22. February 2011 by admin.

I can’t remember when we last rode the ATV’s, it was long enough ago that the tires needed air tonight.

Before I go any further, have I ever mentioned that our Bulldog is crazy? She channels the boys, I think.

I have been wanting for a couple of weeks to get out and ride, but life got in the way, as it has a tendency to do. Tonight we put all the excuses on hold and went.

Primary lesson for the night: If you don’t carry the flashlight, stay with the one that does.

I stopped by the truck to get my sweatshirt. Even with a very pleasant 66 degrees, it can get cool when we’re in motion. That put the guys at the barn well ahead of me.

I knew the stump was there, I just didn’t know it was there. I don’t completely recall how I ended up on my back looking at the stars, but that’s what I was glad nobody saw. I’m quite sure that it involved something that, had I intended it, I would never have been able to pull off.

Dylan is a fair driver; but he has no fear. Furthermore, he thinks it great fun to try and toss me into the bushes. He has no genuine intention to do that, I’m sure. But having already suffered injury to both my dignity and my backside, it was with great earnestness that I –urged–him not to put too much effort into it tonight.

The stars were magnificent, even with the clouds rolling in, the diminished woodscape is still lovely, and I survived the bumping along, very happy to be out among nature again, and, all the same, very glad to limp back to the house after the ride came to an end. The halting gait after a back-splat is somewhat lacking in elegance.

I’m glad nobody saw that, too.

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23. June 2010 by admin.

Life happens, people move in, move out, move up, move along. It seems like over the past several years, some very wonderful people have moved in and then moved along. My life was touched in some important way that was evidently intended for the moment. The internet has made the world a much smaller place, but even so, we can lose touch very easily.

Quite some time ago I was the one that moved along, when I left Birmingham to move to the Gulf Coast. It was a good move for me, but it carried a cost. Vowing to keep in touch, of course that reserve faded with time. Even the annual Christmas cards were eventually abandoned.

Many years before that, I left my home town for military service, again, a good move but with its own cost. Throughout the years that have intervened between then and now, many, many very good friends have passed through my life.

I thank God for Facebook, really I do. I’m reconnecting with some of those old friends and connecting for the first time with some of my family.

But not all.

There are still some significant friendships that I’d like to renew, that I haven’t found on Facebook yet. I haven’t given up hope, I keep searching every couple of months for those names; roommates out in California, study buddies at UAB and TSU, fellow torture victims at Defense Language Institute.

Even now, having set down my own set of roots, I know that any day now I could receive notice of another friendshift. It happens.

Let’s not lose touch!

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10. June 2010 by admin.

My garden is a teacher. I have become convinced that all of life’s lessons can be learned or understood in a garden.

Most recently, we have been harvesting corn. God blessed our corn crop this year beyond our expectations.  We pull it from the stalk, chop off both ends, pull the husks, remove the silks, cut the kernels from the cob, blanch it in water to kill the enzymes, cool it, and bag it up for the freezer. It’s time-consuming and labor-intensive. We don’t particularly love the effort but we definitely enjoy having the corn all year long. The process hasn’t changed much over a very long time.

We had heard that allowing the huskless ears to stand in cold water would make removing the silks easier. Like everything else "they say," we cast a skeptical eye on it.

Then came the evening that we knew we would not be able to complete a whole cycle of the process with the ears we had picked. So we packed them in an ice chest and buried them under the contents of two bags of ice.

Wonder of wonders, the next afternoon as I began to remove the silks from the ice-cold ears, I found them decidedly more cooperative. All of a sudden, I became a believer in something we’ve always heard "they say" to be true.

Something else happened that afternoon, though. My tolerance for remaining silks left on the ears dropped to near zero. I now had a process that made better results easier to achieve.

I work with some amazing people. Some are very creative; some are detail-oriented; some have incredible technical skills; some are visionaries. Every one of them would look at yesterday’s great results as mere mediocrity if a new tool enabled them to raise the bar on themselves.

Read that last phrase again, I promise you it’s true. We will raise the bar on ourselves as skills improve, as tools improve, as processes improve.

It’s what we do.

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18. March 2010 by admin.

It’s been a while since I put anything up here.  I am so sorry. It was really bad manners to neglect my devoted readers.

I live down here in the South, in the land of good manners.  Children are taught at a very young age to address adults as “Ma’am” and “Sir.”  Obviously that alone does not constitute good manners, but, unfortunately, I’ve seen a good many children, and adults as well, whose training in manners extends no further than “Ma’am” and “Sir.”

