Monthly Archives: February 2008

Riding the Scooter to Dallas

Posted on February 25, 2008 | 1 Comment

It was back to Dallas today on the Monday morning 1887 with American Airlines. I’ve gotten too good at figuring out exactly when I need to leave the house to make it in time for boarding this particular plane. It’s a problem when you use that knowledge to it’s limits and then experience any delays at all getting to the gate. I dragged my feet just a bit leaving the house and then the line at security was three times longer than normal. Had I been just a minute or two later I would have missed my ride, but I made it. As usual, we departed gate T9 at 7:30 am sharp.

But something was a little different today. The captain was a real ham. It’s not unusual to have a pilot come on the PA and make a wisecrack or two, but this guy was non-stop. He started off by saying “This is your captain speaking. I’ve always wanted to say that.” It was early, but a few people chuckled. Then he proceeded to explain that whenever he flew the 1887 he referred to it as “The Scooter” which he did faithfully until we unloaded in Dallas.

One of the more quirky things he had to say was right as we crossed over the Mississippi River into Louisiana air space. “If you look real hard down there you can see very tiny people all looking up at The Scooter and wishing they got to ride it too.”

He almost got me to look.

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Riding on the Ghost Train

Posted on February 24, 2008 | Leave a comment

In 1920 my grandmother was born into what was luxury for her time. Her father was a doctor and his family had various interests throughout the county in which she grew up. Despite living in that rural part of the South Carolina low country, her home was equipped with things that were as uncommon then as they are taken for granted today. It had running water fed by a spring and electric lighting powered by a generator kept in the small stone “powerhouse” at the rear of the property. I remember seeing it’s ruins when I was a small boy, confused by the idea that electricity could come from anywhere other than a power line.

Despite the rare wealth of her youth my grandmother was twelve years old before she ever saw an automobile. From the few times she told me the story it was clear that the experience left quite an impression on her, but not nearly so much as the trains of her day did. An illness took her father when she was a little girl, and by the time she entered college the Great Depression had taken what was left of his land and fortune. She didn’t complain very often about either of those losses, but whenever we rode back to her ancestral home together she lamented the disappearance of the railroads. She used words like “marvelous” and “grand” to describe what the trains and train stations were like in the travels of her youth.

Yesterday I finally got a sense for what she must have experienced. It was a cold gray February day. Not much fun to do anything outside, and not many options for diversion downtown with all of the traffic disruption on the 75/85 connector. Still, we wanted to get out of the house and do something we had not done recently. So it was that my parents, daughter and I found ourselves doing something that we’d never done before – visit the Southeastern Railway Museum in Duluth, Georgia. It’s hard to give a sense of what it is like to visit there. It’s one of those things that you almost have to see to appreciate.

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The Savannah & Atlanta 750.

One of the trains in renovation there was the Superb, used to transport Woodrow Wilson on occasion and Warren Harding on a cross-country tour in the last days of his Presidency and his life. Think of the Superb as the Air Force One of the Roaring 20′s. Most of the spaces inside reminded me of the close quarters in an airplane or, perhaps more appropriately, a modern cruise ship. While cramped, it was clear that they were luxurious in their time. It was the same for some of the other train cars there at the museum, the ones that might have carried passengers more like my grandmother and less like a head of state.

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Harding’s sitting room in his private car on the Superb.

There were other antiquities there too – rail cars that were rolling post offices, rail cars refrigerated with block ice for transporting fruit cross-continent, rail cars used to house workers during weeks away from home while they worked on the rail road. There were countless other relics big and small of a vast and vanished transportation infrastructure which most of us today have no idea even existed.

I often wonder what mysteries of my youth that I’ll struggle to explain to my daughter as she gets older and then to her children some day. Staring at the Iron Horses of a bygone era it was hard to grasp which of the “grand” and “marvelous” things in our present lives might make that list.

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Hard to Top That

Posted on February 23, 2008 | Leave a comment

Every once in a while you hear a story about some really cool experience that a friend or family member has that’s truly unique. For example, I had a friend that got to ride in an M1-A1 Abrams tank once. They did all kinds of maneuvers that sounded pretty impressive, among them rolling through a forest of scrub pines at speed and laying down trees like blades of grass. I went to high school with him before he enlisted and became a Combat Engineer. His job, more often than not, was blowing stuff up. Some guys have all the fun.

