RSS Feed: |
|
| My Flickr! |
| Tweetage! |
| © gorners.com 2001-2010 |
My latest loves
|
Journo Dotage
|
December 31st 2002 17:40CST
2002. Goodbye Spike Milligan, literary genius and comic extraordinaire. Goodbye John Thaw, Manchester lad made good by cockney accents and beer drinking sleuthing. Goodbye Queen Mum; I've never been in favor of the monarchy and I only met you once but you were the last of the real people. Goodbye Paul Wellstone; I never really paid any attention to Minnesota politics but you seemed like one of the good guys. Goodbye 2002. Goodbye common sense.
Hello wars (and I mean that in the plural).
Hello Nic. I'm sorry you were born when the world appears to be losing its senses - hopefully by the time you're old enough, the lunatic rhetoric of conscription will have ceased and the military will be populated with the thugs that want or deserve to be there and not with those who are destined for greater things. Hello Nic; I hope your time has greater balance between work and leisure. Hello Nic; I hope that your time balances profits with fairness. Hello Nic.
2002 was the year that I lost 2 managers in cut-backs (one regrettably and one gladly). It was the year that Natzoid and I managed to sneak to England for 10 days on our own. It was the year that I finally got the job I wanted. It was the year I reached 33 not out. It was the year that England should have won the World Cup. It was the year I ceased communication with a lot of people but started communication with others. It was the year I finally didn't make platinum with NWA. It was the year that was. It was the year that my son was born.
2003 will be the year I finally have the courage of my convictions and strike out with my own company. It will be the year that Natzoid and I celebrate 5 years of being grateful for having met. It will be the year that my stock options surface and liquidize. It will be the year I spend too much time in China. It will be the year that we finish the outstanding modifications to our home. It will be the year it will be.
Sappy? Yes. Untrue? No.
The fantastic thing about New Year is its ability to motivate me. I have always loved that feeling of out with the old and in with the new. The dark stranger entering the house with coal. The bagpipes. That cherished short at midnight. That deep and gut-wrenching kiss as you appreciate your loved ones and wonder what joy or horrors await you in the coming year.
Hello 2003. Hello Nic.
December 29th 2002 16:25CST
Does anyone else ever have those days where you feel you are on the brink of thinking or understanding something very important? It's highly frustrating; I'm sure were I just on a little different 'something' frequency I'd get it. If you can imagine two sine waves that are just slightly different amplitudes but exactly the same frequency...the slight difference in amplitude is what is making me miss whatever it is that is hovering around waiting to be revealed.
On a completely different topic, I've spent this morning getting ready to go back to work tomorrow and this afternoon doing some random genealogical searches. The return to work has necessitated the compilation of a list of priorities, a virtual business plan and has increased my blood pressure by a significant amount. The genealogy has produced nothing other than a small bug-fix to a search script which had been mysteriously broken.
If I am enlightened on any level, you'll all be the first to know.
December 27th 2002 17:10CST
I've just spent half an hour writing about how I loathe the sound of metal touching anything, my lack of manual dexterity and my frustration at having to hand anything that requires assembly over to Natzoid.
I re-read it and it was more pathetic than my "I'm traveling/tired/drunk/pissed off" posts. Does anyone else ever get that "I am but a worm" feeling when they do this? I blame it squarely on my (admittedly limited) church experiences.
This feeling surfaced as we assembled Beanie's kitchen set. It wasn't that complicated of a process, just long, manually intensive and frustrating. I'm useless when it comes to manual dexterity and I know it. The annoying thing is that I can keep a football off the floor virtually ad-infinitum, but give me a screwdriver and I fall to pieces. Give me a screwdriver and someone watching me and I give up.
Small point, I know. But I look at other bloggers and wonder how the hell they summon the nerve to openly discuss their sexual preferences, problems or, in some cases, sex lives. Maybe it's an English upbringing, but I have I have a hard time articulating my minor problems to the world (and in the grand scheme, not being dexterous is minor compared to other potential problems) let alone those that really bother me.
Some of you people astound me. I'm not only astounded, but in awe.
Time to hit the kava kava.
