Damn Flannel Sheets

Ah, the joy of being back home and in bed. On vacation. Still. Joy!

Oh flannel sheets you sucked me in with your warm fuzzy goodness and kept me from taking a great photograph. The morning sunlight streamed through our bedroom patio doors and illuminated a wicker laundry basket and an armoir. It sounds simple enough, but the lighting was just right on the wood and on the wicker and the shadows were varied and there were these nice highlights coming off the wicker...and it was a great b&w photo opportunity not ten feet away.

But the damn sheets. They felt soooo good. And the light, well she moved incredibly fast and like a stealthy center slipped away...

If I'm lucky, the light will be the same tomorrow morning and I'll have another chance at it.

Nebraska - Land Ho!

A quick update:

The homes around here in Columbus, NE remind me a lot of the small towns in PA -- towns like Jessup, Throop and German. Little towns. Old towns. Little old little towns with small houses.

And mini-power lines looking clothes lines.

So, it's a lot like PA here in NE, except for the fact that you just need to drive a few minutes and you are outside of town in into, quite literally, the great wide open. And it's customary to wave at the people you pass on the local roads.

The past few days have gone well with no repeats of the meth-lab visit mentioned last post. Lots of food, lots of visiting and lots of picture taking.

I went out earlier today and shot two rolls of film -- mostly panoramas of the fields right off 81 on the way to York, NE I think. Eventually I worked my way back into Columbus and took some shots along the Platte. The people were very friendly. More than a few stopped to chat with me or comment or just say hi. It's true, people are friendlier out here.

Merry Christmas - Nebraska Style

Holy Crap I'm in Nebraska. It's wider and flatter than I ever thought it would be. The land just goes and goes and goes. My wide angle lens doesn't even come close to covering the horizon.

It's my first Christmas away from my family, so it's pretty odd. The thing is though, I've been soooo friggen busy from Thanksgiving till now that I've hardly had a moment to contemplate it. Yet here I am. In Nebraska. On Christmas. Who'd of thunk it.

I am not freezing -- so that's a plus and an unexpected surprise. It's been really mild.

So far it's been a great time just visiting with everyone and getting to know Clarisa's side of the family a bit better. Today we drove out to an antique store in a town called Humphrey (population not a lot) and caught a bite to eat at a local watering hole. On the way back Clarisa and her aunt, Betty, decided they wanted to stop and check out an abandoned church on the side of the road. As soon as they got out of our rental, a guy came out of a garage type building next to the church and walked over to them. At the same point in time I see a Mexican looking guy come out of the side of the church with big white plastic buckets and the white guy waves the Mexican guy back in. Basically he wanted the curious ladies gone and would not answer any questions they had, at least not honestly. While this was going on, I was in the car getting ready to jump into the front seat and use a Ford Escape in a very literal method because it seemed that we had stumbled onto a place that had a bad vibe going on. Meth Lab? Chop shop? Hard to say - but the ladies are not allowed to be getting all curious for the rest our stay out here.

Welcome to your shootout is not really what I'm going for on this trip. LOL.

Anyhoo, tomorrow will be all about going out to shoot some film in the morning. I'm armed with a plethora of filters and lots of film so there should be more than a few pictures worth printing by the time I'm through here.

Well Merry Christmas, everyone. Peace on Earth, Good Will Toward Men.

Flu Shot

For the first time since I got a barrage of shots from the US military I actually got a flu shot, but only because it was free and scheduled about 150 feet from my desk, not because in the past few years I've had a penchant for getting sick around the holidays. Certainly not because I missed Christmas two years in a row because I was hacking up a lung. Nah. Free and easy.

Of course I tried about a month ago to get a flu shot. A Doctor at our company thought he had the inside scoop on a free shot clinic. It turns out the info was given to him and ALL of NYC via Channel 4 News. To say the least, the line was looooong and slow and I gave up after waiting 2+ hours with 700 people still in the queue ahead of me. There were a lot of reporters there and a lot of photographers too

About the shot though -- it got me thinking to how horrible a shot used to be when I was a kid. It fucking HURT. I would cry before, during and after the bad man in the white coat worked his cruel medicine on me. My mother would bribe me with McDonalds afterwards, or sometimes tell me I would not be getting a shot and then distract me at the Doctor's office while someone snuck up on me and jabbed me. Oh the betrayal.

These days it doesn't hurt at all to get a shot or give blood. It's really quite painless. But then I got to thinking -- maybe it still hurts just as much as it did, but all the bullshit and pain life has dished out has made the prick of a shot pale in comparison.

You get older. You get tougher. Like my drill sergeants were fond of saying, "Pain is just weakness leaving the body!"

