Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

Reading my previous entry, one might be tempted to think that it’s the classic setup from a seasoned sandbagger, a handicap fraud trying to draw the gullible into taking a sucker’s bet. One would be wrong, at least in this case. My golf was as ugly as promised, a 145 for 18 holes, and only that low because they quit counting your strokes on each hole once you reach 10, even though those 10 strokes may not have taken you from the blue (men’s - REAL men’s, goddamnit!) tees to the white (ladies’) tees. 

Lest you think I’m winding up to say Mackinac was my Guantanamo, an indeterminate sentence to a squalid and miserable experience, let me say I had an enjoyable time.  The skies along the route were mostly clear, and the flight from Milwaukee to the island, in a KingAir turboprop, afforded views of a pastoral northern Michigan I hadn’t known existed.

Pictures and more commentary here.

Reading my previous entry, one might be tempted to think that it’s the classic setup from a seasoned sandbagger, a handicap fraud trying to draw the gullible into taking a sucker’s bet. One would be wrong, at least in this case. My golf was as ugly as promised, a 145 for 18 holes, and only that low because they quit counting your strokes on each hole once you reach 10, even though those 10 strokes may not have taken you from the blue (men’s - REAL men’s, goddamnit!) tees to the white (ladies’) tees.

Lest you think I’m winding up to say Mackinac was my Guantanamo, an indeterminate sentence to a squalid and miserable experience, let me say I had a great time.  The skies along the route were mostly clear, and the flight from Milwaukee to the island, in a KingAir turboprop, afforded views of a pastoral northern Michigan I hadn’t known existed.

The island itself is comparable, in a way to one of our San Juan Islands, with some important differences.  The “dirt” is owned entirely by the state of Michigan, and the homeowners and businesses hold long-term leases from the state, with strict covenants on maintenance and use.  Except for a couple of short periods each year (early spring and late fall), motor vehicles are not allowed to operate on the roads.  Instead, a gaggle of horse-drawn vehicles ferries people and goods about.  In addition to the people-taxis, I saw building materials and produce being transported on flat-bed wagons.  One of our drivers told us there were 500 horses on the island in the summer.  This culture of horse-drawn virtue also has its tailpipe emissions, however.  All I can say is, if you rent a bike here, get one with fenders.

And, as for the golf - it was sort of grueling to require as many hacks at the ball as I did, and I was very conscious of not only slowing down my foursome, but also of infecting the caliber of the others’ play.  But every third hole or so, I would somehow hit a ball just as it is supposed to be hit, and the exhilaration of it is like a hit on a crack pipe - you just stand there and say, “shit almighty, I hit that!” and you trod towards the ball absurdly, breathlessly, almost, expecting to repeat the experience with your next swing.  Of course, that ball is predestined to a fate at the bottom of a pond or buried in a thicket of briars and poison oak, but you play the next hole anyway, and the next.  I told you it was a form of madness, but I’ll also note that there are women who experience childbirth and have more kids anyway, too.

This is Mackinac Island from the air, looking north to south. The Lower Peninsula is visible in the distance, and the Mackinac Bridge is out of the picture to the right.

This is our ride to the island.

My client knows that I’m both an Ohio State alum and a Kerry supporter, both of which he is decidedly not. Early in the week, he was preoccupied with obtaining clubs and a golf bag for me, and I was a bit mystified as to why he would not simply rent me a set on the island, especially in light of the dubiousness of the end product. Before boarding the plane, he produced a black bodybag thing, and unzipped it to reveal the bag you see me holding, emblazoned with Wisconsin Badger regalia and sporting a Bush (”W”) campaign placard. I had to admit it was a terrific ruse.

We disembarked our private propjet in favor of this conveyance, which took us from the airport to the golf course.

The Mackinac Grand Hotel has a commanding view of the strait and the Mackinac Bridge.

