The Ways of the Force

I have something here for you. Your father wanted you to have this when you were old enough, but your uncle wouldn't allow it. He feared you might follow old Obi-Wan on some damn fool idealistic crusade like your father did. It's your father's lightsaber. This is the weapon of a Jedi Knight. Not as clumsy or as random as a blaster, but an elegant weapon for a more civilized age. For over a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic. Before the dark times, before the Empire.

Ready? One, two, three ... Grimace!

Why is it that most photographers, when taking a picture of someone else, ask their subject to smile? And then the subject has to hold the pose, and wait, and wait, and wait for the shutter to snap. The photographer is never happy, of course, with that first smile. "No, not like that. Smile like it's your Birthday. Big smiles. Big, big! Show me your teeth. No, don't grimace at me ... SMILE!"

Not me, not ever. I hate those canned smiles. I much prefer catching someone in the "act" of just being themselves. Even, and perhaps especially, when they are not smiling.

But my kids, so conditioned by hearing other photographers telling them to "smile", they just do it instinctively, whenever someone is pointing a camera in their direction. It's a habit I'm trying to break them of.

Smile when you're happy, not when someone is pointing a camera lens at you.

Wiped Out

I know what you mean, kid. There are days that just wipe me out, too.

What Do You Want to be When You Grow Up?

Mom: So Julian, what do you want to be when you grow up?

Julian: Mom, I'm only 9 years old. I'm just a kid. I don't know what I want to be when I grow up yet.

Mom: Ok.

Time passes.

Julian: Mom, I think I might want to be a marine when I grow up.

Mom: A marine? How come?

Julian: So I can help protect my country.

Mom: Well, do you want to be a marine with a gun in a battlefield, or to do you want to be one of the generals making all the plans.

Julian: I think maybe a general ...

Mom: Well you have to get really good grades in school, then go to officer's training and the military academy. You know, you might not be able to be a marine because you're going to be so tall. They told grandpa he couldn't join the marines because he was so tall.

Julian: Really?

Mom: Yes, but he helped defend our country in other ways.

Julian: How?

Mom: He went to college, became really smart, and then helped pioneer the development of aircraft radar, which the military installed on those big AWAC planes.

Julian: Oh.

Time passes.

Julian: I think I want to be a marine.

Yes, I'm Still Here ...

I was asked, this past weekend, how come I haven’t been keeping my blog updated. I was surprised that it is still viewed and looked at! I told the commentator that I ALWAYS right for my blog, every day. But lately, well, for the past few months, most of the blog entries have been work-related, and for that reason, I have marked them private. I just reviewed a number of them this morning and I think it’s probably best if they remain that way – at least while I’m still gainfully employed here.

I work at a small telecommunications start-up firm (it’s my third telecom start-up in the past 15 years, you’d think I’d have a clue by now). It’s the most peculiar company I’ve ever worked for, and it’s been the source of many “colorful” blog entries in the past few months. Some day these blogs might see the light of day, become exposed to the national limelight, but it won’t be before this company is either publically traded (not likely to happen soon) or acquired (not significantly more likely). And even then, it probably won’t happen until I’m off to my next venture.

So for now, knowing that I still have a loyal readership, I’ll try to focus a few daily blog entries to some topic other than work.

Red Phone

The phone rang – caller ID reporting the incoming call as “Red Line”.

You remember the old 1966 Batman television series, starring Adam West. Millionaire Playboy Bruce Wayne had this Red Phone in his study. Although it was a rotary phone (I think everything was rotary back then), it didn’t have a rotary dial on the top. This phone could receive calls only, not place them. It sat on a small oak pedestal, covered by a glass dome “cake cover” to reinforce it’s solemnity. It was the ultimate hotline, and just damn cool.

I don’t have a Red Phone. I don’t even have a Study that I could put a Red Phone in. Even if I did have a Study, I’m not a Millionaire Playboy (not for lacking interest, mind you), so I wouldn’t be allowed to spend a lot of leisure time in my Study waiting for the Red Phone to ring. Instead, I’m constantly on the go, with a Blackberry mobile phone on my hip. And quite frankly, I think I’d look pretty silly walking around with a glass dome cake over resting on my hip, covering the Blackberry on its belt holster.

So I guess I did the next best thing – I programmed the Blackberry to record every call coming in from work as “Red Line”. Calls from D come in as her Indian name “Stomps Around House Slamming Cupboard”. Calls from my Dad come in as “Dad”. Calls from my Stacy come in as “Baby Sis”. Calls from Her come in as “Only Desire” (sadly, these calls don’t come any more).

