PhoneBoy Says

In about 24 hours, I should be back home again, or at least much closer to home than I am now. Being away from the usual stuff at home is nice, but I can only spend so long living out of a suitcase and eating out. I eventually miss the creature comforts of home. I miss an Internet connection that doesn't suck. I miss a comfortable bed.

On the other hand, being down in the Bay Area is also like being at home. The weather, the people, the places. They are what I grew up with. But it's different. Not quite like I remember it. And there's traffic. And the housing situation down here sucks.

This is not a subject I want to think about. It makes my head hurts. It's also a little sad. You can't really go back.

One of the things I don't like so much about traveling is that I am way out of my normal patterns. Sure, the change of pace and piece and quiet is nice, but things that I normally do simply don't get done. This week, one of those things involves my RSS reader. I have had enough things to do this week that I haven't had the time to spend a lot of time reading what's going on.

And as I look at the ever-increasing stack of articles in the RSS reader, my motivation to tackle it shrinks. And that seems to happen with a lot of things. The bigger and more daunting the task before me, the less likely I am to want to tackle it. That's why I'm really working to keep my inbox at zero, even if I can't seem to get to anything in the "todo" folders.

Oh well, instead of obsessing over it, I'm just gonna go watch some television.

If you're into that sort of things, Happy Valentines Day! Given that I am currently several hundred miles away from my wife--seems to have happened more often than not in the past 8 years--we decided this year that it wasn't worth spending any energy on this time around. We will not be contributing to the $100 average Valentine gift price in any appreciable way. ;)

Show us what's in your bag.
Submitted by Pants Party.

First, I will show you the bag. The new bag I picked up when I talked with my old friend Pradeep at VPN Dynamics:

So what's in the bag? When it's packed, two laptops, a book, various power plugs, cables, do-dads, and so on. So now I have three backpacks on this trip instead of the two I started with. It's rare I end up with more luggage than I started with. It's not as if I want to use it as more luggage means dealing with baggage claim in Sea-Tac on the way back. At least now it is a possibility.

I had one of those moments today that made realize that I suck.

Jaden was looking for one of his Spyro GameBoy cartridge and realized he left it at the gymnastics meet yesterday. And, of course, he came unglued. The wife was getting ready, so I had to try and handle this. And, of course, I sucked. I didn't know what I could tell him that would cheer him up. When he said we could go back to the gym and try and find it, I told him that it was closed and too far away. He asked if we could buy him a new one, I explained that it may not be possible to get that game anymore. Which, of course, didn't help him feel any better.

My wife overheard this and was not happy with how I was handling it. After a smart-ass comment about my handling of the situation--something along the lines of "are you trying to be mean or does it just come naturally"--she asked me why I wasn't saying anything to console him. I told her that I had no clue how to deal with that situation. Of course Jaden goes to mommy and I watched her deal with the situation. And I felt like I sucked.

My wife also made the comment that if I'm able to troubleshoot my way out of these situations at work, how come I can't do it at home. Simple: there are less emotions involved at work. I rarely see the people on the other end of the phone and I am able to think clearly. When presented with a sobbing person, I have a much harder time thinking clearly.

I don't know where I am going with this. I lost my train of thought. Maybe this is part of my difficulty with people. Maybe I just suck. Or maybe I just had a sucky moment. Whatever it is, time to move on.

Taking my semi-regular trip to the Bay Area to visit my co-workers and generally cause trouble. Have these trips almost down to a science in terms of packing. I am getting more efficient at packing for these trips. Helps that I am getting lighter and smaller gear. Or rather "getting better at figuring out what I can do without for a few days."

Despite carrying two laptops and enough clothes for five days, I can get down to two carry on-sized backpacks now. That doesn't leave a lot of extra room, and that's not a bad thing. I want to discourage large purchases or equipment acquisitions while I am in the Bay Area, or at least not carry it on the plane with me. That's why they invented FedEx. In fact, if I were smart, I would have FedExed a lot of stuff to the office already so I wouldn't have to carry as much on the plane. Oh well, maybe I'll be smart enough to do that on the way back…

Meanwhile, back to work, or maybe off to bed.

