n00b's blog: "muse views"

generally losing my laptop and my phone on the same day, and not being able to replace them for a significant length of time would qualify that day as one really craptacular kind of day, and the beginning of a whole string of craptacular days, eventually graduating into a craptacular week and finally summiting as a completely craptacular fortnight.  a funny thing happened on the way to the louvre LOL.

so i am getting out of the cab, excited after 14 flying hours and 9 time zones to actually be at the louvre, it holds the object of so many of my fascinations.  maybe that was why i didnt realize that the phone i had been compulsively holding since i had landed was not in my pocket.  or i was just stupid.  occam i think says stupid.

i was in the line for tickets when i realized my predicament.  i tried to catch the cab, but ... c'est la vie.  

then i had another thought.  hey, i traveled for years without all that, why is it a big deal now?

well dumbass, the world has changed a bit since 1979, for one thing remember all those phone booths that used to be everywhere?  they all got recycled into tardis.  that and i am just so used to ... what was it bill gates used to call it? ... information at my fingertips.  not to mention translations, trip information, account information, all that stuff we need to go and do the stuff we want to do.

fuckit, no phone ... i'm still going to the louvre.

since my college days, i have been fascinated by renaissance art and the early impressionists.  van eyck, vermeer, through caravaggio bernini and others straight on through to monet, manet, alma-tadema, waterhouse and ... so many others.  in the louvre i was like a kid in a candy store with his pockets stuffed with money and 99% off sale.  seriously.  i could have stayed there for a week at least.  

art is the first subject that i truly learned to appreciate.  the more i learned about it, the more it captured me.  i had an interesting relationship with my best friend in high school and college, he was an artist, quite gifted actually.  i never appreciated how difficult the creative process was until i witnessed him struggling with it.  he literally forced me to take a "real" art appreciation class with him, instead of "art appreciation for dummies" (i.e. business majors).  to say the class had an impact on me would be a vast understatement.

so here i am in the holy of holies, indulging in one of my most cherished addictions.  without a phone to distract me, or a "ding" of email.  i learned long ago that if a situation is inevitable, its best just to sit back and go with it.  i embraced this time.  yes it sucked that i couldnt download the app and have it lead me around to all the places i was interested in.  but the process of discovery for myself was far more sweet than knowing i had squeezed the utmost utility out of my time there.  in some ways i think i experienced it in the best way possible, without distractions, without being guided on some pre-digested course of the most popular attractions.  yeah, that is how i like my life, off the beaten path and working it out on my own.

everything has to come to an end though.  i had drunk my fill of beauty, slaked my thirst for oil on canvas. 

i needed a phone.  actually i needed a phone and a sim card.

the phone i was able to find, and this really cool guy helped me get it unlocked so it would work everywhere.  one teeny tiny problem.  phone without sim card is ... lets say less than useful.  but my sim card odyssey is another story.

i love my life

for all you keeping score at home;

1 dead laptop

1 lost phone

1 stewardess spilling wine all over me

1 international border customs incident

2 lost bags

4 countries 

6 sim cards

14 jellyfish 

16 wonderful days

42 hours without sleep

17,561 frequent flyer miles accumulated

DONT try this at home!

i knew it was going to be an interesting trip, i just did not realize how interesting.  i thought i had it all worked out, extended layover in Paris, all my electronic gizmos to keep me entertained and to help me communicate.  i guess i just didnt allow for murphy.

first thing that happens, on the direct flight to Paris just settling in, pull out the laptop for an extended session of first person shooter fun and ... no fun.  "its dead jim", even though i wouldnt give up on my dear departed companion for another 5 days.  hey, i'm good at this fixing tech shit, i gotz da mad skillz.  so i get to spend 10 hours playing with my laptop, just not the kind of playing i had anticipated.  damn, and i bought a new mouse also.  so we are knocked back a bit, but still in the game, still looking forward to that extended layover in Paris and some quality time at the Louvre.

