What I'm Thinking

Moving On

2005-09-18T16:58:00.000-04:00

There is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven. Or at least that's how the song goes. This is the notice that this blog is moving to the emerald isle. You can find me in Ireland at “What I'm Blogging”

We're Moving HERE.

Blogger.com has been a terrific home for my blogs and I since September of 2003, however I'm thinking about trying something new. I'm also thinking about consolidating all the various different blogs I run into one, and this will let me do that.

Hope to see you at the new place.

Cheers,
Ric

My Sunday Off

2005-09-18T09:44:00.000-04:00

Sunday off; a day free from labour; ordained rest by the Divine on high. Unfortunately, someone forgot to read the memo. My Sunday off is a little different.

...Sunday has really gone to the dogs...

Let's start with the dogs. If God had wanted Sunday to be a day of rest, you'd think he would have informed the dogs. But they still want out of the house early in the morning. There are neighbours to wake, cats to chase, and let's not forget nature's call. No, dogs definitely missed the memo on the whole day of rest thing. Mind you they are very well informed on the afternoon of rest, usually in my favourite spot on the sofa, but I digress.

Next is my day job. The place where I'm expected to be, 9 - 5, Monday to Friday. They missed the memo too. I don't think they were ever copied on the original. Instead of Sunday being a time of rest and time spent with family, for the best and brightest at Gigantic Concrete (and everywhere else I've worked too) Sunday is a change window. It is an opportunity to do all the computer and system work you need to do so that other people can be uninterrupted during their 9-5 work week. “The rocks must flow”. It sounds like a Frank Herbert novel waiting to happen. This Sunday morning I had a telco on the phone with a manufacturer of fine network equipment trying to recreate a problem we solved over a month ago to ensure that we really solved it.

To really top off My Sunday Off we need to look at the home front. There's the grass to cut, the hedge to trim, the car to wash, and groceries to buy. Worst of all there 's the calls of nature from my canine friends to scoop. Sunday has really gone to the dogs.

Undeniable Pressure

2005-09-15T06:53:00.000-04:00

Sometimes you read something and it just grabs you. It speaks to you in volumes of truths that wash over you. Truths that when you think about it, were slapping you in the face all along.

Poem: “The Undeniable Pressure of Existence” by Patricia Fargnoli, from Duties of the Spirit. © Tupelo Press.

I saw the fox running by the side of the road
past the turned-away brick faces of the condominiums
past the Citco gas station with its line of cars and trucks
and he ran, limping, gaunt, matted dull haired
past Jim's Pizza, past the Wash-O-Mat,
past the Thai Garden, his sides heaving like bellows
and he kept running to where the interstate
crossed the state road and he reached it and he ran on
under the underpass and beyond it past the perfect
rows of split-levels, their identical driveways
their brookless and forestless yards,
and from my moving car, I watched him,
helpless to do anything to help him, certain he was beyond
any aid, any desire to save him, and he ran loping on,
far out of his element, sick, panting, starving,
his eyes fixed on some point ahead of him,
some possible salvation
in all this hopelessness, that only he could see.

Mmmmmm Chocolate

2005-09-13T13:49:00.000-04:00

...too subtle for the common palate...

It's the birthday of Roald Dahl, born in Llandaff, South Wales (1916). He was sent off to private boarding schools as a kid, which he hated except for the chocolates, Cadbury chocolates. The Cadbury chocolate company had chosen his school as a focus group for new candies they were developing. Every so often, a plain gray cardboard box was issued to each child, filled with eleven chocolate bars. It was the children's task to rate the candy, and Dahl took his job very seriously. About one of the sample candy bars, he wrote, “Too subtle for the common palate.” He later said that the experience got him thinking about candy as something manufactured in a factory, and he spent a lot of time imagining what a candy factory might be like. Today, he's best known for his children's book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Further delicious reading available at Amazon Canada, US and UK

Istanbul Was Constantinople

2005-09-08T10:18:00.000-04:00

It was on this day in 1664 that the Dutch surrendered the city of New Amsterdam to the British, who renamed it New York. The English navigator Henry Hudson claimed credit as the city's discoverer in 1609, when he sailed into its harbor and up the river that now bears his name, looking for a passage to India. Hudson was sailing for the Dutch West India Company, so it was the Dutch who moved in and settled the area in 1614, six years before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock. Forty years later, New Amsterdam became a city; its population, 800. In the 1660s the Dutch and English were at war, and on September 8, 1664, a fleet sent by the Duke of York seized the city and changed the name to New York.

