Ponderings and Musings

So I am sitting in my car enjoying the summer sun during my lunch hour. The sky is partly cloudy today; some of the clouds have a base of gray, indicating the possibility of a storm here and there this afternoon and/or this evening. This is not entirely a bad thing, though if the truth were to be known, I’m ready for some dry, warm weather to carry us through until autumn. I’m tired of the rain and clouds. This time of year is not my favourite of the seasons as I prefer the crisp feeling of autumn. In the past couple of years, autumn has saddened me because of the depression I felt with the onset of the colder months and what I suspect is Seasonal Affectation Disorder (or whatever it’s called when you don’t get enough sunlight.). I intend on doing my meditation and tai chi practices in front of a lightbox this year to help alleviate this issue.

I gave away the remaining beer at work today. There are still cries of disbelief that I have given up drinking, being partly (and visibly) Irish and all. Not to fear, the Irish temper still raises it’s head more than it probably should.

I was talking with my friend Dave last night on Skype. He asked how much "purging and pruning" was going as I make adjustments throughout the many facets of my existence to better myself in the ways I feel appropriate. I told him that whatever is left standing in a week is something I intend to keep. I’m still purging things I no longer need: there are several ebay auctions in progress for material stuff I no longer have interest in, I wiped out a few websites that were just kind of hanging around without any input or need, etc. As I was falling asleep last night I found myself making a list in my head of ways that I suspect could better my life by saving money or taking out the complicated stuff. The growth is good. The feeling is positive.

I have to admit that I felt like crap most of the day today. The effects of my allergy over the weekend were lingering, I didn’t have much sleep last night as I always get worked up on Sunday nights for some reason and I am working the early shift this week.

To sum it up nicely: my ass was draggin’.

Usually if I get into this sort of state I come home from work and take a nap. This is not necessarily a good thing. When I nap so late in the day I perpetuate the vicious cycle of not being able to sleep at night and my body complains when the alarm clock rings the next morning because I haven’t fallen asleep until midnight. So instead of taking a nap after work I decided to psych my body out and go for the bike ride mentioned in the previous blog entry.

I feel wonderful.

My allergies have subsided substantially, my mood is livelier and I feel great.

I think I’m going to do the same thing tomorrow, without the lethargy at work. It might be a kick.

With the combination of a bachelor weekend and on-call weekend hitting all at once, one would think that I would get a lot accomplished around the house. And you know what? I did!

I did a lot of work on the computer today; I redesigned two websites, moved everything over to the new server on MacHighway (this blog should be quicker now) and overall I am quite pleased with everything that I did.

The Mac fan in my kicked into high gear as I’m finally connecting with my MacBook Pro the way I did with my old PowerBook G4. It’s taken a while but I can cozy up to it now. While I think that Windows 7 is the best version of Windows to come out yet, I still prefer Mac OS X. Windows 7 is good for what it does, but like the folks that prefer Pepsi or Coke, I prefer a Mac over a Windows-based computer. It’s just my preference.

That being said, I finally did something with the imachias.com domain that I have had parked for a while. Feel free to to take a look at the beginnings of what I have over there, all created on iWeb ’09. I had never used iWeb before, it’s a good little program for those looking to start their own website. I have a couple of ideas on how to contribute to the technology community, and imachias.com is one of them. I hope that someday it will grow into a valuable resource and be able to help someone somewhere.

I got a tweet from a secret admirer asking why I had moved over to MacHighway for webhosting. There are numerous choices out there that offer basically the same thing. The definitive factor for me in choosing Machighway was that they 100% powered by wind. That’s right, they buy their energy from a wind farm. While they offer local technical support, great hosting plans for the money and are based on Mac hardware, it was the use of wind power that was the deciding vote. Moving my various sites to my new plan has been a breeze (pun intended!) and I’m quite pleased.

I also worked on a couple of other websites… all to be revealed in good time.

And to think I also fixed the last plumbing concern in the house today too!

Life is good. That is something that needs to be said more often.

So I’m sitting on the front porch at the house at the moment. It’s shortly before 11 p.m. on a Saturday night. Earl is Indianapolis on business; he is entertaining customers by taking them to the Brickyard 500 tomorrow. He just sent me a message, he’s playing pool at the moment. I hope he is having a good time.

Once upon a time I would be just starting a DJ set at the local gay bar and doing my best to fill the dance floor with sweaty, shirtless men and women bumpin’ and grindin’ and/or dancin’ frenetically to the beats I pumped into their ears. The bar would be packed and the vibe would be intense. Tonight there is probably a smattering of people listening to an iPod. There’s a reason I don’t go out to that bar anymore.

As much as I resisted, on-call week has been an emotional turbulent week for me. I blame it on the lack of sleep. I had a busy day today but I’m in good spirits. The difference is that I was able to deal with all the crises in my home, rather than having to drag myself to my cubicle after only a few hours of sleep. I complain about it a lot. I guess someday I’ll stop.

