Hypocrisy

I don't have this sight anymore. Try as I might, I can't really get that wonderment back that I recall as a young boy during the holiday season.

I have memories of angelic Christmas Holidays in my youth. A time that was warm and enveloping, where family was everything, and things were just special. People were nicer, it was cold outside, but the inside of a home was the warmest place on earth. The Holidays were like soft heated gloves on a cold pair of hands. They were something to look forward to and be relished.

Not anymore.

This hasn't been a wonderful time of year recently. Employment problems, issues with our pets and our relatives coupled with the generalized stress of the holiday season have given me pause to think...what the "F*ck"? This isn't what I remember.

I don't know when it happened, but somewhere back in the 70s and 80s, people started lining up at Wal-Mart the day after Thanksgiving to get their hands on the Christmas 'stuff' before it was all gone. A decade or so ago, children started splitting Christmas morning and Christmas afternoon between their mother and fathers house because of divorce. Then, by the year 2000, the holiday season was seen as a bell-weather to determine if the economy would be in the black or the red. We were all encouraged to go out and spend, spend, spend to make sure that everyone kept their jobs. Again, I say, what the "F*ck"?

Childhood's end probably officially came when my ex-wife (the one that taught so much about how messed up the world was getting), came to me on October 1, 1993 and gave me a list.

"What is this?” I asked

"My Christmas List, so you can start saving up to buy me the things I want for Christmas. Where is your list?” she responded.

"Ahhh, I don't have one."

"How am I supposed to know what to get you?" she shot back.

"I don't really want anything; just buy me something you think I might like."

"You're an asshole.", she snipped (this is how most of our conversations ended).

This conversation was followed up on November 1st, 1993, when my ex-wife confronted me and demanded to know the items on her list that I was NOT GOING to purchase, so she could go out and buy them for herself. She also informed me that I wasn't going to get shit, because I didn't give her a list. I suppose that in her home, you had to play Christmas by her rules.

It was about then that I realized that Christmas had become all about expectations. The fear of not meeting others expectations and the fear of not having your own expectations met. The Holiday Season had officially become about anxiety and not that warm glove feeling of my childhood.

This is the reason that my wife and I tend to spend the season down in Mexico. They don't have Wal-Marts there.....yet.

(and what did I finally get for Christmas in 1993……a paperweight and letter opener…..I still have them)

Sons Of Anarchy

2011-11-28T01:00:00.000-08:00

I have been M.I.A. recently. The same busy routine has been getting the better of me, along with the skyrocketing caseload at my office and trying to get all our ducks in a row for a pending Holiday Party.

Still, every once in a while, Sue and I carve out a little down time just to 'veg' a bit, which usually entails watching a Netflix DVD or a Laserdisc. While shopping for some holiday decorations a few weeks ago in a thrift store, I came across a Box DVD set of "Sons of Anarchy - The Complete 3rd Season" and picked it up for $4.99. Based on the liner notes it seemed interesting.

Sue and I have watched all 12 episodes over the past 10 days and it is pretty engrossing. Considering that we have no back story from the first 2 seasons, we had to piece together some of the character development.

The show follows a biker gang called the 'Sons of Anarchy' and all the doings in and around the Northern California town of Charming where they hang out. It is sort of like "The Sopranos" with Harley-Davidsons, with a lot of intertwined plot development and interpersonal issues between the biker club members.

At the end of the third season, there is a surprise ending of sorts that I didn't see coming. Not to give it all away, but the ending involves the execution of a Federal ATF agent, and let me tell you, it was an 'execution' and it was 'bloody'. (as in Tech-9 to the back of the head at close range, squeeze the trigger and don't ease up till the clip is empty bloody). Actually, the entire series is very graphic, usually producing one or two corpses per episode.

But this execution was a bit more bizarre because, in the end, you really wanted this ATF Agent to get her head blown off. She was a real scum bag. This brings me to the point of this web-log entry.

I was raised on Mom, Apple Pie and the American way. As a child I still recall watching "G-Men vs Al Capone" and I pretty much grew up with the theme songs to 'Dragnet' and 'Adam-12' running through my head. The government and law enforcement were to be respected and obeyed. That isn't the case anymore.

In most of today’s shows, law enforcement is riddled with doubt, second guessing and bureaucracy. Every law enforcement professional now has to have emotional issues. The real leap came while I watched 'The Sons of Anarchy'. In this show, the Federal Government Agents are the inept, evil, bad guys and you actually cheer for the biker gang, which sells drugs, deals in prostitution and gun running.

I can't help but wonder if this is indicative of the underlying mood of the country. There isn't a lot of faith in the infrastructure that we have put in place to govern us. Now the Sons of Anarchy shows us that brotherhood and faith in our club, our tribe or our family is more important than what the government tells us is correct.

Interesting times,.......and I already have Seasons 1 & 2 cued up on my Netflix que.

Ride on SAMCRO.................

Recollections Of An Old Gizer

2011-11-01T05:00:00.000-07:00

In front of our house, 10/31/2009

Last night was Halloween. In the neighborhood where we live, this is a big event. We had between 2,000 and 3,000 children pass by our house last night, all looking for free goodies.

That isn’t a misprint, we really do have that many. Last night, instead of handing out candy, we took a break, darkened the house and laid low this year. We needed the break, and buying candy for 2,000+ children usually runs us around $150.

The reason for the mass Trick or Treater invasion is varied. Our neighborhood has at most 150 Trick or Treat age children in it. So where do the other 1,850+ children come from? They are driven or trucked in from outlaying areas.

Back in my days of youth, this used to be a neighborhood thing, where we got to hang out with our friends after dark and get treats and play under the street lights. Things have changed a bit in the past 45 years and now it is more institutionalized.

We live in an old, restored neighborhood in downtown Phoenix. A place with curved streets, old growth vegetation, tall palm trees and every house looks different because they were all built in the 1930s before tract housing became the norm.

So lesser advantaged children from outlaying areas are trucked in by their families to Trick or Treat in a ‘safe’, ‘affluent’ neighborhood where they give out lots of candy. This is tag-team Halloween, where entire families of six or seven (including a toddler in a stroller) go to each house, each family member asks for candy, and then they dump their booty into the pickup truck that is following them, driven by their father or grandfather. They repeat the cycle for each block. After 10 blocks or so, they head home.

As I rode my Segway to work this morning, through the now deserted streets, there were thousands of candy wrappers, Circle-K cups, bottles of water and beer cans strewn everywhere.

I miss my youth, when it was just about the fun and the treats. Now it is more like collecting free food for the family until Thanksgiving rolls around.

Next up is what we used to call Christmas, but is now referred to, in the politically correct terminology, as “The Holiday Season”. It used to be about going to church and learning stories of faith and redemption. Now it is about propping up the economy and buying gifts for people through mass marketing.

Like I said, I miss my youth.

Rigid Thinking

2011-10-28T17:00:00.000-07:00

The wife and I have been making a lot of changes recently. Some of these changes have been referenced in many of my recent blogs. These changes have been difficult, but overall they are proving to be very beneficial.

This was highlighted in a meeting that I facilitated this week. We had some downtime during the meeting and I was conversing with some of the other people in the room about my experiences of building geodesic domes at the Burning Man Festival. They seemed fascinated about this and the concept of how the domes were built.

One of the attendees at the meeting questioned how I would section off the interior of a dome into rooms, since the structure is basically round. I looked at her somewhat comically and realized that she was totally rigid in her thinking based on a lifetime of ‘literally’ living inside a box.

I explained to her that if you take the time to lay out the design of the dome and construct it, the cost of making a second or third dome becomes one half to one quarter of the first. So instead of thinking in terms of rooms within the dome, she should think of multiple domes that are connected. Each dome is its own self contained room.

This got me thinking about how we as a culture are marketed to think that we need more than we do.

Last week, we owned three vehicles (four if you count my Segway). We had a small Lexus, a mid-sized Dodge Dakota pickup truck and my Lotus Esprit. My wife and I were thinking about replacing the Lexus with something that was more efficient, since she has a long commute each day. So we were looking into getting a Chevrolet Volt (that uses no gas).

But early last week the wife and I had a little pow-wow on our front porch and we both told each other ‘wait a minute’. What do we plan to be DOING in the next 5 years, as opposed to what are we DOING right now.

We plan on retiring, moving away, building a home in a remote location, taking our large dogs on trips to the vet and dog park and building a lot of large scale projects. How is the Volt going to benefit us in these scenarios? Add to this, that I don’t drive to work and we rarely used the pickup truck, except on weekends to go to Home Depot.

The end result is that we sold both the Lexus and the pickup and got one brand new big-ass full size quad-cab 4X4 pickup truck with a long bed. It gets awful gas mileage and is basically a road going tank that can tow four tons and haul 3/4 of a ton. So as a commuter vehicle for my wife, it isn’t ideal, but it is a great motivator for her to find another job closer to downtown where we live so she doesn’t HAVE to commute so much before we retire.

In retrospect, one new car is actually much cheaper than owning two used ones. Again, thinking outside the box. More cars do not make us happier, they are a burden. (but I still kept the Lotus, hell it is paid for)

Following up on this basic concept of less is actually more, the experiment of disconnecting our home from the phone / internet / mass media has actually worked out rather well. Sure, the first two weeks or so were sort of uncomfortable. Like someone giving up cigarettes. We lost the ability to check our e-mail and Facebook every 5 minutes, and didn’t know what the anxiety story of the day was on the local news, but this faded after a while.

We now find ourselves watching a lot more movies from our extensive video collection and making even better use of Netflix. The internet is free at the library and I read my e-mail at the office. The interesting side affect is, both my wife and I are much more relaxed. The world continues on without us knowing how many fatalities, or debt crisis and tsunamis are out there. We really don’t care anymore. We are looking toward a different future. Not the one that all those advertisement and local news bobble-heads were steering us toward.

What we have learned from all this, is that the media marketing of the American Dream is all a lie. To have something just ‘in case’ you might need it, only applies to insulin or a cell phone to dial 911. We don’t need a Hummer just in case a dam breaks somewhere upstream and we have to quickly scale a mountain to escape the flood waters. We don’t need 99 channels of forced media entertainment to know where the storms are, or god forbid, to know what Paris Hilton is doing. The burden of owning all these things far outweighs their value.

Cigarettes and Alcohol aren’t the only legal things that are addictive in this society. So is debt and anxiety. If you learn to do without and think outside the box, life is actually much better. But like the old saying goes, “We linger so long in Hell, because we know the names of the streets.” Find a different road map folks and don’t be afraid to make some changes.

Big Love

2011-10-15T13:00:00.000-07:00

I’m A Mormon

I am a little concerned about something. Despite my wife and I watching less television, we noticed something of late that is really odd. I am curious if this is going on in the rest of the country or if this is a regional thing.

Now I am not trying to bash religion in this post. I have stated before that we all have the right to believe and worship however and whoever we want. But there has been an ad campaign smothering the airwaves where we live (American Southwest) that I find disturbing for its political undertones.

“I’m A Mormon” commercials have been popping up during Primetime here for the past three weeks. They are so slick and well done, that at first I didn’t really understand what they were.

They are comprised of two back-to-back 30 seconds spots, showing a run of the mill average guy, housewife, artist or teacher talking about their life, and gosh darn it they seem awfully happy and normal in a real neighbourly sort of way. Then at the end of each spot comes the tag line, “I’m [insert name here] and I’m a Mormon”.

I don’t ever recall seeing religious organizations ‘advertise’ for worshipers, but in effect, that is what this church is doing.

Alright, so be it. Lawyers didn’t use to advertise, but their law firms are plastered on the sides of buses in our town now. Doctors never used to advertise, but they have billboards touting their surgical prowess all over the place as well.

So it sort of makes sense for cash-strapped tax-free organizations to seek out and recruit more followers willing to tithe 10% of their income. Hey, if it floats your boat and makes you feel good, become a Mormon.

Only, we are entering the political campaign season and the leading Republican front runner is a …………….Mormon. Hmmmmmmm.

Is it just me, or are the lines of segregation between church and state becoming a little blurry these days?

For Those That Dream

2011-10-13T01:00:00.000-07:00

....this is what it is like

An exceptional short film on Burning Man 2011 - Rites of Passage. If you want to know what it is like to attend the event, this pretty much sums it up in 6 minutes.

Go to the Burning Man Website for more information.

Essential Cinema - 52

2011-10-09T01:00:00.000-07:00

The T.A.M.I. Show

The Barbarians
The Beach Boys
Chuck Berry
James Brown and The Famous Flames
Marvin Gaye (with backing vocals by The Blossoms)
Gerry & the Pacemakers
Lesley Gore
Jan and Dean
Billy J. Kramer and The Dakotas
Smokey Robinson and The Miracles
The Rolling Stones
The Supremes

Directed by Steve Binder

Produced by Bill Sargent

SYNOPSIS:
Possibly the best Rock and Roll film ever made.

CONCEPT IN RELATION TO THE VIEWER:
When you see the original Rolling Stones with Mick Jagger barely into his 20s, it really hits home that my generation is getting old. Comparing Kanye West and Lady Gaga to these performances, it becomes painfully obvious that newer is not always better. Here are the roots of rock and roll before they branched out into a million different genres. The pure stuff. The gold.

PROS AND CONS
In their song "When The World Is Running Down", The Police mention this film in the lyrics. That was my first knowledge that it ever existed. I have heard about it since but had never seen it. So when I was updating my Netflix cue a few months ago, I found it and had the DVD delivered to our home last week.

I watched this with my wife and we were both blown away on several levels.

First of all there is the talent. This is raw stuff by very gifted young performers who were just entering their own or were already legends. There is no dubbing, there is very little editing and it is all performed live.

There are 48 songs performed in a little under two hours, with one act following the other on stage, and often times performing together. You can't get performers to do this sort of thing any more, either contractually or talent-wise.

Second is the technical expertise with which the performances were shot. Considering this was a live show and shot with modified television cameras, the sound and the imagery are exceptional.

Finally there are the songs. You know almost everyone one of them if you are over 40, and my wife was amazed to actually 'see' the performers that sang the songs that she listened to as a kid.

To get a glimpse of why this film is so astounding, watch the clip of James Brown that is linked above, or click on the title to go to the Wikipedia page for more details about film.

As for cons, there aren't any. Just watch the film to find out why.

For those that can't get hold of the DVD, go to You Tube to see clips of the show, there are many of them, but get ready to spend a whole afternoon watching them, they are that addictive.

First Friday Flashbacks

2011-10-06T01:00:00.000-07:00

The only things I would change in this post from 2008, would be to make it all in CAPITALS and BOLD it. Nothing has changed. If anything, it has only gotten worse.

A Nation Of Victims

First Posted July 2, 2008

Its All A Game

I have seen a growing trend over the years that has really been bugging me. With each new 'crisis' or 'disaster' that befalls mankind it just seems to get worse. It is a crisis of perspective and expectation. We have become a nation of victims and no one seems to be questioning it. I surmise that this is because there is more money to be made from victims than from people that can just 'suck it up' and deal with it.

A few of the long running list of examples that cause me to think this way.

The numerous people I known through the years that always blame someone else for something going wrong.

If they hit a tree with their car....it is the trees faults, or better yet the property owner that owns the tree...he should have put reflectors on that thing.

The drunken person that stumbles on the curb and knocks his teeth out.....it is the cities fault for making the curb too high....or Budweiser's fault for not putting a large warning label on the beer.

The folks wailing in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina because they didn't have anyplace to live....it is the governments fault for not being able to hold back the ocean. (Hello? You live in a city that is below sea level....)

The folks that are railing about high gas prices....but thought nothing of it when they bought that Ford Expedition 2 years ago, assuming gas would never get more expensive (have gas prices EVER gone down?).

And always there are the attorneys waiting in the wings ready to help you get what you are "entitled" to for a small fee. Because you can't collect anything if you aren't a victim.

We now live in a society of 'entitlements' where we all feel we are "owed" something and if we don't get it, we will kick and scream until we DO get it.

I guess THE memo sort of got lost somewhere along the way, but in case some of us didn't get around to reading it;

1. It is a dangerous world, if you don't pay attention, you are going to get hurt. If you get hurt...learn from it.

2. If you don't understand it, stay away from it until you do.

3. Floods, fires, lightening, hurricanes, tornado, earthquakes....they happen, be prepared. (Better to pay your insurance premiums before the accident than pay a lawyer afterwards, or worse yet rely on the government)

4. If you figure things out on your own, you learn and grow. If you pester others to do it for you or pay folks to get it done, it won't get done right and they will be enabling you to fail.

5. We don't all get a trophy just for putting on the uniform and sitting on the bench. Failure is a part of life, it is supposed to motivate us to do better. That is the way nature intended it and it isn't nice to fool with mother nature. I could never trust someone that has not learned from failure. It is what determines character.

Credit Rating = 0

2011-09-30T01:00:00.000-07:00

We Are Doomed

Times are bad and most folks that I talk to don’t seem to think that it will be getting any better any time soon. Maybe not even in this generation. They may be right.

I believe that the reason for this is that the American culture no longer seems to be proactive in the long term and that somewhere along the way we became reactionary in the short term. We want instant gratification and wealth, without the long term commitment. Financial institutions are not planning or investing in the long haul. They don’t want to invest, because they have lost their shirts in the past when presidents and CEOs made really bad decisions that almost put them out of business.

Let me give you a little personal example:

We are doing some remodeling in our house and are paying a contractor to do it. It is an ongoing process that has taken about three months. As is usual, the cost of the estimate keeps going up and we are a bit over budget.

So I went down to the Credit Union where I bank and asked them to if I could increase my line of credit limit from $1,000 to $5,000 to help cover some of the cost.

Before I go any further, I need to give you a little background here.

My credit score is over 780, which is in the top 5th of all credit scores. Our combined household credit card debt is about $2,000, with a max credit limit of around $25,000. Unlike most, we are not upside down on our mortgage and have about half of the mortgage paid off since we put a huge amount down on our house.

My wife and I have been steadily employed for over 10 years. I have been at the same employer for the past 20 years. I have never declared bankruptcy or not paid a debt. My wife declared bankruptcy once, over 10 years ago before we were married. I already have a $1,000 line of credit that I owe nothing on, and have had it for over 5 years. When I have used it, it was paid off with a direct deposit from my employer. Of the three vehicles we own, only one has an outstanding loan balance, the other two we own outright.

Based on this financial background, the credit union denied my request to increase my line of credit by $4,000.

However, they DID tell me that I was eligible for a ‘pre-approved’ auto loan to the tune of $30,000, if I wanted to buy a new car!

Now, I might not be a financial wiz, but this is just F’ed-up.

If banks and credit unions are not willing to take risk (and a good risk at that) to get the economy moving again, but are willing to fork over $30,000 for a car I don’t need, only because they believe that the loan would be secure, because they can always repossess the car, means that there are serious problems with our financial institutions and cultural norms.

I don’t ‘need’ this extra $4,000 in credit. I have other ways I can pay for the contractor. But if I can’t get this sort of credit based on my financial history, then who can? I am assuming no one. Hence, we have a stagnant economy that won’t be moving anytime soon.

The wife and I have a very large piggy bank at home that we put all our loose change in. I suggest that you ALL get one. It might be your most secure investment in the future.

Cardio Media - 1

2011-09-23T01:00:00.000-07:00

Destination Gobi - Movie

Exercise Machine - Treadmill

Distance Traveled - 3.5 miles

Calories Burned while watching - Approx. 500

A guy movie from the 1950s. This was an odd film that I downloaded from the internet. A rather strange tale of a bunch of navy sailors stationed at a weather station in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia during WWII. Supposedly based on a 'true' story about 300 saddles that were ordered by the sailors to befriend Mongolian horsemen. The film is Saturday Matinee fair, with all men, doing manly things and eventually escaping back to the U.S. Fleet with the help of Mongols. I was surprised to find out that it was directed by Robert Wise, one of my all time favorite directors, although I would not rank this high on my list of his best films.

