V-3!

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I’m at home this morning.  Not for long.  It’s about 9:20 now and I expect that I’ll be in the office by 10:00.  Going in late because the heating & air guy is here doing whatever it is that they do twice a year.  Mainly change the filter in the furnace.  Truth be told, that is such a pain in the ass that I’ll gladly write the annual $150 check just so I don’t have to do it.  I’m not sure who the genius was who designed the filter holder in my furnace, but getting a new one in without either destroying it or cutting your hands and arms or both is nearly impossible.

He tells me that my air conditioner is blowing out 52-degree air, however.  That’s nice.  It’s apparently supposed to blow 55-degree air, and the unit is nearly 30 years old, so bully for me.

Should you be wondering, my thermostat is generally set at around 83 in the summer, so I’m not overly concerned about the cost of the difference between 52 and 55 degrees when the air conditioner is actually running.  It doesn’t run much.

As noted in the title, I’m three days away from starting my first real vacation in about two years.  Last year’s had to be juggled all over the place because I had possible strike duty and couldn’t go anywhere out of cellphone range.  Also couldn’t go to Canada – the dates just didn’t work out.  I ended up taking a week in October to visit Lake Superior (and I’ll do that again this year, I think).  Not having strike duty looming over me this year, I’m headed to Magnetawan this weekend and will spend at least a week and a half there before heading back.  Maybe even two weeks.

This will be a great thing, in spite of the bugs, because it is bloody hot in Georgia.  The temperatures have been climbing well into the 90s for the last few weeks, and when there’s a breeze, it feels more like that which would come from an electric heater.  No relief at all.  I generally start my morning walks at about 5:40.  Even at that time, I’m covered in sweat before I’ve gone half a mile.  Incessant heat basically sucks the life out of me.

I’m also looking forward to finding out if a week in clean air will clear up this stupid allergy/sinus infection/whatever, which is still making me sneeze regularly.

No.  I’m not going to a doctor for sniffles.

Work has been work.  Really not much going on, though I did do a bit of coding last week.  I’ve also managed to move most of the call center televisions away from a (very expensive) series of broadcast boxes that are painfully inefficient, difficult to troubleshoot, and completely unnecessary.  All of the center’s 43 televisions, save 2, are now being fed over Ethernet from three laptops and two u-verse set-top boxes.  My boss (and his boss) are pleased with this effort, since we currently pay something like $2500 annually for “support” on the broadcast boxes.  Said support is generally not good, and I’ve never understood why they were set up in the first place.

Got a document from Dad yesterday – the rough draft of his memoirs.  I’m up to 1942-1946, and am already fascinated and thinking of all of the various things that I can google to fill in some of the blank (to me) spots in his childhood.  A map of where he lived, more about my grandmother, etc.  Would also like to look up some of the songs that he sang as a very young child, as I have never heard of most of them.  Maybe I’ll bring a digital recorder to his house sometime and make him sing them.

Sort of like the guy who wandered around the Appalachian mountains to record folk songs, right?

The heating/air guy seems to be about done, so I’ll wrap this up and write a check to him.  Next entry will probably be from Canada!

 

Jury Duty

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I’d dared to hope that, after 50 years without having ever been summoned for jury duty, I’d make it through life as a jury virgin.

Three weeks ago, I – for lack of a better g-rated phrase – got laid by the Superior Court of Gwinnett County.

To say that I was not pleased by the county’s new interest in me would be a bit of an understatement. Sure, it’s my civic duty. Yes, it’s an honor and a privilege (I’m required to say that). And I even get $30 for participating in this incredibly boring endeavor. But the simple facts are these: I don’t want to do this, I’ve never wanted to do this, I have virtually no trust or respect for any aspect of our legal system, and I’ve done what I thought was necessary to avoid being in the jury pool – namely, giving up my right to vote.

Turns out that Gwinnett County started using DMV records to fill the pool…

To clarify one of the above statements, I should say that I think the idea of American jurisprudence is a fine one, and it might have been great at some point. Unfortunately, it’s turned into just another business, in my opinion.

The police are a revenue arm of the local government, not a force driven to “serve and protect.”

