Category Archives: Personal Life

Whither Water

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I read this article about restaurants and their corkage fees. Mostly out of dull curiosity I found myself satisfied that I don't agree and there are delightful ways to avoid this entire argument.

But to the vex, paying a corkage fee is a custom where diners who supply their own wine pay the establishment money for the privilege. You have a choice, either pay the insane markup (feels a lot like a mugging) on restaurant wine or pay to bring your own. Either way you'll pay. The linked article even goes so far to comment that bringing your own wine is shaming the sommelier, because you don't like his offerings. So, you quibble with the quality of truncheon that you are mugged with. Ah. I suppose I've never found a use for a sommelier, and that's likely because it's a class warfare thing, sommeliers are great if you're a 17th century royal, otherwise be your own sommelier. Anyhow, the word indicates the servant who ran ahead and prepared a meal. In the United States, nobody runs ahead, unless it's a mugger waiting for you in an alley. So, sommelier, great. The article states that if you really want to be nice you should offer the sommelier a taste. This is amazing. The guy who marks up his swill 1000% gets honor? How about chased out with torches and pitchforks?

Yeah yeah yeah. Be nice. Don't be so grumpy. But why should a meal out spiral out of control and cost you way more than the “food” you are purchasing? The experience is usually the answer. You pay for the experience. So when it comes to wine, you are paying to “enjoy the services of a fine sommelier” or, really, paying for the opportunity to be screwed on price for a bottle of swill and think it's honorable – and defensible.

Partially this comes down to palate. You are paying a sommelier, and his palate to guide you. Because each palate is unique, like a fingerprint, what if you've paid 300 dollars for wine you detest? Instead you've brought a 3 dollar bottle of wine that you love. The sommelier is angry. They charge you a 85 dollar corkage fee as a matter of revenge for not being able to tear the alimentary canal out of the sommelier and staple it to your central nervous system. I mean really, this screams palate bigotry.

So the way out? Water. Fuck you and your worthless overpriced swilly “wines”. No corkage fee, no mugging, no obnoxious useless mugger behaving like a chimpy King Louis XIV court fop being all pretentious and galling over reprehensible palate bigotry. I never asked anyone to run ahead. So, screw off.

But then there is the setting too. “Fine Dining” is a euphemism for “Food Poisoning”, so in many ways that too is just so much of a waste of time and valuable resources. These self-puffed joints get grumpy and bent if you bring your own wine and so either pay their mugger to sulk in the corner or get your food to go and enjoy it at home with your own wine. Alas, you'll need a roll of TP too, so it's not like there is a win condition here anyways.

At least the water is chlorinated, so you at least have that basic thing to go on… Always remember to tip the angry sulking mugger too. He really wanted to bash your brains out and rifle through your pockets for loose change.

I'm honestly surprised they don't have a $50 charge for a glass of water. Seems like they've followed a theme and left out a gloriously glaring exception. After all, this is Fine Dining! LOL.

PAD Book – 1/1/2014 – Stroke of Midnight

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January 1
Stroke of Midnight
Where were you last night when 2013 turned into 2014? Is that where you’d wanted to be?”

On the last evening of 2013 I was alone with my two boys during the winter storm raging overhead. My partner had the day before left to visit his family in Albany and I was tending to duties around the house and keeping my two boys safe and occupied. Actually I don’t know who was keeping who happy more. I certainly was a warm lap to sit on and the food-giver, but in a lot of ways they were almost always with me, keeping me company and keeping me occupied with their adorable (and sometimes destructive) antics.

I found a bottle of bubbly wine in our collection from M. Lawrence winery up in the Leelanau Peninsula that I had purchased long enough ago that I don’t really remember when. Around 11pm on New Years Eve I inspected and uncorked the bottle and puttered about the house, a small plate of christmas cookies and a champagne flute that I thankfully found hidden in the rearmost of the top cupboard in the kitchen where we keep all our wine glasses.

