Blogging hiatus

The lack of blogging lately is due to piles of work and a desire to try to grab hold of the remaining bits of summer free time before my next class starts. Nothing personal. I'm sure I'll be blogging more regularly once I'm writing papers and have more incentive to procrastinate.

Quote of the weekend:

"It's like that movie Pay it Forward, only with toilets."

--My friend John, during a discussion on how the people who moved into his old house are taking out the toilet, which I believe was originally given to his mother, and giving it to him, and then he's taking the one out of his new house and giving it to someone yet to be named.

Another anthrax victim

It appears that the archives of the National Enquirer are going to be destroyed because of potential Anthrax contamination. The building of AMI, publisher of the supermarket tabloid, has been sealed tightly with all of its contents in place for almost two years after severe anthrax contamination was discovered. Now a developer has acquired the building at a bargain-basement price in return for an agreement to decontaminate it. Part of the agreement states that he can destroy anything found inside.

Not that the Enquirer's archives are the most important archival collection out there. But they are a slice of American life, and it's tragic to see them destroyed.

For more, see this New York Times story.

Submerged in work, and frankly not loving my job right now. I applied for another out-of-state job, this time in NYC. Once again, I'm not entirely sure how serious I am, but I guess I don't really need to worry about it unless they call me back. Also contemplating joing the Peace Corps. Not seriously -- yet. I've thought about this before, and last time I started grad school instead. But that's going to be over by next May. So, who knows?

More angst, I know. I'm just worried I'm going to wake up one day and be 40 without having done anything but slaved away at a job. :-(

Alright, enough of this. Back to PHP.

Creative obfuscated spam of the day:

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Work.. And more of it.

Just got home from work at around 1:30 AM, and have to be back for a 9:00 AM monthly strategic planning meeting. I'm sort of hoping the meeting was cancelled since I haven't seen any of the usual reminder e-mails. But I figure I better show up just in case. Then another meeting at two, and another at 4:15. And none of these three are directly related to the product we're supposed to be launching.

So why was I at work so late tonight? I'm working on a collaborative development project with several other people, one of whom is at another branch of our company several hundred miles away. (This is my first experience using CVS, and I now don't know how I got this far without it.)

Right now I am little less enthused about the whole collaboration thing, though. About a week ago, we decided that we were going to lock in the database schema. So I went ahead and migrated a bunch of our old data so that we'd have something to test with (and eventually launch.)

Next thing I know, the other guy is making more changes to the schema. That's ok -- they're good changes, and they tack on to the end of what I've already done. Not a huge deal.

This afternoon, he e-mailed me again. Only this time he had totally reworked the structure of major chunks of the database, changing datatypes, altering field names, and generally wreaking havoc. So at about 6:00 PM I basically had to start from scratch and do another complete data migration to get it into the new, supposedly locked down for real, schema.

Once again, most of his changes are very good, and they will improve the product in the long run. But at the same time, I feel like I just wasted 8 hours of my life redoing work I'd already finished! And this sucker's got to launch in just over a week. Yikes - I feel some all-nighters coming on!

Layne points out that all-nighters are a "telltale sign of sucky planning and mismanagement." Or they could just be a sign of two many projects and not enough staff. Which, come to think of it, would fall under the heading of "sucky planning and mismanagement."

Oh, and the phantom Mary Kay truck basher hasn't returned my call. Maybe her two-year-old is screening her messages for her.

So precious I could puke...

The Mary Kay "Independent Beauty Consultant" who sideswiped my car over the weekend has some sort of unintelligible mesage from her two-year-old on her answering machine. This is the number that's on her business card, folks.

Oy.

Another reason to walk...

I was running late, as usual. I didn't even notice anything was wrong when I dashed out to my truck. When I pulled into my space at work, I looked down and saw something under the windshield wiper. I assumed it was an ad, and grabed it to throw away. It was a Mary Kay business card. On the back, it said

I'm sorry. I hit your truck. Please call so we can get my ins. info to you.

