BeMused

So, today is the last day of NaBloPoMo, and having posted every day but one, I figured I’d take a second to reflect on my experience.

Simply put, it was a lot easier than I expected. At the beginning I had suspicions that I would have a difficult time coming up with something new to talk about each day. Part of the challenge is to not only post each day, but to post something meaningful and interesting to at least yourself, if not others. After all, this journal is for me to read. I like having others read about what’s going on, and enjoy it when they react to a post strongly enough to feel the need to leave a comment. But first and foremost I’ve always treated this journal as something I keep for myself (with the exceptions of the random IMs I get - some of those are just too funny not to share). At least half-a-dozen times I’ve gone back to read old posts, reliving the moment.  So the postings had to be important or interesting or meaningful enough for me to want to read again.

Secondly, writing every day is good practice. I found myself thinking of ways to clarify my thoughts and try to get my point across in a more meaningful way. At least more coherently.

And third, I realized that I do enjoy writing. I’ve always enjoyed fiction writing, but just random thoughts in my head can be fun to express as well. I’ve been thinking about a career shift; maybe I’ll become a writer! Oooh, here we go, I’ll hop on my bike, hit the open road, and take pictures and write about places I visit. That cures my wanderlust, my career change lust, and my harley lust, all in one shot.

Hell, throw in a redhead, and I’ve got ALL the bases covered.

I’m having a wonderfully frustrating day. The kind of day where every turn you make you run into a wall, and the most positive thought you can conjure is that at least the half-hour you just spent banging your head on the desk is good exercise.

Because we do online banking, it’s policy here that I cannot see certain types of information. Fair enough. Let me give you an example of how this works; Let’s say we have a form that has some personal information on it. I can create the form, create the display template the bank will see, and a ‘thank you for filling out our form’ page. I can create all three of these, but I can’t view the results of the display template. That’s where the sensitive info might reside. So the normal SOP is to create the form, send it to my boss, she uploads them, fills it out, and then checks to see if the results are as expected. Because some of these forms have lots of different fields that all have to match up, it’s not uncommon for me to miss something. She takes a screen shot, let’s me know the problem, I take a stab at fixing it, send it back to her, she uploads it again…you can see  how this can frustrate a developer who is used to being able to see the results right away with a simple reload of the page. And she has other things going on sometimes, so there are times when it takes half-an-hour, up to three hours to get to it.

Now…take my boss out of the equation (She’s off getting married this week). What do I do? Normally, I’d send them to a second person and he’d take care of it. However, he’s off watching my boss get married.

So now what? I sit, twiddle my thumbs, try to find a way around this silliness. Quite a frustrating day I’m having and it’s not even two…

This is a strange coincidence - I was pondering what to post today, and was half-leaning towards another “Damn, I want to get out on the road and travel in my own self-contained vehicle” type of post. I’d gave blood in the bloodmobile yesterday (Big old schoolbus converted to a rolling stick-a-needle-in-your-arm-and-take-my-blood bus), and while lying there, was thinking of how I would convert that particular bus to suit my needs.

But I felt it was probably too soon after the last post where I talk about wandering, so I decided against it, and posted a quick blurb about Expression Engine. Shortly after, I got into a conversation with a friend about the word ‘hoopty’. As in ‘That’s one hoopty ride’. She didn’t know what it meant, so I told her it was like cool/nifty/bitchin’/righteous… I did a quick google search, and among the many hits, found a blog called “Hoopty Life: One homeless woman’s guide to van dwelling, car living and urban camping.” Now how a homeless  woman has internet access I haven’t discovered yet, but it’s a good read from a first-hand point of view about this particular lifestyle.

Pretty weird coincidence…but I’ll go with it.

I’m so close to grasping EE. I was thinking about it in the shower this morning and it slowly dawned on me (must’ve been a lightbulb with a dimmer switch attached), that I needed to use categories to sort the over view pages from the individual models.

I know that probably means nothing to anyone but me, but hey, it’s here to remind me.

