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Boo!

Once again it’s time. It’s time to disguise our children and send them out on the street to beg for candy. It’s time for Karo-syrup with red food coloring, and haunted houses made of cardboard jammed into the garage. It’s time for grownups to buy candy for a parade of children, and vow once again not to eat ANY of it ourselves.

Tiny witches and goblins, fairies and ninjas, pirates, Darths and cowboys will line the sidewalks once again. In the spirit of the season, darkened houses will be fearsome black holes in the night and barking dogs become the spirits of werewolves haunting suburbia.

Parents will wander among the younger spooks, holding hands and smiling at the rapture of a child’s face that has just discovered she can get chocolate for the asking. With each stop the wonder grows until she beams with the knowledge that one day a year, stolid rule-making adults are such easy pushovers.

We will sit in the driveway with lawn chairs and a camping table between us holding hot tea. We will watch the parade as they wend down the street looking for more easy marks from which to extort sugar. We will ohh and ahhh over the clever costumes and be frightened of monsters in age appropriate fashion.

And as the lights fade, and the trick-or-treaters slowly disappear, the stars will come out and we will remain basking in cold air. We will watch flickering pinpoints of light in a black sky and dream dreams of small delighted moments in childhood, when a piece of chocolate was a foil wrapped kiss.

Happy Halloween to all.

Acting up (and not too well)

I seem to be somewhat buried in a rather delightful mess. I was volunteered to be part of the church Christmas play. I simply asked when the performance was and suddenly found myself with a rather large role in the production.

As with any play, the best that can be achieved is semi organized chaos. It’s been described as herding cats, though cats have slightly higher cognitive skill than actors and are easier to control.

Some of my fellow thespians are children, a couple small enough to look precocious in their coat hanger and gauze wings, and a few older boys who have found peer acceptance through the medium of flatulence.

Adults with better things to be doing on a Tuesday night mingle on the stage aimlessly, while straight backed vinyl covered chairs are hills and beds and even a manger.

We strut and stagger, mumble and talk so fast only humming birds are sure of what they have heard. The word “LINE” is called out more than the words written for the plot and we smack our heads and berate ourselves for not memorizing letter perfect.

In defiance of Shakespeare we saw the air with our hands and stutter and stagger and turn our backs to the audience. It is as unprofessional a production as I have ever been in, yet the tumult and the noise are fun and filled with life.

Once each week, I get to laugh and shake my head and roll my eyes and feel grateful I am not the director of this creative mob. What we lack in training and maybe even talent are more than made up in enthusiasm and a common bond to create something together.

So if the shepherds forget to fear a three year old angel with a pipe cleaner halo, or Joseph can’t remember where Bethlehem is, the production will still be a success. It’s the journey that matters after all is said and done, and the message that is carried in mumbled lines spoken out of sequence.

At the Whim of a Hat

Free societies will be allies against these hateful few who have no conscience, who kill at the whim of a hat. –George W.

I was getting ready for work and heading out – I had a travel cup full of coffee (no sugar, a little ½ & ½) in my hand and I walked down the relatively short length of the kitchen to the end of the table. There were two outdoor pillows propped up on the top of the chair and on the table, we’d taken them in when it looked like it was going to rain and had nowhere else to put them.

I set my hat on top of these pillows the night before, and now, running just a few minutes late for work, I gathered my laptop bag, my ID card and needed only my hat before I headed out to another glorious adventure in cubeville.

As I reached for my hat, as if by some invisible practical joker, the pillows and hat suddenly and inexplicably tumbled just as I was about to grab the hat.

Automatically, I set down the coffee cup in my other hand so I could grab the falling fluff and save my hat. I did NOT, however, set the coffee cup on a level surface.

Having been denied pillows and hat, gravity then switched its attention to the coffee cup. It spun in place and fell over, spraying hot coffee (no sugar, a little ½ & ½) all over my pants and shirt. I mopped up the table, and the relatively new wood laminate floor, and then went to change my clothes.

