believe that adults should be permitted to own pistols and rifles if it pleases them and they are not convicted felons - as many in whatever variety as pleases them. I believe it's none of anyone's business what I own or what I keep in my home unless and until I make a prohibited use of whatever the item is.  None of my guns has ever unlocked the safe, loaded itself and bounced down the street looking for someone to shoot. Judhing from the rhetoric I see in the news organs, they must be defective, because a person is never shown to be the problem, the news always lays the problem on the gun, which is inanimate and lacks the capability to self-direct.

At this point, Vermont is the only state that has it right.  Vermont permits any non-felon to carry, either concealed or open.  Do something inappropriate with the weapon and they'll toast you, but as long as there is no inappropriate use, you don't need Mommy's permission.  

The news also loves to write about semi-automatic weapons, which as everyone knows makes it nastier and more dangerous.  I hate to be the one to burst a bubble, but today's double action revolvers work semiautomatically - pull the trigger and it shoots - no cocking, one shot per trigger pull (until all ammunition is used.)  Many folks reading this are confused and think that it means you hold down the trigger and it just sprays all the ammunition it has - this is wrong, but the news will take up that extra space because the writers know that there are folks who don't know this important fact.

Another interestsing fact is that there are many fully automatic weapons out there - and many are legally owned!  ANYONE can own a machine gun if they are permitted to own any other gun - you pay the Federal Government a tax for the privilege (and of course absorb the incredible cost of ammunition.)  There are limits on which may be owned, but it is a fact that ownership is not a blanket illegality.  Interestingly enough,  only one legally-owned machine gun has been used in a crime - and it was one belonging to a police department, used by a police officer.  The rest of those that are owned whose owners have paid for the privilege have never been used in a crime.  Your daily newspaper would never tell you that.

What is it about guns that fascinates me so?  It isn't the noise - it is the fact that they are all mechanical, depend on lighting a fire in an enclosed place to cause anything to happen, and are reliable and predictable.  The engineering, the motion of the parts, how safety parts work, all the mechanical aspects fascinate me.  An hour on the firing range will help you focus - after a bit, your mind does not wander - its sole concern is holding the gun, squeezing the trigger and not moving in a way to make the shot have a poor result.  All extaneous BS goes away, and you emerge from your hour or two refreshed and relaxed - because you haven't had all that nonessential crap eating away at your mind, taking away from the time you have to do important things.  It's even good therapy.  It's a lot safer than having road rage on the way home from work, or being so distracted that driving becomes a secondary task.

If you find guns scary, it is probably because you have no experience with them, but that's OK - I would never require that someone own something that induces fear. Do, however, take the time to learn about something before you dismiss it as intrinsically dangerous.  And please don't be fooled by the "More Laws" folks - lots of them are lawyers and have a vested interest in keeping the legal system riddled with rules that no mere person can understand.  

And please bear in mind - a gun does not a criminal make, nor does a gun law discourage a criminal from pursuing his chosen profession.  We all have choices - demonizing an inanimate objec will however derail us from going after the real problem.

/Rant Off

Monday Evening

I thougnt I learned years ago never to change anything in the last hour of the workday - but I was doing so well at bringing some stuff together and making it work better.

That is, I was doing so well until I broke it.

I didn't want to stay late, and here it is already an hour past leaving time - and only the first two spawns do what they should, then the damned thing just goes to end and doesn't tell me why - and I have code in there that ought to force it to tell me why.

I hate it when I outsmart myself.  

If it ain't broke, don't fix it!  How many times have I told everyone else that, you ask?  Many times, and here I just spatzed myself. Luckily, I can just shut this down and let it wait until tomorrow, so I don't have to stay much later and I can get outta here.

But it sure is irritating that I did it yet again. I'm looking at the code that fails first and the code that works and they look the same. Probably I've just discovered some unwritten rule about programming in Clarion that makes what I am doing legal if you do it twice, but not if you do it three times. At this point, I dunno - but I'm gonna close up shop and go home - WinAmp radio has even quit working - which is something I want to talk about another time.

It'll be interesting to see just how long it takes to find it tomorrow morning.  For tonight, I give up!

Monday Afternoon

Through some mischance I got to work early today, something I usually try not to do.  When I had an office, it didn't much matter because I could close the door - but now that I'm out here in a semicube right by the entry door, it seems that folks are obligated to stop in, chat, watch me code, ask me things, and generlaly make sure that concentration cannot occur.

