June 2008

The Frog.

I may be crazy but I know that I read somewhere that if you place a frog in hot frying pan, he’s going to jump out. However, if you put a frog in a cold pan and then heat it up slowly, the frog will never jump out but instead he’ll just sit there and burn to death, content all along his journey to delicacy.

I think that is exactly what is happening in the United States today. As Americans we were very content in the “cold pan” of yesteryear and for the past several years the heat has steadily been increased. We are eventually going to burn to death without even realizing what’s happening to us. I am applying this metaphor to countless topics. For example, on my way home at lunch I noticed that the price of gas jumped six cents between 7:30 a.m. and 12 noon. A gallon of unleaded is now $4.259 at the corner store. It was a year ago that I was outraged at $2.399 a gallon. Doesn’t anyone care? Why are people not outraged? I know folks that are miffed, but where is the outrage?

People think nothing of standing line at an airport for three hours as your bags are scanned, your illegal shaving cream is confiscated and the fear of God is instilled in you as you board an airplane to your favorite destination. It’s all in the name of security, you know. Be afraid. Be very afraid. That’s been the theme of the 21st century. “Be afraid”. The Flying J still boasts a threat level of orange. Please.

And while I’m at it, why in the hell should I pay extra to bring my luggage along on a vacation? They don’t want us to bring our clothes, they’ve designed xrays that strip us of our clothes yet the rent-a-secure-feeling personnel balk every time I suggest I just go through security naked. Do you want clothes or not? Just follow the lead of the gas companies and raise the fares for everyone. “You’ll have to pay extra for your luggage.” Stupid.

You need a passport to cross into Canada. We need a fence along the Mexican border. What happened to “tear down that wall?” What has Canada done? More importantly, why are people not questioning things? Why are tomatoes all of a sudden the forbidden fruit (or vegetable, I can never remember)? What happened to growing your own tomatoes? Hell, I can grow tomatoes in a 5 gallon pail on the back porch and know that they’re safe from pesticides and god knows what else. And why do we accept high-fructose syrup in “all natural” tea (and yes, I’m firmly entrenched in the “New Coke/Coke Classic” conspiracy theory from the 1980s). Why do people think that Splenda is splendid? The stuff was rushed to market. It’s unnatural. In the 1970s it was all about the saccharin. And today people are literally dumping scoops of Splenda into their favorite dish. I know I eat a lot of crap but I still go out of my way to avoid chemistry when I can. Up until a couple of months ago I was an avid diet pop drinker. That was until I discovered it had many of the same ingredients as rat poison.

Personally I think the United States was headed toward insanity in 2000 and my suspicions were confirmed when Bush Lite was re-elected in 2004. It’s a slippery slope we are headed down. Something has got to give, and when it does, it’s not going to be pretty. When does this madness stop? When will the pan get too hot?

16 June 2008 by Why. 4

Saranac Thursday Night.


Flickr Link.

Tonight I went to my first Saranac Thursday Night of the season. Earl was out to dinner with his boss so I made the trek alone. I met up with friends from work.

It was two weeks ago that there was a good sized fire at the West End Brewing Company. The fire took out the bottling area of the plant. The F X Matt Brewing Company is in the process of rebuilding. Saranac Thursday Nights didn’t miss a beat and it seems like there’s more people there than ever. Throughout the city and neighboring villages, business have signs up that say “Get Well Soon Schultz and Dooley!” Some details of the fire can found on my blog entry from that night.

One of the things that I love about Saranac Thursday Nights is that people from all walks of life are there: blue collar, white collar, executives, biker chicks, gay, straight, fat, thin, big, small; it doesn’t matter. I feel a sense of community whilst I’m there.

Tonight I chatted with my friends Shirley and Christine and John while I downed three Utica Club drafts. I recently replaced Christine at work, she is wicked smart and is pursuing new employment opportunities after earning her Master’s Degree from the New School. Shirley and John still work at the telecommunications company I work at. I enjoy chatting with them off hours. I need to get better about not talking shop.