The neatest story I’ve heard in a very long while, however, was recently posted over at my friend James’ blog at the arc of time. I won’t spoil the story, but it involves flying big jets (sort of). Go check it out.

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The Silent Booming Voice

Posted on February 23, 2008 | 1 Comment

A while back I posted some of my thoughts on the MacWorld keynote given by Steve Jobs last month. At that point I was already resigned to buying an Apple TV, which I did last weekend. Although I’m still waiting for the big update to the library titles (supposedly 1,000+ movies by month end) I was not disappointed. It is really cool to be able to browse through movies – including HD movies – rent with a button press and start watching within as little as 30 seconds.

I have always disliked the process of renting movies at a place like Blockbuster, and for whatever reason Netflix didn’t do it for me either. I think that movies are a pure impulse thing for me and it’s hard to beat a big, interactive video-on-demand library to scratch that itch. But that’s not all of course. Using your TV and a remote to listen to your music and your Podcasts while your favorite pictures run on a screen saver is great too, and surfing YouTube on your TV is surprisingly entertaining. I haven’t tried renting TV shows yet, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.

This all brings me to the point of some commentary I committed to make previously on the under-rated nature of what Jobs announced without announcing at MacWorld last month. The simultaneous release of the Time Capsule, the MacBook Air, and movie rentals for iTunes paints a a not-so-subtle picture of the future of home computing and home entertainment being realized before our very eyes. Here’s what Jobs said between the lines last month:

  1. Forget the wires. Apple’s implementations of 802.11 wireless technology have been great for some time, but with the introduction of the Time Capsule, the “diskless” MacBook Air and streaming HD to your television over your Wi-Fi network, Apple has made it crystal clear that the need for wired connections is quickly disappearing even from the most demanding applications. This is portentous. We easily forget just how “placeless” computing became as a result of Wi-Fi hotspots being everywhere. Cutting all of the cords at home – not just to your laptop but to everything else – will be just as big a deal over time.
  2. Forget the data. Apple has done a very, very smart thing by focusing on brain-dead simple automatic backup as a killer application for home computing. With all of your pictures, music, movies, documents etc. on an Apple platform at home you can be sure that catastrophic data loss would have become a huge customer satisfaction issue over time without it. Since the dawn of the PC people have mostly accepted data loss disasters as being their fault, but that day is drawing to a close. As more and more computing is done in the cloud on data center platforms like Google Apps and others, the idea that you might “lose” your data will become as unacceptable to customers as the notion of the bank “losing” your money. Data centers just don’t lose your data. Neither should your home computing platform. With the Time Capsule providing a totally wireless means of backing up everything you own automatically, this obstacle to worry-free computing has been well and thoroughly eliminated. This is a very shrewd move that’s going to pay big dividends for Apple over time. I have suffered big data loss at home before. Almost all of the pictures of my trip to Disney World with my daughter when she was 4 years old, for example. Everybody’s been there. Now everybody can avoid it with zero effort. Building the capability into the device that also provides your home computing and entertainment equipment their connectivity to the Internet and each other a la the Time Capsule is genius. See “Forget the Wires” above.
  3. Forget the disks. Neither the MacBook air nor the updated Apple TV has an optical drive. “So what?” you say. Here’s what. Long ago when the coal we burn for electricity was being formed in dinosaur infested swamps computing was in the Document Era. Floppy eating leviathans like PowerPoint files were competing for 1,440KB file spaces with the more nimble but still gigantic Excel and Word documents. Multimedia? Are you kidding? Even grainy pictures and cartoonish graphics on a PC were thrilling, and they usually came pre-installed. The first laptop PC that shipped without a built-in floppy disk drive sent a clear signal that networks were getting too fast, email getting too prevalent and files getting too big for removable media to remain important to business users over the long haul. The same signal is now being sent to the home user, who has always been more interested in gigabyte gobbling multimedia than even the most hip business user. What the new suite of Apple products now says to the home user is that media on disks is becoming the exception, not the rule. Just like you wouldn’t think of burning an Excel spreadsheet to a DVD, you’ll one year soon quit thinking of fuddling with any sort of disk to watch a movie, share pictures, etc. Seriously. It didn’t make a lot of noise but a very big object just slammed into the Iron Triangle of consumer electronics manufacturers, Hollywood studios and the home entertainment center. While Big Media was concluding a war of attrition over consumers with Blue Ray and HD-DVD, Apple told the most premium group of buyers out there that it doesn’t matter who wins. Sure, the new disk formats give even more spectacular quality in movie viewing, but who cares? Most people haven’t even adjusted to HD yet, and with an Apple TV selling for $229 to rent HD content on demand and Blue Ray players selling for twice that and coming with all the baggage of dealing with disks, do we really think that this will be much of a competition over time? Apple TV is not the end of the diskless evolution by any means, but it signals the beginning of the end for the disk in the entertainment center.
  4. Forget the Networks. Really. Music labels are the failing Western Empire of Rome. The barbarians breached the gates when Napster did its damage and iTunes kept them solvent at the cost of choosing their future. The Eastern Empire of television and movie distribution has continued to thrive behind the protective walls of Bandwidth Byzantium, but it too is starting to decline. TiVo was troubling, but Apple TV is now good enough to disconnect an avid user from broadcast anything.

