Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

Some old friends of mine from my Ohio State Marching Band days came through this way last week and left on a week’s cruise up to Alaska.  They arrive back in Seattle this morning, and I volunteered to give them a Seattle tour.  For as long as I’ve lived here, I really haven’t done any of the “normal” tourist things.  What I usually do is not-so-fondly referred to by my relatives as “Camp Phil(2)bin”, involving walks, hikes, kayaking and maybe some partying.

One of the people in today’s group has had hip replacement surgery recently, however, and her walking range is limited to about a quarter of a mile.  Suddenly, all the stuff I do and like to show people in Seattle is off the table, and I’m scrambling a little bit to find out what the “normal” tourists do.  I looked up brunch at the Space Needle ($38.50/person - gaak!), Argosy cruises ($25), a surf-and-turf tour on one of those whacked-out amphibious “duck” vehicles ($23 - that might be reasonable).  There’s always the Pike Place Market (flying fish, etc), but even that involves a bit of walking, and hill climbs.  Then I have a sort of wild card - since they’re flying out of Portland tomorrow and have to get there tonight anyway, it might be cool to just head for Mount Rainier.  The views today would be stunning.  I don’t know how I can go there, though and not hike.

I’ll let you know what transpired.  It’s gonna be a great day for picture-taking.

Over a year ago, I talked a little light-hearted smack about the Tyco guys and their antics and since yesterday, owing to their convictions for fraud and grand larceny, I’m getting boucoups hits.  Oddly, though, many seem to want photos of Karen Kozlowski, the wife of the disgraced CEO.  Perhaps they think she’ll be lonely soon.

I was so happy to see this conviction.  While I don’t really think they’ll do any time, it’s a moral victory.  While it was a state prosecution, I’m just waiting for our corrupt and venal justice department to find a way to intervene.  They’ve already helped the tobacco companies skate from a certain comeuppance, and I suspect them of punting the Scrushy/HealthSouth prosecution as well, not the least by allowing the trial to take place in Birmingham, where Scrushy has achieved icon status for garrulous televangelizing and, apparently, managing to transform himself from a rich white corporate criminal into an oppressed black man.  A jury of Alabamans is apparently at a standstill after a couple of weeks of deliberation.  Any bets for this Justice Department re-trying him?

Still, we have the Kozlowski/Schwartz conviction to savor for a few days.

I spent an hour or so tonight of frantic copying of my “categories” subdirectory from a couple of backup copies, and contriving a series of fake updates to try to kick Radio’s ass into upstreaming.  The process made a couple of ripples in the RSS ether, but, like those Twilight Zone episodes where a flying saucer lands and is only observed by a couple cranks and vagrants (you know who you are ), my thrashings in the digital soup will not be apparent by morning.  The best thing is that the categories all got restored - text, pictures and comments.  I don’t know how the fuck it happened, but look, you didn’t see anything, I didn’t see anything, let’s just let the government deal with it.

Wow.  I just noticed that my categories failed to restore from my disk crash last week.  And I was so smug about how I’d gamed the Radio software.  I have them backed up somewhere, but I’m sure it won’t be as easy as copying them into the www directory.  Watch this space….

Our son just returned from a several-week rock-climbing haj to Yosemite and Needles. He’s enviably tan and slim, but it’s good to see him, nonetheless. His heat-shield is glowing a bit from the friction of re-entry to civilization, but this should have been dispersed a bit during a stopover in LA before the drive back to Seattle. I’m anxious to see more of his pictures. They’re easier to look at when he’s sitting in the room with us instead of dangling over some unfathomable abyss.

I encountered an article last week that indicates, merely by its source, that blogging may no longer be hip and “cutting edge”.  It’s from The Journal of Accountancy, a monthly publication of the American Institute of CPAs, which I encountered on a bleak day when the Journal provided the only bathroom reading material.  Entitled Would You, Could You,Should You Blog?, it attempts to explain the blogging phenomenon to CPAs and to suggest that accounting firms could benefit from a combination of internal and external blogs.  Whenever the accounting profession gets it on with technology, I can’t help but envision an elephant trying to tapdance, so I was interested in what the house organ would say about blogging.