yeah, about that.  next time remember that really sick feeling.  that overwhelming sense of dread that accompanied you when you stepped into the que at the Louvre and realized, something is just not right here.  what is it.  ohshitmutherfuckingcheese i left my phone in the taxi.  this is your brain on drugs.  well not drugs but after 14 hours of flying and 9 time zones and no sleep i pretty much guarantee you are a bit loopy.  talk about a major inconvenience.  how much of an inconvenience i wouldnt find out for quite some time. 

ok, dead laptop and my phone seeing more of paris than i ever will.  no big deal, i can solve these problems with dollars.  almost right.

problem that i found was; there are virtually no phones for sale inside the tourist circle.  but wait, i KNOW there are phones for sale in the airport, i'll just go to CDG, get a new phone, get a revitalizing shower and i will be all ready for the remainder of my trip.  the Louvre can wait.

there are phones for sale at CDG, and laptops.  the phones dont have sim cards, and you cant get any sim cards, but there are phones.  Oh and laptops, did i mention laptops?  one small issue though, the keyboards are not the same.  so unless i could teach myself how to type in french, it really wasnt going to work very well buying a french laptop.  i will admit though, i was tempted to get one just for the sheer novelty value.  now a sidebar about a stereotype;  honest to god having been to france 5 times now i have yet to experience the "rude french people" that i hear so much about.  most of the time i have been quite impressed by thier willingness to help.  case in point is the guy at the store where i got my phone, he could have soaked me for a useless laptop, and sent me on my way with a locked up phone that wouldnt have helped me at all.  instead he explained that though i desperately wanted to buy a laptop, unless i could type french, not a good idea.  and the phone he sold me, he took the sim card out of his own phone, placed it in mine for 6 minutes so that mine would be unlocked and i could at least use the wireless networking freatures (which totally saved my ass btw).  so just one guys experience, i think the french are pretty cool.  

now the quandry.  i can access the internet, and i am thinking its probably a really good idea to change my email passwords and other passwords just on the off chance that my phone falls into the wrong hands (it didnt btw, but that's another story).  but here is the catch - 22.  my email does not recognize the device i am trying to access it from, so even though i can supply it the correct password, it still wants to verify by sending a text to the phone number listed on my account.  so i cant make calls, and i cant do email, welcome to 1982.  hey, its totally old school, but i travelled the pacific rim for 3 years back then and didnt have a mobile phone or email, i can DO this.  on to cyprus and the wreck of the Zenobia.

after about 4 days, i finally get into my email, i never did get the phone fully functioning until i got back home.  sorry for all the calls i missed, but hey, shit happens.

cyprus, ukraine, short stint in italy, then it is time for my return.

pictures are coming, its just going to take a little while LOL

now. i dont sleep on airplanes.  i dont sleep well when i travel, but on airplanes i really dont sleep.  i dont know why, i have tried everything but prescription meds to help me sleep.  so, i have another long layover in Kiev, long enough that i get to see some sights and sleep in a bed, then its meet the taxi at 4am to start the long trek home.  

i almost forgot the customs incident.  lets just say that if they ask you how much money you are carrying you damn well better have a more accurate answer than "about" this amount.  and if you do tell them "about" this amount, you better be damn certain that you are not $58 over the official limit for undeclared cash.  stopping at the ATM in pairs for some euros really messed me up LOL.

hey, we will always have paris.

on to the wine incident.

i totally do not blame the steward, he was putting the wine bottle down, when the plane hit some small turbulence and essentially the nearly full bottle of wine got a pretty good jolt from the bottom.  which pushed some wine up through the neck, and all over me.  i actually thought it was a bit funny, (being pretty slap happy sleep deprived) but the poor steward look at me like he had accidentally shot me.  anyways, it was an old tshirt, and they did give me a pretty good bottle of wine, and some extra bonus perks.  

of couse they lost my bags immediately after that.  

all in all it was a pretty great trip, been a long time since murphy showed up so much in my travels, but that is just a part of things.

