Escape from FAR Manor! (evening)

On the subject of what day it is: Keith Oibermann has said all that needs to be said. I shall otherwise remain silent.

Evening on the deck provides its own symphony. But at this time of day, the cosmic mixer turns down the nature track and turns up the sounds of humanity: the flat snapping as I open a beer, echoing off first the condos and then a hill across the lake; a car bringing four ladies (a little older than me, I think) from their day’s outing; the buzz and whirr of an air conditioner starting up. Insects chirp softly; you almost have to listen for them. The geese of morning are elsewhere — they spend much of their days near the picnic area, perhaps trying for a handout.

Sunlight sparkles on the lake’s ripples, nearly blinding before thin clouds come to the rescue. Once in a while, a breeze stirs the trees and shakes loose the occasional leaf. I catch the occasional whiff of a charcoal grill; someone in Mountain Shadows, perhaps.

The spider insists on building its web next to the swing. I knock it down in the morning, and it rebuilds by evening. Someone ought to put this spider in charge of New Orleans; it’s patient and persistent, and couldn’t do a worse job than the Bush league.

I wonder why I stayed at FAR Manor last night. I should have known how it would go: I got about six hours of sleep, then when I woke I was too keyed up to drop off again (I tried). At least I took care of a loose end from work; a customer wanted a table of LED patterns that indicated problems and what to do about them. I had it mostly ready on Thursday, but forgot about it in the panic mode of that last day at work. I emailed it and got a “just what I was looking for” back, so the day wasn’t a complete washout.

Mrs. Fetched was sort of jerking me around last night, though. First it was, “Are you going back?” then “Aren’t you staying?” Then when I agreed to stay, she was like, “You don’t have to stay.” Sheesh. Such is the challenge of taking a vacation a mere hour away from FAR Manor; the evil of the chicken houses has a gravitational field that extends so far. For now, though, I will enjoy not having the TV on as I digest my supper.

Escape from FAR Manor! Inside the resort

The condo I’m staying in is small, but has the essentials for a week: two bedrooms, a bath, full kitchen, and the living area shown here. I’ll be shuttling between here and FAR Manor until Wednesday, at which point Mrs. Fetched will join me until it’s time to check out on Friday.


Not caring much about TV, but wanting a little music, I grabbed some powered speakers and found a convenient place to put the iPod. You can pretty much hear it everywhere inside the unit without turning the volume up very much at all.


Plans are simple for tomorrow: bicycling in the morning, a swim in the afternoon, fix pasta in the evening. Tuesday will be a non-vacation day, although I volunteered to help Mrs. Fetched get the chicken houses ready for the catchers. I hope to get some video of the catching machine in action that night or Wednesday morning — it’s pretty hilarious, watching the chickens get rolled into the cage.

Mrs. Fetched plans are: stay up all night Tuesday while the catchers do their bit, then ride up to the condo with me and sleep most of the afternoon while I put a nice supper together.

AT&T Microwave facility

On GA115 between Dahlonega and Cleveland GA.

Oh deer!

Back at FAR Manor for a couple of hours. Daughter Dearest isn’t working today, so I came back early to get the vacation posts in. Be sure to come back in a couple of days; I’m going to add some pictures to those posts when I get a chance.

Talk about dodging a bullet. Just a few miles out of the resort, a doe popped into the road. I got on the brakes and she stepped up the boogie. Still on the brakes, thinking perhaps the first deer was already across (Mrs. Fetched will tell you “there’s always two”) and I was clear, a large but still-spotted fawn leaped out. I stood on the brakes, to no avail. I think God picked the thing up and threw it, because I didn’t hear the expected thump when I would have hit it. I saw it coming toward the windshield and thinking, “oh great,” but it cleared the windshield… and landed on the roof! THUMP THUMP-THUMP THUMP of it kicking around, trying to get some traction, then it rolled off. I looked in the rear-view mirror and it was going boogity-boogity back the way it came.

Thinking that must have been the first deer I saw running back, I stopped and got out to look. No fawn lying dead off the road, even in the woods a little ways. No damage to the front of the car, and just a few scratches on top. Some hair managed to cling to the car the rest of the 40 miles home. Looks like we both dodged a bullet.



The only other thing I can say is: Whew. Thank God.

Escape from FAR Manor! (morning on the deck, day 2)

The second day of vacation is starting out tons better than the first. For the first time in I don’t remember, I slept the entire night through. Ten hours. I think I mentioned I haven’t been sleeping well lately, or maybe it was to Mrs. Fetched.

Except for someone’s little yappy dog across the lake, it’s quiet out here on the deck. A flock of geese forage in the lawn below, grunting softly. Crickets and a jay off in the distance compete with the occasional whisper of car tires.

Beyond the next row of condos, the lake is still and almost glassy. Beyond the lake is Mountain Shadows, one of those places where you build a house around your camper. If I’d had it to do over, I would have bought one of those places instead of a timeshare: you can come up whenever and stay as long as you like; a few people live there year-round. Everyone is really friendly.


Anyway. Now that the yapper has shut up, the only sour note in this audio-visual symphony is a spider web that I somehow missed seeing when I was sitting next to it on the porch swing with my coffee. Whack that, have a bowl of cereal, and then… jog, walk, swim, read, write, whatever, until I pick up Daughter Dearest this afternoon.

Vacation reports may be a bit spotty after this. See you in a while, though.

Escape from FAR Manor! (Vacation, day 1)

Note: Depending on when I can find a tube (the Internet is a series of tubes, you know), these posts may appear later than their dates. I'm going to backdate them to the day I wrote them.

OMG. If all vacation days were like this one, I’d just work. As it is, I may end up being the exception and saying I wish I’d spent more time at the office. At least there’s a happy ending.

You know it’s not going to be a wonderful day when the phone rings at 5 a.m. and you find that the power is out. In the course of things, we found that the house phone was out as well, but the office phone that woke us up obviously wasn’t. But I digress. When I picked up the phone, the line was dead — in my sleep-deprived state, I forgot that phone has a flaky hook switch. I also didn’t catch details like the night light and clock-radio being dark. It took flipping two light switches, and nothing happening either time, for it to penetrate my thick skull.

“Power’s out,” I told Mrs. Fetched on the way to the bathroom. “Did you forget to pay the electric bill?” (Being half-asleep does little to stop my lame attempts at humor.)

“It is?” she mumbled.

In the bathroom, I could hear the alarm from the chicken houses… seems the situation was more widespread.

“That must have been Mom, then,” said Mrs. Fetched (a good bet; nobody else would call us at 5 a.m. unless it was a wrong number or a prank). “I need to go start the generator.” The chicken houses have backup power, which helps to keep them, you know, alive during a power failure.

I lay awake while she was gone, not from choice, until she returned. I knew that a major feed incident in #1 had all but buried a feed hopper, and I’d already volunteered to help shovel feed in the morning. So when she said she was going to start that at 6-ish, I said, “I’ll come. I’m not going to get back to sleep anyway.” A little breakfast, and away we went. After making a dent in the pile, we did the daily walk-through. That took us to about 10:30.

After a shower, I sat down to check email and what all my blog-buddies are up to, and my smellphone rang. My boss. “Those documents you uploaded to the intranet are coming back ‘File Not Found’.” Serves me right to trust anything built or maintained by IT — just because it worked that last X times doesn’t mean you should ever trust it to work this time. I checked my work email, found another person with the same problem, then turned off the VPN and emailed everyone from my home account. Lotus Farking Notes is still screwing up attachments, which it has been doing for the last few months now, and now the web-based client I’ve been using has been following suit at least for forwarded attachments. Words to live by: in a crisis, don’t depend on IT. Or: “IncompetenT” begins and ends with IT. (OK, rant off.)

Noonish, we went out to eat. On the road, Mrs. Fetched started in about me calling the insurance company about the load we’re taking about against my life insurance. That reminded me about other calls I wanted to make: activate my debit card, order a new battery for my iBook, and let the phone company know the business line was acting up again — the hum was loud enough Thursday night to kill the DSL.

By the time we got home, The Boy had returned from his job and I was about dead. He went with Mrs. Fetched to shovel feed, and I crashed for a couple of hours, waking up about an hour later than I wanted (and just as Mrs. Fetched returned).

Her Imperial Highness was put out that I hadn’t made my calls yet. I’d committed the Ultimate Sin of inconveniencing her: she expected me to take M.A.E. to work; it was 4 p.m. and I had to make the calls now. Never mind that the one she wanted was to Alabama and thus gave me an extra hour. I could have called from the car, but she was already in high dudgeon and even less inclined than usual to listen to reason. Fine: I used the time to make the calls (check’s in the mail, debit card active, battery ordered) and get stuff together (i.e. packing for vacation). The fourth call, to the phone company, never happened. Just to make sure, I took an old phone out to the interface box and plugged it in the test jack. No hum. Loosening and tightening the screw terminals cleared it all up.

What with one thing and another, I didn’t make good my escape from FAR Manor until about 6:30. I stopped in Cleveland to pick up some essentials, and learned that I was in a dry county. I thought such things no longer existed… but then I remembered the sorry excuse for a Pretendersent we have these days….

An hour on the road, a half hour spent grabbing groceries (and a fruitless search for beer), ten minutes to check in, twenty to unpack: at 8:30, I called home to let everyone knew all was well (except for the beer).