WTF??!? I began to walk around the truck, and at that point realized that the side had been bashed in and there was paint scraped off.

I don't exactly know when this happened, although I suspect it may have been on Saturday -- I heard the doorbell ring, but was not exactly fully dressed, and by the time I got to the door there was no one there. She left a business card, though, so I'm hoping she is well insured. But this is a hassle I did not need to deal with this week.

Over the river...

While I was in DC last weekend, the mayor officially opened the newly-refurbished Shelby Street Pedestrian Bridge. It's about time -- it has been closed and under construction pretty much since I moved to Nashville more than five years ago. So today I decided to go see the new span.

It is incredible -- definitely worth the long wait!

The Shelby Street bridge, which has been also been called the Sparkman Street Bridge, the Broadway Bridge, the McGavock Street Bridge, and even the "Korean War Veterans 1950-53 Memorial Bridge," was originally built in 1909, along with a companion bridge at Jefferson Street that has since been replaced. The bridge was among the longest in the nation when it was completed.

The bridge was built in the midst of a great deal of commercial activity. On the east side of the river, it bisected the operations of the Nashville Bridge Company, which manufactured barges. A building (with an entrance at the bridge level) can still be seen, and the remains of derricks used for launching barges are also visible:

       

On the west side, the bridge descends over an old railway line, and emerges into the "SoBro" area -- that's what the Chamber of Commerce calls the area South of Broadway. In the 19th century, it was first known as "Black Bottom," a notorious slum containing "A conglomeration of dives, brothels, pawnshops, secondhand clothing stores, filthy habitations accompanied by the daily display of lewdness and drunkenness on the sidewalks and redolent with the stench of every vile odor," according to one resident. Later in the century it became known as Hay Market -- an area of town used for swapping cows, horses, and cow/horse paraphenalia. You can still see traces of this on some of the remaining buildings:

   

The Bridge now emerges very near the square that is currently flanked by the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Hilton, and the Gaylord Entertainment Center. (Home of the recent Brewer's Festival for those of you who are keeping track at home.) The fourth side of this square is currently a Metro firehouse, but will soon be home to the new concert hall for the Nashville Symphony. (That's just a mural below -- the real building hasn't been started yet.)

       

The bridge itself is a joy to walk over. It soars high into the air, and offers superb views of the Nashville skyline, the river, the Coliseum, and even the new Gateway bridge being built to its south. (The Shelby Street bridge was deemed unsafe for vehicular traffic, so it was converted to a pedestrian bridge and a new bridge was planned to carry Shelby Avenue across the river.)

   

The only downside is the noise, pollution, and visual blight created by the Nashville Thermal Plant, a humongous garbage incinerator built on the Nashville waterfront in the mid-1970s. At that point in history downtown was seen as a good place to send trash, demolish buildings to create parking lots, etc. Nowadays, Nashville is more interested in fostering a livable city, and the plant is scheduled to go away soon. There is some debate over what to do with the riverfront real estate it currently occupies, but the most interesting idea is to build a new downtown ballpark for the Nashville Sounds, our minor league baseball team. They currently play in an aging ballpark in a remote corner of the city that is only accessible by car. Moving this ballpark downtown near the shopping and entertainment district (and next to the bridge) would be a great idea -- keep your fingers crossed!

       

I ended up spending several hours walking around on the bridge and downtown, and I'm seriously considering occasionally walking across the river to work. (The main barrier to this is my chronic inability to get up in the morning!)

In any case, this bridge definitely goes on my list of must-see Nashville attractions, along with Bicentennial Mall.

You can read more about the bridge right here. You can also see the rest of my pictures over at ClubPhoto.

We have hot one. Please ask our stuff.

Bill is still gainfully employed as a performer at Tokyo Disney. He recently posted another batch of silly Japanese signs, packages, T-Shirts, etc. You can see the first two installments here and here.

