June 21, 2015

Clocks.

It’s not secret that I am fascinated by “connected clocks”, or clocks that are synchronized by some method, whether it’s wired, wireless or smoke signals. I have a collection of old slave clocks wired throughout the house. They were all made by The Standard Electric Time Company and were commonly found in schools, factories and other industrial buildings. The clocks in the house advance once a minute with an audible click-click. They are controlled by an old computer in the basement running Linux and a program I wrote years ago in BASIC. My collection of clocks span manufactured years of 1920 to 1955. I’ve been fascinated by connected clocks since my first day of kindergarten in Mrs. Mosher’s room, Room 5 at Lura Sharp Elementary School.

A lot of airports have connected clocks of some sort. I’m typing this blog entry at DTW, Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport. The terminals here at DTW are quite nice and modern. There are clocks everywhere. I don’t know this for certain, but I believe the two terminal buildings were built at different times. Someone obviously made the effort to try to make the airport experience cohesive, the building housing the B and C gates is smaller but similar in design to the building housing the A gates. Remarkably (at least to me), the clocks in what feels like the newer building have the same design as the original, however, they’re not made by the same company.

Terminal A building.
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Terminal B building.
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Ordinary people would take a passing glance and might notice that the clocks are the same throughout the airport. On closer inspection, one can tell that Terminal A’s clocks are made by Simplex but Terminal B’s clocks are not marked with the name of the manufacturer. I suspect that the latter was made by American Time and Signal, a small company in Dassel, Minn., but I can’t be certain with asking someone.

And I might just do that.

My OCD tendencies demand that clocks all read the same time. As a child I couldn’t stand it if the VCR was a minute off from my alarm clock or something of that nature. Luckily, today’s connected world lends itself to clocks more likely reading the same time.

And even though it’s been over 40 years since I sat in Room 5 in Kindergarten, I find all of these connected clocks to still be quite fascinating.

Senseless.

Every time I see the photos of the nine people murdered in South Carolina I feel a lump in my throat and a tear in my eye. When I saw the expressionless face of the young man who fired the shots, I get angry. My naive mind can not comprehend the thought processes involved in making the willful decisions to commit such a heinous act. I just can’t understand it.

When I first heard the voices of family members of the victims telling the accused that they forgive him, I cried, right there in front of the television set.

None of this makes sense to me. The fact that there are Confederate flags flying over government buildings in South Carolina pisses me off. I’d like to think that there will be change in our country, but my gut tells me there won’t be. 

It’s time for change. We need to be a citizenry of good people. We need to be good to one another. I know that I will be more vocal if people make insensitive remarks or jokes based on the differences in another. It’s a small thing, but maybe a million small things can help a big thing.

Rest in peace, innocent people. 

  

Delta 2274. 

So I’m a flight from Raleigh-Durham to Detroit. After a three hour layover in Detroit I will be headed home. Flight plans for the coming week all involve me as pilot; no commercial flights in the next few weeks.

This is my eleventh commercial flight in the past ten days, and I’m kind of happy about that because with today’s flight I become a Delta Silver Medallion customer for 2016. It’s a little thing but it makes me feel good. I’ve been quite happy with Delta Airlines, save for that incident when we went to Vancouver and the flight attendant was hurt after not putting her seat belt on for takeoff.

I’m finally catching my breath after a whirlwind of travel and adjusting to the new job. This coming week will be the third week of the new job but my first week of working from home, which is now my official office. The team I belong to is based in Greenville, S.C. but my employee profile pegs me as an employee of Central New York. This is quite comforting to me.

The new job is going splendidly. Last week I was part of a meeting for the management team of the group and it was during that meeting that I felt like I had made the absolute right decision for my career to move to this new opportunity.

The only drawback thus far is being away from Earl and Jamie as much as I have been over the past two weeks. This weekend I visited our friends Jeff and Mark in the Raleigh-Durham area; this trip was planned prior to the new gig. It was a great weekend.

I’m looking forward to the upcoming layover in Detroit. I’ll enjoy a little dinner, do some people watching and live the life of a jet setter. Earl and I just made flight plans for the holidays in December because we wanted to get a really good rate.

So much life to look forward to.