I fixed a sandwich for supper and entertained myself with some music out of my iBook and reading some ancient (older than me!) Bell System Practices about maintaining 197/198-type switches (those old step-by-step boogers — am I a geek or what?). Then… blessed sleep.

Two glorious weeks of vacation, the first two-week vacation of my working life. I’ll be bouncing back & forth for a few days to FAR Manor, but Mrs. Fetched will join me here for a couple of days starting Wednesday. Next Saturday, off to Solar’s for a week in Florida.

Appropriate

The community yard sale was yesterday. We finally stopped talking about it and actually took a pile of stuff over there to sell. After booth costs, we cleared about $110 and came home with several empty boxes. Less stuff, more money — it’s a good thing. I might go next month with just some books and surplus electronic devices (old Macs, commercial-grade VCRs).

This afternoon, I crawled under the house and cut (and removed) a bunch of copper pipe while Mrs. Fetched and The Boy yanked out the old registers from the living room. I think I only left two registers uncut, and those are on opposite ends of the house (one in our bedroom and one across from the washer & dryer). Lots of copper and aluminum to take to the recyclers, and now we can remove the furniture and rent a sander.

A little later today, I split up the rest of the Romas my mother-in-law gave me and put them on the dehydrator. If I can get another 5 pounds or so, I should have enough dried tomatoes to get me through the winter.

And now you know why it’s called Labor Day weekend.

Hey Solar...

I seem to have lost your phone number. Gimme a call when you get this, OK?

Do-it-yourself camper

Lordy, my cellphone camera bites. But I refuse to be shackled to Stinkular for two more years. Anyway...

Zinged!

Standing outside at the in-laws’ this evening, after eating watermelon: Mrs. Fetched, Daughter Dearest, me, and Mrs. Fetched’s mom. And a bunch of half-grown herd dogs, putting their cold noses on bare legs and so forth.

After one dog nosed Mrs. Fetched, she jumped and complained. Daughter Dearest said, “Did he stick his nose up your butt too?”

“No.”

Then the mother-in-law chimed in: “He was just smelling your ‘cats’.”

I was the last one to get the joke. Daughter Dearest was shocked that she said it, but I’ve been around them long enough to know both of them will zing you when they feel like it.

Shorties

A few bits and bobs that don’t merit their own posts…

***

A guy at an OEM company we’re dealing with at work goes by the name of “Raining Cao.” I guess that’s not as bad as Wayne King (say it out loud).

***

Q. Why are northern nudist camps better than southern nudist camps?
A. It's colder.

***

Is Blogger ever going to fix the blog search? You’d think at a site owned by Google, that would be the last thing to break. But it hasn’t worked for at least a week. I think it broke about the same time they rolled out the new “Blogger beta” that has had a somewhat spotty record to date. Homeless Guy was unable to post for several days; he thinks he lost 200 readers to the glitch. I guess it’s fortunate for me that I didn’t get invited to try out the beta, given how search is(n’t) working.

***

Lobster really seems to have gotten it. He was talking to Mrs. Fetched last week and saying things like, “I was an idiot. Why didn’t I finish school?”

***

Mrs. Fetched’s video business has started picking up again. A local performance boating place is having her clean up some video they shot, and we’re doing taping for a park/rec league football team. “My” “new” camera perches on my monopod like it was made to work the sidelines. I made some mistakes last week, probably because it was the first time in nearly two years that I’ve done sideline camera work, and had an unfamiliar camera to boot. Mrs. Fetched gets a wider view from the sound booth… I’ll have to see if she can get a still of my backside down on the sidelines or something.

***

The Boy is doing sheetrock work now. I have to get him up at 6 a.m., but at least he gets moving with a minimum of hassle. The only friction right now is from band practice; he does this twice a week during the week and gets home around midnight. At least he’s getting some money here and there; he should soon be able to get his car fixed. He needs to get himself an alarm clock that will Do The Job though… when he gets his own place, I’m not coming over there to get him up every morning.

***

Hello, Ernesto. I was starting to wonder if we would (thankfully) have a dud of a hurricane season. All it takes is one, though, in the wrong place… and as warm as the Gulf is, it’s definitely the wrong place. Gas prices have been dropping for the last week or so (I saw $2.69 on the way home), but not even election-year price manipulation is going to overcome the panic that will ensue when people hear “hurricane in the Gulf.” I suspect prices will turn back around by the middle of next week, unless Ernesto fizzles out. Pray it happens, not for the gas prices but for everyone who lives along the Gulf.

***

Off to bed. I have a very non-relaxing Saturday to look “forward” to.

The Rise of the Creator-Consumer, Part IV

Continued from Part III
(start at Part I)

IV. The Passives (reprise)

“Babe?”

“Yeah?”

“Did you ever think things would be… I don’t know… different?”

She looks up from her book, slightly concerned. “Different how?” she asks guardedly.

“I don’t know,” he sighs, silencing the voice of his god with the Mute button. “I mean, we have all this shit, or at least we’re making payments on it. But we sit here most evenings, we don’t really have a clue about what our kids are doing… and did you have any dreams when you were younger?”

Her mouth tightens involuntarily for a moment, caught between annoyance and amusement. It’s finally happened, she thought, he’s having his mid-life crisis. Aloud, she says, “Sure. Didn’t you?” Let him talk it out.

“Yeah,” he laughs nervously. “Kyle kind of reminded me. When I was his age, I wanted a Super-8 movie camera. I was going to interview a ghost in a haunted house… make my own movie, like Kyle and his friends. But I couldn’t afford it, and neither could my parents.

“What about you?”

Trapped! he had opened up, now it’s her turn. “Well…” she waves her book. “I wanted to be a reporter, an investigative reporter. I guess I’d have been a cross between Lois Lane and Woodward and Bernstein. But we couldn’t afford J-school —”

“J-school?”

“Journalism school. I got a scholarship for Annenberg, in California, but it wasn’t enough. I went to vo-tech, and it was good, but… well, I started a mystery novel about an investigative reporter, but never finished it. It probably wouldn’t have gotten published anyway.”

“Hey, you never know. You can prob’ly write better stuff than that,” he gestures dismissively at her paperback.

“This book won an award,” she sniffs. “I didn’t even try to get mine published.”

“Do you still have it?”

“I don’t know. And I’m not sure why we’re even having this conversation.”

He laughs. “You say we don’t talk enough all the time; now we’re talking and you don’t know why.”

She opens her mouth to retort, then stops. “So what brought this on?”

“I guess it was Kyle and his movie-making buddies. He’s supposed to be home in a little bit. Hey, what do you say we walk down to the Thurmans’ and see what they’re up to? That’s where he is.”

She looks at him for a moment. “You know, I don’t remember the last time we went out for a walk. It might be nice.”

To be continued…

Making something of bleeps and boops

Sometimes, following links takes you to some odd places.

This particular oddity odyssey started with a MacDevCenter article, which led O’ReillyNet, and from there to an article on BoingBoing.

Near the bottom are two links to audio files. The first is a short, silly thing made of System 7 MacOS beeps over a funky beat; the second is a complete song whose soundtrack seems to be made up entirely of Nintendo snippets and MacOS beeps, plus the MacOS startup chime. The strangest thing about it is that it works.

Go have a listen and be amazed, amused, or disgusted.

He’s back!

No, not The Boy, although he was gone for a couple of days. I’m talking about this guy:


There’s a lot of weird bugs in the world, but to me the Hummingbird Clearwing Moth stands out as one of the weirdest.

The butterfly bushes have been a little scraggly this year, up to the last week or so when they finally got the idea. We have to cut them back pretty severely each year to keep them from taking over the manor grounds.

When You Rule the Tools

About a week ago, I complained about our tendency as tech writers to become slaves to our tools. Tonight I provide a counter-example — what becomes possible when you, the technical writer, is in charge of the tools.

At work, we’re building a box with built-in Wi-Fi capabilities and routing. Since that’s a fairly well-explored theme, we contracted a company in Taiwan to supply the Wi-Fi router. Like most routers for home networks, this one provides a web-based interface to configure the box, with links to context-sensitive help and a global glossary. As it turned out, the help that they furnished us was already owned (copyrighted) by another company. Since I work under the same department as the people driving this particular product, they brought me a working prototype and asked me to rewrite the help.

I’d seen an earlier prototype a few months back, so I already knew what was there. This time, though, I hit “View Source” in the browser — and was presented with a mishmash of HTML and <script> tags. Digging a little deeper, I realized that every single string in the web interface was being written by ECMAScript (the polite name for JavaScript hockkkk, ptui aka JavaSchit). The strings were stored as variables in files called language.js and langcont.js. The names explained the method to their madness: translating the interface requires changing only two files instead of 30.

Looking at the text itself, I was less than thrilled — we make stuff for cable companies; the help text talked about DSL and even ISDN, but not cable — and I had some better descriptions for other terms. The bolded term was run into the rest of the paragraph instead of broken out into a glossary-style list. I needed to add some cable-centric terms and remove the DSL- and ISDN-centric stuff.

