Ponderings and Musings

So as I was making my way out of the office for lunch a co-worker asked if I was leaving the building for the hour. He indicated that he was finding his way to cafeteria so he could read. I told him that I need to leave the building at lunch time so I feel more grounded for the afternoon. It’s a good way to clear my head.

As corporations continue to squeeze every possible ounce of work out of their employees, many feel the crunch of working in a situation that I’m currently in: we work in a group of three that should be a group of 10-12. This type of situation can create unreasonable amounts of stress and we all know that stress isn’t good for the body, mind or soul. Stepping out of the office for an hour and having a change of view helps me keep that stress under control. Stress that is under control is good.

I’m enjoying lunch in the autumn sun. I’m watching a small calico cat make her away along the perimeter of the parking lot. She looks to be in hunting mode. She’s a small cat but when I made a friendly cat sound to her, she stopped, perked her ears and up looked at me and then continued on her trek. Occasionally she stops in a grassy area and watches for field mice, ears perked in the direction of possible mouse movement. She’s a short-haired calico cat with white paws. She seems content and she appears to be very car smart. Car smarts is a good skill for a cat.

There have been a couple of times in the past two weeks where co-workers have tried to schedule meetings during my lunch time. I refuse to play that game and I decline invitation for this type of meeting. Some may say that I’m being selfish; I like to think that I’m being responsible and doing what I need to do to stay on top of my game. A homemade lunch and a few moments away from a computer (other than my iPad-derived blog entries) and I’m good to go.

Now it’s time to take a short nap.

So I know that I’m nearly two years behind the curve on this but I am suffering from withdrawal symptoms after successfully completing the only season of “The Event.” The fact that this show was canceled tells me that the American television viewing public is basically becoming stupid. The show was well written, the acting was decent to great, the action was believable and while they’re are always gaps here and there in a storyline, they kept the plot believable within the universe that was built for this show.

The last scene of the show was a mighty cliffhanger that will now most likely never be resolved. And yes, I know that people were talking about this a year or so ago when the show was canceled but it’s my blog and I can talk about anything I want to talk about.

Flipping through Sirius/XM yesterday I heard some sort of entertainment drivel about all the new shows that are coming out this season and every. single. show. they. mentioned. was some sort of “reality” show. “The Voice”. “American Idol”. “Dancing With The Stars”. If I want to watch Charo do the cha cha I’ll fire up an old episode of “The Love Boat” and watch her contort and growl out the theme song in a lounge that looks like the Holiday Inn under her guise of “April Lopez.”

I am going to state right here and now that if we win the lottery within the next year, I will make a serious investment wherever we need to invest so that we can at least have a miniseries conclusion to “The Event”. I don’t know why someone in Hollywood doesn’t already have the intelligence to do this. Actually I do know why; Hollywood is dumb and it’s trying to entertain the lowest common denominator, the folks that win a “participation award” at a soccer game because they just showed up.

I think I’m bordering on a rant now, so I’m going to keep it real and tell you, probably not for the last time, if you’re into SciFi and you want to see something good with a heaping helping of action, watch “The Event” on Netflix.

So I am sitting in a different parking lot today. Even though I am working from home, I decided to go out for lunch to give the cleaning crew the room they needed to do their thing without me being in the way. To celebrate this change in my routine, I had a six-inch turkey breast sub from Subway. Now, most would find that this sort of thing doesn’t warrant the word “celebrate”, however, when I get into a routine, I really get into a routine, and doing something out of my routine is kind of nifty for me.

So I’m sitting in this parking lot, still without my iPad (which is scheduled to arrive tomorrow). My iPhone showed that it could be used as a Personal Hot Spot. I fired that up with the intent on using my MacBook Pro with that when the menu option just vanished from the screen. My laptop still sees the hotspot as available but it’s not really. So instead I hacked into the wifi of a nearby house. They really shouldn’t make the hotspot name and key the same thing. I suppose that’s one way to remember it.