At 11:50pm, my iPhone rang and it was Scott with an incoming FaceTIme call. We spent the interval from New Years Eve to New Years Day linked virtually by FaceTime. It was a great use of technology and in many ways we had our cake and got to eat it too. Scott got a chance to visit with his family and we got a chance to spend New Years together, after a fashion.

After 2014 had arrived, I disconnected from FaceTime and finished my glass of wine and with cats in tow, padded off to bed.

Was it what I wanted to do? It really was a matter of what I had to do. I couldn’t leave my two boys on their own for a week as the eldest is the most fragile and I frequently worry after his health and activity level. I was able to use technology to cheat around the edges as it were, to be both at home and in New York with my partner at the same time. I’m so glad I was able to take advantage of the technology and it’s just one more, amongst a gallery of other reasons, why I’m so very glad that I have Apple technology in my life. It made it all seamless and easy. I could have done it other ways, but it would have been a mess. The Apple way is smooth and simple and just as easy as answering the phone.

– This is also the first of the Post-A-Day prompts from the book that WordPress.com assembled to inspire bloggers like me to write more and more frequently.

PAD April 27 2013 – Your Time To Shine

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Early bird, or night owl?

Naturally I’m definitely a night owl. I can get started in the morning without difficulty but I do my best work in the afternoon and evenings. I tend to take nice hot relaxing showers before I go to bed, I find it helps me get to sleep easier and it is often during these relaxing times under the hot spray that my best thoughts arrive. I’m a huge fan, and I’ve written before about how useful it is to seed the subconscious mind with work and then reap the rewards when you are doing totally unrelated things. I like the idea that as I am relaxing under the warm water, which is my “home element” and it’s during these times that I have most of my epiphanies. There is more for me in the evening hours than ever in the morning hours. Too early and my mind isn’t running, honestly I’m usually besotted by dreamstuff that I drag into my waking life from my dreams to be useful for very much at all. I’ve found that I can dislodge a lot of the backed up dreamstuff if I journal it out. I used to muse that my mornings are occupied by dull setup procedures and that I don’t get seriously engaged until late morning bridging over to early afternoon and running into the night.

PAD April 25 2013 – Second Time Around

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Tell us about a book you can read again and again without getting bored — what is it that speaks to you?

I read both 1984 and “What Dreams May Come” regularly for different reasons. 1984 is worth reading because it speaks to the dangers of NewSpeak. When I was growing up I decided that expanding my vocabulary was the best single thing I could do for myself, to make me a better person. In 1984, that whole thing is a thread the book challenges and it terrifies me. The quality and the lessons it teaches I think are incredibly valuable. As for the latter book, I read that when I was at the lowest point in faith and it helped by inspiring me to seek out a new faith. I enjoy Richard Matheson for his other works as well, but that book really speaks to me.

PAD May 3 2013 – Its a text, text, text world

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How do you communicate differently online than in person, if at all? How do you communicate emotion and intent in a purely written medium?

Each medium has it’s own benefits and vulnerabilities. You can’t communicate the same way from one medium to another. When I’m online I find myself preferring email, iMessage/SMS, and Instant Message because you cannot beat the signal to noise ratio of text. When I’m using my cell phone, I prefer to only communicate over iMessage/SMS because the carrier I’m using, Sprint, has a terrible record of dropped calls and rather poor voice quality. Plus text eschews much of the wrappings of verbal communication, there is no need to preamble and no need for closure statements to indicate communications have concluded, usually. Generally, face to face conversations vary between formal and informal, and I have found that elaboration and clarity excel in formal face to face communications but are annoying in informal senses. When it comes to capturing backchannel cues and extended emotional content in media that doesn’t really have a good capacity to carry that information a wonderful shortcut is the cinema. I have found that it’s quite handy to refer to a common corpus of movies in which quoting scenes can convey everything from mood, through atmosphere, including sense and quite often, the message itself. The only issue is establishing that cinematic common corpus that those that communicate with me need to make sense of some of the shorthand phrases that I use to carry backchannel messages.