So I fired up a text editor and got to work. It took all of five minutes for me to realize that I was going about it the wrong way. The string variables look like this:

h3='<b>Term</b> The definition…';

So if I wanted to add a new definition in between two existing ones, I’d have to either renumber everything following or create variables like h3_5 in between. Meanwhile, there was a corresponding <script> call in help.html:

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">dw(h3);</script>

To turn down the bloat a little, they had created dw as an alias for document.write. But the thing was, for every term I inserted or deleted in language.js, I’d have to make a corresponding fix in html.help. Since this is tedious, repetitive, kind of stuff — and I’m lazy — I decided to let the computer do the work for me. With a few global search and replace runs, I turned my text into HTML and then banged out a couple of scripts to transform it into the format needed by each file. It took an hour or so to get the scripts working, but I’d still be pounding on it if I had to do it by hand.

This is the kind of thing that you can’t do, or at least do easily, in Microsoft Weird or even FrameMaker. Even if it were possible, it wouldn’t be nearly as efficient. Sometimes, you even have to make tools to do a custom job on the spot. But when you rule the tools, the tools do the work for you so you can engage in some good old guilt-free slacking.

Disaster Averted

Shortly after getting home from work on Wednesday, Mrs. Fetched told me a tale of… “whoa.”

A while back, some friends of ours moved out of a trailer and gave us their large-ish propane tank so we could replace the ones we were renting. (For those of you who don’t have one of these, most people rent their tank and are locked into a single supplier. If you own your own tank, you can get propane from the low bidder.) Wednesday was the day when the incumbent came to cart off their tanks and install ours. They’re happy to do this... for a price, of course.

In this case, the price included three or four hours of labor. The regulator on our tank was shot, and had to be replaced. Then there was the minor detail of the old system being two small tanks ganged together; that gave them some grief too. The real fun started when they did the leak test... and found (and fixed) two leaks. Under the house. Next to the furnace.

Mrs. Fetched told me all that to complain about the $420 bill. “We should have just paid the $51 tank rental.”

“Um,” I replied, “Not that I’m all that fond of this place, but I would prefer it didn’t catch fire some night in October.”

“It wouldn’t catch fire, it would probably blow up.”

All the more reason to not worry about the $420… especially since the furnace is under the downstairs bedrooms. Not that I care so much about the house, but I would prefer not to have to escape in the middle of the night and try to remember grabbing my wife, kids, M.A.E., and laptop on the way out.

Whither Lobster?

The last time we saw Lobster in this chronicle, back in May, he had: no wheels (lost his truck to Big V); not much education; no permanent abode; and knocked up his girlfriend. I originally put “worst of all” in the latter item, but that seemed to give him the Attitude Adjustment that he sorely and truly needed.

Having a kid on the way seemed to give Lobster a focus. At first, he was quite happy contemplating supporting a family on welfare and his meager KFC earnings. But as he began to reflect on his situation (a miracle! in itself), he made peace with his parents (another miracle) and then moved back in with them (you could have knocked me over with a feather at this point).

The miracles just kept a-comin’ — he started working toward getting his GED (his reading level is atrocious though), got a job at the new Wal-Mart while continuing at the KFC, and (best of all) his pregnant girlfriend dumped him for another guy. So in less than three months, he has completely turned his life around… and life has given him a clean slate. I have no idea whether he’s managed to get a set of replacement wheels, but he lives less than five miles from both KFC and Wal-Mart now — he could ride a bicycle and save a potload on gas, insurance, and maintenance. Some habits, however, are a little more ingrained than others. I suspect he either gets rides from his parents or has bought a beater.

First M.A.E., now Lobster. I can only hope The Boy soon gets a similar attitude adjustment (minus the knocked-up girlfriend, of course).

Squiffed

I poured my self a generous helping of rum over crushed ice, and added enough grapefruit juice to fill the glass. But I’m not wasted as long as I can type typographic quotes/apostrophes & close my open HTML tags. :-P

Anyway, apologies in advance for anything overly silly I type in people’s comments tonight.

The Boy, by the numbers

[This list is now obsolete. Please refer to the current list.]

To make this blog easier to write (and read), I’m considering using a series of codes to describe The Boy’s latest misadventure… something like this:

• TB01: Left home (again)


• TB02: Came home (again)


• TB03: Said he’d be home, stayed out, hasn’t returned


• TB04: Had a tantrum, broke something


• TB05: Caught in a lie, insisting on his version of things


• TB06: Talks about getting a job, no follow-through


• TB07: Talks about getting a GED, no follow-through


• TB08: His band has been signed (again)


• TB09: Blames everyone else for his problems
  

You get the idea. I could just use a subject of, say, “TB04” and I wouldn’t have to type anything unless he threw multiple errors like Friday (TB04, TB05, TB06, TB07, TB09). He hasn’t been doing a very good job of managing his diabetes as of late (his A1C is 10, in the Very Bad range), and that doesn’t help — he goes completely off the rails when his glucose gets really high. And so we have one less phone than we did Thursday.

He now has less than two weeks left to clean up his act, before his court appearance. He now acknowledges drinking heavily and smoking various substances, shows no regret but says he quit drinking after a two-week binge (“I decided that was stupid”). His lip ring is gone, but the earrings are still installed and his hair won’t exactly impress a judge. He still has his head in an alternate universe, where looks don’t count for anything when going to court or job interviews. The hard part is that I agree with him partly — appearances shouldn’t make a difference — but as I’ve been telling him repeatedly, he has to deal with how things are instead of how they should be. The other minor detail is, as a high-school dropout, the facts beyond the appearance makes the job hunt difficult.

“I don’t want to work in a restaurant, or a gas station, or Kroger, or anything like that.” Unfortunately, without a diploma, that’s about all that’s open to him at this point. I think I got through to him on one point: he’s gone backwards in a big way this summer. He started out with a job, a working car, and a cell phone; now he has a non-working car, no job, and no phone. I didn’t even mention his A1C going up three points, but that’s as much a part of it as anything else.

Cool, man

I don’t think it broke 75 here today — it has been overcast all day, except when it was pouring down rain. It was kind of nice to get a day here like what we had last weekend in the NC mountains, even if I did get rained on some.

I just finished adjusting the valves on my motorcycle (two were seriously loose and a third was somewhat loose) and putting it back together, so it’s ready for when the rain clears out (which it seems to have done already). Looks like it will be in the 80s all week, with only small chances for rain, so I’m looking forward to enjoying my commute.

Professionalism, Rants, and Support

Techcommdood related a flare-up over Flare on techwr-l, a mailing list strictly dedicated to work-related communication by and for technical writers. He went on to say,

All facts removed, this was an inappropriate post. Why? Well, it offered little information and, well, it was a classic rant. You have to ask yourself, "What value did this add to the community?"

One word: none.

I don’t know about that. It pointed out some potentially serious problems with Flare, a fairly new help authoring tool (HAT) that’s trying to dethrone RoboHelp. MadCap (the company that produces Flare) stepped up and offered to work with the ranter to fix the problems, so maybe there’s a happy ending to come. Whatever: being a Mac user, neither MadCap nor Adobe (RoboHelp’s current owner) gives much of a rip about what I want or need.

Dood’s point was to decry the unprofessionalism of ranting on a public forum, whether directly or through an intermediary (as in this case) — of course, there’s Techcomm, a forum for tech writers that’s meant to be 95% rants and silly jokes, but that doesn’t really count. But there’s several kinds of unprofessionalism on display here, and they can all be seen in the ranter’s rhetorical question (caps lock removed): “Why should I pay $700 for a product and then spend my time doing workarounds to get it to do what it should do automatically?”

First, the ranter didn’t mention whether MadCap had tried to fix the problems before the rant, or if they were even aware of the problem. If you’re going to spend $700 for a piece of software, you should ask for help and expect to get it… and if you’re charging $700 for that software, you should a) make something that doesn’t break; and b) make sure your customers don’t get to the point of ranting about you in public. (The latter is often something that small companies like MadCap actually do better than larger ones like Adobe.)

The larger unprofessionalism is depending on some pretty $700 piece of software chrome to do your work for you. Face it, fellow tech writers, HTML (or even XML) is not rocket science. We complain about those icky tags, then we wonder why we get replaced by “technical writers” with a certificate education, at half the salary. Then there’s the whole issue of trusting your work to a monolithic database, which destroys everything when it gets corrupted (e.g. the late, unlamented ForeHelp), or any other software that doesn’t allow you to easily extract your work out of it (Word).

I’m not saying that we should be building help systems by hand — but we should certainly be willing to get involved at a much lower level. HTML-based help, after all, is simply a wrapper around a series of HTML (and graphic) files that provides (usually JavaScript-based) niceties like search and context. You provide table of contents and index files — and the content, of course — and that’s it. You don’t have to work directly with HTML — but you should be able to use what your authoring tool gives you to produce HTML, then be able to clean it up and prepare it for use with the help system. Yes, it takes a little time, but so does importing stuff into a dedicated HAT and fiddling with your content there.

Probably the most trouble-free help-building system I’ve seen to date is Mif2Go with FrameMaker to produce OmniHelp, an open-source help viewer. I’ve also used groff to produce HTML that works well with OmniHelp — everything can be modified to work the way you want it to, with no $700 “license fee” involved. Why are we not taking more advantage of set-ups like this?

It’s time to take control of our operating environments and to start living up to the title, technical writer. We’ve let the word become little more than a way to distinguish what we do from journalists and fiction writers for too long now, to our detriment.

FARfetched Faith Healing

I got a new power brick for my iBook the other day, and the new battery should be shipped as soon as I resolve a credit card issue with the vendor. All the fun I’ve been having with my computers lately makes this an appropriate time to tell this story.