Those of you whose only knowledge of golf comes from mistakenly recording a PGA tournament instead of Skinemax perhaps never see this aspect of the game, where people with a combined billing rate approaching $500 will spend 20 minutes tromping through potentially dangerous vegetation in search of a $2 golfball. At least quail have the sporting decency to flush when you’re standing directly over them.

A salve to the unquiet spirit - panoramic view of the Mackinac Bridge from the 16th tee.

Another week working in Milwaukee, and not a lot of stimulating blogging material, or at least nothing that my tired wits are picking up on.

It’s not all work this week, however.  On Friday, my client is flying a group of us up to Mackinac Island for a round of … wait for it … GOLF!

I’ve never been a golfer.  I play once a year, if that, with my parents and brothers when we get together, and it’s an agreeable way to while away an afternoon with them.  Our family didn’t golf when I lived at home.  My dad had a sort of antipathy to the country-club ethos, and would say, “golf is the only game where you hit a ball and have to chase it yourself!”  My parents took the game up after, I believe, all of us were out of the house - they’re born-again golfers.  I’m not sure what sucked my brothers in, just as I’m not aware of when they came by their other execrable habits.  As for myself, it looked from the outside like something I would become obsessed with - multiply the number of clubs in a bag by about 17 ways to hit with each (15 bad, only one or two good) and you have a recipe for alarming and untreatable mental illness.  And, at the time, it just wasn’t a vigorous enough activity for me to spend that much time on.  It helps that Seattle isn’t the kind of town (as Milwaukee seems to be) where you have to golf in order to do business.

It’s against this backdrop that I will essay the links on Friday.  My client took me to his country club Wednesday and let me practice a bit at the driving range.  In retrospect, I’m not sure I view this as a kindness.  Most businesses need a state permit or have links to the Bush administration to create the sort of muddy moonscape, devoid of any living thing, that I created at the tee, a stripmine that only the merciful onset of a Wisconsin winter will begin to heal.  And the seemingly random barrage of balls I hit defied orthopedic or mathematical explanation.  I was hoping I hadn’t hurt anyone in the areas out of my view where my hits seemed to inexorably gravitate, and wondered if my client’s D&O insurance would cover any resulting legal difficulties.

So, pity the foursome that draws me tomorrow.  Don’t know if we’re playing 9 or 18 holes.  I understand that the island itself has its charms, with no automobiles and quaint architecture.  Perhaps I’d be better off grabbing a bicycle and riding around it.  Maybe after the first nine, my partners will pool their money and rent me one.  I’ll be back with pictures.  Gird your stomachs.

Today our son takes an exam, attends his last day of class at the UW, and steps into the abyss of fathomless adulthood.  It seems like just any other day in a lot of ways, since the summer has been so busy, and the rest of August is going to be filled with frenzied activity  Subliminally all week, however, I’ve been regarding it as more and more of a milestone.  He has, too, I think, although to say so would violate a lifetime’s studied nonchalance about school in general and artificial life milestones in particular.  This is belied by the fact that he’s done well - very well - the last 2+ years. 

Since graduate school doesn’t seem to be in his immediate plans, this really does seem to shut the door we opened walking him over to the cooperative preschool 18 or 19 years ago.  We’ve gotten through it.  He’s gotten through it.  There’s more anxiety to come for all of us as he sets a life course, begins to feel the first tugs of the cosmic undertow that pulls us all to the other end of life.  Right now, though, it’s time to congratulate him on a job very well done, and surreptitiously, when old joints allow, pat ourselves on the back, too.

Although I only flew the very southern edge of Alaska, this coastal plain and the profligate meander of its rivers provided an unmistakeable sense of the unseen vastness beyond.

The weather on Adak, which I expected to be uncomfortably cool, relented while I was there, and I saw the tops of mountains that had been completely hidden when I was there before.  Despite the lack of trees or foliage, there’s an otherworldly beauty in the terrain.  I wish I could have spent some time biking or hiking a bit, but missing the Sunday plane would have meant laying over until Thursday.