What movies? There are so many. Off the top of my head, pretty much anything Disney has produced because it’s ubiquitous. Comedies are rich with great scenes and raw material and I find myself referring to the classics such as Airplane!, Clue, Noises Off, Planes-Trains-and-Automobiles, Transylvania 6-5000, and the entire oeuvre of Mel Brooks, such as Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles. Also, worth mentioning is a classic comedy, The Kentucky Fried Movie. There are also other movies that lend detail and depth that aren’t really comedies, such as “Love, Actually.” and “Serendipity”. Then of course scifi movies like Serenity, the Alien series of movies, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Generally, since I keep much of this for the informal channel of communication the people who need to understand this corpus have likely seen these movies several times, likely with us.

PAD – April 22, 2013 – Earworm

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What song is stuck in your head (or on permanent rotation in your CD or MP3 player) these days? Why does it speak to you?

I have an entire playlist on Spotify devoted to these sorts of songs. I call it my Tingles list because each of these tracks speaks to me, and when the songs play, I feel actual tingles wash over me. Each of these songs mean something to me, and there are stretches of popular artists. Some artists that immediately spring to mind is Daft Punk, MIKA, Imagine Dragons, and Gustav Holst. That's actually the musical theme of my life – I'm nearly impossible to pin down and always have been. When I was growing up, back in high school I used to frustrate people I was acquaintances with because I defied musical categorization. Amongst these tracks, I would say the number one that jostles to the top more than not is MIKA's Toy Boy. That track has a profound emotional weight that hits me square between the eyes each time I hear it.

Medium

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This is how social networking works. I was just wandering along, scrubbing through my Feedly list of syndicated items on websites when I ran across an article about headline hunting. As I read along, I noticed the presentation layer, the UI/UX was pleasant enough to be remarkable and catch my attention. It became, quite quickly in fact a trip down the rabbit hole.

The source of this fascination was Medium.com. One well-written, well-presented article was all I needed to see that this is something special. I found myself enraptured, roped in, and signing up. Now I don’t know if I’ll ever write material for that system, but there I was spiraling into it and enjoying it quite a lot.

And this is what startups and social networking enthusiasts are really hoping will happen. That their creations will catch people, like I was caught, and reel them in. It’s the definition of good UI/UX, if the content and presentation are good enough, they become an entirely new thing, something like intellectual Velcro.

I was just floating along. Then suddenly I was reading a lot, enjoying myself, signing up, and then the magic hit: I started sharing. Links from the site to Facebook, Twitter and yes, even LinkedIn.

I think everyone I know would enjoy this site and get caught up in it like I did. In many ways Medium.com wins because in less than fifteen minutes I’ve become an evangelist of it. Check it out at Medium.com. I think you’ll enjoy it as much as I did.

PAD 11-15-2013: Understanding of Evil

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Write about evil: how you understand it (or don’t), what you think it means, or a way it’s manifested, either in the world at large or in your life.

Throughout my life I’ve been refining my faith and morality. There are a lot of systems in our world that you can toss in with if you wish and I don’t begrudge anyone their subscription to those models. For myself, I’ve found the best morality to be expressed in The Golden Rule. It’s from this particular framework that I draw my understanding of evil. The rule itself is simple: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” and concludes there. No prohibitions, no strictures, no exceptions. I find this to be very similar to the Bantu concept of Ubuntu. To express your humanity in your relationships with others. I find this to be delightfully and elegantly terse. Nothing longwinded, nothing complicated to understand.