Essential Cinema – 51

2011-09-20T01:00:00.000-07:00

Network

Directed by - Sidney Lumet

Writing credits - Paddy Chayefsky

Fred C. Caruso .... producer
Howard Gottfried .... producer

Original Music - Elliot Lawrence

Cinematography by - Owen Roizman

Faye Dunaway ... Diana Christensen
William Holden ... Max Schumacher
Peter Finch ... Howard Beale
Robert Duvall ... Frank Hackett
Wesley Addy ... Nelson Chaney
Ned Beatty ... Arthur Jensen

SYNOPSIS:
A major television network beset by low ratings and declining revenues seeks new and questionable methods to increase their audience share and boost profits.

CONCEPT IN RELATION TO THE VIEWER:
As we age, things go crazy. While this is a dated film, released in 1976, it is still scary just how accurate and relevant it remains today. It shows the decline of the media into a pandering boredom killer that manipulates the masses in the name of global greed.

PROS AND CONS
Since my distain for the media has been growing larger and larger over the past several years, culminating with my wife and I pulling the plug on cable television recently, I thought it would be a good idea to dust this copy of ‘Network’ off from my LaserDisc collection and watch it one more time. It has been years since I have seen it, but the last viewing left a pretty strong impression on me.

The concept of the film is still dead on. While it is very dated, shot in a world where there was no cable television, no internet, no cell phones and large gas guzzling cars, the message it deliveries is strangely more relevant today than it was back when it was made.

The film has several levels and plot lines, but most come back to center on the concept of those in power and how they use it for good or how they abuse it for their own gain. In the end the film asks the question, should we be human or should we be humanoids that just go through the motions and be happy with what television gives us.

The relationship between William Holden’s ‘Max Schumacher’ and Faye Dunaway’s ‘Diana Christensen’ is amazing to watch. They are both very good actors that get the most out of every scene and word of dialog, and back in the day Ms. Dunaway was a real looker.

But the best part of the film is without a doubt Peter Finch’s insane news anchor Howard Beale. His lunatic rants about society and the ‘Bull Shit’ of the networks still rings as true today as they did four decades ago. They still make me want to stand up and yell “I’m mad as hell, and I am not going to take this anymore!”

There are some cons about the film. Its dated look makes it a bit harder to relate to today. The world has changed and it now seems odd to watch high powered executives reaching for rotary dial phones to make important calls, when cell phones and computers are now the norm. The film slowly fizzles at the end, and the final scenes sort of leave you wondering and disappointed, but then again, where could it go? The concept of planning corporate murder for dollars isn’t impossible, but seemed somewhat contrived in this film. It either has to end with a bang or a whimper. They chose bang, in the literal sense of the word.

I will add, that the scene between Peter Finch and Ned Beatty, where the Communications Corporation of America (CCA) CEO explains the ways of the world and how Howard Beale is meddling in things he cannot understand in the darkened corporate board room, is probably one of the best lessons in world politics and economics that has been put on film. It should be worth college credit.

This film is a part of my LaserDisc Collection which is located on the LaserDisc Database.

Clicking here will take you to a listing of all the "Essential Cinema" reviews in my Blog.

My Life - Post Connectivity

2011-09-13T11:39:00.000-07:00

It has been about a week since my wife and I pulled the plug on the broadband wifi network that I had set up in our home. It was nice and all, but just not worth the cost for what it was providing to us.

In the wake of our ‘unconnected’ home, we have returned to the YMCA to try and get back to that healthy lifestyle that we always talk about, but seldom actually get around to doing.

One of the things that being a stud-like tech-geek offers me is the ability to find ways to use things that many other folks seem to overlook. For instance, the treadmills and exercise cycles at the YMCA are pretty much state of the art. So much so, that they actually have iPod connectors and USB connections on them to be able to program them and play media through.

I have never seen any other YMCA members utilize these options on the equipment, so I had to figure them out for myself. I am not the type of user that gets on one of these things for 5 minutes and the hops off thinking …..owwww, feel that burn. I am more of a long term cardio exerciser and what better way to spend my time ‘buffing up’ than by watching a movie or listening to an audio book while I spend upward of 1.5 hours on one of these machines.

So for your reading enjoyment, I am going to let you guys tag along on my workout / media journeys and give you a sampling of what I am listening to and watching while I excersize. This will be sort of like a continuation of my Essential Cinema blog series, but with a few added little twists. They will be short and sweet, without a lot details. Look for the first installment in a few days.

Droid Dump - Sept 2011

2011-09-07T08:37:00.000-07:00

My smartphone is starting to fill up with pictures again, so it is time to dump them into storage and archive them for posterity in case I accidently drop my phone off a bridge or something.

These are not great pictures, and most will make no sense. Some of them I took and some of them were sent to me by others. Some are artistic and some are crap. I make no distinction or guarantees about their quality or content. But if you want to see what my daily life entails in pictures, have a look.

Click the blog title or click here.

Pulling The Plug

2011-09-06T09:53:00.000-07:00

After a lot of contemplation and watching way too many episodes of ‘Hoarders’, ‘American Pickers’, ‘Dancing With The Stars’ and ‘The Bachelor’, the wife and I have come to a conclusion…… This just isn’t worth it.

So we are pulling the plug and telling Cox Cable to shove it. No more television, no more phone service, no more broadband internet connection.

It isn’t like we can’t afford it. It is just that it isn’t worth it. The whole bundle is over $150 a month, and I am sorry folks. I don’t feel like paying to watch The Bachelorette AND be advertised to for 1/3 of the show. It is a lose / lose proposition.

The world is changing and everything is going mobile regardless. The internet and entertainment is going to be accessed through mobile devices that connect via 4G and public wireless in the future, so my own personal WiFi that I have in our home really isn’t all that necessary.

Besides, I get T1 Broadband at my office, WiFi for free at the YMCA, at the library, at Starbucks, at McDonald’s, pretty much everywhere. I would rather spend some quality time at home with my wife actually getting stuff done, than staring at the talking heads on the local news.

(Besides, there is my extensive LaserDisc collection that is going to take us about 10 years to get through.)

First Friday Flashbacks

2011-09-02T05:00:00.000-07:00

I won't be going to Burning Man this year. To many other irons in the fire and projects to complete. But deep down, I am going to miss being there. I have come to love that place and truely feel at home there. Next year, definately next year though

Alone In The Sand Box

(First Published December 23, 2009)

That Warm Feeling

This goes way back, to my earliest childhood memories. I assume that everyone has origins like this, and they must vary quite a bit. They are one of those core values / feelings / memories that follow us all through life and create the foundation of who we are. They are more like memories and feelings that keep resurfacing, they are a constant throughout our entire life.

For me, it was being lost in the fog. Not so much being lost, but alone. This isn't a scary feeling like some sort of phobia or nightmare. It is more of a dreamlike state. A waking dream where all your senses come into play and everything is a mystery to be discovered.

Every time I have come across these situations in real life, I am thrown back to that constant feeling from the first time I experienced it.

The first time was probably during a blizzard in North Dakota around 1962. It was nighttime and you couldn't see more than 10 feet in front of you. I was all bundled up and walking back to my house in the dark. But I was so disoriented, I had to walk up to each house to see if I recognized the door, and then stumble to the next one, and the next, before finally finding my home. I knew it was there somewhere, and when I found it, there would be warm blankets and coco waiting for me.

Fast forward four years and we had just moved to southern California. It was in the spring, and there was still a bite in the air. I saw ocean fog for the first time that spring, as it drifted through the groves of Eucalyptus trees behind our house. As I walked through the forest, the aroma of the trees mixed with the coolness of the fog. Eventually the morning mist was countered by the warm rays of sunlight struggling to pierce the canopy of the trees and chase the fog away. It was surreal.

A decade later in College, my friends and I rented a beach house on the Oregon Coast for a weekend. One morning after a heavy night of college partying, we awoke to a dense fog bank hanging over the coast. I walked down to the beach and headed toward the surf. I could hear the crashing waves all around me like a roaring freight train, but the sand was still dry and I couldn't see more than 10 feet in any direction. After walking almost a half mile toward the ocean, it sounded as though a wave would materialize out of the mist and swallow me. I slowly retraced my footsteps in the sand back to the beach house.

I left college in 1982 and moved to Arizona. On my road trip from college student to adulthood, I stopped in the Redwood Forest of northern California to sleep in my car before heading toward San Francisco the next morning. During the night there was no moon and low laying clouds moved in through the trees to block out what little starlight there was. I awoke in the middle of the night to experience total and complete darkness for the first time in my life. That lonely night in the middle of nowhere, the forest enveloped me. (A more detailed account of this night can be found in my blog entitled Deep Woods.)

It has been a while since then and these images have become fewer and farther between but their memory has not diminished in my mind. They are those periods of wonder and reflection when you have to question the world around you and also question who you are.

The last one was in September 2009. I was at Burning Man in northern Nevada. Burning Man takes place on a huge dry lake bed 70 miles from the nearest town. When the wind picks up (which is often) it creates huge dust storms that the participants have to weather. It sounds worse than it is. The dust is like a fine powder and is hypo-allergenic, there are no spores or pollen in it. So everyone always has a handkerchief and goggles at the ready to ride out the 5 to 30 minutes of zero visibility.

I was caught in one of these storms as I roamed the far reaches of the playa, thousands of feet from any structure. The dust engulfed me and I put my bandanna over my face and lowered my goggles to wait it out. As I knelt down on the ground, ghostly images of fellow Burners came and went on the fringes of my sight. Riding bicycles, walking, laughing, dressed in bizarre costumes. They drifted in and out of my world in another waking dream, and then the dust dissipated and the world was normal again.

I sometimes feel that this is what my life is really all about. In our day to day lives, we are just waiting for something to happen. But once in a while, we get a glimpse of what it is like to pass to the other side.

Faces....

2011-08-25T09:36:00.000-07:00

I haven’t been around much recently. I won’t be around much in the future. I am trying to get my ducks in order so that I can start the final push toward retirement. It is still two years away, but in government, we measure things in cycles and I only have about three left. While dealing with those, I am also setting in motion plans for what I am going to be doing after retirement. This all translates to less time sitting in front of the computer, reading and writing blogs. But I will be around; you can’t get rid of me that easy.

So for today, I wanted to give you a little heads up about Big Brother. This isn’t some sort of a conspiracy rant or anxiety story. It is just a realization that I came across a few weeks ago, while cleaning up some stuff on my computer.

I use a bunch of software for doing photography and creating web logs. Some are in the ‘cloud’ and some are on my hard drive. Most of my blog images are stored on Google’s Picasa site. Picasa also has a standalone (downloadable) version of their photo software. I recently downloaded the updated version of it and came across something that I found disturbing. You can find this software here.

This is really powerful (free) image processing software, but it also gives a glimpse into just how far technology has come and how much it is going to change our lives. Once installed, Picasa will rip through your hard drives and find ‘any’ images you have and very quickly categorize them. This is pretty slick, since there were pictures on my hard drive that I had totally forgotten about, tucked away in long misplaced folders.

As I was getting acquainted with the user interface, I noticed a little folder on the side bar titled ‘Faces’, that I had not created. When I opened it, I found that Picasa had ‘searched’ all the images on my computer and found all the pictures that had faces in them. It then cropped the face and put a thumbnail in the ‘Faces’ folder. Further investigation showed that I could assign a name to a face and the software would then automatically scan all the other face thumbnails for matching faces.

So if I labeled a picture of myself ‘super stud’, Picasa would find all other images of me and label them Super Stud as well. And get this; it is really, really good at recognizing facial features. It recognizes me from the age of 54 all the way back to the age of 10, both front view and by profile.

Once I got over the g-whiz factor of this, I realized just how powerful this was. This is free software that you can download, can you imagine what the corporate version is like, or the government version?

I had always assumed that there was some underpaid security guard sitting in a dark room somewhere watching dozens of television monitors connected to security cameras at the mall, the light rail platform or at the grocery store. Guess again.

Hook this software into your security system and it can match faces of anyone instantly, tell where they have been and tell when they have returned and how often. Once they know you are a criminal and have your picture, they can tell when you pop up on ANY security camera that is networked with this type of software.

Big brother is here, he exists on your computer and you can tinker with him if you want. It is time to wake up and smell the coffee. You can’t be anonymous anymore.

Tear It Down - Addendum

2011-08-10T09:08:00.000-07:00

This was forwarded to me in an e-mail, relating to the current situation with the United States Government. I am posting it here, becuase I beleive that it has merit regarding the discussion and the possible solutions to a government that is no longer relevant or capable of executing it's duties.

An ammendment to the constituion hasn't been floated for over four decades. The fact that we have not tried to modify this document given all the changes in the world of late, is sort of alarming.

If enough people demand change in the governence of this country, this is the avenue the founding fathers left us to try and effect that change. I would give it some serious thought. Left to their own devices, the elected politians aren't going to fix the problems on their own.

----------------

The 26th amendment (granting the right to vote for 18-year-olds) took only 3 months & 8 days to be ratified! Why? Simple! The people demanded it. That was in 1971 . . . before computer, before e-mail, before cell phones, etc.

Of the 27 amendments to the constitution, seven (7) took 1 year or less to become the law of the land . . . all because of public pressure.

Let's Proclaim a Congressional Reform Act of 2011

1. Term Limits
12 years max, some possible options are below.
A. Two Six-year Senate terms
B. Six Two-year House terms, OR
C. One Six-year Senate term and three Two-Year House terms

2. No Tenure / No Pension
Members of Congress receive a salary while in office,
that salary ends when they leave office.

3. Congress members (past, present & future) are to participate in Social Security.
All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system
immediately.
All future funds flow into the Social Security system,
and Congress participates with all Americans.

4. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan,
just as all Americans do.

5. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise.
Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

6. Congress loses their current health care system
and participates in the same health care system as the American people.

7. Members of Congress must equally abide by all laws
they impose on the American people.

8. All contracts with past and present members of Congress are void effective 1/1/12.
The American people did not make the contract members of Congress enjoy,
Congress made all these contracts for themselves.
Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career.
The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators,
so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work.

If each person contacts a minimum of twenty people, then it will only take three days for most people (in the U.S. ) to receive the message. Maybe it is time.

THIS IS HOW YOU FIX CONGRESS ! ! ! ! !

Tear It Down

2011-08-08T05:00:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the length of this post, but there just isn't any easy way to explain this.

There has been a lot of disgust going around recently here in the United States about several things. Most notably the economy and the government’s inability to adjust, control and regulate it. This has lead to several stalemates in Washington D.C. over opposing views of how to best ‘correct’ the direction of the country.

The majority in the Senate and White House feel that the economy has to be coaxed back into alignment with incentives and taxes to help fund them. The new right wing (Republicans and Tea Party advocates) believes that ‘leaning’ out government and reducing taxing and spending will right the ship of state.

I roll my eyes whenever the talking-heads on television debate these issues as each side blames the other for how bad things are. I am constantly amazed at how short sighted the American public is when it comes to these issues. They have been ongoing since the 1960s and only appear to get worse with each successive fix of the problem. It appears to me that the Democrats and Republicans are constantly arguing over how best to form the bucket line and bail water on the Titanic. One bucket line might work better than the other, but the end result is inevitable, the ship is still going to sink.

This is a problem that can’t be fixed by voting in a specific set of candidates with agendas or plans. This all started when Abraham Lincoln initiated the first ‘income tax’ to fund the War for States Rights (Civil War). This was followed up by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’, to deal with the Great Depression and finally took the form of Lyndon Johnson’s ‘Great Society’ to lift the impoverished out of the poor house. It seems that all these programs really gave us was Income Taxes, Social Security, and Food Stamps. Not really the best lasting legacies.

Since I have been watching the way this whole mess has been playing out for much of my adult life, I have come to the only logical conclusion of how to fix. Start Over.

I haven’t voted since the mid 1980s in any election. I often hear that I shouldn’t be complaining about the problem if I am not willing to participate in the process to try and fix the issues. My response is, “Voting for candidates in a failed system only perpetuates the failed system.”

I just got a little card in the mail the other day from my government employer. It was a thank you card for my 15 years of service to the state. I have been in my current position for that many years. In that time, I have seen administrations come and go, and crisis pop up and fade away.

What the whole journey has taught me is best summed up by a quote from Ronald Reagan, when I saw him campaign for President back in 1976. When asked about how government was going to solve a particular social problem Mr. Reagan shot back, “Government is not here to solve your problems…..government IS the problem.” I thought I knew what he meant when I heard him say it, but looking back now, I know what he was really talking about.

Let me try and explain it to you. I have been frustrated in most of my jobs in civil service. The various agencies and tasks that I have been given to perform often seemed mundane, inefficient, and produced no tangible results. Furthermore, pending changes were always driving our work model. We didn’t manage change, change was always managing us. This meant that we have always been behind the curve in dealing issues such as changes in laws, regulations, resource issues or technology. The key words in every office I have worked in for the past 20 years have been ‘triage’ and ‘catch-up’. Being proactive is a foreign concept in my world.

I was always baffled by my employer’s lack of foresight and planning, until I started to look at it from the employer’s perspective and not the workers perspective. You see, there is money to be made in chaos and triage. Not money from ‘profits’ but money from ‘budgets’.

Let me explain the budget world that I work in. In the public sector, everything is budgeted. Since in essence, we are a huge non-profit, we can’t get more funding for being more efficient. A government agency can only get more money by having its budget increased. You can only do this if you can show a larger client base, and therefore, the need for more staff / resources to service that base.

So if I come up with a new business process in my division that streamlines the process, uses less paper, requires fewer man-hours, and produces better results than the previous system………..it will got shot down in flames just like the Hindenburg. An office that requires fewer people and less paper can’t justify the same budget as they had the previous year. If you can do the job with fewer resources, you get less money…..so here is the rub.

Management in civil service measures power and influence, not by how much money you make, but how much money you CONTROL. The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of a major industrial company can increase his firms production and earnings and be rewarded with a 2 million dollar bonus. The director of a state agency will never make more than $150,000 a year, but they can have control over 2 billion dollars in budget. With that much funding, they can hire, fire, purchase and influence almost anything. So what do you think they are going to say if someone floats an idea that could reduce their budget?

This is what Ronald Reagen was referring to when he spoke about government BEING the problem. Governments are organizations. An organization, like any ‘organism’ has one primary goal, which is to perpetuate itself.

You are never going to be able to find enough competent elected officials that can break this cycle. It is engrained in the organism like a cancer. You can try and cut it out, but only at great pain and risk of death to the organism. Therefore, tear it down and start over.

This isn’t a radical idea. It is the same idea that founded the country. In fact, the founding fathers wrote it into the Constitution. If the populace feels that the government is no longer serving their best interest, we can dissolve it and create a new one. That is why we have freedom of speech, the right to bear arms and the right to assemble.

The founding fathers knew that the world was going to change and that the Constitution needed to be a ‘modifiable’ document to change with the times. It served this purpose pretty well up until the 1930s, and then things started to change faster than the laws and codes of our country could keep up with.

Let’s face it, Tommy Jefferson and Bennie Franklin could never have envisioned things like the following;

1) The ability to destroy an entire country with the push of a button.

2) Being able to speak into a box in the palm of your hand and talk to another person on the other side of the planet, in a language that you can’t understand, and have the box translate for you.

3) Having a teenager walk into a school with a weapon that would allow him to murder 35 of his classmates in less than 2 minutes.

4) A world without borders where there was no segregation by class or ethnicity.

5) A mass media that can spread propaganda to everyone about radical beliefs or political views.

The list can go on and on. They could not have foreseen the world we live in, and I am positive that if they had, they would have written a different set of codes and laws to govern us by.

I think it is time for a revolution. It could be violent or it could be orderly, but he has to come eventually. The current system does not work. It hasn’t worked for a long time.

First Friday Flashbacks

2011-08-05T05:00:00.000-07:00

Back in the day (almost 6 years ago) I used to wax philisophically about the past and where I was headed. I don't do that much anymore...maybe when I retire I might start doing it again

The American Journey

First Published August 26, 2005

(thoughts that played through my head on my recent trip up north, all pictures taken along Interstate 17 and Interstate 40 with my PalmPilot)

Every once in a while my job sees fit to yank me form my desk and throw me up into the wild reaches of Arizona to handle some business because we can't retain staff to do it.

