I am sitting at IAD (Dulles International) waiting for my flight back home. As I listen to boarding announcements for nearby Air Canada (with flights heading to Montréal and Québec), I am reminded of this blog entry.
It’s time to go for a trip up north again. Maybe as part of a leaf peeping excursion.
I am currently on a flight to Dulles International. I am on my way to see our friends Jeff and Mark in Durham, NC. I do this type of solo weekend once a year or so. I am very lucky to be married to the husband I have. Some people don’t “get” us. Others envy us. I just know that I am still in bliss after all these years.
The flight in question is on a Dash 8-200. 8 rows with 4 seats, 1 row with five seats. Originally in seat 3A, I volunteered to move to the back when the plane was determined to be unbalanced. Like my father, my aviator blood gives me a sense of keeping the friendly skies friendly. I’m in the center square, seat 9C, the extra seat in the back row with LOTS of legroom. Our flight attendant is Val. She reads everything off of cue cards. She mixed up the order of some of the paragraphs, blending water landings with the perks of an airline credit card, but I like her for her efforts. I’m well aware of where the exits are just in case.
This has been a week for my journal. My boss finished his business with the company today and we have no further direction on the status of our group. I had a great one on one with him this afternoon. He’s more than a boss, he is a friend. I look forward to seeing him soon.
Jeff and Mark have their own web development and Internet business. Geeks with common interests are naturally drawn to one another. It should be a great weekend.
The air is getting thick with the impending Presidential elections in November. I’m starting to overhear conversations at work and they are heated. A keep hearing and seeing the word “united” in the “United States of America” but the people don’t seem united. There are united factions, but the people as a whole seem split right down the middle. Everything is 50/50. One extreme or another. No shades of gray, it’s either black or white. Negative or positive. No compromise. I wonder if the media cooks it up to be a tight race so that there will be more ratings, which ends up with the sheep following their lead.
Kind of heavy stuff to be thinking about on a sunny Friday afternoon. I sometimes wonder what the world would be like today had Hillary been the nominee in 2008 instead of Obama. I guess I’ll have to find a way to an alternative universe to find that out.
So I’m sitting in the Jeep in the parking lot closest to the Dunkin’ Donuts near work. I was not able to grab the coveted shady spot, but there’s enough of a breeze to make sitting in the Jeep bearable. I am gazing at the golden rod and purple tinged weeds that line the parking lot; this is a form of meditation that helps me clear my mind.
It has been a week that has needed a lot of clearing of the mind.
Things are a little strange at work. I guess it’s strange when you no longer have a clear sense of direction or being grounded. I’m just doing what I’m suppose to do to the best of my ability and with the hopes that what I think is right is right. The air in the office is somewhat thick with tension. It kind of reminds me of when I worked for DEC and folks started walking around with layoff notices and buy out offers, but I don’t believe that we are in the position in any way. Things are just in flux and it’s going to be a little while before they’re unfluxed.
I don’t think that’s a word.
Yesterday my chiropractor noticed that I had shaved off my mustache and was very complimentary on my “younger look”. Actually quite a few people have commented that I look younger. I feel younger. Exercising in the morning is certainly helping that situation.
Yesterday morning someone inadvertently tried to run me off the road as I was walking on the dirt shoulder (about four feet to the left of the pavement). As I jumped out of the way to what I thought was lawn, I quickly realized that it wasn’t lawn, it was a four foot ditch. I went down in the ditch and scraped up my hand, wrist, elbow, leg and knee. You’d think that the driver would notice that the guy that was walking with a strobe light and reflective clothing had suddenly disappeared, but the driver was probably too engrossed in his or her text message.
LOL.
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.
So last night I was wandering around aimlessly in my web browser when I stumbled across a blog about a sci-fi series called “The Event.” After doing some reading, I quickly realized that I am way behind the curve when it comes to this series, because it has already come and gone and at least a year has passed since.
Where the hell was I when this series came out?
