Nine days into the season and we have the first activity in the Atlantic Basin on the NHC warning chart. Woo!
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I have now completed posting Generation 2 on this blog. So time to see “where Sam is from” if you consider where ancestors at different generations were born. If you remember the more recent generations: Generation 0:
Generation 1:
And now… Generation 2:
The center of mass here is definitely moving South… Hmmm… I should put some of this on a map… in my head I see charts and animations… Hmmm… OK, this is probably my cue to shut down and go to bed. Cause if I start thinking that way, I could be up for many hours making maps. And that would probably be bad.
In the intervening place she did a lot and lived in many places. At least eight states and two countries. High School in Maine. College in Ohio. Nursing School in Rhode Island. Followed her husband’s ministries in Maine and Ohio before he died young leaving her a single mother with two children and pregnant with a third (my mother). Then a full career as a nurse in various locations in Vermont, including 16 years as the nurse in residence for a residential school for children in need. Then as soon as the last of her children (my mother) graduated college, she left the country to be a missionary nurse in Turkey for five years in her 60’s. Finally she retired to Massachusetts in 1973. And of course it is there that I visited her many times as a child, through to the last years of her life a few years back. For more information, click on the picture. I made an off hand mention of this in an email to my friend Ron. He asked for a link, and I realized I should just blog it.
Here she is. The picture is from May though, so she wasn’t 8 weeks old there. But she is now. You know what I mean. Very confusing. In any case, a cute baby girl who is doing great. She is looking very pink in that picture. :-) In any case, congratulations again Matt! I just attended my first demo of an enterprise software product since I left my previous job where of course what we sold was an enterprise software product. And oh my did it bring back bad memories. Now, OK, the product we were looking at is much more well known and undoubtedly of much much higher quality than anything my previous company put out. And it is a public company, so you can go to their website and get all kinds of real information about them and the company and all that. So not so much hocus pocus behind the curtain stuff. However, it is still enterprise software, and so a lot of the same things apply. Can it do X? “Well, it could be configured to do X.” ARGGH! Probably true, but… Just the whole way that business works makes me uncomfortable. And although where I was last year and the year before seems to be much worse than most, a lot of the games that are played are common to that whole industry. And especially after now having been on both sides of that fence, just the whole being there and hearing the demo thing just… Well, I tried to concentrate on the pros and cons of the product itself, but my thoughts kept going back to just my whole negative impressions of the PROCESS. And then there is the whole adoption thing. This seemed like a nice product. But it is one of those things that to be completely effective a culture has to develop around using it. A single person or two trying to use it makes no sense. It only starts to make sense when everybody uses it. So the obvious question is about adoption and how to bring it about. Of course, the management team on our side was clear. If the decision is made to do this, then it will be mandated from on high that everybody must use it, and that will be enforced. Well, that is one way to solve that problem. Anyway, we’ll probably end up using this thing. And really, I see no real problem with it, and probably some advantages. But I just naturally find myself suspicious now of just about anything labeled as an “enterprise solution”. And yes, I am jaded and disillusioned by my previous job. I fully admit it. :-)
Got back from a meeting and noticed that Cronus, my computer at home which is home to both my wiki and my webcam was not responding. Luckily, today I’d had both the usual external webcam and the internal one going. They were both frozen on the last image they captured. The last image on the internal webcam was the one above. Hmmm… Of course, I had all the cameras set because I knew they were coming. Somebody from the apartment complex doing a “routine inspection”. Of course, the thing that pisses me off is that on that last frame you can see the guy’s hand going for that lightswitch… the lightswitch that happens to be connected to the plug where my cable modem and wireless router are plugged in (I know, bad place to plug those in). So as he left he flips the switch and boom… no more internet connection or camera pictures… or Wiki. I’d set both cameras to take more frames in their time laspses than they usually though, but I think I messed up the way in which it was set, so it may not come out right. I didn’t realize until I was at work and it was too late to change. The switch only controls power to the internet connections, not to the computer, so hopefully I’ll have full timelapses when I get home… just messed up I think. I am thinking I accidentally set it so there will be one timelapse with alternating frames from the two cameras rather than two seperate timelapses. Either that, or I’ll only have one timelapse from the external camera. Or, it could be screwed and I’ll have nothing at all. I guess I’ll find out when I get home. After my last meeting today I may have to go work from home so that I can get that connection back on. Having it off is driving me nuts. Over the weekend we dropped the asking price on the house in Florida about 10 grand. Ten grand and six dollars to be exact. The price of the house now matches my customer ID at the place I work. Not my employee ID, my customer id. Which back in the day when I made my account in 1997 were given out sequentially. Little did I know before I came to work here that I was six people away from a very round number. If I had just hesitated one or two seconds before placing my very first order back in 1997, I would have had a customer ID with five zeros in it and that would have been very cool. As it is, I have four nines in a row, and that is kind of neat, but not quite as neat. Anyway, since it turned out that the price we were going to drop it to anyway was right near there, I said why not, and set it to match exactly. It probably won’t, but if it actually sells at exactly that price it would be kinda nifty. Anyway, as predicted a month ago when we finally got the place on the market things are pretty darn slow. We’re maybe getting one or two people a week looking at it. Our price per square foot was actually somewhat agressive (even before this drop) compared to other houses in the area that sold within the last six months and other houses currently on the market. It is just that very few people are in the market right now in our area. Our agent said things were averaging being on the market 90-120 days before they get an offer. He wasn’t kidding. Hopefully this will get us some additional traffic, preferably even an offer. If not, we’ll reevaluate again after another month. We could have been even more agressive to try to prompt it to move faster, but while we want (need) the thing to sell, we’re not yet at the point where we’ll just drop it a crazy amount just to get it to sell “NOW”. But the paying for a house plus an apartment thing really can’t go on forever. We start the monthly payments for Amy’s school on July 1st and things are already tight enough as they are. Spilling coffee on your mouse on Friday afternoon and then leaving it to dry until Monday morning is NOT the best way to have an enjoyable mousing experience to start off the work week. |
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