Lawyers have very little interest in “justice” out “finding the truth,” but are deeply concerned about their win/loss record, about how far they can climb politically, and about cashing in.

Judges used to be lawyers – enough said.

Prisons are more private concerns, with a financial stake in staying filled to capacity (or beyond it), cutting costs wherever possible, and using prisoners for what amounts to slave labor – road crews, for example.

In short, I think our legal system is a joke and a shadow of what it was meant to be.

Yet here I am…. Sitting in a big, hot, room, on an unbelievably uncomfortable chair, waiting for my little pod to be called. And I’ve been doing so for the last two hours.

Call me a cynic. Call me a bad American. Call me unpatriotic. Call me all the bad names you can think of.

But please – don’t call me for jury duty again.

TGIF

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You know it’s not a good afternoon when you find yourself googling “how to stay awake at your desk.”

I actually have a playlist that I set up years ago for just such afternoons.  I believe it was the logical extension of the cassette mix tape that I made in the 80s and called “Late Night Driving Stuff.”  Being much older and wiser when I moved into the digital age, my stay-awake-at-the-office playlist is entitled “Good Working Shiznit.” *

Unfortunately, even this vital stand-by isn’t working for me today.  My eyes just don’t want to stay open.  Probably because I didn’t get to bed until close to 11 last night (was running a trivia game on the other side of town).  I never have been a morning person.  Don’t know why I thought it’d be a good idea to teach the cats to get me up at 5:30.

Yeah, I do.  Because, as obnoxious as they are, they’re still light years ahead of an alarm clock.

12 more spams since my last post .  I can see those getting to be annoying.  Might be time to just disable comments.

Anyway, life in the great white-hot south continues.  It is brutal today.  Went outside to go to lunch and thought I’d have a heat stroke before I got to me car.  If it were possible, I’d be heading for the mountains tonight, but Jenny and her brother are coming to the house to see the cats tomorrow AND I’ve got jury duty next week, so I have to call my juror decoder-ring number sometime this weekend.

I did text my friend Brett a few days ago and suggest that we give it a shot next weekend.  During the wet trip that I mentioned in my last post, I showed him my “RavPower” charger and mentioned that I’d managed to charge my phone with it for a full week before it needed charging.  That was all Brett needed to hear.  He got home and bought one…and a USB lantern and a USB headlamp and a new USB speaker and on and on and on.  I said, “Cool.  Let’s hit the woods.  And you do realize that charging everything you own from one power source is going to kill the power source in 24 hours, right?”

Smart guy.  Really smart.  Just dumb sometimes.

NorthCountryTrail

A part of the trail between the Au Sable Light Station and the Log Slide at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore

I got my RavPower last year in anticipation of making a long hike on the AT sometime this year.  Have pretty much decided that that won’t happen, but I think I will go back to Michigan for a week or two in the fall and get some trail miles in.  I’ve found myself almost craving the hypnotic solitude of the North Country Trail in Michigan.

How to describe how gorgeous that trail can be….I really can’t do it.  I mean, just look at the photo and them imagine that the only sounds you hear are birds, the breeze through the tops of the trees, Lake Superior crashing about 300 yards to the left, and the sound of your boots on grass and/or packed trail.  Imagine that the temperature is in the mid-60s.   You feel – literally – like this area has looked exactly like this for the last 5,000 years, and you’re walking along game trails that mound builders used.  And you see a bear off to the right.  And you poop yourself and the bear walks away.  And then you walk the 5 miles back to your car in what seems like 5 minutes because it’s just so freaking perfect.

So yeah, I’m thinking about doing that again this year and maybe doing some back-country camping instead of staying at a campground as I did last year.  Though, to be honest, it was one of the nicest campgrounds I’ve visited in quite a while.  I could live with doing that again, too.

But I should probably do some work first.

* Lots of Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, some  ABBA, up-tempo BST and Billy Joel.  You know.  Good working shiznit.

Oh yea! Spammers!

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You know how I said that this weird URL might help keep spammers out?

Yeah, that didn’t happen – although it’s fairly obvious that the 11 spams so far were all robotic.  Guess I can’t do anything about that, and some of the “comments” are sort of amusing in their complete idiocy.

