Grandfather

This is the elegy I wrote for my paternal grandfather on his passing....just thinking about him today.

I knew you only in the fullness

Of your days, the father of my father

With a stride to match your will

Unhindered by doubt or regret.

Your hands seemed eternal

Torn on fence posts

Crowned in cruel thorns

Always bigger than mine, those hands

No matter how big mine grew

Hands readied for rain, upturned in faith

Awaiting the promise of heaven

Fingers as roots, strong and gnarled

Grayed with time and the breaking of stone

Hands as strong as time.

Your voice mighty as mountains breaking

A billowing fiery tempest; alight in dry brush

Consuming all the holy rooms of your life

Seeking every opening, wanting a way in

To call the faithless to glory

I loved best your laughter

Low in the hollow of your throat;

A warm wind at dusk

Scented by tilled earth.

Grand father, you are an obstinate root

Deep in the land of our families;

Drawing strength from hidden pools,

Putting forth a flowering legacy.

21 Jump Street

This show has not aged well. However, it is worth watching until the 80's soundtrack becomes more than you can bear. Horrendous acting, poor writing...upside: Johnny Depp's first appearance.

Its the pick of the day at www.hulu.com

Kitschus Extremus!

Woodworking Footsteps...

Yesterday, I spent a couple of hours in the woodshop with Grayham, my nearly eight-year-old son.

He has been asking, for over a year, for a shelf unit to attach to his bunk bed. He needs the space to display his growing collection of Lego masterpieces, most of them Star Wars: Clone Wars related. He has been very patient, but recently his polite requests have increased in frequency. I had to take action.

So yesterday we took the measurements and discussed his requirements. Mostly it needs to accomodate his smaller models and have a back piece that he can customize with his sci-fi artwork. We spent two hours selecting and measuring wood, cutting it on the chop saw. I allowed him to make one cut, but did most of that cutting myself, while he laid out and marked the measurements.

With our pieces pre-cut we then decided it might be nice to have movable shelves, rather than fixed. To do this, we would have to drill a series of indexed holes in the side pieces to accomodate shelf pins. I have an acrylic index already, for use with a #6 drill. We carefully laid it all out with a square and ruler, mounted it on the drill press and got it all fired up.

Working with Grayham as he methodically pulled the drill lever 24 times was a real treat. He kept his eyes on the work, his mind on the depth gauge and his hands clear of danger areas. The end result was a finished piece that would have made a seasoned woodworker proud.

He then wanted to take a break and go for a walk in the crisp Autumn sunshine. Not wanting to push my luck on a job progressing well, I agreed. We will keep you posted as this project continues.

Creative Excitement

To all those that love good translations of fantasy to the large or small screen, two links:

The first is to an interview with Guillermo del Toro about the Hobbit:

http://www.totalfilm.com/features/guillermo-del-toro-on-making-the-hobbit/

As a director, del Toro is excellent and has made some really outstanding films (Hellboy 1&2, Pan's Labyrinth, The Devil's Backbone....) and teamed up with Peter Jackson producing. It's going to be great.

The second is to the current casting for George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire adaptation from HBO, due in 2010.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0944947/

This a majestic story of love, power, betrayal and lust. If HBO can make it with the same love and detail they put into Sopranos or Rome, it will be one to remember.

Google Wave Account Activated

My excellent friend, Erik just hooked me up with my Wave account. I am delving into it this afternoon. More on that later....

Head in the Clouds

As many of you know I have begun to embrace that slipperiest of all modern technologies, the cloud. I dont spend a lot of time actively searching out cloud news at the moment, but am always interested to hear about cool solutions on the software and hardware end. To that end, I saw this on Digg today and thought some of you nerds might find it interesting (link at bottom).

The things I love about it:

It's running open source tools

It's 67 freakin' TB

It's commodity tech

It's red

Check out the Backblaze

http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/

Google Dependence - The Sky Is Not Falling

I use gmail for all of my business communications and project planning. I depend on it. As an entrepreneur I also must take personal responsibility for my own business systems. I use Google so I make certain that I create backups of all of my critical content that lives in the cloud. This is just common sense.

The argument concerning scalability does not apply to me as I am a very small business, but I think the writing is on the wall. More and more of our content is going to be living on the web and we just need to adapt our computing practices to match. Backing up, thinking ahead and planning for failures seem to be things that humans consistently fail to do.

As people start taking Google Cloud apps more seriously I have no doubt that Google will throw more resources at creating ever more redundant systems. Outages have to be put in perspective. Five 9's is a great goal (99.999%) but I suspect the truth is that those numbers are highly relative. I am sure they are attainable but it takes time and resources. A more or less free offering can hardly be held to the same standard as a for pay system.

Modern people are too often caught in the moment and it seems that taking precautions against losing work or losing connectivity are rarely part of doing our daily work. Foresight people! Install Gears, sync offline, save local archive copies. Do your part in protecting yourself and then you can complain with a clearer conscience.

The cloud is not scary if you spend a a few hours sorting out an emergency plan. More on my own plan in the future. The cloud privacy issue is for another post...

