Dear Grandma - How about those Cubs?

Dear Grandma Scott - It's finally happened. The Cubs are playing in a World Series.

I don't have a lot of memories of you, since you passed away when I was still a teenager. Much of what I do recall is from the last part of your life, when you lived with my family but were mostly confined to your own room. I didn't see much of you other than mealtimes, and not even that when your lifelong heavy cigarette smoking led to your hospitalization and eventual passing. But that was the end, and I prefer to remember earlier times.

Before the sports media explosion of the last decade or two, it wasn't nearly as easy to be a serious sports fan as it is now, particularly if you didn't live in a team's home area. There was no Internet to look up all the bits of information about every player, no streaming video to watch individual games from across the country (and world), and cable TV options were much more limited. The Chicago Cubs were an exception, though, thanks to WGN Sports broadcasting a large number of their games. Our family didn't watch a lot of TV, but when you lived with us, my mom made sure we had cable so that you could see the Cubs games.

You sitting close to that little black-and-white TV in your room, turned up loud to help you hear it, the voices of Harry Carey and Steve Stone - that's how I best remember your time living with us. I was more interested in reading and games and music than in actually sitting down to watch a baseball game, so we didn't actually watch very many games together. I still heard plenty, though. Thanks to you (and mom, who got it from you) I knew all about baseball, and in particular the Cubs. And I followed your example in becoming a life-long fan.

We all know that it hasn't been easy. Even those who know nothing else about baseball can tell you that the Chicago Cubs have a ridiculously long World Series drought. Much of the time the team was just bad, and even when they were good the playoffs never went well. From what I remember, though, the winning (or lack thereof) wasn't what you focused on. Whether the team was in contention or losing 100 games, you'd be watching. Sure, it was great when they won, but the important thing for you was hearing Harry and seeing Wrigley Field and watching the games played.

The current Cubs would be both easy for you to recognize, and completely different. Wrigley Field has gone through some changes, but it's still the same hundred-year-old park with the ivy walls. They've built up an amazing roster, largely with young players that could be around for years. There's no Harry in the broadcast booth, but his face still looks down on the field, and manager Joe Maddon is a kindred off-the-wall soul. They've always sung "Take Me Out To The Ballgame" during the 7th inning stretch at Wrigley, and now there's a song after every win, too.

Over the next couple of weeks, as Chicago and Cleveland (yes, the Indians made it too) play for the World Series title, I'll be watching. And I know you are, too.

Love,
Your Grandson Sam

Fifteen Years

Fifteen years ago today was September 11, 2001. Everyone in the US, and many others around the world, will be remembering the anniversary.

There's plenty of events, exhibitions, and other remembrances around the milestone anniversary date. There's a parade and various other events in New York. The NFL will have guests and recognition activities at their opening weekend games, especially the Bengals-Jets game across the river from New York. National Geographic has put together a photo gallery from the attacks. PBS interviewed many of the Pentagon survivors. And many, many more.

Personally, I mostly remember being very fortunate in 2001. I was consulting at the time, and that usually meant traveling someplace every week. I'd never been to the World Trade Center itself, but going to the greater New York area wasn't unheard of. But I happened to be in the rare situation of working at a client close enough to home that I could drive, back in September 2001. Not only was I not in any danger from the attacks, but I also didn't get stuck somewhere far away from home when flights were grounded and the whole system backed up for days. Many of the folks I worked with weren't so lucky - none of my co-workers were caught in the attacks, but several spent many days trying to get home from far-away work assignments.

The office where I was working on that Tuesday was a two-level open-plan layout. I remember hearing people talking about rumors of some kind of disaster early on in the day, but it wasn't until someone jury-rigged a big-screen TV in the middle of the office where everyone could see it that I realized just how significant the attacks were. Being IT workers, we all tried to find information from various news websites, but most of them were down, overloaded by the sheer number of people trying to find out what was going on. So the news on the TV broadcast was how we followed the events of the day. Not a whole lot of work got done that day; hard to concentrate on the mundane with the shock of the attacks still settling in.

