Files Are Not For Sharing from the The Morning News.
Today was a bad day. Bad as in I had to leave work before I totally lost my composure. I feel like the guy in one of those “how do you get two chickens and a fox across the river one at a time with out the fox eating the chickens” puzzles. Only I’ve got two foxes and one chicken. I can handle the grief of Michele’s death. I can handle the grief of my mother’s death. The two combined takes me right up to my limit. I have no freeboard left for anything else.
Only I have a job, and that job, like all jobs, comes with a ration of stress. We are in the final eight days of our design. Originally we were to hand it off on June 19th, which slipped to the 26th, and has now slipped again to the 30th. Ordinarily having some extra time to tie up lose ends would be welcome, but in this case it feels like we are prolonging the end for no real gain. Certainly, I’m not enjoying it. I am burnt out on the endless slog through the minutiae that is this design. Adding to my stress is the knowledge that our current tasking ends on June 30th. There is a possibility that the next tasking won’t be in place by the following working day.
In other words, at a time when I have no spare bandwidth for stress, my job has become more and more stressful, the duration of the stress keeps getting extended, and after it is all said and done, it may really be all said and done. Now I don’t expect the project team to be let go after the 30th, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a delay while the ever so fine wheels of politics grind slowly forward.
On a scale of one to ten I would rate today about a minus three. I’m looking forward to a time when things will just suck again. I know that all of this will pass and I’ll be able to move on, but for now it seems unending and relentless. Venting about it here, be it maudlin or haphazard, has helped. Now all I have to do is beat the cats, yell at the neighbors, and smash something to feel better.
Just kidding… I would never beat the cats.
They know where I sleep.
Back in late April and early May I was casting about trying to decide how to celebrate my birthday this year. For the first time in nine years it would be a day without Michele’s planning behind it. Adding to the difficulty was my mom’s declining health. The weekend of my birthday I actually traveled to Illinois in what later was the last visit I had with my Mom while she was still conscious. I would see her again Memorial Day weekend, but she was no longer aware or responsive during that visit.
In thinking about my birthday and trying to decide what Michele would have me do, were I able to contact her and ask, I settled on having a meal out at our favorite Kansas City eatery, Peach Tree. Serving incredible southern style home cooking, Peach Tree is a gem. Located in the Jazz district meals there are often accompanied by live piano or jazz ensembles. The food is simply incredible.
Not wanting to go it alone I asked a couple I met through work if they would like to join me. Michele and I had started a friendship with them, and my relationship with the two of them has only deepened in the months following her death. They agreed and as luck would have it, the first mutually free date was yesterday. Being Father’s Day it turned into an extended family gathering with mom’s and dad’s and grandparents all in attendance. Usually I feel like a red-haired ugly fifth-wheel when I’m the only non-family member present but I was made very welcome and enjoyed myself immensely.
After leaving the restaurant I could feel Michele’s satisfaction that I had done something for me, in celebration of me, for my birthday. It is hard amidst all the grief, travel, and work, to find time to celebrate me, to allow myself to have some good just because. I know that we all need to feel special and valued or we sink into depression. I’ve worked hard at keeping myself active and moving forward, which counteracts much of the pull depression has, but not all. Letting myself have a special meal out, with good friends, was the just the thing to lighten my mood.
Books that have accurate depictions of martial arts are few and far between. The John Rain series, starting with Rain Fall by Barry Eisler, is one of only a handful novels with a good story and good martial arts thrown in the mix. I’m re-reading the first four in the series in anticipation of the newly released fifth book.
Rating: As hard hitting as any o-soto-gari.
Ever since I was a teenager I’ve been reading Robert Ludlum’s books. The best one was the The Bourne Identity. Ludlum’s books are dense with plot twists and rich with detail, most are hundreds of pages long. Obviously the movie The Bourne Identity bears only a passing resemblance to the original story. Still it is a well crafty and surprisingly good movie.
Rating: One of the few movies I can re-watch again and again.
Rating: A nice continuation of the first Bourne installment.
As I have had the same email address for over ten years now I get a ton of spam; upwards of 500 a day. Yes, five hundred. As a consequence I use an industrial strength Bayesian spam filter to clean out my inbox. In a week’s time the filter traps and segregates 3500-4000 spam messages for me. By and large the filter is excellent but there is one type of message that defeats the filter.