I arrived at work and discovered that my little section of cubeville had no power. The electrician had come by the night before and turned off the power so he could rewire something or another and it got too late for him, so he went home, promising to arrive by 7:30 the next morning. I begin my day at 5:30. That meant two hours before he even showed up, let alone got the thing rewired and the power back on.

I suppose that if I shuffled papers all day, two or three hours without power wouldn’t be that great of a hardship, but the fact is, I am a programmer. I can do NOTHING without being on a PC. On this particular occasion, we were having an issue with a program the vender said was compatible with a change and wasn’t (See No Fan of Monday), so I could NOT sit around for 3 hours with nothing to do, and there wasn’t a convenient empty cube in cubeville for a temporary squatter.

There was, however, and empty cube not too far from me. Though it didn’t have the connectivity I needed, it did have a power strip sitting forlorn and abandon on the desk. I found two more of these and strung a set of four power strips (one I already had) across the hallway and into the far wall behind the printer.

I now had a working PC, but it wouldn’t connect. It took me about five minutes to realize that because I have multiple PCs at my desk, I have an automatic switch box which allows me to connect all three PCs to the network on a single cable. The switchbox is also electric. So I stretched my jury-rigged cord across the cube and onto my lap so I could plug it in too.

So, for three hours, I had a trip hazard across the floor and a power strip nestled in my lap like fidgety cat. There was palette of old server parts parked in the hallway next to the printer waiting for someone to claim it, and as a safety precaution, the people who’d left it there had put out little orange safety cones. I appropriated some of these and set them down on the top of my handmade power run.

I did get the application fixed, however.

Later that day, I installed the video card in the PC at home. I have replaced thousands of video cards. It’s no big deal, pop it in, install the software, close it up – done. The memory SIMM I installed (1GB – yikes), slid in and worked perfectly. The video card required standing on it to get it into the slots, but it slid in eventually.

The card worked fine, but then I went to install the drivers. The manufacturer was quite specific, DO NOT INSTALL THE DRIVERS UNDER WINDOWS FOUND SOFTWARE WIZARD. So I let their install CD come up and the first thing it did was tell me it couldn’t install the new drivers, because old drivers were still active, and these needed to be uninstalled first.

That’s just crazy. Without video drivers, you don’t have video. Without video, you are working with a black screen. Yet, this @#@$# software would NOT install. Reluctantly, I did as requested, assuming that the manufacturer actually knew what they were talking about. By this time, I’m sure you’ve imagined the consequences of such foolish assumptions.

The PC forced a reboot, and that was the last time I saw my desktop.

I spent an hour on the phone with tech support from the card company, the kid I was speaking to knew less about PCs than I did, and eventually he gave up and told me to – gotta love this – CONTACT MICROSOFT SUPPORT.

Yeah, right. Microsoft support charges like calling 1-900-BABE and gives you less for your money. In fact Microsoft support is an oxymoron, much like "tax reform" or "controlled burn".

After two days of trying to get ANYTHING to work (included safe mode, safe mode with command prompt, safe mode with networking, BIOS changes, Bootable disks, kicking and screaming) I finally had to run - restore.

Yes, it brought back my windows, but it brought it back in the same configuration as it was the day I bought the thing. Most of the customizations I’ve made over 18 moths, many of the applications I’ve installed and their drivers were wiped out in a single key stroke.

Now I’m back to reinstalling apps, turning off free AOL offers and MSN connectivity wizards and all the little annoying bits of s**** that comes with a windows package. I’ll be doing that for some time to come, I’m afraid.

But hey, the new espresso maker is working great!

That’s what I need – more caffeine.

No Fan of MONDAY

First, let me set up that over the weekend we broke 100⁰ degrees. Officially, the temperature at the airport was 99⁰, so officially, we haven’t gotten to the triples yet, but that’s the airport. Out in the city where I am, our little mercury tube shot up like a geyser.

It’s only the middle of March and we’re already miserable so we decide to replace the ceiling fan in the living room.

The fan we had was 52”, the biggest you could get ten years ago or so. It doesn’t cover the entire room well and where my wife sits is in the “dead” air space. So we bought a slightly bigger fan – 70”

This thing is supposed to move 8,000 + cubic feet of air per minute. Enough to swirl around the little bit of air our cooler drops into the room like a pebble in a barrel. By the time we made our purchases, and I got a new video card for my PC, it was too dark to put up the fan. I waited until MONDAY (eerie theme music here).