As I mentioned in my previous entry today, I went for a bike ride for the first time in a while. I need to pick up a tire pump in my travels today so that I’m ready to go again tomorrow morning. I started out walking but got to the end of the driveway and made a U-turn after deciding that a walk would be boring. I wanted to do something a little more exciting, even though it was 6:15 in the morning.

My fitness goals are coming along nicely. I jumped on the scale this morning and was pleasantly, yet cautiously, surprised. It’s good to see progress on something and now I feel more energized. I’ll have to keep it all in check this weekend. Being sensible and not trying to follow a whacked out diet is what is working for me this time around. It’s all about moving. I might need to get some snowshoes for the winter so I can keep up the effort.

So I’m kicking it old school today. I’m working from the office on a Wednesday, which I haven’t done in months, I’m using my MacBook Pro instead of my iPad to type this entry and I’m using the city wifi instead of the LTE connection I usually try to enjoy from Verizon?

Why all this frivolity, you ask? Well, folks at the office asked me to come in and work on the big project in person today since it worked best with schedules. I’ll be working from home the rest of the week. I’m a flexible kind of guy these days, especially when the future of the group may be up for grabs. In addition, I inadvertently left my iPad in North Carolina when I flew back on Monday. It’s expected to arrive tomorrow. Without my iPad, I don’t have a network hotspot to use, so that’s why I’m using the city wifi.

It’s an acceptable solution.

Being without my iPad for a few days has not been as traumatic as one would expect it to be for me. I haven’t really missed it. Anything that I can do on my iPad I can do on my iPhone and I can still do more on my laptop than on either my iPhone or iPad. So perhaps this has been a learning experience for me.

I’m in one of those moods where I feel the need to simplify my life again. Things build up and get complicated and then I do some sort of reboot and things get back down to normal. Last night I startled Jamie by thoroughly cleaning the stove and Radarange (microwave) simply because it was good to do something that wasn’t complicated nor technology based. Doing this felt good.

Earl is out of town on business until Friday. I think tonight after supper I’m just going to sit down and read a good book. I’m going to keep it simple.

I like writing code. It comes with the territory when you’re a big geek as I am. I’ve been called a “propeller head” in an endearing way by folks that I work with. Perhaps for Halloween I’ll wear one of those propeller hats and make neener neener neener noises. I don’t know what one has to do with the other but it’s always fun to make an odd sound. It’s better than an odd smell.

I have very few regrets in life but one thing that I wish I had done was to get through the computer classes I started when I went to college right out of high school. At 18 I thought I knew it all and I felt rather insulted that I had to start from square one when it came to computer courses, even though my high school had a rather progressive computer education program for it’s time and I had been using computers for several years before going to college after high school. (I make this distinction because I went to college twice during my life). As the professor of that first class showed us what a computer was and where the power button was and how the keyboard worked, I took it all as another sign that I was completely different from everyone else that was closely paying attention to his dreck and that I knew I was going to be bored out of my mind by the second week of the semester. I asked about a computer class placement test so I could prove myself to be worthy of something more than writing…


10 CLS
20 PRINT "HELLO WORLD!"
30 END


… for my first project, but the professor said that everyone had to start at the beginning (he didn’t sing “a very good place to start!”, which was a shame, now that I look back on the whole ordeal). Since I thought I had better things to do with my time, I dropped the course. I hear that by the end of the course students were expected to build a program that acted as a calculator, complete with memory registers. I never understood why we programmed a computer to do something that had already been accomplished by a device that was specific to that purpose. Seems like a waste of time.

The reason I look back and think that I should have stuck it out was because I would have learned patience and discipline a lot sooner than I ended up doing and I might have built a better foundation of fundamentals when it came to writing code. I have to admit that I’m a big of a renegade when it comes to doing what I love. Who knows, perhaps I’d have a degree in computer science instead of just a ton of experience under my belt. Some employers look at these things and weigh those letters next to a name quite heavily.

