Monthly Archives: December 2007

I apologize

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I haven’t posted in a long time.

I have thoughts to share.

I just don’t have the time.

So, I had a very nice Christmas, I hope you did too.

I am wearing a lovely cable-knit hoodie sweater I recieved from my mother-in-law. MONUMENTALLY, I finally had a conversation with Chris’s brother, my new brother-in-law. Somehow, in the previous 8 years, we never quite launched a conversation. I kept hoping it would happen, thinkingn that somewhere in there was an interesting thought.

And I WAS RIGHT! My faith is justified, and that actually brings new light to all kinds of possibilities that I have been losing hope on. So that’s good.

We got a new car, while not hearing from the insurance yet about old car. Eh, I like me new car, so that’s okay.

We have also misplaced the card reader for the camera, so i can’t share a digital picture. sorry.

and I’m sorry to be so boring. I appreciate your patience, and I note that the blogs I follow are singularly boring just now, so I am giving myself slack for being unoriginal.

Peace and love to all.

Let your pain be your guide

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So on monday another person forgot to hit their brakes.

They hit me and my car is done.

IMG_1538

the crumple zones crumpled.

I am okay. My neck is a bit stiff, but I think that will be over by the end of the week.

I did see the doctor and I asked him if I needed to rest..He said “Let your pain be your guide.”

okay.

nerd word peeve

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Okay people, pay attention!

yes, this means you.

My job title is Senior Videoconference Engineer

I work on video conferencing equipment. I also sometimes help with audio conferences, and with web conferences.

ALL of those things can be correctly called “teleconferences” and none of them may accurately be described so.

the prefix “tele-” refers to distance.

A telephone is a device that sends SOUND (phone) over DISTANCE (tele).

A television is a device that sends PICTURES (vision) over DISTANCE (tele). Televisions also send sound, but that was old technology by the time television was invented so it got ignored when naming the device.

So, a teleconference is a conference that takes place over distance.

If someone calls me and asks for help setting up a teleconference, I immediately must ask them a bunch of questions that (to them) appear stupid.

“Do you want to have a conference in which all the people dial into a phone and can speak to one another and hear each other throughout?”

or

“Do you want to have a conference in which all the people are sitting in a room looking at a TV that shows someone in another city?”

I sound like a kindergartner because I have been placed in a position of redefining terms EVERY TIME the word teleconference is uttered.

Those questions do sound stupid, but the stupid comes from the question. Just because a word has 5 syllables doesn’t mean it’s meant to be used or that it makes sense.

A phone conference is a clear accurate phrase. Even a “telephone conference” is okay to say. A “television conference” is a phrase that never gets uttered. A telephone goes both ways, meaning you can talk and the other person on the other end can talk and you can both hear each other, so it seems right to have a conference (a back and forth discussion) using a telephone. But a television is one way. You recieve the video (and the sound) but you never send. So a “television conference”, as far as I know, has never been used, and kinda doesn’t make sense because when you talk to a TV you really don’t expect it to talk back.

A “video conference” is the correct term. But because televisions and telephones are such common household items, AND because they both start with tele-…we in the business tend to call phone conferences AUDIO conferences. A whole other word can sometimes shock a L-user into rethinking what they are asking for, and when they have insisted (for the 5th time) that they want “a TELE conference” and we ask “An audio conference or a video conference?”…we use words that are not part of the television/telephone diad.

audio or video…take your pick

TELECONFERENCE, no
expunge this word from the dictionary. It is non-specific to the point of destruction.

version control

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I have been working on a book for four years…and I can’t find half of it.

It must be somewhere.

You know those ads for “PC anywhere”? they say “Do you need to access your desktop computer at work from home? Get PC anywhere!”

I need to access my stupid home computer…but

that whitespace is for all the caps i want to use and big profanities. The thing is, our network has been befoogled by the new office. THe office that chris is in. and it’s a little far for my laptops’ wireless to reliably get to…and YES, we put in cabling back to the house…but I must have punched it down wrong…

and it’s because…

and I can’t

But it can’t happen until

it is all about shaving the yak

which makes be want to curse in caps

and I could if I wanted to…i don’t object to cursing or caps when appropriate…

BUT NONE OF THIS IS APROPRIATE

^&*(%
(*()(&*^&%^&!!

Roots

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One of the things I always knew when I was growing up was how special my church was. It was filled with the Holy Spirit.

