summertime blues

September 10, 2014 7:05 AM , Leave a Comment ,

I was coming out of the Alamo Drafthouse one Saturday in mid August.  Some of the movie workers were gathered round in the parking lot talking.  I caught a good deal of the discussion as I wandered past.  Some of them were quitting and headed back to school.  Whether to high school or college I couldn’t make out.

They were glad to be leaving work and to start the new school year but also dreading the monotony of constant schoolwork.

This brought back some memories of working during the summers in college.  Particularly a summer that I worked construction out at NASA.  My then brother-in-law got me a job as a day laborer for the company he was working with.  He was a shift foreman for an electrical contractor and needed some muscle to move parts and supplies for a new office building at the NASA complex in clear lake.

I started out by going to the early 1990s Heights neighborhood, which at the time was much scarier than the now fashionable Heights neighborhood.  I arrived around 6AM and was lost.  I stopped at a convenience store to get directions and a guy in a long green coat sidled up and offered to sell me “new tires” out of the trunk of his car.  I’m surprised he didn’t kosh me over the head with a lead pipe.

Anyways I found the main office which turned out to be a part office and part warehouse where I and 3 others watched a safety video and got a lecture from a middle management type about being very careful since we didn’t have health insurance and that was all there was to it.  I was now a day laborer.

So I spent the Summer driving out before dawn with my brother-in-law and working 14 hour days for 5 days a week and 10 hour Saturdays.  The double pay really added up over the Summer, specially since I was too tired to spend any of it.  On top of everything I signed up for a community college course to finish off an elective course in college.  So between that and work I was pretty much exhausted the entire Summer.

Work itself was tedious.  The electricians were all journeymen and were a motley crew of individualists here for the duration of the contract.  Once it finished they would all go their separate ways and get whatever jobs they could.  Union seniority was really the only distinction.  The shop steward made sure that we didn’t work a second after quitting time and reminded me often and loudly that as a non-union day laborer that I wasn’t covered by the Union in case of accident so I should join up and pay dues.  I explained to him several times that Summer that I wasn’t interested in making construction my life and that I was in fact in school.  Didn’t seem to matter to him.

I expected to be ostracized due to the fact that I was in school but the opposite seemed to take place.  Most of the electricians were interested and asked questions about modern college life.

I can’t say that I made the best laborer.  Most of these guys had been working hard since high school and were fairly muscular and large.  By comparison I was small but apparently they appreciated that I tried to do my job as best as possible.  Apparently day laborer isn’t a very well thought of position.  They apparently are often late to work or don’t show up at all and spend an inordinate amount of time hiding in the supply shed trying to avoid working.  Being naive as I was I didn’t know enough to hide from work and as a result I was being requested by various teams of electricians on different floors for whatever they needed.

Eventually this got me in trouble.  One of the older electricians had a son who was a day laborer.  This laborer was a snappy dresser and was not fond of getting his clothes dirty.  He was as lazy as some of the other laborers.  The older electrician took me aside one day and threatened me.  He said “Do you want to live longer?  Then stop working so hard!”  At least I think it was a threat.  Hard to tell.

The threat didn’t matter to me.  It was mid August and my time was coming to an end.  Community College was long over and I needed to get back to school and get my stuff out of storage and move back to College Station.  I walked up to the foreman’s trailer and gave my week’s notice to the site foreman.  All of the foremen there got really quiet.

“Can’t you wait for one more month, we’re almost done”  I couldn’t and truthfully I didn’t want to either.  Construction was a good experience for me but it wasn’t what I wanted to do for my life.

My last Friday came and I checked out.  The site foreman announced it on the walkie-talkie and all the electricians wished me good luck at school.  It was oddly touching.  As I was leaving one of the junior electricians came up and took me into the supply shed.  He looked left and right and behind him and handed me a scrap of paper.  “Just in case you’re interested”  Then he was off again.

It was a notice to some Christian revival meeting out in some small town I had never heard of.  Unexpected but very kind of him and I could see why he would be nervous.  The company would probably frown on this sort of thing.

I drove home that night and by Monday I was back in College Station setting up my apartment.  I had my working summer and was glad to be out of the hard world of construction work but I was also dreading the monotony of school life once again.