“The Event” was an NBC series in 2010 that featured some mildly known actors, including Jason Ritter, who is the son of John Ritter (and boy does he ever look the part!). I watched the pilot episode last night and then started watching the series while I was riding the exercise bike this morning.
The series is about a big government conspiracy about extraterrestrials that crashed in Alaska back in 1944. Outwardly they look human, but their DNA is just different enough (around 1%) from ours to make them alien. For example, they age much more slowly than we do. The government thought they rounded up all the aliens from the crash site back in ’44 and have since kept them in detention in a special base in Alaska, but as the series progresses we find that some of the aliens were able to integrate themselves into society.
“The Event” does a lot with flashbacks in the couple of episodes I’ve watched, but it doesn’t feel as disjointed to me as when that series “Heroes” was jumping all over the timeline and no one knew what the hell was going on. I am finding myself hooked into the series quickly, which I think must be surprising because the series was canceled after one season. And I don’t remember ANYONE talking about it, though it looks like it’d be something that NBC would promote the hell out of.
There were some rumors about a year ago that the ridiculously named SyFy network was going to show a mini-series to finish off the canceled show, but this project has never come to light. So it’s kind of weird watching a series on Netflix knowing that it’s not going to come to its natural conclusion, but I’m too engrossed in it right now to care.
And for what it’s worth, I refuse to watch anything on a network that has perverted the term “SciFi” into “SyFy”. I’d buy the DVD before I admitted to losing a few IQ points to watch a show on a poorly named network.
If you know how “The Event” progresses, don’t tell me. I’m enjoying it too much.
So Earl and I headed to the Carrier Dome in Syracuse for the first SU Orange Football game of the season. We’ve been looking forward to football season and it was a gorgeous day to make the trip.
I love the Dome. It’s hard to believe that it’s 33 years old. They have made a bunch of renovations to the displays around the place; there are two HD-quality monitors at each of the field now and an LED ribbon that circles the entire Dome. With the addition of the ribbon, the smaller scoreboards are gone; the displays are now incorporated into the ribbon, but in only two spots. And they disappear frequently to make room for advertising. I found that odd. The old big screen display has been repurposed into a permanent scoreboard that sits in the northwest corner.
Then I noticed that they had replaced the time and temperature display that used to sit in the northeast corner. Installed with the building of the Dome in 1980, this display was the lightbulb type that you would find on the front of the bank at the time, and it proudly displayed the time and temperature in a “lazy” alternating display. And it displayed the temperature in both Fahrenheit and Celsius! That’s right, it was installed when the U.S. was going to convert to metric. I noticed that the new, high tech display the replaced this retro-tech goodness only uses Fahrenheit.
Nevertheless, I still love the Dome.
But, one step forward, two steps back.
Actually, the game was all about one step forward, two steps back and we ended up losing to Northwestern by one point. Ugh. There were plenty of visiting fans sitting around us. They make me hostile but I’m not mean to them or anything. I mean, if I drop popcorn on them, it’s not on purpose or anything like that.
The Orange had way too many penalties and mistakes and at one point they were down 13-35, but then closed the gap during the third quarter. I really thought we’d done it but with less than two minutes left in the game, we lost it.
On the way home from the game I told Earl that we should consider going to an away game this season so I can know what it’s like to be a visiting fan. Perhaps I wouldn’t feel quite as hostile towards the visiting fans that are just cheering for their team. Except Rutgers fan. As I always say about Rutgers fans, at least we don’t have to live in Jersey.
Go Orange!
Here’s Earl on the bus from Skytop to the Carrier Dome. Because of the Carrier Dome’s downtown location, parking near the Dome can be a bit of challenge. This year we’ve decided to stick to Skytop, one of the remote parking areas where plenty of buses shuttle fans back and forth. Plus there’s a lot of tailgating!
Another shot of the Dome.
Some people don’t get how much I love Syracuse. It’s my native stomping grounds, after all and that comfort just rings true to me after all these years. It’s the one city in the Northeast that I could live the rest of my life in.
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.
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!