more on the Zenobia, and jellyfish (nobody had to pee on anyone), and why turkey deserves the reputation for rudeness that the french have.

happy trails

in many ways my father was a very simple man.  if you ever heard the song "my way" then you have a good basic understanding of what my father was like.

i say "was" because my father passed away in 2012 at the age of 92.  

we traveled quite a bit when i was growing up, and i cannot remember ever going anywhere where someone did not recognize him, or know him.  this of course was a source of great embarassment in my teenage years, and a source of amazement in my later years.  he was a man of uncompromising belief, and incredibly strong will.  i believe he taught yoda the phrase "do, or do not, there is no try".

he was a child of the depression, and grew up picking strawberries while being color blind.  somehow he overcame that.  he achieved great success in life financially, was dedicated to my mother and his children.  in his way.

i would say that he laughed at personality tests, but that really would not be accurate, he just didnt see the point.  he was who he was, what others tried to label him as he just did not care.  what others thought of him was not going to dissuade him from his goal, and yet he was the consumate salesman, even setting world records for his efforts.

he was also a man of thoughtful understanding, by example he gave me a love of learning, and a love of reading.  he was not well educated in the traditional sense, not having many opportunities because of circumstance and later because of situation.  in a way i believe he felt this was his achillies heel, and read voraciously all his life to overcome his percieved weakness.

despite all his success, he never stopped wanting that one more deal.  that one more event so he could show us all that he still had it.  he truly raged, and burned at close of day.  he did not go gentle into that good night.

i suppose if i expressed some of my more contrarian views i could offend somewhere between 50% and 75% of people in as little as 150 to 200 words.  i really dont wish to offend people, but i do enjoy a spirited debate.  unfortunately my experience is that its rare i can find someone who can embrace a contrary position without adopting a hostile attitude.  just for fun i enjoy adopting different ideas and arguing their relative merits.  i learned at a very young age that a different idea, or attitude about something does not need to be threatening to me, and in fact active and healthy minds often are evolving new ideas, and embracing new attitudes all the time.  thanks mom.

guilt is a bit of a minor fascination for me.  its extremely rare that i feel guilt other than the "its late and i'm eating cherry garcia" kind of guilt.  i suppose guilt to me comes in two different flavors, what might be termed as secular and spiritual.  and its origins would derive from sin in those different contexts.  and since i believe that there are really very few actual sins we can commit, there is really very little need to feel guilt.  i might feel remorse for mistakes in my past, but to feel guilt that is another question entirely.  IMHO.

i really dont want to get into religion / sin / guilt / atonement in this soapbox rant.  i guess i will save that offense for another day.

what i will say is this; speaking as someone who has probably spent more time studying holy writ than the next 100 people combined, my take away from all that would be i really dont think omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent beings really need marketing organizations.  in fact i would make the argument that they really dont need anything from us at all, or from anyone for that matter.  kinda part of the whole "omni" gig.

and that's the way it is, thank you for playing along

i love to travel.

really i love to travel for pleasure.  although to be really honest, i enjoy going places (usually) for just about any reason.

i used to travel a lot for business, like an average of 40 weeks a years kind of a lot of travel.  i did this for many many years.  you know that you travel too much when you keep a "go" bag in your car because too frequently you show up at work, and they hand you tickets to some place.  and while i'm talking about places.  one flourescent lit conference room in honolulu hawaii looks remarkably like a flourescent lit conference room in artesia new mexico.  they both bear striking resemblance to one in orlando florida, which really reminds me of one in fargo north dakota. and they all make me think of one in jackson mississippi.  get my point? i think you do.  travel for work, is a whole lotta work, and what i call "airport tourism".  you become familiar with a city through its airport.  i did almost a million miles of travel like that.

these days i travel because its what i want to do.  i have had a bucket list of sorts for many years, somewhat odd places that appeal to me, but probably not too many others.  i became quite comfortable with being a solo traveler when i was working, nowadays i occasionally think it would be nice to have a companion to travel with, and maybe someday i will, but for now i am content to see the world on my own.