Obscured among the details of several product announcements, Apple has sent a message which has to be rattling the guardians of business models from New York to Tokyo. In a silent, booming voice Apple has told the consumer that they are boss. That the distribution empires will have less and less power to restrict their choices of what, how, where and when over time. That home computing and entertainment have finally merged. That all of this freedom doesn’t have to come at the cost of even more catastrophic data losses when a piece of hardware fails.

Starting now.

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Protected: Wow that Hurt

Posted on February 21, 2008 | Enter your password to view comments.

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Sloth

Posted on February 17, 2008 | Leave a comment

Continuing with my Sunday School class on the Seven Deadly Sins I went today to participate in our class on Wrath, but I still haven’t posted on Sloth until now. How fitting!

Actually I didn’t get to participate in Sloth last week. I was in Atlanta with my daughter. Still, Mary provided me the notes with which she led the class, and today I heard a recap of what sounded like an excellent discussion last week. Mary wanted to stress the work of Reinhold Niebuhr in the discussion. Most people probably automatically think of physical laziness when they think of Sloth, but it’s actually not viewed that way by many theologians. Sloth is really more of a failure to live up to our potential. Niebuhr was one of these, and I’ll paraphrase from Mary’s notes here.

Niebuhr wrote that we humans are both creature, totally separate from and subject to God, and made in God’s image, “little lower than the angels.” Therefore, we are unique among creation in that we are both creature and vessel of the divine. We walk the tightrope of life balancing these two weights on either side of us, and we sin when we lose our balance and fall in either direction. When we deny our creatureliness and aim to be our own gods we fall into Pride (more on that in another post). But when we deny our divine nature and wallow around in our creatureliness we fall into Sloth. In Sloth we ignore or reject the call not only to live up to our potential, but also deny our role in God’s greater plan. Living in Sloth is actually therefore an escape from the freedom of the Spirit that refuses to let us limit our lives. We are overwhelmed with the possibilities for our lives when we understand our divine empowerment, and in our fear we retreat into Sloth. Instead of devoting ourselves to the divine, we devote ourselves to trivial things instead.

Simply put, recall the many things you’ve heard in your life about the greatest courage being the courage to live your dreams – to strive to the best you can be. The failure to do so is Sloth. To me this is a very profound insight. I really like how in Niebuhr’s way of thinking that the opposite failure is Pride. This makes an awful lot of sense to me.

In the recap of last week’s session, Mary brought up how those who are chronic substance abusers are often retreating into the drug as a form of Sloth. The tragedy of the loneliness that often goes along with this form of addiction was a topic of discussion. That combined with the tension between Pride and Sloth immediately made me recall the lyrics to a great song by the Bodeans (I’m dating myself here but hey – it’s gotta be obvious by now that I’m not a college student anymore). The song is “Far Far Away from My Heart”. It goes like this:

Well the feeling’s coming on again
Like a whisper that’s knocking down a doorway
And everything it says I just believe
And I fear that I’m nothing and alone
So I pour another drink and take a hit
And I wonder where the smoke goes
And I’m feeling more and more like less and less
And it comes from so far down deep inside
But you can’t get to it no matter what you try

And I’m far, far away from my heart
Far, far away from my heart

It’s just a voice thats bent on telling me I’m too good
And there really is a shortcut
And I’ve been through this so many nights before
That you’d think it would be easier by now
So I let the chemical reaction cloud over
The pain that keeps on hurting
As I slowly, but too slowly drift away
To a place where I know I don’t have to think
God I hate myself all over so more I drink

And I’m far, far away from my heart
Far, far away from my heart

And now I’m staring blankly at the TV
Holding this guitar for some comfort
But it’s so hard to write a simple song
And try to turn this feeling into melody
So I put it down get on my knees
Close my eyes real tight now I’m praying
To anyone that maybe can hear me
Tell me everything will be OK
And I don’t think I can make another day

And I’m far, far away from my heart
Far, far away from my heart

If you’ve never heard it before, it’s worth the 99 cents to download it from iTunes here.