I don't mind these long trips, because they give me time to think and reflect on a lot of things.

I-17 North from Phoenix

The American Journey isn't just one from point A to point B. It is a journey of understanding and figuring things out. How our views change over time and from location to location based on our experiences and what we have learned.

Sedona Near Flagstaff

I don't know a lot of conservatives that were not liberals at one point in their lives and vice versa. Folks that were conservative and now throw caution to the wind. Their journeys brought about these changes.

Cabin in the Sky

I chuckle at how much the youth of today can't wait to get off the 'farm' and make it to the big city where anything goes and they can party all they want. Only to find out that by the time they have grown up, had kids, taken out a second mortgage and fixed their car for the 18th time to commute to work, that what they REALLY want is to go back to that rural lifestyle that they longed to escape from so many years before.

Wrecks

These cars were once shiny and new, speeding down what was then Route 66 in a country that was affluent, run by caucasians, where Coke had real sugar and there was no HIV or Ebola. Those days, like these cars, are gone, transformed by the journey.

Dents

Yet, in their decay, there is a certain beauty to them. They undergo the slow transition back to the minerals from which they were forged. Like the delicate bones of some pre-historic creature momentarily exposed by the wind before being covered up again.

Gas Pumps

Once these silent sentinels pumped petrol for .29 cents a gallon. Now, in the shadow of the speeding semi-trucks that race by on Interstate 40, they stand as tombstones for the coming end of the petroleum age. More road markers on the journey.

Fallen Dreams

In a way, the land is littered with the graveyards of our past. Those things that we held so dear (or were told to hold so dear) but have become obsolete because something new and better came along. But were they really better? Did we really 'need' them? Figuring that out is one of the purposes of the journey.

Cloud Ruins

In the end, the journey teaches us that many of the dreams we had were not our own. We followed road signs that told of us great destinations, lands of milk and honey, with things that were newer, cheaper, better. But when we got there we found that in the long run none of it was true. The signs were not put up for our benefit, but for the benefit of others, to lead us to them.

Empty Rooms

Some say that we should make our own signs and leave trails to follow, and not follow in the footsteps of others. But the insecurity that is inherent in all our lives holds us back. The older we get, the more we lose that insecurity and the more we finally realize how important it is to blaze those trails, but often we also realize that we have lost the vigor of youth.

Window Ruins

These are the thoughts that continually run through my head while taking these long journeys for my employer. A good use of the State's money, I must admit. In their never ending goal of finding new and inefficient ways of doing things with the taxpayers hard earned cash, they offer me the time and the distance to gage the journey and in so doing, show me just how far off course I am sometimes.

Desert Tower

As I stopped at many of these old places along Interstate 40, I saw all those old days, those slower days. This highway parallels the old Route 66 and it is still visible in many sections. I walked some of it to take these pictures. The mother road had a lot to tell if you just stood still long enough and listened.

I-40 Train

How many journeys? How many lives were changed by the wheels passing over this broken asphalt? A million miles, a million miles.

I-40 Windows

I hope the journey never ends; I have still have so much to learn.

Over Saturation

2011-08-03T09:53:00.000-07:00

I can't stand this commercial. While it is cute and all, I have seen it so many times that it is starting to seem like a recurring "Ground Hog Day" nightmare whenever I see it.

Let me give you a little background here. This is a regional thing, so it may not be common knowledge in the rest of the country (United States) and certainly not the rest of the world.

As big fish gobble up smaller fish, the big fish wants to assure all the other fishies in the sea that nothing has changed and in fact, things are getting better. Such is the case when one of the major telephone / internet providers in the American Southwest (Qwest) got swallowed up by a bigger fish, called 'Century Link' recently.

Strangely enough, prior to the acquisition, Qwest was boosting how they had been around forever and would always be here to serve their loyal customers. Two months later, they were history. This was something that their major rival in telecommunications (Cox Broadband) was quick to exploit in some of their commercials. So much for longevity.

I learned in college that when this type of acquisition happens, it is common for the new company to put out 'feel good' advertising to assure the public that this is actually a GOOD thing and that they are going to benefit from the newer bigger company. Reality has shown that this is rarely the case, since acquisitions tend to mean leaning out the smaller fish to assimilate it, which usually means lost jobs and less customer service.

But my point here is, this is one of those 'feel good' commercials. An invasion of Slinkies that appear to take over the planet to a catchy little pop tune by some up-and-coming middle-of-the-road artist about 'moving forward'. Yet, in essence, this commercial tells you nothing. It just makes you tap your foot and smile. Thereby, making you think that, "Gee, Century Link must be a really swell company. They have darn cute commercials!" They could be employing child labor in Indo-China and overworking their employees to death, but you wouldn't know it.

If this were the case across the spectrum, when Lockheed/Martin acquired Northrup Aviation, we should have seen a bunch of school age children singing and dancing around a B-1 Stealth Attack Bomber singing 'Lockheed/Northrup is good for us all!'.

To compound the horror of the whole Century Link commercial, there is the repetition. I only watch about one hour of television a night and I SWEAR I have seen this commercial at least 100 times in the last 30 days. Often times three times in a single hour of network programming.

I'll cry UNCLE for Christ's sake, just make it stop!!!

....and don't even get me started on this commercial. I have seen it even more in the last 30 days, and until I linked to it on YouTube, I really didn't know who it was (ATT, I had assumed Verizon), although I knew it was for some cellular provider.

Considering that these companies have to be making money hand over fist, don't you think they could put together a more diversified ad campaign, instead of showing us the same commercials over and over until we puke?

Bugity, Bugity, Bugity

2011-07-26T09:54:00.000-07:00

I am gonna rant here for a second folks. Fasten your seatbelts. I have just come back from a four day weekend were I was once again working on a copious number of projects around the house. Working in the Arizona heat means I have to take a lot of breaks so that I don’t get dehydrated. I have to plop myself down in front of the television for about 30 minutes after every hour of outside labor to stretch out and cool off while drinking something cold.

While doing so this past weekend, I got to see the above mentioned clip at least 5 times. Every single news outlet seemed to think that this was the cutest and most funny piece of news on the planet for some reason.

A little bit of background here; I don’t like NASCAR. I have always been a Formula 1 fan. Driving as fast as you can in a circle for two hours has never been my idea of a fun thing to watch. Secondly, I am not a big fan of organized religion. You can worship anyway you want, but keep it in your church, your living room or your basement.

This video just hammered home how stupid the American media thinks we are, if this is something that passes for news and entertainment. There are debt ceiling talks, mass murder in Norway, train wrecks in China and famine in Somalia, and we get to watch a fat Baptist preacher talk about his ‘smokin hot wife’ at a NASCAR invocation.

Is it just me, or am I the only one that would find it odd for Jesus to bless an event that basically puts people’s lives at risk for the sake of winning a trophy? Wouldn’t that be like Christ pumping up the crowd before the Chariot Race in Ben-Hur?

Is it any wonder that the rest of the world thinks we are really f*cked up?

Then there is this whole debt ceiling debate in Washington, or as I like to call it, “So You Think You Can Vote – the D.C. Edition”. Because that is what it has come down to, a reality television show where everyone tunes into to see who gets the final rose or gets booted off the island.

The Republican right is trying to make a stand on this Tea Party movement for no new taxes. In so doing they appear to be willing to shut down the government and cripple the nations credit rating all to make the President look bad and be more ‘defeatable’ in the future.

Having worked in government for the past 15 years, I know how mismanaged it can be. The words government and efficiency cannot be used in the same sentence. So the Republicans seems to think that we can ‘lean out’ the system and make it run more efficiently by not raising taxes and giving tax breaks to create more jobs and ergo, generate more governmental revenue.

It doesn’t work that way. I don’t like higher taxes anymore than the next guy, but if I want things to work, I know that someone has to pay for the fireman, the policeman, the ambulance driver and the old folk’s social security. The economic landscape has changed folks, and cutting taxes to create more jobs in the future isn’t going to happen. Welcome to socialism. Don’t blame Obama, blame the past leaders both Democrat and Republican going back to Nixon. They led us down this path.

So stop scaring the old people and jockeying for the best time slot on network television to slander the opposition. Do it like the old days. Go behind closed doors, make a deal, come out smiling, say everything is going to be fine and let us get on with our lives. We know things won’t get better, they rarely do in government, just don’t make it into a reality sporting event.

That is all, you may now unfasten your seatbelts and move about the cabin.

Project #23769

2011-07-19T09:22:00.000-07:00

I finished a project this past weekend. All my weekends are comprised of working on projects these days. The wife and I are bound and determined to clean our slate by the end of the year and then start downsizing.

The project pictured here is the tiered flower boxes in the front of our house. This has been something that has been in the workds for a long time. I had experimented with making flower boxes in the past and knew how to do it. It was just a matter of cutting a lot of wood, doing a lot of painting and then planting flowers in 108 degree weather. What I thought was going to take about a month to complete, in reality, took about six months.

As with most projects, this one was pretty grandiose in the beginning. Needless to say it has be paired down a bit here, but the results still look pretty good. Originally, the boxes were supposed to wrap around the porch, but time and money sort of meant that original concept had to be downsized. The FlowerBox 2.0 upgrade that includes the sides of the porch may or may not get finished next year.

There was a reason for creating these beyond the ascetic of making the house look nicer. The summer sun rarely gets to the back of the flowerbeds due to the low wall at the front of the porch, which made it hard for most flowers to prosper and grow not to mention hiding them behind the flowers in front. By creating levels, the sun is able to hit all the beds equally and hopefully, make for more flowers and more color. Time will tell.

Now that the front yard is pretty much done for this year, I am off to the back yard, where I have an even bigger and more bizarre project about to commence. If I am luck, that one might be completed by November. It will make this project look tame by comparison.

Like A Good Neighbor.....

2011-07-15T12:55:00.000-07:00

......well, not really.

I have written about this before, and will probably be writing more about it in the future. I don’t know if this a cultural trend, a social networking offshoot, or just a sign of our more repressed nature as a species, but there is a definite problem here. Based on my current mindset, this problem is really starting to piss me off.

My wife and I are doing some work on our home this summer instead of going on vacation. This work involves upgrading some appliances and re-tiling our bathroom among other various projects.

In updates that I posted online in the past several weeks I mentioned this summer long activity in the following paragraphs:

"The wife and I are engaged in numerous household upgrades and projects (picture wall demolition and multiple contractors on sight at any given time). There will be a bunch of pictures posted to document all this upgradeable goodness when all the projects are done. However, it might be the end of the summer before all the dust settles. "

and...

“We have been doing some renovations on our home recently. This has entailed moving a bunch of stuff from one room to another to allow contractors to knock out walls and re-wire things.”

These seemed like rather innocent and un-noteworthy statements, or so I thought. These web logs are viewable by anyone online. But it seems that there are residents in my neighborhood that read them and found them to be disturbing.

So much so, that they contacted the City of Phoenix and informed them that we were doing ‘structural’ work to our historic home and we may not have the proper permits to do so. This resulted in a bright red “Stop Work Order” being pasted on the front of our house a few days ago.

Now the city is involved and we have to meet with them to ‘prove’ that we are not altering our historic home in violation of city codes. We knew we were not doing this when we started, since we know what we are and aren’t allowed to do with a permit because we have done this sort of work in the past on our house.

The tearing out of walls was in reference to removing drywall so that water pipes could be re-routed to our new tankless water heater. The contractors in question were the drywall person, the plumber and Southwest Gas to inspect the line and make sure it was up to code.

So because a neighbor has ‘concerns’ about what we are doing, the city is involved, and both the zoning office and myself have to take time off work to address these non-issue. All while the concerned neighbor gets to bask in anonymity with no repercussions what-so-ever.

I seem to recall my parents raising me to be civil and discuss issues and problems with people to try and work them out first. They did not teach me to call 1-800-SNITCH or go out and hire an attorney as soon as I found out someone was doing something that I did not approve of. I have always assumed that the good people that live near me would have dropped me an e-mail or commented on my web log post to be sure to contact the city to see if any of my planned home repair might require a permit.

Something like, “Hey don’t forget to check into possible required permits when doing your home improvement!”, kind of friendly reminder. In which case I could have responded about exactly what we were doing and if permits were needed.

But instead, I found, much to my dismay and sadness, that we have neighbors that would just as soon chuck a live grenade over our backyard wall and then scamper away into the bushes and snicker.

Thanks for making my friendly and well mannered neighborhood a little bit less of a desirable place to live neighbor! You are doing a great job of making everyone a little more suspicious and untrustworthy of each other. That was your intent, right?

The Lost Journals #4

2011-07-14T09:18:00.000-07:00

August 10, 1996

More snipets of reality from the Lost Journals.

Last weekend while I was going to work on a Saturday, the wife gave me 40 pages of financial material to copy at the office. While on my way out the door she sarcastically said, “Thanks for spending so much quality time with me this weekend.” I made the copies anyway.

The Lost Journals #3

2011-07-13T05:00:00.000-07:00

May 6, 1996

More snipets of reality from the Lost Journals.

This will just be a fast note to advise you of what has gone on recently. This past weekend was not all that great because the wife claims to have had a very bad migraine and was generally in a very bad mood. My weekend activity included, taking the wife to dinner on Friday night, cleaning the yard on Saturday, making her breakfast on Sunday, cleaning the house on Sunday and running errands that she wanted done on Sunday, because she did not feel good enough to do them. This included picking up stepping stones for the yard, 12 of them. I also made her dinner on Sunday night.

My wife found fault with just about everything that I did this weekend, and was particularly upset that I was not talking to her enough, and that I was not paying enough attention to her. She spent most of the weekend sleeping in front of the television with me sitting next to her watching whatever was on. She considers this quality time. If she woke up to find me not there, she got pretty upset.

Sounds like the ideal relationship......for my ex-wife.

The Lost Journals #2

2011-07-11T05:00:00.000-07:00

October 6, 1997

More snipets of reality from the Lost Journals.

My ex-wife had a lot of stress / anxiety related issues that were the constant source of discontent in my first marriage. Exchanges like this were common throughout our five year marriage. This is an actual quote from my ex-wife.

October 6, 1997

“I feel so much better when I don’t have to work. You need to get a good job and make a lot of money so I can stay home all day and not have to work.” (Said on a car ride from our house to a Barnes and Noble book store.)

The Wal-Martians Have Arrived

2011-07-08T08:42:00.000-07:00

From WALMARTIANS

I have this secret fascination with Wal-Mart. I rarely go there, but once in a while my wife needs to pick up some bulk items at cheap prices. Things like 50lb bags of dog food, jumbo rolls of paper towels and paint supplies. Sometimes I tag along.

I tag along, because I find the people that populate these mega-stores to be fascinating. Lets face it, you don’t see these people anywhere else. They come out of their basement caves once a week to stock up on Twinkies and Mac’N’Chese before retreating to their dark cubby holes to watch reruns of Rosanne and Gilligan’s Island.

So as I was wandering the electronics section of our local Super-Store I came upon a new Motorola Xoom tablet. A Xoom is the Android version of the Apple iPad, and it was on display for all the customers to paw and play with.

Like the iPad, it has a camera that you can take pictures with, so I started flipping through some of the images on the tablet. I was immensely entertained at the parade of Walmartians that had played with the device since it had been placed on display. There were literally hundreds of portraits of the cave dwellers on this thing.

Then it dawned on me, an Android powered device should have Bluetooth file transfer capability, just like my Motorola Droid smart phone. By the time my wife found me 15 minutes later, I had downloaded about 50 of the best portraits to the my phone and then left the store.

So without, further delay, I give you the future generation of America. Remember, these are the people that will be taking care of us in our old age, defending our borders and running our factories and retail establishments. These are just the upper crust. To see the entire collection, click on the link at the end of the blog.

Be afraid.....be very afraid.

From WALMARTIANS

It appears that young teenage girls like to pose in outrageous group shots

From WALMARTIANS

Take Us To Your Leader!

From WALMARTIANS

The men seemed to be most concerned with showing off their hats

From WALMARTIANS

I assume this is some sort of 'gang' sign, but have no idea what it means.

From WALMARTIANS

Their parents must be so proud.

From WALMARTIANS

...and you are wearing sunglasses indoors because.....?

From WALMARTIANS

...we be gangsta bitches....Yo!

WALMARTIANS

Click the image for the entire series

The Lost Journals

2011-07-07T10:40:00.000-07:00

October 4, 1997

We have been doing some renovations on our home recently. During this process I have unearthed several volumes of journals that I kept between 1993 and 1998. These were all written during my first marriage and document a rather turbulent time in my life.

All of these journals were typed on typewriters or word processors, since ‘the cloud’ wasn’t invented yet. The entries were all printed out and put into binders and hidden from my ex-wife. I did not realize it at the time, but this was a form of therapy for me. Much like the therapy that this blog affords me in coping with the stress of day-to-day life.

When I unearthed these journals, I realized that times have changed and that thanks to having access to high speed scanners, I could digitize these journal pages and put them on my iPad or any other device, not to mention e-mail them and store them electronically.

After digitizing the files, I have been reading through them on my iPad and have been amused and amazed at what I wrote in the last century..

My first marriage was not a happy or well remembered affair. It lasted about five years and my recollections of it are not very pleasant. I have always written this off to the human habit of recalling traumatic events more often than happy ones. I assumed there must have been good times in the marriage, but I just couldn’t recall them.

After reading through these 15 year old journals, it is evident that there weren’t any good times. While I may have been less than the ideal husband, after reading what was going on back in 1995 it is evident that my ex-wife was a troubled soul that could have benefited from psychiatric help. Sadly, I don't think she ever got any.

I suppose that when you are at the eye of a storm, you really can’t tell how bad it is until you have had a chance to survey all the damage.

So, since I know that almost everyone can’t help but watch a train wreck and that most of you will pull over to the curb to watch a house go up in flames, I am going to be posting some of the snipets from these journal entries on here over the next few months.

I also have some exceptional blogs in the works based on some of the happenings around here recently, but will have to wait for the chaos to die down before I can finish writing them. But these journal entries pretty much write themselves. So in the meantime, I give you the first segment of the long, lost nightmare.....

October 4, 1997: “….the wife was upset when driving to work last week because she was afraid that a member of the chain gang that was working along the side of the highway would try and make an escape. She also noticed that there were Sheriffs Deputies on both sides of the road and on an overpass and they were all armed. If one of the inmates (shackled and wearing black and white stipe suits) did try and escape, she would be caught in the crossfire. She stated that she was going to call the Sheriff’s Department to complain about this.”

(I swear, I am not making this stuff up!)

First Friday Flashbacks

2011-07-01T05:00:00.000-07:00

First published on March 23, 2006. A recollection of being young and free and the first steps toward adulthood.

Running Home In the Dark

There Are Monsters In The Woods

Changes in your life come at odd times. Often they are unexpected. Epiphanies that paint everything that comes after in a different light.

I don't recall the first one I had. But I recall one of the earliest.

I was living in Southern California in the late 1960s. We used to call it life in the fishbowl. My brother and I grew up on military bases. There wasn't any crime, political unrest, or domestic violence on a military base. Everything was orderly and neat. So we all got to stare out at the rest of the world as though we were in a fishbowl. The Vietnam War protests, the summer of love, Woodstock, Martin Luther King Jr., none of these things really had an affect on us back then. We were living in the last bastion of the 1950s. It was a place of cookies in the afternoon, sleepovers and playing hide and seek until long after dark.

When I turned 12 my parents decided to send me to a week long summer camp. I realize now that this was just an excuse for getting me and my brother out of the house so my parents could have some quality alone time. But for me it was a big step. I had never been away from family for that length of time. I was scared but at the same time I was also excited.

As it turned out, I really liked the whole camping thing. You got to stay up late and sleep in a tent. The camp counselors gave us all sorts of things to do to keep us busy. We were outside in the warm southern California weather, where the smell of the dirt and grass mixed with the coastal breeze and made a subtle perfume that I can still smell in my dreams.