On the day itself, I was mostly thankful to be able to go home safely, and that none of my close family and friends were in harm's way. The implications for the future certainly didn't set in right away. The idea of the US spending years at war, taking down Iraqi and Afghan ruling regimes, didn't cross my mind at all. If anything, I assumed that there would be a world-wide manhunt for the culprits, which did happen...but it took years longer than I'd have guessed at the time.

The changes to the airline industry were extensive, of course. When I once again started flying regularly, I spent a lot more time in security lines. Being a young man traveling alone who often changed flights at the last minute put me on the "extra screening" list an abnormally high amount of the time. Normal behavior for an IT consultant, but it triggered lots of warning flags on the heightened security screening checklist. I learned pretty quickly that arriving 30-40 minutes early for my flight wasn't good enough any more. It was several years before I could rely on getting through security regularly without long delays (at least, no longer than everyone else). There were also fewer flights to choose from, so I'd often need to take very late flights or spend an extra night away from home in order to maintain the same work schedule. That part hasn't changed much over time, as the airlines have tried to keep flight schedules leans and profits up.

Fifteen years on, I'm still very thankful to have been kept safe on that day, and the same for those close to me. I'll be remembering those who weren't so fortunate, and those they left behind, on this anniversary.

First Seven Jobs

I'm late to this party, which is the usual for Twitter trends. I rarely watch what's happening on my feed. But I did hear about a #FirstSevenJobs trend on Twitter not long ago, where people talked about the first jobs they held. It seemed like an interesting topic to explore in a bit more than 140 characters.

Here's my list, as best I can remember.

1. Strawberry picking
2. Newspaper delivery
3. Pizza at Little Caesars
4. Espresso cart
5. Computing center help desk
6. Construction
7. IT consultant

Two of those barely count, since I lasted only a day or two as a strawberry picker, and only a few days at the construction site. I was terrible at the former, and miserable in the Louisiana summer weather at the latter.

The newspaper delivery was only partially my job, since the rest of my family was just as much part of the job as I was. The delivery route wasn't what you see in the movies, with a kid on his bike delivering a few dozen papers before school. You needed a car to cover many miles of neighborhoods, handling around 300 papers each morning. Not my favorite employment memory, but it did teach me some discipline, getting up before the sun every morning. I also learned that a manual transmission is a terrible idea when your car is making 300 stops a day.

Working at Little Caesars and the espresso business were good opportunities for a high school student, plus the year I took off before going to college. The food service industry didn't lose much when I left, though. I was pretty good at doing the routine work, but dealing with irate customers isn't my strong point. And in those jobs, there are always irate customers.

I felt much more at home when I went to school and got a work-study job at the computing center. There were still irate clients, but I could almost always do something to deal with the problem. The paper route early-to-rise experience came in handy, since generally no one else wanted the early shifts. Eventually I was put in charge of all the other work-study students, which looked great on my resume, as well as providing very useful experience for my future consulting career.

With a computer science and mathematics degree, I could have gone on to graduate school, but I was anxious to get out into the real world. Partially that was to make money, of course, but also because I was tired of theory at that point. I hadn't even really considered consulting as a career choice before I started going to all the various events that companies held for prospective hires. The idea of working in many different fields for a variety of clients sounded much more appealing than a job with a single company. It worked out well - I spent nearly 10 years as a consultant before deciding that I'd like to stay home a bit more often, and switching to a single employer.

Interesting idea, that #FirstSevenJobs trend. I hadn't thought about most of those first six jobs in years.

Re-Trane-age

I find that my memory has some strange associations. Case in point: while out for a jog recently, I saw a Trane van, and the first thing that came to mind was "retainage."

I spent the better part of several years working as a consultant for the Trane Company. They make and service HVAC systems of various kinds. One of their business lines is large installation and maintenance projects, where high-capacity central HVAC systems are installed for big buildings: schools, office buildings, factories, etc. A good chunk of my time as a consultant involved learning how that project business worked in order to design integrations between various software packages.

The most complex integration that I worked on dealt with the project tracking system sending accounting information to Trane's corporate billing system. For reasons that I don't fully remember, it wasn't possible for either of those systems to make a lot of changes, so the integration software had to do a lot of calculation and data transformation. That meant that the designer - me - had to know exactly what the integration software was supposed to do with all these accounting transactions.

