I am taking a much-needed vacation next week, during which I will probably be working on the house and in the yard, as usual. Ergo, I will not be posting here much, if at all. I hope that you visit here again the week of September 10th, when I will return, unless I am eaten by a flock of flamingos.
After a long day and a long week, I am back home in the jungle. Unfortunately, along the way, I lost the electronic eye that lets me share my strange little world with you. I had my camera in its case at my feet, wedged under the seat in front of me on the airplane, next to the window. It could not move forward, because there were bars under the seats in front of me. It could not move backward, because my feet were against it, and behind me was a bulkhead. When we landed, I got up, went forward about six rows, realized that I had forgotten my camera case, watched and waited for the flood of people to file past me from the rear of the plane, went back to my seat, and it was gone. Someone with a larcenous soul had taken it.
It's my own fault, of course. I should not have had it out of my backpack, and I should not have left my seat without it. However, I got a year and a half's worth of use out of it, amortized at about $1 per day. I certainly got my money's worth from it, and I got a free high-quality photo printer when I bought it. Whoever took my camera obviously needed it worse than I do. And I'm sure that they will in turn have things stolen from them, as such behavior often seems to make victims of those who engage in it.
My darling wife had just started to get used to the camera, after heartily disliking it because it did not fire the instant that you press the button, as a Single Lens Reflex camera does. I was planning to get her a nice digital SLR for her birthday. Now I will do that, and I will get a cheaper replacement for myself, which I will always carry with me, instead of sharing the camera as we used to.
Anyway. For a time, there will be no pictures on this blog, other than the grainy ones I take with my cellphone. You will know when I have a new camera. ;-)
My darling wife says that actor Christopher Walken gives her the creeps. I have always liked him, simply because he manages to convey an aura of menace while not seeming to take himself seriously.
In 2001, he starred in a video for Fatboy Slim's "Weapon of Choice," in which he dances up a storm and flies around an empty hotel. The video won an MTV award in 2002.
I found a very odd stick figure version of the same video. It is a startlingly-accurate copy, done all in black lines, and the dancer is a stick figure. Very strange. I wonder why someone would go to all that trouble to create such a video.
These are some of my best friends, Bill and Janet. I have known Janet for ten years, and Bill nearly as long. They met at my workplace, when they shared a cube. They seemed compatible cube-mates. We had no idea how compatible, at the time.
I had the camera on an odd setting, so the picture is blurred. Argh. But we had a nice dinner together, we and their three boys, William, John, and Charles. I vote that we name the fourth boy for yet another king, like Agammemnon (King of Mycenae in ancient Greece, who fought the Trojan War around 1194 B.C.) or Xerxes (King of Persia, who invaded Greece around 480 B.C., and whose forces fought the Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae, where a tiny group of 300 Spartans+900 Spartan serfs+700 Thespians held off Xerxes' force of more than 50,000 men for three days. This battle is the subject of the comic-book movie 300 which I have not seen). But somehow I don't think that Bill and Janet will switch to Greek and Persian king names. They'll probably go with something boring, like George. Or Ethelred the Unready. Now that would be cool.
It is their fifth anniversary tomorrow. Stupid me, I would not have remembered if Janet had not told me. Thankfully, she did. I have no excuse to forget - I was in the wedding party. I believe it is the last time I wore a tuxedo. That was a fun day.
Happy Anniversary, guys!
I like the Hotel Zico, where we stayed in San Francisco (or Sunnyvale, or Mountain View, or Palo Alto, or wherever the heck we were. It all looks the same to me).
I like this fountain. It's pretty. It has a pineapple on top! It makes me homesick - we have pineapples growing in our yard in the jungle. It takes 18 months to grow a pineapple. Each plant takes up about 10 square feet, because it has many spiky leaves radiating out from the center, where the pineapple grows. Pineapple plantations are gigantic for this reason. 
The front of the Hotel Zico.
At the company where we're doing our needs assessment (sort of an extended sales call), there is a crew of IBM people. I haven't seen most of these people since 2001. I had forgotten their names, but remembered their faces. It's wonderful to see them again. It always surprises me that people remember me. I don't think I'm that memorable. But then, I am always with myself, so I suspect that I'm used to myself.
