Category Archives: Uncategorized

Cafe la Cave

We had dinner last night at Café la Cave, which was absolutely marvelous, from start to finish. (Photos Here.) I had the Chilean seabass, and it was perhaps the best fish I’ve had in years … since that wonderful meal I had at the City Cellar (I think that’s what it was called) at Cit Place, in West Palm Beach in 2004. But, the company was much better last night.

Now we’re having breakfast at the Sheraton. The conference starts at 9, so we’ve got a little time left. I give my talk after lunch today. I’ve made some changes to it, based on feedback from the last few times. I hope it’s well-received.

Moving day

This weekend we helped friends move, and I hurt EVERYWHERE.

All the usual suspects were there. We’ve helped each other move for almost 20 years now, and between the various families, and 2 or 3 moves each, we’ve probably moved each other 30 or 40 times. They’ve moved me 3 times, one of which I wasn’t even there for! That’s right, I had about 4 days between one conference and the next, didn’t have time to get everything done, and had to be out the next week. While I was gone, they descended on the apartment and moved everything out, to the walls, while I was in Portland.

Now *THAT* is what friends are.

Not in Russia

Those of you who follow my blog via the RSS feed may have just seen an article describing my first day in Moscow. This is a result of a bug in the blog software. I marked that entry “Don’t Allow Comments”, because it was receiving hundreds of spammy comments every day, and it was pushed back onto the RSS feed.

The trip to Russia was 3 years ago, and, alas, I have no plans to visit Russia any time soon.

Obligations to Ire

Obligations To Ire

For the Weekend Wordsmith prompt Carrying A Grudge.

It takes enormous endurance
to remain angry,
even when you provide fresh reasons
day following day,
reopening wounds so old,
the original injury is a blur
in the broken rear-view mirror.

Sure, it flares up, fueled
by your careless actions,
selfish remarks, and callous manners,
but, most days, the petulant child
that you have become
merely buzzes, a trapped blue bottle
battering the panes
on a summer day when I’d rather
just be reading by the creek.

The grudge, long since
become an immovable burden,
shackled to me by a cable
of hatred and weary rage,
is too, too heavy to carry —
more like drag.

But so sure as I unfetter,
and try to escape,
you fling a hawser or two
around my raw, chafed ankles,
and remind me of my
obligations to ire.

Storms

Storms

We stand here, high on the hill,
and watch the rains come
like an African monsoon
sweeping across the desiccated
plains, dry dusty barren.

So many of these storms
lately, we just watch it come,
resigned
to the deluge that we know
we can’t run fast enough
to escape. Our sadness

washes around us, even
as the rain, so long in coming,
so feared and so anticipated,
soaks our upturned faces,
hides our tears.

All very cliché, of course,
which isn’t to say it’s not real,
just that it’s universal.

No one gets to their heaven
without a fight.

And some never
get there at all,
though they fight, seemingly,
without a respite
while the storm rages.

Those of us who have found
it, by persistence or dumb luck,
may, now and then, offer
a brief shelter
to those who, so far, haven’t.

iDog

Last Christmas, The Girl begged and begged and begged for an iDog, which is a delightful little thing that dances to music either heard on its microphone or received from a audio input cable.

She played with it once or twice, but quickly lost interest. It’s pretty stupid, and requires a lot of attention before it does anything interesting.

Earlier this week, The Girl and The Boy were fighting over it, so I brought it to work and plugged it into my desktop speakers. It is very weird. It whimpers occasionally, apparently when it doesn’t like my music. It dances to stuff it likes. It blinks its lights in seemingly random patterns. It chirps and flashes green when you pat its head. It growls when you tweak its tail.

Here’s the complete documentation, just in case you care.

When I was a kid, toys didn’t come with 16-page users manuals. Sheesh.

Framed


Yesterday I drove past that place
I used to live,
on the way home to you.

I cowered behind that very window,
afraid
of the world outside,
afraid
that it wouldn’t miss me,
that it wouldn’t notice
that I had vanished behind that frame.

I watched, through that frame,
others living the life
I could not live,
because I was
afraid,
I knew not of what,

nor why I had been exiled
to this penitentiary
which I paid good money
to inhabit.

There, framed in that window,
another lonely soul
gazed out at me, wondering
if I saw as I went on my way,
past this refuge of those
too young to have lived,
and those done with it.

Write every day

Last year, I tried very hard to write every day, and did a pretty good job of sticking to that. This year, it’s been spotty, at best.I wrote a lot while in Amsterdam, and very little since I got back. Trying very hard to write, but, as Bradbury observes in the foreword of Dandelion Wine:

Like every beginner, I thought you could beat, pummel, and thrash an idea into existence. Under such treatment, of course, any decent idea folds up its paws, turns on its back, fixes its eyes on eternity, and dies.

Having met two of my very favorite authors – Douglas Adams and Arthur C Clarke – I can not think of any author I’d more like to meet than Mr. Bradbury, but I have no idea what I’d ask him, for I feel that I already know him, from what he has written. And the most important thing I’ve learned from him is simply to write every day, whether I have something to write or not. Of course, very very few can ever hope to rise to his level, but I imagine I have good story or two hiding away somewhere, waiting for me to write it.

The Nairobi-Mombasa Road

The Nairobi-Mombasa Road
For Three Word Wednesday
May 12, 2008

The highway stretches
from here to there,
shimmering with the heat
of a long season of drought.
All that lies between,
in these huge empty spaces —
empty to us, that is — filled
with the inconsequential,
forgotten, ignored millions,
who we choose to thunder
past on the way
from here to there.
Who eke out their daily
nothing
in this place we would
never have noticed
but for a flat tire
or the call of nature
halfway between
here and there.

They, for their part,
watch us hurry
past on our way to places
they’re better off not knowing,
leaving exhaust and empty
Fanta Orange bottles,
and a vague feeling that somewhere
else might be better than here,
wonder what could be so important
there, that we’d want to rush
there, from that other there,
and back again.

Week Two, less exhausted

I’m completing week two of being an IT manager. Last week, I went home every day falling-down exhausted, from trying to understand a sizeable codebase (861157 lines of code – yeah, I know, that’s small beans to some of you, but we have a small team), trying to understand the business process, and trying to understand the dynamics of team interaction.

This week has been better, although I’ve had a horrible head congestion thing that has rendered me almost deaf all week, which is extremely frustrating, and tends to cause me to retreat to email rather than just going to see people and resolving confusion in person.

I think I’ve finally gotten an understanding of how the code fits together, and how the database fits together, and while I certainly would have done it differently, it appears to be largely a matter of style, rather than one of substance. It’s good code, and it works – it’s not how I would have done it.

Anyways, last night I went home and was able to have coherent conversations and not fall into a coma right away. I consider this to be progress. Any day now, I’ll be able to contribute actual functional code, rather than just stylistic tinkering.

And, Paul, if I’ve learned anything from you (I hope I’ve learned a lot, but, you know, I had to choose just one thing) it’s the Positive Power of Donuts.