A house in Richmond

Last weekend I flew up to Baltimore and then drove down to Richmond with my dad and brother to help my other brother move from his apartment to his newly-purchased house. (Purchased may be a strong word, since he's worked out that the bank owns all but about four floorboards.) After hitting crazy traffic on I-95, we finally made it to Richmond and got our first grand tour of the house.

It is actually not a bad place, but it suffers from an overdose of "little-old-lady" decor. It has institutional green walls in many of the rooms, vintage 1960s light fixtures, customized switch plates, and flowered contact paper on the kitchen cabinets. But overall it is in pretty good condition, and with some paint and minor remodeling it has real potential. It even has a back yard with a large shed that functions as a workshop -- I'm a bit jealous of that!

We spent the better part of two days trekking back and forth between the apartment and the house, lugging all of my brother's earthly possessions from one place to another. (I helped him move into his apartment in 2001, so I've done this drill before.) We finished up the moving on Sunday afternoon, and then focused on important moving tasks: we left the shower curtain for later, but got the Playstation working right away. (This was my first time playing Grand Theft Auto Vice City, and I think I'm hooked!

That evening, my brother and I went out shopping and bought another window air conditioner. While we were gone, my Mom arrived from DC to see the house. Since none of us were in any shape to eat out, we got carry-out fried chicken for dinner. We then traipsed back to Maryland around midnight.

  

   

  

More pics...

Photos

Top Left: Our first look at the house.

Top Right: Daniel shows off his empty living room. This is the before picture -- after much grunting and perspiration it looked like the picture in the bottom row.

Middle Left: Dad and Patrick carrying an easy chair. Well, half of one anyway. Hopefully it was supposed to come apart that way!

Middle Right: One of many architectural details in the house. Every switch plate and light fixture is different. Note the green paint -- the photo doesn't do it justice.

Lower Left: Patrick carries Daniel's giraffe into the house. When we were little, our grandfather made one of these wooden giraffes for each of us, and we had them in our rooms growing up. Mine is still in the attic at home, but my brother took his with him to Richmond. I'm not sure quite where it ended up in the house.

Lower Right: Dad views the carnage in the new living room, while the cat begins exploring. We set her free from her cardboard carrier just in time -- she was making pretty good progress clawing her way out!

The Seeing Eye

I know a man who has lived on one farm half a century. He sleeps in the room in which he was born in the dark. Yet his lambs and his pigs, the velvety roll of new sprouting wheat, the procession of seasons, the apple trees he palnted and has watched for years -- all are new to him each day. I have seen him stand and look at his sheep as if he were a city man long shut out from such sights. A sunset or a sunrise is to him a miracle new-performed each day. That man has the seeing eye. -- Detroit News

Published in the April 19, 1912 edition of the Carbon County News, which I found through the Utah Digital Newspapers project. Very cool.

Urk.

Back in Nashville, but too beat to blog. Look for updates on on my brother's new house soon, complete with photos of the vintage little old lady decor.

On three, everybody lift...

I'm in Richmond with both brothers and my dad, helping move one of said brothers into his newly-purchased house. Details later.

So I open my wallet...

This is how you tell you really live in the South:

Belated Sunday Update

On Sunday, I read most of Amelia Earhart's Twenty Hours, Forty Minutes, went to a company function at the Coliseum, walked along the river bank for a bit, drove up to Shelby Bottoms and hiked around the short loop (alas, no bunnies), then went home and watched The Restaurant.

My grand housecleaning ambitions for the weekend basically fizzled. Oh, well, at least I'm taking advantage of the no classes thing while I can.

  

   

Unbelievable...

As if the Bush defense department wasn't fucked up enough, it now basically wants $8 million to set up an online betting website so that people can place wagers on whether or not terrorists will attack or political figures will be assassinated. Proponents claim that the free market is better able to predict the future than intelligence analysts, so why not set up a "terrorism futures market."