I meet so many new people in my job every year that their names and faces blur together. But because I am a new thing in their everyday lives, I must stand out more in their minds than they stand out in mine.
Interesting.
Anyway, it's nice to see these people again. I hope I get to see them again at some point, because they are nice, kind people to know.
I was meandering after my wife through her favorite home furnishings store yesterday, and saw this floating swimming pool radio.
I bet you can see the strange little face that the white area creates on the front of the radio. The knobs form the eyes and nose, and the product's name/logo forms the mouth.
I doubt this was an accident. If it was, some engineer and marketeer both need to be spanked. Because it's not a pretty face. Worse, it looks an awful lot like a horror movie that was based on Stephen King's novel, "It."
I'm not a fan of Stephen King or his movies, except for "The Shining," which is a classic. I have never seen the movie "It," nor have I read the book - I have only seen the movie on the shelves in the video store. But the resemblence of this pool radio to the evil killer clown in the movie poster is striking.
I did not know this, but the killer clown is played by Tim Curry, of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" and many other films. I like him a lot in "The Hunt for Red October," as the idiotic doctor aboard the Soviet missile submarine Red October. "You'll receive the Order of Lenin for this, sir," he proudly declaims to his captain, Sean Connery, as Sean prepares to evacuate the entire crew and "scuttle" the ship, when he's really going to steal it and defect to the United States. Tim's character is SUCH a sap.
"But you can shop there." (from the movie "Grosse Point Blank") Actually, I am home again, and it feels weird, being back in the mountains, as opposed to being by the sea. On the one hand, it's nice to be back in a familiar place. I feel stupid for having moved away. But on the other hand, this is a familiar place, and I can always come back to it if I want to. Meanwhile, we live in a cleaner, brighter, safer, less-populated place now. If I need to, I will come back here on a permanent basis. But for now, I am blessed to be living in the jungle by the sea.
I am here in the mountains for a week of training. It will be nice to see my friends here, because I miss them. I will leave for a couple of days in the middle of the week, to go to the opposite coast, by the other, deeper, colder sea. I will take pictures, for it has been a year since I've been there, or here.
I was at the pistol range the other day. It was a quiet day, with only a few other people on the firing line. Perhaps 50 yards away, in the rifle range, someone was firing something that made the oddest sound...
FsssssssssssssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhrrrrrrrrrrK.
FsssssssssssssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhrrrrrrrrrrK.
You could hear each shot moving from left to right, winging its way downrange, sending out a loud CRACK all the way. They were bullets moving above the speed of sound, because you can't hear subsonic bullets very well unless they come very close to you. At close range, all you would hear of a supersonic bullet is the CRACK. Far away, when the bullet is moving perpendicularly across your field of hearing, you hear the CRACK moving with the bullet, and it sounds like FssssshhhhrrrrrK.
It was very cool. But I sure wouldn't want that sound coming at me.
The daily birdcage-liner (USA Today) has an unintentionally hilarious column in it by Peter Schmidt (http://www.colorandmoney.com/). Schmidt quotes Ellen Brantlinger, an "education professor" at Indiana University in Bloomington Indiana. Brantlinger interviewed 20 white middle-class mothers in Bloomington, who were mostly teachers, professors (read: Brantlinger's friends) and social service administrators. Schmidt says that these mothers were "widely regarded as intelligent, liberal and well-meaning." (At least, "widely regarded" means that's what Brantlinger thought. But watch, here it comes. These mothers said something in Brantlinger's survey that proved they were NOT intelligent, NOT liberal and NOT well-meaning. In Brantlinger's opinion.)
What did these mothers say? "When asked whether they would be willing to have their own kids in classrooms alongside children from lower-income backgrounds, their liberal ideals went out the window." Meaning that they said "no, I won't have my child go to school with poorer children, or children of other races."
"How unintelligent, conservative, and hateful!" we are supposed to conclude. ;-)
But Schmidt points out that the reason for the mothers' reaction is that there's a scientifically documented and proven "peer effect," where children do much better in school with "privileged" children whose parents value education and who push the children to work hard in school. Schmidt observes that income is often associated with race, and lower-income schools tend to consist mostly of minority students, whose families generally do not place the same value on education that "privileged" (white) families do.
