Into the Wild

It’s one of the most beautiful days in SoCal that I have seen in a long time. I have done grocery shopping, three weeks worth of dishes and now cooking and doing laundry, giddy with spring fever and the freedom of wide open spaces of the greening mountains on the horizons that I’ll be hiking up and bounding down tomorrow. Getting psyched by listening to Eddy.

Life’s good.

Some great lines:

Oh, it's a mystery to me
We have a greed with which we have agreed
And you think you have to want more than you need
Until you have it all you won't be free

…

There's those thinking, more-or-less, less is more
But if less is more, how you keeping score?

…

Society, you're a crazy breed.
I hope you're not lonely, without me.

There Is Pleasure In The Pathless Woods by Lord Byron

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the Universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.

A Day in a Life

I am often at a loss as to what to say when I am asked “How was your day?” What is a day in the life an engineering manager or director like? It’s mostly meetings. But what goes on in those meetings? Here is a sampling.

Me: Ok I got everyone together to talk about the plans for the preproduction phase A of our latest hardware box.

Jacob: I thought the project was on hold?

Steve: No that’s not true we are restarting next week.

Jacob: But John told me it’s on hold.

Steve: When did you talk to John?

Jacob: Yesterday.

Steve: Well that’s not what John told me today.

Me: OK, regardless, we  are going to discuss plans and not worry about the project status.

Jacob: Well, I am just saying. We can plan. But if the project is on hold then this is a waste of time.

Steve (irritated and with eyes closed): NO IT’S NOT ON HOLD.

Jacob (oblivious to Steve’s irritation): Well, I am just saying. If it’s on hold, then this is a waste of time.

Steve (more irritated): How many times do I have to tell you, IT IS NOT ON HOLD.

Me: Guys, guys. Ok. Here let’s look at this Execl table. What are the deliverables for this program?

Adam: Well, it’s a light sensitive automatic flushing system.

Jacob: I thought it was supposed to be pressure sensitive.

Steve: NO IT’S LIGHT SENSETIVE. That’s in the marketing definition document.

Jacob: Well, I for one have never seen a marketing definition document. Are you sure it’s not light sensitive? I am just saying.

Adam: I saw that document last year. There was no reference to the sensor, just stated an AFS, automatic flushing system.

Steve: And it’s got to be light sensitive to work.

Jacob: So if I don’t turn on the light, it won’t work? That doesn’t make any sense. It’s got to be pressure sensitive. I am just saying.

Why do people ever say “I am just saying?” It’s a completely redundant statement, I am wondering to myself.

Steve: It’s light. That’s how EVERYONE does it. You wanna reinvent the wheel, go right ahead.

The references to the wheel and it’s reinvention are also completely overused, if you ask me. I think to myself. And the phrase “If you ask me” is another redundancy. It’s answering the question and then asking if you asked. So much nonsense must be driveled out to fill the hour of a meeting that’s not going to go anywhere other than agreeing to have another meeting.

Me: Ok, let’s leave the sensor alone for now. We just use a place holder for it for now until we know more. How about the controller. Who has developed a requirements document for it.

Jacob: Steve’s team was supposed to do it, but they were late, so I had my team design it without requirements.

Steve: WE WERE NOT LATE. The project was on hold!

Jacob: But you said it was not.

Steve: You said it was, then why did you design anything at all?

Jacob: We did it before it went on hold. We couldn’t wait for the requirements to meet the timing. We had to design. I am just saying.

Me: So what kind of sensor does your design use?

Jacob: Ummm, I am not sure, there was no requirements.

I press my thumb and index finger on the back of my eyeballs and rub. Hard. Little flashing stars appear before my eyes and the scene is strangely soothing.

Me: So we have a design that doesn’t meet non-existing requirements.

Jacob: Well we have to test it to see.

Adam: When can we start testing? We don’t have a lab set up.

Me: Ralph, do you have a test lab available?

Ralph (looking up from his smart phone): Huh?

Me: When will you have a lab available to test the AFS system?

Ralph: What AFS?

Me: The Automatic Flushing System that we have been talking about?

Ralph: All my labs are booked till December. You need to clear it with Bob.

Jacob: Well if there is no lab, there is absolutely no way I can make the timing. No way, I am just letting you know right now.

Me: We haven’t talked about the timing yet. When will we have have new complete requirements Steve?

Steve: I am not gonna write requirements if the design is already done.

Me: How far is the software?

Jacob: Well we have the first prototype tested in the lab.

Me: What lab? I thought there were no labs?

Jacob: We used the Auto Disposal Lab. That project was on hold.

Ralph: You used that lab without authorization from me??!! That project is not on hold. It’s very critical. I am reporting this to Bob!!!