Further reading available at Amazon Canada, US and UK

Where's Waldo?

2005-09-07T02:58:00.000-04:00

You want to know where Waldo is? Well Waldo is right here. Waldo is me.

...Now I'm in Big Sky country...

At the behest of Gigantic Concrete, I'm am sojourning in beautiful downtown Steinbach Manitoba. Home of, among other things, the Mennonite Heritage Village, Automobile Town, and a vast array of pawn shops, churches and car dealerships. Quick cash, religion and wheels seem to be the mainstay.

I must say it's a little unnerving to be here. Yesterday morning I was in the rolling hills of the Oakridge Moraine and the towers of Toronto. Now I'm in Big Sky country. It is flat. Flat; flatter; flattest. There are times you can actually catch the curve of the earth on the edge of the horizon. For someone from hill country, it's like being in a very large fish bowel.

So why am I here? Well it goes something like this. One of our plants had a circuit with telco #1. We ordered a new circuit from telco #2. By some “murphian” fiat of fate, we also cancelled circuit with Telco #1 thinking that the new circuit would be in place before the old one was disconnected. Wrong. So I'm here to figure out how to connect the site with no circuit. For my next trick, watch me pull a rabbit out of my rear...

Kindred Spirit

2005-09-07T02:31:00.000-04:00

It's the birthday of the brilliant and unfortunate William Friese-Greene, born in Bristol, England (1855). Between 1885 and 1890 he built a series of four prototype motion-picture cameras and was granted a patent for a camera to record movement. He went bankrupt in the process and sold the rights to the patent for 500 pounds. During his lifetime, he took out more than 70 patents for other inventions, including X-ray and light printing on paper fabrics, ink-less printing, and electrical transmission of images, but earned little money from them and was on the verge of bankruptcy all his life.

Zen and a Harley

2005-09-06T07:33:00.000-04:00

Further reading available at Amazon Canada, US and UK

It's the birthday of writer Robert Pirsig, born in Minneapolis (1928). He's best known for his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), which 120 editors turned down before one finally offered a standard $3000 advance. The book is about the 1968 motorcycle trip he made from Minneapolis to San Francisco with his 12-year-old son Christopher. But the trip is really a backdrop for Pirsig's philosophical meditations on nature and technology. It was a completely unexpected best seller. He wrote: “The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of the mountain, or in the petals of a flower.”

My Brain Has a Pattern?

2005-09-05T08:34:00.000-04:00

Your Brain's Pattern

You have a tempered, reasonable way of thinking.
You tend to take every new idea in, and meld it with your world view.
For you, everything is always changing. Each moment is different.
Your thinking process tends to be very natural - with no beginnings or endings.

What Pattern Is Your Brain?

London Calling

2005-09-02T08:08:00.000-04:00

...London was, but is no more...

It's the anniversary of the Great Fire of London in 1666, which began around 1:00 am in the King's bakery, on Pudding Lane. The buildings in medieval London were nearly all wooden and the fire quickly spread to the wharves on the Thames River, where oil and hemp, hay, and timber were stored. There the fire exploded, and over the next three days destroyed an area nearly two miles square in central London, though only six persons died. A man named John Evelyn wrote in his diary the next night: “Oh the miserable and calamitous spectacle! The sky was like the top of a burning oven, and the light seen 40 miles round about for many nights. God grant mine eyes may never behold the like, who now saw 10,000 houses all in one flame; the noise and cracking and thunder of people, the fall of towers, houses, and churches, was like a hideous storm. London was, but is no more!”