I’ve posted more pictures from tonight’s fun; I tend to take random shots with my iPhone when I have the opportunity. You can see them here on Flickr.

Here I am all duded up for the occasion.

Flickr Link.

12 June 2008 by Fun and Games Dept 1

Tech Thursday.

Today is all about the multitasking. Not only am I folding laundry, vacuuming the house and doing other odds and ends that need to be done; I am also watching and listening to podcasts, rebuilding the home server and engaging in other geeky activities.

As you may have heard (now there’s an understatement), Apple announced a few things at the WWDC conference during Steve Jobs’ keynote speech on Monday. Even though we were swamped with tech calls at work during the speech, I was constantly refreshing various sources on the web to see what was up. Later on Monday night I watched the keynote from my home studio. As expected, Steve announced the release of the next incarnation of the iPhone, the iPhone 3G. Though still tied to AT&T here in the States, the iPhone 3G will use faster technology to do it’s internet magic. The current model uses a slower technology called EDGE. For the most part I’m pleased with my current iPhone so I’m going to stick with what I have. If someone were to buy me an iPhone 3G I wouldn’t complain, but I don’t feel that I can justify the cost right now. I also have to admit that I like the metal casing on my iPhone. I am disappointed that MMS messaging was not mentioned in the iPhone 2.0 software upgrade. I have a lot of friends that like to send me pictures via phone (and I like to do the same as well) and I can’t using my iPhone; I have to resort to sending them via e-mail.

Another announcement during that same keynote was the conversion of .Mac to the new MobileMe service, which is expected to hit the ‘cloud’ in July. I have had a .Mac subscription since I switched to OS X platform earlier in the oughts, but I don’t use it as much as I could. The MobileMe platform is a complete revamping of it’s predecessor and includes ‘push’ technology: I don’t need to go out and fetch the information, my information comes to me. This is wicked cool. If I update a contact, calendar entry or photo on my iPhone, it’ll be on my MacBook, Mac Minis and other computers in a matter of seconds. If I had a Windows computer here in the Macinmanor it would also be there. Microsoft Office users are familiar with similar capabilities through the Microsoft Exchange technology (when coupled with Outlook or Outlook web interface). I’m looking forward to my .Mac account being converted to MobileMe and have already started migrating away from the myriad of free services I currently use to .Mac in preparation for the conversion. This brings up another topic.

I’m changing my contact information, again!

My e-mail address is now
imachias-at-mac.com

imachias-at-gmail.com will continue to work indefinitely but I will not be using it as my primary account. Please update your address books. I’ve always been a little cynical about using the free service of gmail, even though Google has done nothing to make me distrust them, ever. On the other hand, why I trust Apple with my information is beyond me, maybe it’s paying for the service that gives me a false sense of security.

The bigger home server here at the Macinmanor crashed last week after I tried to apply routine upgrades to the Ubuntu Linux OS. I lost most of the information on the hard drive. The hard drive is fine, but Ubuntu did something to the file system that prevented me from doing anything with it. I discovered a Linux distribution called SystemRecoveryCD that allowed me to boot the server off the CD and rescue some of my data. If I had found this earlier in the troubleshooting process I probably could have rescued all of my data. I guess we all live and learn. Today I am rebuilding the server and have opted to use FreeBSD as the operating system instead of one of the Linux variants. Let’s see how helios 2.0 (the server is named ‘helios’) does.

12 June 2008 by Geek 0

Dance Already.

As the weekend looms on the horizon, I feel it’s fitting to get your toe tapping.

This single is from 1996 and still does quite well on the dance floor if there’s enough alcohol flowing. Only a few rarely believe who is singing when they ask.

12 June 2008 by DJ 0

Whew.


Flickr Link.

I’ve worked it out so that I work three days a week until July 10. Then it’s four days a week until Labor Day and then I’m full time after that. How’s that for setting a nice summer schedule? It is the social season, you know.