Jacob: No one was using that lab for weeks. We just used it. You never noticed.

Ralph (threatening me): I am reporting this to Bob. Your team is out of control.

Me: Jacob, why didn’t you clear this with me?

Jacob: Well actually one of the guys on my team did it without me knowing it. It was Ryan. I told him he shouldn’t have.

Oh god, now comes the time to throw the underlings under the bus. I’ll be telling Bob that it was Jacob. And Ryan will get his ass handed to him for taking an extra bit of initiative.

Me: Please clear the lab out and hand it back to Ralph. Ralph, I am sorry, you’ll have your lab back exactly as it was.

Ralph: It better be. My project is delayed because of this. I am statusing out as RED on this one.

Since when did status become a verb, I ponder.

Jacob: The lab was not used for weeks and no one was asking for it. I am just saying.

Ralph: Our project is definitely delayed because of this resource issue.

Steve: I gotta go, I have another meeting.

Jason and Robert follow him out too. What the hell do those two do? I think they are in my organization. I have never heard them talk. They are young and polite, but seem to be always texting each other and grinning.

Me: Ok, I am going to schedule another meeting for next week to continue planning.

Meanwhile hoping that we’d be bankrupt by then or a tsunami hits the shores or the big earthquake finally hits so that I would not have to suffer through this again.

My next meeting is in 5 minutes. Praying for natural disasters.

In Orange County

Writing requires a certain mood; the mood has struck, alas there is nothing to write home about.

The new job requires next to no travel, so there is not much to report on that front. The car is striking but Orange is the most boring of colors in Southern California.

I have a 110 thousand dollar car to test drive this weekend. The question is where? Make a plan? Lately my best laid plans have dissolved into a hopeless heap of knotted ropes laid upon the deck of a sailboat, best to be thrown overboard in the next rising ocean swell. And the ocean always swells, sooner or later.

Driving through the desert seems like the thing to do. Where the hum of the city fades away and the silence deafens the senses. Watching a sunset on the ancient sun baked rocks. Thinking: Am I much better than these rocks? With all my thoughts and wonders, with what I humor myself to be self-awareness? Am I better than them, when they will still be there to be seen for hundreds of thousands of years beyond me? Weathered and eroded, yet still intact?

Not much humor in all of this, is there? Ok here is a joke: A horse walks into a bar and the bartender says “why the long face?”

And to finish, here is a sailing and nailing song:

Shades of Gray

There are times in life where in an insane moment you get all turned upside down. You are aboard your boat, following a compass heading, looking at charts, no need to time any knots on the dead reckoning line, the GPS is giving you every second of latitude and longitude. The sails are full and tuned. The wind is agreeable. The seas are fair, vast and fresh.

Suddenly a squall kicks up and you are thrown around. You react hard and instinctive, pull on some lines and let loose some sheets, fight the tiller, the boat heels over and tumbles around and by the time you are righted, you have banged your head and are bleeding from the corner of your eyebrow. You are shaky and disoriented; you don’t know who and where you are for a moment. After you stop trembling and gather yourself together, you check your charts and heading to find yourself a thousand miles away from where you were. You are dumbfounded, pressing your fingers onto your forehead in disbelief! Were the charts wrong? Were the instruments lying? Were you always there and didn’t know it? Which reality is right? “What the $#@*& happened to my reality?” You shout at blues of the ocean. “Was everything that I ever knew unreal?”

You check and find that you are at your final destination, without having traveled. You had not planned for such an abrupt end to your journey. You had counted on many stops along the way, anchoring in faraway bays, strolling on wayward islands, tied up to moorings in tropical lands. But you see the large land mass and the final dockage in sight. You have provisions unconsumed, lists unchecked, plans unachieved. The squall has taken them all away.

You have arrived. But oh, what you wouldn’t do to turn back the clock, to do things differently, to enjoy the journey more, to steer away from the storms, to remain at sea a bit longer. What you wouldn’t do? But if you were lucky enough to know that there are squalls at sea that can whisk you away in an insane moment, would you have enjoyed the journey more or less? Is not ignorance bliss?

 

Is anything that we know true? Is truth absolute or relative? Not in black and white, rather a tapestry of impressions that lies across the continuum of time and space, lies in endless shades of gray. At any given moment there is a likelihood that you are where you think are with a certain degree of grayness. Yet there is another likelihood that you are not. This tapestry is the fabric of the being human.

Note for further reading: Readers interested in a more pompous explanation of the above may look up “Quantum Mechanics Probability Wave Function” and “Quantum Non-Locality Phenomenon,”  a bigger mouthful than Shades of Gray!

Schrödinger's cat

 

Boys Night Out

I went out to watch a basketball game at a local sports bar with three friends a couple of years ago and things went so awry that I had to write about it. I came across that piece today and thought to post it on the web to the whole world.