Schmidt notes that school desegregation advocates have been consistently defeated by "parents [who] have repeatedly shown a willingness to opt for private schools, pack up and move to another district, or fight tooth-and-nail in the courts and political arena to keep their children away from the less-advantaged." As these supposedly intelligent, liberal and well-meaning Bloomington mothers no doubt would.
I would argue that parents of any stripe are consistently smarter than desegregation advocates. I also think that Brantlinger's results show that it's easy to have liberal principles when you have nothing at stake. But when your children, their education, and their futures will be affected, so-called liberal ideals vaporize like hoarfrost in the warming rays of the morning sun. It's all about survival of the fittest, and going to a substandard but politically-correct, "racially-balanced" school isn't going to make your child able to compete any better in the world. Instead, they will probably do worse in school, and therefore they will be less able to compete in the world. That was certainly my own experience all through grade school, up until I moved to a different city and a politically-incorrect, racially-imbalanced high school, whereupon suddenly my grades leaped skyward and I actually started learning things.
Oddly, Schmidt and Brantlinger both seem to be dismayed by the phenomenon of parents circumventing the desires of liberal activists by steering their children toward "privileged," racially-imbalanced schools. Those same parents helped propel the Supreme Court decision on 06/28/07 in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District #1 (05-908) that school districts can no longer use race as the primary deciding factor in assigning students to schools. They're going to have to figure out some other means of deciding which kid goes where.
But ultimately, parents will have the final say. If the public school district won't let them send their child where they want to go, then they'll either leave the district, or pay a private school for the education that their child deserves. As it should be, in a capitalist, free society.
Circling back to the article that started this train of thought; I don't think that the reactions of 20 white, middle-class mothers in the Midwest are a statistically significant sampling, other than to the local professor (Brantlinger) who interviewed them. But it certainly provides food for thought.
... never comes to pass. I was panicked about my Train The Trainer class that I'm teaching. I'm training experienced people, core team members, who set up the system, who know the most intimate details of how the system works, and who have delivered training before in a previous implementation. I have taught this course before, several times, but never to such experienced people.
I expected a VERY tough audience.
Luckily, they were very nice to me. They listened, they participated, they interacted, and they actually appreciated the stuff I was teaching them. I expected them to go to their boss and complain about something without talking to me about it first - this has happened before, because it is their corporate culture to do that. But as far as I know, they have not done that today. Yet.
The course is going very well. I have another day of training tomorrow. Tomorrow is another day. Disaster may befall me yet.
But so far, the disaster that I feared has not materialized.
Clearly I am either lucky, or ignorant, or both. But it has been much easier to teach than I had anticipated.
A friend of mine bemoans the fact that she doesn't have a house on the beach like she always wanted. Never mind the fact that such houses get washed away all the time. Her heart has been set on having a beach house since she was young. But alas, she doesn't have enough money to get said beach house. Nor a beach trailer. And if she had the money, the taxes would kill her. That's why a lot of big mansions on the island near her are for sale. Nearly half of them are for sale, and it's mainly because of the taxes and the hurricane insurance. And these are RICH people selling them.
My friend is poor, compared to the rich people on the island who are leaving. But she is wealthy compared to the poor Mexicans who live here in New Jersey, crammed into tiny decaying clapboard houses, ekeing out a living on whatever jobs they can get in this industrial area. And THEY are wealthy compared to their families back home in Mexico, who struggle just to survive, and who long for the good life in a decaying clapboard house in an industrial area in America.
Wealth and poverty are relative. If you have the basics (food, shelter, clothing), then you are wealthy. Everything else is frosting on the cake. My friend is wealthy. I hope that her spirit someday can feel it.
Two anecdotes, one trivial and one not:
Trivial: I was trying to plan a trip to another city and to take my wife along. But we discovered that the people she wanted to see most were not going to be there. Then other logistical issues began to crop up, and pretty soon it was obvious that my wife should not bother to go. So we managed to cancel our reservations the same day, and avoid all sorts of fees. The obstacles that were quickly mounting were saying loudly, "do not do this."
