Story Archive - August 2008

Established 1096 (08/30/2008)

The dons of Oxford and Cambridge are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything. - Samuel Butler

Overall I need to be excited about my trip out to the UK. Though it came somewhat unexpected and somewhat close to the India trip, it's been good and given me a chance to be innovative and impress customers, which is something that has been sorely lacking recently. Of course, most important in my extended business trips, whether it be to Australia, New York, India or England, is to say to my coworkers, "well I know this woman here I'd like to meet up with for a day." This situation impresses them and adds an aura of mystique to my life that inspires office rumors and gossip. Rumors and gossip is something I cultivate since American's youth are not taking enough interest in office politics.

So on Saturday I went out with an old friend that I've seen for nearly six years who happens to live in London now. We shared office space back to back in the final days of the internet bust as my company was slowly letting the SF office atrophy away. Perhaps one of my favorite memories from that time was when she was doing IA for a site and said under her breath, "chaos..." which obviously caused my to spin around in my chair and say "yes?" It's a long story, but through most of my high school years and some of my college, I responded to my screen name of Chaos.

We went up to Oxford and combine my two favorite activities: (1) wandering around on foot a place I don't know and discovering new things and (2) long and meaningful chats with good friends who are at very similar places in their life.

Elise and Jordan

The first step to knowing a city is to climb to the highest point you're allowed and take a look around. So as required, we headed to the top of Saint Mary's Church Tower where Elise proceeded to remark that she got "freaked out" by heights. That is probably something that would have been good to know before we started the ascent. The stone staircase on the way up was extremely tight and windy with a rope dangling down to be used as a support to pull up on. I love old stone stairways that are worn down from use over centuries of walking. It was beautiful and the view was nice.

Jordan on Oxford

I had only one sight I wanted to see for sure in Oxford: The Eagle and Child. Also known as the Bird and Baby, it's the pub that the Tolkien, Lewis and the rest of the Inklings hung out at after work. One delicious jacked potato later and we were back on the street.

Eagle and Child Pub

At our second pub, hidden in a tiny alleyway, we ran into a nice group of people who wanted to be helpful and tell tourists about the best places to see. In accordance with our "it's a small world" discussions we had been having during the day, one of the group said he had lived in Palo Alto for a while (where I live) and the other said he had lived in Wisconsin (where Elise is from). Have I mentioned it's a small world?

Upon their suggestion we went punting. Much like a gondola in venice, we jumped onto a boat that where a punter with a fifteen foot metal poll pushed the boat along the water. This could have been relaxing, except I was the punter! My years of nautical training had me well equipped and we never crashed and no one fell into the water. We saw a few other punters with bottles of wine, cheese and music on their boats. Clearly professionals in the relaxation business.

Dinner at a hole-in-the-wall Thai restaurant also recommended by the locals and one final pub. At the last place we met a man from York named something I can't spell, though I wrote it down as "John T." which I assume is really "Jeantee" or something similarly European. He was completely trashed, but said his parents own an Inn in York, gave me his mobile, and told me that I needed to call and come visit him up there. He also kissed me goodnight. How sweet of him.

Powered by Hope (08/29/2008)

If you're walking down the right path and you're willing to keep walking, eventually you'll make progress. - Barack Obama

The week in the UK is going well. Actually it's going better than I expected it to go with more rest and fewer beers than were originally estimated for. I'm sad to be missing the DNC this week. Four years ago, my apartment was election party central and we had people over for most major events. Watching Johnny Flipflop and Johnny Sunshine up against Curious George and Dick, Dark Lord of the Sith, was a non-stop show. Though, since most of my friends are bleeding heart liberals, I found myself aggressively defending GOP to try and pull people to the middle.

This week I slept through most of the DNC footage and tried to read about it in the British papers the next day. Thankfully in the middle of the night my neighbor decided she wanted to watch the Obama speech at extremely high volume on the TV next to our paper-thin wall. As I lay in bed, wishing I were asleep, I did get to listen to the speech as well as to the response of my neighbor. She would say loudly and in a British accent, "that's right!" "Exactly!" "You're speaking the truth!" She had a big collection of affirmatives.