My first encounter with a Mac was 1985, when we replaced our VT100-clone terminals (connected to a VAX) with “Fat Macs.” Those were the ones with a whopping 512K of RAM, a seemingly-extravagent amount of memory for those times. The trend of the time was decentralization — throwing off the tyranny of IT (which was “MIS” in those days) and taking care of our own needs. I’ll write more about our motivations, and the trade-offs we accepted, some other time.

As I’ve said in the past, my relationship with the Mac was not exactly love at first sight — while I loved having “my own computer,” I chafed at its limitations and propensity to crash. But it was new territory, and I forged ahead to see what it could do. Sometimes, being a day ahead can make all the difference between the “Mac Guru” and the befuddled co-worker.

I’m not sure when the spooky stuff started. First, I would figure out a pattern of non-intuitive clicks and keystrokes that would untangle a snarled program — normal enough for a button-pusher. But then, problems would go away as soon as I touched the keyboard. Then it started happening when I talked to the “owner” on the phone. But the craziest thing was when people told me they could get things working right by threatening to call me!

I’m a fairly rational guy, for being a Christian. I believe that there is an order to things, even to the supernatural — but I also believe we haven’t quite nailed down the natural order, and don’t have a clue about the supernatural. So I’ll admit that it made me a little uncomfortable when touching a computer, or someone invoking my name over it, would make it start working right. But time went on and I found other work, at a place where IT didn’t need a faith-healer, and it became a joke of sorts.

So a few years back, the people that eventually became our renters asked me to check out their daughter’s computer. It was an early Pentium-based Aptiva, with “soft” power (like many computers nowadays, it can be turned on or off by software). So I came by, and the daughter showed me the computer. Sure enough, it wouldn’t power on. I disconnected everything and pulled the cover off, thinking I might find a blown fuse. Not finding one, I told the kid, “Sometimes you can just lay hands on the motherboard” — doing so — “and say, ‘BE HEALED!’” She laughed. Then I plugged everything in, hit the power button, and it started right up.

“You weren’t kidding!” she gasped. She was almost as surprised as I was. (Most likely, unplugging the power allowed the startup circuitry to reset, and I told her that.)

What allows me to laugh it all off — even when I recently learned that people still use my name to make their computers straighten up — is that it doesn’t seem to work on my own gear. Then again, when I have a problem, it tends to be a big one — often requiring a new power supply, or rebuilding the hard drive. Maybe it’s a case of the shoemaker’s children going barefoot. Or maybe God is just reminding me that I’m really not all that.

The Rise of the Creator-Consumer, Part III

Continued from Part II
(start at Part I)

“If he tries to bring it in the bathroom while I’m taking a shower,” his wife growls, “I’ll kill him and break that camera.”

“I don’t think you have to worry about that,” he reassures her. “They’re making some sci-fi flick, I think.”

She sighs. “At least it gets him out of the house. Mary’s up in her room, just like every night. Who knows what she’s doing on that laptop…”

III. The Author

“So will we live happily ever after, Merlynn?” Katera laughed.

The sorceress shrugged, something Katera had never seen Merlynn do before. “That’s a question no wizard can answer,” she laughed in turn, “but you can. You can choose to be happy or not. There are those who have little more than their lives, who praise the gods for each day of life; and some who have conquered entire kingdoms and are yet miserable…”

Mary pauses partly to think, partly to savor the moment. It has taken her a year to get to this point: with two more sentences, she will have finished her novel. A few clicks will send this final part to her blog. But with satisfaction comes reluctance. She is happy and even relieved to be done, and it’s definitely time for a break. But it also seems so — final — to end it. Many readers assured her they felt the same way; they didn’t want it to end, or they hoped she would start a sequel soon.

Putting the laptop aside, she unfolds her legs and stretches across the bed. She has never been one of the popular girls at school — and after listening and watching them, she is glad. Their world was clothes, makeup, and their figures… and what kind of life was that? The boys don’t buzz around her like bees around a rose, but she had created a world in the last year, and if boys didn’t flock to her, all sorts of people had flocked to her story. All the posts telling her they would buy the book if she found a publisher were flattering, but what were the odds? Probably worse than her getting a date for the prom, and she isn’t exactly counting on that either.

She winces for a moment, thinking about how the early parts of her novel really stink compared to the latest — her writing has improved, and she vows to go back and fix up those beginning parts. Some of the readers had caught the odd inconsistency, and she had saved those messages too. “Done” is a relative term, I guess, she thinks, and sits back up to finish her opus.

Continued in Part IV

Good signs?

M.A.E. is still in the hospital; tomorrow is her earliest chance of getting out and it could be until Friday. She still hasn’t gotten to the point where she can eat solid food yet. I figure her Medicaid application, or some other benefit, must have gone through; they would be pushing her out the door otherwise.

The Boy was home when we got in last night. Much to my surprise, the lip ring was gone (and has stayed gone, so far). Call me a skeptic, but I think something got to him. It might have been Cousin Splat getting busted with a huge amount of pot — The Boy was driving with a car full of kids when they got pulled over, and only Splat got busted. Or it might have been his girlfriend’s mom cutting a deal with him; he ditches the girlfriend and she doesn’t try to get him whacked on statutory (he claims she told him she was 16, not 14, yeah right). Or, he might just be running out of people to sponge off of. He doesn’t really want to get his hair cut, but he’ll do it if he has to... and he probably does to get a job that pays enough to get his car fixed, pay the phone bill, get an apartment, etc. He also says he’s going to get his GED. I’ll believe it when I see it.

But the lack of lip ring is highly encouraging.

Miss Diagnosis

With M.A.E. (as we thought) on the mend from her “infection,” I grabbed Mrs. Fetched and Daughter Dearest, jumped into Barge Vader, and headed to North Carolina to visit my mom for a scheduled three-day weekend (mom and her hubby evacuate Florida for the summer, visit relatives in the Midwest, and then rent a place in the mountains for August). Amazing what a 2000-foot change in elevation makes — Planet Georgia is like a sauna, with temperature and humidity in the 90s, but we luxuriated in low-70s almost all weekend (and with temperatures that pleasant, who cares about humidity?).

Meanwhile, back at FAR Manor, M.A.E. had a relapse early Saturday morning. She called Mrs. Fetched’s mom, who took her back to the hospital — but got a doctor who she knew. This guy had a little bit more on the ball than the ER doc; he (correctly) figured out it was gallstones and admitted her to the hospital. Thanks to the magic of cellphones, we found out fairly quickly what was up and Mrs. Fetched called M.A.E.’s aunt and grandmother in Florida. They grabbed a flight and were there in short order. With everything under control, we came home Sunday afternoon as scheduled; the hospital wasn’t exactly out of the way, so we went there first. M.A.E. was kind of in and out of it, between the pain and the pain meds, but we had a nice chat with the aunt (she and I have this in common: we both hate Lotus Notes). Mrs. Fetched sent Daughter Dearest and me on our way to pick up a prescription and then go home and unpack.

Word this morning: the surgeon removed what he called “the worst-looking gall bladder I ever saw” and told M.A.E. she has to stay in the hospital one or two more days. I think the hospital is going to help M.A.E. apply for Medicaid, because that’s probably the only way they’ll ever get paid. By the time she gets out, M.A.E. won’t have had a cig in five days. Here’s hoping she extends that particular record.

The No Juice Blues

Current music: Lift It - World-Wide Message Tribe

Sing it with me…

Well, my laptop battery’s dead,
It’s power supply’s gone flaky,
Another hour before I go to bed,
And my hands are getting shaky —

My laptop, …
It’s got the No Juice Blues.

I’ve known the battery has been going bad for some time now. The power supply issue kind of snuck up on me in the last day or so.

Fortunately, I have a couple of fallbacks: I can use Daughter Dearest’s power supply, as long as I don’t keep it. My other fallback is the old beige G3 in M.A.E.’s room. It's about eight years old now, and still gets nearly daily use. Then people wonder why I insist on buying Macs.

This isn’t good

M.A.E. was complaining of back pain early this morning — it got her up and into the shower at 7:30 a.m., before anyone else was moving. That’s unusual to the point of being unique. Mrs. Fetched told her she would call the chiro-cracker to see if they could set up an emergency appointment.

After getting home just a few minutes ago, Daughter Dearest filled me in on the rest of it. She went to the chiro-cracker, then came home and started feeling sick. When she started throwing up blood around 4 p.m. (which is not what I would call a good sign), Mrs. Fetched took her to the hospital. And there they are as of now.

So if you’re the praying type, pray for M.A.E. Good thoughts, well-wishes, etc., are also appreciated.

UPDATE (9:06 p.m.): Thanks Katie, and everyone else who is reading. I heard from Mrs. Fetched about a half-hour ago; the docs haven’t figured out what’s going on. M.A.E.’s white blood cell count is elevated, which indicates an infection of some sort but they don’t know why it would be causing back & chest pain.

LAST UPDATE (9:47 p.m.): She’s home. The problem is a lower respiratory infection, for which she has been prescribed antibiotics. And I guess we’ll crank up the “quit smoking” nags a few more notches.

The Rise of the Creator-Consumer, Part II

Continued from Part I

II. The Producer

The phone rings. Husband and wife look at each other for a moment, and he says, “I’ve got it, I’m closer.” There’s nothing on anyway, he thinks — perhaps as close as it gets to “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” for him.

