Category Archives: Uncategorized

Pickle Jar

Pickle Jar
November 8, 2008

It was the pickles
that caught my attention.
After all, the city was full
of late-night revelers suddenly
realizing that it was morning,
stumbling home, their heads enormous
and heavy, their eyes burning
with the sun and the hurricanes,
clutching the last bottle of the evening,
a talisman against the return
of their adult responsibilities.

But, inexplicably,
he carried not a Budweiser,
but a gallon jar of kosher dills,
his step slow and determined,
his eyes firmly on his feet.

A long moment later, he came past
again, ignoring the cleaning truck
spraying away the excesses
of the New Orleans All Saints day sybaritism,
and the last trickle of frat boys
down from the University for the long weekend.

This time, with a case
of paper towels, straining to carry
them, but not about to let his determination
be dimmed by his coworkers
breezing past with teetering
arms full of boxes.

All the while we sat
over our grits and eggs,
tried to catch someone’s eye
for one more cup of burnt coffee,
he shuffled between the store room
and the front door
with the daily bread
as the city woke up, rubbed
its eyes, returned to the sins
of their fathers, the path trudged
so any times.

His hands no longer as strong
as they once were, but he not afraid
to get them dirty.

Um …

The last time we did a FeatherCast was way back in March. Since then, life has gotten busy for David and myself, and the few interviews that we have scheduled have fallen through for one reason or another.

We just returned from ApacheCon in New Orleans, and while there, I recorded (I think) 9 episodes of FeatherCast, which will be released over the coming month or two. I also put together a bonus episode for my Lightning Talk last night, which I think you’ll enjoy. Y’know, um, especially if, ah, you’re not one of the people that I was making fun of in it.

My Other Life

This week I’m back in my other life.

At home, I have two lives. From about 8 in the morning until about 5 in the afternoon, I’m an IT manager, with a team of 5 very talented and productive programmers and designers, writing web applications and designing websites. This is extremely busy, and sometimes stressful, but for the most part I enjoy it thoroughly.

The rest of the time, I have a wife and two kids, and a lovely house, and I enjoy that life thoroughly too.

I do the first of these in order to pay for the second of these.

But then a few weeks of the year I do conferences, and this is truly a different existence. This week I’m at ApacheCon in New Orleans, with about a hundred of my third life friends, and a bunch of strangers that have come to hear us talk about Apache technologies. Yesterday and Today, I hung out in a board room with 10 of my friends to plan the next one, which will be in Amsterdam next spring, and I think we’ve put together a pretty great schedule for it.

And this time around, my Best Beloved has come along with me, to see what it is that I do at these things, meet some of my friends here, and generally enjoy this other part of my life that she doesn’t get to see much of.

I used to spend a lot more time on Apache stuff than I do now. With age and marriage come changing priorities. Also, with the new job comes an intense desire to not spend one more moment on the computer when I get home. I tend, also, to have a lot of extra projects going all the time, and for the last several months, they’ve all had to do with Apache, but none of them were involvement with the actual Apache community, which is a little sad. They were, for the most part, writing Apache training materials, which I enjoy, and I think I’m good at, but it’s a little isolating from the great people that comprise Apache itself.

Another thing that I have done with Apache over the last two years, and have largely abandoned since early this summer, is FeatherCast. I hope to pick that up again this week Perhaps as early as this morning. I really enjoy talking with folks from all over the technical world, and Apache particularly, and then sharing those conversations with you. There are so many people, so much smarter than I, working on fascinating projects, and it’s exciting both to talk with them, but also to give them the opportunity to tell the whole world about what they’re doing.

So, these weeks immersed in my third life are always rejuvenating, exciting … and generally expensive. But, I hear that my training class sold really well, so perhaps we’ll at least break even for the week.

Pumpkins and Mums

Pumpkins and Mums
October 26, 2008

I hope he got a good deal
for this small plot of goodness
and light beside the road
from Wilmore to the outside world.

Always a smile, a kind word,
and a better price than Sam Walton,

But three years of bad harvests,
and then this, four lanes of blacktop,
a way to get there faster.

Safer, too, I suppose,
and what price can you put on that?
But Blakeman’s Farm, how many generations
digging this rocky earth,
now erased by a broad stroke of asphalt.

Another victim of progress.

So I hope that he was well compensated
for the ground his grandfather passed to him,
on which I stood,
year after year,
choosing pumpkins,

always meaning to come back
for a few chrysanthemums.

Eiderdown

Eiderdown
26 October, 2008

And then,
at some unnoticed moment,
the down turns to pinions,
and they’re flying
almost solo, if such a phrase
means anything.

A small thing,
making us breakfast before we arose
from the effects of a too-late night.

One can almost overlook,
at least for today,
the burnt pancakes,
the puddles of batter
on the floor and stove,
and imagine them self-sufficient,
getting their own meals,
perhaps paying their own bills,
taking care of us in our
twilight years.

Then, one of them needs help
opening something,
and the other objects to some small slight
or other,
is inconsolable,
and the illusion disperses,
blows away,
in a puff of eiderdown.

Voted

I’m going to be in New Orleans on election day, at ApacheCon, so today I went down to the County Clerk office and cast my vote for the president of the United States, as well as a variety of local elections.

This year, I was (I think) rather well informed about our national races – the president, the senate, and the congress – but woefully ignorant about the local races. And, really, what difference does it actually make who the commissioner of soil and water is, and why is this an elected position?

