Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

Do you ever snap awake from a sound sleep with the certain knowledge that something has just gone “bump” in the cosmos?  I’m not talking about something run-of-the-mill like the earthquakelets that jolt the left-coaster now & then - I’m talking music-of-the-spheres stuff.

It turns out that you may have been awakened every couple of years by an international agency clumsily slipping an extra second under your pillow in an attempt to cover up systemic incompetence of the earth in its assigned task of rotating on its axis:

 Because the moon’s gravity has been slowing down the Earth, it takes slightly longer than 24 hours for the world to rotate completely on its axis. The difference is tiny, but every few years a group that helps regulate global timekeeping, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, tells governments, telecom companies, satellite operators and others to add in an extra second to all clocks to keep them in sync. The adjustment is made on New Year’s Eve or the last day of June.

This is taken from a Wall Street Journal article entitled “Why the US Wants to End the Link Between Time and Sun”  On its face, this sounds like another stunning act of hubris on the part of a runaway US administration and, in fact, that’s what it turns out to be.  The government is proposing to end the practice of using “leap seconds” to synchronize the world’s clocks. 

It’s a sign of the times when I read an article like this and turn it this way and that, trying to glean some underhanded political or theological purpose to something the administration proposes.  Does it benefit oil companies?  Penalize labor unions?  Or is there some biblical proscription to screwing with time that raises the dander of the evangelical base, something that might cause undue delay to the start of the End Times?

It turns out that it’s expensive and disruptive to try to program computers to countenance the existence of a 61-second minute, sort of like the concept of i, the square root of -1.  Think of the conniptions the Cobol crowd went through simply to accommodate something rational like a 4-digit year, and you get the picture.  There would be winners and losers, of course, and it may bear looking into as a political exercise.  Astronomers, whose telescopes need the microadjustments in order to track faraway phenomena, are howling.  One suspects that the timing of the announcement of the discovery of a 10th planet is aimed at swaying public sentiment the astronomers’ way.  No Planet Left Behind would be a catchy slogan for the campaign.

Other constituencies are equally compromised:

 But the U.S. proposal, which an ITU committee will consider in November, has upset some of the most powerful people in timekeeping — including the Earth Rotation Service’s leap-second chief, Daniel Gambis, of the Paris Observatory. “As an astronomer, I think time should follow the Earth,” Dr. Gambis said in an interview. He calls the American effort a “coup de force,” or power play, and an “intrusion on the scientific dialogue.”

Back to Seattle. We’re in the midst of our Secret Summer Weather Festival. I am circumscribed from providing any more detail than the photo below, taken Friday evening at Seward Park, midpoint of a bike ride with my son. 

The Blue Angels will arrive here this week for rehearsals and performances in a sorta cornball summer celebration called SeaFair, culminating in unlimited hydro races next weekend.  Thousands of folks raft up out on Lake Washington, get sunburned and drunk, and watch what is really just a 2-day Budweiser advertisement.  A blimp will buzz Jules-Verne-like over the city all week.  It floated languidly over the house Friday night after dark.  We used to get the haughtily austere Goodyear blimp, but this year it’s a gaudy thing from Ameriquest that looks like a bridge-tagging project that overdosed on BC Bud (not the hydroplane kind).  (Update) It just flew by, so I rushed to the upstairs deck to photograph it.

I spent the middle of the week visiting clients in eastern Washington.   I deal with a winery in Richland that is just putting the finishing touches on a public tasting facility that will include a restaurant, retail sales and classes.  Another is an agribusiness with two locations.

The terrain couldn’t be more removed from the lush growth I was cavorting amongst over the weekend.  It’s basically sagebrush desert east of the Cascades, receiving about 6″ of rainfall a year.  They grow a cornucopia of crops in the region - potatoes, onions, hops, wheat, grapes both for wine and for juice, asparagus, apples, apples, apples - all with water drawn from the Snake and Columbia systems.

The photo shows all of this - sagebrush, an irrigation rig in the middle distance, and, lining the ridge in the background like an unshaven chin, wind turbines.