Taking a short break from fixing software issues while listening to the soundtrack from Hamilton this afternoon.  Not really paying attention to the words, but the music isn’t bad.  Considering its success on Broadway, I’m sort of surprised that it hasn’t been made into a movie yet.

Andi Sprague had surgery on her leg yesterday.  Jenny tells me it went well.  Now the fun part – recovery – begins.

The picture for today is one that I took of the river, Little Santeetlah Creek, on the banks of which a buddy and I set up camp a couple of weekends ago.  It rained the whole time – pretty miserable, really – but the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest is so damned gorgeous that we had a good time anyway.  JK is definitely in my top 5 places to throw up a tent and spend a few days (camping is allowed just outside the national forest part).  Great hiking, a beautiful river, very few people, no cell coverage.

Anyway, Brett and I spent a few days shooting at cans with my pellet pistol (purchased for its remarkable resemblance to a real gun and hopefully a deterrent to anyone who wants to mess with me when I’m camping.  If it’s not, I guess I’ll get a real gun one of these days), getting soaked under a leaky tarp, taking one short hike, and taking cheesy pictures of the river.  I rarely bring my DSLR with me anymore, and decided to see how much I could mess with the aperture and shutter settings on my phone’s camera.  I thought it did okay.

I need to empty out the band’s folders tonight, but I really don’t want to.  Would much rather go play trivia.

So maybe I’ll do the folders tomorrow.

Snuffles

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Had a fairly boring weekend.  Mowed the lawn and did some shopping on Saturday before going to a watering hole to play some trivia (came within 18 points of a perfect score – good for #2 in North America); and did absolutely nothing on Sunday other than taking a long walk in the morning.  Spent most of the day watching the new implementation of Roots and doing laundry.

Also took a walk on Saturday morning.  Both walks featured tiny bits of rain which did not mitigate the ungodly heat and humidity.  You’d think that it’d be comfortable at 5:30 in the morning.  Not at all.  This is going to be a long, hot, summer.

I’ve been sneezing my head off for the past several weeks and it’s really getting annoying.  Picked up some Claritin and Flonase last week to see if either of those will help.  Just started a regimen of the latter yesterday.  I’m not sure exactly what I’m allergic to at this point.  Thought it was the cats, but I’m ruling that out for now.  Also thought it might be a new detergent that I started using about a month ago, but switching back to the old one hasn’t yielded any improvements.

The Puff’s company is pleased, anyway.  Can’t buy enough of the stuff.  Here’s hoping that a couple of weeks in Canada will clear things up at least temporarily.

In my spare time, I’ve been amusing myself for a couple of months by playing two computer games in a series called Medal of Honor.  Both are first-person shooters (in that the action involves a scene as it would be seen if you were in it, and you’re shooting at things) set in WWII.  The first one, Medal of Honor, Pacific Assault, puts the gamer in the marines at Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, Tarawa, and a few other Pacific islands.   The second, MoH, Allied Assault, has the player landing at Normandy and fighting through the French and Belgian countryside.

Both are graphically excellent, and seem to be fairly historically accurate, too.  Both have inspired me to look up details of several of the battles that “I” have been involved in (Tarawa is fascinating.  I wouldn’t mind visiting).

I found it somewhat amusing that, when I watched Saving Private Ryan last Monday (Memorial Day), it became apparent that a number of the scenes depicted in MoH, Allied Assault were taken directly from the movie.  Not just close or similar, mind you.  Exactly.  From the scenery and “battle plan” for D-Day to the towns, weather, and sniper towers throughout the movie.

Anyway, they’re fun games that kill time and make me curious enough to look up WWII history, something that previously hasn’t interested me in the least.  I’m currently watching an HBO series, Pacific – you can probably figure out what it’s about.  Quite well done.

Explanations

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Might as well kick this thing kjiayunbqgpm7onkmoikig5re6xs8pqfn7x5ube8jk1xoytyw95ooff with a few explanations.  Why am I doing this again?  What is Graceful Chaos?  What is that weird green logo?  What’s with the photo of a photo on a wall?  And where did that stupid URL originate?

