Ponderings and Musings

Last night, after deliberation and forethought, we made the spontaneous decision to go to Saranac Thursday, an event held every week during the summer at the local brewery. Proceeds from this weekly event go to the United Way.

I love to people watch at Saranac Thursday, because folks range from NeimanMarcus to People Of Wal*Mart and all points in between. Last night we met up with some of my former co-workers and their partners, as well a couple of people that we have met via mutual friends and/or the Internet. All in all, a good time.

While we were visiting, the conversation made its way through a myriad of topics, as conversations fueled by alcohol often do, and the subject of TED talks came up. Earl was unfamiliar with TED Talks but I had discovered them a couple of years ago when I came across the first explanation in a talk that actually kind of changed my life in a way, The Power of Introverts. Since discovering these talks, I have installed the TED Talk app on my iPhone and when I’m feeling out of sorts I’ll dial one up in search of some sort of inspiration. A favorite of mine is Steve Jobs’ Stanford University commencement speech, “How To Live Before You Die”. In fact, I enjoyed Steve’s speech again this morning. My day has been quite productive and enjoyable because of it.

I was delighted to hear that our friend Ann does a similar thing with the TED app; she dials up the “Inspire Me!” category when she’s feeling the need to feel inspired. I find this interesting in a way, because she’s has a really good vibe about her but I guess all of us can use some inspiration to keep our vibe adjusted accordingly.

Helping each other out, it’s rather awesome.

This led to the conversation about an upcoming TEDx Event here in Utica, as two of the other folks that were part of our little social circle last night as coordinating the event. John (and his better half Christine) and I all worked together at my previous employer. (Christine, John’s better half, impresses the hell out of me with what she has done with On Location Vacations or OLV.) Ryan, the organizer of the local event, and I met on Twitter a few years ago and then met IRL (In Real Life) at John’s photo gallery showing earlier this spring. Ann (the aforementioned inspired by TED person) knows everyone that was in the little circle we had formed last night.

It’s a small world after all.

Last night we had the opportunity to meet Ryan’s girlfriend, Sara and she was telling us about her experience trying out someone’s Google Glass. She found them to be amazing. That was just another confirmation for me that they are freakin’ awesome and are going to be on the “must have” list. Quite inspiring as well and that’s two IRL hits I’ve had with Google Glass. w00t!

Earl gave me the “think of the budget” look when he saw my smirk.

If I had to describe last night I would have to use two words: inspiring (surprise!) and dynamic. I don’t think it was the beer making me feel this way, I think it was just a groovy night and I needed the reminder that good things do happen close to home.

I hope to have the chance to be in the audience at TEDx Utica (but if not, I’m certain I’ll still enjoy the videos) and in the meanwhile, I’m going to continue to enjoy this feeling of inspiration.

It’s making me smile. And smiling is good.

Earl is out of town on business this evening. I believe he is in Wilmington, Delaware. He returns tomorrow. If my hunch is accurate, and it usually is, he’s probably in a casino this evening. That’s not a bad thing, we all have our ways of relaxing and I fully support this.

Jamie returned from his latest tour in the wee hours of the morning. He, along with the four members of the band he was touring with, slept until early afternoon. The layout of our house provides ample room for these indy bands to crash for the night. This sometimes makes me nervous, because even though I can be rather chatty in person, I am mostly a shy, private person that really enjoys my personal space. So when things gets disrupted I can feel a little uncomfortable.

This evening Jamie and the band started recording a music video in the back lawn. The video will apparently have two components to it: a daylight component and a night time component. Jamie let me know that they would be recording more of the music video after dark. Lamps were being moved from our living space out into the lawn to light the scene. If fireworks were legal in New York State I’d imagine that there would be fireworks involved with the production. This was making me uneasy and since my rock is out of town tonight I decided that I would get a good night’s sleep by staying at a local hotel for the night.

I am rather comfortable.

Now, folks might translate this as me being driven out of my own home but that is not the case at all. I merely made a decision that was in my own best interest. I would have been worried about noise and the neighbors and the like if I had try to sleep through the music video production, so I analyzed the situation and made the decision to let the guys do their thing tonight without interruption from me.