At that point in my consulting career, I had just about zero experience with accounting concepts. My specialty was the technical aspects of the integration system, not the business process analysis that led to integration design. So I was doing a whole lot of learning on the job while trying to understand how the projects system would send their accounting transactions, and what the billing system needed to receive. The most complicated part of the process was calculating retainage.

When you have a large project under a long-term contract, there's a natural tension between the client wanting the work done before they fork over payment, and the provider wanting to get paid on a more timely basis. The compromise that's been developed in the construction industry over many years has the client paying on a regular (usually monthly) basis, but a portion of the payment is held back (or "retained") until the project is complete. If the provider doesn't finish the project, they never get that retainage payment at the end.

So here I was, a complete neophyte in accounting concepts, trying to design an integration solution that would translate the project system's numbers into the accounting transactions that the billing system was expecting. Retainage was particularly difficult since the project system's numbers didn't have all the detail that was needed for the billing transactions, so the integration design had to fill in the gaps. I remember spending many hours in design sessions, doing my best to understand as various Trane employees explained the process - which seemed simple to them, as they'd been doing it for years. I was fortunate that those folks were patient and willing to help me get up to speed on a completely foreign subject. I particularly remember a guy named Dave spending hours in meetings and conference calls explaining all the complexities of retainage while I tried to capture it all for inclusion in the integration design.

I spent a lot of time working at Trane, well beyond just this one project. But the whole experience of figuring out this design left quite an impression. Enough that seeing a Trane logo in passing on a van, even all these years later, brings it all to mind.

Happy Flag Day

In 1777 on June 14th, the Second Continental Congress adopted an official flag for their new country. We in the United States also celebrate the birth of the US Army on this day - that same congress had reached consensus on the army two years earlier.

Flag Day isn't one of the most well-known holidays, but in my family we always paid attention. Not so much for the flag part; more because it happens to be my Mom's birthday. Very fitting that she was born on a day with such historical importance, given how much she loves the subject of history.

For a year or so when I was a kid, my family lived in Baltimore. I don't remember a lot about our time in Baltimore, but a trip we made to Fort McHenry has stayed in my mind. I particularly remember viewing the original Star-Spangled Banner, the flag that was flying over the fort during the Battle of Baltimore. It was that flag which inspired Francis Scott Key to write the poem that later became our national anthem. I highly recommend it to anyone who has the chance to visit that part of the country.

So happy birthday to my Mom, the US Army, and the official adoption of the US flag. Many happy returns to all three!

Distance Driving

I used to love driving long distances. Not so much any more. Partially that's just me getting old, but also some of the reasons for taking a long drive no longer apply.

When I first learned to drive, getting in the car for a few hours was a nice way to be alone for a few hours. Just me and my music - on cassette tapes, this being the early '90s. It was before everyone had a cell phone, so I had no fear of being interrupted. I remember making several-hour-long trips around the Portland, OR area with no destination in mind. Even went all the way up to Seattle and back once or twice. Since I graduated from college and moved out on my own, driving hasn't been necessary to have alone time. Sitting in front of a computer or laying on my couch with a book works just as well.

Living east of the Mississippi is another reason that long distance drives aren't as necessary any more. Getting from one major metropolitan area to another in the western US usually means 4+ hours on the road. Here in the midwest, it's usually more like 2-3 hours. Even less on the east coast, where in some places you effectively never leave such areas.

Simply getting older has taken some of the shine off making long drives, of course. Sitting in a car for hours on end isn't as appealing when your back hurts, but there are ways around it. I find that stopping once every hour or so to walk around for a few minutes really mitigates the aches and pains. Those stretch breaks cause a bit of a slowdown in overall travel speed, but it's worth the time.

When I was on my way to college, I took a trip all the way across the country rather than going straight to school. One long drive across US route 20, from coast to coast. No good reason, other than just to mark the change in life status to college student. It was an interesting experience. You see a lot of the country taking a largely non-highway route over extended distances. I don't think I'd do it again now, but even if I did, it probably wouldn't have the same impact. That kind of trip isn't the same the second time.

