Tag Archives: weather

One of the Seven

Posted on by

Today’s featured picture, should you be wondering, is of a trail to the beach at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.  I was just perusing some random files in my OneDrive folders and I liked it.  I think I’ll just start doing that – using random shots – from now on.

Anyway, this morning is what I’d call one of the perfect 7 days that Georgia has each year.  I used to say that we had 6 perfect days, but I decided recently to increase that to a full week.  Not for any particular reason, but it’s probably close.  There are usually 4 or 5 such perfect days in the autumn and 1 or 2 in the early spring.  The rest of the year is either ungodly hot, ungodly wet, or both.  This morning, though….it’s in the high 50s, there’s a luscious breeze blowing out of the south, the humidity is very low, and the leaves in my back yard have finally turned gold.  I have the weirdest tree back there.  I think it’s a Beech, and it stays green forever.  And then, overnight, it seems, it goes gold.  It will stay that color until January or so, and then – again, overnight – all of the leaves will fall off and it’ll be dead until summer, when it instantly becomes covered in thick green leaves.  Just a strange tree.

So I’ve got the living room window open and the boys are loving life, sitting as close to the screen as they can without actually pushing it out of its frame, and smelling all that neat stuff that only cats can smell.

The job search continues for me.  I’ve been rejected so far by AT&T (two or three times), Macy’s (once), GE (twice), NCR (once), and I think by somebody else that I can’t remember.  I have resumes out to AT&T (several), OFS (a job that, if the dorks would just read my resume, they’d break their legs running to get me), RaceTrac (HQ – two possible jobs), and nice lady recruiter in Columbia, SC, has been hounding me for the last two days.  I told her to leave me alone until I’ve exhausted my Atlanta options.  Oh, and I’ve got a resume in Huntsville, AL, too.  Private K-12 needs a support dude.  I think that’d be fun.

My boss called me the other day and said that a friend of his is thinking about back-filling at job at AT&T, and he’s going to pass my name along.  That’d be cool because I’d keep my years in service and current salary (which I’m not going to get if I leave the company), but it would also kinda suck because the job is for an outage call coordinator….which means that my job would be to sit on outage calls and yell at people in order to make them fix the outage.  On the plus side, I’d get to work from home.  Also on the plus side, it’d give me more management experience.  On the minus side….come on…if you know me at all, you know that I don’t get in people’s faces.  I fix the problems for them.  In fact, that personality quirk bit me on the ass last week during my second interview for a sysadmin job at GE.  The interviewer asked me why I haven’t advanced further up the ladder, considering my experience.  I told him the truth: I don’t want direct reports.  I don’t want to be a team lead.  I like being given a problem and told to solve it.

He was looking for a team lead.  Even told me that in the follow-up rejection call.  “We really like your experience, but we want somebody to run the show.”  I thanked him and told him to keep me in mind when they need tuba players and not trumpet soloists.  He laughed and said that he would.  All in all, a pretty pleasant rejection.

I’m also considering applying for a job as the assistant manager at an AT&T retail store – a job that is two salary grades below my own and would just barely pay the bills.  Why would I do this?  A number of reasons, actually.  One, I’d keep my years in services.  This is actually important to me, if for no other reason than the fact that I’m only three years away from being able to take an early retirement.  Two, there’s nowhere for me to go in my current career path except into people management, and I have no experience with that.  If I’m going to have to make that plunge eventually, I think it’d be good for me to actually get some experience as a manager – and what less stressful learning could I get than as an entry-level assistant manager?  Three, I think I’d be damned good at it, given that I’m still a geek who likes to play with all the new toys, that (this is actually true) I’m extremely organized, that I like crunching numbers and making charts, and that (this is also true) I have phenomenal people skills in a work environment….said skills do not apply to social environments, where I can be kind of a dick, truth be told.  I’m also free to apply for that job and to turn it down if it’s offered to me without losing my severance package (because it’s a step down, I’m not obligated to accept an offer).  So I’m working on a cover letter for that gig, meant to convince the hiring manager that I’m not overqualified and that I’m not just flailing away trying to stay at AT&T, but that I’m truly interested in learning in order to maybe start a second career in my doddering years.

In a nutshell, no job yet, but I’m not defeated.  I will admit that my smoke intake has increased markedly in the last couple of weeks, and I really need to chill out as far as that goes.  Stress level is indeed high, but I’m trying to keep it under control.

What else what else….?

Oh!  In between applying for jobs and avoiding all actual work in the office, I’ve been trying to learn more about Bootstrap, which is a CSS framework for mobile-first websites.  Why?  Because it’s cool.  So there.