If you do tromp around on the island, you might want to watch your step. I met some folks who had a contract to locate and dispose of unexploded ordnance, left from decades of military presence on the island dating back to WWII.

Halibut is unloaded from a fishing boat into totes for transfer into the processing plant…

…to join others awaiting cleaning and freezing in preparation for its journey to your plate at Anthony’s.

Catching up on my travels…Last week, flew to Houston on Monday and Tuesday, returned home late Tuesday night.  Spent Wednesday in town mostly catching up on things I’d neglected.  Thursday morning, EARLY (6:00 am) I departed Seattle for Anchorage and the Ted Stevens (ptui!!!) International Airport.  I mean, we’ve got Bush, Stevens, Reagan…are there any airports named for Democrats?  Oh, yeah, La Giardia (I meant that), and Kennedy.  And I liked “Idlewild” a fuck of a lot better.  And in Atlanta, they’ve sorta dual-named Hartsfield Airport for Maynard Jackson, but I think most people continue to call it “Hartsfield”, or the Cherokee word for “that place where thunderstorms made me miss my connection to Seattle and I never found a place to sleep away from the god damn recorded announcements”, and the “Jackson” thing won’t really take.

Anyway, I was on my way not to Anchorage, but to Adak Island, where I have a client that needed tending to.  Adak used to be home to a Naval Air Station, with infrastructure out the gazoo and even a McDonald’s.  (see my previous visit here).  The military abandoned the island in 1995, and turned it over to the Aleut Corporation. 

With the military went all the telecommunications service, though the infrastructure was still there.  My client’s previous owner had established a reasonably fast (128k) internet connection using a satellite uplink, but it was prohibitively expensive, and they now have a 33k dialup connection.

My intention was to remove the remnants of the previous owner’s network domain and replace it with a more down-to-earth office network.  Additionally, I intended to allow them to share their 33k of bandwidth using Windows’ Internet Connection Sharing.  This “technology” is something that had a half-life of about a month in the 90s, and allows a home or small business network to share an internet connection that one of the PCs on the network has established, either through a broadband or a dial-up connection.  It’s not something (as I found out) that you call a Seattle network consultant to get guidance on.  They laugh like it’s a joke, and when they discern that you’re not laughing, they say, “Dude.  Get a router and a DSL connection.  We’ll help you with the Bluetooth wireless to their Palm devices if you can’t figure it out”.

Well, on Adak, Palm devices are reserved for more intimate connectivity, and “DSL” is more likely to mean “Dog Sled Larry” than “Digital Subscriber Line”.  (No, I overreach - there’s nowhere to go there that necessitates a dogsled, and the rats far outstrip dogs for mammalian supremacy).  So, I filled my carry-on with routers, switches, cables and cds and headed northwest to deliver a “solution” that would not only be a technical feat to accomplish, but also would be a crushing disappointment to the client when they saw what it REALLY meant to “share” a 33k connection.

After fiddling a bit (and sweating profusely), I realized that the basic secret of Internet Connection Sharing is that the internet-connecting PC serves as a poor man’s router, and assigns IP addresses back through the network to the other pcs that share the connection.  In order to do this, the network must be transparent, that is, the device that connects the pcs must be a hub or switch,  and not a router with pretensions of assigning its own IP addresses.  In the end, the whole arrangement is pretty bullet-proof, and even admirable, despite the fact that it feels like a parlor game using Dixie cups and waxed string pulled taut.

Lots of talk-talk here lately and no photos, though I seem to always have my camera handy.  The weekend before my Houston trip, my wife’s brother flew in from Tennessee, and on Sunday we drove up to Whidbey Island, a long strip of land that meanders from south of Everett to just southeast of the San Juan Islands. 

