Ponderings and Musings

Withdrawal.

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.

Change.

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.

Old School.

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.

Code.

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.

Tragedy.

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.

Memory.

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.

 

Sigh.

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.

Sigh.

I hate to admit this but I start feeling a little achy in my shoulders when there’s rain on the way. I know that makes me sound incredibly old, and at 44 I don’t think my warranty has expired yet, but nevertheless, when it’s looking like it’s going to rain I can feel it in my bones. Earl says it’s because I try to carry the weight of the world on my shoulders. He could be right. He almost always is.

For those reading this from the Central New York region, there’s rain on the way. At least I’m not like Mrs. Ziffel, claiming that lumbago means we need to plant corn this year.

Space.

Looking back on it, I can safely say that yesterday was a shitty day for me. I should probably use a classier word choice, truth be known, but that would just cover up the fact that it was just a shitty day. That whole lipstick-pig thing. I call it like I see it.

I was so unfocused yesterday. I don’t feel like I accomplished much. I was cranky. Irritable. It’s that whole expectations thing I was talking about in one of my blog entries yesterday; I have expectations, they’re not met, and then I’m cranky when in all truth of the matter I really don’t have a reason to be cranky because they’re my expectations. Someday I’ll learn.

What’s more important is that today is a much better day.

I did discover that one thing that was making me cranky was working on my work MacBook Pro from home yesterday. It’s a 15-inch display but it feels so cramped when I’m working. Like most folks I multi-task a lot, and when I have five windows open on one window and I have four different desktops that I am flinging back and forth on my screen, the 15-inch screen feels a bit cramped for serious work. That size of a display works great when you’re focused on one task, much like when you’re working on an iPad (or other tablet), but when there’s a lot going on in your work life you need to have a lot of space to manage it all. The other frustrating part of it all is that I have a 27-inch Apple Thunderbolt Display for my personal Mac Mini that won’t work with my mid-2010 MacBook Pro from work. The port looks the same. The plug from the monitor plugs into the port, but nothing happens, because apparently there’s one wire difference in the way the connector works.

That’s just silly. It’s even more irritating. You’d think that Apple would make an adapter but they didn’t.

So I’m trying to figure out how I can get my work computer on a bigger monitor without breaking any budgets. I think I’m going to end up selling three computers to buy one robust computer and then I’ll buy one monitor and call it a day.

I just need more elbow room.

I guess it’s little things that make me cranky.

Retreat.

My sister and I always knew when dad wasn’t happy with us. He never showed his anger by yelling or raving or anything like that. His approach would be more subtle. He would get very quiet. It wasn’t his usual quiet nature, you could tell these instances were different. Conversation would be reduced to the essentials and he would spend time alone in the basement building a bookshelf or an airplane or something. He’d come up for meals and sleeping and other required family interaction, but otherwise he’d retreat to his own space, be quiet for a while and get his head where he needed it to be, coming to his own terms via his own space. We would rarely talk about whatever he was upset afterwards. This has probably made me ask folks on their current well being a lot over the years.

I inherited this quiet approach from him, but to keep it all interesting, I also inherited my mother’s more demonstrative ways. I kind of have this hybrid approach. If something upsets me and it’s something fairly trivial or minor on the hysteria scale, I’ll rant and rave about it, slam a few doors, throw a boot and consider the matter resolved. It’s out of my system and let’s move on to the next thing. But if something really disappoints me or bothers me, I’ll take like dad and go quiet and build a computer or edit music or something. And because I analyze the crap out of stuff, I compare, contrast, weigh symbols and scrutinize between every line to the point of what may seem trivial to someone else ends up being a big deal to me. I believe that most everything means something even if it falls into the nature of a Freudian Slip.

Did I ever mention that I was complicated?

These traits of mine are not something that I am proud of. Earl keeps telling me that I shouldn’t have expectations when it comes to people because folks rarely live up to our own expectations. My rosy view of the world is often clouded by reality and that’s because it’s MY rosy view. I know I have control issues and I know I have expectations but even after 44 years I’m still learning to let these things go and once in a while something disappoints me and I can’t help but go silent and figure my own way through my feelings. This is how I get through it.

I guess one of the days I might get it all figured out.