December 25th 2002 20:05CST
So Santa, in a fairly stupified state, arrived chez nous. Thanks to an unexpected accident with some brandy, a mini basketball hoop failed to make it off Santa's sled and into the living room. In spite of this, all was well.
Santa must have spent a fortune (at Walmart) to find a replica of Natzoid's watch.
Although he brought all kinds of goodies for the hounds, one of them was still disappointed that they couldn't enjoy a little Yuletide venison care of our friend Rudolph.
The kids are glued to Pinocchio in the DVD having finally exorcized Wiggletime (sounds like something I would have offered in my teens but is, apparently, a TV show for kids from Australia).
Happy Christmas one and all. I hope Santa Claus, Father Christmas or Krist Kringle (sp?) brought you everything your pea-picking heart desired.
December 23rd 2002 18:00CST
The Bean is nearly three years old so it's her first Christmas where we can set some expectations. Two months after the fact, she is still obsessed with pumpkin patches and trick or treating however we've been telling her about Santa Claus for a month or so. The message is finally sinking in. "I wuv pwesents" says she.
"Santa Claus is going to bwing me two pwesents" she has just informed Natzoid and I. As Natzoid so astutely put it, "she is going to shit on Christmas morning" - prophetic on many levels; as it is for Nick but on only a single level.
There is nothing more joyful than watching all this magic happen to them; it's probably the one thing that proves to me I was a kid at some point. It was the one night of the year where my parents could get me to bed early, too excited to sleep but easily able to due to the sheer excess of the anticipation. In England, we're a little less politically correct than here so at around eight o'clock, we would pour a glass of sherry or brandy or whatever my dad's favorite tipple of the moment was, place a mince pie on a plate and put the obligatory carrot down for Rudolph (all those other poor reindeer must have been ravenous by the end of the night). Off to bed, sleep and then awake at 5:00am (my poor parents' hangovers must have been horrendous).
Of all the bizarre traditions that the Western world has, no matter what the penalties may be financially, no matter what the religious implications (or lack thereof), this is the best. December will always be magic. Whether you're a kid or an adult, the beauty of the magic remains in one form or another.
Expect pictures of the kids in the next couple of days, as long as they wake at a reasonable hour.
December 21st 2002 17:37CST
I'm amazed I ended up being a techie. Natzoid's comments on the Commodore Vic20 got me thinking about how I ended up being such a sad git. It started with a Sinclair Spectrum that my brother and I received as a Xmas present from my parents when I was about 12. Initially it was used to play games. Games back then were less extortionate than they are now, but at the time, they were expensive to me. I took to typing pages and pages of BASIC in an effort to find a good game; the results were always the same...some typo meant the games wouldn't run. The best thing Sir Clive Sinclair did was to include a BASIC manual with each Spectrum. I studied it for hours trying to fix the games I'd typed in from magazines and pretty quickly realized that it was pretty straight-forward. My brother was promptly forbidden from touching the machine when I was around and I lost about a year of my life as I explored the wonders of simple computing.
Just before my 'O' levels, I went off to the local sixth form college to speak with the principal about what 'A' levels I should take. I suggested that what I should do was mathematics, further mathematics and computer science. The principal's response was "Computers are a fad and you can only take further mathematics as a fourth A level". So maths, physics, chemistry, further maths and general studies it was for me. After a single term of physics, it was evident that I had no clue and I persuaded my parents that I should drop that course. About twelve months later, I realized that chemistry too, was way beyond my ken but couldn't drop it. So I royally screwed up my chemistry A level. My growing depression from the death of my grandfather and my increasingly deteriorating interest in academia meant that my results were too poor to get into university to do computer science; they were, however, good enough to get me on to a maths degree. I still don't understand that logic...maybe it's second order logic that blows this particular piece of logic into the ether.
While doing my maths degree, I was given an eight week course in Fortran 77 programming and a 4 week course in db2. That was it...all my formal computer training. Ironically (with the exception of calculus and number theory) these were the only courses that I ever came anywhere near excelling at. Our third year at university involved a year out in industry - most of the class went into purely maths related placements whereas a couple of us opted to try and get programming based placements. I took an aptitude test in Llandudno and was given one of the two jobs available. The first six months of the year involved writing Fortran but towards the end of the year, I was given a graphics package to play with that had a C interface. This C was weird. You could do all sorts with it. You allocated memory and freed it after you had used it. It had these things called pointers and stuff called structures. Fascinating. Within a couple of weeks I was hooked and was writing X Windows programs on HP-UX workstations.
