I just finished making a purchase at Lowe’s. While there, I bought a reusable Lowe’s bag so that I could carry the items I had purchase home and help the environment by using one less plastic bag, now and in the future.
The cashier kindly folded up the reusable bag and put it in a plastic bag to bring home. She seemed shocked when I suggested otherwise.
Oy.
So today I went on an impromptu road trip. Earl is out of town with Jamie and Scott is out of town doing his thing and it was such a beautiful day I decided that I needed to go drive some back roads. I headed towards the western Catskills. The reason for this direction was simple; I had heard that the last traffic light on NY Route 17, the Quickway and the Southern Tier Expressway which goes from near New York City to the Pa. border near Erie, Pa., had been removed. I wanted to see what they had done to remove the last light, which was at exit 98 (Parksville/Cooley). I confirmed that the light has been removed by way of relocating the roadway to the southern side of the lighted intersection, resulting in a nifty bypass that goes up over the mountain. Exit 98 is now just marked Parksville.
Getting to this intersection was an adventure. As I’ve mentioned before, I enjoy riding over the back roads, especially roads that have been replaced by expressways. New York State has recently marked several “Scenic Byways”, one of them being Scenic Byway Route 20. Route 20 crosses the state at it’s midsection (part of US Route 20 that goes from Boston to the west coast) and I was delighted to see that they had posted “Scenic Byway ALT Route 20”, which follows the original Route 20 before they made parts of it four-lane in the 50s.
I didn’t even know that existed!
Back when I was a kid my dad would take us for Sunday drives and try to get me lost. 95% of the time I knew where we were and could get us home. Today I tried to get myself lost by just randomly turning at roads that were not marked as a dead end. I finally found myself in the isolated village of Walton. From there I made my way down to the aforementioned Route 17, checked out the bypass and then headed westward, following the original alignment of Route 17 (which isn’t really marked that well) all the way to Binghamton. I just started my second tank of gas for the trip and have stopped at Panera for a bite to eat before heading home. I’m still trying to figure out which way I’m going to go to get home, because I know the roads between Binghamton and home pretty well, but I don’t think I want to approach it randomly and find myself in the middle of nowhere at midnight.
One thing about riding the back roads (and some dirt roads in the process) is that the gas mileage in the Jeep is fantastic. Highway driving actually kills the gas mileage of my beloved Rubicon, it’s a good thing that I have such an affinity for the back roads.
So as I have been out wandering the roads this weekend (more on that in a separate post), my mind has been digesting the events of the week and filing away the necessary stuff and moving the fluff to the garbage bin. I like to think of it as a brain defrag, though if my brain was a hard drive it would be running OS X and not Windows meaning it wouldn’t be in such dire need of a defrag.
I think I’m digressing again.
One of the things I have been thinking about is my blog and how it has been filling my needs pretty well over the past couple of months, aside from the security breach that raised a little havoc. That got me thinking about the comments left on the blog; I have a tendency to respond to the email directly instead of adding my comment to the blog. I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago when I asked if replies to the comments were emailed to the original commenter; responses to that question were mixed.
I think I’d like to make the blog a little more interactive and make it have a more open feeling where people could post comments. I’m not going to ask for comments; it kind of irks me when someone writes a blog entry and ends it with a question to encourage discussion. That brings up two scenarios in my head: 1. reading Highlights as a kid where at the end of the article about something like birds we are asked “what is your favorite bird? Maybe you’d like to sit down and write an essay about your favorite bird” and 2. HR driven meetings at work where we are given the state of the company in a boring speech that requires blasts of cold air and an air horn to remain awake, only to be instructed to “get into focus groups with three people you don’t know” and coming up with a solution to the company’s problems. Whiteboards are usually involved and the only enjoyable part of those discussions is the intoxication from the fumes of the dry-erase markers. “I’ll write! I’ll write!” I usually exclaim that.
I’m not really looking for validation of my thoughts here on this bloggy thing but rather I’m just looking for the viewpoints of others. For example, the greasy woman driving the Barney van yesterday… do people share my concerns about bad drivers on the road today? There I am asking a question and looking for an answer.
You can borrow my dry erase markers. They’re groovy grape.