It’s ironic that one of my biggest complaints about the national government is how much power is at the federal level, rather than at the state level, yet when I had a chance to affect the composition of the state supreme court, I was utterly uninformed. It’s so very hard to follow what’s going on in local politics when really the only local media outlet is the Herald Leader, which is so completely biased on every issue it’s almost impossible to get a balanced view of anything.

Perhaps I’ll do better next time.

Black Walnuts

Black Walnuts
13-Oct-2008

Yes, it’s a little silly,
the pleasure of seeing these blackened fingers,
these stains the closest that I,
a 21st century bit-jockey,
can come to the joy of growing something
on my own land, with the work of my own hands.

There’s a black walnut tree down by the creek.
It didn’t drop any nuts last year.
Perhaps it was waiting for me
to pay attention to it,
pull the vines off of it,
clear a little room for it to see the sky.

This year, it dropped hundreds of them.
The patter of them a little unnerving
as we sit down there in our tiny chip
of 1908 cherished amidst the noise
and bustle of 2008.

I peeled back the green skin,
and the juice ran over my hands,
staining them a deep umber
as it dripped from my knife,
revealing a black shell, hiding
some secret that I must work to discover,
even as we worked to unearth
this small clearing of paradise.

And now, I sit pecking at the keys,
back in my digital cave,
but with this stain still on my fingers
reminding me that two miles away
is our stand of black walnuts,
where we can again sit in silence,
listening to the harvest fall around us.

BAHA

About 25 years ago, I had a tumor removed from my left ear. It was in the canal, in the middle ear area, and consumed the ossicles and the ear drum. Once the tumor was removed, I was almost completely deaf in my left ear.

A few years later, we discovered that the tumor had not been completely removed, and had grown back. I had a second surgery in 1987, which removed more of the surrounding bone, and left me even deafer. As part of that surgery, I had an experimental device installed. A titanium/steel screw was installed in my skull, just behind my left ear, and I got a hearing aid – a Xomed Audient – which attached to that screw by means of a magnet. A body device, about the size of a cell phone, was worn somewhere on the body, say, in my breast pocket, and a cord went to the magnet attached to the screw. The device was the microphone and amplifier, and the magnet was the speaker.

This device allowed me to hear, but at quite a price. Wearing something that large meant that every time I met a new person, I was obliged to explain to them what it was. Teachers assumed I was listening to music. Kids made fun of the device. It fell off all the time, or would fall out of my pocket when I ran or bent over. But mostly it was the feeling that I was weird that prevented me from wearing it all the time.

Several years ago, the Xomed company stopped making the device, and replacement parts got harder to find. And I just adjusted to being deaf on one side. This meant that in social situations I always maneuver into a seating position where I’m at the extreme left end, and everyone is on my right. If I miss out on that seat, I spend the entire time either contorting my neck to be able to catch what is said, or, more frequently, I just withdraw and don’t participate.

About 3 years ago, the Xomed quit working entirely, and I simply didn’t go to get it fixed. Even now that I’m 36, there’s a social cost to having to explain to everyone I meet why I have this device attached to my ear. Although I expect that with the ubiquity of bluetooth ear thingies, I’d have to explain less than I once would have. Be that as it may, I simply didn’t get it fixed. The cost of wearing the device outweighed the benefits.

About a year ago, I started seeing more and more and more people – mostly children – wearing hearing devices attached behind their ear. Knowing how embarrassing it is to have attention drawn to this, I avoided asking any of them about it, but I started getting more and more curious.

Yesterday, I went to the ENT (Ear, Nose Throat) doctor. I first talked with the audiologist, and she said, what you need is a BAHA. While waiting for the ENT, I looked up BAHA on the web, and found this page at U Maryland which described it in some detail both the device and the procedure. What could be simpler?

Here’s more technical information from the company that makes these things.

Bone conduction hearing is hardly a new concept. It’s how Beethoven continued his music career after going completely deaf. He sawed the legs off of his piano, and then laid on the floor to feel the music through his bones.

So, if all goes well, in just a few weeks I’ll be having a new screw installed in my skull. It will have to heal for 3 months. During that time, the bone actually grows into the micro-holes in the screw, to completely anchor it in the bone, so that it won’t move when the device is attached to it several times a day for the next few decades. Once it is firmly anchored, I’ll get the external device that snaps onto the screw, and, after 25 years of being deaf on one side, I’ll be able to hear normally.

For those of you who hear normally, you may have never noticed how I twist my head to hear you, or arrange to sit or stand on your left side, but you’ve certainly noticed how I ask you to repeat things again and again, or seem to give inappropriate responses to things when I simply get too frustrated trying to figure out what you’re saying. Hopefully, 4 or 5 months from now, that will no longer be the case.

I’m really excited about the prospect.

Camping

We went camping with The Boy this weekend, at the annual scouting camping event. There were roughly 17 million kids there, and at any given moment, at least half of them were yelling.

The window between when the older kids finally shut up and go to sleep, and when the younger kids start crying loudly for Mommy, is about 17 minutes, tops.

Yes, I’m a grumpy old man. But, I hugely enjoyed it, in spite of the cold and lack of sleep. I miss camping, and we definitely need to do it more. Of course, I prefer camping when there aren’t other tents pressing in on all sides, but even that had its charms.

By Candlelight

By Candlelight

One of these days
I’ll write my epic poem.
It will, I am certain,
span pages, generations, and continents,
be a thing to strike fear
into high school students everywhere.

For now, however,
when I have nothing to say,
it seems best to confine myself
to just a few lines
scratched out by candlelight.