To continue the home improvement projects that Earl and I started last night by fixing our leaky shower, I repaired the toilet in the upstairs guest bathroom. The job involved the complete disassembly of the toilet, but when all was said and done, everything was put back together and working beautifully. I am pleased with this. There’s only one more bathroom project to do and that’s fix the handle on the toilet in the master bathroom. I’ll have that accomplished tomorrow.

My other big tasks of the weekend are technically based; the first one I completed today as jpnearl.com now resides on a new server with a new hosting company. The site is running on an Xserve in the states now. My former hosting company was good but they didn’t provide the amount of space or bandwidth that this company provides and since I guess I’m a Mac boy for the most part I feel better for running the site on a Mac.

Tomorrow I’m going to be working on Cubster’s website for his clothing line, Unbearable Clothing. Once it’s ready for prime time I’ll put a link up.

So I’m sitting on the front porch listening to the rain and feeling the gentle breezes. I’m a little lonely tonight but nothing dramatic, but I look forward to being off-call come Monday morning. I have been avoiding listening to or watching the news or reading overly negative blogs over the past 48 hours or so. My friend at Spirit of St. Lewis talks about his loss of center and focus and I found myself in much the same boat. I have to turn it around.

Life is too good to immerse or lose yourself in negativity.

Today was a relatively quiet day at work. A couple of my colleagues had the day off, but those of us at the office today worked together well and collaborated. The spirit of teamwork I felt today was a good bit of rejuvenation.

The phones weren’t especially crazy today, in fact, I expected to be a little busier than we were. As everyone said goodbye at the end of the regular 8 to 5 shift, I wished them off with a “have a good weekend” and began finalising the few things that needed tending to as I was scheduled to work until 6. While I enjoy the folks in my department very much, I revel when I’m in the center alone between 5 and 6 during my on-call weeks. I like the peace and quiet and the opportunity to embrace my tendency of being a loner.

That’s when all hell broke loose.

Mother Nature must have been tricked with Chiffon because several storms passed through the area. The phones started ringing like crazy and because of the time of day, I was working solo. No worries, really, just work my way through it and do the best I can do.

That’s when Todd, a DSL customer, decided to read me the riot back because he couldn’t send an e-mail that had over 50 full-sized pictures attached to it. He was clocking in around 60 MB on the e-mail attachment, something that is a bit of a no-no in the tech world. He didn’t like my answers to his questions, he couldn’t really understand what I was trying to explain to him and he was just not a happy camper. As other phones were ringing, I politely asked if he could hold for just a moment; he said he didn’t need my help anyway, proceeded to tell me why the company I work for is deficient and then slammed the phone down.

Have a nice day.

I shrugged it off; life in a Network Operations Center sometimes goes that way and that’s just the way it is. I learned not too long ago not to let it bother me, I did the best I could do and that was that.

Before I knew it, it was six o’clock. I finished up the loose ends, powered down the laptop and packed up to head home.

The phone rang.

I wondered if I should let it go to the service and let them page me in 20 minutes or should I just deal with the issue right then and there.

I answered the phone.

Her name was Judy and she had a new computer. She couldn’t get her Outlook Express to work.

Sigh. I hate the Outlook Express calls. You see, like the parody of tech support people from SNL, I find dealing with Outlook Express to be a little degrading. It’s not a good e-mail program, it was never a good e-mail program and unfortunately much of the world is still using it.

Judy explained her problem to me and was very vague in the error messages. Worse yet, she was using Outlook Express’ evil cousin, “Windows Mail”, the default program in Windows Vista.

Double ugh.

I walked Judy through the steps of troubleshooting when it turned out her problem was a simple typo in her configuration; we fixed it and presto she was up and running.

Judy thanked me over and over again for my assistance, called me by my name without mangling the letters and then told me to “Have a nice weekend! You’ve been very helpful.”

“You have a nice weekend too, Judy. Thanks for calling.”

The ying and yang of the callers. I needed the kind voice of Judy to end my work day.

Today has been one of those days that I attribute to a “learning experience”. I might go so far as to say a “challenging learning experience.”

Work was a little rocky. I was very verbal about a few of the interactions at work which ended up in a private meeting with my supervisor, which when all is said and done, I really needed to have. I went in angry as a hornet, I came out feeling much better.

A very dear friend is hurting today and I have been trying to be there for him; his pain is our pain here at The Manor. Sometimes it’s hard to hug a loved one over IM.

On call has been moderately busy this evening. I decided to take matter into my own hands and instead of speculating as to whether a customer’s location lost power (resulting in loss of phone and internet service), I just drove my ass down there to discover that my hunch was correct, the power was out. It made my on-call existence that much easier and I think the customer appreciated it.

I haven’t been on-call in eight weeks. I’m only on-call until Monday 8 a.m. and then I am off-call for another four weeks. I should probably stop being cranky about and just get on with it. Everyone involved would probably be happier.

