Getting colder...

I'm not always up early in the morning to shoot this sort of thing, but I once again worked all night at the office. That's not good, but at least I got to appreciate a perfect fall morning.

Well, I thought it was perfect. Some people don't agree!)

Domain of the Day

http://www.wewannadoanythingwewannadoanytimewewannadoit.com/

Seen on Monster.com

Wonder if I can get a leave of absence from work -- I just found my meal ticket for a month in Ireland!

IE-Dublin-Father Christmas & Elves
Status: Full Time, Part Time, Temporary/Contract/Project

Unique Entertainment are looking for persons interested in working for them on a part-time basis throughout late November and December 2003.

We require persons to fill the following roles:

• Father Christmas
• Elves

Please send brief CV, including a passport photograph, details of your availability during November and December and the roles you are interested in to...

From the silver lining department:

One advantage of being at work at 3 AM is that you can play your CDs as loud as you want, and no one gets pissy about it. Right now I've got Handel's Messiah going at about 80 decibels.

Ihr Steuergeld an der Arbeit:

Berlin to get trash cans that can talk. Ain't technology grand?

A real Nashville weekend

This weekend was a true Nashville experience. My grandfather and my cousin Laura both showed up in town, and I got to do all that fun touristy stuff that the locals never get around to.

On Saturday, my grandfather went to the Parthenon and the Frist Center. Both were great, but the Frist center has an especially good "Art of Tennessee" exhibit with everything from wood carvings to maps to photos to muskets. It was extremely cool.

Then we went to the airport and picked up Laura. We went home briefly, then headed over to Hatch Show Print. We walked around lower Broad for a bit, and also stopped into Lawrence Record Shop, where we met Mr. Lawrence. This was a very memorable experience -- you can listen right here!

We gave up our coveted $10 parking space and headed back home for a few hours, where we amused ourselves by looking at old photo albums.

That night, we had tickets for the Grand Ole Opry at the Ryman Auditorium. But before the show, we stopped in to Jack's Bar-B-Que. Then a few steps across the alley to the Ryman, where a long line was just beginning to snake through the door. We got to our seats in the balcony just before the show started. One of the first performers was Nanci Griffith, who Laura had seen a few days before in Boston.

The next day we stopped by my office to scan some of the old photos we found, then headed over to Bicentennial Mall, where we explored and played with our cameras until the misty darkness overtook us. (Listen) My grandfather took a detour into the farmer's market, where he purchased a bottle of Dave's Triple XXX Insanity Hot Sauce. The vendor cautioned to only use one drop!

Afterward, we went out to dinner at Basantes (a great Italian restaurant in the lobby of a Day's Inn), and returned home to watch "When Harry Met Sally."

Monday morning, my Grandfather left at the crack of dawn, and Laura and I had breakfast at the Pancake Pantry before her medical school interview at Vanderbilt.

All-in-all, a great weekend. You can view more photos right here.

A bloomin' family reunion, and a lot of malfunctioning stuff!

My grandfather (the one who lives on the farm in Virginia) e-mailed me to say that he was planning to come down and visit me in Nashville. He has been saying he would do this for years, but this time he was serious. So he's arriving this weekend.

Then a few days ago, I got an e-mail from my cousin Laura, who I haven't seen in almost two years. She has been going to school in Boston, but graduated and is now applying to medical schools. It turns out that she has an interview at Vanderbilt on Monday. So she's also coming down -- and naturally I offered up my place.

So all of a sudden I have two out-of-town guests, and it's time to get the house presentable. I've been spending every free moment cleaning, dealing with repairs, etc. Plus, we have a business plan due in several weeks for my class, and our company is getting impatient. Then late last week the massive server that holds our company's electronic archives decided to die in the middle of the night. This has already been good for one all-nighter and countless hours of additional stress. The worst part about the work is that it's a "hurry-up-and-wait" operation, because it takes so long to move around the tons of data we're dealing with.

Yesterday, I spent most of the day (from 6:30 AM until around 4:30 PM) working on the system from home while the plumber and handyman simultaneously abused my house. (After two trips, I believe I now have a working toilet in the guest bathroom!) I also broke down and hired a maid service to clean the place. I feel so bourgeois. But at least the dust bunnies have left the building.