I’ll enjoy a good night’s sleep, work from the hotel room until lunch time tomorrow and then resume my day at home, anxiously awaiting the arrival of my husband, where the three of us will be able to sit down and have a little family dinner together (the band will be on their way to the next gig). I don’t know the name of the band but they’re really nice guys. I can’t understand a word of their music but that’s only because I’m getting old and/or set in my ways.

Either way, I’m quite content.

I always find it humorous that when you drive through Syracuse on the New York State Thruway, you see a snowplow parked in a maintenance yard that says: “Welcome to Central New York — 115-inches Annual Snowfall”, or something like that.

It’s almost 100º degrees today, but then again, it’s mid July.

When it’s January I’m looking forward to the heat. When it’s July I’m looking forward to the cold. If I had to choose one or the other, I’d like long days with cooler temperatures. It’s easier for me to warm up than it is to cool down.

I keep hearing mentions of Global Warming but I remember summer days like this way back in the 80s, so while I think this is a warm spell, I don’t think it’s overly unusual for this time of year. That doesn’t mean that I don’t think the climate is changing, because I really think it is, but I don’t think this part of the world is experiencing anything wildly abnormal at the moment. If it’s like this in September then I’ll start to wonder.

I get concerned when people leave their animals in the car in this weather. I haven’t seen anyone doing that today, but a few weeks ago I saw a dog in a car with the windows open only about 1/4 of the way down and I was concerned for the dog. He seemed like he was OK but I didn’t know how long he would be there. If I saw an animal in serious distress I don’t know if I would be able refrain from breaking the window and helping them out. The one bad thing about a pet has to be the reliance on the human. Sometimes the human isn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier.

A horse and buggy just walked by the parked Jeep.

The buggy was loaded up with boxes of tomatoes from the local market. The Amish man driving the buggy parallel parked the horse and buggy so he could go into the nearby Burger King. He didn’t get anything for the horse but the horse didn’t seem to mind.

I bet it’s hard to pull a buggy in this heat.

It’s the little things that I notice. For example, I’m looking over at a new department store in the strip mall that I’ve parked myself at for lunch time. The new store is called “Rainbow” and it is in an old Fashion Bug. The first thing I’ve noticed is that I can still see the words “Fashion Bug” underneath the Rainbow logo. The second thing I notice is that the logo and accompanying markings of this Rainbow store are completely devoid of color. Everything is in white.

You would think that a store called Rainbow would be colorful, yes? I have no idea what’s inside the store because I’ve since lost interest.

I’m sitting in the Jeep still trying to find a spot in this parking lot that still feels comfortable to me. Today I’m parked in the spot closest to the Dunkin’ Donuts drive thru speaker.

Every time a car or truck pulls up I can hear “DunkinDonutscanihelpyou” really fast. The voice sounds pleasant in a 21st century kind of way, but the attendant is speaking really fast. I wonder if she is bored in her job and just wants to get it over with, if there’s some sort of efficiency contest going on or if in all truthfulness she just doesn’t care. The prevailing customer request is for anything that ends in “latte”.

I still feel a little off my game during these lunch hours after having been evicted from my edge of the parking lot spot that used to set along side the trees. All of the trees are gone, the cat that could be spotted hunting for mice and birds has moved on to greener pastures and my spot is fenced off as they build a new store onto the end of the strip mall. Rumors have this addition housing everything from a Baby Gap to a Jamesway department store, but I think the Italian restaurant is just expanding. Only time will tell.

In the meanwhile I will try to find a place to park that has some breeze, some shade and the friendly passing by of a feline on the prowl.

Because of feeling off my game during lunch hour (solely because of the location issue), I’m unable to take my midday nap because I don’t feel “safe”. I guess I’ll just have to nap under my desk again this afternoon.

I was looking at an old photo album yesterday (it’s a book with pictures) from “J.P. and Earl, The Early Years” and was delighted to see some photos of our former homestead. Amongst the happy memories were photos of our dear son Tom. He’s a cat but we don’t quibble on details.

It’s kind of neat to remember that Tom has been a part of the family for almost as long as Earl and I have been together. He was around 2 years old when he joined our home in 1997 and he’s still around, holding his own, albeit a little slower than he used to be.