London Calling (08/25/2008)

When you blame yourself, you learn from it. If you blame someone else, you don't learn nothing, cause hey, it's not your fault, it's his fault, over there. - Joe Strummer

It really wasn't my intent to be traveling quite so much. Three weeks ago I was in the east coast. Two weeks ago I was in India. The past week was a quick seven day layover in San Francisco before I jumped on a flight to London. Now I will be out in the UK for around seven days before catching a flight back to the east coast for another few days out there.

I had to wake up extremely early this morning to start my hike to the train station. Both of my roommates are out of town and I didn't really have enough notice to wrangle someone else to take me. I know I'm a powerful businessman and I could take a cab, in theory, but there is just something that sits poorly in my gut about cabbing when my state has gone out of the way to build public transportation lines for me. About six minutes into my half-hour walk to the station a nice man pulls up next to me in his car, "Are you going to the train station? I'm on my way into town and I can give you a lift." Now all of my instinctual training has taught me that this man was planning on killing me and taking all of the valuables clothes in my baggage, but I managed to suppress my fears, size up the vehicle and take him up on the offer. He was, of course, extremely nice and great company. I hate how much I have been taught to fear strangers. When I was in Turkey last summer my sister-in-law suggested a couple times to hitch a ride with someone. When I was in India just last week, my friends were constantly hitching rides with strangers.

On the flight I introduced myself to my two row companions. I've gotten into this tradition of saying hello to the people I'll be traveling with. It started out pleasant enough. Richard and Helen had been a week trip to the states to visit with friends and were on their way home. They were probably in their mid-forties. How would I have guessed that the next ten hours would be filled with petty bickering about the most inane things in the world? Oh it was.

Landing (08/19/2008)

I came to envy his ease, his cnfidence that any given situation was only temporary. - Nam Le

I put up all my bags in the overhead bin and sit down on the last plane required to get me from Singapore to San Francisco. There's a stop over on the way back in Hong Kong. I start to set my watch when the women next to me notices the activity and asks, "do you know what time it is in Hong Kong?" I shrug. "Sorry," I say, "I'm setting this to San Francisco time. This is the part of the trip where I try and start the jet lag process. You power through today until after they server dinner, which will be about midnight San Francisco time, and then sleep as hard as you can until landing." She mentions that her clock is completely screwed up and her total trip is going to take her nearly fifty hours.

No, she is not circumnavigating the globe as I assumed. Her name was Rachel, and she was attending her college roommate's wedding in a village in India. Her trip home consisted of a bus ride from the village to a minor town, another bus ride to a major town, a flight from one major town to another. That's when Rachel made it into Bangalore and when our trip together started. She asked, "you've made this trip before? It's a killer." "Yes, this is only my second time, but people in my company go all the time and I have a lot of advice from them on the right way to do things." "That's great, just keep me updated if there are things I should know."

When the drink cart came around the first time I said, "if you don't like ringing the call button, it's important to stock up on drinks. I'll have a Tiger beer, a Bailey's, a Johnny Walker and a diet coke." As the stewardess was handing me my drinks Rachel was clearly surprised and said, "they'll do that?" "Yes. I assume they think I'm an alcoholic, but I'm really doing this to make their life easier."

After dinner I reminded her, "this is when you need to sleep as hard as you can. If you aren't drinking I suggest two Tylenol PM's. Also, be warned that on the flight out I had a few night terrors." She took my drugs and was completely out very quickly breathing heavy with that light just-about-to-snore level. I'm a light sleeper and during the middle of the night her head casually falls onto my shoulder. It wakes me up immediately, but I nights with the cat jumping on me have trained me not to react to abruptly. I sigh quietly under my breath; normally I am extremely frustrated by my seat neighbors that encroach on my space, but this time I appreciate the moment of false intimacy, and go back to trying to sleep.