As a person with ADD, living amongst the noise, conversations and interruptions is not real easy, especially if I am supposed to Get Things Done along with the occupying of space.  I persevere, but I'm not nearly as productive as I would be if I were screened off from this noise.  Also, out here I cannot play my music unless I use a headset - and I can't use a headset unless I don't mind getting bitched at for not paying attention to someone who came up to my area and started to talk without regard to the fact that I was not hearing anything but the music.  Information Technology is just overrun with bright people, but along with bright seems to come an extra load of pathology.

My middle child went on a date this past weekend.  This is something new, and her son did not appreciate it.  By the time she returned, neither her mother nor I appreciated it.  We are no longer young, and by the time midnight rolls around we aren't all that interested in being awake - indeed, I have already gone to sleep three or four times in my chair in the living room.  Sometimes Phyllis lets me sleep when she goes to bed, and I wake up beween 2:00 and 4:00 wondering just what that noise was (I have yet to figure it out - maybe it's my computer falling on the floor or something like that) and then get up and go to bed, put on my CPAP mask, turn the machine on, and go to sleep.  Fortunately getting to sleep is not hard, even if I've had coffee just before I go to sleep.  I think I've reached the age where my sleeping ability has reached its peak - and I sure hope that that lasts a while - it's a new thing for me, at least within recent years, and I like it that way.  

Here at the office I'm occupied with making some stuff I did better.  Or at least making it different - better is something best judged by me, and some days it's not better, just a little different.  I'm trying to modify the major systems that go elsewhere to get data and then load it up into our Oracle to make it easy for someone other than myself to troubleshoot.  If is kinda hard, because it very seldom fails, and when it does it is usually some outside influence (like a power failure in the server room) that causes it, and there's no way to script that recovery process, since servers as a generic class of device hate having their plugs pulled, and will do all kinds of miserable things to keep from restarting clean.

One small victory tody, however - there's a bit of mainframe stuff that has been "taught" to write directly to network storage instead of needing to write to itself so an operator can download the data onto the network for processing.  Part of this involves some chatting back and forth between a server that manages virtual tapes (that is, tapes that really are not tapes but the mainframe thinks that they are tapes)  in order for the server to tell the mainframe which tape drive that does not exist "owns" the tape that does not exist but is to be used anyhow. There was a bit of a problem with adata area not being cleaned out before sending a message to the mainframe console that I grabbed off and parsed to answer a different mainframe question so a human would not have to do this.  The fact that the area was not being cleared occasionally caused the piece of the answer I needed to put elsewhere not to be where I thought it would be - but today I finally found that there was a way to find it always with about four more lines of program code, so that made me happy, at least for a while.  I love automating things, particularly when some bozo tells me that it can't be automated - which is part of the backstory about this virtual tape server that we are using.

The only thing I have ever found that I could not do (aside from not using my hands to put things in my mouth to accumulate calories in quantity that I could not burn if I lived to be 352) is be unemotional in trying times, although I prefer to present the facade of being so.  Then, when nobody is looking I go downstairs into my workshop and throw hammers in a corner.  I used to shoot targets down there as well, but now that my grandson lives with us I have to keep the guns locked up.  Probably just as well, I guess - my .357 was getting hard on the concrete wall when I missed the phone book backstops....

When I dropped my grandson at school this morning, it looked like snow.  I just looked out the window, and it still looks like snow.  I'd like for it not to snow, but if it is going to snow, I don't think it will ask me.  I'm hoping for a couple more motorcycle days before the cruelty of winter sets in and sits on us - but I dunno; it is looking less and less likely.

My wife schimpfed at me the other day about the fact that there are two motorcycles parked in the carport and I haven't ridden one in some time, and asked me what I planned to do with it - and I told her I thought I'd put a sidecar on it.  Now, a sidecar has only one thing going for it - it won't fall over on your knees - but I've heard it can me a real hoot to drive, and my grandson is forever bugging me to go along - so maybe it will come to fruition.  The other motorcycle is an old Honda CB900 Custom hat has a two-speed transfer case before the 5 speed gearbox - and the lower range of the transfer case would be ideal for hauling the extra weight of a sidecar. 

At least, that's the theory, and what I told Phyllis.  Maybe after the new year a sidecar will come my way and I can get going on that little project.  I've been told that a sidecar rig embodies all of the vices of automobile and motorcycle, and none of the virtues of either, but I think it might be kinda neat - and I'm getting too old to enjoy picking up motorcycles, especially when they're mine.