Somewhere in there, I also ran a line directly from the phone network box to my DSL modem, and proved that my DSL problems are not the fault of the ancient phone wiring in my house. The next guess is a bad modem -- they're sending me another one. The phone company is convinced that there couldn't possibly be anything wrong with the line, so we're trying everything else first.

I then went in to work for a meeting around 5:00, and stayed there working until midnight.

This morning dawned with temperatures in the 30s, and I discovered that once again my furnace seemed to be dead. This happened last year. The repair guy said to just cycle the circuit breaker several times. After about five attempts, it finally came on. (It's an outside unit, and apparently moisture can creep into the unit and cause it not to light. A safety device cuts off the gas if there's no flame. Cycling the power resets the safety device and lets it try again. The unit hadn't been used in a few days, and it poured rain yesterday. So hopefully this won't become a regular occurrence.)

And to add to the pile of malfunction and misfortune, the zero key on my cell phone has died. So to anyone with a zero in your number, I won't be calling you. Everyone else, you're good. (Actually I can work around it with speed dial and other tricks, but it's a real pain!) Verizon says I have to take the phone to one of their stores, which are apparently all in the distant suburbs. And they're very vague about what might happen when I get there. I fear that they may ship my phone off to Timbuktu for repair and leave me without phone, which would be bad since I've also been disconnecting my home phone as part of the DSL troubleshooting.

Now I've got to go into work for more pointless meetings and server angst. Plus I've still got to go grocery shopping to do.

I'm ready for another vacation!

Eclipse

I walked in to the neighborhood grocery/health food store to pick up a few veggies for dinner. The checkout counter was abuzz. The moon, it seems, was half gone.

When I arrived outside, I saw this for myself. I drove home, grabbed my digital camera, and headed for the backyard. I subsequently stood outside in the chilly fall weather that suddenly arrived a few days ago and watched the moon drift into the shadow of the earth. (Unfortunately I lack a real telephoto lens, so the photos aren't great.)

While I was waiting, I called my parents. My mom was busy writing a sermon, and I had to convince her to go outside. My dad went outside with no prompting. They stood and watched the eclipse with me. Suddenly the 700 miles between us didn't seem so far.

Just another (birth)day...

And today, with a whimper rather than a bang, I enter the 28th year of my life. It's been a pretty average day so far. Not that I was really expecting all that much out of it. The last birthday I can remember getting really excited about was when I turned 25, because it meant that car rental companies would stop hassling me when I tried to rent a car. (IMHO, just because you're in a demographic group that's statistically inclined toward wrapping cars around telephone poles doesn't mean they should have the right to give you a hard time!)

That may have also been the year that my birthday fell on a Saturday and I went to Boston for the weekend. So I spent my birthday visiting penguins in the Boston Aquarium and doing various other fun things.

But I really just can't get all that excited about it this year. It's too much like just another day.

To be fair, I guess this has been a pretty decent year. The highlights were Italy, New Years (in PA), my brother's graduation in Maine, the 4th of July in DC, and my trip back to Syracuse. Hmm. None of the highlights were in Nashville. That sort of sums up why I want to leave one of these days, I'd say.

the dreaded early morning call

Ring. Wha... Hello? Hi Mom. I was asleep. What? Your network doesn't work? Urk. I don't know. Hang on.... Do you see the lights on the hub? Yeah, that little grey box. Are they on? There's only one? There should be two. Which one has the light? It should be really bright, not just a bit lit up. Well, stop changing your story! You're sure it's Laura's machine that has no light? OK, try plugging that one in to a different number port. Still no light? OK, try unplugging and replugging that wire tightly on the back of the computer. Still nothing? OK. Well, I don't know what to tell you. It could be that the cable is bad or the network card is bad. But neither of those things usually happens all of a sudden on their own. Just as a last ditch effort, have you tried restarting Laura's machine? What do you MEAN it's not turned on? Mom!!! If you're trying to get to a shared folder on her machine, YES, her machine has to be turned on! I'm not laughing at you, but you SO owe me an hour of sleep! [click]

More Engrishes

Bill has posted a new (and perhaps last!) installment of Close, But Not Quite, his homage to mangled English seen in Japan.

You can read more about his adventures in Japan right about here.

