David Wilcox
For my birthday my wife bought me two tickets to see David Wilcox performing in what my brother would call a coffee house setting.Her one request was that I find someone else to go with :) I knew that if they were free, both my brother and my son would enjoy it. When both *were* available, I just ordered another ticket and invited them both. If I've had a better idea in the last 6 months I don't know what it was.

The only thing I'd change about last night is that we'd have run into less traffic getting to Arlington and then on to Ft Worth so we could have had dinner before the 7pm show we attended. If that had worked out, we might well have taken them up on the offer of a discounted ticket to the 9:30pm show with our 1st show ticket stub.

I knew Wilcox only by his recordings, many of which I enjoyed even after many repeated 'listenings'. I was pretty sure that seeing him live would increase my enjoyment and this show did not disappoint me. Just Wilcox, his guitar and the crowd. What a fun evening.

And if you want to catch up with where Wilcox is now, give a listen to this (apologies for the realmedia link - I know there are those who raise the shields at anything real.com has to offer - if you want to hear it but not accede to real.com terms, email me and 'we can work something out'. :)

I'm very close to deciding on a new home for these ramblings - livejournal. skaughtisch and his significant other, and MY significant other sotraveler all have livejournal identities, and it seems sort of familial to choose that, although I have reserved the ripvansabre identity on blogger.com and journalscape.

 

The other tipping factor was finding a windows client that makes posting easier. I'm not 100% certain, but for the time being I'll post a pointer here to my livejournal home.

Or at least it is GOING TO BE...

 

I worked from home this a.m. - troubleshooting a network design I've been pondering for months. I was deep into experimentation mode when I decided to stop for 'lunch' which today for me was a walk in the park. I decided I'd try for an extra long walk today, because all anybody on tv can talk about is the winter weather event we supposed to have tomorrow...COLD with winter precipitation, which I guess means it might be snow, it might be ice, it might be rain, we just aren't sure.

 

Anyway, the real point of this entry is to speak in favor of getting up and walking away from the keyboard. I wasn't 10 minutes into my walk when I had an inspiration on my network design that helped me put the pieces in place. I'd played around all morning (and some of last night, too) and had gathered a lot of data, but not much in the way of conclusions on what I would do. I put the mp3 player in my pocket, locked the front door and took off walking, listening to Karla Bonoff singing. After a few steps I was NOT thinking about work. After a few minutes, from out of the blue came the keystone thought that had eluded me all morning. It was *almost* enough to get me to walk back home.

And after the intermission we were really amazed at the DSO's performance of Mahler's Symphony No. 1. I'll admit I am not familiar with Mahler, and when I sat down and realized that the piece runs 55 minutes, I was wondering what I had put myself in for. But the performance was wonderful and I can honestly say that 55 minutes flew by, regardless of how late I'd stayed up the night before.

 

Gosh, you don't think I fell asleep during it, do you?  Surely Chris would have noticed and jabbed me awake if I had.

Chris and I attended the DSO last night and were wowed by both halves of the program. In the opening we saw Caitlin Tully as violin soloist as the DSO performed Beethoven's Violin Concerto. As I watched her play, all I could think of that she just 17. Her bio says she asked for a violin for Christmas when she was 4. I'm no expert, but it was clear that she has a rare talent and obviously enjoys performing.

 

During intermission, I told Chris that I had realized I've lived 3 times as long as the soloist. I don't think that type of thought has ever occurred to me.

 

This morning I realized that she's only been playing since Christmas 1992 when she got that first violin. I wonder what I could have accomplished if I'd started working on it then.

Well if life has you feeling a little down and you wonder if people are worth the trouble, I can point you to this article (subtitled "While the feds fumble, hurricane survivors find relief thanks to a Dallas hotel owner and friends") in the Dec 1 issue of the Dallas Observer. If you read that and aren't a little bit encouraged about the basic decency of people, then I'll have to buy you a Three Musketeers bar to try to cheer you up.