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Chateau Wine Market

Posted on February 16, 2008 | Leave a comment

Last night I joined one of my colleagues, his wife and a couple of their friends for some drinks and dinner in the Knox-Henderson area. It’s a nice part of town that I’ve visited on several occasions, including multiple trips to the Apple Store there and one stop at Wild About Harry’s which I posted on here.

We started off at Cretia’s but left for dinner not long after everybody had shown up. It was getting smoky anyway. Are you guys as baffled as I am when you see a beautiful, well-dressed, obviously together woman in her thirties smoking? I can’t help but think “This grown up has a lot going for her, what the hell would she mess that up for?” but I know that’s a little shallow. I digress anyway. I’ll post separately on this enigma.

After Cretia’s we walked across McKinney and down to Taverna, which was a nice spot. I’m a sucker for Italian food of any kind though. My dish was good and the prices were a bargain considering the location and atmosphere. It wasn’t what I would call top-shelf but it was solid – I can easily see going back some time.

But enough warm up. The real experience of the evening was the Chateau Wine Market, which is a fantastic wine shop that has an awesome wine bar called Bodega Bar in the back. If you enjoy wine at all I have one word for you: Go. It’s great. The selection is like nothing I’ve seen before, Amir (the owner) is very pleasant and helpful, and Bodega Bar is a perfect spot for sipping away the evening. I tried a let-me-show-you-who-is-boss Chianti and before I had drained the glass I’d walked back out front and bought the last bottle on the rack.

I would never have found this place without Billy dragging us there after dinner. It’s tucked away on the quite side of some shops near the dead-end of Travis Street. Like I said – go.

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I Can Has Cheez Burger

Posted on February 16, 2008 | Leave a comment

For those of you out there that use WordPress to blog you might have seen a link to I Can Has Cheez Burger on login today. Don’t know why, but I clicked through. I don’t hate cats, but I don’t much care for them. Give me a dog every time as far as I’m concerned. Despite that, I found the top post today – so, u wantz marry her – to be very funny. Scroll down and check out the picture of the ram also. I think I scared the people sitting next to me here at Einstein’s when I started laughing out loud.

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Just Like That

Posted on February 13, 2008 | Leave a comment

It seems like just a moment ago that I figured out that I wanted to get a place in Uptown and signed my lease. It was just October, after all. Now I’ve got a notice for renewal. It’s hard for me to see why I would want to do anything other than stay right where I am. I only started getting to know the area in January when I finally got to spend some time here.

And the place isn’t bad. The location has exactly what I wanted, the few people I’ve met so far are friendly enough, and my commute from this spot is a dream compared to what it was in Atlanta. In one sense it seems unadventurous not to check out other alternatives, but the experience is still a new one, and I’m pretty content right here.

I think I’ll be signing this weekend.

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Now That’s a Confident Man

Posted on February 12, 2008 | Leave a comment

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m pleased to introduce you to the Reverend Gilbert Wright, also known as Mister Magic Experience, one of my fellow passengers this morning on American 1887 from Atlanta to Dallas.

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While I walked up to gate T9 at Hartsfield this morning to catch my way-too-early flight there was a big crowd of people waiting for boarding to start. In general they looked like they were asleep standing up, but not Mr. Magic. Some people radiate energy – Minister Wright is one of them. Everybody else within 30 yards was so plain and weary by comparison that they might as well have been wearing gray sweat clothes and staring at their shoes.

We didn’t get to talk a whole lot – just long enough for him to show me pictures of his wife and three boys and to hear his thoughts on seeing to it that his sons had the confidence to find the “king inside themselves” – at least I think I got that right. Also I learned that he has performed as an illusionist for more than a few celebrities. Despite our brief acquaintance he let me take his picture at our gate in Dallas before he had to run off to catch his connecting flight.

Travel is often routine, dull and draining. But not always.

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