Hoohrah.

Mister Smarty Pants

I don't give myself enough credit. Usually. This time around I'm all about the self-congratulatory arm-breaking pat on the back.

But first, naturally, a little back story.

Six years ago or so I left the horrid world of retail for the world of IT. Well, not exactly. I just left that world not knowing where the hell I would wind up. I just knew that my life would be infinitely better not selling you the extra insurance or telling you where to find the Beano or writing a rain check for the toilet paper that was on sale and plundered in three days. And, I was pretty sure I did not ever ever ever want to drive you home after you pulled into my lot five minutes after I'd closed the office down. In the rain. On a holiday weekend.

Do I convey my derision or shall I go on? I HATED all that.

Moving along then...

I quit Enterprise Rent A Car and went to temp for a coven of witches that ran a personnel agency. The three Macbeth girls pimped me out here and there and eventually I wound up at Texaco's Corporate Planning and Economics Department on a maternity replacement gig for a departmental admin. The duties were light - type, file, book travel arrangements, stock the copier etc etc. It paid just as much as Enterprise and no one yelled at me and the phone stayed blissfully quiet.

In the meantime I decided that there might be something to the whole tech boom deal and started taking some Microsoft Networking courses at the Westchester Business Institute so I could get in on the action. What a rip off that place was. Soooo freaking expensive and the teachers were morons. Lets put it this way -- the head of the networking program had not ever taken one MS networking test or ever worked in networking at all. She had though, worked with some people that might have at one time or another clicked on Administrative Tools. Ultimately the courses were pretty useless, but they did do one thing.

They got me noticed at Texaco.

One day a guy named Ed Feinberg wandered by my desk and commented that he'd heard I liked computers and was taking some classes. He asked me if I would like to build the department's site for the Texaco global intranet. Recognizing opportunity I said yes, even though I had just about no idea how to go about it. Ed threw a copy of Publisher '98 at me and told me to have at it. Eventually I moved onto Frontpage (I know I know, the shame) and even got a Microsoft Certified Professional certification for it. (So very impressive, I know)

There I was though, now the official web guy for Texaco's CP&E. I bought some books and took some notes and met with the one of the Directors, Drew Overpeck. Drew brings up MSNBC and a few other large traffic sites and says that's what he wants. Drew could certainly dream big. I nodded and smiled like a foreigner and left his office terrified. How over my head was I?

Well, as luck would have it, hardly anyone at Texaco new anything about web design. Those who claimed they did had actually just outsourced it. The sites that were built in house were hardly professional so it seemed I could really do no wrong. They wanted me to learn.

Did I mention that this was better than washing cars in the summer in a suit?

Eventually, they brought in another guy that wound up being a super close friend, mentor and confidant, Mister Dennis Derobertis. He was brought in to help out with the CSS, whatever the hell that was. They meant ASP, but they told me CSS. Together we wound up building and managing the flagship site for Texaco's intranet.

Two and a half years or so of Shangri La at Texaco came screeching to a halt when Texaco got bought by Chevron and we were cut loose. Man did it suck leaving that place. Nine months of unemployment later, I landed a gig at Westcon, courtesy of one Ambrose Buldo, Director of E-Commerce. There I learned all about JD Edwards, E-Commerce, Biz-Talk, XML, EDI, Citrix and a host of other crap. I had a lot of leeway in my job. The people at Westcon were great and I really loved it there but I was being really underpaid. So I left the 'Con and my five minute commute for Healthology and a wheel-barrel full of money to become their QA guy, though I really did not have any QA experience.

Let me say this, QA is goddamn tough. Especially when you have no clue, and the department has no clue. So I do what I can with that and try to make up for it with my systems knowledge and sneak in some SQL Server Database stuff.

Ok, so that's the backstory.

Given the preceding, one might think I think I am quite tech savvy, that I am just the bees knees when it comes to IT. The truth is I have really struggled to define myself in that arena. I tend to look at myself as a generalist - someone with a wide range of skills but no real specialty. A utility player, or as I sometimes referred to myself, "Human Middleware". I've been working to change that but the only thing that seems to stick is database performance tuning. Along the way I've become a bit of Jr. DBA, gathering lots of knowledge but without a place to apply it.

Well, my current boss has let me run with it and I just came up with two fixes, one at the application and one at the database level that have had a huge positive impact on our application performance. We freed up at least a days worth of database processing time with fixes. The apps fly now and there is room to grow.

My solution. Me. The English Lit major, ex-helicopter pilot, ex-retail guy, ex-insurance guy, ex-real estate guy, ex-art room guy and the Brett Weston, Ansel Adams wannabe. Doing DBA shit.