There were about 30 of us. We were all young boys between the ages of 8 and 12. We didn't know each other, but we bonded pretty quickly like most kids do. We were living for the moment with a short attention span and lots of sugar and carbohydrates to keep us going. It was all a dreamy blur.

On the last night of the camping weekend there was a big jamboree. It was held near the center of the camping area and our tribe put on a skit that is so traditional when boys camp out in the wild. We had no television or radio, so we had to make our own entertainment. Lord, I would love see that skit on video tape (if it had been invented back then). When it was all over, the counselors told us that the first ones back to our campsites got to light the campfires and start cooking the smores. Smores are those chocolate, graham cracker, marshmallow confections that every camping trip ends with. So we all scattered like rabbits and ran through the night back toward our tents.

I suppose that this was the height of childhood. Running like a pack of wolves through the cool evening air, heavily breathing in the summer night, flying through the darkness, not wanting to be the last one back to camp. As I ran through the trees and the tall grass I heard something. A faint scream. I slowed and turned my head and I heard it again. Even as a young boy I knew the sound or terror. It was a fearful scream and then sobbing. I stopped and started to walk back toward the jamboree area. My mind wrestled with the thought that I was going to be the last one back to camp, but I had to find something out. I was half curious, half afraid.

None of my other companions had stopped. Perhaps they hadn't heard the scream, maybe they were scared, maybe they didn't care. As I walked back a boy came stumbling out of the darkness, he was crying. When he saw me, he screamed and ran to me like a child lost in the woods. Which is what he was. He wasn't hurt, he was just scared. He had never been away from home. He was just a kid frightened of the dark. When everyone scattered toward their tents, he hadn't known the way and was left behind in his indecision.

To him, there were monsters in the woods. The Grimm's Fairy tales were still real. Some of us had learned to suppress our fear with bravado and logic. He wasn't able to do that yet. I put my arm around him and told him it would by OK. I knew what he felt like. Only a few months before I might have been him.

He tried to put on a brave face and not act scared while I walked with him back to camp, but the tears drying on his cheeks sort of ruined that charade. We were the last ones to arrive and the fire was already raging. The others were getting ready to toast their marshmallows. The frightened kid sat at the campfire and eventually joined in the comradery and laughter. We didn't speak of coming back last. He hadn't grown up as fast as the rest of us but he would catch up soon enough. He just wasn't going to catch up that night.

During that lazy California summer I realized there were more important things than running with the pack. That was a big step for a 12 year old boy. I think I understood compassion for the first time in the darkness under that starry night sky. It was the first time I started to become an individual and think for myself. After that week in the woods, I saw the world a little differently. I still do.

The Squeeze

2011-06-30T08:47:00.000-07:00

contemplating the meaning of it all

I am looking for some input from my readers. That includes all you lurkers out there that follow my every word but never bother to post a comment (you know who you are!!!).

These are obviously different economic times. Over the past couple of years, the media has likened the current economic state of affairs to another depression like the Great Depression of the 1930s. The analogies are false. The fundamental playing field is different and that type of economic collapse can’t happen any more. The economy is global these days.

I have often regaled you with antidotes about my job and the surreal nature of it all. Complaining about our workplace is a type of American Sport, since we all believe that we have a better way of doing things and are smarter than our bosses / leaders.

The flip side of the coin is that we (or at least most of us) have jobs. We have a lot of things to be grateful for, like cars, homes, loved ones, pets, broadband Internet access and health care. These are things that most of the world still does without.

But times have changed and are continuing to change. As my generation gets older, we see the change more and more and I must admit, that I am somewhat horrified that the youth of today don’t grasp it. They don’t have a good foundation of how things used to work and believe that the way the world is run today is actually a normal baseline to work forward from.

While my workplace experience is a bit on the skewed side, since I work in the public sector, I know that some of the surreal nature that surrounds my office isn’t true across the spectrum of employment. However, I have talked to others in the private sector and see a lot of similarities.

With the squeeze in global competition and the decline in the number of jobs here at home, I have seen the obvious downsizing in the workplace. Business can no longer ‘over-staff’ a position to take into account turnover, extended medical leaves, vacations and the like. If there is a drop in staffing, the remaining lemmings have to cover the work load. If there is a permanent drop in staff (RIFFING), the remaining lemmings have their workload permanently increased. If there is a permanent drop in staffing and the case loads increase, there tends to be loss of office structure and a noticeable drop in the quality of work output by the organization.

This seems to be permanent. It is a shift based on the forces that have acted upon us by the global economy. If there are hoards of East Asians that have Doctorates and PhDs that are willing to work for minimum wage, the $45/hr factory job in Michigan just isn’t going to be sustainable.

So, what I have seen, at least in my generation is the ‘de-structuring’ of the workplace, where the remaining staff (the hold outs) are doing more and more work, resulting in less and less quality output and extreme levels of stress as we strive to hold onto our benefits and retirement. In my office, important tasks are often forgotten or missed altogether due to staffing / scheduling conflicts. This is the kind of scenario that you would not want to have in a bank, an auto repair garage or a hospital, now is it?

Yet, this appeasers to be the trend at this point. Am I wrong here or is this something that everyone is seeing?

If so, it is not another depression, it is a new form of economic ‘de-construction’, where once highly paid, skilled and competent workers / managers are adjusted back into a global economy and forced to take a reduction in their expectancy of affluence that the previous generation promised.

I would appreciate some comments regarding what all of your perceptions are of our economic outlook and your personal experiences with ‘de-construction’, if any.

Dog Days Of Summer

2011-06-28T11:11:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note to let all of you know that I am still alive and breathing out here in cyber-space (you do care don’t you?).

Things have been busy, which is nothing new. There are too many irons in my fire to count here, but I will be trying to document them in the future when the fire dies down.

The employment picture continues to be surreal but my long term readers knows that this isn’t anything new. But the level of the surreal-ness never ceases to astound me these days.

The wife and I are engaged in numerous household upgrades and projects. There will be a bunch of pictures posted to document all this upgradeable goodness when all the projects are done. However, it might be the end of the summer before all the dust settles.

In the meantime, I have been reading a lot of books and watching a lot of movies, because with the average temperature outside hovering at around 108 degrees (115 today), I am not in the mood to do a lot of yard work.

The books include "Catcher In The Rye" and Sarah Palin's "Going Rogue". Also unearthed some old journals that I wrote back in the early to mid-90s. Will be going through some of those in the future and posting some interesting tidbits. Boy have I and times changed.

The wife took me on a mystery date to the ‘iPic Theater’ in Scottsdale, Arizona last weekend, which was very interesting. This is an upper end movie theater with sofa seating, your own waitress who brings you food and drinks (wooo whooo Merlot) during the movie. Not cheap, but a fun thing to do. We watched Pixar’s “Cars-2”. If you liked the first one, you would like this one. But don’t expect anything really, really deep.

Watched “Albino Alligator” on Laserdisc a few weeks ago. A little known film by Kevin Spacey, starring Matt Dillon and Faye Dunaway. I have to admit it was interesting. Not a great film and bit implausible, but it made you think and had a very interesting ending.

So stay tuned for the long line of project blogs that I will be posting in the coming weeks, so you can marvel at all the handy work that my wife and I have lined up for this summer.

You're Not Helping

2011-06-10T14:31:00.000-07:00

I would like to start out by saying, I am not racist, nor am I prejudice. At least not any more than the average American. I do have some qualms with stereo-typical ethnic behavior, such as wearing your pants around your knees so you underwear shows, or pushing a shopping cart full of Twinkies and frozen pizza 12 blocks and then leaving the cart in a local park for someone else to push back to the store.

This is a melting pot after all, and all those Irish, and Polish Europeans helped make this country what it is. They defeated fascism and made us into a great economic and political powerhouse on the planet. The Chinese helped build the railroads, and African Americans and Hispanics tamed the wild west and fought in the Civil War. People that come here, make a difference and work within the system to become part of the system are an asset.

Unfortunately, this isn’t really very common anymore. Many of the immigrants that I interact with at my job are here seeking the riches of entitlements. They want health care, good paying jobs, free food, and free assistance.

During this last week, I had to facilitate two hearings. These hearings consisted of numerous meetings that had to be coordinated and reviewed on a schedule throughout the day. The schedules started at 8:30am and typically ran till past 4pm in the afternoon. Many people are invited to these meetings since they deal with child welfare and and other social issues. Invitations are sent to all the interested parties to attend the meetings, both in English AND Spanish. The interested parties are not required to attend, so we never know exactly how many people will be at each meeting during the day.

So it was with a bit of disgust, that twice (2 times) this week, a Frito Bandito and his old lady showed up for a meeting, not being able to speak a word of English, and demanded that we supply them with translators so they could participate. We don’t have a problem with this, except for the fact that the invitations for the meetings state IN SPANISH, that if you need an interpreter, call ahead of time so one can be arranged for you.

These interested parties read the invitations, they knew when and where to show up, but they didn’t bother to inform us of their handicap before showing up. So the end result, is that we have to scramble to find an interpreter that can teleconference into the meeting for them to understand what is going on. This means that a 35 minute meeting runs 45 minutes overtime. In turn, this makes all the other interested parties that show up for their meetings have to wait an extra HOUR for their meetings to begin.

If that alone was not bad enough. Both of these individuals decided to cop an attitude in the meeting about how not enough was being done for them by the 'system'.

I have this sneaking suspicion, that if I got arrested for speeding in Mexico, and I coped an attitude with the magistrate in Ciudad Juarez and told them that their speed limits were stupid and then demanded an interpreter to explain that to everyone, I might not be seeing U.S. soil again for a very long time.

This is a ‘melting pot’ folks, not a smorgasbord. Learn how to blend in and become part of the whole instead of standing off to the side screaming for attention. You're not helping your ethnicity, your race or your cause.

They Should Call It Crack-Pad

2011-06-07T10:44:00.000-07:00

I finally broke down and got one of these last weekend. I am selling my motorcycle and figured I owed myself something for the loss. So I went out and bought this to console myself.

First of all, I really didn't 'WANT' one of these. They appeared nifty and all, but I have this sneaking suspicion that this is where the world is going, so I figured I better jump on the train before the last car left the station.

So I plunked down my debt card and picked up a 32 gigabyte WiFi only model of the Ipad-2. While I was at the Apple Store purchasing the thing, the Sales Associate told me that he would check, but that he couldn't garrantee that they would have the model I wanted in stock. He said that when shipments arrived, they usually sold out within 3 hours, so I might have to take whatever I could get regarding the models they had on hand. I was lucky, I was able to get one of the last two of the model I wanted from the shipment that had arrived 2 hours before I did.

I have to assume that they are backing up semi-truck loads of cash to Steve Jobs estate every hour because of these things.

I have been setting up the device for the last several days, configuring wifi setting in our home and loading applications (apps) that I am downloading from the Apple App Store (more boat loads of cash for Apple) and generally trying to figure out Apple's iOS operating system.

So far.........I am impressed. I mean really impressed. I can see where this device is a game changer. It isn't a replacement for a computer or a smartphone, but it does drastically change the way you use the internet and communicate with it.

One of the reasons I have not been reading or writing blogs that much of late (besides the yearly melt-down in staffing at my office) is that I can see where I will be reading almost everything on-line from this device, once I have it all set up.

The iPad2 would make an excellent gaming device, if you wanted to use it for that purpose. As for me, I have no interest in that what-so-ever. As a reading device it has almost limitless potential.

For example, one application that I have come across is called 'FlipBoard'. This App is going to change the way I read and view blogs forever. While it is hard to describe, it takes the entire content of my online Google Reader and reformats into a magazine style layout. Imagine picking up a copy of Newsweek, but instead of news stories, all the blogs you read are laid out in REALLY slick formating with pictures, graphics and text and you can just browse through them like reading a magazine or book. I gotta tell ya, it is sweet. It makes all of my fellow bloggers look really good.

It wasn't cheap, but I am glad I got it. It is like putting a turbo-charger on your socially networked life. I am looking forward to catching up on all the stuff I haven't read for a while as soon as things settle down around here and I can cuddle up with the iPad and a cup of coffee.

There is only one negative that I would have to comment on regarding the iPad. It isn't lite. It is actually pretty solid and heavy at around 2.5 lbs. That isn't a lot, but if you hold it for about 45 minutes, your arm is going to get tired. Needless to say, I will be building up my arm muscles over the next few weeks.

First Friday Flashbacks

2011-06-03T05:00:00.000-07:00

First published: July 24, 2008
One of the many lessons that life has taught me. I hope my grandchildren read this, before it is too late.

Back Of The Bus

Never really arrives

One of the axioms of life that I have learned is, 'It all depends on where you sit'. Much like the 'Glass half empty, glass half full' question, it tells a lot about a person even though they don't know it.

From the time we were in grade school, certain children always wanted to sit in the back of the bus. They usually wanted to be as far away from authority (the bus driver) as possible, so they wouldn't be caught doing things they weren't supposed to.

Fast forward to college, and I realized that the same thing applied to 20-somethings. The slacker students always sat in the back of the class. They rarely lasted more than a semester. In the beginning, I usually sat somewhere in the middle of the classes. I suppose I was a slight under-achiever.

Then it dawned on me in my junior year. If you wanted to get ahead in life you had to take on the world and meet it face to face. The "A" students always sat in the front row. So I started sitting in the front row. I quickly realized that when you do this, you are mano y mano with the instructor, you have to have your homework done, you have to be prepared and sharp. You have to be engaged. You aren't a spectator anymore, you are in the bull ring.

While taking the bus home from work, I usually stand near the exit. That way, I don't have to worry about finding a seat and who might end up sitting next to me. The back of the bus is always crowded, with the transients, the homeless and the rebellious, slacker youth.

I am so glad I learned to move to the head of the class in college. Once you muster up the courage to sit in the front row, you will never sit in the back of the bus again.

How Gullible Are We?

2011-05-26T09:50:00.000-07:00

"Your Vote Counts...Really?"

It has been a busy past couple of weeks. As is usual this time of year, my job is melting down and we are deep within the depths of triage management at my office. Add to this the fact that my wife and I were off on a 4 day 5th wedding anniversary weekend and it leaves little time for getting on the Internet and reading blogs or browsing ebay auctions.

So, while I am picking up the pieces of my life right now and have some killer web logs in 'draft' mode waiting in the wings, I thought I would throw this little ditty out here for consideration.

As I have stated previously, one of our guilty pleasures are some of the more insane reality shows that infest broadcast media these days. I never miss "The Amazing Race" and "Top Shot" has its moments, but one of our long standing favorites is "Dancing with the Stars". Never mind that they really aren't 'stars' and that the show is more geared to hip-hop and popular culture than ballroom dancing.

So we tuned into the final show to see Hines Ward get the mirrorball and get all teary eyed thanking his Korean-American mother and ignoring the absent father that abandoned him so many years ago.

My issue here is, how do we KNOW he won. The last dancer standing on this show is chosen by some mystical calculation of judges scores and phone in votes. However, NEVER in the history of this show, have they bothered to explain HOW these totals are calculated nor what the actual numbers are. Did Hines win by a landslide or by less than 1%. Tuff shit viewer, we aren't going to tell you.

I have this sneaking suspicion that the winner of the show, has the agent that offers the most in kickbacks to the producers. How else could you explain how Bristol Palin and Kirstie Alley lasted into the finals?

It is 'entertainment' folks, not 'competition'. They are there to sell soft drinks and pharmaceuticals, not dance competitively. Let’s get real here. Would we accept the election of the President of the United States without knowing the numbers, or would we just assume that Sara Palin is Commander In Cheif just because Tom Brokaw tells us she is?

I will be back in the next week or so with more enlightening and better written web logs, but in the mean time, follow me on:

Flickr
Twitter
and
Facebook

I Try, I Really Do!

2011-05-10T10:10:00.000-07:00

It all started back in late 1990s. I discovered that there was data loss on the database. Information was being deleted for no apparent reason, so I wrote an e-mail to all my superiors and the support center in the Information Technology Division. I never head anything back.

I raised the issue again in a meeting we had three months later and everyone around the table was SHOCKED at the data loss. “Why didn’t you tell anyone?”, my program manager asked me. “I did.”, I replied, I e-mailed everyone sitting at this table about it three months ago, didn’t anyone read it, I can forward it to you again, it still sits in my sent folder waiting for a reply.”

I could hear the shuffling of feet under the table and the nervous glances that everyone started throwing at each other. I was informed after the meeting by a supervisor in the hallway that “no one ever reads my e-mails”. If something was important, I had to force others to listen to me. I couldn’t type the word “FIRE” to someone, I had to go and yell it in their face.

Since that day, I have written several long and detailed memos / e-mails up the corporate ladder where I work regarding ‘issues’ that we have in our work process and redesigning our business model. All of them have gone into the same black hole of the e-mail waste bin.

I have also found that yelling it in their faces didn’t do much better. I raised these same issues in key management meetings, and pressed for time lines and focus groups to move these changes toward implementation. I am told they would be discussed later, but they never were.

So in the interim, I continue to run the race with concrete sneakers, doing three times the amount of work that is necessary to accomplish my job.

Yesterday, I got an e-mail from my manager regarding a report that is generated every month from our database that is showing expired information. I fixed this report 5 months ago and e-mailed out a draft of it to see if it met with everyones approval before setting it to run on the database server. You guessed it, I never heard back from anyone. I re-forwarded the e-mail to him and told him that I would schedule to run on the server by the end of the week.....as soon as I have run a few more laps in my lead track shoes.

If you look at the top of the right side panel of my web log you will see a count down timer for my retirement. That little clock cannot tick fast enough for me these days.

First Friday Flashbacks

2011-05-06T05:00:00.000-07:00

I am glad I write this stuff down, otherwise I would forget it....and some of this stuff is just too good to forget. Memories from the rails.

(first published: August 14, 2008)

Stream-Liner

Levi and the Train

The ground dropped away as the train rolled onto the trestle. Levi leaned toward the glass of the observation car and looked down. Three hundred feet below, the river looked green and placid. The brim of his Amish hat bumped against the window glass as his baby daughter shifted in his arms. This land was so vast and empty, nothing like his lush farmland in the upper midwest.

As the train soared above the Texas river he glanced around the observation car at his fellow passengers.

The shutter clicked on the Nikon AE6, capturing the placid face of the young Amish man as he starred at the broad Texas plain. Hiro flicked the film advance lever as he lowered the camera. He had taken more than 30 rolls of 35mm film. With each click of the shutter, another expression, another face, another story. He wondered what they were all thinking. Behind him he heard a cell phone ring.

Courtney looked at the caller-ID for a moment and then flipped open her phone and held it to her ear.

"So, you're going to talk to me again?"

It was evident that the person on the other end of the phone was her girlfriend in Santa Fe. Courtney was on her way to see her, but there had been a misunderstanding the previous day. The girlfriend had been told that Courtney was really coming to see her live-in boyfriend. Everyone within the Stream-liner got to hear the conversation, whether they wanted to or not.

"That's crazy, why would I do that? You know me better than that!"

The great gorge outside the windows went unnoticed. She was focused on the drama in her mind and nothing else really mattered.

Robert gently squeezed Lisa's hand and smiled at her. She grinned back at him as they listened to Courtney's one-sided conversation. They had met in High School 35 years ago. This was their journey back, across a lifetime of memories. Memories that spanned wars, jobs, marriages, children and loss. They both knew that the drama that surrounded Courtney would be just a footnote in her life, and not the chapter that she now thought it would be.

As the train rolled back onto the Texas prairie, Lisa leaned across the isle and asked Levi, "What your daughter's name?"

"Rebecca", was his reply as he gently bounced her on his knee.

"She is adorable."

----------------------

This is a condensed slice of life from my trip earlier this year from Philadelphia to Phoenix by rail. All of these characters were present on the train as was the actual scene. The blog graphic is Levi standing next to the train in Ft Worth, Texas. You can read more about this trip in the original blog posted about it, Travels With Casper.

From The Mouth Of Babes

2011-05-04T10:43:00.000-07:00

Cheap Child Labor

Last weekend, we took the ‘munchkin’ for another day. The munchkin is our grandson, Connor. For a look back at the first weekend that we had the little tyke, check out “The Teachable Moment” from last month.