Not Trivial: A relative of a friend, who got married at a young age recently, is now getting a divorce later the same year. No matter how hard he tried to make his marriage work, it was not going to work. Now he is quitting and cutting his losses before they get worse. He is listening when the universe is telling him to quit while he's ahead. I think he's smart.
I think everyone should know when to quit. There's no shame in quitting when all the indicators are clearly pointing to why you should. Instead, you should congratulate yourself for being able to heed the advice that the universe, without words, is whispering in your ear. Now you can devote your energy into finding the path that you are MEANT to be on, instead of the one you ARE on.
Anole lizard egg, photographed by my darling wife.
Our bananas are growing like weeds! This is one week's growth. Seven days. Can you believe it? That's a foot and a half.
We're practicing taking pictures of our rental house in preparation to sell it. The back lanai is very nice.
About 80 people were arrested at an Ozzfest concert in New Jersey recently, mostly for underage drinking, but also for "violent dancing." I didn't even know that was a named offense. "Violent dancing." The police spokesperson said that some people were getting rowdy in the mosh pit.
Really? Who would have guessed?
It's a freakin' MOSH PIT, the place in front of the stage where everyone thrashes around and bangs into each other. If you're going to be in the mosh pit, you should expect to get dirty, clothes ripped, and bruised and/or bloody. If you don't like that stuff, don't go near the mosh pit. Hang back by the fire exits, where I hang out. I don't trust the morons at a concert not to set the place on fire.
Sheesh. Now, if someone's wading through the mosh pit swinging a tire iron, I can see where that would be an offense, like simple assault (versus aggravated assault, or worse, complex assault). But regular old "violent dancing," well now, that's just to be expected.
And it's Ozzfest, for goodness' sake. It's not a Sunday prayer meeting.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I was watching a guy play with his iPhone on the plane next to me. Scrolling through his emails, flipping through the menus. Sure, the interface is pretty. But the darned thing is a brick. It's HEAVY. It's the size of my three-year-old HP iPaq hx2450 Pocket PC that I bought from my neighbor for $50 at her garage sale because she never used it. I don't really use it either, mainly because it only has wireless 802.11b, and no phone. But anyway. AT&T had massive problems activating the iPhones for the first month or two. They just wouldn't work on AT&T's network, which is ridiculous when AT&T is the sole network provider for them. Someone at AT&T needs to get fired for that screwup. And now it's been announced that, oh gee, Apple withheld information about the fact that the battery in the iPhone is only good for 300 recharges (about a year or so) and the iPhone is sealed, so you can't replace the battery yourself. You have to mail it back to Apple to have them disassemble it and replace the battery for $80. That's a load of horseshit, because you're still paying for your phone service while your phone is gone for two weeks. What a crock.
Early adopters, the techie geeks or fashionistas who just had to have the iPhone, are looking kinda stupid right now, I think. But most of them are anyway.
Now, one of the client people I work with just got a Motorola Q. Sure, it's old technology compared to the iPhone. Buttons instead of a touch-screen, for example. But it's half the thickness of the iPhone and one-quarter of the weight, and it works right out of the box. But I wouldn't touch a Motorola product after my horrible experience with the T720 phone a few years ago (one of the first flip-phones). It wouldn't hold a charge on standby more than 8 hours. Everyone I knew had the same problem. Buy an extended battery, said Verizon, so I did, and that gave me 12 hours of standby. Ridiculous. I had to leave it plugged in all the time. Finally I ran over it with my truck (on purpose) and threw it away, and switched to an LG phone, which worked perfectly. Only later did I find out that all the T720s had a power-management defect in their software, which is why the battery drained so fast. Verizon and Motorola never said anything about it, even though they knew about it at the time. I won't ever buy a Motorola product again for that reason. For something to escape the factory with a defect like that is inexcusable. I wrote hate mail to the president of Motorola about it. Never heard anything of course, but I felt better.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The little town where I have been working lately is apparently a vacation spot, a tourist area, because it's on the "Jersey Shore." Ooooooooooooooo. And there are indeed lots of tourists, from New York and Pennsylvania, mostly. My office is just down the street from the main drag, which is a street full of bistros and shops. It's crowded every night. I am lucky to be here in the summer, because I'm sure it's quite dismal in the winter.