Color me, for the first time in my life maybe, impressed. With me. I got a lot going on.

Imagine there's no countries,
It isnt hard to do,
Nothing to kill or die for,
No religion too,
Imagine all the peopleliving life in peace...

You made the mistake of making eye contact.

For the most part I'm always on the train to and from the city at peak hours and for the most part the trains are packed with commuters that spend their time with the MTA sticking to themselves. People sleep, read, fiddle with gadgets, listen to tunes. But its all very quiet. Loud cell phone talkers are often shooshed or told to shut up. Hey man, there are rules to this commute thing. Set a moving pick if you can while getting on the train to assure a seat. If you are not ballsy enough to ask someone to move over, you will wind up standing. Do not be loud and do not make eye contact with a drunk.

Earlier this week I was on a later train than usual. Still peak, but late so the cars weren't so crowded and getting a seat was a snap. Lo and behold a stench of stale beer and cigarettes makes me look up to see a wasted blue collar guy coming down the aisle. He sits right across from me and dammit I made eye contact. Just the briefest of of acknowledgements but contact nonetheless. I became this guys buddy for the ride all the way to White Plains. Any comments or complaints that my new friend had were floated right my way with the finest mix of aromas. Ah. Halitosis. Stale beer. Nicotine. Gotta love it. It's like college!

So there we are, me staring straight ahead and this guy is looking for an opening - a little conversational trinket. Shortly his trinket arrives in the form of a large sweaty balding older and nervous guy that's just passed 5 open seats and stops in front of my drunken commuting associate and gives him one of these:

"Excuse Me.' he said when he really meant, "Move your ass for me now. This seat has spoken to me like the dog spoke to The Son of Sam and I must sit here."

Other people might have moved over. The guy had fulfilled a commuting rule and had the ballz to ask for the seat. Thing is though, my drunken canvas coat with leather collar friend was not a commuter and did not realize the rules. Instead he sat there and stared at the swarthy accoster in a manner that conveyed bafflement. Though drunk, his common sense and inscrutable trailer park logic was still in full effect. The Blue Collar drunk guy said,

"You have to be fucking kidding me. There are like a ton of empty seats everywhere and you want to sit HERE?"

And with that observation the swarthy man muttered in a small voice, "I guess that's true." and moved on.

Then the blue collar guy had me. Just as the swarthy man cleared the space between us he looks at me and says "Can you believe that shit? That dumbass wanted to sit here. HERE! With all these empty seats."

"Yup" I said.

"Really, that guy wanted to sit here. Right here in this seat. Wanted me to get up. Wanted me to get up and fucking move so he could sit here." He gestures to the vacant seats and continues "Look at all the seats....Etc etc....

"Yup."

After a few rounds of that sort of conversation my erstwhile traveling companion got caught up in a phone call and was polite enough to take his conversation to the train car's vestibule and well out of earshot. Maybe it was politeness, maybe it was to make a drug deal or place bet. Who the hell knows, I was just glad to not have to hear it (or smell it).

In the meantime, the train stops at 125th and a woman and a young girl get on the train and sit right behind me. She starts reading to the kid about tigers and lions and stating lots of lion and tiger facts. Then she moves onto some whacked out geography lesson and quizzing the kid about what the capitol of Sri Lanka is and asking the kid if the kid was Sri Lankan. Rinse and repeat for Nepal, Tibet, Thailand and a host of other countries. I'm perplexed because the kid has no idea what the hell a tiger or a lion is but is supposed to know that Katmandu is the capital of Nepal.

Re-enter the drunk guy who has since returned to his seat and is downing a third Bud Tallboy. He's been listening too. He looks back at the woman in the seat behind me and says:

"I don't mean to interrupt, but not for nothing, but since you are being so loud I couldn't help but hear you. How about this though...how how about what the capitol of this state (finger pokes seat). This state (poke poke) right here. What about this country. How about learning about this country FIRST before that crap."

Of course awkward silence follows and of course he looks to me for support. "Am I right?"

I wanted to turn around myself and say that the guy was right and she was being loud and shut up and teach the kid about America first and if you aren't with us you are with the terrorists and dammit the kid doesn't know what a lion is yet.

However, diplomatic me could only come up with, "Geography sure is useful." and stare out the window some more. The guy just continued to needle the lady with questions like "What's the largest lake in New York? What's the capitol of this state?" while she sat in silence. This just egged him on though. "What you don't know? Really?" and he would come back to me and tell me she didn't know. Then he would ask me how fucked up it was that she did not know.

And so it went till we hit White Plains and I got off and left the conflict / quiz show.