My web site content management software (MovableType) sends me a message for each new comment and each new trackback or ping. Since I rarely, if ever, get any comments I have only gotten “new comment” email from the site twenty-nine times. Usually the content of the comment is acceptable and, as a result, it passes the incoming mail filter and lands in my inbox. Cool.
Trackbacks, or pings as they are sometimes called, are links to a specific posting I’ve made from someone else’s site. I write about some topic x and they write about my posting on their site with a link back to my posting. If they so choose their content management software can “ping” mine resulting in a link on my posting to theirs. It’s a neat feature that is unfortunately ripe with potential for various pond scum eating knuckle draggers.
Purveyors of Viagra or porn or adult sex toys use automated software that generates trackbacks to a postings on thousands (millions) of sites, including mine. Now my site has links to their product. In effect they are using my site to advertise their shit. Imagine having your own billboard along side the highway, only it is constantly being covered up with ads for everthing under the sun: gambling, sex, and drugs. You are paying for their ad.
When the email from MovableType arrives the spam filter sees the content of the trackback posting title as spam since it usually contains words that have scored very high in previous spams. Words like sex, Viagra, online gambling, et cetera. So I don’t see the trackback notification - it’s off in the junk folder hidden in the noise of several hundred or even several thousand other messages. Training the spam filter to accept the trackback messages regardless of their spam-like content only increases the amount of real spam in my inbox. Not training the filter leaves me wide open to abuses by various uni-brow cretins who ought to have their noses stapled to their assholes just before being covered with fire ants and set ablaze with lighter fluid.
This morning I cleared out several HUNDRED trackback spams and turned off once and for all the trackback feature on my web site. What really upsets me in all of this is that the offenders are totally uncaring that the software they are using indiscriminately vandalizes my site (and hundreds of thousands of other sites). If a punk wants to vandalize your house, and every other house on your street with spray paint he has to at least physically go to each house. The script-kiddie (a euphemism for shit-for-brains-nose-picker) just downloads a script or two and runs it, never caring a whit about the damage that will follow. At the push of a button he can deface not only your house, but every house for hundreds of miles.
Prison time is too good for these vermin. They should be made to bath lepers with their tongues.
I have enjoyed all of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch novels, and was pleasantly surprised to discover that I had missed a couple along the way. A Darkness More Than Night comes at Harry Bosch from the side and gives us a glimpse into the darkness that resides inside of all of us.
Rating: Kept me up way past my bedtime
Earlier this week I used an “Old El Paso” taco kit to make, oddly enough, tacos. The outside of the box hinted that free iTunes songs could be had within. Sure enough, printed on one flap inside the box is a code good for one download.
This morning I rounded out the John Sandford “Lucas Davenport top 100 Songs of the Rock Era” playlist I’ve been building by getting the last 12 or so songs I needed. Did I happen to remember to use my free download coupon?
Of course not.
<Expletive deleted. />
This morning’s workout was exceptional for me. About ten or twelve students from Lawrence came over and joined us, making the group around twenty for the day. The Lawrence dojo is Korean, and while they call it kumdo to our kendo, the two arts are the same. Remembering the fun of large group work outs from my karate experience I had been looking forward to today’s workout since Wednesday when Sensei informed us it would take place.
More and more of the nuances are clicking into place for me now. Towards the end of the practice I suddenly “got” the rhythm of hiya suburi and could feel the flow of my movement forwards and back in sync with the men strikes. It brought back memories of getting to the same mental/physical space in karate. Good memories.
I have been holding off on buying a keiko-gi and hakama as I didn’t want to spend money on equipment if I wasn’t going to use it. After today’s workout I am convinced that I’ll be doing this for a long time to come. Time to get out the tape measure and order an exercise jacket (kieko-gi) and split-skirt pants (hakama). Time also to start saving for a complete set of bogu (armor).
For those of you who are interested in seeing what kendo looks like, I’ve uploaded some pictures to Flickr: Kendo-Kumdo Workout Pictures. (Kumdo is the Korean form of kendo.)