I Will Be Assimilated

Like Captain Picard beaming down to the Borg ship, next week I will be flying to Redmond, home of the main Microsoft Campus.
I'm a long time CNE, so I make the trip with much trepidation. We're involved in the TAP program for a new product, and I'm excited about the possibilities of having actual input into how this thing comes together. It has the potential to fundamentally change the way we do IT here.
I thought about Microsoft, oddly enough, when I was in Colorado last week. (And, BTW, now I know what John Denver was all worked up about. I'll post later on the Cornbelt Kid's first veiw of mountains.) We were looking at merging in another, much smaller company. I was playing the Corporate Cheerleader, listing all the benefits we could bring them from an IT standpoint just by sheer budget and staff numbers. And that brought M$oft to mind. They surpassed Novell because they new how to market, not because thier product was any better. Now they have the power to throw hundreds if not thousands of coders at a project, and millions of dollars. It's finally starting to pay off in terms of usability and stability. I'm even willing to say that thier Directory Services is finally up to the task of handling larger corporations. If they can just get past the Feature Bloat that they think has to come with every new version, I'll be happy.
I'll try to blog at least a couple of times from Redmond to give an outsiders veiw of the inside. Stay tuned.

Must See TV

Does it get any better the Keith Olbermann? I mean, really?

Rememberance

From my comment on a Brian Noonan's blog:

I remember being at work that day and my wife calling from home again and again, and me not thinking it was that big a deal... until the towers fell. I remember waiting in line at a gas station gone crazy with other folks whose main fear was that gas was going to go through the roof. I remember our Representatives standing together and singing God Bless America. I remember Freedom Fries. I remember being furious at Sadaam for trying to get aluminum tubes to make nukes. I remember being furious at being duped.
I hope the lessons learned from 9/11 are more than patriotism, God and country. I hope for optimism, and caution, and faith that is not blind.

Labor Day

I gladly take advantage of any Federal holiday. In fact, I think there should be more of them. Ben Franklin doesn't have a holiday, nor does John Hancock or any number of other founding fathers. They all deserve one. Each.

But on Labor Day I admit to a bit of guilt as I whiled away a beautiful day at our very nice state park.

While the kids were on the slides and I was pitching horseshoes (three ringers, thank you very much), I was thinking about my Dad.

My Dad retired from a local manufacturing company after 35+ years of service. Among other things in his career there, he was mainly a grinder. He'd grab a tray of little metal things to be worked on, sit down at his stool in front of a bench and belt grinder, and start in. He'd grind a bit, feel a bit, grind a bit, take a measurement, grind a bit, put the metal piece into a fixture to measure it, grind a bit, and eventually he'd decide that it was ready to go. He'd set it to the side, grab another metal piece, and repeat.

The parts that he made helped fly thousands of people through the air, helped countless military missions.

For a time I had a job that took me into the local GM plant. It has since gone the way of most Midwest manufacturing plants, to Mexico. There were guys in there who would start out the day with a ten-foot bin of brake calipers piled next to them. They'd spend the day in front of the grinder, caliper after caliper, cleaning them up and setting them in the done pile.

I spent a summer working as “summer help” at the plant where my Dad worked. We did grunt work : washed lights, cleared brush, swept, etc. I watched my Dad work for the first time, saw how he made a living, and wondered how he could have done it for so long. Day after day, year after year. I gained a new respect for the man who had seen me through childhood, paid for useless things like toy cars and bikes and bats and uniforms and marching band and... well, everything through his labor, his sweat and his mangled fingers.

And here I sit, literally, making my living by clicking a mouse and wiggling my ten fingers on a keyboard. Occasionally I have to lift a computer or blow the dust off of my official Compaq (tm) screwdriver and mount something in a rack.

It was that summer of work that made me vow to finish my education. I was thinking of other things, like travel and maybe car repair or a journeyman in a local trade. But my father, saying nothing, convinced me of the path I should travel. And showed me what being a father and a man was really all about.

FIRE!