After breakfast the next morning the plane lands behind schedule. I get my bags and wish her well.

Pulling WebKit (08/17/2008)

I know what I should be doing is copying pasting numbers from people's time cards over to a profitability spreadsheet to calculate Q3 numbers for work. You know what is intensely more interesting? Writing a shell script that will download the nightly build for WebKit and install it for me. One problem I am having is how to install it into /Applications instead of ~/Applications, but that is just a minor problem that affects other users of my computer.

downloadUrl=`curl -s "http://nightly.webkit.org/" | grep "Download WebKit for Mac OS X" | \
    sed 's;.*"\(http[^"]*\)".*;\1;'`
downloadFile=`echo "${downloadUrl}" | sed 's;.*/\([^/]*dmg\);\1;'`
curl -s -o ~/Downloads/${downloadFile} ${downloadUrl}
hdiutil attach -quiet ~/Downloads/${downloadFile}
osascript -e 'tell app "WebKit" to quit'
rsync -rlpog --executability --delete /Volumes/WebKit/WebKit.app ~/Applications
osascript -e 'tell app "WebKit" to launch'
hdiutil detach -quiet /Volumes/WebKit
rm ~/Downloads/${downloadFile}

Going Down (08/16/2008)

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. - Macbeth (Shakespeare)

The stewardess comes on the line and tells everyone to turn off electronic devices for takeoff. I switch my iPhone into airplane mode, slide it into an off position, wrap the earbuds around the case and put it neatly in the seat back in front of me. I pull out the collection of short stories, essays and other collective writings that I have been worked through and start to read as the plane taxis out.

The jet engines gun loudly and the plane begins zooming forward. I most ignore the environment and continue reading. Then my sixth sense kicks in. I have taken off from SFO at least a hundred times in my years living the bay and working for various companies and something feels wrong. I realize that we're not going as fast as we probably should be this far down the runway. The plane should have been airborne by this point.

We go off the end of the runway into the bay bouncing on the water. Screaming starts. "Well crap" I think to myself as I realize this is going to delay my trip. Things are going in slow motion and I am shocked by how calm everyone in the plane is. I'm shocked by how calm I am as we skip across the bay.

Then about six rows in front of me the front of the plane snaps up and off. I have this out-of-plane experience and visualize the front snapping back like a kid snapping his neck doing a belly-flop. The sound is sickly. The lower lip of the cabin touches the water and it blasts into the plane. Strangely calm and resolved I think, "I wonder if I'm going to drown or if something else is going to kill me first?" The water smacks my face like a punch...

...I jerk awake and my arms flail around me. The stewardess literally leaps back from me. "I'm so sorry sir" she says. This is the moment when you're suppose to realize, "I just woke up from a dream" but all I can think is, "Oh my god I'm dead. Why would I go back to the plane in my afterlife?" She gives puts a supper tray in front of me as we enter the very last leg of the journey to land safely in India. It took nearly ten minutes for me to shake the feeling that eating my breakfast was a part of what dreams may come. That was my first exposure to the side effect of the anti-malaria pills, "vivid dreams." It was terrifying and I can understand why some people refuse to take them.

A Brief Rest for People (08/09/2008)

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn. - C. S. Lewis

I like being a hermit. It's actually one of the main reasons that I live with roommates so late in my life. If I didn't do it, I would be "that quiet guy who seems to spend all his time alone in his apartment with his cat(s)." Instead, I am blessed with constantly having people around me all the time and continuing to socialize me. Still, I do love running away from it all and just being in the quiet of my mind.

I'm off on a week trip to India. I think most people get antsy on the flight, but there is nothing so serene as having 24 hours without really having to talk with anyone. I successfully watched three movies!

I have almost finished reading "Rainbow's End." I will be done by the time I land in India. It's such a peaceful and relaxing flight. I need to take 30 hour retreats more often.