Have no fear.  I shall endeavor to provide satisfactory answers for each of those questions.  If I can’t, then sue me.  It’s my website, and I can do what I want.  I’m an American.  I have the right to be an idiot if I so choose.  Says so right there in The Constitution or The Bible or The Catcher in the Rye or one of those books that starts with the word “The”.

So why am I doing this again?  Why not?  I told Dad I was thinking about firing up a blog (or revisiting one of the old ones) to entertain him and myself.  And I’ve had a spare domain just sitting out there on a server in Arizona doing nothing for the last year, so I thought I could kill a couple of birds with one sniper-like shotgun blast.  Anyway, I started playing around with the unused domain a while ago – and recently renewed it for a few years as a kind of catch-all for my stuff – so I installed WordPress on it.

And then I reached my limit for reading political garbage on Facebook and nuked my account there.  Sorry.  It was just making me angry all the time and I saw no need for that.  Maybe I’ll sign up again after the election.  In any case, I’ve got a blog again.  And I’m not wasting time on Facebook, so maybe I’ll keep it updated.

Graceful Chaos.  Believe it or not, I put some thought into that, and I’m still not satisfied with it.  It might change if I can come up with a one-word description for something which I can’t believe doesn’t already have one.  See, my favorite style of music, by far, has no name.  It’s a combination of styles, really.  Paul Lovatt Cooper writes a lot of it (I’ve considered both Lovattetto and Cooperando) as did Paul Hindemith (maybe it’s a Paul thing??).  Basically, a simple theme is stated somewhere, gets lost for a while, and then comes back as the central flowing theme layered over the top (or underneath) a riot of technical, usually presto, counterpoints.   This type of thing happens a lot in brass band music, which may explain why I love it.

Example (indulge me):  Philip Sparke’s Tallis Variations is based, not surprisingly, on a very simple theme by Thomas Tallis.  Yes, I know that Ralph Vaugham Williams used the same thing for his Fantasy on a Theme by Tallis.  Focus, people.  I’m talking about brass bands, not orchestras.  Moving on.  It’s an extremely simple theme (it is, in fact, Tallis’ Third Mode Melody, which you can see here if you’d like: Third Mode Melody).

Sparke takes this hymn, states it early, and then goes about doing what Sparke does, which is blowing up brass players’ faces for 10 minutes.  “Cornets, play lots of 16th notes.  Horns, go fox hunting or something.  Euphs, play etudes.  Snare – I need shock accents!  Tubas, oompah your guts out. Flugel..are you drunk again?  Play like you’re drunk.  Now, everybody do all of that together.  Oh yeah – bones, take the melody and make it pretty.”

The result winds up being something like this (courtesy of the Yorkshire Building Society Band):

https://youtu.be/svI-wYQ6lpY?t=770

You see how that works?  Simple melody.  Played strongly.  On a bed of spaghetti.

I love that shit!  And there isn’t a term for it!  It is, therefore, my duty to come up with one.  Also, since it is widely known at my workplace that I am able to remain calm when everything is falling apart, Graceful Chaos seems like a decent interim name for my blog.

Understand that the reason I remain calm is because I really don’t care about the things that are falling apart.  It’s just a job, after all.

The green logo thing (an original TWD, entitled Rawr!) also fits the theme.  It is a monster.  It’s lifting weights.  It’s on a fluorescent green background.  It’s got pointy teeth.  It’s wearing a sort of argyle/plaid sweater.  It’s chaotic.  But I drew it during an outage meeting at three o’clock in the morning a few years ago and the act of doing so kept me calm.

It was at around the same time that I superimposed the glamour shot of myself into an art gallery.  Why did I include that picture in this post?  No idea.  I wanted a picture to break up the text and that’s the first one I found on my laptop.

Lastly, what’s up with the funky address for this page?  Migration?  What’s that all about?

Long story as short as possible.  I got TheUFFP and wrote stuff for it.  It was on a Windows server.  Then I wanted to upgrade lots of the stuff and put everything on Linux, so I got UFFP2.  I’d planned to move everything back under TheUFFP name at some point, but as more and more went into UFFP2, that became a bit of a hassle.  Logically, I should have dumped TheUFFP.  Except that I’ve had @theuffp email addresses for nearly 20 years and doing away with the domain name would have been amazingly painful.  So I kept it with nothing on it.  Until I was informed that the hosting account tied to the TheUFFP domain was moving to a different server and I had to move everything.