It was in the mid-100s over there, which made for balmy 80-degree nights perfect for running (it’s dry heat, after all!).   I only suffered on Thursday, when I had to drive in my ac-less car for about 75 miles in midafternoon.  When I reached my client’s, their doorhandle put a serious burn on my palm - the doorknob to Hades, I thought.

Amusing bit: you’ve probably heard the term “sneakernet” - a computer networking method involving copying data to a floppy disk and walking it over to another computer?  Well, the agribusiness client with two locations needs to share data, but the telephone infrastructure at one location only allows for about 8k linespeed, and pokes a lot of holes in that.  So, we deployed a technique called “spudnet” - each week after payroll, a zip disk makes its way between the locations on a truck carrying potatoes.

I had a pretty smooth trip back to Seattle last Friday night, arriving about midnight.  I had a window seat on the right side of the plane, and we took my favorite approach to SeaTac, from the north.  The night was almost cloudless.  On this approach, we’re descending from east to west, and bank south on final pretty much directly above my house.  From there, we cross above Lake Union, catch the Space Needle and then over the downtown core, with ferries floating on the velvet blackness of Elliott Bay.

It was about 2:30 by the time I wound down and hit the rack.  My wife and friends had planned a Saturday morning trip into the Cascades to rock climb.  I was tempted to just wallow around “recovering” from my week on the road, but decided it was just too nice a day to pass up, and rode up with them to do some hiking while they spidered around on rock walls.

It turned out to be a great call.  The hike up Mt. Washington is about 4 miles, with 3,200 feet of elevation gain, a nice aerobic challenge.  Once at the top, the trail opened into some meadows and old logging roads, and afforded some terrific views of the Snoqualmie valley, the Cedar River watershed and Mt. Rainier.  I snapped a lot of pictures, with you guys in mind, of course.  In all, I got about 9 - 10 miles of up-and-down hiking.

The day turned sour when we arrived home and I discovered that my Canon S300 camera was missing.  I called all the participants and asked them to check amongst their gear, receiving only regrets.  In addition, when I turned my Creative Zen Xtra mp3 player on to try some soothing tunes during dinner, the display was blank.  I ascertained that the hard disk was intact, so my collection of tunes was not lost, but I was sort of bummed by the prospect of $600 of electronic equipment wiped out in a day’s hike. 

The mp3 problem was “solved”, however temporarily, later that evening.  The player is out of warranty, so I had nothing to lose by disassembling it to see if I could discover some loose connection.  Once apart, I didn’t see anything obvious, so I reassembled it and resigned myself to backing up all the music and looking for another player somewhere.  However, after I’d finished tightening the last screw, I turned it on and it worked.  Sort of a mystery, but it’s worked fine so far.

The camera issue was less encouraging.  I put a “lost & found” ad on craigslist, and we drove back up to Exit 38 Sunday morning to scour the parking lot and trail up to the last place I remembered taking a picture.  No luck, so we posted a sign at the trailhead.  Since we were up there anyway, we decided to take another hike, the 2 miles from the Mt. Washington trailhead down to the Twin Falls overlook, where there is a series of picturesque cataracts plunging into picturesque pools.  The pictures will have to remain “esque”, of course, because I didn’t have my damn camera.  Nice day hike, though, and I rationalized that lots of people would have paid at least the cost of my camera to have spent the weekend as I had (minus the anxiety).

I hung around all day Monday hoping for a call, but my phone was all about stony silence.  I started to prepare for my drive to the Tri-Cities in eastern Washington, and my wife arranged to do some gym climbing with her buddy from Saturday.  Her ride arrived, and we said our goodbyes.  A minute later, she was back on the porch knocking on the door.  When I answered the door, instead of looking around for some piece of gear she had forgotten, she handed me my camera.  She had found it lodged in the luggage rack of her friend’s car - it had ridden back from the mountains and around the pothole-ridden streets of Seattle for 2 days.