I didn't want to return to complete my final year at university as I had experienced computing in all its glory. I had discovered FTP and started to understand networking. My final year project was studying the orbit of the asteroid belt that lies two thirds of the way from the sun to Jupiter. It involved a lot of numerical analysis so some coding was required. I wanted to do the coding in C but was told that noone in the maths department understood C so wrote the stuff in Fortran, an entirely sub-optimal solution. Suffice to say, I got my degree and went back to work.
I did a three month contract at the same company that I had done my placement at, but things were getting tough, so after the contract ended I was let go. Six months of hell followed as I festered on the dole. I couldn't get a coding job because I had no formal computing qualifications. Eventually I got a job in technical support for a great company that did Windows to Unix integration products and I lapped it up. I learned so much in the five years I spent there, about the web, about modems, about networking, about Unix, about all of it. I wrote my first html in 1992 (bad though it was).
I've been addicted to technology ever since. And all of it is self-taught. The education system that tried so hard to thwart my interest in this fad failed. That love of technology has served me well. It's still fascinating. I have no need to run Unix at home but I do. I have no need to play with PHP or Mysql but I do. And the beauty is given a book on pretty much any programming language, I can pick it up in a couple of hours. Now that is satisfaction.
The thing is, arrogant bastard that I am, I sometimes find myself listening to developers and thinking that they're sandbagging or that they're setting about doing something the wrong way. That's probably why I'm in marketing with no formal computer qualifications and they do the job they do. I have been lucky enough to work with some absolutely top notch developers over the years, but with that always comes the dross...the trouble is, every now and again, I get the urge to shout it from the rooftops that someone is useless. Every American software company I have ever had any association with contains these process guys who sit and 'manage' software teams. Test this, test that. OK, I know things need testing, but sometimes common sense, extrapolation and a remote understanding of what the code is meant to do can save a lot of time.
I don't know where I'm really going with all this but what I do know is that there's an awful lot of wasted hours spent on corporate American software projects. I'm all for planning and architecture, but when push comes to shove, it's the speed at which quality code can be written that dictates your survival. Sadly, most American software companies haven't got it. Nor do they have the people required to do it. Don't get me wrong, there are an awful lot of good American software developers; it's just that I don't know any personally (with a couple of exceptions).
Anyway, rant over with. Dr John Gardner's fad has made me a nice living. And one day it might make me a nicer one thanks to what I taught myself. My trip back to the UK got me thinking about projects and I have the mother of all ideas formulating. I wonder whether venture capitalists care that I have no formal computing training - I suspect the quality of my powerpoint and marketing skills may trump that particular objection. As my current boss says "the best presentation gets the cheese".
December 20th 2002 19:00CST
So I'm back home in my own little Tundra. There's snow on the ground just like there should be.
One of my favorite pass-times is people-watching and flying gives you a great opportunity to do just that. As I sat in the world club at MSP, I categorized people by demeanor. The rule of thumb is that there are four types of travellers (is that a single L in American?); business people who want to talk, business people who don't, the leisure traveller and the Canadian drunk guy.
The Canadian drunk guy is a scream. He's always in construction and he flies home for Xmas. His job flies him to places for long lengths of time and he always gets home for Xmas via anywhere I'm travelling from. He always has a very amusing story about his travel delays and is willing to share it with whole rooms full of people who may or may not want to hear it. The reason for his delay is to allow him some of that extra quality time in the world club with a free and seemingly endless resource of drinks. I could be quite scathing here, but I won't. The Canadian drunk guy is just about the nicest person you meet when travelling. He doesn't bitch when planes are late, he doesn't complain about airlines. He's just happy to be going home. He is open, friendly to people who don't want to talk and full of the (chemically enhanced) joys of life.
The Canadian drunk guy has three weeks off at Xmas and everything is going to happen next year. All his woes will be gone, all his troubles will melt away in the Spring and this year he will get lucky.