Posted in: Houston, memories, school, work

Useful links

September 8, 2014 6:38 AM , Leave a Comment ,

Stipulated.  This is a bit of a filler post.  Woke up feeling somewhat off.  Not physically, just my mood.  A somewhat anxious and/or depressed mood, so I threw something together at the last second.  Somewhat interesting but really not up to snuff.  Maybe by Wednesday I will be back on form.

 

So the internet is supposed to be this big wonderland where you can find or do anything but lets face it most of us don’t look past Twitter and Facebook and 2 or 3 other websites.

To make your internet experience  a bit fuller here’s some of the better links out there

Google – http://www.google.com/  –  Ok this is a no brainer.  Its like the king of the web, anything you want to find is here.  Bing and Yahoo can protest all they want and I admit Google has done some dubious things in the past few years but still.

Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page – this is an online encyclopedia.  If you ever wondered what the exact atomic weight of Strontium was or just what the name of Cristina Aguillera’s second album was, it’s all here

Reuters – http://www.reuters.com/ – although most people prefer CNN i find Reuters to be more impartial with more hard news and less gossip type stuff

CIA fact book – https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/ – facts about every country in the world.  So if you’re going to Turkmenistan next week you better read up on it.

Things to do – https://world.timeout.com/  – if you’re looking for something to do in your city this is a pretty good link to start looking in.

Time – http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/cgi-bin/timer.pl – if you need to know the exact time

time converter – http://www.timezoneconverter.com/cgi-bin/tzc.tzc – if you want to call your friend in Australia check here first and make sure it’s not 3 AM

international calling – http://www.countrycallingcodes.com/ – if you call that guy you better know how to dial

Travel – www.expedia.com/ – Somewhat pedestrian but reliable.

movies – http://www.imdb.com/ – trying to remember the name of that actor in a movie you saw 20 years ago? it’s probably listed in here

Just a few things to make your lives easier.

 

Posted in: internet

The mobile revolution

September 6, 2014 6:42 AM , Leave a Comment ,

We’re getting there. This time it’s not just some wishful thinking or cheerleading on my part. The days that we were bound to a desktop or even a laptop to be productive are coming to an end.

But what will take their place then?  Difficult to say really. If one were to be taking bets back in the late 70s as to what the workplace of the 2010s would look like I would hazard to guess that no one would assume that the office typing pool would have disappeared or that the vast rooms filled with filing cabinets would give way to mainframes that would store magnitudes more data than they ever could. We were simply not ready to imagine this back then.

Will we ever be free of the physical office space?  I rather doubt it. Humans have a need for personal contact that no computer camera or office meeting software can provide.

Certainly the software and hardware aspects will become moot points in the discussion within the next 5 to 10 years. I am in fact typing this out on my smartphone and although it is a bit awkward, the auto-correct works well and the hardware can handle most of the productivity software on the market.  I could, in a pinch, work like this for an extended period of time.  Wouldn’t be the most comfortable thing, but it could be done.

I imagine with speech recognition and advanced touchscreen controls that we could make the experience less cumbersome and much more user friendly.

No, I think that the main argument will center round how can we leverage the producers of content and product. Does increasing a person’s personal comfort equate to higher returns or do producers need to have an overseer or peers to boost their performance.

Will we one day return to the old office model just from a need to bond with others? Who can say for certain.

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in: business, future, speculation

alternate sources of news and information

September 4, 2014 6:38 AM , Leave a Comment ,

[Author’s note:  This is part of a writing challenge that Leslie Farnsworth issued.  We will both write about the same subject and compare notes later on.  She wrote her version on the 3rd of September, 2014.  If you get a chance head on over to her blog at www.lesliefarnsworth.com and read not just her version of this topic but all of her postings.  They are thought-provoking and well written articles and she loves to discuss the topics with her readers.]

 

I heard about 9/11 online.  I was in an online chat room at the time when someone typed in that a plane had struck the first tower.  I guess that make’s me a bit of a cultural cliché.  Part of a generation that matured alongside with the internet.  If I had not had internet access I might have not found out till I drove home in the afternoon.

My experience with alternate news sources isn’t just confined to this one example.  I have been searching out unconventional news sources since my college days.

But why turn to alternate sources of news if we have such a robust news industry out there?  Firstly, precisely for that reason.  It is in fact an industry.  The days that news reporting was strictly just about presenting facts are long past.  News agencies and newspapers are owned entities.  They have their owner’s slant stamped on everything that they produce.  Even if they don’t have a particular slant, they have an obligation to be a money-making organization and that means entertaining their subscribers.  Just as much entertainment as it is information and this tends to tinge news.