UPDATE: As my good friend Randy pointed out, my post should have included something about the outage yesterday. My post was actually a reaction to this post at ZD. http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=5290&tag=nl.e539.

Open Office Options.

With the advent of Office 2007 the ribbon interface was introduced. Open Office now proposes a new look and feel to their popular alternative to the Microsoft Office suite. I'm not sure the introduction of such a controversial feature into my preferred open source Office alternative is such a great idea.

In the case of Microsoft Office, I did get used to it and eventually found it less annoying than many more rabid haters. I finally was frustrated by other issues and have now migrated away from the entire Office suite behind in favor of Open Office by Sun.

I love the simpler and more compact interface of the current Open Office. It is akin to Office in the 97-2000 versions and is a pretty faithful representation. Simple and straightforward.

At the same time there must be some reasoning behind this experiment and progress much march forward. I don't mind that the new Open Office ribbon clone is such direct rip-off of Microsoft, but I don't want it forced on me either.

Please Sun, make it optional and leave it in the hands of users to decide what interface they prefer.

Read More at Mary Jo's ZDNet blog.

Epiphany.

I love to write. Since I do so much writing and have done for many years, it came as a surprise to learn that my best writing happens in public. I know that this is nothing new for many, but I was raised with the concept of the cloistered writer, rising every morning with the sun (Asimov, King, etc.). Banging away in solitude. Treating it with a fully Lutheran midwest work ethic.

My favorite spot is close to coffee, always indoors (until they dramatically improve screen contrast) and in the company of mildly noisy, ocassionally nosy neighbors. I like to be interrupted and the background of life is a nice stress reliever.

On the flip side I like to design while watching movies that I have seen more than 10 times. Dirty Dozen comes to mind.

Go figure.

Anger Management.

Yesterday, while shopping at HOBO for new office cabinets, Susan called me with bad news. Apparently our cat Sootfoot, in an effort to jump into the basement window sash, decided that my new Dell 24" monitor would be a perfect staging area. He is a big cat and the monitor is a bit top heavy; the result: were one freaked out cat and one destroyed monitor.

After the inevitable moment of irritation, I thanked Susan for letting me know and went about my business. There was nothing either of us could do. The cat is naturally curious and LCD monitors are fragile. It hardly makes a difference how I feel about it. Being angry would only make everyone feel worse and likely shorten the life of my cat.

Today, my daughter hit my son. Not casually, either, she really hauled off and whacked him.

Both of my children are lovely and full of energy, but it cannot be denied, by any who know them, that my son is a kind, gentle soul and my daughter is a bit of a short tempered hooligan. Before anyone takes me task for these raw categorizations I remind you these are not value judgments. It's just the way things are. I love Meghan's spirit: she won't take no for an answer and she is willful to the point of distraction. Grayham's forebearance and patience are laudable. I sometimes need to remind him that he's not his sisters' punching bag, that he has to stand his ground with her. Grayham doesn't want to hit her back, but he's annoyed that she shows so little consideration for him. She's seeking attention in the shadow of an awesome older brother, and has little in the way of impulse control at this age.

My wife brought her to me for punishment, which she really hates. She hates the idea of Daddy being mad with her, of disappointing me. When I catch her doing these things myself, I am quick to give her a swat on the behind: not as a punishment, but to get her attention, in no uncertain terms. Now, I am not so sure. In any event, she was brought to me after the infraction and I decided that a swat on the behind, was not going to be appropriate. Hitting her for hitting him just did not seem like the right way to go.

I took away her new bike for a week. She wailed, but she didn't fight me on it. I hope she is starting to learn that hitting her brother isn't cool.

One-and-a-Half Star Prince

The latest installment in the Harry Potter series, "The Half Blood Prince" was a bit of a disappointment and this is coming from a fairly rabid fan of the book and film series. I hate to say it but the movie was just, well...boring. To be fair, I am reading the book concurrently and it has its issues as well. But that being said there were numerous other issues with the film.

***spoilers***

The pacing was really difficult to follow and at times seemed like the production was racing from plot point to plot point with little regard for the characters motivations or background. The first 30-40 minutes reminded me of making marks on a checklist.

"Slughorn is a chair...got that?...ok. Trip to the orphanage done?...let's move on, folks. Don't forget 30 seconds of Draco brooding, there....perfect!" Finally, we have 2 hours of plodding to wade through. Sheesh.

The film is heavy on teenage angst. The principals are at the ripe age for maximal hormonal fluctuation. Hearts are broken, chests are pounded, girls swoon. Pretty typical fare, but even the production team must have seen the writing on the wall. They added a new scene midway, full of fire and Death Eaters and explosions (was Michael Bay uncredited?) just to keep the adrenaline levels off life support.

In fairness the movie looks great and the cast all do a fine job, but the pacing and material often seem forced and in the end the movie doesnt do very much to push the story forward. This film is a poster child for a decent directors cut, but it has so many bits that need work it would amount to a substantially remade film and I don't see that as an option.