And if the answer you're hoping for is blowing in the wind in Coppell today, you'd better drive to Murphy to get it, because the wind is so gusty that nothing is where it should be.  I had heard a warning today that high profile vehicles should use caution, but I didn't think that would include a 6 foot tall pedestrian. As dark approaches the wind has died down some, but still it added to my exercise as it provided extra resistance today.

 

I've spent some time considering this blog experiment I embarked on back in June, and with the coming turn of the year I've decided I'll upgrade the blogging facility. I've been using the blog capability built in to my verizon website and it suffers by comparison to those sites on the web better suited for blogging. Notably the lack of easy to use feedback has prevented any sort of 'interactivity' among my readers. I'm making this call for feedback from you few readers...I'm aware of livejournal and journalscape -both used by close family members - and would probably flip a coin if I can discern no better way to choose between them, but I do have my own linux server here in the home office and could presumably host my own if there were a reason..

So how about it...any suggestions on what to do?

"Take your time, it won’t be long now
Till you drag your feet to slow the circles down"

 

The day before Thanksgiving and these lyrics have special significance to me right now. How quickly life can change. Since last Thanksgiving we've lost my sister Sherry, Jill is 'back east' with most of her brood, Mom will be confined to the nursing home while her hip and femur continue to heal, and Scott is travelling with his significant other and her family.

 

The 12 pound turkey we have defrosting will be way too much for those gathered around the table tomorrow. For that matter, our house - which was almost the perfect size to raise two kids but never was quite large enough to comfortably host a family gathering will be ample size tomorrow as 'LBJ' will be the only guests arriving for the meal, a meal which will be their second turkey dinner of the day.

 

Intellectually I have no problem with this. The circle spins and some people leave us, others have temporary setbacks that prevent their attendance, and I know the whole point of parenthood is to raise them so they fly off to live their own lives.

 

But those song lyrics don't talk about intellectual feelings, they speak of the heart which wants to savor the moments, made all the sweeter by the knowledge that the circle continues to spin.

 

So the next lesson to be learned is to savor the quiet, reflect on those we've lost and treasure those we still have.

 

Happy Thanksgiving!

I was shocked last night when I stepped on the scales - I was down to a weight I had not been in some years. I was really excited. I knew that I was using a notch on my belt that had not been used before - in fact there's only one more notch on this belt before it get tossed out, but the weight I was last night has significance - if for no other reason that it means I've broken through the plateau I had hit. From the 26th of July to the 1st of October I was essentially stable, even though I was trying to do everything I had done in the weeks prior when I had been losing at the rate of 1 pound per week.

 

In an effort not to get too excited, I reminded myself that I'm still obese by the calculator at www.cdc.gov and to get to a BMI that they call normal (and not overweight) I'll need to lose almost twice what I have lost already. But I am determined, and if a two month plateau didn't knock me off my mission, I won't let anything else.

Try as I might to think of myself as a computer engineer, in reality I'm in computer sales. And before computers, I sold boy scouts. Wait, that doesn't sound quite right - I sold the scouting program to parents and institutions, did training of adult volunteers and participated in fundraising to support the program - that sounds better.

 

But the long and short of it is that even in that job I did a fair amount of selling. At NCR I definitely sold computers, first as a quota carrying sales rep, and later as a presales support consultant - explaining what was sold and often assisting in making it work.

One of the reasons I joined HP was because I had been impressed with their sales force when I worked in the IT department of a company that used HP computers. And when the opportunity came to join that company, in a role that would be in support of both existing customers and sales reps trying to win new business, I thought it was a good match of my skills and interests. Most of the sales reps I've worked with have been topnotch - honest, intelligent, and although they're interested in 'getting the next order' - they're also interested in building a lasting business relationship.

 

Once, though, I had a discussion with a rep about a particular strategy he was using to try to make a sale. And when I told him that I didn't think the technical problem the customer had would be solved by his proposed solution, he said to me "Ted, never confuse selling with installing".