Further reading available at Amazon Canada, US and UK

Red Cross - Donate if You Can

2005-09-01T05:54:00.000-04:00

American Red Cross

DONATE if you can

Sleepless in Cyberspace

2005-09-01T04:29:00.000-04:00

Do you ever have one of those days where you are so wired that sleep evades you? Well I'm having one, and I don't like it. I don't like it one bit.The wife doesn't like it either, because when I'm up, she can't sleep. I haven't taken any real survey, but I don't think the dogs are impressed in the least.

...there's an addiction that needs feeding...

Perhaps it's too much coffee? I have been known to drink a lot of coffee. Sometimes 10-15 cups a day. I blame this of course on the Order of Friars Minor. Prior to my association with the Franciscans back in the early eighties, I drank no coffee. None. Nada. Not a stitch. Couldn't stand the stuff really. However, in order to perk myself up for morning prayers, I started drinking the black oily stuff. Now I'm hooked. Addiction has it's monkey claws deep in my left shoulder blade; the only surviving remnant of a shattered Catholicism. The Church faded away, the coffee remained.

Of course I could just be stressed out. There is a lot of activity going on at Gigantic Concrete and there are times I feel like I'm barely keeping my head above water. So much to do, so much to keep track of, so many bloody emails to respond to (Yes, Matt this includes yours). There's also the burden of command. I had to chew out one of my staff today. I hate doing that. The guy isn't meeting expectations and now I get to be all managerial about it. I fear becoming a beloved one in my own right.

Whatever it is. It's left me awake, frustrated, and grumpy. I'd write more, but the kettle has boiled and there's an addiction that needs feeding.

Contingency Planning

2005-08-30T06:51:00.000-04:00

When you are planning your future, even at my late stage in the game, It is important to have a fall back plan in case things go wrong. What is my strategy? Simple, if things at Gigantic Concrete don't work out, and several thousand people perish unexpectedly, then I'm President. Planning is good.

Get your position here

Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain!

2005-08-29T22:23:00.000-04:00

Your Hidden Talent

You have the natural talent of rocking the boat, thwarting the system.
And while this may not seem big, it can be.
It's people like you who serve as the catalysts to major cultural changes.
You're just a bit behind the scenes, so no one really notices.

What's Your Hidden Talent?

Animal Crackers

2005-08-29T08:14:00.000-04:00

Further hilarious reading available at Amazon Canada, US and UK

On this day in 1930, the Marx Brothers' movie Animal Crackers opened in New York City. The farce, the brothers' second film, was directed by Victor Heerman and starred Harpo, Chico, Zeppo and Groucho, this time playing an African explorer who manages, among other feats, to shoot an elephant while wearing pajamas. He also performs the comic aria "Hooray for Captain Spaulding," in honor of himself. Margaret Dumont plays her familiar role as the long-suffering socialite, this time called Mrs. Rittenhouse.

A Little From Column A, A Little From Column B

2005-08-28T21:32:00.000-04:00

How You Live Your Life

You seem to be straight forward, but you keep a lot inside.

You're laid back and chill, but sometimes you care too much about what others think.

You prefer a variety of friends and tend to change friends quickly.

You tend to dream big, but you worry that your dreams aren't attainable.

How Do You Live Your Life?

It's Not the Fall, It's the Sudden Stop

2005-08-28T08:00:00.000-04:00

Today is believed to be the date when the Roman Empire fell in 474 A.D., when the Emperor Romulus Augustulus was deposed by a barbarian. What they called barbarians, we might call Germans or Swedes. One tribe, the Goths, had originated in Sweden, migrated to the Black Sea, and split into two groups, the Ostrogoths and the Visigoths. They were driven out of their own homeland by the Huns who had been advancing across Asia from the east. And so 200,000 Visigoths migrated across the Danube into the Roman Empire in 374 A.D. and were tolerated there by the Romans. But then the Romans tried to disarm them, and there was a rebellion. The emperor sent Roman troops into battle at Adrianople, and the Visigoths won and destroyed two-thirds of the Roman army. Their victory was thanks in part to the fact that the Visigoths had developed a horse's saddle with stirrups, which made the horses much more maneuverable.