I’ve made several big decisions this week: a full-time job, school on hold, etc. I could go on and on about how my head is spinning but to be honest it’s not. I always listen to my gut and my gut says I did good. I feel great. I feel remarkably stress free, though I know that’ll change once I get back into the on call schedule again in September. The great thing is that since all the positions in my group are now filled the on call schedule is manageable with my turn coming up once every five weeks. I can live with that. They have added incentives to on call to make it a little more bearable. I see gadgets in my future (after the debt is paid down).

Ironically, as soon as I sealed the deal with my boss with a handshake, all hell broke loose in the Network Operations Center and it hasn’t slowed down at all. The controlled chaos came back at full-tilt and quite frankly I was reveling in it. Instead of one or two customers losing their internet connection at a time, we had 60 to 70 dropping at once. No xtube in lots of offices this week!

Now I get to relax for Thursday and Friday. I have a few projects around the house I want to finish up. I might even run the vacuum cleaner from where Tom threw a plant at us at 4:00 a.m. this morning.

11 June 2008 by Ponderings and Musings 0

Newsworthy.

I received an e-mail from Earl around 11:20. “We had a fire, everything is o.k., no one was hurt but the heat treater burned to the ground.” Earl’s plant works with cardboard1 and wood. Fire is obviously not a good thing. As General Manager, he feels responsible for each employee at the plant. Safety is what it’s all about.

Long story short, the heat treater (a separate building from the main plant) caught fire and the fire department had to be called in to get things under control.

It’s a good thing he sent me the e-mail, because I saw this on the local newspaper’s website when I sat down to eat my lunch. I called him, he said they’d be back in business in no time but it might be a long night tonight.

1 Us folks in the know call the cardboard ‘corrugated’.

11 June 2008 by This Ain't No CNN. 0

The Big Decision.

One of the reasons that I’m able to work part-time at my old position at the telephone company this summer is because a full-time position in the group recently opened up. I enjoy working for this local telecommunications company; it’s a family owned business that does it’s own thing in a very cookie-cutter world. That last point can occasionally be frustrating, but there’s a certain organised chaos in the atmosphere that I enjoy. I have mentioned before that I love the people in the group that I work in and this latest incarnation of staff seems very cohesive. I enjoy going to work.

I often say that when people tell me to look at the “big picture” they soon realise that I am not even looking at the same painting and sometimes I’m browsing a completely different wing of this proverbial art gallery. My “big picture” is often different than what other people see and I enjoy this quirky nature I have.

Over the past several weeks I have been re-evaluating my schooling and career aspirations. Thinking over my goals began early in the last fall semester; I was learning that I had a good chunk of schooling ahead of me: my two-year degree would get me a position that paid less than the job I had left, a four-year degree would get me in the ballpark and then I would have to do several years of working with the Department of Transportation or a consulting firm before I could take the required exams for the position that I was striving for. By then I would be in my late 40s and, as I sensed at a recent job interview, the industry is looking for young bucks and buckettes that they can shape into something wonderful and more importantly, long lasting. Couple my age with my lack of health insurance, an increasingly struggling economy and a retirement fund that wasn’t getting added to and a sense of responsibility (drat that common ‘big picture’) was starting to rattle it’s keys in my direction. Earl and I are doing fine financially but since I started school we’ve been playing it close. Contrary to the chaotic fiscal past of my youth, I don’t like having debt looming over our heads. You never know when the house of cards is going to come crashing down.

I threw my name in the hat for the full time position at my old job last week. As a person, both personally (of course) and professionally, I feel that I have grown considerably since I left the full time version of the gig one and a half years ago. I feel that I still have a lot to contribute to the team and to the company and I honestly miss my daily dabblings in technology. Things _happened_ at my old job whilst the position I aspired for appeared to move at the speed of flowing molasses.

