Category Archives: Paul

April 4, 2017 · 23:36

Eight Years

The “Four-Four” mnemonic (as in April 4th) has a special meaning for me for the past eight years.

I have no idea who took the picture – some random stranger who happened to be in the right place at the right time. There was no one else around and I really, really needed the picture to be taken. I remember seeing someone walking by and I shoved my point-&-shoot camera at him and asked if he would take the picture. He did and walked away.

I was a bit discombobulated and excited – I had just passed my FAA Private Pilot practical exam (otherwise known as a “checkride”) and was now a full-fledged private pilot, single-engine, land. That’s my certificate that I’m holding.

I had been certain that I had failed the test. There were a couple of things that I didn’t do too well, and one particular thing I thought that I had bungled. (He cut the engine on me and asked where I would land. I started off on whether or not I could make it back to Whiteman, Van Nuys was too far away, there were multiple freeways around to choose from, a number of golf courses up in Santa Clarita… He pointed out, politely, that we were almost directly over Agua Dulce Airport and I should probably be aware of that sort of thing.)

We landed, I taxied in and shut down the engine. He got out and started to do paperwork while I pushed the plane back into its parking space and tied it down. He came back over to me and I asked what was next, expecting to be told I needed to work on A, B, C, etc and then I could take the test again. Instead, he said he was going to start filling out my private pilot paperwork inside, when I was done locking up the plane I needed to come in and sign it.

April 4, 2009. It was a very good day.

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Filed under Flying, Paul

March 27, 2017 · 23:24

When Your Night Goes Left

All of a sudden it’s about 23:15 and you’ve got a couple of different folks bugging you for stuff…

…and you have no time at all to explain the long and bizarre story behind my attitude toward this poor, innocent blender.

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Filed under Paul, Photography

March 19, 2017 · 22:59

Another Year Forward

Another year in the rearview mirror.

Mourn the passing of the one gone, or celebrate the arrival of the one to come?

How about we do both? We’ll gather what family we can, build a funeral pyre (well, light off the gas grill – same thing), and sacrifice some meat to the gods of BBQ?

As one does for the first BBQ of the season.

Here’s to another 365.25!

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Filed under Castle Willett, Paul

February 27, 2017 · 23:27

Old Dog, New Computer Tricks

Okay, maybe I’m not the absolute last person on the planet to figure out how to print multiple tabs/pages in an Excel workbook/file, but I’m sure I’m on the short list.

That “discovery” was due to the sudden, lightning-like insight that what I was doing, what I had been doing was stupid. It might have been what I had been doing for ten or fifteen years in Excel, and probably doing before that in Lotus 123, and before that in SuperCalc, and before that in VisiCalc, but – and here’s the insight – why in hell isn’t there a fast and easy way to do this? Just because it would have been incredibly difficult to execute thirty years ago, or even ten, doesn’t mean that it’s not trivial today.

Once that thought lodges in your cerebral cortex, the next one thudding in there immediately thereafter should be (and was), “What are the odds that it’s not that the program won’t do it, it’s just that I don’t know how to?” Of course, from that point, a 30-second Google search tells you how to do it and, yes, it is exactly that simple and trivial once you know which button to push.

The point is not that I’m an idiot or an old phart stuck in his ways (both of which are more or less true, but they’re not the point), but that all of us get into our routines and go through one action after another (pro hint – I’m not just talking about computer programs here) because it’s what we did yesterday and the day before, not because it’s what we should be doing today.

On the other hand, there can be new tricks discovered completely by accident, not because you figure there has to be a better way, but because you stumble on a well-hidden preference or setup trick when everyone is bitching about the trick doesn’t exist.

If you have an Apple iPhone or iPad, you know that with the old iOS you just rested your thumb or finger on the magical fingerprint-reading Home button and the iPhone or iPad would unlock itself and be ready to use. With the latest iOS, you rest your thumb, get a teeny tiny little message that tells you that the device is now unlocked, so press on that Home button to start it back up.

Why is this now a two-step procedure with a “pay attention” in the middle of it?

Do you want it to not be?

Settings –> General –> Accessibility –> Home Button –> Rest Finger To Open –> Set to “on”

There, it’s back to acting like it did before it was made “better.”

You’re welcome!

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Filed under Computers, Paul

February 23, 2017 · 23:58

Torture

You turn on your computer at the office to find this wonderful, random, beautiful desktop photo:

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Now they’re just torturing us.

“Look at what’s out there – and you’re HERE for twelve hours today!”

You can almost hear the evil “mew-har-ha-HA!!” laugh off in the distance.

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Filed under Computers, Paul

February 14, 2017 · 23:41

Some Other Days In Audit Season

It’s Oreos and cookies ‘n cream ice cream.

And Bronski Beat turned WAY UP LOUD!! (“Smalltown Boy”)

But there’s hope on the horizon! It’s called “May,” as in, “the month following April.”

Wouldn’t it be neat to get back to some pictures from NYC?

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February 13, 2017 · 23:26

Some Days In Audit Season

When you run an accounting department (or worse, two), during audit & tax return season there are days when you need ice cream at the end of the day, regardless of your weight loss goals or A1C results.

Some days you need cookies.

Some days, you need both ice cream and cookies.

Tonight it’s Klondike bars and Chewy Chips Ahoy.

How did your day go?

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Filed under Health, Paul

February 10, 2017 · 23:52

Paradox

We all have things that we would like to be doing differently, ways in which we would like to be “better.”

Assuming we’re talking about something plausible and within shouting distance of reality, we have some vision or ideal image of ourselves that would be better, stronger, faster, smarter, more relaxed, richer…

The paradox is that we generally like who we are – we are who we are because we’re comfortable with it. We are what we are because we are. (“Wow! Farm house, man!”) But it’s true. If we truly don’t like some aspect of ourselves badly enough, we’ll do what is possible to change it.