Well, I guess I have to get back to coding.  I'd recommend folks visit http://dooce.com - it is an interesting blog, Heather is a real hoot to read, open, honest and funny, and some days she makes me feel really good.

Happy Monday, everyone.  

Sunday Afternoon

I thought I would get to dog it today , but it is not to be - choir this morning went well, but I forgot about an organ committee meeting this afternoon, which will keep me from computer stuff I need to do on the church's network.  Maybe next weekend.

I saw several motorcyclists today, and can only conclude that they have better circulation than I do, that they're dead, or that they don't feel the cold like us older folks do.  I thought about starting one motorcycle this morning and then changed my mind and took the old Volvo to church. Probably one of my more clever moves this weekend - I sure didn't have any on Saturday....

Phyllis and I had lunch at a place we like for the first time in many weeks, and it was nice to have an hour undisturbed and uninterrupted by some reality of life.  We don't have enough of these times any more - one of the things I am suposed to work on is somehow finding or creating more of them.  For some reason I thought that when I reached this age there would be leisure aplently, and that it would not be hard to schedule relaxed time since that's all there would be.  I sure did get that one wrong. 

Out baby Elizabeth sang in early church and I didn't get there, but Phyllis assures me that she did beautifully.  Liz's baby Sam was bellyaching when I arrived but stopped within a couple of minutes (no thanks to me) and I was reminded how not ready I am for my baby to be a Mom.  I guess maybe I never will be completely ready for her to be a totally independant person, but she's doing it so well, and has scheduled her life much better than I had at her age.  She was 26 today, has her master's degree, a couple years of teaching experience, a husband and a baby - and they're all well, healthy and happy.  I wish I could take some credit for all of this but I can't - she's her own person, and that person has grown into a really great adult, seemingly while I wasn't looking.  How does this happen?

Well, I have to go get some coffee and get back to church for the organ committee meeting, after which I just might get to work on the network for a little bit - if I can remember to take this ToughBook with me.  One thing I am learning is to have Vista, which is what was on the last two computers we bohght for church.  Granted, it does a lot that I used to have to do for myself, but I am not convinced that it does it better, and I know damn well that it takes away many options, not to mention sucking down resources like they were infinite.

Of course, I am still convinced that OS/2 should have won over WinDoze 3.1....

Be well, y'all - I gotta go.

Computers, redux

Well, I spent most of the day with my Toshiba 3500 tablet PC trying to make it make sense to me.

After getting frustrated all morning, I took it, my CD's, and my USB drives down to our PC repair shop to inquire if they had a USB CD drive that I could borrow since mine seemed to be not OK. There was one, but meanwhile I learned that one of the folks that lives in there has one of these little pups, and even has the right CD drive for it. We are trading the use of his drive for the use of my official disks. When I get back on Monday, it will come right up - it says here....

Meanwhile, I'll take the drive home and see if I can get the mini-Toughbook to come back to life. That would be a real coup!

I've just rediscovered internet radio - WinAmp comes with a set of directories to find almost anything you might want to hear - and some of it is pretty good. One of our local radio stations changed format a while back, and made me mad so I quit listening to them and supporting them - and on the internet I found a source of the sort of things that they had me hooked on.

The Internet is like a huge library - without a card catalog. Google helps, but if the search is broad enough not to miss something it can take years to examine everything that gets returned. I've learned to get clever sometimes with searches - but sometimes I get too clever and get frustrated.

Some SOB in our building finally turned the heat on - and has it up really high to make up for the month that had everyone complaining about freezing. Not cool (and no that wasn't an intenional pun, but if it works for you....)

Choir rehearsal was good last night - it seems to be getting better, or else I'm getting more mellow. But when it was done, I was ready to go home and read the latest from Greywolf at the Roswellfanatics site, which is one of the largest and most active Fan Fiction sites based around the Roswell TeeVee show. I should never admit to this, lest folks think I'm getting soft in the head, but I really liked that show - it resonated with me - and there are some damn clever writers writing to the show's character set and backstories. Some of what is written is crap, but much of it isn't - and as much as I'd like to think most of the writers were twenty-somethings, I have found a couple up around my age - and some of them are truly outstanding. In fact, I wish I could write like some of them.

Anyhow, now you know my secret vice. Please don't tell anyone, OK?

Actually, there's another secret vice - one of my compuers here at work has Linux on it - and Linux has mcuh better games than Windows, even their Solitaire is better. There's a Mah Jongg that will make you crazy, and a pretty good Othello, too. Since I use one monityr and one keyboard and a KVM switch to switch between computers, if I am paying atention, nobody notices when I'm playing, and since it usually happens only when I'm waiting for something to happen so I can continue something, there's no harm and no foul, although he bosslady has asked on occasion what I'm doing. When she asks, I tell her I'm goofing off, and she walks away, apparently the truth boggles...