I still take the occasional trip that requires multi-hour drive time. Not just for the sake of driving, though - I need some kind of purpose to the trip. And not without breaks to give the old aches a pains a chance to subside.

The Middle Earth Collectible Card Game

More than 20 years have gone by since Iron Crown Enterprises released their first Middle Earth: Collectible Card Game (MECCG) set. It only lasted a few years, but that doesn't stop some of us from pulling it out as often as we can.

Back in 1995, the game was still called Middle Earth: The Wizards, and it was fairly simple. Oh, there was some complicated stuff with how you moved around Middle Earth to various locations, and I don't think anyone liked trying to figure out how influence worked. But overall, it had a straightforward theme: take a few characters around the map of Middle Earth, gathering up allies and items for the coming battle against the darkness while preventing your opponent's efforts to do the same. Or possibly try to destroy the evil of the One Ring, of course, although that was fairly difficult to pull off.

The MECCG designers had a hard time knowing when to stop, though. ("Delved to greedily and too deep" into the complexity of design, one might say.) The addition of dragons, agents (ugh), and then entire new playable factions (Ringwraiths, Fallen Wizards, Balrog) made the game a complex mess that required a huge amount of effort to learn. A basic two-player game could take hours to finish. There are some really cool themes in every MECCG set, but actually playing the game became more and more difficult. Eventually, the game collapsed under the weight of some unsound business decisions from the publisher, but I'm not sure how much longer it could have continued to grow regardless.

People still play the game, even after all this time. As recently as 2006, there were world events, held mostly in Europe. There are still World Council web sites. Haven't heard anything for a few years, so that may finally have ended, but I still get the occasional email from someone looking to sell cards or find out info about the game. And you might find MECCG players at several of the larger gaming conventions, often playing small tournaments with the pre-constructed challenge decks.

Locally, there are a few of us who still play whenever the opportunity arises. For years, we'd use sealed product that we'd picked up for practically nothing once the official game support had stopped. It ran out eventually, though. Now we mostly take a whole bunch of cards and randomly divide them out among 3-5 people, then play the results like a sealed deck. These games are generally bloodbaths. Kings of Gondor, Elven Lords, Wizards, Men, Dwarves, Hobbits...the corpses pile up. Even if you play it safe and stay away from dragon country or the heart of Mordor, there's still plenty of danger. Especially since combat involves dice rolls, and those things are treacherous. More than one mighty warrior has been defeated by the dreaded snake eyes.

One goal of these games is to win, of course, but the larger goal is to pull off something thematically cool and/or crazy. For instance, I once took Gandalf to Moria, and the Balrog got dropped on him. Which I promptly defeated with Sacrifice of Form - exactly the theme battle that card was designed for. (OK, actually it got cancelled and I had to go back and do it again later once I got the Sacrifice of Form back in my hand. But it still fit the theme!) Or the time someone had Boromir in a company being attacked by Orcs, and used Many Foes He Fought so that Boromir protected everyone else (and died). Just like the battle at Amon Hen. Near misses are nearly as good...such as when the random shuffle gave the same player Gandalf, Frodo, Gollum, the One Ring, Gollum's Fate, and various other supporting cards. Everything you need to take the One Ring to Mount Doom and destroy it...until Gandalf got killed, and he had no other way to actually put the One Ring into play.

There aren't a lot of games that I still get excited about playing, nearly 20 years after they went out of print. MECCG may be a complex mess of overly-ambitious design, but it's still one of my favorites.

1980s/90s Christian Rock and Metal

Poking around the Spotify catalog has been interesting on several fronts. Discovering new music via recommendations and playlists is the main draw, but it's also been a trip down memory lane.

As a teenager in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I listened to a whole lot of rock and metal. Mostly Christian bands, though there was a good amount of Metallica and Rush in there as well. And I mean a lot, to the point where I wore out cassette tapes and broke tape players. Yeah, cassettes, although I did mostly switch to CDs toward the mid-90s. That all seems so ancient now, but I still have some of that stuff lying around. Though I don't think I have any cassette-playing equipment any more.