But last night’s call was from the “Red Line”. I always hate to receive this call, because inevitably it means I’ll spend the next 1-12 hours managing a crisis. But, that’s why they pay me the big bucks. I picked up the phone and joked, “Go ahead, Commissioner Gordan … this is Batman.”

It’s getting to be a pretty lame joke, they’re tired of hearing it, I know. But they didn’t groan, or laugh. In fact, I could barely hear the caller at all. I jacked the volume up, and faintly made out the sound of my boss’s voice, and some others in the background. I started shouting his name. “Jack. Jack! JACK!! J-A-C-K!!!!!!”

He couldn’t hear me, so I hung up. The “Red Line” rang again. Jack again, I must have been on auto callback. So being the voyeur that I am, I put the Blackberry on mute, and just listened. There’s a certain thrill of listening in on people’s private conversations. I wonder if cops on stake-out feel the same way, or government officials using CALEA to monitor calls. I was hoping for some juicy conversation that I could share in the office the next day – maybe accolades on what an outstanding performer that JP is in the office, or maybe my boss getting funky with his live-in girlfriend, Christine (who’s a hottie, btw). Or maybe news about the company being bought out, going IPO, or … anything.

Nope, nope and nope. Just talk about the truckers on I-89, and how the commute is horrendous, and zzzzzZZZZzzzzzz.

I’m not a very good voyeur, I confess, because I’m also terribly impatient. And the juicy stuff doesn’t happen within the confines of my limited attention span, I’m off on some other tangent and miss it completely.

Pink

I was typing along and then – WHAM – the computer screen turned pink. I guess it was pink. It’s hard for me to label colors, now that I’m a computer geek. I’m pretty sure this particular color was 0XFF00FF, which is quite a bit darker than what I would classify as “pink”. But if you sat 10 people in my office, probably 7 of them would have called it a “pink screen”.

The keyboard was locked up. It couldn’t reset the system with CTRL-ALT-DEL, although the harddrive light blinked on, suggesting the computer was busy doing something when I tried (swapping out virtual memory?). I slammed my fists on either side of the keyboard, because I’d been working for the last several hours on an project. Most of it would probably be saved from the Auto-Save feature, but I probably lost the last 10 minutes of work (I still haven’t looked yet). The slamming fists, or the spew of obscenities from my mouth, startled the two colleagues in my office, but they politely ignored my rampage.

This was the third time my computer has locked up in the past few weeks – each time the same way, although the color changes. Last week, I got a white screen (or 0xFFFFFF). One or two weeks before, I got a blackish-grey screen (0x000033, probably). Both times, I’d lost a sizeable amount of work.

So I sent a note to our crack IT squad, telling them they’d given me another Lemon Laptop. The IT engineer responded back,

“JP, this is the third Laptop I have rebuilt for you in the past four months, this is as frustrating for me as it is for you. Unfortunately I don't have any D620's which is our newest models, not sure if where to go from here?

Bob, any ideas?”

He CC’d his boss (Bob), and my boss (nice). The clear implication here is that, “JP keeps breaking laptops, and management needs to intervene!”.

It’s true, this is the third laptop I’ve had hear in my 4 years at the company. My first three years were trouble-free and bliss, but a few months ago, I started having problems with the computer. The computer would lock-up for a fraction of a second. I type rather fast, and the effect of this lock-up would be that the computer skipped letters during my typing. So a single sentence might look something like this: “Nowis te time for allgood men to com to the aid of their ountry.”

It wasn’t a sticky keyboard (no comments, please, Angie) – because it was a different character every time. And in the above text, I exaggerated the frequency of the lockup – it probably occurred 4-6 times in a page, not 4-6 times in a sentence. But the effect was equally frustrating. I had to type slower, and spend more time correcting every report, email or document that I wrote.

IT couldn’t figure out why the computer was behaving this way, so they replaced the computer. Not with a new computer, mind you, but with a used piece of junk that some other employee had turned in. And I soon found out why.

The “new” (refurbished) Dell600 laptop – same model I owned previously -- was PAINFULLY slow. It took 6 minutes and 23 seconds for the computer to load a simple PowerPoint presentation. When I tried to ALT-TAB from one application to another, I could literally get up from my desk, go down the hall, get a cup of coffee, and come back before the computer had transitioned to the new application. I would start an application like Excel or Word, and then sit in front of my workstation, shooting rubber bands at the screen waiting for the application to load.

So I complained to IT. They got me another computer – this one an upgraded D610 model, with twice the RAM (1GB) than my old laptop. It’s been working beautifully, aside from these occasional lockups.

So here’s the memo to IT: Fix my computer. That’s all I want. I just want a computer that works … flawlessly. I don’t care if it weighs 20 pounds, or has 0xFFCCFF polka-dots on it. I just want a computer that allows me to perform my job.