Moving On

There is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven. Or at least that's how the song goes. This is the notice that this blog is moving to the emerald isle. You can find me in Ireland at “What I'm Blogging”

We're Moving HERE.

Blogger.com has been a terrific home for my blogs and I since September of 2003, however I'm thinking about trying something new. I'm also thinking about consolidating all the various different blogs I run into one, and this will let me do that.

Hope to see you at the new place.

Cheers,
Ric

My Sunday Off

Sunday off; a day free from labour; ordained rest by the Divine on high. Unfortunately, someone forgot to read the memo. My Sunday off is a little different.

...Sunday has really gone to the dogs...

Let's start with the dogs. If God had wanted Sunday to be a day of rest, you'd think he would have informed the dogs. But they still want out of the house early in the morning. There are neighbours to wake, cats to chase, and let's not forget nature's call. No, dogs definitely missed the memo on the whole day of rest thing. Mind you they are very well informed on the afternoon of rest, usually in my favourite spot on the sofa, but I digress.

Next is my day job. The place where I'm expected to be, 9 - 5, Monday to Friday. They missed the memo too. I don't think they were ever copied on the original. Instead of Sunday being a time of rest and time spent with family, for the best and brightest at Gigantic Concrete (and everywhere else I've worked too) Sunday is a change window. It is an opportunity to do all the computer and system work you need to do so that other people can be uninterrupted during their 9-5 work week. “The rocks must flow”. It sounds like a Frank Herbert novel waiting to happen. This Sunday morning I had a telco on the phone with a manufacturer of fine network equipment trying to recreate a problem we solved over a month ago to ensure that we really solved it.

To really top off My Sunday Off we need to look at the home front. There's the grass to cut, the hedge to trim, the car to wash, and groceries to buy. Worst of all there 's the calls of nature from my canine friends to scoop. Sunday has really gone to the dogs.

Undeniable Pressure

Sometimes you read something and it just grabs you. It speaks to you in volumes of truths that wash over you. Truths that when you think about it, were slapping you in the face all along.

---

Poem: “The Undeniable Pressure of Existence” by Patricia Fargnoli, from Duties of the Spirit. © Tupelo Press.

I saw the fox running by the side of the road
past the turned-away brick faces of the condominiums
past the Citco gas station with its line of cars and trucks
and he ran, limping, gaunt, matted dull haired
past Jim's Pizza, past the Wash-O-Mat,
past the Thai Garden, his sides heaving like bellows
and he kept running to where the interstate
crossed the state road and he reached it and he ran on
under the underpass and beyond it past the perfect
rows of split-levels, their identical driveways
their brookless and forestless yards,
and from my moving car, I watched him,
helpless to do anything to help him, certain he was beyond
any aid, any desire to save him, and he ran loping on,
far out of his element, sick, panting, starving,
his eyes fixed on some point ahead of him,
some possible salvation
in all this hopelessness, that only he could see.

From the Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor
Available by e-mail daily.

Mmmmmm Chocolate

...too subtle for the common palate...

It's the birthday of Roald Dahl, born in Llandaff, South Wales (1916). He was sent off to private boarding schools as a kid, which he hated except for the chocolates, Cadbury chocolates. The Cadbury chocolate company had chosen his school as a focus group for new candies they were developing. Every so often, a plain gray cardboard box was issued to each child, filled with eleven chocolate bars. It was the children's task to rate the candy, and Dahl took his job very seriously. About one of the sample candy bars, he wrote, “Too subtle for the common palate.” He later said that the experience got him thinking about candy as something manufactured in a factory, and he spent a lot of time imagining what a candy factory might be like. Today, he's best known for his children's book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

From the Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor
Available by e-mail daily.

Further delicious reading available at Amazon Canada, US and UK

Istanbul Was Constantinople

It was on this day in 1664 that the Dutch surrendered the city of New Amsterdam to the British, who renamed it New York. The English navigator Henry Hudson claimed credit as the city's discoverer in 1609, when he sailed into its harbor and up the river that now bears his name, looking for a passage to India. Hudson was sailing for the Dutch West India Company, so it was the Dutch who moved in and settled the area in 1614, six years before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock. Forty years later, New Amsterdam became a city; its population, 800. In the 1660s the Dutch and English were at war, and on September 8, 1664, a fleet sent by the Duke of York seized the city and changed the name to New York.

From the Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor
Available by e-mail daily.

Further reading available at Amazon Canada, US and UK

Where's Waldo?

You want to know where Waldo is? Well Waldo is right here. Waldo is me.

...Now I'm in Big Sky country...