 

He didn't last very long at HP, and over the years I've heard that he made the same statement to plenty of other people. Today as I walked the nature trail in the park, I was listening to the Diane Rehm show from Friday November 18. The Friday news roundup was discussing the current debate about our presence in Iraq and where it's headed, and suddenly I realized GWBush and that former HP sales rep probably have a lot in common. I think part of the problem the administration has today is that they did a poor job of selling this war back before it started. They certainly a poor job of explaining the cost of the war and asking the people to share in that cost.

 

I would argue that they probably thought they wouldn't be able to sell it if the American people understood the cost and had to bear some inconvenience, or even some pain in support of it.

 

I think it's a mistake to say they lied to us about it. I really believe they made an honest mistake in analyzing the prewar intelligence, but even if it was a dishonest mistake, I believe that THEY BELIEVED it.

 

It was popular at the time to belittle the countries that wouldn't join our coalition. One thing I haven't heard anyone talking about lately is that maybe those countries had it right and that we were wrong.

 

What next? I really enjoy when Republicans ask where the Democrats are with a plan. Pardon me, but 12 months ago you were crowing about a permanent Republican majority. Perhaps you were confusing campaigning with GOVERNING.

One of my guilty pleasures is reading rec.arts.tv - I don't even know why I do, since I've never been motivated to post there, and there's a LOT of noise and not much signal, but I still read the subject lines every day.

 

Today I read a subject line that asked "When did 'Happy Days' jump the shark?" and the self-referential absurdity just struck me as funny.

 

After missing my walk the last two nights I decided I would walk tonight NO MATTER WHAT. Today was a very busy day which ended with me taking a package to the FedEx office - I'd missed the shipping deadline at HP. Amazingly I still began my walk before dark, which these days sunset is around 5:25pm so dark is around 6pm.

 

It was still pretty light when I hit the north rim of the path in the park, so I took the detour off the paved path and onto the nature trail. The trail ventures into and out of the trees roughly parallel with the paved path, although there are lots of weaves and even a few 'ups and downs' to the path that make it a more fun walk, and I think more exercise, too. As I walked I wondered how many people even use this path. It's a little known treasure, in my opinion, as during parts of the walk the trees are so deep and thick that you cannot believe you're in a metro area of several million people. You're alone with nature, which even 5 weeks from the winter solstice is still pretty active here in north Texas (or should that be North Texas?).

The title comes from an article by Carolyn Megan of the NYTimes that's reprinted in the Lifestyles section of today's Dallas Morning News. It's a compelling story, by the way, of an Aunt who steps in to help raise the two children of her brother when his wife dies of cancer, but that's not what this blog is about....

 

The phrase "the ease of being in the mainstream" resonated with me as I read it this morning. As I wrote in my Sept 17 blog about 'doing the opposite' "Humans are herd animals". While I still believe that going your own way is good, for children the ease of being the mainstream can be a tremendous asset. The job of a parent is to watch the development of their child and to gauge when is the correct time to begin to encourage the child to leave the mainstream occasionally.

 

As I look back on my parenting track, something I wish had done better was to encourage my kids to seek the mainstream. My wife and I are both individuals, and we've probably always encouraged our children to be individuals. I don't recall any instance where we gave them any indication that blending in was a good thing. While that is satisfying emotionally to a liberal adult, I'm not sure it's fair to a growing child.

Last night as I went on my walk (late - 8:45pm) I was walking along the streets bathed in the street lights. As I walked I could see the lights of the parking lot of Vista Ridge Mall, and the other retail developments 2 miles north of my house. I walked along until I got the edge of Andy Brown Park, and as I entered the park I was surprised to find no floodlights on. Monday nights in November means no little league, and I guess no soccer practice either, so instead of several banks of floodlamps lighting the fields there was only one lamp lit - slightly illuminating the parking lot.