I gotta get ready to get outta here. It's Thursday, tomorrow I am off, but that doesn't mean rest - Phyllis and i have a Joe visit, then I have to get ththoroughly swaddled and insulated and get my motorcycle up to Jack so he can put in the new steering column lock, then get home before frostbite sets in. At least it isn't supposed to snow before Saturday.

Happy Thursday to all of you out there.

Computers

I work with computers. As a result, I have a couple that my office did not issue to me. Being the cheap SOB that I am, I never buy anything new - most of the desktop computers around our house are things I have assembled from parts (including the media server in my basement that is currently waiting on parts) at one time or another, many of which have been upgraded to the point that I no longer know just what I originally built into them.

I have a (work-supplied) Compaq NX-9600 laptop/kneecooker. Nice machine, a bit out of date, big screen, weighs a little more than a case of beer. It also runs hot (apparently early P4's were like that) but it has been reliable and does most of the development duty at work, since it is stronger than any desktop that they've seen fit to issue to me thus far.

My lovely wife is a bit of a Luddite, and will touch no keyboard that looks like anything other than a piano, so she doesn't do computer things. I had hoped to get a Midi setup hooked to the keyboard that she has learned to love, but it hasn't happened yet, and the things she would need to use it for involve a really long learning curve. In order to try to get her interested (and to learn something myself) I picked up a Toshiba tablet PC, thinking it might appeal to her, with its ability to accept handwriting and such. It still might, but meanwhile I used it for a GPS machine in my car, and apparently it took a thumping that was more than the drive would like, and it quit booting one day. It tries, but gets nowhere.

Meanwhile, I picked up a Panasonic CF-T2 Toughbook that worked well - nice and fast, weighs next to nothing, good battery life. I had various USB CD drives and floppy drives laying around the house, so I wasn't concerned that it did not have either, for that ws part of how it got so light. Well, I fell asleep in front of the TeeVee one night with it on my lap, and apparently it spent too much time in contact with me - the fanless design demands air space underneath, and there had been none for a while, so it no longer boots quite up to XP - instead it ges so far, says "CRAP!" and starts the boot again. Of course, I did not get it with recover disks.

Then I got another Toughbook, this one really hardened - heavy, but nice and fast and it even came with a good battery (unheard-of!) so it now sits where the HP 6100 I had from work had sat, and that 6100 is going to be returned.

I got recovery disks for the tablet Toshiba, and spent about half a day discovering that even though it would 'see' a USB CD drive, it would not boot from one. So I googled a few things, and found that there is a utility to write a boot image (and probably all the recovery CD's) onto an SD chip, which I do have - but I can't find the utility anywhere, dammit, and the workarounds all involve a boot floppy, so I know where part of the weekend will be spent.

Meanwhile, the tiny wonder languishes, and I read somewhere hat it can be reloaded from an XP master set, then have the special drivers added back for the touch screen - so I have to get a pristine XP build, and then find all the drivers. More of the weekend gone, I guess - but with any luck at all I'll have them all back to functional next week.

I'm trying to get to the point that I can leave the big Compaq at work, and use one of the smaller machines as a Remote Desktop gateway to it, and then carry only the smaller machines. First I have to get them all healthy again.

I remember when computers would simplify our lives, or so they said. Then again, I'm old enough to have worked on computers that had tubes (and not the CRT variety) in them. We sure have come a long way, I guess - but life isn't all that much simpler, and as for paperless, which dates back to the halcyon days of the mainframe - well, I have yet to see anything computerized produce less paper than before.

I ought to retire and go to work selling the Police Department paper, I suppose.

I guess the point of all this is that life just gets more complex, and computers will be hated by even folks like myself that love them. If I were to bury in the back yard all the hardware I have accumulated over the years of working on and with computers, I'd run out of back yard long before I ran out of stuff to bury there. If I didn't know better, I'd say it reproduced by parthenogenesis (the thought of computers having sex has far too high a squick factor for even this old reprobate.)

I'd be inclined to get rid of them, but I still enjoy writing some software now and then, and when I can';t sleep or the TeeVee bores me, sometimes I get my best code just sitting there in my chair with the laptop on my knees. I am also addicted to the variety of music and video available through binary newsgroups, and am building a couple of collections just for me, of things I like to see and hear. Whether I'll ever get the chance to listen and watch what I collect is anyone's guess, but I've heard the best part of any journey is the getting there, so this collecting is fun - and at least big drives are cheap and fit inside the case - it the music were on LP's and the videos on tape, I'd've needed a bigger house just to warehouse the recordings.