15 years is a long time. A lot can happen in 15 years…

In 2007 32 people die at Virginia Tech and Tony Blair resigns.
In 2006 Kobe scores 81 while Kramer goes on a tirade.
In 2005 Live 8 tries to Make Poverty History and Pope John Paul II passes on.
In 2004 we lost the Gipper and The Scream.
In 2003 we lost the Old Man of the Mountain and Great White burned down the house.
In 2002 we lost the Queen Mother and the Beltway Snipers began their spree.
In 2001  the iPod is introduced. 9/11 happens.
In 2000 Y2K fizzled, Elian is siezed and Bush is handed the election.
In 1999 Lance Armstrong wins his first Tour and the Great One retires.
In 1998 Google and the iMac come into the world, and a president did not have sexual relations.
In 1997 Hale-Bopp traveled on by and a boy named Harry Potter is introduced to the world.
In 1996 Whitewater was a scandal and Major League Soccer was born.
In 1995 eBay and Yahoo were created.
In 1994 Kurt Cobain died, OJ was chased, and Friends first went on the air.
In 1993 the World Wide Web was born.

And on this day in 1992, a beautiful young woman became my wife, making me incredibly lucky and unbelievably happy. Happy Anniversary Gail.

At the grocery store this evening, I was standing in line, waiting to make my purchase behind a lady on a cell phone. Some people are decent cell phone talkers, can either carry on a conversation quietly, or tell the person they’ll call back. Not this lady, she was babbling about meeting someone somewhere loudly. And she never stopped talking, even when she was checking out. Quite annoying. I saw her a few minutes later in the parking lot. She loaded her groceries, got in her car, backed out and left and never stopped blabbing into the phone. Seriously, do you need to be *that* connected? It annoys me that some people have to be on their cell phones all the time. I wish the cashier would’ve not helped her until she gave him her attention.

On a side note, signing your name on those card readers is pointless - the signature doesn’t even look close to my real signature. So I’ve recently started just making loops and swirls. Sometimes it’s just a big X - other visits I write stuff like “Shark Attack!”

Great fun.

Yup, I missed a day.

I thought about it as I was going to bed. Yesterday was a typical post-Thanksgiving day; my brother an I hit a couple of stores, Gail and Adriana went hiking with Sarah. Sounds like that should be the other way around, until you realize Seth and I went to Micro Center and REI. Good guy stuff.

But as I was thinking about this, I realized I really didn’t care if I made every single day posting or not. Especially if I’m just posting to make my quota, so to speak. And that’s what I was afraid of when I first started; that I’d make crap posts just to post. So I decided not to. And look! It didn’t kill me!

It was good having Seth and Adriana down for Thanksgiving, and we’ve already made plans for next year. Thanksgiving 2008 we’ll be inviting the rest of the family to come, so that’ll be a bit more challenging. Gail’s never cooked a turkey before (but it turned out splendidly), so Seth and Adriana were just a warm-up.

Today is play practice and laundry. Typical Sunday.

Welcome to Black Friday. The day it behooves you to stay away from the mall.  Unfortunately, we’re getting ready to take Cody to Best Buy to get his Guitar Hero III. I wont’ lie, I want to play it as well.

We had a wonderfully typical Thanksgiving. My brother and his wife came into town, Gail cooked her first turkey and it came it out well. We sat around and digested and talked and caught up with each other’s lives.

After yesterday’s long-winded entry, I feel justified in keeping this one brief. Hope everyone had a good day.

I mentioned a couple of topics I considered discussing when first starting NaBloPoMo, just to make sure I had something to talk about. One of those topics was racism, as I do think I have a rather unique view of racism, considering I’m your average mid-30s white guy. Typical house in the typical suburb, living the typical demographic - wife, two kids, SUV, cat, dog, etc.. What could someone like me know of racism?

Easy; up until I was in the fourth grade, I was very much a minority. I live on the Navajo Indian Reservation in Arizona. My dad worked for the BIA, hence the reason for living on the reservation. In my grade, I was one of four white kids. All the other kids were Native Americans. And I was constantly picked on. Two incidents stand out vividly in my mind.

The bus ride was always a challenge. I knew every intersection, every scrap-wood fence, almost every rock, as I stared out the window the entire ride to school and home. I didn’t interact with the other kids. On the way to school this particular morning, the other kids were in a torturous mood. I suffered smacks upside the head, flicks of the ear and stuff being thrown at me. I didn’t respond, nor react. When we got to school, I flat out refused to get off the bus. All the other kids had gotten off, but me. Brother Mark, our bus driver (yes, it was a catholic school I attended), came back to talk to me. I remember him being nice. I also remember him bringing another authority figure on the bus, whether another teacher or an administrator, I don’t know. I just remember Brother Mark telling this person that all the other kids picked on me and he simply didn’t know why. Eventually, they persuaded me to get off the bus.