“Hi Dad!” came the voice of his son over the line, more cheerful than usual as of late. “I’m over at Jim’s, just wanted to let you guys know.”

“OK,” he says. “Doing anything interesting?”

His son laughs. “Just making a movie. Jim got a camcorder for his birthday. Do you think I could get one for my birthday too?”

“Um…” A memory stops him. Through the eyes of a younger self, waiting for his mom to pick up her pictures at the local camera shop, he stares wistfully at the Super-8 movie camera on the shelf behind the counter. He remembers a dream, boldly walking into the old abandoned house down the street, camera rolling, ready to interview a ghost. He would have been famous — but that camera was as out of reach financially as it was physically. That movie maker was gone, but…

“I’ll talk to your mother about it,” he says at last. “But your birthday’s in February — we’ll see how your grades look once school starts up.”

“I’ll get straight As if that’s what it takes!”

“I’ll hold you to that. Say hi to Paul for me, and be home by ten.”

“Ten… yeah. That’s enough time. Thanks, Dad! Bye!”

***

“You can stay ’til ten, Kyle?” asked Jim, as Kyle hung up the phone.

“Yeah, and I might get a camcorder for my birthday, if my grades are good.”

“That’s… seven months from now,” Tony said, counting on his fingers. “Maybe you could get it for Christmas, that would be better.”

“We’ll talk about it later,” Kyle said. “Let’s get these last two scenes done — we’ve only got two hours to wrap this up.”

“It’s not like we’re on a schedule or anything,” Tony laughed. “We can finish up tomorrow if we have to. It’s more important that we do it right.”

“You haven’t seen the comments page, have you?” Jim retorted. “There’s at least fifty of ’em, everyone’s all, ‘Hey, when’s Episode III coming out?’ We can’t leave ’em hanging.”

“OK,” Kyle picked up Tony’s script. “We still haven’t figured out how to wake up the crew — or why we’re awake to begin with. We’re all getting up from the table when the red light starts flashing — Tony, is the foot switch where you can hit it? Good, turn it off. We’re going to dub in the buzzer, right? Then we have do the bridge scene, where we see the asteroids.”

“And that’s the end of Episode III,” Tony grinned. “It’ll give us a month to figure out how we’re going to get out of it in Episode IV.”

“Let’s do it,” said Jim, turning on his dad’s halogen work lights and starting the camera. “Places, everyone,” as he grabbed a chair in front of the solid blue wall.

Continued in Part III

Three fools in a pool

The Boy, me, and Daughter Dearest at the resort last weekend. I have since had major bush-hogging done to my hair.

The Rise of the Creator-Consumer, Part I

This is a true story. That’s not to say I saw it happen, but I have seen its light shining from sites like Blogger, MySpace, and YouTube; its shadows cast across the living rooms of American households. It’s my story, and yours too... if you let it be.

I. The Passives

Another near-silent family supper is over. “Family” supper, although the four of them sat together for maybe two minutes with all the late arrivals and early leavings. Being (as he thinks) an enlightened kind of guy, he carries his dishes to the sink before entering the sanctuary of his living room. He bows to the altar of his lounge chair, picking up the remote before dropping himself onto the altar, presenting himself a living sacrifice of another evening to his one-eyed god. His god asks little of him but attention, and usually fills his empty evenings with empty entertainment in return.

But there’s no ball game on tonight, and nothing else strikes him as particularly interesting as his slack-jawed, belly-scratching worship carries him from channel to channel. He looks up as his wife comes in from the kitchen, having loaded the dishwasher and left the pots to soak in the sink. She looks past him as she settles into her own chair, picking up the romance novel from the lampstand.

He watches her for a while, pretending to watch the TV. She turns a page, then another; her expressionless face could be mistaken for a mask of anger.

That’s not the best she’s ever looked, he thinks; an echo suggests he has little to talk about. Sighing, he points to his god once again and communes. Persistence may be rewarded.

Continued in Part II

Go Back To Shopping, America

D-Day lays out our whole economic dilemma in one fine rant. In a nutshell, if we don’t spend ourselves into bankruptcy we’ll bring down the economy.

Anyone who has been out of debt for 33 years is worth listening to.

The Boy: America in Microcosm?

Current music: BassDrive

The Boy has done yet another one of his in&out maneuvers. He came home Friday evening, and flaked off back to the New Party House Wednesday night after going to see a movie with M.A.E. Amazingly(?), this came after he started looking for a job and Big V offered him one when their regular guy quit. Of course, there were strings attached to the job, like getting a haircut and putting the hardware in his pocket (he has chunky pointy earrings and a lip ring that even his friends think looks stupid). There’s also the minor detail of cigarette addiction (we’ve been after M.A.E. to quit too). He supposedly has also embraced Rastafari, but I’ll bet you a beer that he can’t tell you who Haile Selassie is or what he signifies to Rastafari — his supposed conversion is probably exactly what you would guess it is. (I’m still trying to figure out whether white people are even allowed to be Rastas… if anyone who knows happens to be reading, please feel free to comment.)

So I was huffing and puffing on the evil exerbike last night, when I started thinking about how The Boy’s self-destructive behavior is a small-scale version of what our nation is doing to itself:

• The Boy is using Rastafari to justify his ganja use; America picks and chooses parts of the Bible to justify a selfish, judgmental lifestyle that has little to do with either Judaism or Christianity.


• As The Boy is addicted to nicotine, so is America addicted to oil. Both use their addiction as an excuse to continue doing what they want — and both will continue until it’s too late, most likely.


• The Boy and America both want what they want, and want it right now.


• Neither The Boy nor America is looking ahead 20 years (or even two years) to see where their respective paths are leading.


• Neither seem to respect nor care for anyone else, no matter how much those others love them.

It’s difficult to stand by and watch both The Boy and the nation going to hell in a handbasket. But I have very little influence over either one. I do what I can about them both, but I fear it’s not enough.

Too much happening!

Work is driving me nutz. Home is driving me nutz. Got a long weekend coming a week from now though, and I’ll probably take Solar up on his invite & go roast myself in Florida next month. Then we have a week of vacation scheduled in September. Just gotta hang on a little longer.

The Boy has been partly the reason I haven’t been writing, and partly the inspiration for an upcoming essay. I’m also trying to wrap up a rather long essay on the rise of the creator-consumer, which fortunately lends itself to serialization.

Just got off the evil exerbike (puff, puff) and have some bread in the oven. This is the first night in a long time that I haven’t had to run out and pick up somebody. Yesterday would have been it, except that a friend of The Boy and his mom were out of gas & I got drafted to help them. At least they paid for their (and my) gas.

Back to it....

Musical humor

Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) is perhaps the first US Senator to be immortalized with a techno remix of his infamous “series of tubes” speech. Absolutely hilarious!

The $3/gal threshold

This hit home yesterday... gas prices have stayed just under $3/gal here for a while now. At that price, if you use two gallons per day on your commute to work & back, working at home two days per week saves enough on gas to pay a $40 DSL bill each month.

So if you're trying to convince your spouse that you need broadband (or need to keep it), here’s your ammo.

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign

Sometimes, it’s best to bring the camera along instead of wishing you had.

A bus stop bench near where my uncle Sonny used to live. Look carefully at the model (click on the pic to get a bigger image).


If I could choose my clients, it might not be a bad deal!

I had a look inside. It was full of spelling books.


I’ll bet he’s against gay marriage. Only a Republican would miss the irony....

DSL fixed, no longer neutered

Whew.

The No DSL Blues

Awhell came out and fixed our noisy phone lines yesterday, but the line technician must have goobered the DSL at the same time. A call to customer support got a promise for someone to come out... tomorrow.

Daughter Dearest is having net.withdrawal symptoms, and I’m glomming an open wireless network after dropping M.A.E. off at her work.

World Cup Headbutting analysis

There was more to the Zidane headbutting incident in the World Cup final that we were aware of. Now we know, thanks to more quality journalism by The Register!

Falling flat

Heading home from work Wednesday, quick stop along the way to pick up a couple of pizzas. Between that, a coffee, and lunch, the $80 I got in the morning was half gone — and it was supposed to last through Friday.

Off the four-lane, heading into town, the car wanted to stay straight in the curves so I backed off a bit. Hunh? I thought I’d imagined it, until I got to the next curve... definitely something going on. A second later, the rumbling from the front of the car told me what was going on: I’d borrowed ten miles too many from those Bald Eagles on the front. $#!+!!!

The Civic is built to be a practical means of getting from Point A to Point B. However, it is also versatile enough to be turned into a teenager’s wet dream machine — and Splat’s older brother did his level best with it before he had to buy a truck and sold the thing to us. One of his little trick additions was this monster speaker box, nestled in the trunk behind the back seats (which can be pulled down as shown here), complete with a 200W amp. It works pretty well with Goa trance and other music where deep bass is a primary component, but the box normally sits on top of the spare tire and can’t be pulled out of the trunk. I'm going to whap this guy over the head next time I see him.

I took the few other things I have in the trunk out (a change of clothes and a box with brake fluid and oil, basic stuff you should carry with you anyway) and pushed the box back as far as it would go — pulling some wires out along the way, dangit — but I had enough room to wedge a dead UPS battery under the thin sheet of plywood to raise it up. I called the house and Mrs. Fetched said they would come out ASAP, so I got back to work. Naturally, the wingnut holding down the fake spare was really hard to turn, and I didn’t have any pliers with me. I got out my Swiss Army knife (Victorinox, don’t leave home without it), wedged the screwdriver blade into a slot, and finally got it to turn. I was pulling the fake spare out when Mrs. Fetched and The Boy arrived: just in time, because there’s not a jack in the car either. At this point, I was ready to commit nephewcide, but The Boy was in a more practical frame of mind and started jacking the car up. I had a spinner lug wrench, so I was at least able to get the nuts loose.