So then evil, it would be the opposite of good and good is defined by the rules of morality. In my case it would be to stray from the Golden Rule, to treat others without any concern for how they treat you. It’s really a matter of spiritual inequality, and I see it as a matter of the grossest ignorance. There are differing levels of evil, there’s the simple kind where people are selfish and ignorant about how their behavior impacts those around them, they spend their lives without any seriously close relationships because they simply cannot be trusted. They can’t form any bond beyond a power relationship and once that relationship is broken, they are shunned worse than if they were just strangers passing on the street. Then there is the more complex form of evil, the type with the full commission of the will. I think of Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello, especially when he settles as being the villain of the tale. It’s in the planning and plotting of evil acts that this form describes for me. I think one of the most poignant forms of evil, in the complex reckoning is that of betrayal. When you’ve invested in someone else, when you have done your level best according to your morality to treat them with Ubuntu, to behave according to the Golden Rule, when you imbue them with trust and hand a part of yourself to them with that trust and then they perform an evil act by ruining that trust and damaging you in the process, there are few true expressions of evil that rise above this. For me, it’s colored by the will. Being simply barbarous is a mindless evil, but when you apply a personal level of willpower and it’s between individuals then it takes on a more unique and deep sense than simply being a rampaging monster.

My understanding of evil is colored by my recent experiences with betrayal. I think that’s why I select betrayal as one of the pinnacle evils, because it cuts so deep. During that experience the sheer number of corrupted souls was breathtaking. It actually caused a crisis of faith, that people could be so wretched, so nasty, and so powerfully evil to another person. I have retained my optimism through these trials because not a day goes by when I can’t find one instance of people following the Golden Rule. So the awfulness in people isn’t pervasive, it’s localized. It’s this fact that helps me retain my faith in humanity.

Then we get to why evil is stupid. Not simply dumb, which indicates a kind of unknowing ignorance, but actively spurning the best option to pursue ends that are powered by selfishness or bigotry. There is an infinitely greater return on investment when everyone conducts themselves well, in my case, according to the Golden Rule. If you retain your moral center and act rightly, you find yourself cultivating the very best of yourself and others and applying that laser focused will towards whatever goal it is that you and in the workplace, your group, is striving after. The world rewards right action, it rewards honesty and goodness and selflessness and it punishes the evil, the selfish, the dishonest and the betrayers. It is not that a few small acts of evil will ruin your life, but that your behaviors of evil will eventually tint your reputation, in how others see you. It ruins relationships and severs connections and makes you less persuasive and powerful because of all of that. Generally those who have been wronged seek revenge but once they have proceeded through the stages of grief for what was done to them, they settle on a nebulous notion that a nameless and faceless force of the Universe will step in at some point to mete out justice. I quite enjoy the name the Hindu faith places on this force, Karma. For those that are wronged, the destination is simply having faith that Karma will eventually mete out the punishment that is right and appropriate. If nothing else, the understanding of this force, named Karma, offers consolation to the wronged. It also provides the wronged a balm which is far better than revenge, which just leads the victim to be exactly like their transgressors, turning the will of the victim against The Golden Rule, for example. That is why revenge is impossible. To satisfy this deep urge to mete out personal justice you break your own moral code and therefore you are no better than those who wronged you.

Those that are evil reap what they sow. They are eventually recognized as their corrupt souls shine through and they wear that mein as their relationships falter and flag. Evil serves nobody. It leaves both the victim and the perpetrator bereft, lesser than they were before and it does nothing to forward any purpose or goals that anyone has. In a certain Darwinian sense, evil does not serve evolutions design, it does not make you strong, it makes you weak, it lessens you. There is no path that evil illuminates which leads to success or strength. It only leads to a downward spiral of corruption and solitude. Instead of being a wholesome part of a greater whole, you are a malformed clattery piece that simply does not fit and eventually you will jog yourself off your pinion and fall on the floor to be swept up in the dustbin of time.

I have faith that those that wronged me, the betrayers that I have had the misfortune to know professionally will eventually reap what they have sown. It won’t be by my hand, but it will be by fate, or Karma, or whatever you call that force. Misfortune will surround them as they reduce themselves. In many ways, that’s what evil really is, it’s the path of reducing yourself, which goes against the natural order of expanding yourself. You are unwanted, unloved, shunned because you eventually wear your evil, the chains you forge in life you wear afterwards.