course we could always meet next year at Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, then head over to Rennes le Chateau in France , that would be an interesting trip, we can commune with the spirits of the templars and cathars!

you take an infinite number of keyboards, and an infinite number of monkeys.  at least one of them will bang out the collected works of shakespeare.  that monkey is The Lucky Monkey.

i have written 4 books.  when someone reads something of mine, and they tell me they enjoyed it.  i feel like the lucky monkey.

i have never seen myself as a writer, but i write quite a bit.  i generally bludgeon my subjects into submission with words, or maybe the "spray and pray" approach is more accurate to say.  bludgeon means my words hit the mark.  not certain that is generally true.

have a great week everyone

to quote jerry garcia.  "what a long, strange trip its been"

i am fond of saying "life is not a linear equation", meaning that you dont start at A and proceed straight to B.  there is all this stuff that happens inbetween.  all the "stuff" of life, i call them "left turns".  why left turns?  i dunno, just seems to fit i guess.  i like labels as allegories.  like a short hand to convey a particular idea.  

when i was young, i had a very clear idea of what i wanted to do with my life.  like from the time i was 12, i pretty much had a clear vision of what i wanted to do, how i wanted to accomplish it.  yeah i know, "man plans, god laughs".  thing is, looking at my life 40+ years after i put myself on a particular path, at time diverging wildly from where i thought i wanted to go, and looking at where i have ended up.  i'm pretty happy, and pretty surprised at the same time.  i really dont have many regrets.  i mean i have missed some things certainly LOL.  guy offered me 1000 shares of Apple stock for $1000 in 1981.  yeah, that is painful to think about at times LOL

thing is, its the left turns that have really made my life interesting.  the unforeseen horizons i have ventured across have been the landscapes that brought the most wonder and joy to my life.  had i rigidly pursued my original plan, i would most likely be a very frustrated cubicile prarie dog railing about all the injustice in the world and ingesting my fill of bitterness and disappointment each day.  thankfully i have never been one to sit around saying "i coulda been a contenda" and when i have taken to hard hits to the body, have pretty much been able to get back on my feet pretty quickly.

i am always fascinated by roads i see that just seem to drift off into the middle of nowhere, i am glad that in my life i have occasionally followed those paths, willingly or unwillingly, maybe its my version of the road less traveled

i live my life, or maybe i just understand my life via a series of personal axioms.  what i feel are statements of truth that help me to clarify the situation.

one i have been thinking of lately has been "you cant push a rope".  essentially that there are situations where no matter what efforts you put into them, you cannot achieve your desired result because of some structural impediment.

this is s difficult situation for me to accept really, i tend to relentlessly pursue whatever goal i have.  the idea that something might be beyond my ability can make me a bit manic.  my father used this aspect of my personality to great effect.  he knew if he threw a challenge in front of me i generally would react like a bull to a red cape.  this was good and bad.  

it was good because i was able to achieve some goals that many people only dream about.  it was good because i grew up basically not putting any limitations on myself.  but it did put a bit of a gibralter sized chip on my shoulder in certain areas as well.  luckily i think i know most of those areas and can control myself a lot better these days.

it took me the longest time to figure out though that there were some situations where, no matter what i did, it was just not going to turn out how i wanted it to. no matter how much i wanted it.

several years ago i was engaged.  i was over the moon happy.  when we were together, everything seemed to work, everything seemed perfect.  problem was, when we were not together.  to say there were problems would be a vast understatement.  like, pregnant by another guy kind of problems.

this used to drive me crazy, and i am embarassed to say that i spent years trying to figure out how things could be so good when we were together, and so completely fall apart when we were apart.  it took me a long time to accept that i just wasnt going to be able to change her behavior, and that i had to either accept her as she was (which was unacceptable to me) or i had to let her go.  in a way, how i felt had no meaning, because how i felt could not make a change in her.  so i let her go.  i had to.  