The fake spare was a little low on air — about 20 PSI when it should have 60 — so I went really slow for the two miles it took to get to the gas station. I fortunately had a couple of quarters to run the air pump (leave it to oil companies to figure out a way to charge for air) so I was able to get home without further mishap. This particular gas station has a Subway in it, and The Boy grabbed an application for Subway. He missed the “Drug-Free Workplace” sticker, so I pointed it out to him in the car.

“I can always get a detox kit,” he said, naming a couple of brands and incidentally admitting (in a left-handed sort of way) that he has been using. (Gotcha!)

Should he stay or should he go now?

We interrupt this series of essays for another round of real life.

Here’s one of the few points on which The Boy and Mrs. Fetched aren’t alike: when she wants something, she goes straight for the jugular; he usually takes a few trips around the bushes before homing in.

We came home from church Sunday to find a message from The Boy on the answering machine: “Hi, I was wondering if you would come and get me,” and some other ramblings, but he didn’t quite get around to saying “I want to come home.” We called the number he left (on my smellphone because it was another smellphone that was long-distance from our landline). Once we got the connection established, which took a minute of “Hello? Can you hear me now? Is this better? You’re breaking up, you’re breaking up, that’s better,” (Stinkular claims the fewest dropped calls, probably because it’s hard to get one started) I got the kid (who turned out to be the one who ran up $570 worth of airtime on The Boy’s phone) to pass the phone to The Boy.

“Hey, don’t worry about it, I’ve got a ride.”

“Are you coming home?”

“Everything’s okay, you don’t have to come get me.”

“Are you coming home?”

“It was good talking to you.”

“Are you coming home!!?!??”

“Bye.”

Somewhat concerned about his state of mental health, we went over to the place he said he’d called from. Cousin Splat’s truck (which used to be Lobster’s) was there, the significance of which will become apparent later. He came outside, while his two friends reluctantly went back in, and we chatted for a while before Mrs. Fetched started one of her screeds while I tried to get a word in edgewise. The upshot was, he wasn’t ready to come home yet, and he was still looking for a job. Yeah, I thought, good luck finding a job with a lip ring, chunky earrings, and your hair hanging in your face. I must have actually said it, because he said he took the lip ring out and pushed his hair back on interviews. Not like it helps much... he can almost get a job for a long time.

So we went our way, he stayed where he was, and then thunderstorms and Mrs. Fetched made it a No Computer Day. We (Daughter Dearest, Mrs. Fetched, me) played Yahtzee and Uno on the porch and I wrote about two-thirds of another essay (on paper!) that I hope will see the light of blog shortly.

Home from work yesterday, nobody home, (as usual) no supper, and my muffler CAME LOOSE ON THE WAY HOME. I had just enough time to send off some emails I wrote through the day at work before Mrs. Fetched came in and gave me the latest news of the free-range insane asylum that I sometimes call Planet Georgia. Turns out that the party house, where he usually stays when he’s not here, has been a bone of contention between the woman who owns it and her ex-husband. The guy apparently has the upper hand at the moment, because the house reverted to his ownership at midnight last night. This wouldn’t be an issue for me at all, except that The Boy’s car has been stranded there since the female who (unbeknownst to him) turned out to be in a mailbox theft ring asked to “borrow” his car (intending to run for it) one night last month. The ditzbag put diesel in it, leaving it in a non-running state, and abandoned it nearby. Now if he’d had his head on straight and had a job, this wouldn’t have been any big deal: a couple tanks of gas, fuel filter, and new spark plugs would have got it right back on the road. But he didn’t even have money for gas, let alone the rest, so they ran it dry and it’s been sitting there ever since.

Now the new owner of the house had informed his ex that she was to have everything cleared out of the house and off the property by midnight, and he’d have the car towed if it wasn’t moved. So there goes my evening, including supper… Mrs. Fetched’s idea of addressing a problem is to do something NOW; whether it makes progress toward actually solving the problem is of less importance. Knowing the car was out of gas, even if it would start, we grabbed a gas can and went over there. Turned out one of the jerks who had been hanging out there with The Boy stole the keys (and was on the run for other thefts). Some of the other kids who lived there gathered up his backpack (including his diabetes medication) and the one insulin pen he had with him. We went back home and found the other set of keys, dumped some gas in, and I cranked it until the battery started to run down, getting nothing but a feeble cough for our trouble. I figured the plugs were fouled. This we did until it was time to get M.A.E. from her job (which she has held longer than any of her others, hooray!). We used the bathroom at the nearby Kroger to wash up, just before midnight, and I bought a pack of sushi for my supper before going to Toxic Bell for the wimmin (neither of whom were about to eat sushi, although Mrs. Fetched’s shellfish allergy is a legit excuse). At this point, I had neither the time, energy, nor inclination to look at the muffler.

Morning arose, Mrs. Fetched faux-reluctantly woke me up and gave me the phone number for the towing service we usually use when we have car trouble. The plan was to try yanking and cleaning the spark plugs on The Boy’s car, if it was still there and the new homeowner was inclined to be reasonable, and hope the sucker would start — and if not, we would have it towed to our mechanic. I arrived just before 9 (no breakfast) in the old Barge, which is pretty much full of tools because it‘s the farm vehicle, to find the house empty. I figured I’d talk to the guy if he showed up, called into work to get a personal day, and started on the car.

A half hour later, I was ready to take the pliers I had in hand and twist the nuts off the engineer who thought it was a good idea to mount a V-6 engine sideways. How do they get those backside plugs out, anyway??? I gave up and called the tow service, who told me it would be an hour before they could get there. I managed to waste most of an hour by staring at a small tree, then pulled up the news about the Mumbai bombings on my smellphone, then it started ringing. Mrs. Fetched said she would be coming with the checkbook, because they would want to be paid right away, friends were calling for this and that, and that was fine because it killed some time. I spent the last 15 minutes out at the road, finding a spot both shady and having a good signal, and the tow truck showed up only five minutes late. We (I say “we” because I steered while he ran the winch) got the car onto the truck well before Mrs. Fetched arrived. Surprisingly, she had The Boy, who was now ready to admit that he wanted to come home. Oh, and incidentally, his PlayStation and games were probably buried in all the stuff everyone moved out of the former party house last night. After a brief attempt to find it (she moved to the next house down), he figured it would turn up later and we went to get some lunch.

The Boy walked to Big V’s to ask her about working for their landscaping business (no), then we got the dangling muffler off the back of the car and DROVE IT TO THE SHOP. My day was pretty well shot for working by this point, so I didn’t even bother trying. But it wasn’t long before he wanted to go to Devil’s Elbow, a people’s park of sorts where there are several high jumps and rope swings (some rather extreme) over the river. I let him borrow my swim suit — he weighs 196 pounds now, probably his lowest weight since his early teens, so it fits him — and a friend we know came to get him.

A couple hours later, Big V calls looking for Cousin Splat (who hasn’t been home in a couple of weeks himself, and lost a good job at Kroger over something really stupid — right after getting a promotion), since there are some insurance issues with the truck. I suggested they check at Devil’s Elbow, since I heard The Boy mention something about Splat meeting them. Off they went, then the phone started ringing (waking up Mrs. Fetched from her nap) with this person or that wanting to talk to her. I think it was Lobster’s mom on the line when I saw Big V and her husband pull up. Splat wasn’t at the Elbow, nor were any of the others. Hmmmm. They got in Barge Vader to go looking for Splat (and The Boy) — they immediately found The Boy at the same place we found him Sunday, and one of his friends knew where Splat was.

So at this point, I’m not sure whether he’s ready to come home — or be home — or not. I don’t think he does, either. He said he’d mow the lawn when he got home… how many feet high will it be by then?

Why They Get Away with It

We’ve all seen them or dealt with them: they cut in line, or they shoplift stuff & try to “return” it, or they scuttle our weekend plans, or they tell people who don’t agree with their politics that we hate America, hate our troops, doing their worst to project their own hate onto us (and then accuse us of being “mean” or “angry” when we fight back). Basically, those who do any of the million and one things that violate that most uncommon of all things, “common” courtesy. And they get away with it, almost all of the time.

Why? Because the rest of us let them.

On the way home from work today, I turned off the radio, pocketed the iPod, and gave this one a little thought. People act like @$$h013s for a reason, and that reason is because it works. But why does it work? Because, again, we let it work. But why do we let them get away with it? That’s a little more complex, and sometimes different situations have different answers....

• Maybe we’re feeling too unmotivated to do anything about it, or we don’t feel as strongly about the situation as the @$$h013 apparently does. A nice way of saying we’re too lazy to stand up for ourselves (sometimes, we won’t stand up for ourselves as readily as we would for someone else).


• Perhaps we’ve been conditioned, via strict parenting or parochial school or some other means, to meet the expectations of others. The @$$h013 knows (or senses) this, and make its expectations clear so the rest of us know to meet them.


• Sometimes, we’re just intimidated or shocked into inaction by the breathtaking effrontery of the @$$h013.

