One Way Not To Start A Business Trip

I have a pretty good gig going, gotta admit. A lot of my coworkers are stuck on an endless cycle of flying up to Portland for some part of every week, and there’s nothing wrong with that the first few times, but it’s getting old. Six o’clock flights, cheesy hotels in the ‘burbs with little kitchenettes, and long hours in the vast gray or tan cubicle farms that the company has scattered about up there. Now, some of them are in Taiwan this week, and some others are in India, but no one seemed particularly excited about any of it. Meanwhile I got to come back to northern Italy.

It’s all business, of course. I wouldn’t be here if the project was going well and there isn’t much in the way of sightseeing on the agenda. Maybe a really good restaurant or two. But still. I’m a dozen or twenty kilometers north of Milan. No complaints allowed.

One thing I’ve done though that I really didn’t want to do was lose all my credit cards.

In Atlanta I bought lunch in between airplanes, and put my wallet in my laptop backpack so I wouldn’t have to sit on it during the long flight across the ocean. In Milan I came out into baggage claim and decided it was time to get some euros at the currency exchange. Looked all through my backpack: no wallet.

Do I really need to recount the ensuing three hours? Shuffling from lost luggage to the airline to the airport carabinieri, trying (mostly in vain) to get a net connection so I could get some critical phone numbers, hauling a backpack full of books and laptop and two heavy suitcases (tools, parts, a weeks’ worth of clothing, spare shoes, I don’t know) up and down and up and down to different floors, and finally after doing all I could do discovering that the rental agency wouldn’t give me a car because I also lost my driver’s license?

A car? Yes, thanks to some big festival, all of Milan and every hotel near a train station is booked solid, so I’m out in the boonies, a nice place I’m sure but no train station so I need a car to get to the office. This problem will be solved by the fact a colleague is joining me tonight, and he can drive. Unfortunately he’s from England, so I’m not sure he can drive in Italy.

Oh, of course he can. Brits drive on the continent all the time. So I’m told. Anyway, it’s five-ish outside and dinnertime but eight in the morning to me, and I stink, and no one within ten kilometers speaks English, but I did get some cash and a ride by using my resources, so I guess all will be well because it will end well, though the well part hasn’t happened yet. Traveling’s never really easy, but this could have been a whole lot worse, so still no complaints from me are allowed, no indeed, I get that.

One way out my window:

The other way:

Think Of It As Sharing

More pictures. I've got a million of 'em. Every time I press the shutter I'm thinking of something, a story, a connection, a weird thought, something. Of course all of that is long forgotten. But the pictures remain, and I want to share. It's like putting a bowl of stale crackers on a table at work. Maybe no one will take any, but somehow putting them out there is enough. And think, even if it seems like it, you're really not trapped in my living room in front of a projector screen with a warm beer and a napkin full of stale crackers.

Horny guy	Stylish sheep constraints	Weird guy walking weird
R/C feedwagon	Baby piggies!	Sac's finest
Lego golden bear	Fine art	Wine art
Night vision	I want that one	We've been a great audience, thank us very much!

All this at the State Fair.

Why Be A Democrat

They didn't start this particular war. They're not frightened by homosexuality. Their line-up isn't just a bunch of old white guys. And as a party, they know how to party. But there's an even better reason than that.

One ardent Obama supporter (who declined to give his name because he works in politics) says he'll attend both the rally and the after-party, and he doesn't expect to be going home alone.

"Let's face it: Leftie girls are easy," he says.

Thursday Thirteen: Gold Rush Days

Annual event down in Old Sac. Some pix I took when I snuck my camera out of my pocket, something not at all compliant with the 19th Century garb that was stuck to me. Cell phone neither. But the coal-fired variety is just too heavy to carry around in that heat.

  

  

  

  

Ah, the quiet moments of morning

I hate the Nyquil^® hangover. Actually, it’s kind of nice, because it leaves me tired and unmotivated. Another word for that might be relaxed. Too relaxed to dig into my laptop backpack and find a spare pair of cheap reading glasses, my usual set being left on the night stand. So I sat here awhile, listening to the chirping of the hard drive and some distant keyboarding. Ah, the quiet moments of morning.

Equinocalypso

This morning I realized we had passed the equinox. So did Roy. Do great minds truly think alike? Actually, no, but sometimes they do go side by side down the same freeway.

What caused this epiphany was a left turn on the way to work. I turned directly into the rising sun. I don't clean my Jeep often enough and the buildup of grime on the windshield refracted the incoming sunlight into a thousand orange and yellow beams and I couldn't see the road. Just a double yellow line undulating on the road's gentle hills into a bright and mysterious oblivion. Rather like my life. But then I noticed, as I notice such things, that the double yellow line didn't aim directly into the sun. The sun was a wee bit off to the right. These roads were laid down by late 19th Century real estate speculators in a strict compass-oriented grid imposed on the landscape. So I knew the sun was rising a wee bit to the south of true east. Four days' worth, apparently.