When I got into work at 5:30AM, as I usually do, I picked up an email from the Friday before. One of the processes our vendor ASSURED us would work on their system doesn’t. SURPRISE! So I spent the entire day trying to rewrite an application on the fly while people upstairs were trying to work around while waiting for my solution. I rewrote the app, set it up on the test server to be sure it would work and then found out that the test server had been deactivated.

It took all day to get someone to fix that, so in the meantime I created a test area on the production server. This is a no-no, but, when needs must and all that. The solution partly worked and I had to spend the afternoon “tweaking”. I almost have it; I just need to throw in some error handling, as the people upstairs create a lot of errors.

On the way home, I needed to get some mayo and some buns. The store is a little out of the way, but not by much, it’s just a different street I have to go down. One I didn’t know was under construction.

Just as I got to the barricades closing off the right lane, a little car pulls in front of me and comes to a complete stop. He tries to go to the right, sees that it’s blocked off and then SLOWLY pulls forward toward the intersection. The left turn lane, the one I want, is empty and the green arrow just turned on. The only thing between me and the turn is the little car that won’t pull forward until the arrow turns yellow, when he suddenly decides he wants to go left too. So now I’m behind this same befuddle little man and we’re both waiting for the arrow. When it comes again, he pulls through the intersection at a blazing 3MPH as all the traffic behind us is blaming me for going so slow because they can’t see him around me.

I finally get into the store, find what I need and go to the self service line. Two items. Scan, pay, no problem. Except that all of a sudden my ATM card stripe is too worn off for the machine to read.

I get home and the NEIGHBOR FROM HELL is parked in such a way that he has blocked off half the alleyway to my carport. In that big truck I need as much room as I can get. I was able to slide the truck into my carport, but had no idea how I was going to get out again in the morning.

It was with that attitude I started on the ceiling fan.

I easily took down the old one. I put on the new plate to mount the new fan, wired up everything as per the instructions and tried to put the fan on the plate. ONE bolt out of three wouldn’t line up. The fan was just a hair too low to match the plate, so after a half hour of inventing new four-letter words and running through the available list of well known ones, I thought that if I tilted the fan to that angle, I could get the fan hooked in.

Well, tilting the fan tilted the plate, the plate then dug a hole into my ceiling, nullifying the stability of flush mounting. I took it all down again and moved the plate slightly to get as much undamaged ceiling under it as I could and tried again. Another hour later, my vocabulary had increased to words of five and six letters and each one as filthy and terrible as I could spew. I finally got it on well enough that I didn’t think it would wobble too much. I hooked up the blades and the light fixture and then discovered it took those bulbs with the little tiny miniature bases: the ones that are supposed to look like candles, or flames or whatever. We don’t have those.

Well, the point was for the air to be moving, so I turned on the switch, pressed the remote and … NOTHING. Absolutely no power at all.

By this time I was up to compound words.

Now, of course, it’s dark; too dark to see. I’d been fighting this thing for nearly four hours and now I have to disassemble and start over from scratch.
No. Tomorrow. When the planets aren’t aligned against me and I’m no longer living the book of Job. Tomorrow.

It occurred to me, however, that I DID have two of those silly little bulbs, they were part of an older fan we’d kept, and I’d saved them. I went out to the storage shed, got the two little decorative whatevers and screwed one in.

I screwed the second one in and the base separated from the bulb. I was still holding the bulb, the base was snugly inside the socket.

There were no more words.

By the way, the good light doesn’t work either. There was NO WAY I was going to open up my PC and install the card on THAT day.

Today, I’m getting a ceiling medallion to cover the hole, and trying again. This morning the NEIGHBOR FROM HELL’s car was gone, the people upstairs at work have a temporary solution until this gets ironed out and traffic at 5:30AM was light.

If you happen to have an extra prayer on you, use it for me.

I’m spending the day looking up new words, or at least trying to find them in other languages, just to confuse the dogs.