 

I believe officially when the lights are out the park is closed, but the walking path is so nice that I usually walk the 'south rim' (as I call it) even if it's dark. This night as I walked on the wooden path/bridge that goes over the pond that is the home of the Coppell Beaver Family I was struck by how dark it was, and yet how light - MOONLIGHT! The clear sky meant no clouds to reflect the city lights all around me, and being in the park meant I was in one of the darkest places in Coppell, hundreds of yards of park land with no electricity in use. At that point I noticed my shadow in the moonlight and as I looked out over the pond towards the far side of the park (where the northern path lies) I decided that I would go ahead and walk my favored loop, even if it meant walking into the darker part of the presumeably closed park. I did so, and I eventually got to the only part of the loop that is treelined - both sides of the path have tall live oak trees, leaving that part of the path mostly shaded during the day. And that is where I was treated to a beautiful pattern of moonlight through the leaves of the trees. I don't recall the sunlight making the same pattern, although I guess it makes sense that it does, but somehow in the soft moonlight, those shadows moved me. That moment is an example of how I've changed since I've been walking. I honestly don't think I would have noticed any of that 6 months ago. 

Part of my job at hp is managing an 'internet facing system' in our solution center. Every morning I review the statistics to tell me if someone tried to break into that system. Occassionally HP's IT security probes the system to be certain it doesn't have any known vulnerabilities. I'd say about 50% of the time the report shows at least one ip address attempting to find an easy login. As much as it happens I put some effort into keeping up with the latest and greatest in security.

 

Every time I spend some time doing research I am reminded of the film Sneakers starring Robert Redford. Although I'm sure the years since have rendered the technology in the film as antiquated, but the story was enjoyable, as well as the interaction between Redford and his costars.

 

The latest foray into the state of the art in security yielded this article about decoding the input based on the sound of keyboards. It is a little bit 'out there', but unlike your phone line or your data, the sound of your keyboard being typed isn't protected by any kind of law, since it's not really communication.

Do you suppose the NSA has had this already?

 

And of course, the paranoia I'm feeling reminds me of this scene from "King of the Hill"

 

HANK: What is that chinging noise?
DALE: One of those stealth helicopters with computerized noise-cancellation capability. They're still working the chings out.
BILL: How'd you know about the stealth helicopters?
DALE: alt.conspiracy.black.helicopters.
BOOMHAUER: Yeah man, I tell you what, man. That dang ol' Internet, man. You just go on there and point and click. Talk about W-W-dot-W-com. An' lotsa nekkid chicks on there, man. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. It's real easy, man.

I have always been impressed with the loyalty of Apple's customers. As I have only recently become a customer of theirs (by virtue of winning an IPOD) I have a new appreciation for how they've earned that loyalty.

 

I used MusicMatch Jukebox as my mp3 organizer since the early days (I think I still have the installer for MMJB version 3 on my hard drive at home). And I've owned several portable mp3 players (mostly from Creative Labs). But the combination of Itunes and the Ipod has impressed me at several turns. Today at the office (where I have ITunes installed on my laptop) I was listening to a podcast on wireless security, when I noticed a new icon in the sources pane in ITunes - Shared Music. I hadn't noticed that before, but after reading a tutorial, I'm again impressed. What they're doing isn't rocket science - but the fact that they thought of it and made it INSANELY EASY for a user to do impresses me.

 

No question about it, if I had to buy an mp3 player for my 79 year old mother to use, it'd be an ipod.

 

And as I've started telling people, I am very seriously considering buying a Mac the next time I decide I have "hardware money" to spend.

 

I hope this doesn't come off as insensitive or otherwise off-putting, but there's nothing like a trip to a nursing home to motivate you to exercise.

 

Today my Mom was moved from RHD Hospital to Tremont Nursing and Rehab Center as she continues to recover from a broken hip and a broken leg. When I first heard the possibility that she would be moved there, I went for a tour. Not knowing any better I went to the Assisted Living Center that's on the same property, but they quickly directed me across the courtyard to the Nursing and Rehab center. A nice person there took me for a quick walk to see a room, the dining area, the rehab facilities, etc. It was all very nice and I'm sure it will be good for Mom to be there while she recovers.

