The Microsoft vehicle fleet
As I was sitting on the metered ramp from Hwy 87 to northbound 101 this morning, I noted with surprise that I was directly behind a Saturn Outlook sport-utility vehicle. I had not seen this particular model before, and the time of morning (7:30) combined with my lack of coffee caused a rather odd sequence of ideas to occur to me.
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Dangerously bored or distracted
It shouldn’t be difficult for anyone coming across this site to figure out that I work in technology, and have for years. Come to think of it, every job I’ve had since 1989 has been a high-tech job of one sort or another.
After 17 years in this industry, you start to notice some patterns. For me at least, there is a definite pattern to employment in technology. I first observed this back in the dot-com years, when the pattern may have been more noticable, or perhaps when I was simply in the right place to notice. (more…)
Time may change me
A few months may not change everything, but a lot of things can change in that time:
- Blog software (MT to WordPress)
- Blog host (my ISP, to a server that Rob kindly runs
- Writing status (I haven’t written a damn thing since March)
- Published authorship (My second book went on sale)
- and the biggie…
- Parental status
Yes. We’re expecting. (more…)
Ottoman Turkish Empire Settlement Payments
Of course it’s tax time here in the US, and I recently finished our taxes. I use TurboTax like I’ve done for years. As I went through all of the pages of interview questions, I came across something that I have not noticed in previous years. (more…)
Riley Part 4
The memory of the ancient redwood grove stayed with him all through his school years. It featured prominently in his dreams. His parents never took him back to Oregon after that trip. Mother went back to work shortly afterwards and his father was so obviously uninterested in traveling that any vacation time was related to school or youth organizations.
He was actively encouraged to join the boy scouts, and found there a profound love of nature and the outdoors. Still not social by nature, he spent many nights away from the campfire and the other scouts, listening to the wildlife, the forest or even the grass. Longer backpacking trips were what he really enjoyed, because once a base camp was established he could wander by himself all day through the trees. There were a few solitary times, alone there in the high forest, when he was able to once again experience the sense of wonder he had felt before. (more…)
The Year in Music
Many radio stations will take the last week of the year and play a "best of" selection of all the music the program director was paid to play. I’m sure the music video channels do this too, but I haven’t watched them in over a decade. We’ll assume that they do.
I wanted to do something similar, so I’ve picked out 19 songs that I first heard in 2005. Not all of them were released this year - the track from Hednoize dates back to 2000. I don’t care. This list to me is a list of songs I discovered in 2005, and which I think are good enough to tell people about.
If you know me at all (and you probably don’t), some of these tracks will not be surprising. I can just hear you saying "Ooo! U2, Depeche Mode and Tears For Fears! Could you drag your pasty white ass out of the 80s?!?" Bite me. I like what I like.
Riley Part 3
The sedan returned Katya to her house just after sunset. There were 17 small cottages here, spread over the grounds of a large Victorian mansion. A discreet sign on the gate outside the grounds named the property “Blackpool Spa & Resort�. Each cottage was painted a different color, hers was teal.
Her head thrummed with sound as she opened the front door. The technicians had told her this would happen. She had eardrops and a specific range of facial exercises to do. She was fully prepared – this had happened to the other sixteen already – so she had their experiences to draw support from.
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Riley Part 2
His name was not Riley. However, it suited his needs. A real name would never be known to anyone but himself. It had to be that way. His plan would not allow any deviation for personal reasons. The plan was too… well, too personal to permit such distraction.
It would be almost impossible to say when the plan itself took form. It had come into being over several decades. For his first 30 years at least, many parts of the plan were not even possible. The first recollection, the beginning of it all, could be traced back to his childhood.
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Riley Part 1
A strangely smooth-skinned man watched the surgical procedure begin. His eyes glowed a deep green in the fluorescent light. On the opposite side of a clear plexiglas window, his most recently acquired employee was prostrate on a surgical table, technicians and two robot manipulator arms surrounding her in a complex synchronized dance.
The patient, a woman, was not anesthetized in the traditional sense. She was simply unable to feel that her inner ears were slowly being replaced. At the beginning of the surgery, a robot arm equipped with a micro-dermal laser had sliced through her skin right below the ear and blocked the necessary nerves on each side of her head. The technicians had given her the option of watching the procedure, but she had declined and was instead reading a book with the aid of a page-turning assistant.
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Voices from the past
I’ve been listening to music as long as I can remember. My grandmother listened to old country: Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams Sr. My sisters exposed me to everything from Styx to the Beatles to *shudder* John Denver. Our household was fairly musical. My mother sang and played the piano. Most of my brothers and sisters were put through some sort of music lessons. I started piano at age 6, sang in the church choir after turning 12. So I’ve had an ear for melody and harmony for a long time. (more…)