Learn more at Amazon Canada, US and UK

Other Germanic tribes then began to move into the Roman Empire, the Vandals, the Burgundians, the Franks, the Angles, and the Saxons. Rome was sacked by the Goths in 410 and again by Vandals in 455. The Roman Empire was in shambles, and the emperor was deposed on this day in 474 A.D.

Edward Gibbon put forward a theory about the fall of Rome, arguing that the Christian Church was to blame, that after Christianity became the official religion of the Empire, the best and the brightest became leaders of the church rather than going into the military or into the government.

Another theory says that the aqueducts, which carried the water supply, were lined with lead, and so the Romans slowly went crazy. One of the more recent theories is that the Roman army had been infiltrated by the barbarians themselves, and so when the army was ordered to attack the barbarians, they, of course, refused.

This Must Be Rigged!

2005-08-27T22:43:00.000-04:00

Your IQ Is 140

Your Logical Intelligence is Genius
Your Verbal Intelligence is Genius
Your Mathematical Intelligence is Genius
Your General Knowledge is Genius

A Quick and Dirty IQ Test

Separation of Church and Camp

2005-08-27T22:08:00.000-04:00

Today was child retrieval day. That is to say it was the last day of Summer Camp and NOS (Number One Son) needed to be picked up. In the past NOS had attended the camp of the United Church of Canada, a liberal bunch of theologians who provided shuttle bus service to and from their northern retreat. This year, he attended the Presbyterian (Read: Church of Scotland in Canada) Camp, and being Scottish, they skimped on some of the basic necessities to save money. Necessities like shuttle bus service.

Of course this meant that I had to take the drive to go get him. The drive north. The long, lingering trek from home to summer camp in the automobile whose only air conditioning system is all the windows open while travelling 100 kilometers per hour. Oh joy.

My journey began at eight in the morning and was uneventful. No car issues, no road kill, no coffee. NOS was retrieved and insisted that we stop at the Restaurant of the Scottish Clown on the way home. After all he'd been cut off from civilization for a week. No video games! No TV! He needed an infusion of Western Pop Culture stat! It was over the faux burgers that the metaphysics question and answer period started.

“Dad, If God made us and loves us, why does he send some of us to Hell?”

This is the point where I nearly spit my root beer out my nose. My seemingly non religious son was enquiring on points of theology after only one week's exposure. Isn't there supposed to be some kind of constitutional separation of Church and Summer camp? I never would have gotten a question like this had those cheap Presbyterians sprang for the bus ride home. He never asked those questions after a bus ride home from the United Church Camp. But OK, time to come up with an answer.... hmmm..... think, think, think...

“Son.... God doesn't send us to hell. If there is such a place, we send ourselves. We are completely responsible for where we end up in life.” He thought about it for a while. Took a bite of his burger and thought about it some more.

“That makes sense,” he said finally.

Good. Theology lesson over. God gets off the hook for sending us to hell, and next year a camp with a bus.

Happy Birthday Hegel

2005-08-27T17:26:00.000-04:00

It's the birthday of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, born in Stuuttgart (1770). He started out as a theologian, particularly interested in how Christianity is a religion based on opposites: sin and salvation, earth and heaven, finite and infinite. He believed that Jesus had emphasized love as the chief virtue because love can bring about the marriage of opposites.

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Hegel eventually went beyond theology and began to argue that the subject of philosophy is reality, and he hoped to describe how and why human beings create communities and governments, make war, destroy each other's societies, and then build themselves up to do it all over again.

He came up with the concept of Dialectic, the idea that all human progress is driven by the conflict between opposites, that each political movement is imperfect and so gives rise to a counter movement which takes control—which is also imperfect—and gives rise to yet another counter movement, and so on to infinity.

SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM

2005-08-26T08:24:00.000-04:00

Major kudos to Scott over on Acting Up for pointing out Word Verification for comments on Blogger. Good bye-SPAM-bots!!

At least, that is, until the next advance in the Spam Wars and they find a way to fool that system too.

