Monthly Archives: May 2015

Dark and quiet…

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Last night I learned that my little corner of the world is incredibly dark and quiet when the magic of electricity fails in the middle of the night. We’re talking can’t see you hand in front of your face kind of dark… and wake you up out of a dead sleep because you’re not hearing all the running HVAC equipment and other background noises that electricity brings kind of quiet.

It was downright eerie… for about 40 seconds until one by one I could hear the neighbors backup generators springing to life to power life as normal in the 21st century. The power here only stayed out for about ten minutes, but it’s safe to say I now have one more home improvement on the list – if only because I’d be hugely ill tempered to find myself the lone person in the neighborhood sitting in the dark during a longer term outage.

Now if I can just count on nature to play nicely until after next tax season, that would be fantastic because I’m fairly sure the kind of genset I want isn’t going to be one funded out of petty cash. After that, dark and quiet will be someone else’s problem. I mean, sure, you can live without the modern conveniences, but why the hell would you want to?

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Human interaction. Some people don’t get subtly. They don’t pick up on the social cues that the rest of us understand naturally. Occasionally that means you have to do things that under any other circumstances would make you seem and feel like a jackass… but when someone isn’t getting the message, sometimes that’s all that’s left. If that means I have to stand up and walk away from you mid-sentence, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m not going to feel bad about it. I’m not going to apologize for it. As much as I’d rather handle it like a normal human being, I’m perfectly willing to be an asshole in the service of my own sanity.

2. The canonization of John Stewart. Stewart is a funny guy. I like the Daily Show. But I don’t get the left wing lionizing him for his take on Fox News. I mean does anyone not know they trend towards the right wing? I’m not sure that’s even a serious discussion. Like every media outlet, they have an agenda or an ax to grind. CNN, MSNBC, Sky, they all have their own brand of slant, but Stewart singles out Fox with glee as if they were the only ones pushing an ideology. It’s a case that could be just as easily made about just about every organization, everywhere. Then again, I guess it doesn’t hurt that the Daily Show’s viewers skew left… I suppose Mr. Stewart, too, knows how his bread is buttered.

3. Lunch. Turkey sandwich. Peanut butter and jelly. Ham sandwich. Turkey sandwich. Salad. Turkey Sandwich. Meatball sub. Turkey sandwich. Turkey sandwich. Salad. Ham sandwich. Peanut butter and jelly. As a cost cutting measure back in the dark days of the furlough I started packing my own lunch… but honest to God if I keep opening my bag and seeing nothing but deli sandwiches, salads, and wraps I might have to burn my cubicle to the ground. There simply has to be a better lunch than sandwiches, microwave “meals”, and leftovers. If there isn’t, the terrorists have already won.

Reason why…

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Scotland_Forever!There are a lot of ways that making your living with your brain is a hell of a lot easier than making your living by lifting heavy things or digging holes. I very rarely come home physically exhausted from the day. I’m not particularly worried about joints giving out around my 50th birthday (which on reflection is closer than I really want to admit). Some days, like today, you just come home with your brain oozing out your ear or a headache strong enough to power several small northeastern states. Trust me, mental exhaustion is a very real thing.

It comes from trying to carry out tasks the point of which is uncertain in an environment where the endgame is obscured. It comes from a world where everything (and thereby nothing) is a priority. It comes from a place where “Mine is not to reason why…” is a completely justifiable answer to so many questions of purpose.

It’s been my professional experience that at any given time half the people are trying to do the right thing. Some of them are even doing it for the right reasons. The problems arise when there are no reasons – or because those reasons are a gut feeling, a hunch, or a best guess from echelons higher than reality. True, sometimes that’s all there is to go on, but when it becomes SOP, you’ve got yourself a problem. Even people who generally want to do the right thing are challenged to make that happen when they’re left in the dark about the big picture. Even for those who aren’t deep blue strategic thinkers, it’s helpful to know where your widget falls in the big picture.

My brain hurts… I supposed that’s what I get for a vain effort to reason why.

First impressions of a Watch…

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If you’re on the fence about ordering an Apple Watch, a word of advice – don’t do it. I think it’s going to be one of those things you either love or hate and if you’re not chomping at the bit to have one on your wrist, the price of entry probably doesn’t justify the functionality you’re going to get from the device.

If you do think you want one, if you like having tech to fiddle with incessantly, or if you’re just trying to cram as much data as possible into your head all day, Apple Watch might just be for you. Other than getting s42sg-sbbk-sel_GEO_USuse to something other than my old, trusty Swiss Army watch strapped around my wrist, I can say definitively after three days that this new piece and I will get along just fine. It was touch and go there in the beginning. There is a seriously steep learning curve that goes along with it, but after some fits and starts and a lot of tweaking to get the settings “just so,” I have no regrets.