Hot stuff

I'm at Bongo, and am drinking a coffee they've named Hair of the Dog. Oddly, the taste is remarkably similar to that of a good cigar.

And I'm still procrastinating on my paper, despite the looming deadline. Last night I cleaned my living room to avoid working on it. When I start house cleaning, that's a good indicator that I really don't want to do something. But I'm about to have a burst of caffeine-induced productivity. I can feel it coming on. Right. Now.

Drat. It didn't happen.

I got those blinkin' sync light blues...

For some reason that eludes me, I've been having major DSL problems for the last week or two. But they're very strange DSL problems. First of all, they seem to be the worst at night. This morning I was able to stay online and connected to my office via VPN for several hours. Yet if I log on at 1:30 AM, as I am wont to do, I can barely keep a connection for two or three minutes without having the modem drop and re-sync.

The only real change I can think of during this time period has to do with the assault on pavement currently being carried out by the good people at Nashville Gas. Part of this involved digging up my front yard and replacing an old-school iron gas pipe with plastic tubing. I'm wondering if perhaps something in the house was improperly grounded to the gas pipe. Now that the pipe is insulated with plastic tubing, perhaps the lack of ground is causing the problem.

My little theory, however, wouldn't explain the curious day/night phenomenon.

This is all quite vexing.

Like all good DSL techies, Mr. Butler was very quick to blame my unfiltered alarm system. But the system has been disconnected from the phone line for several days, and the problem has persisted.

Of course, the phone wiring in this 1920s-vintage house is strung up from the rafters in the dirt cellar, and is quite literally held together by thumbtacks and duct tape. So I suppose at some level it's amazing the thing worked at all. I should probably take the time to crawl around down there and run new wiring, but I have a paper to write this weekend. So maybe I'll just borrow a cup of wireless Internet from everyone's favorite funkadelic neighborhood coffee joint.

In unrelated news...

I saw The Runaway Jury with a friend earlier tonight. A great suspense story, and I got to revel in a bit of New Orleans nostalgia to boot. (Shady dealings are just better when you negotiate them over Beignets at Cafe du Monde.)

I also discovered that Bonhoeffer, which I just missed the last time I was in DC, is playing for the next few days at the Belcourt. I have been fascinated by the German theologian and Nazi resister ever since I read Denise Giardina's haunting historical novel Saints and Villains. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to convince my friend to go see it with me, but I'm going to try to make it over there before the show closes.

They don't do windows

Some VIPs from our company's headquarters are flying in on the corporate jet next week for a bunch of meetings and schmoozing. My boss just sent out an e-mail with their agenda, which I opened on my computer at home. A brief moment of amusement followed. When I double clicked the Word attachment, Word popped to the front. My to-do list from last weekend was still open on the screen.

So for a brief moment, I thought that the corporate honchos had scheduled activities like like "clean bathroom, "get new toilet seat," "get scrapbook supplies," and "directions for Grandpa." Alas, it turns out that they're just doing things like having Operational Discussions about Financial Impact. Too bad.

ding, dong, ratatatatatatatatatata

I was up very late last night. (Blogging, I admit, but also doing some school work and various other things.) My plan had been to sleep until 9:30, which would have still given me, if not a lot of sleep, at least enough to make it through the day. At 7:00 AM, the neighbor's kid persistently starts ringing my doorbell to tell me that the cat was fine when she checked in on her. A week and a half ago, while I was on vacation. Not sure I see the urgency in this, but anyhow.

So then I was awake for a while, checked my e-mail and did a few other things, and could already tell that I was dragging. So around 7:45 I figured that I'd go back to bed for another couple hours. No sooner had I gotten to sleep, the world champion jackhammer team arrives outside my bedroom window. And starts tearing up the part of the street that they hadn't already destroyed.

Maybe I'm an unwitting part of some sort of sleep deprivation experiment.

Luther -- The Man, The Myth, The Movie

Sorry I've been invisible lately. Lots of stress, for a variety of different reasons. Hopefully things will get better soon, but I have a feeling posting may be erratic for a while -- possibly until the end of the semester.

On a non-stressful topic, I saw Luther on Friday night, and was blown away by it. Not that it was necessarily the best movie ever made. But, like Titanic, it gives you a real impression of what people might have seen and heard at a particular point in history.