It’s not always enough to call the @$$h013 on its behavior; those who have been there know that brazening it out is often the best way to go. Oliver North is the perfect example — in my opinion, there’s someone who should have been tried for and convicted of treason (defined in the Constitution as “making war on the United States, or giving aid and comfort to its enemies”). He certainly gave aid & comfort to Iran, and at the time just about any American (in or out of government) would have defined Iran as an enemy. But he appeared before Congress, blamed them for all his wrongdoings, and walked away basically scot-free.

So if an @$$h013 jumps to the front of the line, and I (from a few places back) say something about it, the @$$h013 can simply ignore me. The only way I would be able to have any effect would be to walk up there and shove the @$$h013 out of line myself — becoming an @$$h013 myself, in a sense. But now I’m the bad guy, at least in the @$$h013’s eyes, because I escalated the situation into the physical realm. But the person who should have been next in line can confront the miscreant instead. That’s the person who has been directly wronged by the @$$h013’s behavior and thus can act from the high ground, so to speak.

Some Christians, and especially the neo-Pharisees that look so much like them, often natter about “taking a stand.” All too often, they end up being @$$h013s about whatever “stand” they take, forgetting the compassion without which there is nothing Christian about it (or them). But if we want a more polite society, we have to take a stand to enforce good manners, unfortunately. Mrs. Fetched, one day, saw someone park in a handicapped spot, hop out of his car, and walk toward the store. She yelled at him, “You must be mentally handicapped!” and he actually turned around and moved his car. We have often applauded cops writing tickets to people illegally parked in handicapped spots — I mean, Judas Priest, we could all use a little more exercise. One of my favorite TV news spots was one I saw while on vacation at Mom’s: the Tampa station covered a deputized wheelchair patrol, who were writing tickets to people parking in mall handicapped spots who didn’t need them. It was amusing to see the miscreants whining about how unfair it was, there were plenty of other spots, why did they have to get singled out, boo freeking hoo.

But that’s the modus operandi of the @$$h013 — nothing is their fault, they always have a good reason to believe their immediate need is more important than everyone else’s. In brief, they’ll try to project their @$$h013ry onto anyone who confronts them if we let them. I will close this with a great story that circulated in email a long time ago:

A man pushed his way to the front of a long line at an airport ticket counter, demanding that he get his boarding pass right away. “Sir,” the attendant told him, “you’ll have to wait in line with everyone else.”

“But this is important!” the line-cutter protested.

“I understand that,” the attendant replied, “but all these people have to be served, and their needs are important too. Please get in line and we’ll take care of you.”

The line-cutter flushed. “Do you know who I am!?” he barked.

The attendant picked up the pager microphone and told the entire airport, “Attention, please. We have a passenger here who does not know who he is! If anyone can identify him, please come to the XXX ticket counter.” That was enough to embarrass the @$$h013, who slunk to the back of the line, while the rest of the passengers clapped and cheered the attendant.

Cool Program – Journler

I stumbled across Journler in a MacDevCenter post today, and it took about 10 minutes to get me hooked — at last, I can write posts offline and send them directly to Blogger when I’m ready. I really need to send Phil a check.

I do have a couple of nits that I hope he’ll fix:

• import of an existing blog (with comments?)


• blockquote style


• Blogger titles; option to save as draft


• smart quotes

I have a feeling I’ll be spending a lot of time inside this application.

How much is enough?

A recent post from The Homeless Guy prompted me to think about this while I was in front of my blog for a change. He wrote, “I think I've finally learned to be content with whatever I have, or don't have. Thats a big step for me, as I think it would be for any homeless person.” HG, that’s a big step for anyone. In my book, you’re ahead of 99% of the population, homeless or no.

That kind of contentment is not only hard to gain, I can testify to how easily it can be lost —and not always by your own doing. Before FAR Manor, we lived in a double-wide about a half mile from here (the rental property I’ve mentioned from time to time). Sure, it wasn’t a huge place, but we added onto it and the total climate-controlled area was nearly 1800 square feet. Yes, it was cluttered. Yes, it was a little cramped in the kids’ rooms. But the arfing thing was totally paid off, it was secluded to an extent that most people east of the Mississippi can’t even fathom (1/4 mile to the nearest neighbor), and we were barely keeping up with the bills we had at the time. To say I was content there may have been a stretch — the chicken houses and the in-laws were constant irritations then as now — but I was content to live there. Mrs. Fetched would complain that we needed a bigger house, and I would point out (rightly so, IMO) that we didn’t need more house, we needed less stuff. The Boy and I put up a nice deck out back that I could get to from the bedroom; I would take my coffee out there in the morning, and sit out there on pleasant evenings and irritate the squirrels by imitating their territorial calls.

But I digress. It seems like most people have a broken “enough” switch — look at Bill Gates; he has more money than... probably any random million people or so, but it’s only recently that he’s been able to stop. The one thing I would have wanted to say to him if I ever met him: how much is enough? Even Mrs. Fetched would have a hard time spending $30 billion — I believe she could do it, but it would take her a lot of effort.

Maybe somebody was able to ask him that question, and he listened. I think most of us would be better off if we considered that question, and came up with our own answer.

Programmers. Argh (2.0)

Seagull: someone who makes a lot of noise, craps all over everything, then flies away.

It’s been a while since the last one of these, before I started Tales from FAR Manor in fact.

One of my recurring work projects is a four-volume set of software firmware documentation — one volume each for features, provisioning (i.e. installation and configuration), management, and troubleshooting. These are the “wonk” documents, as opposed to the consumer documents. I depend pretty heavily on the developers (i.e. programmers) to get me the information that I need to put into these documents, and their usual modus operandi is to wait until the last minute and drop a ton of changes on me.

On occasion, some of the things they want just, as Mrs. Fetched says, “get all over me.” In Programmers. Argh. 1.0, it was a request to add text to the manual, verbatim, that contained a howling grammatical error. This one is a bit more complicated, and started a couple of months ago with this request:

We *really* need section numbers in the documentation. I am asked *all the time* to explain how certain features work. I would like to just reference the correct guide and section number for the answer. With the way the document is structured, I have to go into the document and find a *string* to reference that can be searched on to find the information.

Now you have to remember that this is a programmer manager asking for section numbers. I haven’t used section numbers in customer documentation in nearly 20 years, and 98% of what I’ve done was for technically-oriented audiences. Not to mention that section numbers really wouldn’t solve his problem: the manual needs a better index, and he can use page numbers to refer them to the right place. I need to do a better job of indexing, I’ll be the first to admit, but the thing that bothers me is that they didn’t even think to include me in the discussion, or even forward any kind of post-mortem to me. I like getting comments about my work, so I can make it better (and if you, yes you, are wondering whether I want comments on my blog, the answer is yes).

Now it was my turn to make a mistake: I quickly wrote a response, saying pretty much what I just wrote, and Notes (once again) came up b0rk3n. I saved the reply in my Drafts folder and promptly forgot about it until it came up again.

Fast-forward to last week. Here come the comments, courtesy of the guy who pulled 1.0 on me, and guess what was at the top of the list? I started looking for the original request and found the response in Drafts. Cursing Notes and the IT department that forces us to use it, I updated the reply and sent it off. The bit-munchers were copying everything to my new boss, which only irked me more — not only do I suspect them of deliberately waiting to drop all their comments at the last minute so I’ll be the one late and officially holding up the release (giving them more time to fix their problems), they are trying to make me look bad to my boss. I sent him the general history of the project, including the stuff that has gone on before, and suggested he contact previous managers for confirmation.

He dug in, I dug in. You can’t out-flame a writer, and he probably knew that: all he had to do was stonewall until it was time for him to leave on two weeks vacation. But he may come back to find the company short one tech writer. One of my co-workers helped to diffuse the situation somewhat, arranging (and refereeing) a meeting between me and this guy’s manager (who kicked off this particular request). We compromised: I agreed to put chapter numbers and titles in the headers, especially since I’d planned to do it in the first place, and he agreed to start copying me on customer squawks that involved documentation. But I’m still pretty cheesed about the whole thing.

Time to find my resume and start emailing, I guess.

There's a sign...

... on the road ahead... and it says: “JOB BURNOUT - KEEP GOING.”

The question is: where do I turn off?

Half-right

A while back, I wrote that Ken Lay (and Jeff Skilling) would stay out of jail because Bush-league would write them pardons on his way out the door. As it turned out, I was half-right — Ken Lay will never spend a day in jail — but I got the reason wrong.

That’s really too bad, and I truly do feel bad for Mrs. Lay. I’d hoped that Ken Lay would live for a long time... behind bars, of course. Skilling may have been just as involved, but he was lesser known and he might slip by with a pardon, if Bush-league remembers to give him one.

But this pretty much ends the Tale of Enron. Skilling’s appeal and eventual sentencing (and possible pardon) really only rates an afterword or appendix.

Future boom regions

I'm no sociologist, but that’s never stopped me from pontificating.

In a world of change, one constant is that there is always a boom region — a place where people move en masse for whatever reason is in vogue at the moment. California comes to mind: the 1849 gold rush, the Dust Bowl migrations during the Great Depression, and the dot-boom of the late 1990s (that became the dot-bomb of 2001) are probably three of the better-known examples. Southerners moved to Detroit and other midwestern locales through the 1940s and 1950s to work in the auto factories, and midwesterners returned the favor during the Sun Belt migration of the 1970s and 1980s. And until last year, it seemed like everyone was moving to Florida — although now many Floridians no longer think the warm winters are compensation enough for a summer of hurricanes, and are moving to high ground (often around here).