One Ring

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Today had a simple plan. The first step was to shake the lake effect snow off the Christmas-themed lawn ornaments in the front yard. A five minute job, easy peasy.

So off I went. Got all the snow off the ornaments and as I was shaking my hands to get the snow off them I felt something slip and I heard a bright metallic tink sound. My partnership ring, one of my most prized possessions slipped off my ring finger and tinked off my shoe and went piff right into a snowbank. The ring isn’t elaborate or expensive, it’s just a simple silver band that goes around my right ring finger. Right instead of left, because I am not like everyone else. I’ve had this ring for almost as long as I’ve been partnered. The ring itself isn’t worth much as a ring, it’s just a simple silver ring, but the meaning and significance is exceptional, at least to me.

So of course I look all around me for little ring-sized holes in the snow, checking each one and having to run inside because I can’t feel my hands with trying to paddle through about six inches of snow across the field of my front yard. I started to think of possible ways to get my ring back – heat lamps, vodka in a spray bottle, anything that might quickly reduce the snowpack and show off where my shiny ring is resting. Nothing. I shoveled and raked the snow, I hopped from one likely indentation in the snowpack to another trying to see if there was a silver ring somewhere just under the surface. Nothing. At all. At 4:55pm I called the local Rentalex, which is a tool rental shop. I asked the proprietor if he happened to have a metal detector, and he did. I rocketed out of my place and down to the Rentalex. They are located on Gull Road, so it was just a few hundred yards away as the crow flies, to get there before they close at 5pm. I was able to get the metal detector, a wee bit of training on it, and cashed out for $16. I got back home, and of course at this point the daylight is dying and I am facing having to scan my yard in the dimness of the lights mounted in the windows of my home and the streetlamp which is about 100 yards down the road.

I got out of the car, grabbed the metal detector and started to scan. I fiddled with the sensitivity and pushed it to the max. I swept and found about 8 different metal-signals all over the place. I think the detector found various bits and pieces, most specifically the sewer line and the septic tank. Many years before I bought my house, the previous owners signed up for the townships sewer system to be attached and I think they just left the septic tank in place and forgot about it. I only say that because there is a green square of grass that really does well in the spring and summer time and I think the grass is feeding off the now elderly and (probably leaking) septic tank. Anyways, the detector found lots of metal signals and I ended up scrabbling away, in vain.

So I decided that the best thing for me to do was use the detector and see if the snowbank had any signal in it, and if it did, shovel it all up into a bin and take it inside and rinse the snow with blazing hot water, melting the snow. The idea was, my ring was somewhere in the three-dimensional matrix of the snowbank. The detector could tell me where a metal signal was in two dimensions but since my shoveling panic, I had mounded snow up into a four foot high pile. I ran all over the yard, in places my ring couldn’t have been because you can’t say you checked everywhere if the missing object is still missing. I had abandoned hope that I would see a metal glint as the sun mocked me by setting right after I got home, about 5:30pm or so.

I got to scanning the entire yard, finding all the signal spots, and made a educated guess that if my ring was going to be “around” that it would be there in the high and packed snowbank from my earlier panic. I scanned up and down the mound, turning the sensitivity as high as it would possibly go, hoping that my ring would be close enough to the detector for something, for anything. The detector had two modes, a chirp mode and a squeal mode. I felt a little awkward in my yard with a metal detector sweeping over the yard as I walked like a waddling penguin. I started at one end of the snow pile and set the detector to maximum and to squeal. Very tight motions and very slowly, making a hell of a racket as it went along. I got halfway along and the detector went bonkers, huge wailing squeals in a very small spot. I got a big plastic tub and shoveled the entire snowbank, about two feet of it into the bin. I dragged the bin inside the house and parceled out sinkfuls of snow and leaves and debris into my kitchen sink and turned on the hottest water and used the sprayer. As the hot water tank caught up with my humor the water started to melt the snow. The first two trips to the sink from the bin were worthless, except that I had a sink full of rotting dead oak leaves and tiny little twigs. I emptied out the sink, making sure to feel each batch of goopy leaves for anything hard, as I figured my ring, if it was in the snow, and later on trapped in a pile of dead leaves would resist any hand-based squeezing. Nothing. I got to the end of the bin, tipped the rest into the sink and figured if the detector wasn’t going to help that I would end up simply shoveling the entirety of the front yard into the bin and melting it in my sink. I would win by sheer labor and attrition. So as I stood there, melting the snow and rooting around in the dead oak leaves I saw my ring. It was there. Hallelujah!