Another reason to check alternate news sources is embodied in a quote from the character Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse.  When asked how he knew so much about communism Jeeves replied “It’s good to know what tune the devil is playing.”  Meaning of course that if you don’t know what arguments that someone with an opposing view holds that you would not be able to counter them.  If you stick to main line news sources then you will find that your world view is going to be somewhat narrow and that you’re going to be missing out on a lot of things.

So where to find those alternate sources of news?

Well the first and best place is going to be with those people around you that you know.  Not necessarily your best friends but maybe your casual acquaintances.  Those folks that have radically different life experiences.  They can view the same event as you do in a different light and can guide you to resources that you might not know about.  I know people from all shades of the political spectrum, from different religions, and economic groups.  They all have opinions and valuable input to provide.

Next would be to step out of your comfort zone and actively seek out publications and websites you would not normally look over.  I usually don’t have interest in things like fitness or fashion magazines but through them I’ve read articles on politics, technology, and social issues covered from new perspectives.  Sometimes they reinforce my beliefs, sometimes they make me question them.

The last source of information is to be your own reporter.  You may have a unique question that no one else has ever asked and maybe no one knows who or what to ask.  It’s up to you to dig out the truth.  Talk to people who normally don’t talk to strangers.  Request information that isn’t normally requested.  Your own patience and will to find the real story is your only limitation.

I find that going the extra mile and finding things out for myself rather than relying on the word of others usually leads to getting a much more precise and detailed picture of what’s happening in the world.

Posted in: communication, current events, news

hectic holiday aftermath

September 2, 2014 6:27 AM , Leave a Comment ,

I love being lazy.

At least I used to.  Holidays, not vacations mind you but short one or two-day holidays, were opportunities to do nothing and to take delight in just being. I could linger in bed sometimes up to 11 in the morning sleeping, reading, or watching TV.  Once I discovered online games I could stay in my PJ’s till 3 or 4 in the afternoon sitting in front of my desktop involved in some online adventure.

But not anymore.  Holidays now mean extra work on the day back or work during the holiday to keep things from piling up on the day I return.  Even though I’m out of the office, my overseas customers aren’t.  Even my clients in the US expect to have replies to their queries and to pick up the threads of a deal from before the holiday immediately.

How was I able to ignore this for so long?  One answer is that I didn’t use to have so many responsibilities.  I’ve inherited or created responsibilities over the years and I know from experience how work piles up if I just let these sit till I’m back in the office.

My method of dealing with this backlog has changed over time.  I used to do some “pre-work” and address some issues before I left the office before the holiday.  A sort of pre-emptive strike.  But half the time the situation would change over the weekend and I just created more work for myself.

What I’ve switched to now is to doing little bits of work over the holiday.  I telecommute so my office is with me at home.  Since I’m always up before dawn I do some light office work.  I chase down old leads and contacts with emails, I update sales spreadsheets, I clean out directories and old files.  Things that need doing but aren’t heavy-duty work.  I also peruse the email traffic that’s come in during the holiday so I don’t get any nasty surprises when “I return”.

I swear I’m not a workaholic.  If anything this is my way of not having to work harder.  I think it’s a great way to keep the work load down and to use time that I might normally waste.

 

Posted in: business, holidays, work

the return of college football

August 31, 2014 6:30 AM , Leave a Comment ,

We have once again crossed the stark and trying month of August.  Maybe it’s global warming or El Nino or just old age but August seems to get worse each year.  But we’ve made it once more.  At the cusp of September I can now look forward with anticipation to my favorite time of year.

The rituals have already begun.  Kids and college students are all back in class now, the stores have set out their back to school sales and are slowly bringing out their Halloween decorations.

For me it’s seeing college football return.  I don’t really care for much in the world of sports.  Professional sports are too commercialized and mercenary for me to enjoy.  I know some athletes do practice their sport for the love of the game but for most it’s a paycheck and a job, plain and simple.  I don’t begrudge them the huge salaries they make but neither will I contribute to them.

The college game though.  That still has a tinge of purity about it.  Particularly in the small schools.  Most of these kids will never draw a check or even see a game except as a spectator.  Yet even knowing that they won’t make this into a profession they still pour their hearts and souls into each game.