Well, there WASN’T anything in the hosting account.  It had all been moved the UFFP2 or deleted.  But, since it was such a huge hassle for other domains on the same server – the ones that had websites attached to them – I got a free hosting account for a year, and all I had to do to make it work was name it something other than TheUFFP.com.  So I named it Migration.TheUFFP.com.

Because it was, you know, migrating.

Since this is just an experimental site – a place where I can test code, store databases, post photos, etc. – I don’t really want people to just stumble into it.  Sure, some robots will find it eventually; but, realistically, if I don’t give out the domain name, normal people won’t find it.

And if they do, I’ll just delete all of their comments and lock things down.  I have the power.

I like that.

Anyway, welcome aboard.  I guess this thing’s live now.

TWD

more all-night blues

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Seems like as good a time to update this as any, since I’m once again sitting a work doing absolutely nothing while waiting for an upgrade to commence.  For some unknown reason, I was informed that I had to get here 6 hours early for today’s upgrade – scheduled to begin at 11:00 tonight and to run for 4 hours or so (and once again, I’ll have my own little 5-minute part to play).

Seriously.  6 freaking hours early.  And people wonder why I despise my job.

Theoretically, my boss and I will be chatting on Monday about another job opening that I spotted yesterday.  It’s the second of the two potential jobs that I mentioned a few posts back – the one that is basically systems administration, and the one that I really really want.  I know that I’m qualified.  The guy posting the job knows that I’m qualified.  My boss knows that I’m qualified.  The only question is whether or not my boss will once again block me from moving to another job, as he did last month (a move that – he knows – severely pissed me off).  When I mentioned this new job posting to him yesterday and requested that we talk about it, I basically told him that I’m at the breaking point and he’s going to lose me one way or another – either because I start working for someone else and supporting his team or because I start looking for a job with another corporation.  May 10th is coming up, after all….

Last weekend was the North American brass band championships in Cincinnati, and the contest, by and large, went pretty well.  There were the regular complaints about the venue, and there were the regular complaints about the judging (I kind of agree with those), but we had 23 bands and a couple hundred soloists show up and stayed pretty close to our schedule.  I got a serious work-out over the two days of competing by running up and down 12 flights of stairs to take as many pictures as possible.  My little pedometer told me that I cleared 5 miles each day and around 95 stories.  My feet were, not surprisingly, pretty tired by Sunday.  Got to spend some time with Amy, however.  That was nice, as was her cornet solo (“I’d Rather Have Jesus”).  She also got picked up as a ringer by the band that ended up winning the First Section, and the band that hired her to work with its cornet section a couple of weeks ago ended up taking 1st in the Championship Section – which *nobody* saw coming – so I’d have to say that she acquitted herself pretty well on the weekend.

Yard work began in earnest today with the mowing of the back yard.  A few weeks ago, I trimmed the holly in the back yard and pruned a couple of trees that were trying to grow through the side of my house, but I’m not counting that work.  The front yard is scheduled for tomorrow if the weather cooperates (and it looks like it will be another gorgeous day).  I also need to trim the front hedges pretty drastically.  I hate doing that because they look completely dead for the first month after I cut them back, but they’re encroaching on my sidewalk, so…..

Not much else to talk about.  Every day is sort of smashing into the next recently.  Get up, go to work, go home, watch some television, go to bed early.  Jenny and I nearly went to a minor league hockey game last night, but agreed – at around lunch time – that we were both too tired to do it.  We could possibly reschedule that for tomorrow.  It depends on how much sleep I can get tonight and how the lawn work goes tomorrow.

Hope everybody else is having a good spring.

TWD

beach weekend

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Coming to you live from sunny Waukegan, IL, it’s the newest entry into the soon-to-be world-famous Frowsy Noise!

Yes, it’s a dreary Sunday afternoon and I’m writing this from the Illinois Beach Resort in Zion, IL, which is actually about 10 minutes north of the aforementioned Waukegan.  I got here at about 6:30 Friday night and have spent the last couple of days walking around taking pictures of the snowy beach along the western shore of Lake Michigan, spending time with Amy (and, to a lesser extent, her folks), playing with her dog, and generally enjoying a few days away from work.