The sky was prettier an hour earlier when I took my son to water polo practice. Three and a half dozen stars shone in the deep blue deeps like little diamonds. Well, they did. I don't care how trite that sounds, it was true. What, I need to come up with something better? Okay, uh, the stars were like little tiny lights way up in the sky. Better?

p.s. - I made up the post title before writing it. I don't know what it means. Equinox, apocalypse (no reason), calypso, I don't know. But it'll do.

Speaking of Time Machines

Weren't we? Someone was. Maybe that was at work. Or at home. Don't remember and I'd need a time machine to find out.

Anyway I went back and signed up for the Cal 100. One hundred men selected for their shooting and riding skills who paid their own way back to the States and became Company A of the 2nd Massachusetts Cavalry. Do our part to put down Johnny Reb. But they found out I can't ride, and I found out people would be shooting at me, so I came back.


I really just want to play in the band anyway.

Wandering by the Willamette

I have no direction, when alone. Park the car in some random spot (or walk some random direction out of the hotel, or get off at some random metro stop, depends what sort of city I’m in), and just walk in what seem to be likely directions until something happens is my usual style. This would be hopelessly annoying to a companion, were I so rude as to be myself when with someone else.

Downtown Portland is unique to me in that wherever you go there are a few random people walking the sidewalks, going somewhere, oftentimes women alone as if the streets are safe; and however barren a given block may be, however closed up the shops and abandoned the warehouses, another block along there will be a coffee shop, a restaurant, a bar of some sort. Maybe this doesn’t really contrast with Sacramento and San Francisco -– but I don’t generally have cause to walk those places at night.

I was hungry and alone and didn’t know where the Pearl District was. Street people were polite -– “Any spare change, sir? Okay.” Prosperous middle-agers and non-prosperous youth were mixed and going in the same random directions. The air was cool but warm enough and I enjoyed being lost. A part of town seemed to have a lot of girlie bars with variations of “Full Nude” in their marquees and at this point I asked for directions. I wanted dinner.

When I found the Pearl District I also found my talent for picking the wrong streets. Is it a part of town famous for fine bars and restaurants? I expect so but somehow I picked the blocks that didn’t have them. I did however find Powell’s.

“Can I help you find something, sir?”

“You have books, what else is there?”

I smiled and bounded up the stairs and wandered through the stacks aromatic with bound and printed paper, a smell like no other, looking for something to make up for the fact I was about to dine alone. The landscape narrowed as my hunter’s instinct drove me down the trail. Purple signs, history books, western states, California, San Francisco; and as always must happen, a treasure I would never otherwise have known existed: A 446-page book on the banking career of William Tecumsah Sherman.

Well? One man’s used book is another’s gold strike. It fits perfectly with a project that has been growing in my mind for years and even occasionally found its way onto virtual paper. I also bought a Powell’s t-shirt.

Mission half-accomplished, I was happy now to continue my directionless quest for food. I turned towards the river for a vague memory of a cool old part of town, walked swiftly through what garishly passes for Chinatown, passed by countless wonderful brick buildings ninety to a hundred twenty years old (each one alive with its unique history and personality) and turned at least into Kell’s for a table and a shepherd’s pie and sixteen cool dark ounces of Guinness.

A refuge is no refuge if it isn’t sweet. The table had a small lamp to read under. The crowd was relaxed and friendly. The stage held a man who held a guitar and sang like a Clancy and spoke with a brogue. The shepherd’s pie was far too fancy but the place had a below-ground cigar bar so a wee bit of pretension was no surprise. Let’s just say the blood in me bequeathed by my Irish great-grandmother Susan Braley was at home, and the evening wound down well.

In A Semi-Anechoic Chamber, No One Can Hear You Scream

It’s a black art, this mitigation of noncompliant electromagnetic emissions. We can detect them. We can sort of figure out where they’re coming from generally. But how to make corrections? There is a lot of hand waving, strange muttering, and invocations of the ghosts of Nikola Tesla and Guglielmo Marconi.


All the little devices of your life emit radiation. Cell phones, MP3 players, laptops. If they merely did their jobs, they would interfere with one another and not be able to do their jobs. In every case, some black arts magicianeer made teeny tiny little changes – maybe in software, maybe in how a wire is routed, maybe in the shape of some little metallic part – changes were made so that they would not emit radiation that messes with someone else’s radiation. The FCC publishes standards and no one can sell into this market unless they meet those standards. So, the radio wave geeks do their thing. It’s just part of the job. Training applied to circumstance in return for benefits and a paycheck.