I only have Gracie today because he is competing in his first trampoline meet today. It's over two hours away and involves a lot of waiting, so Gracie and I are doing our usual Saturday thing without Jaden.

Both pictures are taken with the Nokia N80 Internet Edition. The blurry one was taken in the default mode, the non blurry one in "sports mode" which reduces the picture quality to 1.3 megapixels.

My dad had made a comment recently in response to something I wrote about my parents in a post I made about music:

I can attribute my taste in Pink Floyd to mom and The Eagles to my dad.Considering some of the other things I saw both parents partake in,listening to their music was probably the safest of the choices I could have made.

Specifically, he said:

You weren't supposed to be watching everything we were doing back then.

Well, guess, what: I was. I remember far too many things from my youth. Heck I remember being in my crib back in our apartment in Capitola. I remember living in that apartment, though unlike what my dad implied in his comment, I have almost no memories of my parents actually being together. There is also a certain amount of irony in having my first job out of college two blocks from that very apartment building.

I'm not going to get into the stuff I saw growing up. Okay, maybe I will, but not here and not today. But it does remind me of an ongoing debate about the fact that teachers aren't real fond of camera phones being in schools because, well, their tirades can end up all over YouTube.

My employer, Nokia, has sold more digital cameras embedded in mobile phones than many manufacturers of standalone digital cameras have sold. In fact, the proliferation of digital cameras in mobile phones has caused problems not only for schools, but for business as well, particularly in areas were sensitive information exists. The business are afraid of information leakage, and rightfully so. And it's even difficult to find phones without cameras. They do exist, of course, and even Nokia is making camera and camera-free versions of some of their business-oriented E-series phones.

I've heard the quote from Robert Heinlein "An armed society is a polite society." Guess what: most of our society is now armed with camera phones. And while we've always had nature's perfect camera: the eyes, what we now have with camera phones is the ability to share what we saw with others very easily. Nokia has tools built-into the Nseries devices that make it fairly straightforward to post what you've captured to Vox, not to mention the tool that Vox itself makes available for Nokia handsets.

Unlike guns, it's not going to be easy to legislate these things out ofexistence. The camera phones aren't goingaway anytime soon and are only getting better. I think the best thing we do is assume that anything we do in front of others can easily be captured by someone and shared with others instantly. And maybe, just maybe, we'll all act a little nicer towards each other in the process. Polite society, indeed.

You know, considering how well Dark Side of the Moon has stood the test of time--hell, it's as old as I am and Roger Waters is still playing these songs in concert, even today--I've never really thought about what attracted me to this album. Yes, I mean album in the conventional sense of the word.I remember when I was probably four or five and I was able to climb up on a chair and work my mom's LP player. I know I put on a few Sesame Street albums (probably 45s) and Peter Pan that my mom had picked up on some old 78s, but one of the first adult albums I remember putting on was Dark Side of the Moon. Specifically, I would put on side 2, which is where the song Money begins. And yes, that was my favorite song for a while, even though it had that naughty little bullshit word in it, which I had the good sense not to say in polite company. Time might have been my second favorite. I can't remember.One of my favorite cassette tapes I had when I was 7 or 8 was Dark Side of the Moon on one side, Wish You Were Here on the other. For some reason, though, whomever recorded the tape had put Side 2 of Wish You Were Here first. So instead of hearing Shine On You Crazy Diamond first, you heard Have a Cigar first. Which threw me off when I later realized that mistake. For a while I persisted in listening to Wish You Were Here that way.To this day, I have no idea what was going on in my little mind that made me latch onto Dark Side of the Moon and later Wish You Were Here at such an early age. Maybe it was my way to be just like my parents. I can attribute my taste in Pink Floyd to mom and The Eagles to my dad. Considering some of the other things I saw both parents partake in, listening to their music was probably the safest of the choices I could have made.

Photo: Show us a ticket.

When this meme came around, I was looking for this ticket, but could not find it. Today, when I pulled out my 20th Edition Dark Side of the Moon CD, there it was in the box:

A little worse for the wear, but it's my proof I saw Pink Floyd In The Flesh. Too bad it wasn't Roger Waters Pink Floyd, but I was just a little too young for that.