This time around we were set to teach Connor the value of physical labor and hard work. He was going to learn how to mow my lawn. At long last, I was promoted to supervisor of the yard and I had a minon to do the dirty work for me, or so I thought.

Prior to his arrival, we had to go and pick him up from his parents house, who live about 30 miles away. We had my mother-in-law (MIL) in tow as well because we were running some errands with her. She lives in a retirement community.

After picking up Connor, we had an early dinner at a local oriental restaurant, then took the MIL home and headed back to our place to start yard maintenance 101. As we pulled into the retirement home where the MIL lives, the following conversation took place between the MIL (who is 85) and Connor (who is 8).

Connor: “Grandma GeGe, why don’t YOU own a car?”

Grandma GeGe: “I can’t really afford one Connor, they are pretty expensive.”

Connor: “oh”

Connor: “Thats because you are poor!”

At this point the wife and I just looked at each other and cringed. The MIL just looked at Connor and smiled.

My MIL never planned on living as long as she has and she made no attempts to plan for her retirement. She has no savings and lives off of social security only. My wife and I have to help with her rent and expenses. No one else will.

About a year ago, my MIL fell pray to scam artists that robbed her of over $1,000 with the promise that she was a multi-million dollar lottery winner. You can read more about that episode in the web log “The Wolves Among Us”. It was because of this episode that we had to take control over what was left of her bank accounts and take away her car and Internet access.

As we dropped my MIL off at her apartment and left the retirement community parking lot, my wife and I turned to Connor in the back seat.

“We need to have a little chat Connor.”

On the way home, was another teachable moment about honesty, respect and not always telling the truth.

We have a long way to go with this kid.

Essential Cinema - 50

2011-04-29T06:31:00.000-07:00

From Cinema

The Shoes Of The Fisherman

ACTORS:
Anthony Quinn ... Kiril Lakota
Laurence Olivier ... Piotr Ilyich Kamenev (as Sir Laurence Olivier)
Oskar Werner ... Fr. David Telemond
David Janssen ... George Faber
Vittorio De Sica ... Cardinal Rinaldi
Leo McKern ... Cardinal Leone
John Gielgud ... The Elder Pope (as Sir John Gielgud)
Barbara Jefford ... Dr. Ruth Faber

DIRECTOR
Michael Anderson

SCREENPLAY
James Kennaway
John Patrick
Morris L. West novel

CINEMATOGRAPHER
Erwin Hillier

SYNOPSIS:
A Russian bishop exiled to a Soviet gulag for 20 years is thrust into the Papacy by forces beyond his control.

CONCEPT IN RELATION TO THE VIEWER:
How power can come in unexpected ways to those that least expect it. Those that live a simple life can sometimes see things much more clearly than those at the center of the storm.

PROS AND CONS
I liked this film. It has a lot of flaws, but the concept and pageantry of the film makes it somewhat epic. It delves into some of the hidden ceremonies within the Catholic Church and gives a sense of what it must be like to be a part of the oldest organization known to mankind. Anthony Quinn alone is worth watching. He plays the lead role of Bishop Kiril Lakota with understatement and intensity. As a simple man that has seen more horror in his life than most, he finds himself a duck-out-of-water in the political intrigue that surrounds the Vatican. He must find ways to cope and change the direction of the church and its place in a changing world. All of the actors in the film seem to be relishing their roles, which make them appear larger than life.

What I didn't care for in the film were the sub-plots. The philandering television reporter played by David Jansen served little more than to narrate some of the intricacies of the Catholic Church. His estranged relationship with his wife did nothing to move the plot along and seemed to be little more than a distraction. His huge metal-ball hand-held microphone also seemed just downright odd.

The sub-plot of Fryer Telemond with his writings about the meaning of faith and the concept of what God is also seemed to have little relation to the plot, with the possible exception of making Kiril question what faith is and to think outside the box. Oscar Werner is a joy to watch, but I think he was somewhat wasted in this role.

The only other thing I found disappointing was the soundtrack. For a film of this scope and grandeur, I would have expected something more sweeping in scope and religious in tone. What Alex North gives us is something akin to 1960 pop inspired background music which just did not do it for me.

This film is somewhat dated. It was shot in the 1960s and predicted what the world might have been like in the 1980s, with the cold war adversaries of the United States, the U.S.S.R. and China still playing a game of nuclear brinksmanship. The future didn't turn out this way, but it is still interesting to speculate how it could have been.

This film is a part of my LaserDisc Collection which is located on the LaserDisc Database.

Clicking on the "Essential Cinema" title will take you to the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) entry for this film. The listing of all the LaserDiscs that I have reviewed on IMDB can be found here.

Clicking here will take you to a listing of all the "Essential Cinema" reviews in my Blog.

Am I Obsessed?

2011-04-27T05:00:00.000-07:00

I made a decision a few weeks ago, that I was going to stop collecting LaserDiscs. I have over 600 of them, all filed and stored in plastic sleaves for protection. I have set up a small media room to view them all (when I retire) and have them all cataloged online.

So, last weekend, the wife wanted to go out and find a new area rug for the dining room prior to Easter dinner and she wanted me to go with her(to help her carry the thing if she found one she liked). I agreed, even though I was bone tired after having worked in the yard most of the day.

We found the rug she wanted and loaded it into our truck. On the way home I needed to stop by Ace Hardware to pick up a toilet part for the toilet that was re-installing. Before we go there, we deceided to stop by a local Savers (a type of thrift store here) to see if there was anything that caught our eye.

While browsing through the old record albums,.....I came upon the Holy Grail of Laserdisc collections. I found over 45 of them, many unopened and all either hard to find concert disks or foreign films that are rare as hens teeth, even on DVD. [Brucie loves him some Truffaut, Goddard and Fellini] At $3.99 each, they were cheaper than anything I could find on ebay. Needless to say, I plunked down almost $200 for the whole collection and wheeled them out to the truck.

So now my collection is pushing 680 Laserdiscs. According to my online LaserDisc tracking database account, that is over 1,199.3 hours of video that I can watch, which is well over 50 days worth of viewing, non-stop. If you want to browse my whole collection you can see it on the LaserDisc Spreadsheet in my Google documents account.

So, is this healthy, or am I a some sort of obsessed fruit cake?

The Generalized Rant

2011-04-26T11:37:00.001-07:00

Welcome To The Collective

I don't usually rant anymore (although it was the original inspiration for this blog back in 2004), but this past weekend was an exceptional one, so allow me to digress.

Rant #1

So you think you are an individual?

A lot of things have been going through my head in the last few days. Most of these things are annoying me. So in an attempt to avoid scheduling a doctor visit to get a prescription for Prozac, I am just going to unload on you....my fine readers.

About a month ago, there was a syndicated anxiety story that came out of the morning news shows about how the camera in your smart phone ‘records’ the information about where the pictures were actually taken by using GPS coordinates. The worry being, that you could take a picture of your 5 year old daughter in her cute Easter Sunday dress, post it on Facebook, and that tech savvy pedophiles could determine exactly where you live so they could come and snatch your daughter off your front lawn. (can you say living in fear people?)

Now this past week, the media is all over the discovery that Android phones and iPhones have been tracking the user’s movements and they can tell where you have been for the past 3 months. (Gasp, big brother is watching!)

This all leads back the naive concept that most people believe that the Internet is this anonymous place where you can do all sorts of things and no one will ever know where you have been or what you have done. It is time to wake up and sip some Red Bull people. Technology and the Internet is the most track-able and public place every created. Anyone can track back an IP address and know where and who sent that scathing anonymous letter to your ex-spouse.

The police can subpoena any phone company and get records of who and when you talked to someone for as far back as a decade.

All newer smart phones have GPS signals that let police and the phone company know right where you are at any given time. This comes in especially handy if you call 911, since the dispatcher can send first responders right to your location, in case you are in a strange city and don’t know the cross streets for that house that is on fire.

Thank goodness those pedophiles aren’t that bright, since even an erased hard drive full of naked little boys can be restored and all those downloads from Denmark can and will be used in a court of law.

The fact is people....we are a collective. Just like that race of aliens on Star Trek called “The Borg”. Except, the Borg were a hive like race where individuals were assimilated into a collective which had no empathy or soul. What the Borg lacked was good marketing, like Verizon and ATT. If being part of the collective was super-cool with all sorts of gadgets and distractions (think Farmville and Mafia Wars), then folks would be jumping on the Borg-Wagon.

If you want to be an anonymous individual, put down your phone and live in a shack. It won’t be nearly as much fun, trust me. And even then you will be watched.

Remember that Hubble Space telescope? The telescope that peers into distance galaxies to determine the origins of the universe? Well, economies of scale state that it just isn’t practical to build only ONE of something that complex. The U.S. government built several, and launched them all secretly. Only they aren’t aimed at space, they are aimed at us. Those babies can see a dime on the ground and tell if it is heads or tails. They can also definitely tell what you are doing whenever someone in power wants to know.

The Taliban never see or hear the Predator or Global Hawk drones that fly at 10,000 feet and watch their every move. You won’t either. To say that big brother is watching us would be an understatement. We are trained to despise this invasion of our privacy, until we are lost in the wilderness or trying to find an escaped criminal on the loose in our neighborhood, and then it is OK.

The world has changed people. Adjust your thinking and stop paying attention to all the anxiety news that you see in the media. They are pandering to you because they believe you are chumps with loose change who can be talked into buying sugar water and cheap threads at Old Navy.

Rant #2

Donald Trump and the Presidency.

I don’t know if you think Mr. Trump is a savvy businessman that knows how to delegate or if he is nothing more than a flamboyant P.T. Barnum media whore. But the fact that he is thrust into the national spotlight solely on his ability to manipulate the media speaks volumes of how the concept of politics has changed.

Training and commitment to serving the public good are no longer a prerequisite. Now it is just money and the ability to project a persona in front of a camera. I personally doubt that Mr. Trump would be effective as a president, but I could be wrong. He might be our next Theodore Roosevelt in the wings, willing to walk softly and carry a big stick. I personally hope that Ivanka Trump is made press secretary...(hubba hubba, what a news conference that would make).

I just can’t help but think that the vetting process to find a national leader seems awfully bastardized if our primary criteria is how many times their face appears on a super-market tabloid that we see when we are checking out at Safeway or Piggly Wiggly. If that is the case, then Angelina Jolie has some killer chops for being Secretary of State.......(grooooowwwlll).

I have learned to strip away all of the folklore that was taught to us in social studies and high school history and get down to the real nitty-gritty of what this country was all about and how it was ‘supposed’ to be run.

The old men in white wigs back at Independence Hall in Philadelphia didn’t envision the United States as it is today. They saw it as something totally different. A few key points;

They only envisioned men voting. Women and slaves were not educated enough to be in the know about important matters.

It was assumed that only ‘landed gentry’ or ‘business owners’ would vote. Laborers, were sort of grouped together with the women and the slaves. Jefferson pushed through the whole one man one vote concept, but that was later modified by Hamilton through his argument for Federalism.

In Hamilton's argument, the populace as a whole, could give their ‘opinion’ at the polls and vote at the local level, but when it came to matters of state, ‘electors’ would be elected that would vote on their behalf and in their best interest, regardless of how the populace voted. Therefore, we live in a Republic and not a Democracy.

The founding fathers did not see the Presidency as a position of policy making. The President was set forth to do ONLY two things. He was the commander of the armies and would lead the country in war. He had the power of veto if he felt that the Congress was not acting in the best interest of the country.

Everything else in government was envisioned to be done by the Senate and House. Foreign policy, budgets, interstate commerce, weights and measures, and the creation of all laws were supposed to be overseen by congress. The current power of the presidency has ‘evolved’ over time to be a policy making wing of the government.

Franklin, Hamilton and Jefferson all saw a republic that would be represented by numerous political parties, as many as 15 or 20. Not just Democrats and Republicans. They know that discourse and compromise comes from many factions working together. When we just have two parties, it is a win / lose mentality which fosters extreme partisanship.

When a few select power brokers (the DNC and the RNC) present us with candidates for high office, the reality is that these are fabricated choices that have specific speaking points bundled together to appeal to the largest voting blocks. This in effect, means that the average voter ends up voting for the less of two evils. Not the candidate that they truly want to represent their ideals.

This is akin to being given the choice between Mussolini and Hitler. Benito is charismatic and makes the trains run on time. Adolf is a real organizer and is ruthless at getting things done. Which one do you want? If you make the stupid statement that you want neither, they are both DICTATORS!, then you are shunned for not supporting the 'American Way'. Voting for a failed system, only supports the failure of the system, it won't change anything.

Which is why, I don't really care if Mr. Trump gets into office, if he does nothing will change. It will just make for slightly better news copy, when he tells the President of France, "Nicholas, you're a cheese eating surrender monkey, Your Fired!"

Wal-Martion Landing Zone

2011-04-26T06:20:00.001-07:00

P1020671_2_3_tonemapped, a photo by lotus_07 on Flickr.

Via Flickr:
Contemplating the meaning of life in a Walmart Parking Lot. This image is more of an experiment than anything else. It is comprised of three long exposures (over 3 seconds each). The camera was propped on the hood of our car, while I waited for my wife to come put of the store. Images processed in Photomatix software. Shot with a Panasonic Lumix Digital set to manual mode. f-stop of 8.0 with shutter speeds between 2 and 8 seconds.

My Web Log: Hypocrisy

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Hiding Out

2011-04-26T06:12:00.001-07:00

P1020652
Originally uploaded by lotus_07

Self Portrait, Panasonic Lumix Digital Camera. Blog Posting Test.

See the original here.

Droid Dump #2

2011-04-19T13:26:00.001-07:00

Random Scenes From Life

I have more than one web log. This is the main blog where I post most of my writing. I also have a picture blog hosted on Flickr where I post most of the images, either film or digital that I produce. There is a final web log, that is my YouTube account, where I post videos and motion pictures.

But I take a lot of pictures that never make it onto any of these web logs. Great artist don't produce perfect creations all the time. A lot of what they do ends up in the dumpster. The public only gets to see the good stuff that they want you to see.

In order to safe guard the voluminous amount of memories that I take with my smart phone, I have learned that it is best to download and archive what is on my smart phone from time to time, least it get lost or stolen. I have set up a folder on my Apple Mobile Me account for this purpose. I have just finished uploading the last quarters worth of images from my smart phone.

So if you want to check out a lot of the random stuff I have been doing, click on the web log title above or on this link to see what I have been up to.

(if you want to check out Droid Dump #1, it can be found here.

Illuminating The Neighborhood

2011-04-12T09:11:00.000-07:00

How Much Bureaucracy Does It Take To Change A Light Bulb?

This is an actual e-mail that I sent last week to the city councilman that represents the neighborhood where we live in Phoenix, Arizona. It is pretty self-explanatory. You can't really be too upset over something that you don't have and never expected to get. But don't promise us something and then never deliver, that just makes people angry.

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Dear Councilmen Nowakowski,

I am one of your constituents living in the Encanto-Palmcroft Historic Neighborhood. I am writing this e-mail concerning the Historic Street Light Restoration Project that has been slated for our neighborhood for quite some time.

The Encanto-Palmcroft Historic Preservation Association (EPHPA) was advised of this project in the summer of 2009. The City Historic Preservation office made a presentation to the EPHPA that was very impressive and comprehensive. They indicated that work on restoring the street lights would commence in January 2010 and take about three months to complete.

Suffice to say, that it is now April of 2011 and to my knowledge, no work has been done on this project. It was the EPHPA understanding that this project was being funded by a Federal Historic Preservation Grant that the city had applied for. The money for the project was approved, available and could not be used for any other historic projects.

I understand that there were some delays regarding design specifics that had to be resubmitted, and due to staff turnover because of the ongoing city budget crisis, however, this delay has passed the extreme and is now approaching the ridiculous. Many residents are doubtful the restoration will ever take place.

For a project that should cost the city nothing and in turn beautify our neighborhood to take this long reinforces the cynical attitude that many of my friends and neighbors have regarding government in general.

While I am not blaming your office for this delay, this is the sort of mismanagement that your office should be watching out for regarding the management of the city center and the historic neighborhoods. I believe that there must be contractors that could be creating jobs with this grant money. It would also have been a point of pride to have the street lights on display for our recent Historic Home Tour in March 2011.

We have our home tour once every two years. Do you think it might be possible to have the street light restoration project completed by our next tour in 2013?

Sincerely,

Bruce Johnson
EPHPA Newsletter Editor
XXXX X XXXXX XX
Phoenix, AZ 85007

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It has been almost four days....and I have never received a follow-up response. I'll keep you posted. Although many of my neighbors have read this and have applauded the content.

The Mexico Option

2011-04-05T09:36:00.000-07:00

Bruce & Sue On The Beach

Sometime in the near future, my wife and I plan on leaving. Where we will end up we haven’t decided. We just know that we can’t stay here. Phoenix, Arizona is not a good place for your health, physical or mental.

We have a lot of friends that say the same thing. They are just biding their time until they can leave. In fact, we don’t know a single person that actually plans on staying in Phoenix and retiring here. This seems a bit odd, considering that just two years ago this was the second fastest growing city in the country behind Las Vegas. Something must be attracting people here.

There are many reasons why long-term Phoenicians no longer want to stay here. Personally, the reasons that my wife and I have is the hypocrisy of the infrastructure here. Governments and business here claim to have a higher standard than they actually do. This manifests an inability of almost any organization in Arizona to do the simplest task correctly, if at all.

The latest instance of this type of thing occurred yesterday. I had to take part of my day off to pick up a check from Phoenix City Hall. Now mind you, this is my day off from work, and I conservatively consider my time to be at least $40/hr on my days off. I don’t get a lot of them and they are VALUABLE to me.

The check I was to pick up was a refund for some historic preservation work that was done to my mother’s house. My mother past away last year before the work was completed. When it was completed, the city issued the check to my mother....who was deceased.

So I took this check to my bank with my mother's death certificate and a letter showing me as the executor of her estate. The bank would not accept the check. They said that they would not accept it unless it had my name on it.

So we went back to the city and requested that they reissue the check. This had to be approved by a committee and they came back to us stating that they could only issue the check with my mother’s name (since she had entered into the contract with the city), but they could issue it as payable to my mother OR me OR my brother. We agreed to this and they stated they would cut the check and mail it to us.

Months went by and we heard nothing. We contacted the city and they stated they had mailed it, but it never arrived. We requested a stop payment and a new check issued, which we would pickup. They phoned yesterday that the check was ready. I picked it up and noticed that was made out incorrectly. It was made out my mother OR myself AND my bother. This won’t work because my brother lives in a different state and is frequently out of the country. The bank refused to accept it again, so now we have to ask that the check be reissued a third time.

What is the end result? This has taken almost 10 months to resolve and we still are not done. The cost in man hours to my wife and I is probably in excess of $1,000. (Remember that $40/hr figure from above?) The check is for only $4,000.

The issue here isn’t the money. The issue here is that this is the NORM. I have never had any dealings with government or business in this state where this type of red tape and incompetency was NOT the case. Gone are the days when you filled out a form, spoke to a competent individual and a problem was solved or service was rendered correctly.

Yet, we are still told the lie that organizations and civil service are competent and well run.

So this all means that something that used to take 3 hours and $80 to complete or fix, now takes 3 weeks and $800. Yet we are still promised 3 hours and $80. Repeat this scenario four or five times a week, and you understand why everyone wants to leave.

However, I have been around long enough to realize that a lot of this is just perception. It isn’t that everyone else is incompetent. The problem is that my expectations of others ability to do their jobs correctly is too high. I should learn to expect less and be happy as a clam if anything gets done all! This appears to be the mindset that I am supposed to have. Unfortunately, it isn’t the mindset that my parents instilled in me when I was growing up. They taught me that there is always a better way of doing things if we just work hard and think. I am not yet willing to give up those lessons that they taught me. I remember the days when things DID work and I miss them.

Which is why the wife and I have been contemplating the Mexico option. We go to Mexico often and we love it more each time we go and find it harder and harder to come back when the vacation is over.