So I’m an active user of Twitter. Well, if I’m going to be technical, I actually use the Echofon app (for iPhone, iPad, Mac) to get to Twitter. I don’t use the actual Twitter app itself because I find it to be buggy. When it was called Tweetie it was good, but then Twitter bought it and screwed it up a bit and now I don’t use it anymore. Besides, Echofon allows me to keep my various flavors of the app in sync with one another and that’s kind of cool.
I think I’m digressing.
One of the cool things I like about Twitter, besides the fact that you can read about an earthquake before it hits you, is that you can reach out and sort of touch famous people in a digital sort of way. My friend B.B. Good once made a comment to a fan of her radio show when the fan was all gushy about being near B.B.; “Being on the radio is a job that I love and the cool thing about it is that a lot of people get to hear what I do for living.” I tend to like celebrities that have that sort of presence about them. I want to feel that if we actually knew each other, they’d sit down over a lunch and chat about normal thing, even if it was the intricacies of their art because that’s what they do, but nevertheless, they’d be kind of normal while having this conversation. I despise it when fans tweet at a celebrity things like “OMG please say hi to me.” That’s just ridiculous.
I follow quite a few “famous” people (of all degrees of fame) on Twitter. Right off the top of my head I can name ten, there’s probably more. Some of my favorites are Amy Brenneman (because, of course, I find her incredibly sexy to look at and because she is wicked, wicked smart), Audra McDonald (because if there was ever an angel on earth with a good head on her shoulders, it’s her – what an old soul), Kaley Cuoco because she seems quite funny and Alec Baldwin. Curiously, Alec will not respond to my personal judge of character question regarding using a blade or electric razor when shaving. He probably finds the question odd. Either that or he’s too busy answering mundane, idiotic questions from the fans that are all gushy over his chest hair.
I have recently started following Ruth Buzzi. I have always found her funny and I was happy to see that she’s embraced the digital age. I met her at Assembly Mall in Somerville, Mass. back in the late 80s when Laugh-In was on Nick At Nite. She was cool to talk to. Her tweets are humorous. Today she is celebrating “Caturday”.
One person that I follow kind of disappoints me with her tweeting, and that’s Reba McEntire. Her tweets started out being personable, i.e. “Houston, you were a lot of fun tonight!”, but lately her tweets refer to her in the third person and I find that creepy. “Reba will be in Nashville tomorrow, get your tickets!” I understand that the tweeting responsibilities have probably been handed over to an assistant, and that makes me lose interest in following Reba because I don’t want PR, I want to just see Reba the person instead of Reba the performer.
I know that folks that are famous have to maintain appearances in order to make a living at being famous. I guess I’m most attracted or interested in following them on Twitter if they remain grounded and seem human. Twitter is about making connections. It’s best when it’s a human connecting to another human.
So today is Friday and it is feeling like a Friday to me. And that’s a good thing. I am in the mood to relax this weekend. Well, I’m actually probably going to do some catch up work for a few hours on Sunday and some odds and ends around my studio on Saturday, but other than that I am planning on relaxing and taking it easy.
I’m finding myself feeling a big sigh of relief that it’s Friday. My favorite phrase of the week at work has been “forward motion” and I feel that The Big Project is making enough forward motion to keep the masses happy and all of us productive at the same time. And due to a few connections put into motion at work, I now have a 15-inch MacBook Pro with 24-inch Cinema Display, bluetooth keyboard, Magic Mouse and nifty carrying bag for my use at the office. That’s why I can do some work this weekend and get caught up. I have the only Mac in the entire building, since it was shipped to me from another office elsewhere in the country and quite frankly it has already made my work life much easier. I guess I just think Mac. The Windows computer sits to the side, ready to help if I come across something that I haven’t figured out how to deal with on the Mac, since we are all about Microsoft at work, but so far it’s been relegated to resting and providing USB power for my iPhone.
As I was pulling into a parking space at Dunkin’ Donuts this afternoon a woman driving the car to the immediate right of the space decided to pull out. She cut the left hand turn short, like so many people in this part of country do, and cut across the upper third of my space as I was pulling in. There was no contact between our vehicles but there was only one or two centimeters between us. She glared at me like I was wrong for pulling into a parking space. She had been lighting a cigarette while she was making the short left hand turn. I just glared back. Her minivan was adorned with a big Barney like creature on the side but she was the only one in the van. She looked greasy. This had the potential of frustrating me, even though there was no incident other than a close call, but after screaming every blue word I could think of and rejecting the idea of hunting her down with a paint gun (not worth the effort), I decided to smile and enjoy the remainder of the day.