The second incident was considerably more embarrassing, and I’m not sure I’ve actually told this to anyone. See, being white, I was circumcised. The Navajo and Hopi boys (as I imagine all the Native American boys), weren’t. And when they saw I was, it was as if I was suddenly a side-show freak. I would go in to use the bathroom, and if there were three or more boys in there, I would get laughed at. The incident that stands out in my mind was peeing, and having some kid come up behind me and pull my pants and underwear down to my ankles. As a boy, once you start peeing, it’s very difficult to stop, so I stood there, finishing with my pants down around my ankles, the other boys laughing and taking turns kicking my butt. Not much fun.

I wasn’t until later in my life I understood what racism was. Granted, the discrimination against me was mild, and I apologize if I’ve offended anyone who might be reading this that suffered more than I. I don’t remember the adults giving me any sort of the treatment the kids did. And not all the kids were like that. I had a friend name Frederick who invited me to play, who took me to his house and to meet his family.

What really drove it home was when we lived up in Oregon. We moved there when I was in fourth grade. Talk about a culture shock; from high desert to lush, green, nearly rain forest-like climate. To sunshine all the time to rain every other day. To white people, and nothing but white people. My mom said after a week of being there, I asked her “where are all the Indians?” And in the fifth grade, we had a kid move into the neighborhood who was black. It was then that I really learned about racism.

Do I blame those kids for picking on me like that? Not in the slightest. As I said, it might have been a case of being the outcast kid that everyone picks on. I don’t think that’s the whole story though - another kid who was white, by the name of Joel, suffered many of the same indignities. Again, on the whole, they were minor. To a kid in the second and third grades, they were terrifying.

It’s at this time of the year that I think a little deeper than most about Thanksgiving and what it signifies. As an American, it’s more than family time, getting together and sharing good food; it’s also shameful. What our forefathers did to the Native Americans was a travesty. The way we treat with them now is an embarrassment.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. Think about what it means.

/soapbox.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and in case I forget to make a post tomorrow, I want to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving today (at least those of you in the States… I actually do have a couple of friends who pop in now and then to read this). I do have a post planned for tomorrow, for Treva actually. I’d mentioned when I started doing this post-a-day-for-thirty-days, that I had an idea or two, one of those ideas being my views on racism. She IM’d me a few days back asking when it was coming. So Treva, I promise, if I remember to post tomorrow, I will post about my views.

Before talking about what I really was going to talk about, I want to direct everyone’s attention to my Quick Bits over there. I want you to check out the link to Pigeon Point Lighthouse. And no, I’m not going to link it here, go over there you lazy bastards and click!

Today is going to be about my brain and the things it does to keep itself occupied while I’m asleep. See, I’m doing a new production right now, a reading of A Christmas Carol. Basically what that means is there are 6 of us on stage, actually reading from the script. We’ll be dressed in costume, but have minimal props and addressing the audience directly.

The other thing taking up a lot of my time is, naturally, work. I’ve been stressing over the creation of several different secure forms for these banks. Lots of little things I have to remember to include, and naturally I missed a bunch the first time (or two) around. Because of security measures taken as the result of an audit, I’m not allowed access to the production servers, nor the secure sever. Basically, I can create the forms, and make sure they look OK, but for full functionality, I have to send them to my boss and she has to upload them and tell me all the mistakes I made. Which, quite frankly, is a sucky way to develop.

But back to the brain playing while I’m sleeping. This morning, probably about 3 a.m. or so, I woke myself up. I woke up because I was talking. I was reciting lines of the script for a Christmas Carol. But they were formatted in the aforementioned Secure Forms. So, instead of Last Name [input box], First Name [input box], the were lines like Scrooge [Scrooge's Line], Cratchit [Cratchit's Line]. And that’s how I was reading the lines, talking in my sleep. And this isn’t the first time work has intruded. When I was managing the pizza restaurant, I was working very long hours (70-80 hour weeks). At one point in the middle of the night, I sat straight up in bed, and yelled to my wife “CHEESE! I NEED MORE CHEESE!”

I quit shortly after that.

So that’s how my brain occupies itself; merges two aspects of my daily life into one, and messes with me. Lovely.