But there really aren’t many radio wave geeks left. That stuff is real hard, and there’s no particular money in it. So the rest of us hack along the best we can. Like I say, it’s part of the job.


I made this near-field probe out of spare parts, and it worked pretty well. Fundamentals have a way of remaining valid. Now I just wait for a phone call so a few of us Californians, stranded here in the great northwest, six hundred miles from home, can get together for dinner. Away from home, hungry; thus the passionless and disinterested tone of this post. Certainly not due to the lovely environment as depicted above.

Randomsundaynightness

I should be asleep but I'm not. I have to get up at four so I can fly back to Oregon again. I am beginning to wonder why I selected a 6:30 flight. Oh, I have a meeting at nine and if I hurry and rush, I can be in that other office just in time! Is it like rilly important that I be there? No, it isn't. Yeesh.

Watched the ninth inning of a Yankees / Red Sox game tonight with my son. We've been too busy to watch baseball but that one reminded us why baseball will never die. Ninth inning, two outs, bases loaded, winning run on second, Big Papi to bat ... We don't even follow those teams. But if asked, I much prefer the Red Sox over the Yankees. Papi popped out. Boo.

I love that they have a player named Coco Crisp. Someone was thinking endorsements when they named that kid.

Speaking of air travel, few people annoy me more than people who get annoyed with babies.

More biz travel next week and the week after. I don't see my kids much anymore. They're both awesome young men and busy as can be so it's okay, I suppose, but waah.

Writing is about telling stories, and telling stories is about extracting meaning from your life. I could do that here every day and would love to. But it takes time I don't make, mostly for reasons best left unexplained. Suffice to say I'm not whining about random chance. Still, what little I can, etc.

There must be something I need to say so I can go to sleep, and I haven't found it yet. I expect by now that I will not. I will double-check my packing, then, and go to bed and lie very very still and drift into mysterious lands never written of.

A Few Minutes' Rest in a Company Cafeteria

So I came back to Oregon, just like last week, just like next week. Oregon has become my workplace away from workplace. Indeed, I’m really beginning to feel at workplace here. A major difference, of course, is the weather. Yesterday I was in San Francisco and walked to lunch with a guy who lives there. He wore a jacket because he said it was cold. It was not cold. It was downright balmy. Later, inside the office, another local asked if I thought it was too hot. I said, you kidding? I live in the Sacramento Valley. When it’s too hot for me, you San Franciscans will already be fully desiccated and put into bags with Just Add Water printed on them. Now I come to Oregon. Last night it was clear and Portland, as always, was heartbreakingly beautiful as seen from the freeway bridge, all her lights twinkling in the river. Today, in Hillsboro or Beaverton or wherever the hell I am, the sky is gray and the air cool and humid but it’s still lovely and I would happily take a long walk in it if I knew anyone here who likes to take long walks. I don’t. Aren’t any such people so far as I can tell, not in this confusing flat suburbia. Maybe they do on weekends.

Confusing, I said. My company has facilities spread all over the place out here and I am always getting lost. Up this road, down that, one side or the other of the airport … I cannot get this place straight. So I give up and head into the closest facility to ask where the one I want is but there’s never anyone there I can ask. All the guards have been cost-cut away and the automatic badge-reading turnstiles are not very informative. I found the place today more or less out of blind luck. Went down this brand new road and that brand new road, each of them lined with identical condominium complexes delimited by identical shopping centers, and after about six right turns, whoa, there it was. A big-ass building surrounded by cars. Not that such a thing is hard to find, but it had to be the right big-ass building, and it was and so now I need only remember the street names and I’m jake.

Inside, it’s all cubicles arrayed under a high ceiling crawling with pipes and cables. Used to be a manufacturing floor. Since all the factory jobs are now in China, the echoing space is filled with desks that hunker gray and cold under dim lights from high above. Almost as if they were outside, only without quite so much rain. It was in this low-key-worker-creating environment that I realized I’d skipped breakfast and was too distracted by the fact to be of any more use. Now that I’m fed, it’s back to the millstone for me. I can’t even begin to describe what I’m doing. Not because I would be giving away company secrets or because it’s just too technical to explain. No, I’m sure you can guess the reason.

Various Things All Posted Together

Previous post prompted protests of professional preclusion, to wit: What of structural engineers? Hydrologic engineers? To which I reply: Who? What? The companies that have employed me have always been about teeny tiny silicon transistors, the integrated circuits that contain them, the circuit boards that interconnect them, the enclosures that house them, and the software wrapper that compels the market to think all that stuff is worth paying for. That's all covered by EEs, MEs and SEs so nothing personal, since I also didn’t mention chemical engineers, and they’re hot stuff down in the fab, but they’ve never had anything to do with me, and that’s really what it’s all about isn’t it. (We had a guy with a PhD in physics, too. No one was impressed particularly.)