Folks, good manners is so much more than just addressing adults by proper titles.  Manners isn’t about saying certain things and doing certain things. It isn’t about knowing which fork to use at a formal dinner. It isn’t about not wearing white shoes after Labor day.

Good Manners is about respect.

Good Manners is treating people as you would like to be treated in a perfect world. It’s about putting people at ease and making them feel comfortable. Often it is as much a matter of knowing what NOT to say, possibly knowing enough to say nothing, rather than knowing WHAT to say.

Good Manners is really very easy but it may take a bit of retraining.  Very simply, think of what you would like to be on the receiving end of, and act accordingly.  Grammatically pathetic that was, I know.  But it’s really very simple.  If you don’t think you’d like people calling attention to a mole on the side of your face, don’t call attention to someone’s mole on the side of their face.  HOLY COW–that means you  may have to start engaging the brain before putting the mouth into gear.

Strange concept for these times, especially when we can post whatever is on our mind almost instantaneously in 140 characters or less, and out to the whole world! The new social media has made it much easier to communicate faster; it’s still up to us to do it better.

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29. October 2009 by admin.

…and by that I mean a RIGHT as an ENTITLEMENT, as opposed to a WRONG or a LEFT.

I learned this in college, in an excellent class called Political Philosophy. As much as I would love to mention the professor’s name, I don’t have his permission to do so.

One of the most memorable concepts that came from that class was our discussion on developing a theory of rights.  A theory of rights must do four things to be a full theory.

1: give a name to the right being defined

2: Identify who has that right

3: Identify by what virtue or value the group in #2 has that right, and

4: Identify the responsibilities placed on others as a result of the group in #2 having that right.

This is going to be an excellent exercise for many of you who think you have rights but others think you don’t. You need to be able to articulate WHY you have that right and WHAT IT CAUSES OTHERS to have to do or not do.   One example is the Bill of Rights enumerations. We have the right to, for example, assembly (#1).  WE THE PEOPLE OF THESE UNITED STATES have that right (#2). We have that right as an unalienable human right granted by our Creator (#3). You may have to dig beyond the Constitution to support that, I can’t remember which document I read that tied that right back to the Declaration. And for #4, the responsibility placed on others is to step back and let us assemble, to not interfere with our assembly.

An additional ideal in a theory of rights is the understanding that one person or group having a right must never infringe on any other rights of any other person or group.  So our right to assemble peaceably must not infringe on the right of any other group to assemble peaceably, or to do any other things that we as a society acknowledge as being rights.The claim of a “right to healthcare” fails to identify #4 to any satisfaction.  However, I will entertain any and all attempts to do so.

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25. October 2009 by admin.

How many things do you have going on right now?  How many things do you typically have going on at any given time?  During a typical workday, how many programs are open on your computer desktop? Is dinner cooking, laundry in both the washer and dryer, and a conversation occurring on the phone or with your kids? It may surprise you to find that you’re not doing all that at once.  And don’t take offense, but you’re not physiologically capable of doing it all at once.

Neither is your computer. You may have several programs open at once, but the processor in the guts of the machine is still handling instructions in the order it receives them. Even with the dual-core and quad-core processors built into the current  generation of computers, there are limitations as to how many and what type of activities can be conducted simultaneously.  If you’re curious about the nuts and bolts, this website has an explanation that comes pretty close to plain English: http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-dual-core-processor.htm

Most of us live our lives in a single-core scenario, even if we don’t want to admit it.  Instructions must be processed in a queue, and that queue may also include decisions, actions, and conversations. You may, for example, be on the phone and reading email "at the same time."  Face it: you will miss a few words of the conversation if you read each word of the email. Or you will merely scan the email for important words or phrases so as to not miss anything important in the conversation.  But it is simply not possible to pay adequate attention to the phone conversation to catch every word while genuinely reading the email.  You cannot carry on two separate conversations simultaneously.  You will switch back and forth between them, but you will not give them both your full attention at the same time. Having said that, it is possible to engage in one activity that requires a great deal of attention and another that requires almost no attention. Examples of this: stirring a pot of soup on the stove while conversing with the children about homework; raking leaves while you converse on the phone.