There’s a place just west of Coupeville called Ebey’s Landing that is a combination national monument/Nature Conservancy acquisition, and offers a terrific little 3 - 4 mile hike that starts on a beach, climbs up to a bluff with great views south to Mt. Rainier, north to Mt. Baker and west to Vancouver Island.  The trail descends to the beach at the half-way point, and you beachcomb your way back to the trailhead.  It’s a great mini-vacation if you only have a day to burn.

After our hike, we retired to a corny little tavern in Coupeville with an eyepopping view of Penn Cove and Mt. Baker out the window and, if one reclined too rashly in his chair, a less stirring view of some former wildlife.

OK, here’s a quote from the early edition of the Seattle P-I.  I’m sure they will have corrected it by the time morning rolls around, but it was fun while it lasted:

The pipe, about 7 inches long and enclosed with screw caps on both ends, was found by the two shooters just off Interstate 90 near Exit 38.

It had what appeared to be a fuse sticking out of one end and, Urquhart confirmed, it was later found to contain black power, “which by definition is very unstable and extremely dangerous,” he said

A little behind the curve here. After fulfilling my social/business obligations in Houston, I drove my rental car to the airport. To be precise, the George HW Bush (ptui!!!) Airport. I was reminded that this was Texas when I refilled the tank at a Shell station, then had to drive over 10 miles between the airport entrance and the “Rental Car Return”. Signs kept appearing that said “Rental Car Return”, directing me to exit the 3-lane approach drive from the lane opposite to the one I was in, and then continuing for so long without additional instruction that I was ready to give up hope, then directing me to dive across three lanes and exit in another direction, etc. I was sure that when I finally arived somewhere that I could actually relinquish the vehicle, the tank would be half-empty and I would be confronted with the accusing glares of Thrifty employees who would not believe that I had spent $15 refilling their little Dodge Neon just 1/2 hour ago.

I had booked a late flight (8:45) because I thought we would be doing a plant tour after our elegant lunch, but it turned out that the day’s festivities were concluded after lunch, so I was WAY early for my scheduled flight. I had been upgraded to first class on my scheduled flight, but I saw that there was an earlier flight at 5:30, so I waitlisted for it at the advice of a gate agent, who was convinced that the hurricane activity presaging Charlie would cause multiple delays and cancellations.

At the gate for the 5:30 flight, they announced that the flight was oversold and were asking for volunteers. For me, this translated into exchanging my first class seat for a middle seat in coach, if available. I hung around until they were almost finished boarding and, seeing no dearth of folks showing up, decided to keep my seat on the later flight.

So, instead of returning to Seattle and a houseful of my wife’s relatives 3 hours ahead of schedule, my elbows skinned from competing for armrest space, I returned to the Continental President’s Club, reconnected to their free broadband internet signal, poured a glass of free Chardonnay, and whiled away the time until my next flight composing enjoyments for you, Dear Reader, which I was able to upload just prior to packing up and running for my gate.

I boarded in due time, and found that my seat was occupied. A couple had been assigned seats in first class, but not together, and wondered if I would give up my customary aisle seat in trade for a window in a different row. No problem, I moved on to the exchanged seat and saw that I had to negotiate past a largish man with a leg brace in the aisle seat.

Once ensconced in my seat, I overheard my largish seatmate speaking hurriedly to someone he called “Brother Omar”, and noticed that he had a copy of the Koran open in his lap. He was a black man, not Arabic, and sounded as urbane as (and with an accent similar to) Bryant Gumbel. Still, the combination of the open Koran, the emphatic phone conversation and the brace, even at this remove from 9/11, set my teeth on edge a bit. I mean, I flew the Friday after 9/11, and have flown regularly since, so I long ago rationalized the minimal threat involved. I’m convinced that there will be another attack, but it won’t be a copycat crime. Still, I’ve read of instances where TSA, as anal as they are with tennis shoes and belt buckles and wine corkscrews, gives passes to folks with leg braces and other prosthetics because they don’t have specific guidelines for them.