Well, lunch time is over and the boss wants something from me, so I have to go pretend to work so they can pretend to pay me. Odd how that works....

Tonight is Choir Rehearsal, one of my favorite days of the week. Y'all have a good day, y'hear?

Weekend Thoughts

It was a nice weekend. Except for the rain, that is.

I had a lot of stuff I was going to get done this weekend. I don't remember what most of it was - and the stuff I do remember didn't get done. But weekends come around pretty regularly.

As I recall it, Saturday was to have been a motorcycle day - or at least enough of one that I'd get the Kwacker up to Jack for the installation of its new column lock. That didn't happen - I don't care for riding in the rain in the summer - and it was only 47 out yesterday. I think most of Saturday went to catching up on FanFic reading (about which more in another diatribe) and working on making this new laptop into what I think I want it to be. It seems to me I did some other stuff, but not much. I tend to nap a lot on weekends - I don't know if it is age-related, depression-related, or blood sugar related - but it doesn't bother me enough to want to find out.

I also did some work on unloading the DVR by watching some stuff I had recorded.

EVERYONE needs a DVR - if you have one, you can watch any show in just over 2/3 of the time it would normally take because you can quick-skip the commercials. That means I can watch three episodes of Eureka in the time it took to record two. Unfortunately, HD TV takes a LOT of space, and the DVR storage just is not enough to this point. There are drives big enough to do it, but the vendors won't let us into the box to replace its 100 gig drive with one of 1000 gig or so.

Sunday I made music in the morning, and visited with my youngest daughter and youngest grandson for a while in the afternoon, making myself useful by building a fire in her living room (in a wood stove, of course.) I also amused Sammy for a while, played with the cat a while, touched not one book, TeeVee or computer all that time.

Then we went home, and as I recall it I watched the drag racing at Pomona and slept intermittently, even through CSI:Miami, which usually doesn't put me to sleep. Before I knew it, it was Monday Morning, time to get myself up, get the other grandson up, make coffee, read the paper, take Ronnie to school and myself to work. Traffic sucked bigtime this morning - what takes me 25 minutes at night takes just over an hour in the morning sometimes. I'm not going off on a rant about Verkehrsarschloecher (Griesheimer for Anal Sphincters of Traffic) but I will let you fill in your own, because I suspect that everyone who doesn't work at home and has to drive to the office has their share of rants.

The first thing I learned after my arrival was that some work that had taken me a couple of weeks a year back was going into the dumper because someone decided we didn't need to be quite so nice to our client base, and we could get by making them use other processes that are more arcane and less intuitive to get the data I was spoonfeeding them. I guess I don't care - I get paid to do this stuff, but I kinda like it when it gets used.

The rant about outside data is postponed - right this minute it is entirely too profane to be posted here. Laer, when it gets less profane and more germane i'll get into the Uses and Misuses of Data ias it relates to people who save data without knowing that somewhere that has to be a unique identifier.... It's like a mailing list for all your friends filed under "Friends" without any distinction between the various names - like they were interchangeable parts. I guess there are probably folks that operate that way, but it gives me a headache and makes my eyes bleed.

I gotta go back to work. Have a good balance of the day, all of you.

Life at 66

Someone asked me yesterday why I still work. Of course, I had a semi-smartass answer - "But for certain unfortunate addictions, like food and housing, I'd've quit by now." Now, there is a certain amount of truth in that - I do have debts, and I like being able to spend money. A simple subsistance lifestyle would probably bore me to tears, or drive me into self-destructive behavior.

It cannot be said that we live high - both of us work, and our lives don't intersect often enough. Choir directors never have a weekend off (or hardly ever, anyhow) and spouses of choir directors either join in the musical activity or spend weekends alone. As a choirboy, I choose to sing - I still enjoy it, and like to think that I still have enough talent to make the choir better, not worse.

I have tried imagining being retired - and failed miserably. I truly don't know what I would do. I'd use up a month of blog material the first day, and then have 29 days to wonder whatthehell I ought to be doing. We're headed into winter, and while I do love motorcycling, I'm not stupid nor do I have a love for pain - so motorcycling on snow and in rain and snow is not for me (At least not as long as I have a solo bike without a sidecar!) and while there is a certain amount of fun available throwing my old Volvo around in the snow, somehow it just isn't the same.