I grabbed it, rinsed it off, and cleaned up the rest of the snow, the bin, the sink, the leaves, and tossed the bag of leaves I was collecting into the garbage. I put all my other silly contrivances away and packed the metal detector up for it’s return tomorrow morning back to the rental company. Alls well that ends well. Of course the front of my yard looks like a disaster struck it, there isn’t any beautiful snowpack left, it looks all messy – but at least my ring is back where it belongs, on my finger. There is a new rule, if I am going outside to futz with the ornaments I will wear gloves! That way if I shake my hands, my ring has nowhere to go.

There was no sound more unwanted and seemingly mockingly final than the “tink” sound the ring made as it bounced off of my shoes on it’s random course into the snowbank. I couldn’t have done it, at least not this quickly or conveniently without Rentalex. The price was great, the detector was top-notch, and I’m a much happier fellow now that I have my ring back.

Of course, with all the tramping around I unintentionally made the snowbank into snowpack and I fell a handful of times. Now my legs and hips and back ache. Nothing worth mentioning, except that the heating pad I’m resting on has caught a certain cats notice and I am now sandwiched between a blazing hot heating pad and a rattling boat-motor-purring feline. I look at my ring, and I smile. It was worth it.

Tomorrow morning I have to remember to get up extra early and drop off the detector. It’s a neat device, but I’m glad it’s rentable, as it’s the kind of thing you need very dearly once or twice and spending a huge wad on it seems like such a waste. Hooray for tool libraries and tool rental shops like Rentalex! They saved my day! 🙂

OSX Mavericks Possible Data Corruption Bug

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Over the past two weeks there has been much upheaval in my life. Involved with this upheaval has been one of the most unwanted activities any IT professional has to do as part of their professional lives and that is bowing out gracefully. Sometimes IT professionals can actually achieve this state of grace, however most of the time fear overwhelms grace and trust. The morality I will leave to another blog post to come.

In rescuing data from a computing device a few days ago I discovered that the act of using a USB external hard drive with a Macintosh MacBook Pro with OSX Mavericks may have a nasty bug lying in tall grass. I had about 212GB of data that needed to be moved to another medium, and I elected to use a Western Digital external hard drive using USB 2. This drive had never before shown any signs of failure however after copying the data onto the drive using OSX Mavericks, the HFS filesystem on the drive suffered some mystery damage that I’ve never witnessed before. Thankfully the volume was mountable and I could rescue the data from the errant drive and copy it to another drive and effectively save my bacon. The error concerned a failure in the node structure when fsck was asked to diagnose the HFS Journaled filesystem present on the suspect drive. Now I can’t say for sure that OSX Mavericks caused this failure, but the proximity of it and an earlier email from Western Digital stating that there might be drive problems with OSX Mavericks also rang in my mind as a potential problem that points to this particular possible bug. Now the Western Digital warning was just for their drives that used the extended WD software to mount the drives to the Macintosh file system, I suspect that the bug is indeed deeper than even WD knows, or Apple perhaps.

If you are using WD, or perhaps any other external hard drive or memory-stick technology with OSX Mavericks the smart money is on frequent backup and sync to multiple locations. Really smart administrators will backup over the network to some other computing platform with it’s own independent drive technology. If you are using Macintosh OSX Mavericks, I would say it’s better to be safe than sorry and for the love of all that is cute and fuzzy, make your backups!