So this morning I met with the department head who made me an offer I just couldn’t refuse. When I threw my name in the hat, I added some numbers to my slip of paper. Their numbers and my numbers surprisingly matched. And faster than Brett Somers can write “BOOBS” on her Match Game card, I strongly considered the position. “I’ll let you know in the morning, once I talk to the big guy.” (That would be Earl).

We had the talk tonight. Weighing the pros and cons, adding a few tears of love and punching a few numbers on the calculator on my iPhone1 I’ve decided to become Mr. Telephone Man again. The position allows me to play with technology, pays the bills and more importantly, makes me happy. Some may think I’ve lost my mind completely by jumping back into the controlled chaos but I’m really excited about the opportunity. I’ll work part-time through the summer and then I’m back to full-time the day after Labor Day.

And as I moved from one painting to another in my separate gallery, I took a glance back at the painting I had been looking at for the past 18 months and saw my passion for that painting to be fully intact. Had I stared at that painting for too long, I have a feeling that the passion may have turned into “just a job”, destroying my inquisitive nature of discovering highways and construction projects and journeys across a smattering of countries.

I know I have made the right decision.

1 Here is my obligatory iPhone reference on ‘iPhone 3G Day’.

9 June 2008 by Ponderings and Musings 5

The Side of a Hill.

Earl and I are back from our weekend at Hillside Campground (actually Earl is still out on a golf tournament, but more on that in a minute). This little camping trip was entirely different than any other we’ve gone on in the past twelve years: Earl went on Thursday and left on Saturday, I went on Friday and left on Sunday. It’s all a question of scheduling. It worked out well for both of us.

Since it was our second weekend in a row on the same site at Hillside, last week we were able to leave the camper relatively set up for the week. Earl didn’t have as much to do getting things ready on Thursday night when he got there. I don’t think he had experienced a weeknight at Hillside before, which is entirely different than a weekend night. He said it was very relaxing and quiet and just what he needed, at least what he remembered from the experience; apparently he had some cocktails with our friend Robert from New Jersey during the course of Thursday evening.

So it was Friday afternoon when I blew in and while there were several campers heaving tarps, stringing lights and arranging flower pots (gay camping priorities are a little different), we were sitting pretty watching all the action. Site 70 affords us prime manwatching space, so we were cordial and watched the guys walking to and fro to various parts of the campground. We took a few walks to see who was setting up home (living on the side of a hill for a weekend does wonders for your cardio health) during all this commotion before inviting Robert to join us for supper. He was kind enough to bring the wine and the 3/4 of the bottle that I drank pretty much fueled my mood for the rest of the night. Later that evening, Earl lovingly added a few cups of beer to my mood at the campfire while I chatted with Joe, Chris and Aaron. Since we had missed GB5:NYC this year, it was good to see some of the guys again. I would have brought the canned cheese if I knew they were going to be there. I suppose some of my conversation sufficed.

Saturday morning Earl took off for home and my friend Greg from Connecticut came in for the night. A last minute decision, it was Greg’s first time at Hillside so I gave him the grand tour and such before we attended a few parties and another night at the campfire. There are always quite a few parties on any given weekend at Hillside. This weekend was no exception. I stuck to beer and found my bearings to be a little more even than on Friday night. I’m a beer guy at heart I guess.

This morning Greg was on his way back to Connecticut relatively early and I had the task of packing up the camp. I’d never done it alone but it went better than I expected. I was on the road by noon. A quick stop at Burger King and I was home by 2:30 or so. The drive flew by courtesy of my iPod and some Russian trance music my friend Dave had introduced me to.

One of the most important things to remember when heading home is that once you past through the gate back to “the other side”, clothing is no longer optional.

8 June 2008 by Fun and Games Dept 0

About J.P.

Just a guy with a husband. We’ve been together 28 years and he still makes me see fireworks on a daily basis. Hiker. Storm Chaser. Private Pilot. Tech Guy. Hackerish.

Weird? Eccentric!

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