And there is a certain amount of satisfaction in doing what I do for money - because much of what I do creatively is useful for people around me. I'm too lazy to do it just for myself, and without the work environment to improve with things I create, there isn't feedback of any sort - this no incentive to extend myself.

Living on just my social security is a little scary, too - with my salary, it's a nice addition, but without my salary it just isn't all that much, and it would make a big hole in spending for computer parts & software, as well as weekends away. We'd have the time again, but the money? I dunno....

I used to tell people that I wanted to return to Germany, but when I had the time, I didn't have the money - and when I had the money I didn't have the time, and then I got married and had neither money nor time. Frankly, it is more comfortable having neither than thinking about having lots of time and no money.

I like what I do, although it occasionally bugs me that I have to work a certain amount, and have little or no flex built in. But once I am involved in what I do best, time flies, and I can put on a headset (now that I no longer have an office with a door) and ignore what's outside what I'm doing.

It would be better if I were more active, but my life has been spent (since leaving field engineering in 1972) in front of a monitor on a desk, not out killing things to eat, so my exercise is minimal, which means that interruptions are minimal, and as a person afflicted by ADD the minimization of interruptions keeps me on track.

But my knees hate me. They've carried too much weight for too many years to suffer in slence, so now I suffer in silence while they make life and motion hard for me. Picking motorcycles up doesn't help, bit I do not have to do that very often, and frankly do not miss that activity at all. I know so many riders who claim never to have had to pick one up from laying on its side, but I am convinced that they all lie, too embarrassed to admit to being so clumsy.

Anyhow, I think I'll keep on working for a few years yet. As long as they'll pay me, I might as well, at least until my lovely wife decides she's had enough and wants to retire.

Ideally, we'll sell our house and buy into a retirement community - an hour up the road is the one that my parents were in until their deaths, and we both find much in it to like - so that is a possibility. I seriously do not think we'll move to Australia with grandkids here, so we'll be staying close. I don't think the rest of the kids are going anywhere any time soon, so there'll at least be that small island of stability.

If we're very lucky, we'll be able to maintain enough health that we can do pretty much what we want - that's the ideal case. We'll see how it all shakes out.

Meanwhile, being 66 feels a lit like 55, which felt a lot like 44, which wasn't far from 33 - but I no longer remember 22 at all - it was lost in a beer-fueled haze in Germany somewhere. If I'm as old as I feel, on good days I'm around 12 (according to my wife and some coworkers) - and on the bad days I'm probably 99 - which averages to 55, so I'm ahead!

But the sum and substance of this ramble is for my contemporaries - don't let your age distress you and don't pay attention to the numbers. You'll live until you die and there's no point at all in anticipating and preparing for that event, because if you guess the time wrong, you'll die slowly waiting for it, and that's probably no fun at all!

Be well, y'all.

Jamie left

Our kids are our kids - we just have to love them. Our oldest, James (Jamie since he could talk) just left yesterday for the west coast, then New Zealand, then Australia and after that who knows.

We knew he was going sometime this week, but didn't know he had gone until we got home from work yesterday. He's driving, plans to sell his car on the west coast, and leaves on the 26th on a big airplane.

A couple of years back, he spent a year in New Zealand, and liked it a lot. Phyllis and I have a feeling that if we are to see him again, we'll have to go there, but one is never certain. I'd like to think I had wisdom to impart before he left, and he missed out on it, but really, he's 35 now, so anything I might have said would not have made a big change in his plans or his life.

I had rather hoped some woman would throw a rope around him and tie him down, but he's skinny and flexible, so nobody managed to do that. It's going to be quiet around here without him, but it was quiet before and he came back. He would have been gone some time ago except that his baby sister got married and threatened mayhem if he left before he could be in the wedding, and I guess he just got too comfortable and stayed around for a lot longer than planned.

I might be a little envious - I had wanted to go back to Germany and never did it, but may yet - he's still unencumbered by responsibilities like wife & kids - but he's pretty much on his own as all of his pals have taken up the conventional life and have wives, kids, mortgages and such - although one of them moved to New Zealand to live his life.

There's something subtly seductive about that part of the world - we have family members that had gone there once on vacation and never returned, having found mate and life there. I guess there's still hope for Jamie, but I rather fear he'll end up old and alone for being too picky or something. Of course, I may just be being morose - it is, after all, Friday....

Anyhow, he's off again, and I miss him already. Wonder when we'll see him again....