The article gets off to an unpromising start by asserting that blogs “gained credibility during the 2004 presidential campaign when three Minneapolis attorneys used their Power Line blog to disprove (emp added) CBS news reports about George W. Bush’s military service.”  That’s giving them a lot more credit than they earned, as they did nothing to establish that CBS’ assertions weren’t true, just that their documentation was faulty.  Nonetheless, I suspended my disbelief and read on.

In my blogger’s myopia, I hadn’t considered blogging as a viable tool for businesses beyond a technologically adept bastion like Microsoft.  So many of my clients, for instance, have their admins print out their inbound emails, and type their dictated outbounds.  The article makes a convincing case for blogs as a sort of knowledge microwave, a way for technicians like tax experts to quickly reach clients and, more to the point, potential clients with tidbits of information without having to formalize an article for the monthly newsletter, or to engage their web designers to add a page to the firm’s website.

The article led me to consider, with a bit of a shudder, what my life would have been like if blogs had been in use when I was in public accounting.  I can see it as an engine of spectacular self-immolation, and I would have been a leading candidate.  Even without an abetting technology, I gained a reputation for off -the-wall memoes, and, for April Fool’s day once, I wrote a send-up of the firm newsletter that should have put me on the short list for a post-tax-season ride out the ejection tube.  Unbeknownst to me, however, my office was planning to split off from the parent firm, and the partners behind the split were delighted with the parody.  In a way, it immunized me for a short while.

In responsible hands, however, it appears that some accountants are successfully dipping their toes into blogging.  There are several tax-oriented blogs for public consumption, and some firms are using blogs for project management and knowledge management (”k-blogs”):

Blogs make it easy to document projects so that all team members are better informed.  Knowledge blogs also can serve as a venue to help telecommuting employees stay more involved or (I love this one) for departing employees to leave knowledge behind.

I can just see this mechanism for automating those cheery, frozen-smile exit interviews.  Just don’t let the url outside the firewall.

Sorry for the fake post.  I received my new laptop (Dell Inspiron
600M) on Monday, and have been methodically pumping programs and data
onto it.  One big drawback was that, somehow, my Radio backup only
had posts up through 5/27, and I’ve been battling the bewildering
restore function for about a day now.  I finally mashed together
backup files from a couple of different sets that I have squirreled
away, and got my full complement of entries back.  It was like
pushing mercury uphill with my nose.

Not out of the woods yet with the laptop.  It came with a bunch of
Norton software that greatly interferes with networking and internet
access, and I’ve basically disabled it.  Still, I wasn’t able to
get the internal network adapters (wireless and wired) to play at all
with my home network.  Just to check things out, I disabled them
and installed a wifi pcmcia card from my old laptop, and - voila! -
instant networking and internet. 

So, I may have a hardware issue with this new laptop.  I hope I
don’t have to send it back.  I bought one of those cool Dell
warranties where a guy comes to your house and repairs your computer on
the dining room table.  I’ll have to work up the stamina and a
reservoir of goodwill and noblesse oblige before I call Dell support
and teach someone how to diagnose my problem.

Testing.

The weather turned in our favor Sunday afternoon, and we took a variation of our favorite walk around the neighborhood, Gasworks Park and Fremont. It’s never quite the same.

For no particular reason, a brass ensemble had set up next to one of our viewing stations at Gasworks.

Next to the Fremont Street Fair, I think this guy’s stolen a march on eBay. I instinctively felt for my wallet.

An inopportune place to sleep off the day’s dose of developer fluid.

Espresso To Go, a sliver of a coffee shop on Fremont Place, serves dynamite coffee and pastries made on the premises. Fittingly, No Doubt was playing on the stereo.

The bar at Chop Suey beckons