He still enjoys flinging his food around. He doesn’t race around the house with me anymore but he’ll trot in my direction. I’m a patient man so I wait for him and then he’ll throw one obligatory “bat” at a catnip mouse or something before giving me a look of disinterest.

Since he is in his senior years, he pretty much gets what he wants when he wants it. He’s about 1/2 the weight he carried a couple of years ago. All of his functions are still functioning aside from either a marked increase in disinterest or a complete lack of hearing.

Tom’s new habit is now to eat three square meals a day. At first I thought he was just begging for food just to relieve boredom (face it, we all do this), but the fact of the matter is, he wants three cans of food a day and he finishes three cans of food a day. There’s nothing wrong with that as far as I’m concerned, but as you can see, he still likes to make a mess of the situation.

Nevertheless, we wouldn’t change him for the world.

I asked a simple question: “What size is the (spare) room?”

The response: “12-by-15”.

This began a discussion about math, more specifically, how we individually solved the simple multiplication of 12×15.

I’m not one to carry numbers over and do the whole swing the digits over to the left as necessary. Too. Much. Work. I get something to zero, making the whole affair much easier to figure out in my head. So, faster than you can say “Please excuse my dear Aunt Sally!”, I think: 12×15 = (12/2) * (15*2) = 6 * 30 = 6 * 3 “plus a zero”.

Yes, that’s the way I do multiplication in my head. I always get something to zero somewhere. Same thing with addition. I was the fastest student in Mrs. Delaney’s third grade class (room 205) when it came to solving simple addition problems. Given something like “7 + 6”, I would say, sometimes out loud, “7 + 6, 8 + 5, 9 + 4, 10 + 3, 13!” I would do this in a rapid fire kind of way, which would either startle my opponent in the game to the point that they couldn’t even find their fingers to start counting or else some sort of mutant weirdo gene would be showing its superpowers, thus guaranteeing my victory.

I was smug.

Earl has looked at me since the very first day he heard me do the divide/multiply thing to get multiplication or addition to a zero number to make it easy and tonight he finally asked me, “what are you doing?”

“I’m solving 12×15. It’s 180.”

“How did you get there?”

I explained to him my algebraic way of doing this.

He then spouted out, “15×10 + 15×2 = 150 + 30 = 180”.

Oh. My. God.

He takes a different avenue to get there but he does the “get to zero” thing also. He then admitted to me, for the very first time in 17 years, that when posed with a question such as “what is 7 + 8 + 9?”, he “sees” in his head 8×3, thus 24.

I then asked him what color of the stoplight he crosses the street on and he told me the dreaded red. I cross on the green because I cross with the traffic. He crosses on the red because that means the cars in front of him are stopped.

Two paths, one direction. That’s what it’s about, baby.

It’s has been raining on and off today. This isn’t particularly newsworthy, except that it’s been doing this for over the past week and there has been a lot of flooding in our area. Luckily, The Manor has been high and dry, but getting to the nearest village (on the other side of the river and canal), has been a challenge because of all of the flooding.

Our little inconveniences don’t compare, though, to folks east of us in the Mohawk Valley. This is the parking lot across from the radio station I used to work at.

This is rural route in one of the many gorges in the area. This was a common scene.

Earl and I drove through the village of Herkimer on Saturday and were surprised by the number of side streets that were still underwater. I couldn’t bring myself to take photos; just as I witnessed a year or two in Owego, there were a lot of folks cleaning up what they had left and trying to salvage what the flood waters have left behind.

I’ve asked a couple of people if they remember this kind of flooding ever occurring at this time of year and most people don’t. It must be a new cycle of the climate or maybe it’s just an abnormality.

Driving to work this morning was interesting as well as there were several convoys of DOT trucks head somewhere east and the shoulders of the Thruway had been eroded away in several spots.

Heavy rain is predicted for tonight with more rain predicted through the week and thunderstorms coming in just in time for the weekend.

Stormy weather, indeed.

Good manners never go out of style.