He doesn't care about the business traveller's reluctance to talk. He doesn't care if he reiterates the same story multiple times. He is the Canadian drunk guy(TM).
I raise a glass in your general direction Mr CDG; if we all travelled like you, it would be a better experience for everyone. The world club fees may increase, but it would be worth it. I hope you have a fantastic time wherever in Canada you were going. And I hope that the ignorant ass-holes who looked down their noses at you have Xmas dinners that are so dry they catch fire and that all their presents are of the exploding variety.
It's great to be home (the Bean is currently an ice-cream truck).
December 19th 2002 22:00GMT
I'm currently crunched on the floor in a hotel in Harrogate, having dismantled the whole of my hotel room to get at the phone jack. It's painful.
I have a flight at 06:00 tomorrow and I'm tired. Methinks there was a little too much lascivious wassailing has gone on as well as a lot of work.
All I can really say (due to fatigue) is that my missus kicks butt. She considers herself to be inferior to Melly but she's wrong. As much as I love Mopsa's and Melly's blogs, Natzoid's is the complete dogs bollocks and I'm so lucky to have such a literate and thoughtful wife.
The guys in Skipton love you. I love you. And a whole bunch of other people love you and so they should.
December 13th 2002 10:30CST
I just started typing "Today is the day that I leave home to go to the UK for a week" and stopped myself. It's strange that I've relegated the UK to be pretty much a previous life. Stranger still is that I always feel mildly depressed about going there; I look forward to seeing the people but the damp cramps you in and the towns stifle you. The moors I once considered so comforting now threaten.
My mother insists she always knew that I would move to the US. I never imagined it. I was happy with Manchester, I was happy with Leeds. I wasn't happy at all. I over-compensated for my unhappiness by throwing myself at my work. The last two years I lived in England were probably the worst of my life.
So it's sad that when I board that huge jet this afternoon and climb into my huge seat, I'll not be thrilled with the prospect of returning to the country that made me, but I'll have a heavy heart as the memories of the years before my departure flood my semi-conscious.
All the trepidation will evaporate as I get off the plane in England, breathe some cold damp air and remember that it's only a visit and that I'll be home soon. Home is a comfortable place in the middle of America interacting with people who have never set foot outside its borders. People who expect everything as a God-given right; they are Americans. They are descendents of immigrants but live like the affluence of middle-America is a birth-right. I sincerely appreciate the good fortune that got me here, my family, my life-style and for that priviledge, I will happily have my driver's license marked as a temporary immigrant. I will not be afforded the rights of a citizen, but I will be allowed to pay taxes. In younger days, this would anger me but as I grow older, I accept, resign and just appreciate.
A favorite couple of lines from a song that just about sums it up:
Oh England, my Lionheart, I'm in your garden fading fast in your arms. The soldiers soften, the war is over, the air-raid shelters are blooming clover. Laughing umbrellas fill the lane, my London Bridge in rain again.
The England that I love doesn't exist in the present tense. And maybe it's just better that way.
December 11th 2002 20:30CST
If you think I am stupid enough to keep formmail.cgi or formmail.pl in my cgi-bin directory, and you are stupid enough to try to abuse it, you will be quickly and eloquently told to 404-off and worse still, the gift of denial will be placed on your pathetic spamming domain. Love, lettuce and laughter to most of you and a whole bunch of 404's that magically convert to 403's for the idiots (and believe me, you don't want to get me started on that after my drive home tonight).