As a beginner project, I’ve decided to make a mileage/gasoline tracker for myself, rather than going back to one of the myriad apps that do the same thing.  If you want to watch my progress, you can do so by looking at migration.theuffp.com/mileage.  It’ll open in a regular browser.  More importantly, if you open it on your phone, it should fit on the screen perfectly, thanks to Bootstrap.   As of today, it does absolutely nothing.  You can enter numbers and click buttons to your hearts’ content, and nothing will happen.  Next week, however, I hope to start filling in the fun stuff that actually writes and reads data and displays graphs.  Then I’ll have to add some security to it.  Then I’ll be happy to set up accounts for anybody who wants to use it – and I’ll charge you.

Career #3 maybe?

In the “spending money I shouldn’t spend right now” category, I bought Battlefield 1 the other day.  It’s a video game.  First-person shooter of World War I.  Having already beaten up the Japanese and Germans in two separate WWII games, and the Russians in a Cold War game, I’ve decided to go old-school and kick some WWI butt.  Unfortunately, I need to get a video driver update before the game will work for me on my Surface Book.  Hoping to do that later today, but I’m being very careful.  All I need at this point is to break the graphics on my main computer….

And that, friends and family, is all the news that I can think to print.  Maybe next week I’ll have something better.  If not, I’ll try to just ramble on again anyway.  After nearly 50 years of doing it, the act of writing (or typing) is still a very calming experience for me.  I spend more on pens and notebooks than anyone I know.  And then I leave them at my desk and type everything that I thought I was going to write.  Weird.

Almost as weird as that stupid Beech tree.

 

Computer Fights

Posted on by

Took a long walk this morning and managed to get home shortly before it started raining, which was nice.  After having a cup of coffee, I decided that I should probably put a new post in this here blog, so I plugged my SurfaceBook into the new port replicator that I got for it last week (told you I was making my office back into an office), and – on the spur of the moment – decided to hook the speakers that were initially attached to my television into the port replicator.

That worked well, so I had to immediately fire up a game of Battleground and fight Russians for an hour or so.  The fine folks who were with me in Canada this summer got to watch me waste several hours fighting the Germans in WWII (all of whom I eventually defeated), and I’d previously crushed all Japanese resistance (again in WWII).  So now I’ve moved on to the Russians.  I’ve got some Vietnamese people itching for a fight, too, but thus far I’ve been unable to get the game to load as a single-player thing, and I have no interest in forming a team with online people, so it’s the Russians for now.

I’m winning.  Slowly.

At any rate, after shooting at the commies, I turned my attention back to the blog.  Logged in, and was informed that an update was available.  So I backed up my stuff and ran the update.

You catch that, you computer neophytes out there?  I “backed up my stuff” BEFORE running the update.  This is why I’m a paid professional.  Because I’m paid to know that updates that I didn’t write personally never work.  Naturally, the update failed halfway through and left this site in a completely unusable state.

So I got to do some computer fighting of a different sort.  I will eventually win, but you may notice that a number of graphics and photos are missing as of the date of this post.  That’s because, while I did back everything up, I still have to restore it all.  At this point, I’ve got the database restored. That’s where all the interesting stuff is anyway.  The pictures and a few settings will have to be restored later.  After I get the file and folder permissions set up correctly.

So…what else is going on….hmmmm…

OH!  Furman lost again yesterday.  We’re now 0-3 for the season and – as two of the three were against Southern Conference competition, we have virtually no chance to win the conference and/or make the playoffs.  Again.  In defense of the purple guys, the first part of this season is a monster.  At #12 (FBS) Michigan State.  At #15 The Citadel.  Home against #4 Tennessee-Chattanooga.  And next week will be at FBS-transitioning Coastal Carolina (which would probably be ranked #2 FCS if they weren’t transitioning).  So we’ll be 0-4 after next week.  I don’t remember the last time that happened.  And I’m not going to look it up.

Also yesterday, I got a good deal of cleaning done in my garage, which is something that’s been on my schedule for several months.  I still haven’t got it cleared out as much as I’d like, but I can once again park my car in the middle of it, which gives me room to set up my workbench and play with power tools if the mood strikes.  So that’s nice.

The weather in Duluth has been hot lately.  By “lately,” I mean, “for the last 6 months,” and by “hot,” I mean, “unbearable.”  It’s been a basket of unbearable, I swear.  Temps nearing (or exceeding) 100 several times.  Usually passing 90 by noon.  At least the mornings have been somewhat okay – high 70s when I take my 5:30 AM walks – but it’s in the 80s by the time I get to work at 8:00.  This can’t last forever, right?