Fire is a horrible thing. I don't need to tell anyone who's been through one, I know. But everytime one happens around here I'm amazed at how quickly they go, how quickly people lose just about all of their possesions.
There was a fire at a downtown business over the weekend. By the time the firefighters got to the scene, it was too hot and involved to go in the building, and all they could do was dump water on it from the outside. Which they did, for about the next 36 hours.
The folks over at the Fischer Theatre graciously opened their doors and cranked up the air. The firefighters came in, fueled up with Gatorade(tm) and cold water and donated food, and then went back out again.
The mayor was on the scene for two days, doing everything from co-ordinating command and control to picking up garbage.
The amount of donated items was impressive. Over a dozen local business donated everything from ice to chicken to giro's to oatmeal bars. At one point there was more food than I thought could possible be eaten, but it went. We went through cases of pop and buckets of ice and countless bottled waters.
In my travels, people occasionally like to tell me how much better of we'd be if I just moved to a bigger community - say an Indianapolis, or Peoria, or a Chicago suburb. Weekends like the last one reaffirm my belief in and my optimism about my hometown. When times get tough, people band together and get things done.

Rehab

I've been wanting to write something about my son who is in Residential Rehab. I find it difficult, if not impossible, to put in words the extremes of emotions that we've gone through over the last three months.
No one wants to believe that their kid is addicted. We were certainly aware he was using, and at least suspected further underlying issues. But the degree of use that has come out through his counseling and therapy has just been staggering.
I mean, we're relatively hip, early forties parents who have been there and done that. We have no pre-conceived notions of our children as angels, and have talked to them long and frankly about drug use. We both have friends that have gone from promising young people to worthless adults, in and out of prison and homes because of addiction. We thought we were successful in teaching them to know better.
Turns out, just because they know better doesn't mean they won't turn around and do it anyway. Peer pressure? Addictive personality? Inability to deal with stress? I don't know the answer, and I'm not too sure he does at this point.
Prescription meds were his drugs of choice. If he had a pill he would pop it, regardless of what it was and sometimes how many there were. We found him one night so passed out that he would not awaken. When he did wake up we caught him in the bathroom, so hopped up on pills that he forgot to lock the door, getting ready to take more Xanex and Vicodin. We called the cops, and they came and got him. We later found out he had hidden more Vicodin in his sock, which the police did not search, so he had a little supply to use up in his jail stay. I'm convinced that had we not intervened that afternoon, he would have OD'd that night.
I feel fortunate that the facility is only an hour and a half away, and that he's doing well there. After some initial turmoil (he was still coming down, I'm sure, begging for Tylenol or Aspirin or anything he thought might get him high), he's become a model patient, at least according to his counselours and the staff there. I'm concerned that he's mostly telling them what they want to hear, so he can get out. They tell me that's normal and really doesn't matter, because if they can get him to say it enough eventually it'll sink in and he'll believe it.
We'll see.
What I do know is that we picked him up Saturday for his first out pass. We had six hours to kill, so we went out to eat and played catch with a football and drove around and went to Wal-Mart. There was some initial tension over whether or not we were going to get him some smokes (we were NOT), but once that settled down he later said he didn't even want one.
I marveled at this young man who was with us, this stranger I hadn't really seen in years, this kid who was suddenly articulate, and funny, and a joy to be around.
I pray you stay well, my son. I pray you stay clean and follow the path that leads to you being a productive member of society. I pray that the young man who was with us on Saturday stays around for a long, long time.
I pray.

Project Runway

God help me.
I'm addicted to Project Runway.
What's happening to me? Watching a pack of over-the-top personalities argue the mundane and superficial is entertainment?
It must be, because I can't miss it. Maybe it's the passion of the contestents, their sincere desire and sometimes amazing creativity. I'm amazed by the ability to create beautiful (and sometimes god-awful) garments out of nothing. The level of talent this year, if the first episode is not a fluke, is far more consistent and above previous years.
And, BTW, Daniel should have won last year.
I can do without the drama, the manufactured tension, and most of the atitude.
I'll be tuned in weekly, hating myself every minute of the way.