Some things I’ve noticed:

1. It’s heavy. That is to say even with the sports band the stainless Watch is heavier than the watch it’s replacing. With today as the first day I’ve had it on nonstop from morning to night, my left arm feels something between tired and numb. I have to think that by the end of the week I won’t even notice it.

2. Settings are important. If you get a lot of notifications pushed to your phone, you’re going to want to clean house a bit once you get your Watch. Having your wrist vibrate every 30 seconds isn’t value added (to me). However, now that I’m just getting notified about breaking news, calls, emails, and texts as they come in it feels like something worth having.

3. The battery is surprisingly good, but you have to remember to plug it in. I could probably get two full work days out of a single charge, but if I were demanding a lot of notifications, or initiating a lot of calls or messages from my arm, I’m sure battery life would suffer correspondingly. Mercifully the battery at least charges quickly.

4. The app store is still a little thin. It has the basics – a few news sites, Insta, Twitter, some games, calculators – but it’s going to take the 3rd party developers some time to figure out how to get the most out of this wearable piece of screen real estate.

5. It’s networked. That’s the real asset for the Watch. In some cases it’s also an Achilles heel… especially when you’re required from time to time to show up at locations that don’t welcome stray electronic devices with open arms. If you happen to work all day in a place like that, it’s probably best to stick with analog technology. Since it’s not a full time issue for me, I’ll just have to remember to take the thing off (and secure it) before wandering into those parts of the building.

If you’re hoping the Watch will replace your iPhone or iPad, you’re going to be disappointed. It’s not and it wasn’t designed to. It was designed as an add on for one or both of those devices. Ultimately it’s a software based watch with some neat notification functionality built in. It’s enough to give you a glance at the news, switch up the song selection, and let you know if someone is tweeting, but it’s not a phone on your wrist – not yet anyway – but I think it’s pretty clear that’s the direction Apple wants to go in their pursuit of lighter and thinner.

It’s a watch – with some extra functionality built in. Once you take control over the settings it does most of what it was built to do remarkably well – not a surprise given it’s source. Ask me a month from now and I’ll bet it’s another device I’d be hard pressed to live without.

I wonder when I can start looking (and budgeting) for v2.0 to make an appearance…

Just about perfect…

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The last of a good day’s sun is creeping across the tops of the back yard oaks. I’m more of a sunrise guy, but there’s something to be said about this dusky time of day too… especially on a Sunday night, which I assume we all find at least a touch melancholy. As the light drains away from another weekend, I’m almost willing myself into boredom in an effort to extend the day just that little bit longer – a fool’s errand to be sure – but it’s a well established part of the Sunday evening routine.

I don’t have much of anything to add to that little observation. The weekend was uneventful and unremarkable in nearly every way. Some people would find that disappointing, but I tend to consider it an achievement… So if you’ll excuse me I have an appointment with the back porch, a cold drink, and the setting sun.

And that’s just about perfect.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Outlook has exceeded its storage capacity. I got an email from Outlook this morning at the office, roundly chastising me for vastly exceeding my network storage limit and effectively forcing me to dump easily tens (and possibly hundreds) of thousands of emails from the neat and orderly file structure I’ve had since the dawn of time into giant “pots” of email segregated by year. Sure, yes I know there are automatic ways to find all sorts of files, but nothing makes me (professionally) happier than seeing a neatly organized rhyme and reason for how my files and documents are arranged. I want to know how to get to things without needing to ask the machine to find it for me. It’s a personality quirk. Still, at a time in history when electronic storage is cheap and easy, running out of network storage is just stupid, bad, and wrong. Google might be mining my every message for content, but at least those pricks have never imposed a unilateral ex post facto storage cap on me. After all, you just never know when that email thread from February 2007 is going to suddenly become important. Based on my observation, the future largely a rehash of something we tried five or ten years ago… and when it comes around again, I like to be able to reference the documentation showing why it’s as bad an idea now as it was then. Forewarned is forearmed.

2. Pay walls. I’m a reasonably informed person. I try to draw my information from a variety of sources both national and international and representing multiple ends of the political spectrum. I think it’s important not to rely too much on any one news outlet, although I clearly have a few favorites. Regardless of whether you’re a favorite or not, I’m not going to pay for access to news content online. Not. Going. To. Happen. With a million other competing news sites and blogs, I don’t have any reason to pay for the news – for the same reason I wouldn’t pay for a newspaper when I was an undergrad. Aside from not wanting to pay just to read the one article a month I might be interested in, the same or similar content is available somewhere. In college it meant stopping by the local coffee shop or McDonald’s that always had plenty of copies of the paper laying around. Online it means clicking over to a news aggregator or running a quick key word search. It’s cute that news providers are desperate to hang on to the 19th century subscription model of distribution, but I’m not convinced it has a place in the 21st century. There are plenty of other, likely more lucrative, ways to get at the consumer’s wallet… if you’re just a little bit innovative in the approach.