I’m not much into TV anymore and Lord knows that I don’t have much free time for it either.  But kicking back and catching a couple of games on a lazy Saturday afternoon is something that I still like to do.

The excitement and energy from those games is infectious.  Even if I know nothing about the particular schools playing, I can get into how intensely these players are trying to win for the rest of their school bodies.

So yes, Once more I will be wrapped up in college football until early January.  A bad habit?  Maybe.  But one that I think I can afford to continue with.

Posted in: activities, football, sports

Attack on Titan review

August 29, 2014 7:05 AM , 2 Comments ,

[Standard spoiler warning.  This will be a review of the anime series, Attack on Titan, and will cover details that you may not want to hear.  It is also going to be a bit graphic.  If you don’t want to know, you should stop reading now]

 

 

A couple of years ago I was at a convention and I saw a couple of kids in costume wearing odd little jackets with feathers on the back.  I felt a bit old realizing that anime and pop culture have continued to move on and that I hadn’t kept pace.  I’ve seen the same costume over and over so I finally asked and found out it was from the anime show Attack on Titan. I’d heard the title before and knew a little about it.  Supposedly it had extremely graphic violence but beyond that I didn’t know anything about it.

Last month Netflix released Season 1 online so I decided to take a peek.  They weren’t kidding.  The show deals with the struggle of humans versus giants known as Titans.  These are carnivorous giants that attack humans and eat them.  Little to nothing is known about them but humans have been forced to live behind giant walls.

Essentially the series is a “coming of age” story following three friends that survived the initial attack of the Titans and have vowed to gain revenge on the giants by joining the military.  Throughout the season the characters have introspective monologues reflecting upon their back stories and contemplating their fears and faults.  Each character is forced to look within and find their particular strength to fight the giants.

During the story line the characters find out that some of the Titans are actually human beings that turn into these mindless monsters and cause this havoc.  One of the main characters finds that he has this ability and struggles to control the Titan for the benefit of mankind.

This is the superficial story of course.  The deeper meaning behind the story didn’t become clear to me till I watched the last episode of the season.  The story is actually a parable concerning contemporary terrorism.

In the first episode we are told that humanity has enjoyed 100 years of peace.  Within five minutes the peace is shattered by the Titans attacking.  The mighty defenses that the humans have relied upon prove to be worthless against this type of violence.  Very precise parallels to what America experienced after 9/11.  In the blink of an eye the myth that America was immune from being attacked was shattered and we were left reeling.

The parallels don’t stop there.  Just as terrorists attacks come to unexpected places at unexpected times, the Titans attack without warning and each time they cause terrible damage.  Also there is the hidden aspect of ordinary humans being able to turn into Titans comparing to the fact that we can’t tell who might or might not be a terrorist.

In much the same way that our security apparatus is overreacting to the threat, the military in this series becomes more and more paranoid and repressive in the treatment of its citizens.

The final parallel that I see is in the reaction of the characters themselves to the sudden threat thrust upon them.  9/11 forced a generation of young americans to re-examine their relationship to their country.  How would they react when faced with an enemy bent upon their destruction?  What was more important?  Their personal safety or the safety of the nation as a whole?  What does it mean to be an American?

Attack on Titan is definitely not just a kid’s cartoon for more than one reason.  If you can get past the gore you will find a deeper story that is worthy of any literary fiction novel.

Posted in: anime, review

HMNS. my home away from home

August 27, 2014 6:14 AM , Leave a Comment ,

[Author’s note:  This is an edited reprint of an article from 2008]

 

They brought a special display to the Houston Museum of Natural Science in August and the display was ending next week.  I realized this was one of those once in a lifetime deals you can’t pass up

For the first time ever the remains of Lucy, the first step in human evolution, were displayed outside of Ethiopia.  Australopithecus Afarensis was the first step on the long road to humans.

The Houston Museum of Natural Science is located near downtown in the museum district.  If Houston had a cosmopolitan center then this would be it.  Wide boulevards, parks, a trolley, it might remind you of Central Park in downtown New York City.  The museum itself is somewhat small for a major city but its a favorite for school kids.  I certainly adored coming here even as a kid back in the 1980s.

 

I bought a ticket for the display carrying my camera and cell phone.  I expected they wouldn’t let me take pictures.  The flash can damage old relics, so I had my cell phone camera too, but to my surprise they made me turn that off too.  So I couldn’t get any pictures.