 

Both facilities were full of 'the greatest generation' and most people I saw were in wheelchairs. A very few were using walkers. Many still had active, expressive faces - sadly some were somber and defeated. I went out of my way to smile and say "Hello" or "Good afternoon" to those. About half of those I spoke to perked up and replied..the other half just stared at me, as if I was speaking a foreign language.

 

This afternoon Mom moved in, and I stopped by on my way home to see that she'd gotten there safe and sound and was settled in. Knowing precisely where she'd be, I parked around back and entered by the most direct entrance. I held the door open for a nice couple - the wife was pushing her husband in a wheelchair. And Mom is in a semi-private room so I watched as her roomie wheeled herself in, and then gingerly walked from the chair to her bed.

 

Tonight as I left the house on my walk, I knew I wanted to go to the grocery while I was out and by some bananas and some sliced turkey. After the two visits to Tremont, it was an easy decision to pick the grocery that's furthest away, and to start the walk headed AWAY from both stores, so that my walk was long. And as I walked, I said "Thanks" for my health.

This phrase comes from a column by William Kristol in the Weekly Standard concerning Karl Rove and his future at the White House.

I first was exposed to Kristol on the roundtable segment of ABC News' This Week. Since leaving that semi-regular job, he's been a fixture on Fox News Sunday, and perhaps other Fox News venues. Although I don't agree much with Kristol, I do enjoy his commentary, and he occasionally hits the ball out of the park (most recently, he was the first person to predict the withdrawal of the Miers nomination), and he seems to have a consistency in his views that even allows him to be critical of Republicans as well as Democrats.

 

In the referenced column, in which he argues for keeping Rove, Kristol includes this:

 

This is where Karl Rove comes back in. Between the 2000 election and the 2004 election, Rove became the master of polarization politics. And now, with this year's ill-fated experiment in trying to govern from the middle surely over, polarization along ideological and party lines is a fact of life. Ethics classes won't ameliorate Democratic hostility to Bush. Nor will firing Rove. In fact, throwing Rove overboard--dropping the political adviser who has been with Bush during his past comebacks and greatest triumphs--will increase the sense of a White House in disarray and retreat. 

 

I've got all kinds of problems with that paragraph. I'd like to hear a justification of describing the last few months as 'governing from the middle', as it sure doesn't look like that to me.

Next I'd quarrel with the idea of "democratic hostility to Bush" - my understanding of the checks and balances between the 3 branches give Congress the charge of checking and balancing the power of the executive, and there are some of us who feel that Congress has been asleep at the switch in 43's first term.

But my biggest quarrel is the phrase "polarization along ideological and party lines is a fact of life." What a depressing thought....if you really think you're a leader, accepting polarization as a fact of life is admitting defeat. You're accepting that you're not the president of ALL the people, and you're deciding that anyone criticizing you is unreasonable.

 

It seems to me that this is just the attitude they've had all along. So sticking with it is going to fix his problems?  The definition of insanity (or Stupidity?) is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

 

But now I'm going to surprise my readers by stating publicly that I would recommend 43 keep Karl Rove, just as I would recommend to Christian that he keep Cyrano on board as he was woos Roxanne.

 

But I'm still glad I'm not him.

I read the following headline on news.yahoo.com:

 

BUSH DECLARES: "We Do Not Torture"

 

and I thought - "Cool, then he'll sign the McCain amendment!"

 

So I click the link and read:

President Bush vigorously defended U.S. interrogation practices in the war on terror Monday and lobbied against a congressional drive to outlaw torture.

 

Ok, so we don't torture, but we don't want Congress to prohibit us? 

I'm sure someone can explain to me this position...

 

Boy, I'm glad I'm not him.

There's a wonderful Joni Mitchell album with a song called "The Same Situation" which includes the following:

 

Again and again the same situation
For so many years
Tethered to a ringing telephone
In a room full of mirrors