Went for a walk yesterday and found three deer looking for
food in the snow.

The weekend did not start we’ll for Amy’s mom, who fell sometime Friday afternoon and, after visiting a dentist to check the damage, learned that she’d broken her jaw.  The poor lady subsequently had her jaw wired shut and will be eating through straws for the next month and a half.

That didn’t keep her from attending church this morning, where Amy and I joined her, but it did rule out any choral performances.  I believe she did stay after the service for hand bell practice, however.

Amy and I went to see a movie, Oz, The Great and Powerful, last night.  I had high hopes for the flick, but it failed to live up to them.  Might have been fun for kids, but it totally failed to engage me; and the 3D effects, while occasionally very good, did not justify the time spent in the theatre fighting to stay awake.  Live and learn.

After church today, Amy and I had lunch at a diner near her house, and then went our separate ways – she to do some trumpet exercises and me to walk in the rain, maybe take some pictures, update this little blog, and see what’s going on with the NCAA basketball brackets.  We’ll get together later today for a movie or something and tomorrow morning, early, I’ll hit the road for home.

It’s been a great couple of days, overall.  I always like the time I spend with Amy and it’s also nice to see some actual snow on the ground! Makes me miss my life as a Yankee.

TWD

 

cars

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This will have to be a short entry because it’s a little after 8 o’clock and my alarm clock is set for 3:58 tomorrow morning.  Shortly after that time, I’ll hit the road for Waukegan.

Today at work was relatively hectic.  In addition to a training class that’s been going on for the last week – and will continue for three more – (I am constantly interrupted to open the doors for trainees because they don’t have badges and I am the gatekeeper), I was being slammed by the IT department to put together workstations for them, get others fixed for them, and discuss ways that I could keep them informed of workstation problems in the future.  I also had to complete a completely stupid “what did I do last month” spreadsheet for the finance department, which apparently hasn’t figured out what should be counted as a capital expense in our department and so has had us doing this STUPID busywork for the last couple of months (“On February 9th, I spent 3.2 hours reading email…”).  While doing all this stuff, I was also attempting to debug some code for a project I’ve been working on for the last 6 weeks or so, help technicians with installations, and keep one eye on a conversation going on with the rest of my group about next week’s launch of our 24×7 schedule in order to make sure that I don’t get stuck with an 8pm-7am shift of something (and that’s not a joke…15 freaking years in this business and now I’m trying to avoid getting a shit shift that should be worked by somebody 1/3 of my age with 1/10th of my experience).

But I made it through the day.  Got home and got packed for the trip, and am currently sitting in bed thinking about sleep.

So.  Cars that I’ve considered purchasing.  Top of the heap is still the Subaru Outback, but – mainly because I hate the idea of dropping 25 large for that car, I’m leaving the door open for other makes and models.  The Nissan XTerra looks good, and I’ve also eyed the Toyota 4Runner and Sequoia, various flavors of Jeep (Cherokee, Liberty, etc. – not the Wrangler, though that would be a great thing to have in the woods), and a couple of Hondas (Pilot, CRV).

Basically, what I want is a car lets me do all of the following: cruise around the city in relative comfort and quiet – not a lot of road noise, leather seats, decent stereo, Bluetooth, aux in for ipod or phone, etc.  However, I also need a machine that I can take into the woods several times a year.  By that I mean, while not technically off-roading, about as close as one can get.  The places that I go to camp are generally approachable only by hiking or by twisty, rocky, rugged, washed-out, narrow dirt roads.  Yes, I have taken most of my former cars on these roads, but I haven’t enjoyed it.  The Audi particularly makes me cringe every time I hit a washout or drive over a section of corduroy.  I want something that’s close enough to being a truck – and that has enough ground clearance – to make me comfortable on these mountain forays.  Next, I want something that I can sleep in in relative comfort.  I want the back seats to lay down flat, and I’d like the front passenger seat to do likewise.  This was one thing that I really liked about my PT Cruiser.  When the seats were laid flat, I had an 8-foot bed in the car, and I could pull into a campsite during a football weekend, string up a tarp, and not have to bother with a tent.  I also want a car with decent gas mileage – not spectacular, but 30+ – and without a massive cost of ownership (a la the Audi).  Last, it has to be a manual transmission.  I’ve done the automatic bit.  I’m over it.  I want a clutch and a stick shift (actually, I’d love to have a column shifter, but I don’t think anybody makes those anymore).