After all, the weekend is just four hours away.
Since everything is working here on the site again and the weekend doesn’t have a lot of int’s plate, I’ll probably do more blogging than I usually do on the weekend. While cleaning up the hacked mess of the site last night, I looked at the traffic stats for the first time in over two years. The most popular entries involve defunct department stores, pictures of bearded men and the picture of me at the barbershop when I had that really big mustache. I have more daily readers than I could ever imagine, though they don’t say much in the comments section. I guess I rant or write statements more than I ask questions, so that’s normal I guess.
I’ll just keep on doing what I’m doing and smiling along the way.
And back to our regularly scheduled program… After 24 hours of dealing with a security issue here on the web server, things seem to be buttoned down and ready to go.
It was weird not being able to write a blog entry at lunch today. I had to spend the lunch hour cleaning up files that had been hacked.
I’m still not comfortable with things because I haven’t figured out how the hacker got into my blog, but at least things are cleaned up.
So this morning I had to give a big presentation to the “leadership team” on the status of the project I am working on. The presentation went well and I received word that folks thought I did a good job, but I still breathed a big sigh of relief when it was done with. I don’t have a problem standing up and making a presentation to my peers, I do it on a semi-regular basis, and lord knows I used to talk to lots of people when I was on the radio, but there’s something about conducting a presentation over a conference call when someone else has control of your slides that I find unnerving. Nevertheless, I consider that part of the mission as accomplished. No need for a banner on a boat. Let’s move on to the the next task.
Earl is in Buffalo on business but before he left in the wee hours this morning he was kind enough to make me a wrap for lunch. It was relatively healthy and more importantly, insanely yummy, so I am content. To celebrate my successful completion of the presentation and the delicious lunch, a friend decided to join me. I shared a bite of the wrap with him. Maybe it’s a her. I don’t know.
Speaking of conspiracies, the Emergency Alert System will be activated nationwide for the first time today at 14:30 EST. They keep mentioning this on the news, because apparently the design of the system might not trigger notifications that “this is only a test”. I find this unnerving because a. the new Emergency Alert System was implemented in 1994, so they’ve had nearly 20 years to get the bugs out and b. This is the first time they’ve set it off nationwide, even though it’s been used locally since 1994? Now there’s a government efficiently using technology to make our world better. When do we think they’ll figure out how to broadcast EAS alerts to cell phones, 2025?
Personally I think the Emergency Alert System is horrible because they fire the damn thing off so much. Every time there’s a rumble of thunder or more than two-inches of snow they fire it off and scare everyone into “milk and bread mode”. To make matters worse, the new sound (what I call the “duck farts”) are incomprehensible to many. I say the EAS should be like it’s predecessor, the Emergency Broadcast System, which was fired off only in the event of a catastrophe (like nuclear war, etc) and scared the fuck out of you with it’s ear piercing, two-tone notification sound. Back in my day, we knew when to sit under our desks to ride out nuclear holocaust, today we just get more milk and bread from senseless panic.
Apple has rolled out a new service with an upgrade to their Apple Store App on the iPhone. I’m finding it to be quite nifty.
You can order any Apple product from the app and have it shipped to your home or business. Pretty standard fare, right?
It gets better.
You can order an Apple product from the app and have it available at the nearest Apple store, ready for pick-up in as little as an hour. This is pretty much like what BestBuy offers (and I enjoy this convenience once in a while).
Better yet?
You can walk into an Apple store, pick an item off the shelf, scan the barcode with your iPhone camera and then leave the store with the item.
Now this is cool.
Let’s say I would like to buy a pair of Bose headphones that they have at the Apple store. I already know what I want and I know that they have them at the Apple store at Crossgates Mall. I simply drive down to Crossgates, walk into the Apple store and find the headphones. I open up the Apple store app on my iPhone, scan the barcode of the headphones and click “pay”. The total amount due is charged against the credit card already registered to my iTunes account. A receipt is emailed to my registered email address and the transaction is logged on my iPhone, so I can show the friendly security guard or other Apple employee that I have paid as I walk out of the store.