I think if you've been exposed to something all your life, you sometimes don't really get the point. Growing up Lutheran, I've known about the 95 theses and Luther's wrath over indulgences for as long as I can remember.

The phrase "Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise" is stuck in my head, but not because I really comprehended it. Instead, it was part of a church camp chant that we'd repeat every morning before announcements:

Gooood Mooorning, Mister Craig. And what a fine morning it is. Yes, yes, indeed. The sun is peeking through the clouds, and it looks like it's going to be a wonnnderfulll day. Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise, God help me, Amen. A might fortress is our God. His banner over me is love. Turn, Turn, Turn. Oh, rocka my soul, Baby! A Do Run Run Run, A Do Run Run.

(Or something along those lines -- it was like 20 years ago!)

The point is, that when something is drummed into you in such a relentless and silly way, it loses all meaning. So that's why I was blown away by the scene where Luther stands in front of representatives of the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor (who could easily have him burned at the stake) and refuses to recant his writings.

Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me.

This dude is thumbing his nose at the most powerful people in the world, in a time when due process wasn't even a glimmer on the horizon. Not something you realize when the phrase is a prelude to announcements about tonight's big game of capture the flag.

To be sure, the movie is probably a rose-colored look at the life of a complex person. Nothing is said, for example, of Luther's antisemitic writings -- which reflected his time but are incongruous with his otherwise progressive views.

Still, I found the movie to be inspiring. If nothing else, it made me want to revisit Germany. I think we breezed by some Luther-related sites during our whirlwind 3-week stay in high school, but I'd like to see more. So I was also inspired to dust off my German book and order a new set of flash cards.

Nothing new there, I guess. I think my restlessness in Nashville is reaching new heights lately. And that's saying something.�

At the Beach

A cold day in the rust belt

United Technologies, the parent company of the Carrier corporation, has announced that it is shutting down the company's manufacturing facilities in Syracuse. About 1,200 of the company's 2,800 employees in the city will be laid off. The refrigeration equipment manufactured locally will now be made in Singapore and Stone Mountain, Georgia.

This is a huge deal. Carrier is one of the most visible industries in the city -- SU's domed stadium has been known as the Carrier Dome since it was built about 25 years ago.

I don't know what to say...

It appears that California has actually elected Arnold Schwartzenegger Governor. I don't know what this means for Western Civilization As We Know It, but it can't be good.

Keep meaning to...

I keep meaning to blog, and then not quite getting around to it. Same old school/work stuff. Plus I've been trying to do much needed fall cleaning on my house. And I've been sucked into eHarmony, an online dating service that's more time-intensive than the real thing. (More on that one of these days.)

In other news...

What I did this weekend:

• Went to an Italian restaurant with friends and got to listen to a lounge guitarist with really cheesy synthesized background tracks. Then a chunky guy wearing an apron and an "Italian Stallion" t-shirt came out and started crooning. I was endlessly amused.

• Actually read my school reading assignments (on time, for a change.) Listened to an hour long interview with this biotech bigwig. And chatted online with my project team. All sorts of academic fun.

• An assload of laundry. And actually put most of it away when I was done.

• IMed with my friend in Boston about the Yankees, Red Sox, etc.

• e-mailed a professor at said friend's college to try to get in on a trip to India in January. For credit, to study offshore outsourcing of IT. Assuming they'll let me enroll and my school will let me transfer the credit. A lot of ifs, but traveling to India would sure beat another boring online elective.

• Watched The Other Sister with Juliette Lewis and Giovanni Ribisi. This is going to brand me as a total sentimental sap, but I absolutely loved this movie. It is a (debatably realistic) portrayal of a mentally-disabled couple, focusing on the woman's struggle for independence from her domineering Mom. I probably wouldn't have given this a second look in the theater, but I'm glad I happened to stumble into it on cable.

That's about all the excitement. On Wednesday night, I'm flying out to North Carolina for a four-day beach minibreak with my parents and one of my brothers. My parents are nuts, which is why they think that October is ideal beach season. I laughed at them the first year, but every time I've gone it's been warm enough to swim, at least most days. And there are absolutely no crowds. So maybe they've got the right idea.

OK, enough of this. Gotta go finish a group paper that I stupidly volunteered to edit. Gak.