December 9th 2002 20:15CST
Ah the joy of les familles. World War III (the War of the Roses) started today with a salvo of email and phone calls. As I mentioned, I'm leaving for the UK on Friday for a week and arrive there on Saturday (subject to my passport making it back from the US embassy in London on time). When I stay in the UK over the weekend, I usually go to my brother's house in Thirsk - this is to avoid any chance of encountering my ex-wife who lives in a house near my parents near Manchester. Normally, my parents drive up to Thirsk and we have a meal, a few drinks, a touch of karaoke in the local pub and a whole lot of ribbing about my being a traitor for moving to the US. However this time, my 76 year-old grandmother (understandably) wants to accompany my parents to Thirsk which is where the war starts. My brother has decided that my parents, grandmother, me, him and his fiance (together with two dogs, one of which is a guide-dog) is just too many people for his house and told my parents, in not so subtle terms that they are not welcome. Parental units are, to put it mildly, mightily dischuffed. Their house is probably just a tad bigger than my brother's and they have catered for many more people over the years and are meant to be catering for the two of them, my brother, his fiance and his fiance's parents this Christmas. The act of aggression from the Yorkshire side of the house has fueled a direct and harsh threat from the Lancashire side; Christmas is in danger of being canceled at chez Kenny's parents. I'll keep you updated...this could escalate quickly.
In an unrelated potential family crisis, my brother's wedding next year could also bring about a broohaha. In a massive snub to my ex-wife, my brother has summarily decided that I will be at his wedding as best man together with the rest of the Minneapolis contingent, which rules out my ex-wife's presence at said event. The big problem here is that four full-price air-tickets and a baby airfare will cost at least $2500. Then there's minivan rental in the UK, hotel bills, new outfits, etc which all adds up to me parting with over $5000, a sum which I could dearly do with not parting with.
I, of course, have a cunning plan involving some lottery tickets, a couple of au-pairs (one of which is also a fine dog-sitter), several limousines, World Business Class and a large pack-llama (OK, so I lied about the llama). Natzoid has poopoo'd this fine strategy as unrealistic, being that I have more chance of being struck by lightning than winning the lottery. I have countered with the fact that winning the lottery is far more likely than the stock market helping us out and covering the cost. So, a challenge has been thrown in the direction of the venerable Mrs Y; tax season looms and her magic is legendary. You go girl!
The point of all this is if one night's accomodation in Thirsk can escalate so quickly, what on earth can a wedding do? In the unlikely event that I don't win the lottery, the stock market (not) recovering and my avoiding being hit by lightning, I may well appeal to the UN for funding for the trip to the wedding on the grounds that if they don't cough up the cash, sharks with frikkin' laser beams may well become a reality.
December 8th 2002 16:00CST
While Christmas-shopping, I picked up a copy of the Pogues greatest hits. Makes me want to get to shit-faced drunk and sing.
December 8th 2002 11:30CST
I bought the new Tori Amos CD a couple of weeks ago. I did it with some trepidation given the last couple. I have been very pleasantly surprised. It's fantastic; go buy it now. I still wish I knew what she was talking about though.
I'm off to do some Christmas shopping in the sub-zero tundra. Current temperature is 12 degrees F but it feels like 0. I don't even want to convert that to C. If anyone knows of how I can insert a live temperature for Minneapolis, I'd be very interested, but I really don't want any twee graphics with it.
I'm not sure what this says about our respective psyches but Natzoid's Windows box is called Lucille and my Linux machine is called Teapot.
I need to lie down again...
December 7th 2002 10:40CST
I know, I'm pathetic. That's what happens when there's no milk for tea.
December 6th 2002 19:45CST
Being British can be problematic at times. Yesterday I drove to Eagan to an anonymous defense company to discuss some requirements that they have for a product. Me being newly appointed product manager after a few years in the wilderness (and thankfully out of marcomms) thought this would be a great opportunity to learn about a new market. Not so. As soon as I signed in and ticked "no" to being a US citizen, the alarm bells went off and numerous securtity personnel descended upon me. This shouldn't surprise me as it's happened before at places that supply the US military. What did surprise me is that they expected me to be carrying my passport (which is currently on its way back from the US embassy in London). Surely my Minnesota driver's license would be enough to prove my identity? The upshot of it all was that I wasn't allowed in.
I've struggled over the years with the ethics of supplying the military. The thought of it immediately conjurs up visions of a Kate Bush song from the late eighties. The premise of the song is that when you meet people, you have no idea what they do or who they are. It's based on a real life experience of a friend of her's who met Oppenheimer but didn't know who he was or what he did. Her friend thought him charming and enjoyed his company. It was only later that she discovered his little secret. Kate Bush has played on that in a lot of songs. The most literal was a straight substitute of Oppenheimer for Hitler (sidenote: fantastically funky fretless bass riff by Mick Karn). Nice guy huh? A more subtle reference is a song about the military developing sounds that could "kill someone from a distance". Both are very disturbing.