Spotify has a whole bunch of the bands that I remember in its catalog, and I've been revisiting them lately. The "similar artists" feature means that once you've found one, it's easy to get lost in clicking around to a bunch of stuff from the same time period. I built a playlist out of some of the favorites that I ran across. A few of them, in no particular order:

• Petra - These guys were seriously long-lived, from the 1970s to the 2000s. I best remember the On Fire album, which I'm pretty sure I bought at least three times since I broke one cassette, bought another cassette, and later the CD. But their best work in my opinion was Beyond Belief, both the song (probably my favorite single Petra cut) and the whole album. Saw them several times in concert, too - 3.5 that I can remember. (That 0.5 is a show where just the lead singer, John Schlitt, did a concert with pre-recorded band tracks.)
• Die Happy - I listened to a lot of very heavy stuff by a band called Vengeance Rising, who aren't on the playlist only because my tastes don't run to screaming-all-the-time vocals any more. Die Happy was formed when most of that band split from the leader, and they had a very different sound. Blues Metal, as I remember my friends and I called it. It's too bad they only ended up doing two studio albums.
• Deliverance - I was in a garage band in high school (of course) and we'd have been deliriously happy to sound like Deliverance. Their first two albums were pretty much pure metal, but later on I'd classify their sound more as hard rock. My favorite album is Stay of Execution, which I'd put somewhere in the middle.
• Bride - Southern rock, heavy style. These guys absolutely loved their wah-wah pedals. Judging from the Spotify most-popular list, people seem to like the Snakes in the Playground album. Nothing wrong with that one, but for me, Kinetic Faith was better. Particularly the songs Hired Gun and Everybody Knows My Name.
• Whitecross - I best remember Whitecross for two things: listening to their In the Kingdom and High Gear albums while delivering newspapers, and getting to meet their bass player after a show sometime during my high school days. It was one of those 10-second autograph conversations, but it still stuck with me.
• White Heart - When I came across this Spotify page, I was unsurprised to see that the most popular song by far is Desert Rose. I remember that ballad as their biggest hit, though I liked the rest of the Powerhouse album quite a bit as well. Saw these guys a couple of times in concert.
• Tourniquet - Probably the heaviest band on this list. I listened to some even faster and harder stuff back in the day, but my tastes have mostly left those behind. But even before I started this little trip down musical memory lane, I still had Tourniquet in my MP3 collection. Pathogenic Ocular Dissonance, Psychosurgery, and Vanishing Lessons are all great albums.
• Saviour Machine - It's hard to classify Saviour Machine musically. Some of it is metal, but there are also operatic and classical themes. Thematic classification is pretty easy, though - dark and apocalyptic. Lots of focus on the end times and the book of Revelation. I saw them live twice, easily two of the better concerts I've ever seen from anyone, Christian or secular. Too bad that's unlikely to happen again, as lead singer Eric Clayton had retired from music, at least partially due to illness.

Autumn Leaves

I don't remember a whole lot from my grade school days, but one thing that does stick in my mind is the Autumn Leaves project. Every year at Faith Bible Christian School in Beaverton, Oregon, fifth-grade teacher Mrs. Norrie gave her students a project to gather falling leaves and put together a display booklet.

Anyone familiar with Oregon may be wondering how well that would work, in a state populated by a whole lot of evergreen trees. The state tree is the Douglas Fir for a reason. Plenty of deciduous trees around as well, though, at least in Beaverton. Simply walking around the residential streets around the FBCS campus usually yielded plenty of fallen leaves to use.

I don't actually remember the details of my own Autumn Leaves project much at all. I vaguely recall that I may have done it in a different year than 5th grade for some reason, but otherwise it didn't stick in my mind. But the existence of the project, and the walk around the neighborhood to gather leaves - that I remember. I'm pretty sure that's because I'm reminded of it every year when the leaves change colors. Memories, like muscles, are stronger when used regularly.

The pictures here are nothing special, just a few trees from around my condo complex. But they're enough to remind me once again of a few days 30-ish years ago, when a teacher encouraged a bunch of kids to get outdoors and see some of the beauty in the natural cycle of the seasons.