Just my two cents.

Half Blood Prince

Getting amped for the 10.15 show. Susan (my lovely wife) and I are heading out to meet friends at the local iPic. For those that have not yet attended the iPic, two critical items of note. NO KIDS under 21 after 7pm AND you can get a decent double rum and coke to take into the theater in a glass. Holla! My shoulder is in need of a drink and is bringing me along for the ride, so who am I to complain.

I'm excited about "the Half Blood Prince" as well. Most of my friends are into the series, but lately I have run into more folks that know almost nothing about the series. Makes me wonder if they have been kidnapped and replaced, to be honest. I mean how much effort does it take to be up on your Hogwarts lore.

Check the link, o dwellers in ignorance:

http://harrypotter.warnerbros.com/harrypotterandthehalf-bloodprince/#/home

It takes a lot for me to get out to the theater these days. Last show I saw was the new Star Trek (very good), so I guess I pretty much limit myself to effects films these days on the really big screen. I have been trying to finish the book again, prior to the film, but it is just not gonna happen. Oh well, I'll get a jump on the final book anticipating the final two films next year and the following.

I think we are gonna shoot for sushi before the show.

Expelliarmus!

Monday Morning Moans & Groans

I find that writing early in the day is the best time for me. Two hours before the rest of my world wakes up and discovers me. I am writing a "tough love" scene at the moment and it scares me. I suppose I will just keep diving in and hoping to surface somewhere useful.

I was injured over the weekend during martial arts practice. I resisted doing the right thing, and froze, causing me to crash down heavily on my right side. Not being a lightweight did not help. Something in my neck tweaked. Had that moment of seeing stars and have not felt right since.

Taking it slow, stretching, breathing, just going about my day and hoping that the pain and tension will decline as the days progress. My testing date is looming large in the next few classes. I can't afford to miss class Wednesday, so I'll just have to suck it up.

Watching CharlieRose.com for inspiration. Alan Alda is the man.

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/8719

Post OS future...save me.

READ THIS:
MICROSOFT OPENING STORES NEAR APPLE
http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=3358

AND THEN:
Microsoft has an uphill battle, certainly.

Historically, they have not been able to compete with Apple's perception in the marketplace. But they own the marketplace volume in many areas. It's hard to compare. In fact the whole point all along is that the comparison is almost impossible. The "Apple is cool and Microsoft is not" or "Microsoft is faceless evil and Macs are for poets" argument usually follows. The coming post-OS environment (cloud, web apps) is poised to make this a moot point.

The way I see it they are not going to be able to compete on Apple's terms (seamless experience) they will have to create a new paradigm and let users decide. This has not always been Microsoft's strongest suit and they are often depicted as the also ran candidate.

Buy what you like.

Recovery at last.

Apparently my last save, last night, was not the last word for my 148 layer Illustrator file. At some point I erred and lost an evenings work. As evidenced by the BSOD report that awaited my arrival this morning. Big crash of the Vista-cular variety. Took all day to recover which scotched my writing time today. Ah well, have to catch up tomorrow.

I am looking into an autosave script that can run as an adjunct to Illustrator CS4. I am familiar with the argument that autosaves in creative programs are an interruption, but balanced against repeating work I would say its well worth it. It should be controllable by the user and part of the actions or history panel. Somehow.

Needs thinking.

A short interesting read....

http://rwillustrator.blogspot.com/2008/09/dear-adobe-quest-for-perfect-feature.html

Officially Offing Office

Yes its true. Office is leaving my machine. I have been beta'ing OpenOffice for a month or so to really see if it stacks up against the Office Suite. It does. There is nothing that I need Office for anymore in my day to day business.

Hasta la vista, senor bloatware. The stampede continues, into the cloud with the open source herd.

OMFG OCD

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder kickin' in as I pick through the 124 layers of my illustrator file renaming and reordering layers to supposedly make it simpler for implementation. 28th revision.

I love design.

Creating Icons

Our latest designs are calling for more in the way of social networking tie-ins. Rather than using flat images for the icons I recreated the most popular in illustrator so I can scale them as I need to without degradation.

Wut-wut, Illustrator CS4, yo!

Gotta figure out how to post images in this thing. A lesson for later.

The new company

11th Hour Solutions is up and running this last year. We are providing clients with marketing and online consultation. At the moment I am the creator-in-chief, handling most of the business duties and pumping out designs and ideas. Currently working on a couple year long projects for site development and fundraising with NFP clients. Its good fun and I am working from home for the first time, full time.

Finishing office renovations in the basement that will make loads of difference to the productivity. A real network and workstations for co-working days. My partner, Monica stops in once a week and my other team mates stop in as they can or when they just need some companionship.

All in all its a good thing.

Been a year. WTF?

Finally getting back to this as part of my daily writing regimen. Working on a graphic novel and balancing a lot of creative work for my clients.

I am anxiously awaiting the arrival of my new bike. I won it on ebay and my hope is that it will get my ass out on the road with the kids. Their boundless energy and annoyingly effective guilt are a potent motivational force.