It isn’t that Mexico is any better run than Phoenix, Arizona. In fact, if anything it is run worse and is a bit more corrupt than the United States. But they have one thing going for them what we don’t. They don’t have higher expectations. For them, it is a good day when the car starts and you don’t have a tooth ache. If their day ends with a cold beer and a shrimp cocktail, it was a good day. They know that most things don't work and they are OK with that.

Better to live in a place where everyone expects nothing, than in a place where everyone expects something and gets nothing.

First Friday Flashbacks

2011-04-01T05:00:00.000-07:00

Salt and Pepper

Because there is an opera that surronds all of us. We either sit in the audience or get up on stage. Don't be a wall flower.
(First Published March 14, 2007)

The Space In Between

Black & White, Mustard and Ketchup, Ying & Yang....you get the idea. Everything has its counterpart.

On my recent day off from work (I take a lot of them, seniority has it's perks) I took my car into the shop to have some work done on it. If you have read enough of my ramblings, you know that my car is not a practical thing; it is more of a hobby. It is also more of an expensive hobby. I guess it is considered one of those mid-life crisis toys that men get when they turn 50. It is also one of those things that every 18 year old dreams of having. Let me tell all you young'uns one thing, the reality isn't quite what you dreamed it would be.

So on my day off I am driving the "Red Rocket" to the other side of town for some $150/hour TLC. I am passing folks left and right and turning a few heads as I go, which is basically what this car is designed to do. More than once, I have driven down the interstate and thought to myself that "I am living the dream", while at the same time calculating in my head how much it is costing me to traverse each mile of asphalt.

I ended up at the dealer and droped off my toy, handed over the keys, chit-chated for a while and left. The dealer has never worked on the car for less than 10 days and I knew I wouldn't be seeing the Red Rocket again for a while. That is just part of owning an expensive adult toy. There are long periods of separation.

Since my wife was home sleeping off some anesthesia from a recent dentist visit and in no shape to drive a car, I hopped on the local bus system for the 2 hour bus ride back to our house. This was the other side of the coin.

Phoenix is a driving town. It is built on the assumption that everyone has an automobile. Although, Phoenix has improved its bus system over the past few years. They had to, with the shifting economy and the influx of immigrants that need to ride it. This city is really spread out and you can't walk anywhere, especially when it is 110 degrees in the summer.

I boarded the west bound bus at its terminus and grabbed a prime seat. What I got to see over the next 2 hours was a succession of folks getting on and off the bus at almost every stop. There were construction workers with tools, office workers, students, elder folks in wheelchairs, some transients, and a whole mess of young Hispanic woman with several toddlers in tow. After a few stops, the bus was standing room only.

As I sat in my chair with my sunglasses over my eyes and my iPod plugged into my ears, I got to watch this whole inner-city opera of characters come and go to the strains of Nino Rota's music composed for Federico Fellini's early films of the 1950s and 60s. It was all a bit surreal.

I mused how each of them would react to driving the rocket to their destination. I wasn't being smug or condesencding. I just wondered if they thought they would ever be living their dream and what it might be.

I as I stared into their faces, I saw the cross section of America that many people don't see while commuting to work in their Chevrolets and Lexus. Some of these bus riders had aspirations and hopes that hadn't been crushed by corruption or bad luck. Some had lived hard lives and it showed in the lines around their eyes and on their foreheads. Some didn't seem to have a clue and were just going through the motions.
This was the 'melting pot' that we all hear about in history books and in social studies. It is a real thing, not just a cliché.

If the politicians that are spending mountains of money to get themselves elected president really want to get my vote, they need to ride this bus for a week. They need to give up their seat for an elderly woman; they need to stand next to the foul smelling drunk. They need to contemplate the 15 year old rapper with the tattoos and the pierced lip. They need to stand holding on to a strap for 50 minutes until their anlkes swell and their feet hurt. They need to become one with the 'melting pot'.

This is one of the little things that the Red Rocket has taught me. It is just one end of a spectrum. Seeing the spectrum from both ends has given me a much better view of all the things that lay in between. Strength isn't found at the ends, it springs from somewhere in the middle.

Sleeping Bus Rider

Good Times!

2011-03-29T09:14:00.000-07:00

The Circus Is In Town

These are not good times. As Dicken’s stated, “they are the worst of times.”

Many states are going through some rough budget sessions now. The recession isn’t over, and it appears that it may be lingering for a long, long time.

It appears that the rest of the country is finally starting to catch up to where my wife and I live. We live in Arizona.

Arizona has long been known to its residence as a bit of a backwater in politics. Much of the rest of the United States knows Arizona by its national political leaders that have risen to power. People with names like Goldwater, Babbit and Napolitano. But these are the exception.

Most of the people that run Arizona are idiots. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way. I am speaking literally here. They are idiots, their IQs on average, must be below 50.

So with state budgets being hit hard, it appears that folks in Wisconsin, California and New York are finally starting to catch up with Arizona. When times are good, the electorate tends to turn a blind eye to the politics in their region. Sure, we know they are corrupt and possibly inept, but we let it slide because there isn’t any real ‘affect’ on the rest of us.

Then times get really bad, and we come to realize that these yahoos actually control large sums of money and jobs. Much to our horror they start slashing positions or withholding funds and pretty soon the domino effect starts hurting us all. It is times like these that the electorate really starts to see how messed up the process really is.

Welcome to MY world America.

In the past 15 years, here in Arizona, the State Government had come close to bankrupting the state three times prior to the current recession. The laws were so poorly written and badly thought out that the State Senate and House couldn’t even figure out their impact on the state budget.

One of the problems we have in Arizona is that there are really TWO Arizonas. There is the Phoenix-Metro area (where we live) and there is rest of the Arizona which is very, very rural. Phoenix is is the 5th largest urban center in the country. In rural Arizona, you can drive for hours and never even see a cow.

The problem here, is that in the State Senate and House, the representatives from the rural areas have as much power as those from Phoenix. Give a local yokal with 250 acres of land and a grade school education a seat in the State Senate and you can guess what happens.

If uncle Billy-Bob wants a stop light in front of his Circle-K in Jerome, all State Senate work stops until he darn well gets it. (this happens a lot at the Capital, seriously).

But in all fairness, it happens in almost all state politics, we just don’t notice it, until times are bad.

So, that is why I find this time of year so entertaining. That picture at the top of the blog was taken on 3/29/2011. It shows the State Capital with a tent in front of it.

The circus is in town! Every day for the next two months (when the government is in session, we have a ‘part-time’ legislature that only meets for 6 months out of the year), there will be a tent (or tents) out there. The tents are erected by lobbyists and special interest groups to ‘persuade’ and ‘influence’ the legislature with lunches and presentations. Lots of smoozing, back-slapping and promises inside those tents....and I bet they are all tax deductable!

So far this year, some of the better high points in the Capital debates are: trying to get schools and hospitals to ‘snitch’ on illegal immigrants, banning gays and lesbians from being able to adopt, requiring all Presidential candidates to ‘personally’ come to the state with their birth certificate and present it to the government if they want to be on the ballot, allowing ‘anyone’ to carry a concealed weapon, even into bars (they just can’t drink) and making it illegal for dogs to ride in the bed of a pickup truck, but not humans. All the while trying to figure out a way to close that two billion dollar budget gap in State funding.

Good Times Indeed.

The New Model-T

2011-03-22T15:12:00.000-07:00

Ask my wife, and she will tell you that I over-analyze things. Everything has an action/re-action effect that sometimes stumbles and sometimes rolls into the future.

Changes affect us in different ways. Sometimes change is good. Sometimes, change is bad. We don’t tend to know that change was bad until long after the affect has taken hold.

Predicting how change will affect us is a tricky thing. It is basically guess work based on past experience. I started thinking about this recently when I was looking at a picture of pony dung. You know, mare droppings, used oats, horse shit.

If we study history, and I don’t mean just ‘read’ about it, but really study it, we learn that things really don’t change. Only the trappings that we live in change, and they in-turn change our perception of how we see and interact with the world around us.

The picture below is a crop of a much larger image taken with a film camera circa 1909. It shows an urban street somewhere in the mid-west. A halycon image that looks tranquil and serene. See that street there? That is horse dung in the middle of the road.

Ya see, back before Henry Ford and General Motors burdened us with the concept of ‘personal’ transportation, everything in the world was horse (animal) powered. There was a huge industry in this country related to the stabling and upkeep of horses. There were breeders, oat suppliers, farthers (horse shoe repairmen), black smiths, horse reapers that would come and take your dead horse away and yes.....guys whose job it was to go around and scoop up the horse shit off the street.

Then along came mass production and internal combustion and everything changed. Check out the next cropped image form another photograph taken about 15 years later. Notice the difference? No more horse poop. No more horses period. In the span of two decades everything changed. All those jobs that related to the horse industry....gone. I don’t know what the guys that worked for the city shoveling horse shit did after they lost their jobs, but they had to do something.

So was the car better than the horse? Certainly more powerful and less temperamental. Definitely not as organic or user friendly though. There were only so many things that could go wrong with a horse.....numerous thing could go wrong with a car. It was probably harder to get drunk on a horse and mow down people in a cross walk, but it also took a lot longer to get to the next county, much less the next state.

So what is the point of all this? Change is happening again. Change always does. And when the change is complete, there will be a lot of people looking for new jobs and some jobs are never coming back.

So what is the new Model-T? What didn’t we have 10 years ago that everyone is going to have in 5 years?

They are coming, there is no question about that. Are they a good thing? Time will tell. The affect they will have on how we perceive the world and relate to each other is going to be profound.

Cars seemed like a great thing back in the 20s. Everyone wanted one. But I assume that most folks burdened with car payments, while they sit in stop and go traffic on the expressway today might have a different opinion. I wonder how much we will love / curse the iPad in 20 years. Anyone have any thoughts on the matter?

(All of the images referenced here along with many others can be found at the Shorpy Website.)

Voices From The Past

2011-03-17T10:29:00.000-07:00

To set the stage here. Many of my readers will recall that I often mention my dissatisfaction with the way things are going these days. We appear to have lost our national and world focus and seem to be devolving into partisanship, religious rhetoric, and capitalist driven greed.

I was listening to portions of Robert F. Kennedy's inauguration speech the other day. We have all heard it. The one where he states

“...let the world know, that a new generation has come forth...”

”....ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.....”

”....we chose to go to the moon and the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.....”

All wonderful sound bites and very inspirational. These are words that defined my generation while we were growing up, but words that I fear most of the Gen-Xers and Gen-Yers have no clue about. Somewhere, between here and there, we lost our way.

This all got me thinking about the speech that no one else talks about much. The one that was given the day before Kennedy made his. It was the farewell address by President Eisenhower given on the eve of Kennedy’s inauguration. This is something that President’s no longer do and it is a sobering speech to read. It is eloquent, but he warns of things that he sees on the horizon. Things that he could not have known about, but that he comes very close to getting right.

Keep in mind that at the time, President Eisenhower was the oldest living President to serve in office and Kennedy was the youngest President ever to be elected. Eisenhower was the vested leader, West Point Graduate, Supreme Commander in WWII, College Dean, NATO Commander and President for eight years. Kennedy was the up and coming charismatic Navy Captain that got his boat shot out form under him in WWII.

In his speech, Eisenhower emphasises ‘balance’ in the public and private sectors. He warns of the looming influence of the ‘Military Industrial Complex’, and fears that ‘the one quick fix mentality that will solve all our problems’ was leading the nation to a ‘live now, be happy’ sort of mindset which was mortgaging our children’s future.

This is sort of chilling when taken in the context of today’s world of multi-national arms dealers, Enron and Bernie Madoff.

Eisenhower had the slow and steady, pragmatic approach of a victorious soldier that had seen far too much carnage and too many mistakes in his life. Our current leaders appear to have lost this mindset. This worries me, it worries me a lot.

To read the entire transcript of Eisenhower’s farewell address, click here. It really is interesting stuff, that shows a style and eloquence that is rare these days.

The Teach-Able Moment

2011-03-11T08:55:00.000-08:00

Mr. Face-Plant

We went hiking last weekend. By ‘we’, I mean my wife and our 8 year old grandson.

My step-daughter just had her third child last month and in order to give the proud new parents quality time with ‘Bubba #2’, the wife and I agreed to take ‘Bubba #1’ off their hands for one weekend a month. Bubba #1 is named “Connor” and the wife and I are determined to give the little tyke some real world experience outside the Cartoon Network and his iPod Touch.

So we decided to take him hiking in a Phoenix Park to look for a Geocache. For those that don’t know what Geocaching is, go to the website and read up on it. In a nutshell, it is using a GPS device to find a hidden container. Sort of like high-tech treasure hunting. It teaches a lot of skills, such as math, spacial coordination, problem solving and exercise. Things that you just can’t get from a video game.

So we set off on a mile long hike along a rocky path in a Phoenix Mountain preserve with our GPS units. Connor was busy working off all his hyper 8 year old energy, chattering away, looking at the scenery and generally having a grand old time. So much so, that I could tell he was not paying attention.

So we stopped hiking and sat him down for a ‘teach-able’ moment. We explained to him that the wilderness is a dangerous place. The rocks are sharp, there are lizards and snakes, and if he falls down and sprains and ankle or breaks a bone, there is no one there that can help him in the short term. In short, we impressed upon him how dangerous the wilderness is and that he had to ‘focus’ on where he was going and what he was doing.

Being all of 8 years old, he listened and then forgot what we told him in about 3 minutes. Once again, he was lolly-gagging along the trail, not looking where he was going and not paying attention. We stopped and corrected him several times along the way and told him to ‘focus’ on what he was doing and where he was going.

After finding the geocache, we headed back to the parking lot along the same route that we came. About ⅓ of the way back, while Connor was jabbering away and looking off at the horizon, his left foot slipped on a rock, his right foot tripped over another rock and you guessed it......FACE-PLANT right into the trail. No sooner did his face (literally) bite the dust, than he started whaling and crying. The wife and I just stood there for a second with the classic, “This is what happens when you don’t listen.” look on our face.

Bubba #1 was no worse for wear after the spill and forgot all about it 10 minutes later as he continued down the trail.....still not focusing.

When you fail playing a video game, you just hit the reset button. When you fail in real life.....it hurts.

We need to take Connor hiking more often.

See more of the adventure here.

If you hang around long enough...

2011-03-09T12:01:00.000-08:00

You get to see Karma in action.

My friends are always pointing out that I complain about my job too much. In reality, I like the job, albeit, it is a bit more frustrating than it has to be some of the time. However, this is a feel good story about my job.

I have been at my job for 15 years performing various duties. One of my jobs here is to ride heard over volunteer committees who review state policies. This is a state mandated ‘safety net’ and they are referred to as Review Boards. Each Board is made up of five volunteers that donate one day a month to this task. One of my jobs is to coordinate and facilitate these monthly Boards.

I have facilitated in excess of 1,500 of these Boards since signing on here in 1997. Some Boards are easy, others are rather contentious.

After 14 years of doing this, none of the volunteer Review Board members has ever complained about my ability to do my job. That is, until last year.

I was assigned a Review Board comprised of older women that flat out just did not like me. For some unknown reason, I was the lone man sitting in the ladies room and I was not welcome.

The longest serving volunteer of the Review Board proceeded to fire off a series of e-mails to my supervisor complaining about my ability to conduct the Review Board in the way she was accustomed. None of the previous 1,499 Review Boards had a problem, but this Board did.

I sucked it up and carried on because I knew that this is how life goes sometimes. If you walk through the garden long enough, you are bound to get something smelly stuck on the bottom of your shoe. This Board is the fertilizer among all the flowers.

The Board and I sort of reached a truce for the last several months and carried on with our job duties in the reviews as best we could. Then, last month, due to some staffing changes, I had to cover a co-workers Board and she was assigned to cover my happy-happy-joy-joy Board.

I emailed the Board members that I wouldn’t be facilitating the Board for the coming month and my co-worker would be there in my place. Several of the Board members responded via email and thanked me for the update and provided me some scheduling updates for the Review Board in April. However, the long-serving volunteer replied to “all’ of the people on the cc-list (of which I was also attached) with the following response:

“Good news, guys. Bruce won't be facilitating the March review--he's covering for CXXXXX SXXXXX, who resigned. AXXXXX will be our facilitator!”

Just to make sure that I wasn’t reading this the wrong way, I showed the email to several of my fellow co-workers and manager. They all agreed. There is unprofessional, and then there is REALLY unprofessional.

I don’t think I have to worry about any more complaints from this Board. They might make them, but at this point, I don’t think anyone is going to pay attention to them.

This e-mail, really made my day. I couldn’t stop laughing at it for about 30 minutes.

Impact!

2011-03-02T08:35:00.000-08:00

From EV1

I have been watching the saga of the Chevrolet Volt unfold.

For some readers that don’t know what this is. It is a new car from Chevrolet, that is sort of a reverse hybrid vehicle. It is an all electric car (electric drive-train) that has an on-board gas motor to power the batteries if they get low.

So far, the Volt hasn’t been selling too well. At $40,000 a pop, I am not surprised. A tad bit pricey for a car that does not have killer performance and does not get really great gas mileage. When introduced late last year, they had only sold about 400 of them nationwide by the end of the sales year. I don’t think those sales figures are going to boost GM’s bottom line too much.

The Volt was supposed to be ‘radical’ in its design which is one of the reasons that it took so long to get into production. By all accounts it is supposed to be a ‘thinking’ car that is a technological marvel. There is just one problem with this whole concept.

GM has already done this before.

Back in 1995 I got to drive one of these:

From EV1

It was the General Motors EV-1 (also known as the Impact). It was an all electric coupe that GM leased to the public for a whooping $700 a month, (which was the cost to lease a new Cadallac or Mercedes at the time). Again, their pricing strategy didn’t seem to be too in-line with reality.

This little car was a ‘rocket’. I mean it was fast. It made NO noise and recharged overnight in my garage. It had full regenerative braking and an on-board computer that told you what your range was based on your driving habits.

To be understated, this car was Super-Cool.

To be depressing, they are all gone. GM scraped every last one of them. They even tore down the production facility that made them.....and this was 15 years before the Chevy Volt.

I won’t go into all the reasons why GM made this colossal blunder. If you want to know the whole sordid story, check out the documentary “Who Killed The Electric Car”. It lays it all out in painful detail.

So all I have left is the sales brochure for the EV-1, which I have preserved as a reminder of how American Industry can do things right, and how they can do things terribly wrong.

I won’t be saving my pennies to buy a Chevy Volt anytime soon. I took my money and bought a Segway instead. You had your chance GM, and you blew it.

If you want to see what all of us 'could' be driving today, here are the links to the sales borchure for the electric car that no longer exists:

Brochure_1

Brochure_2

Brochure_3

Brochure_4

Wasting Money

2011-02-21T05:00:00.000-08:00

Phx_Metro
Originally uploaded by lotus_07

I keep hearing supposedly intelligent people repeating things that they have seen on the news or on the web about how money is being wasted on things that aren’t doing any good, or are costing too much, or shouldn’t be built for one reason or another.

The constant barrage of these endlessly forwarded news clips, YouTube videos and web links is really starting to annoy me. If only because the people that are forwarding these via e-mail, Twitter or Facebook are being duped and don’t realize it.

The latest Facebook post that pushed my button was regarding the ‘boondoggle’ that is the Phoenix, Arizona Light Rail system called the ‘Metro’.

The Metro has been in operation for about 2 years now, and by most accounts, the people that use it like it. I have used it numerous times and it is a nice inner-city light rail system.

However, all during its planning and construction, there were special interest groups yelling and screaming about how much money it was costing and how the money could be spent on better things that were more beneficial to the population as a whole.

Then I read this little blurb on Facebook earlier today, posted by someone I know, who re-posted it from somewhere else. It reads as follows: “So Phoenix could have bought every single light rail rider a brand new Prius, and given them 10,000 miles of free gas a year...and it would have cost 1/3 of what we spent on light rail? Who could have seen this coming...this guy”...which lead to this “Link” about the story in Forbes Magazine.

A nicely written piece that totally misses the bigger picture.