* * *

I don’t understand why people think there’s any difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. First Obama, now Edwards, claim to cheering crowds that if Pakistan doesn’t do its part against Al-Qaeda, he as President would send American troops in himself. Fundamentally this is no different than Bush’s foray into Iraq. Just less an unsubstantiated WMD or two. All those other differences – abortion, gay marriage, taxation policy – are merely the means whereby the two halves of the power structure maintain the myth that the electorate has any significant choice. Both parties’ positions on these and other major issues are based on no consistent moral philosophy and serve only to fuel rhetoric with which to carve us up into allegiances based mostly on where we live or who our friends are. The important stuff – our place in a violently shrinking world and the means with which we expand and protect our turf – is already planned out.

A great American philosopher said, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”

Another said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

* * *

I said this a few days ago because Asia is missing Edison and so I’m saying it again:

When Max had his head in my lap and wheezed and sighed and asked me what is wrong with me Daddy I sat with him on the garage floor and cried like a little boy, and then he finally went to his peace two days before Christmas and I missed him terribly and Christmas was colder and lonelier than usual, but hey, I was only a kid of forty five at the time. I still get sad but it only lasts a few seconds, like a flower of love tossed into a breeze that blows it back again because it has nowhere else to go. Why does it hurt when it comes back?

* * *

Yet another great American philosopher said,

I want a new duck
One that won't steal my beer
One that won't stick his bill in my mail
One that knows the duck stops here

We recently attended a lecture by this luminary at the local annual cultural emporium and large animal auction and once I had completed my oenological analyses, I snuck around to the side of the lecture hall to catch a snap or two.

A Blog Post

We are up late writing on our laptops. I'm doing this, and don't know where it's going yet. My son is doing an essay for English 1A, the same freshman college course we all took, everywhere, and doesn't seem to know where it's going yet either. Thus the communal nature of this writing scene. The tapping of my fingers and an occasional grunt of paternal encouragement or completely random observation is sure to get him going.

Tomorrow I fly off to Oregon for the day, to hang about in labs and offices and ask questions and try to figure out how in the world I'm going to accomplish in the next few weeks a certain thing that needs accomplishing in the next few weeks. I'm doing it because we don't want the contracted EE in San Francisco to do it. We want an internal EE to do it. Since the labs and equipment are in the wild lands west of Portland, OR, it's only natural that the task fall to me, since I live six hundred miles south of Portland and ninety miles east of San Francisco, rather than to some EE up there in Oregon or the guy in the City. We have standards of corporate efficiency to maintain.

Last time I flew up there I took these pictures of the moon falling away from the dawn.

  

They're not much as pictures, but from a distance they're kind of nice.

Just to break the mood, here's a typical lab scene. I won't mention what or where it is, being as someone somewhere who has more power than sense might think I was compromising someone somewhere's intellectual property.


This is the electrical engineer's domain. Just as there are supposedly three races of men, there are three major races of engineers. ("Just as" meaning the idea is completely wrong, but it works occasionally as a model.) They are mechanical, electrical, and software. I was noticing something about these three. As they age and mature and gain the potential for roles of leadership, a natural demarcation seems to arise.

Most of the leaders, the project managers, the people managers, they are mechanical engineers. They're not the brightest, but they're solid people, excellent note-takers and minutes-senders, even-handed task-masters, goal-oriented, practical. At the other end are the twisted geniuses of the team, the jokesters, the coders and gamers, the brilliantly unfashionable software engineers who work the longest and hardest hours but whom you really wouldn't want in charge of anything. In between, sometimes filling one role or the other but mostly just getting their work done with a maximum of cynicism are the electrical engineers, the sparkies, the guys who add cool blue LEDs to the project and then sneer at you for liking them.

This continuum is reflected in their work domains. Mechanicals work in the real world. They make things you can see, touch, and hold. Electricals work with real physical processes but you can only observe them by their secondary effects: lights, oscilloscope traces, puffs of smoke. The software people work in an entirely virtual world. All they do is shove bits around in a computer, bits that are nothing more than momentary voltage states or tiny magnetic fields. Yes, yes, they have to know where to shove them. I'm not going there.

This subject suddenly made me feel like these guys. Bet it did you too, huh?


Somewhere in Utah. Warm morning sun. Slow-moving river. The absolute quiet of the desert but for a few tiny buzzing insects. *yawn*