Salutory Invention (08/07/2008)

I wish I could just hug you all, but I'm not gonna. - Layne Staley

The first time you run into an old friend of the opposite gender that you've never met, how do you greet them? I get introduced all the time in social situations to nice young ladies and I'm never quiet sure the right way to start things. When meeting men, it's never a problem for me. I give them a nice firm hand shake. At some point, if we become close friends, those men might graduate to the one hand shake slash one arm hug. Eventually they might even achieve the mythical bear hug. That level of salutary escalation makes sense to me. I know how to deal with it and I rarely feel like a tool.

But with women? Oh vey! Upon first introduction I am at a complete loss. The handshake always seems so out of place, and I'll tell you, most of the women I seem to run into have timid and limp handshakes. Sure, I get the idea of not wanting to insult my masculinity, but please! The limp hand shake says to me, "you screwed this up so much I'm not even going to bother pretending like you know what you are doing." So where do you go that is one level past the handshake? I'm not sure; usually when I am introduced to close friends of friends I reach out for the shake and feel like a tool assuming that it will only be this once time. I know that at the end of the evening I will probably be giving these people a friendly hug goodbye, but at the start? Trying to hug a stranger is a recipe to get kneed in the groin. I mean, so I've heard.

I've thought through many options. The hi-five seems like it would work on some. Maybe some sort of terrorist fist bump? But in general, I have no solution to this problem other than to continue to lament.

Around the World Again (08/06/2008)

Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err. - Mohandas Gandhi

Last week I went to NY for a day. I flew out on Tuesday night on the red-eye, stayed for six hours of meetings and then flew back home. It's the kind of cavalier thing I would do in my youth. I'm not such a spring chicken anymore and I really should know better than to pull those kinds of stunts. Over the weekend I started cleaning and packing in preparation for my trip to India next week, but took a break on Sunday to see a friend in the city. While I was up there I started having "you travelled to much" rumblings. I thought it was in my head, but sure enough, on Tuesday morning the sniffles hit me full force.

So what are my key inventory items for India? I've got all my vaccines updated, my malaria pills ready and four big bags of halloween candy. While India always has numerous delicious dairy-free treats they don't have a lot of chocolate. They also don't have a lot of chocolate candy bars. So when I go, I bring big bags of bite-size halloween candy. The candy vanishes very quickly in the office. Delicious.

Bye Bye Harry (08/05/2008)

I am glad that you are here with me. Here at the end of all things. - Frodo (Lord of the Rings)

I'm happy to say that I'm done reading the Harry Potter series. If Jo keeps her promise, I will never need to read another one. I didn't enjoy reading the books. I felt the books encompassed a lot of truly terrible moral views on the world. Why did I read them? Because I have enjoyed the movies and since I have constantly told my friends they should read Lord of the Rings and Chronicles of Narnia before watching the movies, I felt I should do them the same honor for the Harry Potter series. There is this great irony with Harry Potter, that the movies lessen my complaints about the book.

There are two main lessons these books teach to our children that make me sad. I think my children will have to wait until they are old enough to know that the books are just children's novels before they will be allowed to read them.

The first lesson, "if you're life is hard, discover that you are rich, famous and a natural athlete. Then you can ride on the achievements of your friends and get special treatment from teachers to help you coast through life." It's sad really, how little Harry does through all the books. But why should he need to do more? The world moves around him.

The second lesson is that people you expect are evil are always evil and beyond redemption. The lack of a redemption story anywhere in the series is such a sad point. There are so many characters who appear evil on first glance, and who other characters tell us to put faith in and to trust. Yet, at the end of all things, they are just as evil and selfish as in the beginning. Sure, for some, their selfishness can be used to trick them into helping the powers of good, but they are without redemption.