I opened my current book (All The King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren) and read with my eyes, but kept my ears peeled for my seatmate’s cellphone conversation. Eventually he rang off the phone. After a bit he turned to me and asked me what I was reading. Bonus points in his column. I explained that it was a work of fiction very loosely based on the career of Louisiana governer Huey Long, that the language was sumptuous and, although it used the “N” word (for that is why I thought he asked - that he had espied it in the text). it had to be taken in the context of the time, etc,. Then he took a call from someone he was planning to meet up with when he landed, and the general humanity of what I discerned of him disarmed me about any Mad Muslim scenarios.

As the flight progressed, I considered for a bit, as you might at a church picnic, about the appropriateness of my ordering alcohol in the presence of a seatmate who obviously eschewed it. This quibble was exceedingly fleeting, however, and I encouraged the flow of Chardonnay refills that one becomes accustomed to in first class. My glass of infidel elixir cohabited the armrest for most of the flight with his copy of the Koran in a church-state armistice in our demilitarized airspace.

Later, as I opened my laptop (he already had his opened), he asked me a techinical question about how I had Windows XP configured, and I pondered how someone who was so obviously addicted to technological gadgets could so unreservedly espouse a faith that considered modernity in even its low-tech manifestations the enemy.

We landed safely, of course. The next terrorist orgy will not involve corpulent zealots with prostheses, seated next to more nimble seatmates bent on stopping them.

On Monday and Tuesday, I went to Houston to meet with the management of one of my clients’ major suppliers.  The supplier is Japanese-owned, publicly-traded, and the CEO and upper management are native Japanese.  So, I surfed a little bit to bone up on Japanese business etiquette.  For one thing, I had to bring a suit, the first time I believe I’ve worn one in 3 or 4 years, and of all places, it had to be Houston.  In August.

The sites I saw were equivocal on the issue of bowing.  I decided to take my cue from our hosts, and we got by with some head-bobbing and hearty handshakes.  And lots of politeness, enough, after a while to get even Mother Theresa’s gag reflex going. 

We had prepared a Powerpoint presentation, which I had on my laptop.  They had a projector for me to use, and the gathering waited, politely, while I sought to adjust my display to feed the projector.  And waited some more.  I had, the week before, upgraded my OS from Windows 2000 to XP in order to try to alleviate some of the problems that I whined about last week.  When I opened my display driver dialog, which used to allow me to select among external monitors, televisions and projectors, those options were nowhere to be found.  While my client CEO’s polite veneer heaved to and became markedly restive, the supplier CEO’s lieutenants’ politeness increased to the level of trying to help me.  Helpful suggestions, “are we there yet” inquiries and sympathetic murmurrings are equally the bane of those of us who wrestle with technology for a living, and I alternately cringed and seethed.

After what seemed, and indeed probably was, an eternity in the temporal argot of Chief Executive Officers, I finally did something which caused my laptop display to flow beneficently to the screen on the wall. My client narrated as I clicked through the slides.  About halfway through, I noticed that the lieutenants were sitting erectly and assiduously taking notes as my client spoke, clinging to every word.  At the time I thought this was more over-the-top flattery, but in the discussion that followed, they seemed to refer to the notes as they made inquiries.  Still, I imagined stacks of these yellow pads in a dust-riddled room labeled “Customer Relations Recycling Center”.

Afterward, we took a short limo ride to an elegant lunch.  Back at their office, we exchanged gifts, which is also a Japanese business tradition.  We had heard that their CEO was a bird enthusiast, so we presented him with a crystal bald eagle, which he seemed to relish.  We received gold Greek coins commemorating the coming Olympic games.  More head bobbing, handshakes, picture-taking, holding doors and after-you-my-dear-Alphonses as we dosey-doed our way down to our waiting limo, and we were on our way to the airport.

Considring that my previous business experiences in Texas, involved cowboy hats, steak houses with scantily-clad trapeze artists flying overhead, strip bars and line dancing lessons, this experience was refreshing. and I came away with a genuine liking for these guys.