We didn’t want to build the light rail system in Phoenix. We were mandated to. This goes back to the basic concept, that many people that LIVE in this country, don’t really know HOW this country works.

Since the end of the ‘War for States Rights’ (you called it the Civil War in social studies), the Federal Government has been the arbiter of how the states do things. It is a carrot and stick approach. The Federal Government will offer a state 200 billion dollars to improve their state infrastructure if the state builds a regional airport. If we don’t build the airport, then the 200 billion goes to some other state. Since the airport only costs us 50 billion to build, it is sort of a no brainer to build the damn thing, even if no one uses it.

The concept here, is that the Federal government steers the overall direction of the country by giving states incentives (or conversely, withholding incentives ) to do certain things. If the planners at the Federal level want to increase the availability of jet travel to the masses over the next 20 years, airports have to be built.

With regard to the light rail system in Phoenix, it was the same thing. We have WAY too many cars in Phoenix, and the freeways are overly congested which makes pollution very bad. The Feds knew this and also knew that if left unchecked, it would get much worse, because Arizona wasn’t about to do a damn thing about it. So here comes the Federal stick.

Arizona was told that if they did not start to reduce auto miles traveled significantly over the next 50 years, the federal government was going to start withholding Federal Highway funds. Translation, build mass transit or fix your own damn bridges and freeways. The yard stick to measuring the states compliance is the level of particulate pollution in the Phoenix Metro area measured at yearly levels.

How much the ‘Metro’ system cost isn’t the issue. Quality of life 50 years down the road is the issue. In 50 years, no one is going to be driving Prius’ and gas is going to be over $10 a gallon and there will be millions of us that have to get around this city. How are we going to do it? Bicycles? Since, per the Forbes article, the Metro has reduced 20,000 cars a day from Phoenix streets, that is one big boatload of pollution that I don’t have to breath in.

I often times don’t agree with what the Federal Government does, but in this instance I think they have the right idea. So if you don’t like the Metro System, shut your damn mouth and walk to work you idiot.

Working Late

2011-02-17T13:12:00.000-08:00

My Desk Lamp / Sony Mavica FD73 - Solarize Mode

I have said it before, and no doubt, will keep on saying it. Things change. Inevitably, sometimes without us realizing it, until the things in our memory no longer appear recognizable.

The most recent change I have noticed is ‘free time’. It is gone. I have the scrape, claw and horde for it. Free time to do anything or nothing, or just do what I want. It seems like a distance memory.

Case In Point: At my office we are short staffed. Pretty much always have been, and I am sure we always will be until I retire. The economic crisis (both state and federal) haven’t helped much, nor have the hiring freezes and the lack of training, not to mention the lack of proactive thinking and foresight. All of this makes Brucie busy, busy, busy putting out fires and solving problems for others that aren't well trained or lack basic logic skills.

Most of this busy-ness at work comes from not knowing what I will be doing on a daily basis. Every day when I walk into the office I have no clue what I will be doing. I know what is on my calendar regarding what I was hired to do. But most of those long range projects were placed there months ago and have simply been pushed back, time after time, to the present day. Maybe someday, I will get to those projects.

But adversity is the mother of invention. If I can’t complete the work I was hired to do because I am doing the work of others, I can find a work-around to fix the problem. The fix is to work late.

Originally, this worked great, I did what I could during the day, bobbing and weaving around the unexpected chaos that arises on a daily basis. Then when everyone started to trickle out the door around 4:30pm, I started working on the long range projects that I was hired to do in the peace and quiet of an empty state office building. Little insignificant projects, like developing exception reports to find bad data in our database and developing an electronic document managment system (EDMS) that could cut our operating expenses by a third. I got so much work done between 4:30pm and 7:30pm. It was amazing.

Until recently, when I realized something. I wasn’t alone anymore. More and more of my office-mates, aren’t going home at 4:30pm. In fact they aren’t going home till after 8pm. Most of these are the new hires, that have been dumped on from the get-go.

Which of course, means that if they can't figure something out at 7pm in the evening, who do they go to? They look to see if my office light is still on......and.....you guessed it, unpredictability and chaos have followed me to after hours.

I can’t even find any free time late at night, after work, in my office.

MY - MP3 [Techno]

2011-02-10T08:40:00.000-08:00

Artist: General Midi
Album: The Westerner
Song: The Westerner
Released: October 1999

Track List: (12 inch Vinyl EP)
1. The Westerner
2. The Eastoner

I am resurrecting this series after about a year and a half of neglect. I have been doing some clean-up behind the scenes on my web log and had to come to the decision of either trashing this music or moving it to a new location. I deceided to keep it, so for a look down memory lane at all the "My-MP3" titles I have posted in the past, click HERE.

Musical tastes vary with changes in culture and changes in our age. Few that listened to Barney the Dinosaur on PBS back in the 1980s are listening to him now. They are probably into Lady GaGa or Kanye at this point.

I never listened to 'Techno' before 2007. What happened in 2007? I went to Burning Man. Things changed a lot after that. They play a lot of Techno at Burning Man. By a lot, I mean they have huge sound trucks (usually converted school buses) with giga-watt sound system blaring this stuff out 24 hours a day as they roam the playa. Damn, if standing in the middle of a vast desert in the middle of the night with 45,000 neon lite people and listing to this stuff didn't get under my skin.

So much so, that when I came back to the 'default world', I started looking for it. If you go looking for it, good luck finding it. Cutting edge Techno isn't real mainstream and usually isn't available in stores. You might find some of it on iTunes or Amazon. Most of it is underground and spread through Usenet or Internet Radio. So finding it is a hunt and seek sort of thing.

This is a prime example of what I consider good Techno. It can be a bit repetitive and simplistic at times. But not all good music is complex.

P.S. For the best effect, you have to play this really LOUD!

Lyric:
"Alive Or Dead, It's Your Choice." (sampling of Clint Eastwood dialog)

My - MP3 is an ongoing experiment into obscure music that you may not have heard before. Clicking on the album will take you to the MP3 file of this song. To see past installments of the MY-MP3 series, click HERE.

Out Of The Past

2011-02-09T07:21:00.000-08:00

Forgotten Memories

I have a bunch of projects in the wings for this web log. Some have been there for quite some time. Suffice to say, I don't lack for content, I just lack the time to get it all organized to post here.

I am going to start one of these projects today, and it will probably take me a long time to finish.

I am an avid photographer. I have been taking pictures since I was in college and continue to do so to this day. I wouldn't classify myself as a professional or an artist, although I occasionally impress myself by what I have learned. I can't say why I do it specifically, but one of the reasons is a fear of forgetting.

If we are not reminded of the past, we tend to forget it. The little things that make us who we are get lost in the fog of memory and are forgotten. Who here, can remember what their first grade classroom looked like, or your first Christmas tree or the dashboard of the first car you made-out in? They are important, but all too often gone from our memory.

We don't just live in the here and now. We are made up of a string of events going all the way back to our birth, and beyond.

Before the advent of digital video, there was motion picture film. It wasn't used by many and is all but gone now. 8mm, Super 8mm and 16mm movie film was the only way to document moving images up until about 20 years ago. I used to do a lot of home movie production until it became impossible to find the film and develop it. I have reels of the stuff along with film tins of 8mm that I have picked up at garage sales and thrift stores. Probably in excess of 40 hours worth.

These are all memories stored away and unseen by anyone. Some of it I took, but many of them are memories of people I never knew.

So I am in the process of digitizing the collection and posting it on my YouTube channel. The first installment is posted at the link above. I have no idea who these people are, except for what was written on the film box. They were young and appear to be frolicking in a river sometime in the 1940s. They were someone’s friends, parents, co-workers. They are probably all gone now, with nothing left except a head-stone...and possibly this film clip.

I will be posting more weekly on YouTube and coming back here to post some summaries of them on a monthly basis over the coming year.

Born Free To Dance With Black Holes

2011-01-31T14:38:00.000-08:00

John Barry
11/3/1933 - 1/30/2011

Like many of us, I have gone through stages in my musical tastes. There was a time when the Beatles were Gods to me. Then I found Led Zeppelin in high school, and that changed everything. Gin Martini’s sipped to the tunes of Steely Dan, Little Feat and the Clash followed in college.

We all have a soundtrack to our lives. Even more so with the advent of digital music players. Back when I was in college I studied a lot of film. The films I really liked, I read the credits to. I learned about Foley Artists, and Production Design and Directors of Photography. More than anything else I learned to pay attention to the Musical Score.

There aren’t any ‘classical’ composers around today. They are all long dead and buried. They have been replaced by film composers. Those individuals that can give even more of a sweeping scope to the images created by David Lean and Stanley Kubrick.

One of those composers passed away yesterday. His name was John Barry. He had scored dozens of films and won Oscars for his work. You might not have known him, but you have heard his music. You have probably heard more than you realize.

I have a bunch of it. Along with the works of Jerry Goldsmith, Alex North, Michael Legrand, John Williams and Thomas Neuman, their works have been filling my headphones for a long, long time. While I walk in the wilderness, or stroll through a museum, walk to work, or build things in my garage. They give an epic scale to what may otherwise be an ordinary life.

From the James Bond films, to 'Out of Africa', to 'Dances With Wolves' to 'The Black Hole'. This guy was good. Very good.

Thanks John, for making my life a bit more cinematic.

Quick Friday Update

2011-01-28T12:29:00.000-08:00

Unlike most of my well scripted and precisely thought out web log entries, this is just going to be a quick update. I know that sends gasps through my reading audience, who have come to expect my Hemingway style and James Joyce subtle wit, but this is Friday and I am in a hurry.

I want to comment on a couple of things. First of all, this whole civil disobidience thing in the Middle East that started out in Tunisia and appears to be rolling across the Arabian Peninsula like a Caterpillar tractor with no one at the controls. I had a sneaking suspicion that something like this was going to happen. I had this suspicion three years ago, in a blog I wrote called “New World Order”. Things are changing and they are changing much faster than old world governments can react to. This is going to be a different century. A much different century.

Next up are my ebay auctions. They will be over in a day or so, and I am somewhat dumbfounded by how they are going. At this rate, it looks as though all four of the items I put up for auction are going to sell. The one that I thought would garner the most interest hasn’t. The item that has garnered the most interest is the one I thought bidders would be least interested in. The most bids are for an item that started out with an opening bid of $1.99 and is now up to over $40.00! Watch out Donald Trump.

Finally, I got an e-mail this morning from some anonymous shit-head about someone that I read and comment on on-line. They must have gotten my e-mail address from a comment that I wrote on one of my friends blogs. The e-mail was a long documentary about how this friend was a convicted felon, had spent time in jail and was not remorseful for the heinous crimes they had committed. This sort of piggybacks onto my recent web log about ‘Whistle-Stabbing’ that ranted about how anonymous people come out of the shadows to dispense fear and doubt and then quickly disappear back into the darkness. I hate these scumbags. My response to them is below, although I doubt they will ever read it, since they have gone to ground again.

-------------

So what is the point of all this?

Vindictiveness?

She has paid her debt and is doing what she can to put this behind her and live a good life.

How does this disclosure and character assassination make any positive statement what-so-ever? I have known for several years that she served time in prison, so what? I have made mistakes in the past, are you going to dig those up as well if I piss you off?

Would it make you happy if she lived in 'regret' all her life and walked around with a scarlet letter on her shirt?

Have you ever done anything that you regret in life and let it burden you until your death? Was the time she spent incarcerated pleasant? Should she be required to be a pauper for the rest of her life to pay for her sins?

Our society dictates that she has paid her debt, and will continue to do so for years to come through parole and restrictions placed upon her.

How do you know that she "isn't" making monthly restitution to the courts system to the families?

This just seems like anonymous character bashing from someone in the shadows.

Why don't you do some background checks on me and see if you can dredge something up to post on-line, without telling anyone who you are. Your actions seem pretty cowardly to me.

------------------

So it has been an interesting week. Hope you all have a good weekend.

Paranoia Sets In

2011-01-27T05:00:00.000-08:00

This is going to sound as though I am a bit paranoid and possible have a screw loose, but I have been noticing something of late that is really starting to bug me.

At first I wrote it off as just bad timing, or karma, or just too many idiots in too small a space. However, after weeks, months and years of this, I am starting to think that there is something else going on.

It might just be where I live, or it could be that I have a different expectation set than most others I come in contact with.........or, there could be something sinister at work here.

I have often spoken to my wife about this at the end of a long day, and it has almost gotten to be routine. “What stupid things did you have to deal with today honey?”, is usually how we begin our evening as we veg and unwind at 7pm. We aren’t just bitching about our jobs, we actually discuss all the things that went wrong in the past 12 hours and document them, to compare notes. It has become obvious that our notes tend to match up pretty closely. She works in the private sector, I work in the public sector.

What I am referring to here, is the general lack of competency in almost every aspect of American culture, especially here in the southwest. And when I say competency, I am talking about the basic human ability to do the simplest acts.

A day does not go by in my world, when I am driving on a street or walking on a sidewalk and the following things don't happen, usually more than once a day;

Someone driving their car will come to a complete stop in the middle of the street (nowhere near an intersection) to look at a map, or book, or just stare at the floor mates, totally oblivious to the traffic piling up behind them.

People walking on the sidewalk randomly wander out into traffic without bothering to look to see if anyone is coming, often times causing drivers to slam on their brakes to avoid hitting them.

People come up to me weekly asking for directions, such as “Is this the Human Resource Building?”.....while the name of the building is obvious above the door in huge letters. (I have learned that this is because there is an extremely high illiteracy rate in this state, most people on the street can’t read.)

These are just examples on the street. In our professional lives, it has become obvious between my wife and I, that American society has totally lost the ability to ‘problem solve’. Instead, our co-workers are constantly seeking aid from their office-mates that they perceive can solve their work / personal problem. I touched on this topic in my recent web log called “Fear Of Failure”. No one wants to assume the risk of failure anymore.

I can continue to expand on these topics all the way to the top of the heap. People like Bernie Maddoff, and the boys at Enron and General Motors. Educated people that knew they were playing inside a house of cards, but did nothing to correct the problems and instead just continued to try and grab the brass ring until they fell off the Merry-Go-Round.

My question is this. Are we just getting more stupid due to a decline in our civilization, or is there something else at work here? Is there something in the water? Could terrorist or foreign governments be seeding the clouds to make us all stupid after it rains? Is all that genetically engineered corn and hormone fed beef messing with our brains?

The frequency of all the stuff that is going on around me has made me wonder. I am waiting for the day when my supervisor comes to me with a staple through his finger and asks me to pull it out for him, all the while stating, “I don’t have any idea how this happened.”

Making Money The Old Fashioned Way...

2011-01-24T09:59:00.000-08:00

.....on Ebay!

I have spent the last two weekends cleaning out the garage. Since it is the start of a new year I am determined to get things around Casa Johnson back on track and....

...this time I mean business! I have been taking a lot of stuff to Goodwill over the last few weeks, in an effort to get things cleaned, organized and the priorities back on schedule.

Some of the stuff might be worth something to someone, so I am throwing a few of the items up on E-Bay to see if I can find anyone who might be interested. If no one buys this stuff, it goes off to Goodwill as well. If you want to take a gander (or god forbid, actually bid on some of this stuff) check out the links below. You have 5 to 7 days to get out your wallets.

Military Documentary on VHS (Not your average war movie)

External Iomega Jaz Drive (SCSI / USB Interface - Complete)

Jeppesen Manual Flight Computer (before computers - pilots navigated with these things)

Apple External CD-ROM Drive (SCSI Interface)

I put this stuff out there because it is pretty eclectic and not things that you would find every day. Hopefully, some folks who really want one or more of these items will start a bidding war! Cha-Ching!!

The Golden Age

2011-01-18T10:47:00.000-08:00

The Second Coming.

Haven’t been around much so far this year. Been super busy, and hope to be able to get caught up on bunch of blog reading in the next few days. This year has been super busy so far, and I am just now starting to get on top of the work-pile.

Been watching a lot of television recently. We have both been so tired when we get home that by 8pm in the evening, all the wife and I can do is plop down in-front of the HDTV and veg before we pass out.

Netflix and downloaded content from Usenet (played through my AppleTV) is all we watch anymore.

Without all of the media saturation that comes across the broadcast airways and cable, our view of the world has shifted significantly in the past few months.

I am actually happy to say that we really don’t have much of a clue about what is going on locally. There are a bunch of killings and scandals and other trivia that go on in Phoenix, Arizona, be we know little about them. A co-worker made the comment about two young African-American girls that were raped in South Phoenix last week, and I admitted that I had no knowledge of it. The world would not change if I did know about it. While it is sad, it is also just the story-de-jour. It will be forgotten with the next anxiety soundbite that comes along.

Once you learn how to search Netflix and Usenet, and empower yourself to watch the kind of programming you would be interested in, as opposed to the programming that someone else markets to you, things start to look a lot different.

Recently, I have been forcing my wife to watch a lot of documentaries. At first she rolls her eyes since she assumes they will be boring. But after about 10 minutes she becomes engrossed. If you have never watched documentaries before and think they will be akin to a two hour lecture on calculus, think again. Modern documentaries are light years ahead of their predecessors. We recently watched The Smartest Guys In The Room which documents the rise and fall of Enron. Highly recommended. It shows the hypocrisy in corporate America and government in an almost overkill fashion. Followed up by Bernie Maddoff and the real estate bubble, you realize that we are all pretty much screwed for the next 20 years. Other exceptional documentaries of note have been King Corn, Smash His Camera and In Search of Beethoven.

However, television isn’t always about truth. Sometimes it is about fiction as well. Many may have forgotten, but there was quality television prior to ‘reality television’. Much of this television has been forgotten, but it is still out there. Either on DVD from Netflix or from Usenet.

Some of the gems that I have run across of late have been;

- The 1950s and 60s Christmas Specials. I played these through the month of December on the AppleTV. Such gems as ‘A Petticoat Junction Christmas’, Christmas with the Beverly Hillbillies, The Donna Read Christmas Show and my favorite, the ‘Car 54 Where Are You?’ Christmas episode.

- Numerous episodes of Highway Patrol starring Brodrick Crawford. This was basically the pre-cursor to the television shows ‘Cops’....where a world populated totally by Caucasian people, drove 1950 late model cars and solved rather simplistic crimes with a Gestapo like efficiency.

- Several Episodes of "77 Sunset Strip", with Efram Zimbalist Jr. Ulta hip, ultra cool, thin as rails and smoking in every scene. Sort of like Mad Men in Black and White, only solving crime instead of doing advertising.....and the hair on Cokie Barnes is not to be missed. Hilarious.

- Companion episodes to Sunset Strip were a spin off called Surfside 6. About three hunky bachelors that live on a house boat in Miami Beach and solve crimes. The theme song alone is worth watching. It dawns on you while watching this show, that it is basically an advertisement for Miami Beach, for cold folks living in New York and New England during the winters of the early 1960s. Margarita Sieraa as Cha Cha Obrien is hilarious. She looks and acts like she just stepped out of the Sharks gang from “West Side Story’.

- Before there was Hawaii 5-0, there was Hawaiian Eye. Another escapist crime solving hour, this time in the tropics during the 1960s. Robert Conrad (of Wild Wild West and Black Sheep Squadron) stars in this along with Connie Stevens. The opening credits showing them all on surf boards with Diamond Head in the background is worth watching alone.

Add to these some British television documentaries, such as “Lost Gardens”, where a team of folks from the BBC find and restore gardens that have been overgrown and lost to the ages. Sounds ridiculous, but it is actually very interesting. This is something that could never make it in the US, even on cable, but the Brits do a very good job of it. Watching it makes me want to plant a garden.

Then there is “Narrow Boat Afloat”, about a guy that restores an old English canal boat and powers it all over southern England at 8mph through century old canals. There is a whole subculture of this in England, which at first seems odd, but after watching a few episode, I am seriously considering taking a narrow boat holiday in Britain sometime this decade.

So after watching this sort of fair, I am actually proud to say, that I have never seen an episode of “Glee” and I have no idea what is going on with “The Bachelor”, or when the award shows are on, or who won. I don’t care.

I program my own channels to watch....and the world is a much better place.