Most other places were not filled with the Holy Spirit. In fact, other churches were so far away from God that they were even suspicious of people who were filled with the Holy Spirit. We knew that was silly, because the Bible talks about being filled with the Holy Spirit, right there in the beginning of Acts.

How could a Christian call themself a Christian and be suspicious of what was right there in the BIble?

I wanted to know how it had gotten lost. I was told that the Bible was written, and then the Church got all corrupted because of the sinfulness of the Catholic Church. It was amazing that there was a church at all, but it trucked along by the mercy of–the Holy Spirit!–until Martin Luther could hang his 95 theses on the wall and everyone could be Christians again.

But that didn’t answer my question about how Christians had lost the Holy Spirit. What had happened?

It was kinda the same thing. Just like Christianity itself had bumped along in the dark until Martin Luther cast off the evil catholics, the Holy Spirit had been ghosting around like a fog in the dark, just waiting to come back. He waited, until a lady in Los Angeles was suddenly filled with the Holy Spirit, started talking in tongues, and then everyone got filled with the Holy Spirit again.

A lady in Los Angeles? That means it couldn’t have been that long ago.

No, it was right before the great depression.They called it the Azusa street revival and that’s how our church got started. A lot of churches got started throught that movement.

———————-

I remember hearing about the Asuza street revival. What I didn’t know what how HUGE it was, and that the lady who was filled with the Holy Spirit was a world-wide phenomena knows as Sister Aimee Semple-McPherson.

I didn’t even know that my bus passed that very Asuza street church, known as Temple Angelus, every day when I used to work downtown.

She was a huge force, and magnetically powerful woman who had passed into obscure legend, a no-name entity, by the time my folks had jumped on the caboose of the train that had started out as her bandwagon.

She started in the midwest, and her first husband was a preacher. They went to China as missionaries, and he died. She miraculously made it backto america and eventually became an evangelist.

And how! She had a radio show during the heyday of radio. In fact, she was the one who came up with the “Place your hands on the radio to be healed” idea…

I also find it interesting that her phrases (as I have heard them in documentaries) are the accent and tones that I heard imitated by itinerant preachers that came. I aways wondered why people would get that prophesying tone.

Oh Lord-ah…we prayyy for sturength-uh

I wondered about that as a kid…People who spoke normally in conversation would start talking all funny..

IT WAS HER! she talked like that.

And I never knew. I never knew that such an incredible strong woman got baptized in the man-centered church of my youth..baptized SO HARD she never came up for air.

and I had to learn about her through a PBS documentary.

…yet another example of how anonymous is a woman…

There was no end to the references of the Asuza street revival. But heavens, I never knew what it was.

Alternative

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problems with my itunes has me reloading the music that’s on my computer back into the player.

That is a treacherous path down memory lane. I have an odd assortment of music on the computer.

Gin Blossoms. WOW, that’s memory lane. it’s under the genre heading Alternative & Punk.

Alternative. I remember asking what that was supposed to mean.

“It’s like Heavy metal, but about how your life sucks…”

Does anyone else remember the Flannel shirt days of seattle music like me? I haven’t met anyone who does in a long time. But the GBs were from that time, and I am there again.

Nirvana can follow Cobain to wherever he went, they were never my anthems. But the Gin Blossoms, a million weird college bands never to be heard from again…They Might be Giants, Linda Perry’ screaming “WHAT”S GOING ON?” and the doc marten shod cranberries…”Do you have to…do you have to…?”

“Step out the front door like a ghost into a fog
where no on notices the contrast of white on white”

That slammed me in the gut..the struggle for selfhood and to be noticed in the big wide world of other people’s importance…

I remember beign grateful that huge clothing and torn jeans were in, because the homeless look was just about all I could afford at the time. I was POOR.

way poor

and then in ’95 I moved to California, and that’ about when I met Alanis. SHE let me know just how pissed off I was.

“I dont’ mean to pick you apart you see
but I can’t help it…
..all I really want is some patience..
a way to calm the angry voice…
and all i really want is deliverance”

Those were the days.

Most profitable

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Another topic of conversation during the super-smart-and-successful employed girls of the girls night was the state of health care.

Someone was mortified that our civilized country would allow pharmaceutical companies to advertise. She contended that they were already the most profitable industry ever.

I narrowed my eyes. “I don’t think that’s true.”

“Yes it is!” she said. She had read several books about it.