3. George Foreman. A George Foreman grill was one of the first kitchen appliances I received after graduating college and striking out on my own. That original grill is long gone, but I’ve always had one stashed in a cabinet and used it at least once a week if not more often. Then I moved a month ago. The only thing I lost as part of the move was the Foreman’s drip tray. One single, solitary piece of plastic gone while moving the entire house. I have no idea how something like that would get lost in transit, but it did. I’ve been using assorted substitutes for the last few weeks. None of them have been particularly good at filling the role. I assumed jumping on Amazon and ordering a replacement would be cheap and easy. As generally happens when I assume, I was dead wrong. Not only where they not cheap, but they weren’t in stock. Anywhere… unless you wanted to order one “used, but clean” from eBay. Uhhh… no. Thanks. That’s ok for books, but not something that’s going to live in my food prep area. So instead of a $.37 piece of plastic, Amazon is sending me a new $49.99 grill tomorrow. It feels a little like swatting flies with a cruise missile.

Explaining the Game…

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Sunday I had the singular experience of trying to simultaneously watch the new episode and explain the back story of Game of Thrones. I don’t feel like I did either activity the kind of justice it deserves, summing up the nature of what is modern television’s greatest fantasy epic as 1500s Europe meets Harry Potter meets Dallas… with dragons.

While trying to fill in character elements and key overall plot points, I missed big swaths of story arcs moving forward – so much to the point of reading the recaps on Monday and wondering if I’d even watched the right episode. Turn your eyes away for a few seconds and you find yourself hopelessly lost in the progression. It’s even worse now that the show has started outpacing or diverging wildly from the source material. Even the things I knew to be “true” about the world of GoT aren’t necessarily so. Questions of “why did he do that,” are met with only a perplexed “I have no idea.”

I’m going to have to go back and rewatch last week’s episode before settling in Sunday night for the next installment. I should go back and rewatch the whole damned season at this point since you could probably fill another book with the details I missed while watching some other part of the screen. If I struggled to explain the Game after being a faithful viewer and being well versed in the books, I’m not sure I have a prayer of keeping things in order now that we’re heading off script.

The only thing for sure now is that when someone wants a primer on Game of Thrones I’ll just point them at A Wiki of Ice and Fire and wish them a good day. I no longer feel at all qualified to speak with even limited authority about what’s going on and why.

A good dream…

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Aside from a couple of spots that are going to have to be backfilled once they settle, the great fence build of 2015 is mission complete. I’m well satisfied, the dogs (even Winston) are doing their best to chase off the rabbits, squirrels, and birds, and for the moment all is right with the world. I won’t go into the vast number of new and interesting landscape projects that this opening effort of the spring fighting season has brought to mind. There’s no end to the brush that needs cut, stumps to grind, and nature that generally needs to be beaten into submission at every turn. This week has already been a damned good start, but I’m all too aware that what I want to get done is likely a project of years and not of weeks or even months.

The up side is that I’m pretty sure I can now, at least in my own mind, justify the cost of a chain saw and maybe even a pole saw if I want to really push the limits of belief. See, all I wanted was a fence… but in the best traditions of home ownership one expense finds a way to bleed seamlessly into the next. That’s the dirty secret of the American Dream that no one ever mentions.

It’s a good dream. A happy dream. But the little bastard will nickel and dime you to death.

Benign oversight…

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I’m sure that watching people build a fence isn’t nearly as tiring as actually building the fence, but after 9 hours of making sure (most of the) posts ended up where I wanted them, I’m just plain worn out. The 300% air-to-pollen ratio and two dogs barking non-stop probably didn’t help with that. I feel guilt even bringing it up, really. After all, I wasn’t the one knocking 30 post holes through tree roots as big around as my forearm. At best, my role today consisted of providing benign oversight, occasionally pointing, and offering access to the bathroom. It wasn’t exactly a backbreaking exercise.

With that said, the project advanced nicely so far. Tomorrow calls for digging about five more holes, hanging the rails, and running wire mesh inside it all. Supposedly it’ll all be wrapped up by closed of business tomorrow. Maybe it is doable, but it feels like something that falls into the category of “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

Until then, I’ll just go on about the day trying to remind myself that 4:30 PM isn’t an acceptable adult bed time… Which right about now feels like a real shame.