How cool is that?
I don’t need to hear outrageously loud commands screaming friendly hints at me such as “Please scan your first item” or “check your bag” (she’s with me and she looks fine). While I enjoy fraternizing with the very friendly staff at any given Apple store, sometimes I don’t have time to outline my entire Apple collection as we shake hands, exchange phone numbers and bat eyes at each other when all I want to do is buy a certain item and move on. We’ll save the cooing for the big stuff.
What I like most about this Apple store app is that it makes sense to me. It’s self checkout done right. Grab and go. No need to make sure the item is perfectly situated in the bag, no need to sign a credit card receipt at a checkstand monitored by a very crabby cashier who is monitoring a fleet of these screaming self-serve checkouts. Scan, tap and go.
Brilliant.
My, it’s a big book!
Even though I’m a pretty rabid Apple fanboy, I didn’t know a lot of the details of Steve Jobs’ life. I know that he could be very cranky in his interaction with others and that this was a result of his quest for perfection and/or reaching a certain vision that he had. Many describe him as a visionary. I don’t dispute that in the least.
I am surprisingly finding this book inspiring. I have mentioned before that I am working on The Big Project at work and there are some folks that want to make the software implementation “good enough”. I’m not willing to settle for that. I want to make this conversion to the new software, to borrow a phrase from Steve, “insanely great”. You see, I don’t think that I should be wasting my time doing something halfway when I can invest just a little more time and go all the way with it. It bugs me when a new version of Windows or iOS or OS X or whatever comes out and it is missing a feature or something doesn’t work, only to be told that it’ll be fixed on an update. I’d rather delay the implementation and do it right the first time than let the user down on the initial experience and sour their feelings on what should be insanely great with a bunch of error messages and the like.
As I make my way through this book I am discovering that I share a trait with Steve and that’s what I call my “extreme binary thinking.” Earl helps me keep this trait in check, but I have a tendency to say judge things on a scale of awesome to miserable without addressing the fact that the subject could actually be somewhere in the middle. As I said, Earl keeps me in check on this and I know that I can always do better in toning down this tendency of mine. Now I don’t go into group meetings telling folks that whatever they’re presenting in a pile of crap but I am visibly disappointed when I feel expectations aren’t met due to laziness. This, in turn, leads me to be rather harsh on myself when I feel that I haven’t met my own standard of perfection. I then get cranky when folks out in the everyday world don’t live up to my vision of the way people should be (for example, not knowing what you’re going to order after standing line for 10 minutes blabbing on your phone or worse yet, going up to the Panera counter and asking for fries.)
Reading Steve’s biography is helping me keep all of this in perspective and it’s actually forcing me to look at myself, my behavior and how I conduct myself both in the business climate and in the real world. Because I have seen the same tendencies in Steve, I am forcing myself to look for the positive and how we are headed in the right direction for the vision that I have, instead of dwelling on the negative and making people miserable. My progress can probably be measured in baby steps, but at least I think I’m headed in the right direction.
I’m looking forward to continuing this book. I highly recommend it to both fans and non-fans of Apple.
It is a well-established fact that popcorn is my favorite food. I can eat popcorn for any occasion and quite frankly, I can even eat leftover popcorn and enjoy it very much. Popcorn was omnipresent on the supper table when I was growing up; soup, popcorn and hot dogs were a favorite for the hibernation months of winter. Grandma Country made popcorn every Saturday night for Gramps and there was always leftover popcorn in a big bowl on Sunday morning when we went over for coffee and donuts, a ritual that was called “Family Day”.
I was trained early on that the proper way to serve popcorn was in a big bowl so that it could be easily accessed by several people in the efforts of sharing. Multiple hands, dirty and clean, reached into the popcorn bowl back in the day and we all survived. There was no Purell present. We just used common sense.
Since hibernation season has officially begun with dark evenings, I thought it was appropriate that we have a big bowl of popcorn as Earl and I relaxed in the living room. This is what it looks like after about a half hour. The bowl was empty shortly after this picture was taken.
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!