One of the two senators, Byron L. Dorgan of North Dakota, said the idea seemed so preposterous that he had trouble persuading people it was not a hoax. "Can you imagine," Mr. Dorgan asked, "if another country set up a betting parlor so that people could go in — and is sponsored by the government itself — people could go in and bet on the assassination of an American political figure?"

And meanwhile on the homefront, the administration is busy trying to dismantle what remains of the nation's passenger rail system, creating record-breaking budget deficits, and coming up with tax cuts for the rich.

Sorry for the political benders lately, but a times I get very frustrated about some of these things, and blowing off steam here seems more constructive then yelling at the computer. For my next post, I promise something more fun and decidedly non-political.

A principled position

Today's Washington Post Magazine has a great piece on John Brady Kiesling, the US dimplomat who resigned his post with a blistering letter criticizing the Bush administration's Iraq juggernaut.

In his April 25 speech at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, a couple of weeks after the fall of Baghdad, Kiesling made an explicit attempt to rally the internationalists. Princeton, he told the 200 or so students, faculty and foreign policy professionals in his audience, "used to be the heartland of a brilliantly successful foreign policy coalition" that shaped American diplomacy for most of the 20th century. It was a bipartisan alliance between liberal "Wilsonian idealists," with their humanist worldview, and the kind of conservative pragmatists who used international institutions to advance American economic interests. But the coalition now "lies in tatters," he said, and he offered his views on how this had happened:

September 11 offered a golden opportunity for anyone "savvy and unscrupulous enough to manipulate public fears," and the advocates of "hard-nosed neoconservatism" promptly seized it. They adopted "the power politics of the schoolyard as their model of human interaction" and reduced a complex moral universe to a permanent face-off between "the forces of light and the forces of darkness." They used "lies and half-truths" to build a case for invading Iraq as "a step toward a more complete power grab." As the neoconservatives began to drive American policy, old-school internationalists tried to come to terms with them, hoping to retain influence. But accommodation has proved no easy task.

"This is an administration at war, and you are with them or you are against them," Kiesling said.

[...]

Among Kiesling's former State Department colleagues you can find a variety of opinions on the need to forcefully remove Saddam Hussein. But there appears to be near-consensus on one point: American foreign policy in general has been dangerously militarized, and the diplomatic point of view devalued. [...] Chas. Freeman, the retired ambassador, is more direct. "We have a national mentality now that says, if you see a problem, shoot it! Because we know that we're very, very good at shooting things."

Free beer!

Well, sort of... We went to the second annual Music City Brewer's Festival, held in the park between the Gaylord Entertainment Center, the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Hilton, and the future site of the new Nashville Symphony Hall.

The deal is, you pay $20 to get in, and then you get a "bottomless cup" that lets you sample beer from a bunch of different brewers arrayed around the outside of the park. There is also live music, and part of the proceeds go to Second Harvest.

Altogether, a pretty great way to spend an afternoon. (The beer is free, but you have to pay a buck for the water!)

We hung out at the festival for most of the afternoon, then went and had dinner at Jack's Bar-B-Que, which serves the best barbeque in Nashville (in my opinion, that is!).Then back to the beer festival for a while longer. We finally closed out the night at Robert's Western World. Oh, and we took a few more catfish photos, too!

I walked from my house over to the park, which I like to think compensated in some small way for drinking beer all afternoon. The refurbished Shelby Street Pedestrian Bridge is scheduled to reopen next week, which will make it a lot easier to hike from one side of the river to the other. (Right now all the working bridges are clustered on the other side of downtown.)

Here are some photos:

  

  

  

You can check out some more right here.

Comptroller blames TDOT road fixation for poor air quality

This story appeared in the Tennessean this morning. Well, it's about freakin' time someone in government pointed this out. Hopefully this will lead to some more rational development and mass transit planning in Tennessee.