That which we call "multitasking" is a lot like the physical act of juggling.  Juggling has a lot less to do with how many objects you have in the air than it has to do with what happens to each object as it lands in your hand.  Juggling isn’t so much about great catches as it is about great tosses.  You must toss each object into a place in the air where it will predictably end up in nearly the same spot. Your hand must, of course, also end up in nearly the same spot, but that’s much easier to accomplish than the toss.   I have not been able to accomplish a series of good tosses. I am physically inept at juggling.  With practice, and a great deal more patience than I normally exercise, I may be able to juggle three objects one day. "Multitasking" has started making more sense to me since I found the parallel to juggling.  The tasks I face at any given time cannot all be accomplished at once.  I have to select the most important objects and weigh them, then decide what to do with them. Each must end up in the air for a time.  And each will land, and hopefully each lands in my hand.  As it lands in my hand, I decide what to do with it: does it go back up into the air, or can it take it out of the mix, or do I need to hand it to someone else?You don’t need to freak out if you cannot multitask all the priorities in your day.  Handle each appropriately, or decide to set it aside. Toss into the air carefully.I promise you, no matter how good you think you are at "multitasking," you’re nowhere near as good as your computer, and even your computer does it all one item at a time.

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22. September 2009 by admin.

There are some people who just excel at giving excellent customer service, and sometimes a good cs rep is hamstrung by policy.  I spoke with two excellent cs reps today from Sony who were trying to help me get replacement earbuds for the two sets that went bad within two months, a month apart.  They did succeed in getting me ONE set of replacement earbuds to replace TWO sets that went bad.  Okay, that’s not the fault of the reps.  That’s SONY policy.Just fyi.I try to be courteous to the cs reps I have to deal with over the phone, because they’re doing their job amid some very badly-behaved customers.  The CS Reps I work with are superlative examples of what CUSTOMER SERVICE means.  (You know who you are)  When a product is produced and doesn’t perform to expectations, the product should be replaced.  The Sony website states that without a receipt, one should expect refurbished goods.  I didn’t buy refurbished goods, and no, I didn’t keep my receipt after I found out that they did work out of the box.  A $30 item shouldn’t require a 7 year statute of limitations on proof of purchase!  I suppose that Sony would want to make sure that I didn’t buy them two years ago.  I understand all of that, and I understand that there are times when policy has to be the driving force.  But how long would you expect to hold onto a receipt for a $30 item, and what should I expect as restitution?

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4. September 2009 by admin.

The tech support rep from AT&T called again today.  They went and checked and of course, while everything is working nothing is wrong.  I finally got someone to verbalize this concept: If the problem occurs when the tech support center is closed, that is, after 6 pm on Saturday through 9 am Monday morning, there is nothign that can be done. Period.And they feel that they’re fulfilling their end of the contract.

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26. August 2009 by admin.

I got a call from a rep at AT&T today. He said that the network engineers tested the equipment at the tower and it’s all functioning correctly.  My reaction of course was to ask if they tested it on Saturday when I was having trouble.  Without hesitation, he assured me that they did test on Saturday.  Question from my side was how they knew to test it when it wasn’t even submitted until at least Monday.  Hmmm….good question.  So he said he was going to submit a network ticket to have them test it on Saturday.  This is really dragging out a long time, and I think that the longer it drags out the more certain it becomes that I will be cancelling the service.  Upside of that is that the early termination fee shrinks with each passing month.  Downside of THAT is that it becomes less advantageous to take them to small claims court, because the relationship between what I’d pay and what I’d gain (already a loss but we’re talking about a principle here) widens.

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24. August 2009 by admin.

My win does not have to equal a loss for AT&T, not that they care.  But our internet bombed on us early enough Saturday that I was able to demonstrate to a technician for AT&T that what I said was happening was in fact happening.  The aircard is not programmed to drop on Saturday, the tower, to her knowledge, is not programmed to “manage” network traffic such that our throughput would drop completely.  Here’s what’s bizarre:  She could see us hitting the tower; I could see that data packets were being sent and received.  The problem is not signal strength, we had a powerful signal.  We made all kinds of adjustments to the aircard control program, to the wireless device configuration, etc., and then I asked her, “Okay, if these work, then we’ll have to see what we need to do to make it happen on the mac.” She kept forgetting that this issue was not isolated to a Windows Vista machine. (I think people have become accustomed to blaming Vista for everything that doesn’t work; the fact that it also doesn’t work on a Mac should cut Vista a bit of slack.) Bottom line Saturday was that it just plain didn’t work; we showed “connected to the internet” for a brief period of time, then “connected to the network local only” for a period of time.No, it’s not solved.  But someone at AT&T finally believes me.Oh, and I am going to get a credit on my bill for every Saturday and Sunday since the time when I can say I noticed a pattern of non-connectivity, which was sometime in May.

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