Why shouldn't it be that way? (08/04/2008)

People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them. - George Bernard Shaw

She was born to parents that weren't ready for her. When she was born, they weren't too young to have children, but they were too young to be ready for it. Her father was living at home, working and never intended to go to college. Her mother was working and trying to fit college classes in on the side. It wasn't exactly the right time for either to be starting a family. But as good religious people, they decided to make a go at it. She was less than a year old when they called off the engagement and decided that it wasn't going to work out.

Eight years later her mother had graduated from college, gotten married and had two more children. Her father had never graduated, but had a steady job, gotten married and had two more children.

Seven more years I came into the picture. There was a fifteen year old girl who had two step siblings on either side, but was too old to be any kind of friend with them. She could have been a big sister and considered herself one of five, but instead she felt completely outcast by the family situation. She felt like a painful reminder of a stupid mistake that her parents had made. She always talked about being the odd one out. I can't really say how much that was true and how much that was a teenager's distorted view of the world. All I know is that her angst was real and that she brooded over it constantly. Her angst saturated a lot of my time in high school. Her angst was a lens that I saw a lot of families through.

I carry that around with me a when I hear people talk about their modern American family. History is full of complicated and confusing family units. I remember it when I talk to people about my family.

"Wait, exactly how many siblings do you have?" "I'm one of two or one of four or one of five or one of seven; I mean, it all depends on how you do the math." I need to start carrying a chart around with me to so I don't have to spend so much time trying to explain it. I mean, really, it's not that hard. Here is the simple family tree:

The Family Tree

Or if that is too confusing here is the simple Venn diagram:

The Family as Venn

There was an interview between Larry King and Priscilla Presley a few years ago. The two of them were running through all the divorces, failed relationships, new children and such of the Presley family and Priscilla kept saying, "they're friends." Over and over. Larry pauses in disbelief and says that all these people can't possible be friends anymore. She says a singularly moving thing, "Why not? Isn't that great, though? I mean, when you stop and think about it, why shouldn't it be that way?"

Time to Switch (08/03/2008)

Sir.. I've witnessed heart attacks while illustrating simple changes between XP and Vista so... yeah... windows to mac... its like dying. - Stephen D. (Certified VA Re-trainer)

I have been exceptionally happy since I impulse bought my MacBook Air at the start of the year. I cannot ever imagine having a larger computer again. Carrying it around lightly in my off-hand is just like a dream. As part of this purchase, I ended up with an extra Mac laptop.

My mother has been complaining for quite a while about her old computer and its slow death. I'm not one to fight the universe when it points out the obvious so last week I passed on my old MacBook to her. I stalled for a while because I know that she learned computers by action not by concept. While the concept doesn't change between Windows and Mac (or any other GUI), the actions can be very different.

There were so many examples of switcher insanity. I guess I'm starting to get why Apple has to market.

Incident #1) "I want to organize my documents. So I'll open up Microsoft Word, select 'Open Document,' and then attempt to drag files around between directories." WHAT!?! You use the MS Word Open Dialog to organize your folders? You're kidding me.

Incident #2) "Wait wait wait. Where are my folders?!?!" "It's sorted alphabetically." "NONONO! I need all my folders on the top. I'll never find them otherwise." "Why? They're sorted alphabetically." "I can't deal with this!"

Incident #3) "Why are the ports on the side?" "Because Apple never puts ports in the back. That is super inconvenient." "Are you kidding me? On the side all my cables just get in the way."

Incident #4) "Delete is broken! It's in the wrong place on the keyboard and when I press it deletes the wrong direction." "It's in the upper right and it's does a backspace like a type writer." "Nono! Delete is suppose to delete the letter in front of what I type."

Incident #5) "I can't find the insert key! How do I make it so that I can type over?"

Incident #6) "Okay, I've got my pictures into iPhoto. How do I organize the folders?" "You don't have to, iPhoto will keep it organized." "No! I have a very particular structure, I'll never find anything again."

How can I even begin to talk about her Palm IIIc that only has a serial connector.

I mean, they are small things, and she hasn't broken down into tears yet.