All my photos from the hike were intact, and, because I so love the world, or at least the blogosphere, I’m gonna post a bunch of them.

Hiking/climbing companions Enzo Ferarri and Martha (neither one ours).  Enzo’s very young, and has yet to develop a realistic sense of…proportion.

 
I love digitalis. They were growing in clumps at the top of the trail.

Mount Rainier peeks out from clouds, above the Cedar River reservoir.

Cedar River Reservoir, source of Seattle’s drinking water.

I had a pretty smooth trip back to Seattle last Friday night, arriving about midnight.  I had a window seat on the right side of the plane, and we took my favorite approach to SeaTac, from the north.  The night was almost cloudless.  On this approach, we’re descending from east to west, and bank south on final pretty much directly above my house.  From there, we cross above Lake Union, catch the Space Needle and then over the downtown core, with ferries floating on the velvet blackness of Elliott Bay.

It was about 2:30 by the time I wound down and hit the rack.  My wife and friends had planned a Saturday morning trip into the Cascades to rock climb.  I was tempted to just wallow around “recovering” from my week on the road, but decided it was just too nice a day to pass up, and rode up with them to do some hiking while they spidered around on rock walls.

It turned out to be a great call.  The hike up Mt. Washington is about 4 miles, with 3,200 feet of elevation gain, a nice aerobic challenge.  Once at the top, the trail opened into some meadows and old logging roads, and afforded some terrific views of the Snoqualmie valley, the Cedar River watershed and Mt. Rainier.  I snapped a lot of pictures, with you guys in mind, of course.  In all, I got about 9 - 10 miles of up-and-down hiking.

The day turned sour when we arrived home and I discovered that my Canon S300 camera was missing.  I called all the participants and asked them to check amongst their gear, receiving only regrets.  In addition, when I turned my Creative Zen Xtra mp3 player on to try some soothing tunes during dinner, the display was blank.  I ascertained that the hard disk was intact, so my collection of tunes was not lost, but I was sort of bummed by the prospect of $600 of electronic equipment wiped out in a day’s hike. 

The mp3 problem was “solved”, however temporarily, later that evening.  The player is out of warranty, so I had nothing to lose by disassembling it to see if I could discover some loose connection.  Once apart, I didn’t see anything obvious, so I reassembled it and resigned myself to backing up all the music and looking for another player somewhere.  However, after I’d finished tightening the last screw, I turned it on and it worked.  Sort of a mystery, but it’s worked fine so far.

The camera issue was less encouraging.  I put a “lost & found” ad on craigslist, and we drove back up to Exit 38 Sunday morning to scour the parking lot and trail up to the last place I remembered taking a picture.  No luck, so we posted a sign at the trailhead.  Since we were up there anyway, we decided to take another hike, the 2 miles from the Mt. Washington trailhead down to the Twin Falls overlook, where there is a series of picturesque cataracts plunging into picturesque pools.  The pictures will have to remain “esque”, of course, because I didn’t have my damn camera.  Nice day hike, though, and I rationalized that lots of people would have paid at least the cost of my camera to have spent the weekend as I had (minus the anxiety).

I hung around all day Monday hoping for a call, but my phone was all about stony silence.  I started to prepare for my drive to the Tri-Cities in eastern Washington, and my wife arranged to do some gym climbing with her buddy from Saturday.  Her ride arrived, and we said our goodbyes.  A minute later, she was back on the porch knocking on the door.  When I answered the door, instead of looking around for some piece of gear she had forgotten, she handed me my camera.  She had found it lodged in the luggage rack of her friend’s car - it had ridden back from the mountains and around the pothole-ridden streets of Seattle for 2 days.

All my photos from the hike were intact, and, because I so love the world, or at least the blogosphere, I’m gonna post a bunch of them.

Hiking/climbing companions Enzo Ferarri and Martha (neither one ours).  Enzo’s very young, and has yet to develop a realistic sense of…proportion.

 
I love digitalis. They were growing in clumps at the top of the trail.