At the behest of Gigantic Concrete, I'm am sojourning in beautiful downtown Steinbach Manitoba. Home of, among other things, the Mennonite Heritage Village, Automobile Town, and a vast array of pawn shops, churches and car dealerships. Quick cash, religion and wheels seem to be the mainstay.

I must say it's a little unnerving to be here. Yesterday morning I was in the rolling hills of the Oakridge Moraine and the towers of Toronto. Now I'm in Big Sky country. It is flat. Flat; flatter; flattest. There are times you can actually catch the curve of the earth on the edge of the horizon. For someone from hill country, it's like being in a very large fish bowel.

So why am I here? Well it goes something like this. One of our plants had a circuit with telco #1. We ordered a new circuit from telco #2. By some “murphian” fiat of fate, we also cancelled circuit with Telco #1 thinking that the new circuit would be in place before the old one was disconnected. Wrong. So I'm here to figure out how to connect the site with no circuit. For my next trick, watch me pull a rabbit out of my rear...

Kindred Spirit

It's the birthday of the brilliant and unfortunate William Friese-Greene, born in Bristol, England (1855). Between 1885 and 1890 he built a series of four prototype motion-picture cameras and was granted a patent for a camera to record movement. He went bankrupt in the process and sold the rights to the patent for 500 pounds. During his lifetime, he took out more than 70 patents for other inventions, including X-ray and light printing on paper fabrics, ink-less printing, and electrical transmission of images, but earned little money from them and was on the verge of bankruptcy all his life.

From the Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor
Available by e-mail daily.

Zen and a Harley

Further reading available at Amazon Canada, US and UK

It's the birthday of writer Robert Pirsig, born in Minneapolis (1928). He's best known for his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), which 120 editors turned down before one finally offered a standard $3000 advance. The book is about the 1968 motorcycle trip he made from Minneapolis to San Francisco with his 12-year-old son Christopher. But the trip is really a backdrop for Pirsig's philosophical meditations on nature and technology. It was a completely unexpected best seller. He wrote: “The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of the mountain, or in the petals of a flower.”

From the Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor
Available by e-mail daily.

My Brain Has a Pattern?

Your Brain's Pattern

You have a tempered, reasonable way of thinking. You tend to take every new idea in, and meld it with your world view. For you, everything is always changing. Each moment is different. Your thinking process tends to be very natural - with no beginnings or endings.

What Pattern Is Your Brain?

London Calling

...London was, but is no more...

It's the anniversary of the Great Fire of London in 1666, which began around 1:00 am in the King's bakery, on Pudding Lane. The buildings in medieval London were nearly all wooden and the fire quickly spread to the wharves on the Thames River, where oil and hemp, hay, and timber were stored. There the fire exploded, and over the next three days destroyed an area nearly two miles square in central London, though only six persons died. A man named John Evelyn wrote in his diary the next night: “Oh the miserable and calamitous spectacle! The sky was like the top of a burning oven, and the light seen 40 miles round about for many nights. God grant mine eyes may never behold the like, who now saw 10,000 houses all in one flame; the noise and cracking and thunder of people, the fall of towers, houses, and churches, was like a hideous storm. London was, but is no more!”

From the Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor
Available by e-mail daily.

Further reading available at Amazon Canada, US and UK

Red Cross - Donate if You Can

American Red Cross


DONATE if you can

Sleepless in Cyberspace

Do you ever have one of those days where you are so wired that sleep evades you? Well I'm having one, and I don't like it. I don't like it one bit.The wife doesn't like it either, because when I'm up, she can't sleep. I haven't taken any real survey, but I don't think the dogs are impressed in the least.

...there's an addiction that needs feeding...

Perhaps it's too much coffee? I have been known to drink a lot of coffee. Sometimes 10-15 cups a day. I blame this of course on the Order of Friars Minor. Prior to my association with the Franciscans back in the early eighties, I drank no coffee. None. Nada. Not a stitch. Couldn't stand the stuff really. However, in order to perk myself up for morning prayers, I started drinking the black oily stuff. Now I'm hooked. Addiction has it's monkey claws deep in my left shoulder blade; the only surviving remnant of a shattered Catholicism. The Church faded away, the coffee remained.

Of course I could just be stressed out. There is a lot of activity going on at Gigantic Concrete and there are times I feel like I'm barely keeping my head above water. So much to do, so much to keep track of, so many bloody emails to respond to (Yes, Matt this includes yours). There's also the burden of command. I had to chew out one of my staff today. I hate doing that. The guy isn't meeting expectations and now I get to be all managerial about it. I fear becoming a beloved one in my own right.

Whatever it is. It's left me awake, frustrated, and grumpy. I'd write more, but the kettle has boiled and there's an addiction that needs feeding.