But pictures don’t do justice to this.  Tiny little bones, just fragments really.  You could see the relationship, the long path to our skeleton, but just barely.  They made up a model of what she would have looked like.  Just barely 3 foot tall.  There was a 7-year-old girl with her parents.  They were looking at the model and I couldn’t help but look back and forth and compare them to each other.

I wandered out of the display and went to look at some of the permanent exhibits.

I mentioned diamonds didn’t I?  The museum does have one of the best jewel displays around

A pirates hoard of gems of all types.  Glittering in their cases.  If you stood in the right spot you would be blinded by the gleam

Being Houston, it had to have a display on the oil industry.  Sponsored by who else but Exxon.  The one thing i didn’t like is that since kids are the prime target for the museum most of those displays are geared for kids with lots of buttons and Disney like videos for them.  Kind of dumbs it down for the rest of us.

This is a well log.  When I first started out I had to read these everyday.  Shudder.

 

Last but not least a model of an armadillo from long ago,

Overall it was worth it to see Lucy, something I may never see again in my lifetime and something that most people wont ever see.

But mostly I just enjoy wandering the cool darkened halls of the museum.  There’s something soothing about being in this building with all the knowledge and study that it represents.  I feel rejuvenated just coming here.

 

Posted in: activities, Houston, museum

the 2014 vacation plans

August 25, 2014 7:03 AM , Leave a Comment ,

I admit that whenever I see web pages like “places to visit before you die” that I get enthusiastic for travel.  Of course that is the point of these websites and of travel magazines, and TV shows.  To show you all the pleasant aspects of travel and to whet your appetite to go and do something different and most importantly to spend money.

So inspired by this and a need to find a vacation spot I started looking.  My first thought was to go to the other side of the planet and try Asia or Australia or the Indian Ocean.  All have lovely places to visit and are really affordable.  But one of my friends pointed out that I would probably spend at least 3 solid days traveling on planes and waiting in airports.  I barely have 10 days in total so that’s on hold for another year.

So I would have to confine my trips to something closer to home.  I’ve been to most of Latin America.  Canada?  Didn’t really impress me as that different from the US.  I don’t just want to stay at a generic McHilHyatt type of hotel.  Those are for conventions or business meetings.

Ice hotels in Sweden in mid December?  ummmm pass.  Maybe a bit too different.

Machu Picchu came up in conversation as a possible destination.  But I’m thinking “ok I’ve seen the rocks, now what?”

Ladera resort on St Lucia island in the Caribbean would be nice, depending on the hurricane season of course.

Patagonia is another.

I’m just so scattered that nothing really speaks to me.  I know, first world problems.  Normally I would have had this figured out by now but this year has been nothing but hectic.

Ultimately I may end up not going at all.  I’ve been spending more and more time working and I have several different side projects going and at various stages of completion.  So vacation planning has tumbled down to near the bottom of my priorities.  One thing that I can’t do is to have work suffer because I am off on vacation or have one of my side projects collapse because I’m not there to tend it.  I hope that things will clear up soon and that I am able to make a decision.

I have to make up my mind in less than 2 weeks to book with sufficient time and right now (as of the 24th of August) everything is still up in the air.  Like I said, hopefully things will become clearer in the next 2 weeks.  If things do line up then I will be off on vacation.

Posted in: activities, vacations

accepting

August 23, 2014 6:30 AM , Leave a Comment ,

I’ve many faults.  Some I’ve eradicated over time and some remain.  One of the biggest?  I have a hard time accepting credit.  If I do something really good or noteworthy, if I do a great job on a project, make a big sale, or in any way do something superlative and someone congratulates me or thanks me I don’t really know how to react.

I mean it seems rather bizarre to me that anyone would praise me for doing what is essentially my job.  Why?  Doesn’t anyone else do the same?  I mean I get that you would be criticized or chastised for screwing up, but why would you get praised?  I found it rather confusing for a long time and I never knew how to react to it.

Not a huge deal right?  But along with this I wasn’t praising others for doing a good job either.  I guess I was taking it for granted that everyone else just did a superlative job anyways, so why praise them?  I eventually realized that my attitude is somewhat off-putting and it makes it difficult for people around me to relate to me on all but the most basic of levels.

So I’ve had to learn to praise and to accept praise.  Weird I know, but true.  Like I said a huge and somewhat basic fault in me.  One that I’ve had to work hard at trying to correct for many years.

Posted in: attitude, life in general