Whistle-Stabbing

2011-01-06T05:00:00.000-08:00

The concept of Whistle-Blowing and Back-Stabbing, all rolled into one.

I have been watching with some disgust, the case of Owen Honors, the Captain of the U.S. Navy Aircraft Carrier “Enterprise”. Not disgust at what he did, but the unmentioned back story of how this whole episode transpired.

For historical reference, for those that may not know what happened. Captain Honors was relieved of command of the Enterprise due to his participation in some morale videos that were created and distributed to the Enterprise Crew back in 2005. At the time, Honors was the second in command of the aircraft carrier. The videos, meant for crew viewing only, were laced with profanity and references to homosexuality and were meant to be entertaining and humorous and not to be taken seriously.

Everyone on board the ship knew about these videos, including the captain of the Enterprise. Honors was promoted to captain of the Enterprise almost two years ago and was generally well liked by his crew. He has a long and distinguished military career as a high ranking naval officer and a navy pilot.

Was what he did proper? Probably not. Did what he do merit his termination and the end of his military career? Probably not. But the military was embarrassed and needed a scapegoat,..... five years later.

So much for the back-story.

This whole episode makes me pretty upset, because I have been in the same situation, but for totally different reasons.

No one is asking the question, why this came to light five years later? The answer is, because someone was pissed off with Captain Honors and went to a newspaper with the videos. And they did so anonymously. They did not confront Executive Officer Owens at the time of the videos were made nor follow the military chain of command on-board ship with a complaint, or even notify the Captain about their concerns as far as we know. They waited for five year and then stabbed him in the back and ended his military career.

The reason they are ‘allowed’ to do this is a mantra in our newer, politically correct government, that states “something that is ‘offensive' to one worker, is offensive to ALL workers” and won’t be tolerated. This supposedly makes for a more safe and secure work environment, but when abused, it has the opposite effect. It creates team-splitting as opposed to team building.

Let me share my personal experience with this concept.

Back in the 1990s, I was employed in a state office. For reasons that are still a mystery to me, one of the supervisors that I worked under decided that they did not like me and wanted me fired. I assume she determined that I wasn’t a ‘team’ player, which meant that I didn’t back her up in certain office situations. So much so, that the other supervisors in the office counseled me to ‘stay away’ from her, because she ‘had it in for me.’

One day, I was called into my directors office and told that a complaint had been filed. That a ‘fellow employee’ (anonymous) had found something in my office offensive and it had to be removed. What was the offensive object? A small painting by the artist Maxfield Parish that was hanging on my wall. The painting showed a person (androgynous, you couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman) sitting by a campfire with a naked back. I agreed to remove the picture.

Now mind you, both the director and I knew what was going on, and we both knew who had filed the complaint, even though no name was mentioned. Since he was advised that someone was offended, he was obligated to take action.

Never-The-Less, for the following year, there were copies of Cosmopolitan and Vogue magazines laying on our office break room table that displayed naked models hocking Channel #5 and stating 10 ways to have better sex with your lover that were never removed. The hypocrisy was evident.

Was hanging the picture in my office wrong.....no not really, and if someone found it offensive and told me, I would have taken it down in consideration. Was Captain Honor’s foolish in what he did, yes, but life on board a Navy ship is different than life on main-street. The culture is different and the stress and chain of command are different.

In both instances, anonymous individuals sought to tear down people that had done nothing wrong in most of their co-workers eyes and were allowed to get away with it. The only thing they accomplished was to cause descent among the ranks.

I keep a watchful eye on my co-workers now, because anyone of them can 'claim' I told an off color joke in the men's room and make an issue of it with management in order to have me reprimanded. They won’t come to me to discuss the matter directly in order to resolve it.

The crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise is more wary now as well, knowing that as soon as someone's tour of duty is up, they can spill the beans (anonymously) and ruin someone else’s career.

Whistling blowing is one thing, if it involves criminal intent or defrauding someone. Whistle blowing just to get revenge is back stabbing. The Navy and the Government need to know the differencee.

….and that supervisor that had it in for me many years ago? She walked away from the job under a cloud of suspicion about a year later and no one knows what ever happened to her.

A Better Therapy

2010-12-30T05:00:00.000-08:00

As far as my wife and I are concerned, 2010 was not a very good year. We had hoped it would be great, but life threw us more than one curve ball, and then the economy tanked, which made our jobs more stressful, etc, etc, etc.

By the end of the year, we both just needed to get away. So in late October I started looking for a year end get-a-way. Someplace we could go to forget about the maelstrom that swirled around us at home. The logical place is a small Mexican seaside town about 5 hours south of us on the Sea of Cortez. It is called Puerto Penasco on the map, but most folks around here refer to it as Rocky Point.

It is one of the better bargains in the area, since you can rent a rather large, custom home on the beach for the price of a round-trip airline ticket across the country. So last October, I booked 4 nights in a 2 bedroom, 2 bath house, that depending on the level of the tide, was usually only 50 feet from the ocean. We would be there from December 23rd through December 27th. Just me, the wife, and one of our dogs. Well, that changed, to two of our dogs.......and at the last minute we added a cat.

Two people, two dogs and a cat took off for Rocky Point on Thursday afternoon. By the time we finally made it to the outskirts of the big city, we were exhausted from the packing and the driving. We drove down to Mexico in silence as we each reflected on the year that we had just been through.

There are a lot of things going on in Mexico right now. Mostly, this whole drug war / drug cartel thing with all the murders and violence. This is more hype than anything else, with most of the violence centered around a few small border towns. But hype is hype, and along with the bad economy, the little seaside town of Rocky Point was really hurting. They depend on a lot of tourist dollars there and there aren’t many tourists these days. Those that don’t have jobs can’t go and those that do have jobs are afraid of roaming drug lords.

This all made for a very smooth and quick drive down to Mexico. Heavily traveled roads were deserted this time around and we made it to Rocky Point in under 5 hours.

We picked up the key to the house from the rental agency. The house is called Casa Zillori and it didn’t take us long to find it, since this wasn’t our first trip down to the Sea of Cortez. The two dogs we brought with us were our 8 year old 125lb Great Dane, Chella, and our 2 year old, 55lb terrier / beagle / boxer / retriever mix, named Maximus (Max for short). Chella had been down to Rocky Point on many occasions, but Max had never seen the ocean. We knew he liked water, but had no idea what he would think of endless sea and sand.

We unpacked the truck and took the dogs down to the beach. It was high tide and the surf was moderate. There was no one else on the beach for as far as the eye could see, so we let Max off leash to see what he would do.

To no one’s surprise he leaped forward and starting running down the shore as fast as he could, and we both assumed that would be the last we saw of him, possibly forever. But a funny thing happened. After running through the surf at full gallop, he stopped after about 100 yards and dove into the ocean. He then swam back to shore and ran back toward us at full speed, passed us, and continued running for another 100 yards in the opposite direction. All the while he was leaping through the surf and diving head first into the waves that dared to cross his path.

Max continued up and down the 200 yards of beach for about 20 minutes, non-stop. Max was in Heaven. It was a child’s first trip to Disneyland, your first solo car ride and first time making love all rolled into one. Sue and I just stood there with Chella as Max did his best to wear out that beach. The look of sheer joy on his face was mesmerizing.

So much so, that we forgot. We forgot all about our lives back in Phoenix, Arizona. We forgot all about 2010. The look on Max’s face as he plowed through the surf was more than worth the house rental, and the gas and the time to drive down to the ocean.

Most folks that are depressed, find comfort in a bottle, or at a therapist’s office or in a pharmasutical. But let me tell you. The best therapy ever devised is a dog on an empty beach. Max made us realize more than anything else.....life is short, dive in.

For more of my thoughts on what Max has taught us, click here.

(All pictures taken in Puerto Penasco, Mexico with a Panasonic Lumix Digital Camera, 12/23/2010 - 12/27/2010)

Cruising Altitude

2010-12-29T14:38:00.000-08:00

Peace and Quiet at 20,000 Feet

It seems that I do one of these ever year around this time. I suppose it is some sort of year end therapy. At least it feels like it.

A 2 minute 30 secont Terragen Raytracing created on my office computer over the Christmas Holiday. Comprised of 4,000 sepeate images, they were sequenced using Quicktime 7 and edited in iMove, with the soundtrack added from GarageBand.

Worst Phishing Ever

2010-12-23T05:00:00.000-08:00

I got this in my e-mail last weekend. While I have to assume that most internet users are savy enough to realize that this is utter bullshit, I am sure that there are some folks that will fall for it. Even though it has no logos or graphics, or even good grammer.

I am still waiting for the 3.5 million dollars from the Nigerian bank account that I sent my social security number to.......so I sort of doubt that 'Google' is telling the truth here. (my comments in blue)

-----------------------

Dear Google Mail User,

We hereby want to let you know that your Google Mail Account needs Verification.

Due to the recent problems encountered by our Google Mailing system.

Google Team will be deleting some in active accounts so as to reduce the number of registered Account on the New Affiliated Google Web Browser. (WTF does this mean?) Please Provide the following affiliation process (what the hell is 'affiliation process?) by filling out the details below so as to make a correspondence (their command of the English language is astounding) with the saved data on our system.

mail:
Password:
Present Country:

Warning !!!Failure to fill in the details above,we will believe your account is not active anymore and it will be deleted within 48hours and shutdown. (are you threatening me? ? ?)
Gmail Registration Services®.

-----------------------

Evidently, anyone that is actually fooled by this e-mail needs to have their internet access taken away.

Droid Dump

2010-12-20T05:00:00.000-08:00

I take a lot of pictures that most folks never see. If a black & white negative comes out a little to over-exposed, or the first attempt at a digital sunset isn't right, it gets filed away on some disk for future generations.

Recently, a lot of friends and co-workers have lost cellphones, or forgot to back up their digital cameras and lost EVERYTHING. So I am going to 'try' and start backing up stuff.

Since the concept of storage has moved 'way' beyond floppy disks and CD-ROMs, I have scavenged all the old digital media I have and posted it to a safe keeping place on the web. Specifically, my Apple Mobile.Me account. Most of these pictures are not great images, however, some of them aren't bad and have made it onto the pages of Flickr and this blog. Keep in mind, that all of this is 'digital' media. Which means it is NOT film. That is reserved for Flickr or specific blog posts. I mean, after all....I have to have some content standards.

Many of these images are from my Droid Smartphone, but some of them go back as far as my Zire 100 Palm Pilot and my LG5600 cellphone.

I will be updating the contents a few times a year as I dump memory cards and hard drives into it. So if you want to look through my shoe box of recent photos, click on the blog title above or just click "here" and you can browse them at your leisure.

Multi-Tasking

2010-12-15T09:28:00.000-08:00

I find myself frustrated a lot these days.

Frustration isn’t a good feeling. It leads to health problems, irritability, lack of sleep and a host of other bad things.

It appears that the majority of my frustration comes about due to the fact that I can’t get a lot of things done. It is an inability to complete a task, or at the very least, the task takes much more time to complete than it should.

Now I realize that I am partly to blame for this. I give myself more things to do than I can probably realistically get done. Every year or so, the wife and I have to ‘clean house’. Which is another way of saying, we go through our home and throw away all the old projects that we realize aren’t going to ever be completed or that have just fallen off the radar.

However, there are some tasks that we just can’t do this with. They are usually the tasks forced on us by others. Usually our employers or our families.

There are two primary frustration creators in this vein. One is the expectation that others will do things for you and our refusal or inability to tell these people ‘No’. By being charitable and helping others, we, in effect, enable them to fail and they return to us over and over again seeking help, support, advice or problem solving skills.

The other primary source of outside frustration is lack of resources. This is another way of saying that you are spreading the workers too thin. The catch phrase back in the 1990s was ‘multi-tasking’. This came from the use of computers, which could do more than one thing at a time. Such as, you could work on a spreadsheet AND print out a Word document. You didn’t need to wait for one process to end before you started the next one. Pretty cool, when you talk about computer....not so cool when you talk about people.

It became a boastful statement when workers would state that they could ‘multi-task’. Unfortunately, there is a downside to this. Not everyone can do it and not everyone should do it. It depends on the tasks.

As resources have been cut back over the years (i.e. less staff to do the work), management has seen multi-tasking as a way of keeping the same production level with fewer workers. You, as a worker, no longer have a JOB, you now have several JOBS, depending on who calls in sick or who gets laid off or who is on vacation.

I often explain it this way. If you are an accountant and you are hired by Ford Motor Company to create financial spreadsheets, you are hoping to really flex your muscle with Excel and create some killer workbooks. But what if after 3 months on the job, your supervisor comes to you and says, “Hey Bob, production just called, and they are really short staffed on the Pinto production line today, could hop on down there and install windshields for a few hours? It would REALLY help us out.”

Since Bob wants to be seen as a ‘team’ player he agrees. But the danger here is, once Bob knows how to work on the production line, Bob is going to be seen as a production line ‘resource’. So the next time half the Pinto builders all call in sick because Ford cuts back on their coffee breaks, who do you think they are going to call? Thats right...Bob.

The end result is obvious. Splitting Bob’s resources between creating Excel spreadsheets and building Ford Pintos means you won’t get good spreadsheets and you won’t get good Pintos. And Bob is going to get a little ….. frustrated, because this isn’t what he signed up for, nor is it what he wants to do. He didn't go to accounting school to learn how to build long lasting highway safety flares.

You wouldn’t want your heart surgeon splitting his time between operating room prep and working in the hospital pharmacy now would you? Some would say that being a surgeon is much to important and skilled a job to multi-task, but you would be wrong. Almost ANY job in the United States these days is extremely complex.

I work in an office where I have to track in excess of 10,000 children, there welfare and their well being, but I am also tasked with answering the phones for my division several times a month. In essence, I am their statistician and their front desk receptionist. So, in addition to worrying about missing 500 children that have medical needs that aren’t being addressed on a multipule sheet Excel workbook, I also have to worry about placing multiple people on hold and losing them when I try and transfer them.

But such is the way of the Western World today. With professionals from India and China willing to work for minimum wage, for 60 hours a week, it is either multi-task or or stand in line at the soup kitchen.

As I have stated before, I hope to be able to make it to retirement, where I can focus on ONE task at a time, until they are all done. However, I think I am in for a whole boatload of frustration between now and then.

The End Is Near

2010-12-09T11:10:00.000-08:00

What follows is an excerpt from an e-mail that I got recently. It is all true. But I am a little concerned about the tone of it all. As if most of this were a 'bad' thing. See below, with my comments attached, and leave me any of your musings in the comments section.

-----------------

CHANGES ARE COMING

WAKE UP CALL

There is nothing political about this email. It simply points out very probable changes that are in our future.

CHANGES ARE COMING ----

Whether these changes are good or bad depends in part on how we adapt to them. But, ready or not, here they come

1. The Post Office. Get ready to imagine a world without the post office. They are so deeply in financial trouble that there is probably no way to sustain it long term. Email, Fed Ex, and UPS have just about wiped out the minimum revenue needed to keep the post office alive. Most of your mail every day is junk mail and bills.

All I get is junk mail and bills.....so I really won't miss this that much

2. The Check. Britain is already laying the groundwork to do away with checks by 2018. It costs the financial system billions of dollars a year to process checks. Plastic cards and online transactions will lead to the eventual demise of the check. This plays right into the death of the post office. If you never paid your bills by mail and never received them by mail, the post office would absolutely go out of business.

Every time I am in the checkout line (espeically the express one) and some moron tries to pay with a check, I am so glad that I don't have a hand gun with me to blow their brains out.

3. The Newspaper. The younger generation simply doesn't read the newspaper. They certainly don't subscribe to a daily delivered print edition. That may go the way of the milkman and the laundry man. As for reading the paper online, get ready to pay for it. The rise in mobile Internet devices and e-readers has caused all the newspaper and magazine publishers to form an alliance. They have met with Apple, Amazon, and the major cell phone companies to develop a model for paid subscription services.

I read the newspaper ever morning on my Sony eReader (like a Kindle). It is delivered automatically to the device via 3G networking and saves them all for me. Imagine trying to carry around 25 Wall Street Journals, I do. And they are all indexed with no advertising....pretty sweet.

4. The Book. You say you will never give up the physical book that you hold in your hand and turn the literal pages. I said the same thing about downloading music from iTunes. I wanted my hard copy CD. But I quickly changed my mind when I discovered that I could get albums for half the price without ever leaving home to get the latest music. The same thing will happen with books. You can browse a bookstore online and even read a preview chapter before you buy. And the price is less than half that of a real book. And think of the convenience! Once you start flicking your fingers on the screen instead of the book, you find that you are lost in the story, can't wait to see what happens next, and you forget that you're holding a gadget instead of a book.

(See my comment on #3 above)

5. The Land Line Telephone. Unless you have a large family and make a lot of local calls, you don't need it anymore. Most people keep it simply because they've always had it. But you are paying double charges for that extra service. All the cell phone companies will let you call customers using the same cell provider for no charge against your minutes.

We have these in our home, but they are more of a curiosity for our grand kids, sort of like having a Model-T for in the garage....they are cool.

6. Music. This is one of the saddest parts of the change story. The music industry is dying a slow death. Not just because of illegal downloading. It's the lack of innovative new music being given a chance to get to the people who would like to hear it. Greed and corruption is the problem. The record labels and the radio conglomerates are simply self-destructing. Over 40% of the music purchased today is "catalog items," meaning traditional music that the public is familiar with older established artists. This is also true on the live concert circuit. To explore this fascinating and disturbing topic further, check out the book, "Appetite for Self-Destruction" by Steve Knopper, and the video documentary, "Before the Music Dies."

Music is changing. It is global and free to anyone that wants to post it. The only value in music anymore is its live performance, which is sort of the way it should be in my opinion.

7. Television. Revenues to the networks are down dramatically. Not just because of the economy. People are watching TV and movies streamed from their computers. And they're playing games and doing lots of other things that take up the time that used to be spent watching TV. Prime time shows have degenerated down to lower than the lowest common denominator. Cable rates are skyrocketing and commercials run about every 4 minutes and 30 seconds. I say good riddance to most of it. It's time for the cable companies to be put out of our misery. Let the people choose what they want to watch online and through Netflix.

This is all true. See my last post on "The Future Of Television" to see my comments on this.

8. The "Things" That You Own. Many of the very possessions that we used to own are still in our lives, but we may not actually own them in the future. They may simply reside in "the cloud." Today your computer has a hard drive and you store your pictures, music, movies, and documents. Your software is on a CD or DVD, and you can always re-install it if need be. But all of that is changing. Apple, Microsoft, and Google are all finishing up their latest "cloud services." That means that when you turn on a computer, the Internet will be built into the operating system. So, Windows, Google, and the Mac OS will be tied straight into the Internet. If you click an icon, it will open something in the Internet cloud. If you save something, it will be saved to the cloud. And you may pay a monthly subscription fee to the cloud provider.

In this virtual world, you can access your music or your books, or your whatever from any laptop or handheld device. That's the good news. But, will you actually own any of this "stuff" or will it all be able to disappear at any moment in a big "Poof?" Will most of the things in our lives be disposable and whimsical? It makes you want to run to the closet and pull out that photo album, grab a book from the shelf, or open up a CD case and pull out the insert.

I learned long ago, that there are only TWO things that are worth keeping. Photographs and written correspondence. Because those are memories. Everything else will end up in a landfill someday. Who needs it?

9. Privacy. If there ever was a concept that we can look back on nostalgically, it would be privacy. That's gone. It's been gone for a long time anyway. There are cameras on the street, in most of the buildings, and even built into your computer and cell phone. But you can be sure that 24/7, "They" know who you are and where you are, right down to the GPS coordinates, and the Google Street View. If you buy something, your habit is put into a zillion profiles, and your ads will change to reflect those habits. And "They" will try to get you to buy something else. Again and again.

I wrote a web log on this ages ago. It is all coming true. Which just goes to show that I am way ahead of my time.

It is going to be a brave new world......get ready for it. Pay attention to mother nature......change is inevitable.

Future Channels

2010-12-06T08:33:00.000-08:00