But I can't figure out why the "Jersey Shore" in general, or this little burg in particular, is actually a tourist attraction. Sure, it's small, there's lots of trees, and the air is relatively clean. The buildings are old but they're generally in decent repair. There's not much parking space, and many of the streets are one-way, probably just to make sure that people don't get comfortable or complacent in their driving. It's on a wide, shallow river, which flows backwards and forwards with the ocean tides ten or twenty miles away. But really, there's not that much special about this place. If you want to see someplace really beautiful, go to the coast of Maine, like Bar Harbor, for example. Or Petoskey, Michigan, on Lake... whichever lake is on the left side of Michigan, I can't remember. THOSE places are beautiful. This place... eh. It's certainly nicer than the industrial hellhole that a lot of northern New Jersey and southern New York and eastern Pennsylvania is. It's got more things to do than most of the impoverished midwestern and southern villages and towns that I've worked in during the last decade. But it's the coast of NEW JERSEY. Tar balls, medical waste, and garbage bobbing in the waves. Mile-long traffic jams. Crime. And you have to PAY to go on the beach. That is bizarre to me. The beaches are all state property where I live. If you can get to the beach through a public access, you can walk the entire thousand miles of beach if you're up to it, and it's free. These poor saps have to pay for it.
But I suppose that for all the writhing masses crammed together in their sad, polluted, crime-ridden, heavily-taxed warrens in the Northeast, the Jersey Shore is a desirable place to go. I just think it's funny, because there are so much nicer places to go than the Jersey Shore. It's all relative, I guess. I just hope those writhing masses of Northeasterners don't find those nicer places. They need to stay RIGHT where they are, so that the rest of us can enjoy our own nice places.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I've been Tivo-ing the "X Files" and catching up on the last half of the series, which I missed after Fox Network stupidly started shifting the schedule around in 1998, and I couldn't watch it anymore because I was always on a plane when it was on. (Sure, I had a VCR. Sure, I taped it. And I was always too busy at home on the weekends to watch the tapes.) I sure like Robert Patrick as Agent Doggett, a substitute for Agent Mulder after Mulder disappeared for a season or so. I have only seen Robert Patrick once before, as the T-1000 terminator in the movie "Terminator 2." He was very good in that. This role on the "X Files" is great for him, because he gets to play a human instead of a machine. His character is a pragmatic street cop-turned-FBI agent, and he doesn't know what to make of all the weird occurrences that he encounters. You can really empathize with his character.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I have been trying to figure out how to carry my weapon without sweating all over it in the jungle heat, because shorts, an untucked T-shirt and sandals don't leave a lot of places to stash a weapon. In northern climes, I often use an ankle holster, or a small-of-the-back holster. But in the jungle, the only place to hide a weapon is in the small of the back or in a pocket. And silly me, I had completely forgotten that I have a tiny .380 pistol, the size of a pack of playing cards. .380 Auto Colt Pistol (ACP), or 9mm Short in Europe, is a decent-enough cartridge for up-close-and-personal defense, provided that your target is not wearing heavy clothing that would slow down or stop the slug. (In which case, aim for the head if you can, I guess, though the head is a hard target to hit when you're in a hurry.) I usually prefer to carry a .45 ACP, because the bullet is almost three times the mass of a .380 bullet, and most humans can't ignore a .45 slug when it hits them, whereas some can ignore a .380 if they're high enough on drugs (in which case, grant them a second shot, or a third, until they notice, or drop dead, or both). But even though I recently acquired the smallest .45 ACP pistol made, it's still too big to hide easily. So. Back to the .380, which I rediscovered while rummaging around in my safe the other day.
I really need to catalog these things.
I have never ever sweated so much in my life, as I do in the jungle. I am used to the mountains, where no matter how hot it gets, it's so dry that the sweat just evaporates off of you.
Alas, not so, in the jungle. I keep swatting at my legs, thinking there's bugs on them, but no, just little rivulets of sweat trickling down into my socks, as I work outside in the yard or on the house.
This weekend, I crashed on Friday after I got home around noon, and slept until about 3:30 in the afternoon. Then we ran errands, which were so memorable I can't recall a single thing we did.