Predicting where and when the next booms will happen is a guessing game, but I see trends pointing to two places in particular during the next 25 years:

Michigan (and the entire Great Lakes region)
One word: water. Many southwestern (and even southeastern) boom areas are straining to get enough water for drinking, irrigation, and industry. Eventually, they’ll need water more than warm weather — and what with global warming, Michigan’s winters are getting milder (I remember when snow cover all winter was normal, now it comes and goes). Naturally, the dry states will resist the trend, expecting the Great Lakes region to just give them water. In fact, their first attempt went down in flames some years ago. There will be a nasty political fight over water sooner or later, but many people will give up waiting and move their homes and businesses to a place where water supplies are reliable.

Europe
An excellent infrastructure coupled with a declining population makes Europe another likely destination, although there are some factors that may limit or kill the boom a-borning: lingering tribalism (the EU notwithstanding) and a little too much government for some peoples’ tastes are the two major ones. But with fewer Europeans, property values will begin declining and businesses (and governments) will start offering incentives for skilled foreigners to immigrate, and many people (especially liberal and moderate Americans, fed up with their own government) will take the plunge.

Of course, I could be totally wrong — things can change overnight and the next boom could be in Thailand or Namibia, for all I know. You, dear readers, might have your own ideas about future boom regions — leave a comment or a link if you’re inclined.

Argh! My eyes!

Yesterday, I came in from doing something or other, and walked down the hall toward my bedroom. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement as I passed M.A.E.’s room, and made the mistake of looking. There she was, in her underwear, putting something on. Good thing she was sideways to me, because she wears thong bottoms. Yeesh.

I went eyes forward as quickly as possible and continued down the hall, hearing her door slam behind me. I’m still trying to decide whether I should scrub my eyeballs with iodine or bleach.

Uncle John

Family Man posts a lot of great stories; today’s was about The Hay Field. It reminded me of a story about Uncle John, a colorful character who is the genesis of many family stories. Uncle John was the oldest of my dad’s brothers, has been a farmer all his life, and... shall we say, has a bit of a temper. I actually saw him go toe-to-toe with an uncooperative horse once, and the horse decided to cooperate.

But Family Man wrote about his experiences in a hay field, so the first story is one my dad told me about a hay field. He and Uncle John were getting ready to bale some hay — it was cut and dry and ready to go. So just as they started, it started to rain (and as Family Man said, that’s not good news). So Uncle John raised his face and his fist to the sky and started cussing the rain — and it stopped. He cussed it right back into the sky.

In his later years, he developed diabetes and lost circulation in his legs. They amputated one leg, and then the other some time later. So he’s laying in the hospital bed after the second amputation and a male nurse came in to get some information. He asked about name, address, date of birth, then said, “How tall are you?”

“I don’t know,” Uncle John replied. “The doctor didn’t tell me how much he cut off.” The nurse got so flustered he walked out. He gets around pretty well with prosthetics and a walker — he needs a little help getting on and off his tractor, but he’s fine once he’s in the seat.

His farm is 105 acres in southwest Michigan, in an area that’s turned into a bedroom community for several of the nearby cities, and the subdivisions have grown up all around him. He just keeps on doing his thing. Every once in a while, developers come by and ask him if he’s willing to sell his place; his response usually boils down to, “Get your @!&$##& #$!@!! the $&#@&! off my property!”

Old farmers can be among the most stubborn folks on God’s green earth.

Friday Night Cinema

You get paid on Friday... next Friday... and you don’t have time to drag yourself to the theater anyway.

Tonight’s selection is a horror flick... or it would be horrifying if you could only stop laughing at the soundtrack. Go watch it and see I’m right.

Soundtrack: Jonathan Coulton

Video/machinima: Mike “Spiff” Booth, a program manager at Adobe. If he manages FrameMaker, I understand why the thing has been languishing lately: he’s too busy making silly machinima to pay attention to his product. :-P j/k!!!

We have network

I have to hand it to Alltel — the new DSL box came in today, the most optimistic end of the 3–5 days the support guy said it would take. The CD had been shoved into the box at an odd angle and came out warped, but it wasn’t difficult to locate the disk that came with the old DSL box and use that instead.

With the DSL working again, I quickly realized that the Airport hub had taken a hit in the Ethernet port as well. I had just enough time to get to Office Max before they closed and grabbed a D-Link router. It didn’t take long to set it up and get it talking to the DSL box, and it has a built-in 4-port Ethernet hub so I took the Netgear hub out.

Daughter Dearest is ecstatic, and I’m pretty happy too because I can work at home tomorrow.

Work stuff

Some brief scenes of work lately....

I got moved to a different cube last week, after being told I wasn’t moving, which in turn came after I was told to get packing. This was the first time I’ve moved cubes where it wasn’t part of a group move: instead of grabbing boxes off a stack and told to pack up everything, a Facilities person did 90% of the job for me. He moved all the stuff that wasn’t on my desk (taking drawers or the entire piece of furniture), and all I had to do was clear the desk and set up my phones and computer at the new cube.

The new cube is an improvement, although it would have been hard to find a worse cube than the one I just left after several years: near a main traffic area, across from the training room (the trainer’s voice carries and he leaves the door open, not to mention the equipment noise), as far away from windows as possible. The new cube is near a window, and there’s a little chit-chat and equipment noise, but nothing my headphones can’t drown out.

One problem: the keyboard support was broken. I emailed the Facilities guy asking for a replacement, preferably with a mouse surface. So yesterday I came in to find a new platform on the floor and a Ryobi 18V drill in its case. When the assistant didn’t show up after an hour, I took drill in hand and did the five-minute transplant job myself. It’s a great stand; enough room to use it for lunch (after moving the keyboard).

Last night, I sat down and made a list of all the things I’d like to do given the time, or see happen in general. I might post it later, but none of the work-related items had anything to do with my current employment. Scary.

What The Boy hasn’t learned

That could actually be the subject of a voluminous blog in its own right, but for now we’ll limit it to one thing: he hasn’t learned that “magic” words only work on machinery.

I came home from work yesterday, to exactly what I expected: no supper. Fine, whatever, I had some last photos to shoot for a work thing and had picked up two MOVs to fix a surge protector. While retrieving a tripod for the photos, Mrs. Fetched rolled in. I didn’t say anything, just went into the outbuilding and shot the photos.

I needed a Phillips screwdriver to get into the surge protector (one of those nice old Isobar models that have screws holding the case together — not something you want to throw away if you can salvage it), and didn’t have it in the outbuilding. I came back out to find Mrs. Fetched dumping gas into her Barge and the detached garage opened up.

“We need to make sure the windows in the garage don’t open,” she told me. “The Boy said he’s going to get his guitars and amps tomorrow, and he’s not getting them until he pays us for the phone bill.” Neither one of us said the obvious: he probably wanted to sell them to buy drugs. I forgot to mention: last weekend, he admitted his friend borrowed his phone and pretty much stayed on it constantly, running up $600 worth of airtime (putting the girlies to shame). Mrs. Fetched demanded his phone, he threw a tantrum and left, and Mrs. Fetched had his number suspended first thing Monday. So with that in mind, I went back into the outbuilding and finished what I was doing (the new order: I’m not suspending anything for anybody in this free-range insane asylum). Then I picked up a two-by-four laying around, measured out the right length, and fed it to the table saw.

Just in time: as I dropped the last board into place, I heard an unfamiliar car pull up. I quickly locked the garage, shut off the lights, and closed the last door just as The Boy stepped out.

“Is the garage unlocked?” he asked.

“No. Why?”

“I’m going to get my guitar and amp.”

“No you’re not. Not until you pay us the $600 for the phone.”

“F— that. Open the garage or I’ll bust a window.”

“Go right ahead if you want to get arrested,” I said. Mrs. Fetched came back outside, phone in hand, and heard the last exchange. “I’ll call the law!” she yelled, waving the phone.

The Boy walked right up to the door, perhaps he pushed it to see if it hadn’t latched, but decided not to call our (non-)bluff. “F— you! F— you!” he started screaming, walking back to the car (a wise move on his part... if he’d wanted a fight, in my frame of mind I’d have given him plenty more than he wanted).

“F— you right back,” I replied, with the appropriate gesture, as he got back in the car. “You think you’re going to just order us around and blow off your obligations to us, you’re wrong.” The girl at the wheel of this silver Grand Am (with an airbrushed “Kindra” plate on the front) waved at us a couple of times. Mrs. Fetched saw it as more provocation (anything she doesn’t understand is a provocation); I saw it as the futile gesture of someone trying to be helpful and wandering into the middle of something she didn’t want to be a part of.

He rolled down his window and screamed from the safety of the car, “You sell my stuff and I’ll sue you! I’ll sue you!”

“Nobody said anything about selling it,” Mrs. Fetched said with a minimum of heat. “You can have it as soon as we get the money for the phone bill.” He spat something about getting the money from his friend and they drove off. His last gesture was what old-timers would call a “V for Victory” sign — I’m not sure how kids interpret it.

Reruns of the Summer of Discontent are the last thing I need right now. Or maybe I need them as something to direct all my own anger toward. The less time I spend at FAR Manor for now, the better.