I was reading a blog entry on the first moon walk. The author included this line:

Some people say that September 11, 2001 was the moment America best defined itself. I respectfully disagree. On the evening of July 20, 1969 we defined ourselves not by our fear of what could happen, but our dreams of what would happen, if we only dared to dream.

That is one of the best things I have read in a very long time.

It has been a busy week. It’s only Wednesday (or to put a positive spin on it, it’s Wednesday already!) and I have to admit that I’m ready for some rest and relaxation. This week has been go go go.

Monday kicked off what I think as the “birthday streak”. Dad’s birthday was on Monday, Dave’s birthday is today, my birthday is coming up on Monday, Greg’s birthday is next Thursday and then my sister’s birthday is next Saturday. Monday night it was dinner with my Dad and stepmom in Syracuse, tonight it was dinner with my Mom, aunt, uncle and cousin in Syracuse for an early celebration for me (which I appreciated very much).

I took half of the day off from work today so I could get some medical appointments out of the way. I had my last cleaning with the dental hygienist today: I received an official clean bill of dental health and don’t have to go back until my routine cleaning and exam in six months. Yay for that! Then it was a visit to “Chirp”, whom the rest of the world knows as my chiropractor. This was the longest I’ve been between visits, two weeks, and it seemed to work out well. I go back for some snap, crackle and pop in two weeks. I feel the best I have felt in years.

I have been doing some meditation exercises over the past several days; more so than usual. I have been using the practices I learned during a course I took back in ’97 plus I’ve done a few electronically assisted meditations using binaural beats programs on my iPhone. Both have had satisfactory results, though over the past 48 hours or so I’ve been purging some negative stuff from my psyche. I feel the better for it all so I guess it’s all good. Tomorrow I work the early shift for my co-worker that’s taking some comp time; I should be in bed right now.

Earl and I leave for vacation on Saturday morning. We are traveling through the Canadian provinces of Québec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. I am _really_ looking forward to the trip.

So last night after an unsuccessful attempt at going to sleep, I sat up for a couple of hours doing research on wind turbines. Inspired by our trip through the Maple Ridge Wind Farm north of us, I decided to learn all I could about the pros and cons of wind farms, their effectiveness on the environment and the benefits and detriments associated with their existence.

It’s no secret to just about anyone that we need to find a source (or sources) of clean, renewable energy. We have been hearing that song and dance since the mid 1970s when the speed limit was forced down to 55 because we were going to run out of oil by 1980. Of course, we found more oil and the speed limit went back up and people became über-dependent on fossil fuels once again. Emissions from coal burning plants and waste from nuclear facilities (amongst many other things) are nasty to the environment; harnessing the power of the wind and the sun are renewable, clean ways of providing some of the power that we need to fuel our increasingly electric-hungry society.

Here’s the thing with wind farms. There are many people in favour of them, as long as they are somewhere else. Naturally wind farms have to be located where it’s windy, after all, something needs to turn the turbines which generates the electricity that is contributed to that big grid¹ thing that we have. Unfortunately, the windier places are up on top of hills where it tends to be more scenic and people don’t like the way the turbines look as they dot these areas.

One of the concerns with the Maple Ridge Wind Farm was the chemicals used to control dust during the construction phase of the project. This is unfortunate. If you’re building an environmentally-friendly, renewable, ‘green’ energy source then you probably should do it as environmentally-friendly/’green’ as possible, yes?

Opponents of the wind farm project tout the benefits of nuclear power and how there is a substantial increase in the number of kilowatts generated per square foot used with a nuclear facility versus a wind farm. But what do we do with the nuclear waste? Burying it deep into the earth is not a solution; the “out of sight, out of mind” approach doesn’t make the problem go away. I grew up not that far from a site with three nuclear reactors and I watched the cooling tower of the third be built during my teenage years. I heard the sirens (for drills) and I read all the posters on how we were suppose to save ourselves should a catastrophe occur. Sorry, but I didn’t feel any safer knowing that I could be crammed down into the basement of my high school with 700 other students as the fireball incinerated the school above us. It just wasn’t my idea of a good time. Life comes with risk, I’ll give you that, but mass annihilation shouldn’t be one of them.

As I read more and more about the technology used and the mechanics and engineering involved with the construction of Maple Ridge, and other wind farms throughout the United States, the civil engineer in me kicked in. I have lamented before that I have a really big need to make a contribution to society to leave the world better than the way it was when I got here. While I enjoy what I do for a living now, I don’t feel that what I do really improves anything for anyone. To _maintain_ is a waste of talent, to _improve_ is where one really soars.

I sometimes wonder if I started figuring all this stuff out too late in life. I have read about folks that got a PhD at age 55 or started a completely new career after retiring from their first at 62. While I suspect that perhaps lottery winnings were involved, I can’t say that I have figured out how they did it.

Perhaps that should be the first step.

¹ Contrary to popular belief, the United States doesn’t really have a power grid, but rather a bunch of interconnected networks that are dependent on one another. If it were a true grid, then a major line failure wouldn’t bring the entire system down as it has in the past (1965, 2003, etc).