As I sat there on the first day of my second semester of college in 1987, I wasn’t in the best of moods. I was no longer a Music Education Major at SUNY Fredonia; disagreements on what I thought my singing voice should sound like clashed against what others felt I should sound like, coupled with feeling completely out of my element with an advisor who just didn’t “get me” ended with the declaration that I would be an Education Major with a liberal arts focus instead of a Music Education major. It just felt wrong. Since I was tagged with the “Liberal Arts” tag (which isn’t a bad thing, but it was to me at the time), I figured I would make the best of it and start exploring my rapidly growing interest in computer technology. Already on my second personal computer (a Commodore 64!) and having already discovered the world of online social connections, my fanatical obsession with bits and bytes was leaping 10-fold.

Then why the heck was I sitting in a beginning computer class where the professor was lecturing us on the difference between a keyboard and a floppy disk. We were spending an entire day talking about the power switch. I was going to go mad.

My interest in computers began at Wegmans. Back in the mid 1970s, Wegmans installed cash registers that scanned items. This was wicked cool. The process was fairly slow, the cashier had to be rather deliberate with the way the item was scanned and the register would usually fall behind and complain about the speed in which the cashier was doing their job, but my goodness that was wicked cool to me. I wanted to crack the barcode. It was seeing that that got me interested in all things technology related and I started comparing how Wegmans did their checkout thing versus our local P&C Foods (which didn’t have scanning, heck they didn’t even have electronic registers at the time).

I touched my first computer as a freshman in high school. It kind of looked like this:

The computer lab in 1983 had 10 or so Apple ][+s and a couple of Apple ][es, which were in high demand because they could display lowercase lettering. We used these machines to run a BASIC program that coached us on what we learned in French class.

WHAT IS THE ORANGE?
L’ORANGE

We were told to ignore accent marks.

I was able to stop the program and look at the code within 15 minutes of starting my first lesson. I was hooked. Yeah, yeah, the French thing was mildly interesting but this computer was cool.

I took a couple of computer classes my senior year of high school and I honed my programming skills: Apple stuff at school and Commodore VIC-20 at home (budgetary concerns and all that). I had three really good teachers in high school; I shared programming ideas with the French teacher who had written that first program I had hacked into, I learned lots from my official computer teacher and to this day I still hear the echoes of the third who criticized my code structuring style, ultimately resulting in my writing more efficient code. My first programs emulated what I saw at the various grocery and department stores and they became robust enough that they actually developed into an accounting system that was used at the family store.

So why was I sitting in that Introduction to Computers class? Because I had to. Prerequisites and all that. “You don’t have the experience to take Computer 102.” I dropped the class the second week. I had already done the “Hello, World” thing. Heck, my “Hello, World” had been dancing around and transmitted to the other end of the country at 300 baud.

I was told many times that I would never amount to anything because I ultimately dropped out of college and I had no letters beyond my name to back up the skills I claimed I had. I wasn’t formally trained, so what could I possibly know? I decided to prove myself and interviewed for a job that required a two-day self-paced training program and rigorous exam. They were smug, but I was even more smug. I finished the whole thing in three hours and aced the exam. The resulting contract gig was good and it put some good entries on my resumé. But then prospective employers started wanting the letters again.

Long entry short, I finally found my way to where I am today and I think I’m making a really good contribution to my company and I love what I do. I’ve proved what I could do and I found my way by talking lots and being charming. It’s what I do.

Why am I rambling on about this?

I’ve heard mention of Edward Snowden’s dropping out of high school and not having a degree and the amount of surprise that some have because he was able to accomplish many things and work in important jobs within the CIA without letters behind his name. Agree with him or not, he’s one smart cookie and obviously talented.

I’ve seen men and women make lots and lots of money for their employers by being the smartest one in the group be passed up for a promotion or raise because there are no letters behind their name. I’ve been told that it’s impossible to do something in a computer program and that I didn’t know better because I wasn’t a computer science person, and then I was able to make what they wanted to make happen, happen.

Had I continued to listen to the folks that told me that I couldn’t be a computer guy because I didn’t have the educational background, I don’t know where I would be today. I know that I wouldn’t be as happy as I am in my career right now. I’m happy that I decided to stop buying what others were offering and to build my own path. Am I conventional? Hardly. But I’m here and this is where I want to be.

And I feel just fine, even with no letters following me around.