Mount Rainier peeks out from clouds, above the Cedar River reservoir.

Cedar River Reservoir, source of Seattle’s drinking water.

So, after we filled our our truncated tests and revealed our truncated personalities, we broke into groups for a couple of exercises.  In one, we were presented with the following situation:

As a nurse, you are the last person to see Mr. Doe before he dies in the hospital.  You believe that he has become mentally incompetent in the last few hours and in that time he has rewritten his will.  In the new will he viciously attacks each member of his adopted family and reveals that he actually was born a woman.  He then cuts every family member out of the will, leaving his fortune to a Psychic Chatline.  Mr. Doe asks you to make sure that the new will gets to his lawyer.  Knowing that the document will most likely be thrown out of court but not before the damage to Mr. Doe’s family is done, do you carry out Mr. Doe’s last request?

My retentive response was to sit on the thing overnight in order to sort out the moral complications.  The other three at my table, not all of them Drivers, chorused “shred it”.  In fact, that was the consensus throughout the entire room.  I felt I wouldn’t/couldn’t be so cavalier about rejecting the guy’s wishes out of hand.  He may have been ranting and a bit delirious, but the impetus for his action came from somewhere.  And I didn’t even notice the “adopted” adjective to “family” until I typed this out.  Meanwhile, another consensus developed in the room that the nurse screwed up by not getting named beneficiary him/herself.

In the other exercise, each table was presented with a bag of all kinds of stuff - construction paper, plastic coffee stirrers, a floppy diskette, glue, duct tape - and told that we had to use the stuff to build a house in 3 minutes.  I started laying out a foundation and said, “we need a plan.  Any ideas?”  The Driver at the table, meanwhile, folded up a piece of construction paper to form a roof and two sides and looked at us as if we were finished.  I decided, “screw it”, and the rest of the time the other two spent taping stuff to the construction paper.

Then each table described its process.  At the table next to us, they told how they agonized a little about some detail, and a fellow named Hector said, “I just told them it didn’t have to be perfect.”  Everyone looked at Hector for a couple seconds, then a few chuckles broke out.  Hector is the head of the Quality Control department.

Still in Milwaukee.  My client had its quarterly meeting today, and, because there’s been some perceived dissonances in the organization, we engaged in a sort of truncated Myers-Briggs exercise.  This one was REALLY quick & dirty, with 15 questions on a 4-column grid.  As it turned out, each column represented one of the quadrants - let’s see, this time they were Driver, Expressive, Amiable and retentive Analytical.  I usually turn out way analytical, but this time I was solidly Amiable.

I was puzzled by this for a while.  Have I gone soft?  I posited that “Amiable” was in fact indicative of an Analytical that had just quit trying.  I started to plot ways to get back my Analytical chops, things like sandbagging the Drivers’ decisions with “process”, answering “yes-or-no” questions with 5-page dissertations.  I was sure I still had it.

Then I examined the testing sheet again and discovered that the Amiable column was the third, and the Analytical column was the fourth.  We were given only 3 minutes to fill the thing out, and I realized that I had just been too fucking lazy to read over to the fourth column for most of the questions.  In a way, it confirmed my earlier feeling that I’ve slipped a bit - the true Analytical would read all the responses and ruminate on them until time was up.  I want another shot when I’ve had more sleep.

Only a few days away from home, and I’ve fallen in love with a Canadian girl.  You have to be quick - it’s a short season.  And, no, it’s not Meg - everybody loves Meg, so that wouldn’t really be bloggable news.  No, it’s a Canadian singer/songwriter named Feist that I heard on KEXP, they played a song from her new album Let It Die.  I dug around and found this live performance on KCRW and was really taken with it.  The live performance is solo (she’s touring solo, I found that I missed her last week in Seattle), and it’s personal and riveting, whereas I find the album poppy and sort of slight.  It may grow on me, though.  Or, I may decide it was a ridiculous infatuation that will be mercifully obscured by the imminent onset of the Canadian winter.  Give it a listen and tell me what you think.