Time to go back to killing Russians.

Is Fall on the Way?

Posted on by

It’s 7 o’clock on Saturday morning and I’ve just returned from a walk (a couple of miles, I think).  This is not an unusual event – I take a walk almost every morning – but, for the second day in a row, it was not a horrible experience for me, temperature-wise.  Yesterday morning and this morning were both the beneficiaries of, I assume, the storm that’s currently wafting around the southland (Hermine?).  Light breeze, temperature in the low 70s.  Really nice.  I should mention that I also have the window to my deck open in front of me, so I’m still benefitting from the breeze, and the cats seem to be loving it.

Strike that.  I just had to close the window because one of the feral cats just came up on the deck and started messing with Chamberlain’s head.

So it’s a long Labor Day weekend, made longer by the fact that I took Thursday and yesterday off several months ago with the intent at the time of driving up to East Lansing, MI, to shoot the Furman/Michigan State game, which occurred last night.  For various reasons – expense of renting equipment, a dearth of desire to drive for 24 hours in a 72-hour span, and Jenny’s vacation to Peru – I didn’t go.  I did watch the game on the Big10 network, however.  The Furman guys acquitted themselves well, holding one of last year’s FBS semi-finalists to 28 points and getting 13 of their own marks on the scoreboard.  The official point spread was set at 42.5, which was patently ridiculous for a number of reasons. Were I a betting man, I would’ve put the house on Furman and the points.  Be that as it may, for a team that went 4-7 a year ago to lose by only 15 to the team that won the Big 10 during the same period ain’t bad at all.  Perhaps – just perhaps – there is reason to hope for good things in Greenville this year.

As I said, Jenny’s in Peru – at least I think it’s Peru – and I’ve been tasked with taking care of her cats and, at some point, going out to dinner with Herb, who’s been feeling all of his 83 years recently, what with having to deal with Andi in assisted living (still recovering from her leg surgery), deciding what he’s going to do with himself and their house, and (I would assume) still working 40 hours a week.   I also need to bring him some packages that Jenny had sent to my house and, if I can figure out how, to borrow (read: take forever) his extension ladder.

I need the latter (the ladder – get it?) because I noticed during the day of the great tree massacre that I have a tree growing in one of my gutters.  Wish I could say that I’m joking about that, but I’m not.  There’s literally a small pine growing in the gutter over the back door, and I don’t have a ladder tall enough to get up there and clean the gutters – and I’m not getting on the roof.  Don’t remember exactly when I became deathly afraid of heights, but I did.  And I am.  And me no go on roof.   I took out my pole saw a few days ago and tried the classic “knock that sucker down” approach to the gutter-tree, but all I managed to do was knock some dirt on myself.  So an extension ladder is the next step.

If I can’t do that, well…me go on roof.  I’ve had a full life.  It’s been nice knowing you.  Somebody take care of my cats – and get my clock fixed.  Sorry, Dad.  Quincy’s clock needs to go to the shop again.  4 times in 150+ years….I guess that’s not bad.

So the picture up there is what my back yard looked like on the day after the tree guys left.  It’s a panorama, which explains things like the shape of the yard and the fact that the bird-feeder pole looks funny, but the things to notice are the large stump near the fence on the left, the fact that my shed is actually visible, and the lack of privet on the right.  The south forty, behind the white fence, will be the next area to get mauled by my tree peeps.  That’ll cost me another $2,300, but all except one of the trees back there (a large Oak) will be gone.  Once that’s done, I’ll have the fence back there replaced (it’s in bad shape), and will then decide what to do with it.  Either a garden (doubtful) or some new grass.  For the last couple of years, I’ve basically abandoned that area because nothing except trees will grow there.  I’d love to be able to get it sodded and maybe put in a swing, for which the frame is already there.

I can hear you all thinking, “Man.  That yard looks like shit.  He spent how much on that?”   And, for now, you’re all right.  It does look crappy.  Largely because of the tree, which is now gone, and the limbs on the Beech tree in the center, also gone.  Nothing could grow there.  Now, hopefully, grass can.  If that photo doesn’t open (I don’t think it does), you can get a better view from the one below.

After the trees came down

After the trees came down

Today, I think, I might start to reclaim Scott’s old room (which also served as a recovery ward for Chamberlain when he broke his leg) and turn it back into a home office – which is what I had nearly completed when Scott first moved in 6 years ago.  I’ll have one decent expense for that project: since I got the new laptop, I’ll need to get a new docking station for it.  Other than that, though, it should just be some sweat equity.

Might help me lose some weight.

V-3!

Posted on by

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!

 

Snuffles

Posted on by

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.