A smart and successful approach to the problem is to read books about it. And it is more than the casual interest, quite obviously, because it takes work to read it.

but it also takes work to write such a book. And I am suspicious of that…I hear in the distance the sound of an axe grinding.

So, I want to research which companies are the most profitable. Fortune magazine gives a list.

Johnson&Johnson are at #11…but I think they are more focussed on shampoo than finding the new viagra…Pfizer is #15…that’s a drug company for sure.

I wonder what criteria those books use? Here’s a site that says they are the most profitable. He cites 2001…When my link above cites 2005.

2001 was a bad year for many many companies…Maybe not the best year to pick for judging profitability across the board. Then again, it depends on what you are trying to prove. Maybe if you want to say they are the most profitable, then it is the best year to pick. 2001 is the year you would be RIGHT!

Profitability is tricky. I mean, Enron looked extremely profitable, until it didn’t.

What’s the deal here? Do we want to be right, or do we want to solve a problem? I personally don’t care to be right, I care to be better off.

The people i know that work in the pharmaceutical industry tell me that the research and development of new drugs all get paid for out of american pockets. That the r&d wouldn’t happen if they didn’t get the money back from the USA.

is that true? they are insiders, but might be skewed to favor their viewpoint too.

As far as I know, all the big companies are international. Wikipedia has a list. They seem to indicate that all the comopanies are based in some nationality.

But trade being what it is, surely they all sell to america. The word on the street that the USA pays for the R&D could be true.

And maybe that’s not fair. The EU and Canada should shoulder their part! All the rich nations should be penalized equally!

then again, maybe they are penalized by not getting the good pills. I don’t know. It is most intriguing.

I have heard it said that the problem with Big Pharma’s profitabiliyt expecations is with the regulations required to get the goods on the market. That the FDA is so darn picky, and can change teh requirements at any time, meaning that Big Pharma might have to undergo big expensive changes to their testing causing delays. That means that they must build into their pricing very high profit levels, on the chance that they might have to do that kind of silly thing.

Of course, the source of this “de regulate!” message is awfully libertarian. So maybe they are skewing the facts to support their beliefs.

The R&D for drugs is not a sure thing. There are all kidns of experiments that are dead ends. That’s what it takes to find the good stuff. Try, try and expensive try again.

In the same way that the scientists must look around to find the cure for cancer or aids or MS, shouldn’t we be scientific and open minded about finding the cure for our not-optimal health-care system?

let’s look at the situation, and poke at it in various ways without assuming the answer pre-poke. it’s a large complicated system. who knows what might be the right action?

socialization

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I went ice skating this weekend. It is part of a girl’s night my fabulous socially organizing-type friend is doing.

There are a lot of girls that could be part of the girls’ night. But this is the second girls night, and we are capping out at four. They are not all the same girls. It’s a rotating cast of people that can manage to come.

At our dinner afterwards, Kim (the organizer) brought something up. She has a roommate, a mostly employed actor, and he asked her what she was doing.

“Girls night”

“Oh, I’m having a dinner party, I was gonna tell you to come.”

This dinner party was organized about 2 days prior. They expected about 40 people to show.

OUR girls night had been organized MONTHS ago, but only four people (and only two for the whole time) came.

I suggested that maybe roommate’s JOB is to draw an audience, and that is why all these people come. He pulls a crowd, and that is what makes him employed as an actor.

Someone else suggested that maybe it’s because all his unemployed actor buddies are quite up for anything at the drop of a hat. He KNOWS a bunch of people with free time.

We girls were not full of free time.

So, It makes me think. How do people end up being friends with people these days? Myspace and Facebook are not really full of friends. Not the sort of friends you see and hang out with.

It’s tough, once you get successful and responsible, to maintain the friends. That’s why I admire Kim greatly for helping. I know it takes time for her to organize our girls nights.

Somehow I think we forget to give ourselves and fun times a priority. It gets pushed back, lower down on the list. FIRST we have to get to work and FIRST we have to go take the class and FIRST we have to…

but we can’t seem to find a second.

I know that once people have kids, they seem to grow a social life again. I’ve seen elaborate birthday parties for three year olds that have more adults than kids.

I guess if you hang out with poeple who are full of free time, then you can have friends. Like the employed actor. but those of us who are more than mostly employed…well…we like hanging out with other ambitious people. And people like that take 2..3…4…10 tries before you can actually spend the time.