This new feature of Blogger came at just the right time, I was running out of dogs, and would probably of had to go after Tim's cats.

Those Daring Young Men in Their Flying Machines

2005-08-26T08:12:00.000-04:00

It's the birthday of the inventor Joseph Montgolfier, born in Annonay, France (1740). He and his brother Etienne were in the paper manufacturing business. And one night watching the fire in his fireplace, Joseph wondered what caused the sparks to rise. He made a bag out of silk and lit a fire under the opening and watched it rise. He thought it was smoke that lifted it. He didn't know it was simply heated air.

...the first human beings to take flight...

So the Montgolfier brothers decided to build a contraption for flight. At that time the only creatures who had ever flown were birds and insects. But in 1783, they made a huge bag out of cloth and paper, held the opening over a fire, and inflated the bag to a height of 110 feet. When it was full, they released it, and it rose more than 3,000 feet into the air. Then they sent up a balloon with a sheep, a duck, and a rooster in a basket under the balloon, with the king and queen of France watching. The balloon landed, and the animals were okay.

So on November 21, 1783, the Montgolfier brothers sent up the first human beings to take flight. Deciding not to do it themselves, they sent up two volunteers, one of whom was a major in the French army. A half a million people came to watch in Paris.

One of the people watching was Benjamin Franklin, and when someone asked him what practical purpose this contraption might have, Benjamin Franklin said, “What use is a newborn baby?”

Free Men in Paris

2005-08-25T07:19:00.000-04:00

It was on this day in 1944 that Paris was liberated from four years of Nazi rule. So many of the major cities in Europe were destroyed by bombing during the war, but Paris remained relatively unscathed, in part because the Nazis had marched into the city unchallenged, and the French, at least the French in Paris, had not put up much resistance. Many Parisians tried to be as accommodating as possible to the Germans. Most of the theaters and music halls, restaurants and cafés were open for Nazi soldiers and officers.

...but the idea of a curfew deeply offended them...

After D-Day, many people hoped the Allies would liberate Paris, but Eisenhower made a decision to go around the city. He didn't want to get bogged down there. And then, as the Allies got closer, the Germans ordered a 9:00 p.m. curfew on the city. The Parisians had not revolted against the German occupation, but the idea of a curfew deeply offended them, and the Paris police began collaborating with the French resistance. Fighting broke out in the streets. Hitler ordered the city be destroyed, but the German commander refused the order, and a division of French troops entered the city on this day in 1944.

Among the war correspondents was Ernest Hemingway, who said on this day, “I had a funny choke in my throat and I had to clean my glasses because now, below us, gray and always beautiful, was spread the city I love best in the world.”

Stop or the Dog Gets It!

2005-08-21T18:00:00.000-04:00

You know who you are. The blood will be on your hands, you sorry bastards.

Down to the Sea in Ships

2005-08-21T17:55:00.000-04:00

“They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; These see the works of the LORD, and his wonders in the deep.” And what works we saw.

...rhyming the ancient mariner are we...

My buddy Murray and I are completely insane. We push the boundaries of our physical limits and when we surpass them, we chase those gremlins even farther out. No we are not doing a remake of “The Right Stuff”, but rather we are undertaking one of those pastimes of human antiquity. We are become sailors; rhyming the ancient mariner are we.

Murray is the owner of a sixteen foot Hobie Cat. A Catamaran. A vessel offering passage to fun, excitement, and verification that two post 40 year old males are insane. The weather was gray, overcast, threatening thunder and lightning, but did this deter us? No not at all. We boldly went, and pit ourselves against the elements. The wind blew, the spray whipped our faces and the thunder clapped. This latter bit was a little daunting since we sat at the bottom of a twenty foot aluminium mast heavily conductive of airborne electricity known as lightning. But sail we did. We sailed for hours into the sunset, until our arms ached, until our legs could hold us up no longer.

The next day, of course, our post four decade bodies reminded us that we were not as nimble as we once were, but the memory of elemental wind and waves more than made up for the minor bruises and pains we suffered. Mind you, the aspirin and rum helped too.