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OK folks, there is a lot misinformation about what happened on Friday night and I just wanted to give a detailed account of the truth and clear our good names. Also since our names are now in the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security databases, I’ll have to use factitious names or just initials to protect the innocent.

Friday

8:00 pm: the Pistons game: drinking beer, eating nachos, smoking cigars. Didn’t pay much attention to the game but I think the Pistons won by a land slide. Not.

8:15: A.M. suggests going to Windsor to enjoy the various cultures and be exposed to a foreign culture with a strange language. All agree.

8:50: The border guard sends us inside saying “You can come to Canada and do whatever you want, fish, hunt, gamble, but you might not be able to get back in U.S., eh”. Inside the nice lady guard says “there’s no guarantee they’ll let ye back in you know, you got no passports, and these days it’s all aboot passports, eh.”

P.B. “I have been to Canada lots ‘a times and have never been hassled. This is an outrage”

Guard “Sir you can enter Canada, but there is a chance you’ll have to call home and have somebody bring you a passport when you try to get back in!”

P.B. “This is crazy! I am never coming back here again! Canada sucks, no wonder it’s a dictatorship.”

A.M. “Let’s just go back. Can we go back?”

Guard: “Sure. Let me just fill ooout this form, you sign it and back ye go.”

The guard walks us back to our car. Before getting into the car J.P. smirks “Good thing they didn’t search the car.” The guards standing outside look at each other suspiciously. J.P. jokes “Just kidding man…”

Guards “You don’t joke here at the border sir. Please step aside we have to search the car.”

After a thorough search, J.P smirks, “Good thing they didn’t do a body search.”

Five minutes later: Body search inside. Fortunately the Canadian border guards are attractive women as opposed to their overweight-tooth-missing-middle-aged American counterparts.

B.B. “Hey, I know my rights. I am an American, What about cavity search, I demand it!”

P.B. “Damn Canadians! In America they use the good K.Y, Jelly! This is an outrage!”

J.P. “Hey, those are the spare keys to the Focus. I was looking for them.”

B.B. “I usually keep the weapons of mass destruction in my shorts, be sure to do a thorough search!”

Guards: “where were you born sir?”

A.M. “On the border of Iran and Iraq to Palestinian parents. Undergrad in Afghanistan and graduate studies in Sudan.”

Guards “Please come with us for special processing sir.”

J.P. “Those are mighty big guns for these little guards.”

P.B. “You know, if you grease those guns they won’t rust. You gotta use the special PT57 grease; they have ‘em at NAPA. I had a cousin with a 9 mm who…”

10 minutes later

P.B. “Then again the FP45 is less viscous…you can use it on the carburetors too…”

20 minutes later

P.B. “Never use cotton for greasing though; it clogs up the chambers…”

The guards have put their gun barrels in their own mouths and are preparing to pull the triggers. One of them points her gun at us and says “if you don’t leave now we are going to go Abu Ghareib on your ass!”

Five minutes later: In the car back in the U.S.

P.B. “Those damn Canadians, this sucks.”

A.M. “Damn, that special processing!!”

J.P. “Hey good thing they didn’t search my shoes, har…”

B.B. (smoking a cigarette) “Hey, that Abu Ghereib thing sounded like fun, let’s go back!”

P.B. “This is something I’ll never forget, I am never going back.

A.M. “I think we should invade them preemptively.”

J.P. “ No oil though.”

B.B. “But they got that sand oil thing.”

P.B. “But that’s no good for the engine.”

A.M. “Might be good for the hybrid electric engines though.”

J.P. “No the energy content is too low. The conversion is the issue.”

A twenty minute discussion on hybrid-electric vehicle technology ensues.

P.B. “Hey look at that 67 Chevy el Kahuna, 650 cubic foot engine triple over head cam…all POWER”

J.P. “No that’s 625 cubic. The paint job sucks though”

B.B. “I had one of those.”

A 15 minute discussion on the el Kahuna’s internal combustion engine ensues.

Greek Town Casino, ATM machine trip number 3:

P.B. “This is exactly why I wanted to go to Windsor. I hear they have nickel poker tables. Let’s go to white castle!”

A.M. “No man, my luck is turning around.”

30 minutes later: some Greek restaurant in Greektown

April to P.B. (on the phone: “Where are you? I thought you where dead in a ditch”

10 minutes later

Nancy to A.M. “Where the hell are you it’s 4:30!!! $$%# whatever …”

5 minutes later

Jenny to B.B. “$%#^$#” clank.

5 minutes later

Everybody to J.P. “ha ha look whose wife hasn’t called. Poo’ baby, wifey doesn’t love him…”