Life is a State of Mind

Vermin spammers! Over the weekend they figured out how to get by the older versions of WordPress with older versions of Akismet spam filter module/plug-in, so I came home from dance competition to discover hundreds of spams in my WordPress blog’s moderation queue and thousands that had been blocked.

Making things worse a few guest blogs I help friends run had the same problem. So I upgraded to WordPress 2.1.2 (thanks to DreamHost for making that a “one click” per blog install) and huge thanks to the WordPress team for including the upgrade to Akismet plug-in 2.0 in that install. I am hoping that shuts down the vermin.

Makes one glad that LJ handles all this stuff for you… My LJ blog was completely un-impacted by the burst in spam activity over the weekend. Yay LiveJournal!

Second day into the third week in the new office at work (Sterling/Dulles CC4 6B:J06) and there is a new form of irony that I find amusing enough to share. There were not enough open cubes to go around to all the people who wanted them, so a few of us have to share double offices with another person. The “offices” are made of the same stuff as the modular cubes, but the walls go all the way to the drop-tile ceiling: metal and plastic frames with metal, glass, and fabric snap-in panels to make “walls” or “windows” that happen to be chest high for cubes and floor to ceiling for offices.

People snap out the glass, stuck decorations between the glass panels and snap them back into place for in-wall aquarium effect, or for trophies and/or toy dinosaurs. Others take a glass panel and put it back to back with an opaque panel to discourage light getting through, or trade with people who like more glass and light.

The second day Cliff and I were in our office, Bruce G snapped out one of our wall panels from the outside and punched through the matching inside panel as a joke attack on us. We all had a laugh after the initial surprise, and then cliff and I left that panel out to enjoy the better view out the 6th floor window. For three weeks we’ve had a perforated office.

We were never issued keys to the office door, which does lock. The fact that it locks we find silly because it is so easy to snap the panels next to the door knob, reach in, and open the door from the inside. We decided we’d never lock the door and we just would not store valuables in the office.

Sunday night the security guards decided to start locking the door. Yesterday I was tired so I borrowed the master key from our department AA to get in to start work. Today I just climbed through Bruce’s decoration of our office (the perforation). I don’t really want to start carrying another key, I’d much rather have a cube.

Between 6 flights of stairs and a climb through the belly high “window” in our office I am getting a regular work-out now. Perhaps I will appear less “prosperous” in the future.

Gah! Two weeks of work-hell straight and my neck is twisted out of shape from being on too many long conference calls where I have to talk and type at the same time. I don’t have a headset on my old plain old telephone at home. The trusty old Motorola i85s (Nextel/iDen) mobile phone I inherited from Erci is many years old and stopped taking a charge.

I decided to throw money at the phones and plow through the stupid daylight savings time change workload as best I could.

I am pretty happy with the phone situation I ended up with: I have a new AT&T model 992 “Speakerphone” with standardized 2.5mm headset jack (yay) and it works very well. I even figured out how to put pauses into the speed dial so it can dial me all the way into work’s most commonly called conference call numbers. Yay!

I also have a brand new Motorola i580 (Nextel/iDen still) mobile phone. This is my first Bluetooth capable phone, and it already works well with the Prius (though I am still trying to figure out how to transfer all contacts instead of just one). This i580 is heavy, tough as nails, gets good strong signal, has full duplex speakerphone and standard 2.5mm headset jack (as well as aforementioned Bluetooth).

A lot of people wonder why I stick with Nextel, instead of something 1) thinner, 2) sexier, or 3) laden with smart features. The simple answer is that for me a phone must work well as a phone. I have a camera and a PDA already, so those features on a phone are a waste. No phone can compete with my camera as a camera nor my PDA as a PDA. The thin and feature laden “smart” phones out there are a waste of time and money in my opinion, because most of them break all too easily and make horrible sounding calls. As to the sexiness of a phone… uh - people need to get a life. A phone is just a phone. I am happy Nextel and Motorola remain focused on what is critical: excellent call reception, clarity, contact list, full-duplex speakerphone, standardized headset jack, and recently - bluetooth for car and more headset functionality.

Work is beginning to calm down a little now that we are on Eastern Daylight Time and management finally realizes there is nothing to worry about, and I can enjoy long conference calls with my hands free.

I usually publish a simple list guide to choices in a given election, and was already working on one for this year’s state and local elections when I found that Craig Vitter beat me to the punch with this excellent guide for Prince William County (thanks Craig)!

Craig is also going a bit farther than I do and predicting the races.

Well, I got comfortable in my office again, so the company is moving me to a new building. This will be my 10th office move (11th office) at AOL. I’ve been pretty lucky and usually got nice places to work and great people to work with. Packing today was mildly depressing because I will miss all the fine folks in Reston whom I have loved working with regularly. The move offers several benefits, and a few drawbacks.

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Tuesday night Erci and I celebrated the 14th anniversary of our marriage. It just does not seem like that long. We get to celebrate twice a year because we did the legal transaction about 8 months before we pulled together the big scary public ceremony. We’ve had a fabulous adventure together so far.

Fourteen years ago she was a database administrator at the Defense Intelligence Agency, actively fighting with rattan in the Society for Creative Anachronism, cooking medieval foods for her friends and household, bicycling, already involved in La Belle Compagnie, traveling to NATO (Brussels) and London quite often for work, and she had ferrets (I still miss Mudge and Newt).

Back then I was still in the United States Air Force on active duty, stationed at the Pentagon, flirting with everyone in the SCA, tinkering with my Amiga computer, running, playing occasional games of pickup football (the kind with goalies) with locals, and bicycling all over the Washington Area. She was unstoppable. She amazed me. She still does.

We’ve lived apart (the USAF sent me to freakin’ Omaha for about 7 months of enforced separation). We’ve been in tiny apartments, a small townhouse, and two very large homes. When I got out of the USAF my income jumped so much that I literally paid more in taxes for 1995 than I grossed for all of 1994! We gradually got less involved in the Society for Creative Anachronism as we got more involved with La Belle Compagnie and as we got very involved with ballroom dancing. She pulled me into La Belle, and I pulled her into Scuba diving, and Marine Aquariums. She helped me re-discover Buddhism. We’ve had several more ferrets, and now a cat and several aquariums. We’ve traveled to England, Jamaica, Mallorca, Greece, Turkey, Curacao, Cozumel, Belize, Bonaire, Japan, the Virgin Islands, Bahamas, Michigan, California, Arizona, Nevada, and New York together. She has become a chef, part-time, while continuing to be an amazing IT professional at work. We have had the opportunity to build our dream home. She is still unstoppable, and I am still amazed.

Tuesday night we went to Le Tire Bouchon, a cozy and quiet little traditional French restaurant in old Fairfax. There were ony two other couples there at that time, and one couple finished and left shortly after we got there. We had excellent food, good wine, and got to talk a lot (mostly about work, but talking about anything is fun with her).

She remains my partner, sharing the awesome adventure of life with me as an equal. Sometimes she leads, sometimes I do. We are incredibly blessed and fortunate to have many, many close friends. She’s cooking up another Windjammer cruise to someplace warm and exciting.