All I know is that I still enjoy writing code as much as I did when I wrote my first program in 1982 on one of the six Apple ][+ computers in high school. It was a cash register program that tracked inventory, printed receipts and accurately computed tax and change. Hey that was big stuff for 1982. I probably enjoy writing code even more these days, because it seems like the possibilities are endless when it comes to technology. I like seeing a user’s face light up when they accomplish something using a program that I wrote. I love the challenge of taking a corporate bureaucratic procedure and smoothing it out with just the addition of some bits and bytes. That’s wicked cool to me, and if someone were to ask me what I wanted to do for the rest of my life (as far as employment goes), I’d tell them that I’d be quite content in my dimly lit office writing code and making a user think that technology is awesome. Because it is.

I’m thinking about this stuff today because yesterday my group at work was told about some leadership changes (meaning my manager was let go, along with a couple of others in the organization, as part of some master plan). I don’t know where I’m going to be on the totem pole right now. I still have a job and I’ve had a couple of people tell me that “they’ve got my back” (and I have theirs) but it’s hard to be excited about working when someone that you significantly admire and respect is no longer on your team.

I just have to remember my love for writing code and solving the challenges presented to me. Losing myself in that avenue of productivity is where I can still smile.

I walked into the Dunkin’ Donuts near work today for my usual lunch hour routine. There have been several new additions to the staff of this particular store, but for the most part it is populated with the usual folk behind the counter. I made a pit stop in the wash room and then went to the counter to order my usual large, unsweetened iced tea with lemon. The girl that is the most attentive to my needs was working behind the counter.

Ok, now here’s a couple of things that tell me that working from home has distracted from my relationship with the Dunkin’ Donuts folks.

1. The girl behind the counter is now quite pregnant. I don’t know where that came from. Well, I know where it came from but how did it happen so quickly? Well, they probably hope it didn’t happen quickly, especially that night, because quick isn’t always good, but you know what I mean.

2. No one behind the corner could recall my order from memory. They knew it had something to do with iced tea but there was a controversy with lemon participation.

3. No one noticed my lack of facial hair.

This is my tragedy of the moment.

On the bright side, I refrained from offering congratulations on the girl’s pregnancy because sometimes the bump in the belly isn’t a baby but just an overindulgence of whoppers or something and I don’t want to repeat the mistake I made way back in 1990 when I congratulated a woman who wasn’t pregnant but instead had enjoyed too many large sandwiches from Papa Gino’s.

My dad had the habit of calling me up and starting the conversation with a complete random fact from days gone by.  I would answer the phone, “Hello?” and he would say something like, “Remember the time we were loading hay in the Four Story and your mother got caught in the manure and fell down when she forgot to let go of the hay bale when she threw it on the elevator?”

Yeah, he was funny like that.  He always referred to mom, who, of course, was his wife at the time, as “Your Mother”. The best part of these conversations is that I have completely and unabashedly inherited his memory for crazy details and the like. I could totally relate. And god help me, I can see me calling people up and having a similar conversation when I get old. 

I was thinking about this whole thing this morning as I was out for my pre-sunrise walk. As I trucked my body up the steep hill that our road winds up, all of a sudden I had a flash of memory of being in fifth grade and thinking I was so smart because I figured out why two classrooms in our elementary school had two doors instead of one. I don’t know why this random factoid popped into my head but there it was. By the way, said rooms were Rooms 209 and 211, which used to be part of the high school. The part of the room with a “back door” used to be a separate departmental chair office. And that’s why they had a separate light switch and extra clocks in the store room.)

Yep, complete geek even in elementary school.

Anyways, remembering this made me a little sad because I miss those random facts from my father and when I remember this sort of thing, I have no one to confirm these facts with.  I guess the fact that I even remember these sort of things means that he’s still hanging around somehow.

Earl is in Memphis for the week for work-related stuff. He left very early on Monday morning and is scheduled to return on Thursday evening.

Even though we have been doing this sort of thing for over 16 years, there is a large part of me that will never get used to not having my husband around for days on end. It’s a necessary part of his job, and undoubtedly I’ll be traveling for work next year, so I get that it just comes with the territory. But with that being said, I’ll never get used to it.

Thank goodness for technology. We can Skype and text and talk and chat, but only during his breaks!

Le sigh.