While the leftist in me debates the ethics of military production, the realist says that this is important and I can't allow my personal views to influence my judgement in the world we live in today. If what I help them to make saves an innocent life, then I have done no wrong. If I don't do it to the best of my ability, then maybe someone else will who is purely profit-driven and might compromise with a sub-par system that will cost lives.
The irony of being denied access to said company is that I have been in far more secure Naval bases to consult on their computing systems and been privy to more 'restricted' information than I remember. A possibly even bigger brain-fart is the fact that my wife is American, my kids are American and I have a vested interest in their safety, stretching to how well missiles perform. I'm English for God's sake - you know, that country who supports George W more than the majority of the House.
While I may struggle with how we handle the despot in Iraq, I know that when push comes to shove, I will be firmly behind the safety of our people fighting (whether the reasoning is right or not). So it is my responsibility to do whatever I can to help. And if that means receiving telepathic requirements, so be it. I can live with it.
The problem with being reasonable and humanistic is that you have these dilemmas every day. In a previous job we supplied software that was used to monitor nuclear reactors and I saw a competitive product in use at HCMC when Zoe was born. Now our products can affect the safety of everything from your cell phone to pace-makers to smart bombs.
All these things are a heavy burden to live with. I hope I'm doing the right thing.
December 4th 2002 11:10CST
I've had to block some IP addresses due to either some electronic stalker who expects me to update this every few minutes or someone being a bit naughty. I was going to ask you to email me if you have problems accessing this, but if you do have problems, you won't be able to read it...duh!
Pearl of wisdom for the day: it's never too cold to snow.
December 1st 2002 12:00CST
We did our Thanksgiving dinner yesterday once Sam had returned from her dad's. In addition to the obligatory turkey (which is one of the few meats that I'm not that keen on), we had a duck that Sam and I competed for. Natzoid made enough food to feed the whole sixth fleet so we will be living on the left-overs well into next week.
This is probably the first year where I have regarded Thanksgiving as being a legitimate holiday. Prior to yesterday, it has been a random holiday for no good reason but yesterday, it took on a new form.
I set out for the airport yesterday morning to pick up Sam. It was crystal clear and beautifully crisp with blazing sunlight, just as I remember my first Midwest winter (before I moved here). The roads were relatively clear and the ride down 35W was pleasant.
The walk to the A concourse is a long one and MSP is flooded with natural light and beautifully designed (for an aiport). Most airports are not friendly in their design; the international terminal at O'Hare is a prime example of how to make people not want to travel through ORD. The late Douglas Adams summed up airport design perfectly when he wrote that the plumbing was always exposed (since it was functional) and the departure gates hidden (presumably because they were not functional).
Anyway, the trek down to the A concourse was filled with the smell of aviation fuel, a smell that I absolutely love. Considering I fly so much on business, I would have thought that the smell would be associated with leaving home and a bit of a malaise but it's not. The smell of aviation fuel fills me with life as I remember the days before I moved here, when I was in the UK and Natzoid was in the US, the days when one of us would meet the other at the airport in LHR, MAN or ORD. It summons up anticipation of going somewhere or the comfort of coming home. It conjurs up memories of being wonderfully squiffy after a couple of cocktails in the World Club and climbing aboard big jets to AMS, the wonderful service that you get in World Business Class and that fantastic grogginess that you have when you arrive in Europe after a Transatlantic. It reminds me of that perfect cup of coffee that you can only get at Schipol. Aviation fuel is a fantastic memory stimulant.
When Sam and I returned home, the house was filled with the glorious aromas of the Thanksgiving dinner. I'd picked up a couple of bottles of Beaujolais Nouveau which were perfect. After dinner, the kids played and Natzoid and I watched a drama on BBC America. Just a completely perfect day. That is what Thanksgiving is all about, and that is why I now recognize it as being a fantastic idea. It's a day to eat, drink, relax and enjoy the fruits of your labor without the odious undertones of religion or the financial stresses of gift-buying.