So, as I continue to wonder if I should or shouldn’t get a new vehicle, I’ll also continue to winnow down the list – or maybe expand it – of potential cars.  I’ve owned a lot of cars – but I want to get it completely right the next time around.

TWD

and again

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How do I keep forgetting to update this?  Huh? HUH?

I even REMINDED myself to write something here yesterday – and immediately forgot to do so.  See, I had to go into the office last night for a number of trivialities – a truly bogus conference call to go over various types of alarms and how to respond to them (uh…we’ve been doing this for the better part of a year, folks.  We know what to do), mapping the layout of the call center workstations (why this had to be done last night – or any night, for that matter – is beyond me), and four separate systems updates with which I had nothing to do.  So my plan was to sit at my desk and type an entry…and I completely forgot the plan.  I ended up asking a bunch of questions that everyone knew the answers to on the alarms call, had a great time turning workstations on, writing down their host names in my little notebook, and putting together a pretty decent floor plan in an excel spreadsheet.  I even tried to pay attention for about 5 minutes during the first systems call; but, as I usually do when I’m on a call that doesn’t involve me, I lost interest and eventually just left at around midnight.

YesterDAY at work wasn’t much more exciting than last night was.  I finally got my laptop reimaged yesterday afternoon and spent much of the day reinstalling programs on it – many of them not approved by the corporate software Nazis (things like Office 2013, Visual Studio 2012, and various other apps that I use on a daily basis).

Today was more of the same.  Installed a few more programs that I need, helped a technician who was having problems during an install at a customer’s house, helped the IT guy (who’s job I want) set up some command center workstations, paid some bills, wrote some code, drank some coffee, and left.

Then the fun began – or at least a little fun began.  Today was bonus day – that glorious one day a year when we get our obscenely-large bonus check.  Traditionally, I take the opportunity to pay off a credit card or a car – or make some other large and relatively responsiblee payment; and I also buy myself a toy that I otherwise wouldn’t.  Past toys have included a new refrigerator, a camera upgrade, a nice lens – one year I put a down payment on new windows; but this year I’m still waffling on whether or not I’m going to get a new car, so I didn’t really want to spend a great deal on my toy.  True, I’ve had my eye on the Canon D1x since I rented it several times last season – and I had indeed considered making it the 2013 bonus toy – but after much thought, I decided that I’ll just rent it a few more times this year rather than dropping $3000 on it.  I’d dearly love to have one of the things at my beck and call, but I’d also dearly love to be debt free and/or behind the wheel of a Subaru Outback (maybe I’ll talk about my car research in tomorrow’s post); so in the end I went with a much cheaper toy, but one that has also been catching my eye for the last couple of years: a GoPro sports camera.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that there is absolutely no way to consider this purchase to be anything other than a big boy’s toy.  It is highly unlikely that I’m going to be shooting any footage for National Geographic, Alpine Ski commercials, or the Survivorman television series – although the little camera that I got for myself is indeed capable of doing any of those things (as you’ll see if you go to the link I provided).  No, this is strictly for the type of filming that I’ve wanted to do for years, but the hardware to do it was always ridiculously expensive and/or crappy.  The GoPro Hero3 that I bought shoots high-definition video (or 12MP stills); is waterproof, shockproof, crushproof, and coldproof; weighs in at about 2 ounces; and can be mounted on virtually anything – a bicycle, a shoe, my wrist, chest or head, a car, a roller blade….or a tripod.  My camping buddy Brett and I have been experimenting with hiking videos since about 2000, and I now have the camera that will let me do some of those sequences that we’ve never been able to do.

First up, however, I’m going to see if I can do a time-lapse film of the trip from Atlanta to Chicago.  It’ll be a fun way for me to get used to the camera, and I do love time-lapse stuff.

So roll your eyes all you want to.  It’s my toy.

TWD