you cant push a rope.

i have a real love / hate relationship with technology.

i am old enough to remember black and white television, with three channels, and walter cronkite the most trusted man in america.  

my first portable computer was a compaq suitcase, so bitchin cool because the bottom folded out and had a 4 inch screen and a full sized keyboard.  and speaking of "full sized" what ever happened to 5 1/4 floppy disks?  remember when floppy disks were actually floppy?  when i took it to a class i was taking , along with a dot matrix printer and a case of paper, my group was able to complete an entire semester assignement during a single class.  and still had time to play pong.

yes, i was that guy.

i gobbled up new tech, it actually became my career for many years.  Chief Information Officer.  got ever new laptop and desktop.  every new phone.  every single dongle, gadget, card, adapter, PCMCIA, or internal that came on the market.  i had a T1 line at my home when most of the world was getting AOHell CD's in the mail and marveling at 56K modems.  i had a 6 digit ICQ number.

the tech made it possible for me to ALWAYS be working.  "information at your fingertips" as bill gates famously promised.  decades later, i am still not sure if it was better that i could keep working on all those airline flights, and in all those hotel rooms, and even during vacations and holidays.  yes i was reachable when everything went to shit, and therefore wasnt blindsided on those horrific monday morning staff meetings.  yes i was always up to speed on every project in real time because we adopted a cloud based project management solution before there even was a cloud.  

enough of that though.

in the end.  has technology made our lives better?  i was reading where hundreds of years ago a man would work an average of 30-35 hours a week on his farm to provide the basic necessities for his family.  now, i understand the differences in providing "basic necessities" vs. the american dream.  but really what that means is that they had more time for things other than making a living.  yeah, the life expectancy was only 35 years, but i would bet that if you measured the amount of time a family from that time spent together, vs. the time a contemporary family spends together, i would bet serious money that even with the reduced life expectancy they spent far more time together than a typical family today.  and if you deduct time spent looking at screens, i think it becomes even more obvious.

we live in a distributed world.  everything is out there, everything is available, you just have to have the right screen to find it.  but this super human ability to communicate has not led to more interpersonal communications, it has let to less personal, more anonymous communication, or communication that is off-vocal, and non-corporeal.  communication with the cloud.

remember heavens gate?

they got their cloud communication.  they really drank the kool aid.  i wonder if it made them happy.

i used to be able to forget my phone, in my car, at my office, or at home.  and while i might be annoyed, i managed.  now, i have to go back.  i have special pockets for my phone, and every minute is filled with communication of some sort.  its the world i live in.  its a world i chose.  i no longer am in the tech business, but tech runs my business.  it runs my life.  i dont facebook, i tweet, i am not even linkedin.  i have not willingly stepped into a mall in this century.  i buy everything online.  communication is essential to my life, but the tech is not my life.  i am most happy conversing face to face.  i need my phablet, but i dont need it all the time.  i walk the tight rope of technology one foot in the air.

my favorite vacation spot is very remote.  if you look at any coverage map, the area bounded by southern Utah and northern Arizona you will see a big dead spot.  smack dab in the middle of that is Lake Powell, and the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.  its not completely cut off, but if you go back into the more remote areas, you can not only lose internet and phone signal, you can actually get to areas where you wont see another human.  except for the airlines flying overhead.  way overhead.

i love it there.  i can disconnect from everything, and reconnect with those closest to me.  we spend time actually doing things together.  an activity that is increasingly more difficult to accomplish.

i love tech, i hate tech.  i dont know if life is better with tech, but i know i could never do what i do without it.  so for now i see it as a blessing.

there really are only two seasons in san diego.  some would argue 4, but i only recognize two.

1 .. flip flop season

2 .. shoe season.

its a big deal to me, that changeover, my whole wardrobe gets changed.  instead of shorts and shoes, i am wearing shorts and flip flops.  

now some would argue that there is also a pants/ shorts season change as well.  but i think that is just silly.