Within reason. (If you’re 5’6″ and your dream in life is to play center in the NBA…)

But that vision of ourselves in our heads won’t be us. It might be a better version of our “right now” selves, but it won’t be the same. It can’t be.

There’s the rub, there’s where the trepidation hides, there’s where the outright fear comes from. What if we make the changes and then we don’t like being that person? No matter how much we wish or hope, none of those changes come for free. Are we willing to pay the price? Will that also change us into someone different enough so that we don’t like them?

What if those we love don’t love us any more when we become that new and improved version of ourselves? What if we don’t love those we love now after we’ve gone and deliberately changed ourselves?

That’s some scary shit, right there.

Lose ten pounds? Twenty? Great! How many hours are you going to spend at the gym, or running, or on a bike, or whatever? How much are you willing to change your diet, while everyone else in your home keeps eating the same as they always have?

Quit drinking or smoking? Do you stop hanging out with your friends who drink or smoke?

Need to get more done and work harder, maybe go back to school and get that degree at night? What do you give up to get those hours? Time with family? Time with friends? Time just chilling?

Finally, when you see some of that happening and there’s part of your brain that says, “All right! About time!” why is there also part of your brain that says, “Shit, what if this is the wrong move after all?”

Which one wins? Or is this a no-win situation?

James Tiberius Kirk didn’t believe in the no-win situation. Do you?

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Filed under Deep Thoughts, Paul

February 5, 2017 · 22:43

Incoming From Left Field!

In a stretch of days that just seem to get a bit more bizarre by the day (and I’m not even including any of that political stuff), this one was right up there:

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1) I have an Ello account?

2) Someone other than me knows that I have an Ello account?

3) What’s Ello??

OK, that last one’s not quite true. I do know what Ello is, sort of. I remember it came out a few years ago as “the next Twitter” or “the next FaceBook” or “the next [insert Platinum Unicorn social media upstart de jour here]”.

To the best of my knowledge, I never even made a “Hello, world!” post there. My posts from here don’t cross-post to there like they do for Twitter, FaceBook, Linkedin, Tumblr, and even Google+. (I actually know two, maybe three people, who actually use Google+) I remember noting that Ello existed and signing up simply to preserve my name and ID on it should it ever actually become anything.

It hasn’t.

So while I’m sure “robin_garcia” is a lovely person in real life, I’m pretty sure the Ello account with her name on it is actually a bot in either Russia, Uganda, or SomethingUnpronounceableStan which scraped her data from some other site. It’s not at all clear why someone would make an Ello bot account – it would seem to be like a counterfeiter trying to make a career out of creating fake pennies.

I’m not even going to bother to try to guess what my Ello password is so I can get back into that account. If Ms. Garcia truly exists and somehow is dying to reach me, I think contacting me here would probably be far more efficient.

P.S. – Is “Ello” supposed to be like a Cockney accent version of “Hello,” like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins?

In the meantime, I’m not even goint

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Filed under Computers, Paul

January 23, 2017 · 23:46

Mischief Suggestion

My apologies if this has been suggested by me before, but an incident this weekend reminded me, so here it is:

First of all, don’t do this at a place where you like them and/or they like you. But if they’ve given you lousy service and then screwed up on their security procedures to boot…

Secondly, this isn’t criminal or even particularly rude, more like something that you might see on the old “Candid Camera” show.

So, do we all know what RFIDs are?

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While they have a ton of uses, the most common one for most of us is “loss prevention control,” otherwise known as stopping shoplifting.

When you buy your stuff, the cashier and/or their checkout system is supposed to deactivate the RFID, kill it, turn it off. So when you leave the store – well, you leave the store.

BUT… If left active, it will be detected by the scanners near the door and the alarm will be activated as you leave, making a ton of noise. If you just shoplifted your large, economy size bottle of Head & Shoulders, presumably it’s at this point you take off running with your ill-gotten booty.

If you’re like me and you paid for it, you’re just annoyed because someone screwed up and now you’ve got these really loud and annoying alarms going off next to you. It’s enough to give you the vapors! Plus, everyone in the store (except for the employees) is staring at you and wondering what you stole. The employees, on the other hand, have this happen ALL DAY LONG so they simply ignore it.

So much for security.

Now imagine, you’ve just left your local grocery store, or better yet, department store or electronics emporium. You’ve dropped a couple hundred dollars (especially at the grocery store – damn, margarita mix and chips and chocolate is expensive!) on your cart full of stuff and as you leave, you get that loud noise scaring you out of your sneakers.

Here’s my suggestion.

When you get to your car with your shopping cart, go through your stuff and figure out where that still active RFID is. Remove it carefully so you accidentally don’t damage or deactivate it. Now find a good place on the shopping cart, an out of sight place, a place not normally examined casually, and stick the RFID there.

If it’s one of the big ones that’s about the size of a large postage stamp, this plan gets harder, but not impossible. With the little ones like the one shown above, the underside of just about any structural member or pipe will do. With the larger ones, you might have to be a bit more selective.

Either way, once the active RFID is now secure and hidden on the shopping cart, put the cart back into the cart corral. (Really, put it into the corral, don’t leave it out where it will block a parking space or roll off and ding someone’s car. We’re not animals here!)

Then you can sleep peacefully, knowing that every single time that cart goes in or out of that door, those alarms are going to go off. It could happen literally hundreds of times before anyone at the store bothers to go look for the RFID.

Carry on. Be mischievous!

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Filed under Farce, Paul