I’m working in Milwaukee again this week, just a horrible week to be missing in Seattle since the weather there is nearly perfect.  The weather here is the prototypical midwest summer heat and humidity, as you can see in the picture at right, taken after a 4-mile run through the park near my hotel.  I’ve donated the shirt to science.

I had worked things out so that, instead of my usual early-morning departure on Sunday, I was booked on a 4:15 flight to Minneapolis, connecting to Milwaukee and arriving at 11:30.  A little bit of a push to stay alert on Monday, but, really, I don’t get to bed very early anyway.  Bonus: a whole week previous, my Platinum-elite upgrades to first class were confirmed on both legs, so no anxiety-ridden hanging around the gate to see if my name is called.  Just check in, head to the World Club and relax until boarding time.

Not so fast.

As I checked my bags, the agent said my Minneapolis flight was running at least an hour late, and would miss my connection to Milwaukee, which was the last one of the evening.  She put me on an earlier Minneapolis flight, which was also an hour late, but only middle seats in coach were available, with not much hope for an upgrade.  Although I was able to change to an aisle seat toward the back of the plane, no first class seats magically became available at boarding time, and I trudged back to the depths of the coach-class catacomb.  Still, the plane was leaving about the same time as my original flight, so I’d have time in Minneapolis to grab dinner, and I still had the first class seat to Milwaukee.

Not so fast.

Just as we were 20 miles from landing in Minneapolis, a thunderstorm passed through the airport and they closed it.  We powered up out of our approach and probably flew  thalfway to Milwaukee before getting permission to turn back and finally land in Minneapolis, about 45 minutes later than originally estimated.  It takes a while to disembark if you’re sitting in 39-D, but I still had 25 minutes until my next departure.  I walk briskly through airports, bobbing and weaving through the platoons of summer saunterers phalanxed throughout the concourses, and I thought I had plenty of time even though my gate was in a different concourse.  I was a little stunned, then, to hear a PA announcement, “final boarding call for flight 394 to Milwaukee.  All passengers must board immediately at gate C-16.”   As fast as I had been walking, I doubled my pace and opted to use the people-mover belts, which I usually eschew in order to get a bit of exercise.  People were, for some odd reason, respecing the Walk/Stand demarcations on the belt, so I was able to cruise pretty quickly along.  Still, at Gate C-10, the announcement was repeated, with the addition of, “Seattle passenger Perils of Caffeine needs to check in at the gate immediately.”

At that point, I abandoned any semblance of nonchalance, gripped my backpack tight against my back and broke into an OJ Simpson-esque sprint over the 100 yards or so left.  I run as part of my conditioning, but the extra 25 pounds on my back made it feel extremely ungainly.  I planted my right foot and made my cut for the gate, resigning myself to the probability that they’d already given my first class seat away.  Instead, it turned out that neither the pilot nor the first officer was on board yet, so my athletic feat, while admirable in the abstract, had been unnecessary. 

We’re not done yet.  Upon arrival in Milwaukee at 12:30am, I found that my car rental folks had bailed on me, and I had to go to another car company and pay twice as much for a full-size monstrosity for the week.  My client ends up paying, but still…

Don’t misunderstand, I’m not one to complain about the discomforts of air travel, even when things seem to unravel a bit due to weather or other mishaps as they did Sunday.  When you consider the organizational and mechanical complexity required to transport you and your luggage 2,500 miles within a 5-hour period, it’s really marvelous.  My heart goes out to anyone who works for an airline in this awful business environment that’s mostly not of their making.

My wife was at the liquor store tonight (warning them again how they could lose their license by selling to me while I’m under the supervision of the court. Her getting the prosecutor’s cell phone number was a major coup in this endeavor), and some guy came to the checkout counter with several bottles of this the elixir at the right. He said he was having a Harry Potter party tomorrow night, and the clerk rolled her eyes and said, “I’ll bet.” Not sure of the actual arrangements, but we’re pretty sure Michael Jackson doesn’t shop in our liquor stores