But Saturday and Sunday, oy, those were indeed sweaty days. Saturday we got up at the crack of dawn, while it was still cool at 80 degrees and 100 percent humidity, and we went outside and drilled holes in the gables of our garden shed, to allow the heat to drift out. I drilled a pattern of half-inch holes the size of a softball on each end of the shed, and covered them on the inside with window screening. It seems to help. If it doesn't do much, then I will install a solar-powered fan. But we'll see how normal air movement through the gables of the shed helps.
Then I started work on the front lanai, installing hurricane shutters (okay, plywood) on the front windows. Normally we use plywood with metal spring clips called Plylox, which hold the plywood into the recessed window frame. Most houses like ours are sheathed in stucco, and the windows are recessed about three inches into the wall, which allows Plylox to wedge the plywood into the window and hold it there. You can't get it out without a screwdriver to pry it out - regular wind gusts won't budge it. But our front windows are flush with the wall, because it's a three-sided bay window bulging out from the house. So there's no recessed window frame to wedge plywood into with Plylox. Ergo, you have to drill holes all the way around the window, then mount brass screw receptacles in the wall, then drill holes in the plywood and stick steel bolts through the plywood into the brass screw receptacles, and torque them down tight.
It took me the rest of Saturday and all of Sunday to finish three windows. I could have done it a lot faster with a hammer-drill, but those are about $200, and I didn't have the money to spare. So I made do with some masonry/metal drill bits and a lot of WD-40 lubricant to substitute for drilling oil. It's surprising how much faster a drill bit cuts through metal when you put oil on it. I was drilling through both stucco/masonry and also through the occasional metal window flange. I couldn't tell where the window flanges would be, so I just measured out the holes, marked them, and drilled them. What a lot of work that was, though.
My darling wife brought out a big box fan and put it on the front porch to keep me cool. Without that, I would have melted.
But, regardless, I got it done. Somewhere in there, we also found time to go to the beach and read the newspaper in our beach chairs under an umbrella. That was wonderfully idyllic.
I took some pictures here and there, but forgot to upload them. I'll do that this weekend.
We rented two movies over the weekend (my birthday treat) - "Music and Lyrics," with Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore, and "Flushed Away" with Hugh Jackman and Kate Winslet and Bill Nighy. "Music and Lyrics" was weak and predictable, and Hugh and Drew seem too friendly to be lovers, but Hugh's wisecracks were great. It just wasn't as good as "Four Weddings and a Funeral" or "Notting Hill." "Flushed Away" was frenetic and crazy, and it sent up a bunch of other movies and TV shows, but ultimately I was glad when it was over. It's nice to see another claymation-style Aardman film a la "Wallace & Gromit," but this one was just too much.
I think that in general, films are so mediocre anymore, that we would rather just rent them and sneer at them, than feel obligated to enjoy them because we paid $13.50 to get into the matinee. And at least when we rent them, we can fast-forward through the dull bits.
I remember watching film of the 1940 Tacoma Narrows bridge disaster, where a new suspension bridge over the Tacoma Narrows in Washington state began vibrating in the wind like a guitar string. The wind blowing at a steady 42 miles per hour through the narrows between the mountains set up a harmonic vibration in the bridge, causing it to twist longitudinally in opposite directions. It did this for a couple of hours before it finally flew apart and collapsed. It's fascinating to watch.
Anyway, we haven't had a really interesting structural collapse of a major bridge for awhile. When I turned on the TV and saw the bridge that collapsed today in Minneapolis (I've been on that bridge, that gives me the creeps), I thought it was California and that there had been another earthquake. It's awful that at least 6 people died in this collapse. Don't you know that the contractors who were working on the bridge are in deep trouble! The bridge had been down to one lane each way for months and months - imagine how bad the casualties would have been if the bridge had been operating at full capacity.
They're making a big deal out of the bridge collapse, but really, this is a smallish bridge in comparison to others, and the damage is quite localized. As usual, the cable news networks are hollering about it constantly, because face it, this is the most exciting thing to happen in days or weeks. Especially in Minneapolis, where not much ever really happens.
