Jeber’s

Jeber – a portrait

Back in 1983 I was at loose ends. I’d been out of the Army for two years and had received my second degree from a local college. I had screwed up big time at my job and been fired. My future, at least in San Diego, appeared bleak at best.

My father and I first met as adults the year after I graduated from high school. I spent a Summer with him in Plainview, Texas where he was working for John Deere as a tractor field-mechanic. Those three months summed up my knowledge of my dad first-hand until I was 29, in 1983.

By then dad had moved back to his hometown of Rupert, Idaho, and I decided to write him and see if I could spend some time with him there. He agreed to this, so in March of ‘83 I and my Keeshond puppy Colin flew to Boise. We both arrived in our San Diego coats. Colin arrived a few hours after me, having been accidently diverted to San Francisco. He obviously had his own plans. Neither of our coats protected us from the freezing cold of an Idaho Winter.

So there I was, in a strange town living with a near stranger, no job and a dog I was responsible to keep fed and healthy. Before leaving San Diego I’d sold nearly everything I owned. I arrived with a week’s worth of clothes, my dog and enough cash to keep us both alive for a few months. Then I found out a few ways my dad and I were alike. We were both opinionated and curmudgeonly. We weren’t social kingpins. We were both sarcastic. We rubbed each other the wrong way. We agreed I should live on my own and visit now and then. I really needed a job.

In Burley, near Rupert, I met a painter named John Horejs (pronounced hōrsh). Not a house painter, an oil painter, a landscape painter, an artist. He was about my age and a very enjoyable person to be around. We were polar opposites in two ways. He was a Mormon and I was an atheist. He was married with nine kids and I was a single bisexual. Normally when two people disagree over sex and religion, any type of friendship is near impossible. Not so with John and I. We both respected the other’s right to their life and beliefs. We were both raised to be tolerant of those not like us. He knew gay people from the art world and I knew Mormons from having one as a friend through high school (we were both in the school’s barbershop quartet). We hit it off and soon he asked if I’d be willing to do some framing for him.

John Horejs

I had a degree in drafting and that made learning the art of framing a bit easier for me. Like most of the jobs I’ve ever held, I hadn’t a clue how to accomplish the task I was being hired to perform. But I’m a quick learner and don’t hesitate to ask questions, and I really like gaining new skills. I loved framing. I can’t paint a lick. Can’t really draw much of anything. Prior to this, drafting had been my artistic outlet. “Drawing” with the aid of French curves, a straight edge and templates. It was as close to being artistic as I’d managed at that point.

Framing was to me what John’s painting was to him. John studied in France and I’d just been an intelligence analyst for the Army Security Agency. We both enjoyed talking about world affairs, art (him, painters: me, writers). We discussed philosophy. We both loved nature, hiking and photography.

John was a great companion as well as an employer. He, I and my two dogs spent a week once around Jenny Lake. It was perhaps the best week of my life. Sharing his company and that of his friends, getting to stay in a condo in West Yellowstone, knowing his wife and kids, watching him build his dome house, many were the benefits of working for John. Who would have guessed I’d have to travel to Idaho to find the international scene. The closest I’d come before was being stationed just outside Washington, D.C. during my enlistment.

Another benefit of working for John was that a couple of times I traded framing work for paintings instead of pay. I have two oils hanging in my front room, both landscapes painted by John and framed by me. I love them now as much as I did when I first saw them. They were quick one-offs for John. He usually paints huge canvases.

One day he asked if I’d like to pose for a portrait holding my then pup, Hillery. Of course I was flattered and intrigued. John didn’t paint portraits. Maybe he had as a student, but as an established artist he was strictly a landscape artist specializing in Idaho and Montana scenery. So I was curious to see how he would render a human and his dog.

Jack and Hillery by John Horejs

Since we cannot see ourselves as others see us, I’m a poor judge as to the accuracy of the image, but I can honestly say that this is the one and only oil painting I have of myself. Good or bad, it’s certainly unique.

It’s not painted on canvas. It was painted on a piece of artist’s board, so it’s all of a quarter of an inch thick. It’s also not signed, but John would remember it, I know he painted it and now I’m preserving that knowledge online, where thanks to Google it will forever be available to anyone who wants the information, like whoever will be selling it or buying it 200 years from now.

I’m glad I had a chance to meet, know and spend time with John Horejs. He was a down-to-Earth guy with his head in the clouds. I’m sure he still is. He’s not into the web, and I haven’t been in touch for several years. We didn’t have so much in common that we ever became like brothers. My life has taken different directions from what I was doing then, and John appears to be getting shown in more galleries around the country. Any gallery anywhere that features nature paintings on a large scale ought to be showing his work.

That’s the tale of the portrait. It is the only self-portrait I own. It’s still unframed.

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Cleo sends a message

There’s hardly a day that goes by in which Cleo doesn’t amaze me with her personality and intelligence. There should be no way a 6 month old pup could be this creative.

This afternoon at work I was cleaning up one of the stations. At one point I took a container of water back to the bathroom to pour down the toilet. Cleo tagged along as usual and watched me. A short time later I saw her go into the bathroom and stare into the toilet. I figured she was just curious. Then she walked from the bathroom through the shop up to where her water bowl is. She walked back to the bathroom and stared into the toilet.

Curious, I checked her water bowl. It was empty. She was letting me know the water in the toilet should be in her bowl. I grabbed her bowl and filled it in the sink with Cleo watching me the whole time, tail wagging merrily.

Once she again had water in her bowl she never returned to the bathroom.

Any dog trainer will tell you that dog training is at least 50% a matter of training the owner to pay attention to what your dog is telling you. I have been given my lesson for the day and will remember it.

When social networks are one-way streets

Social networks are the latest rage on the internet among the technorati. I’ve joined several; Plurk, identi.ca, Popego, nearly all in beta or early development. The two I enjoy and use the most are Friendfeed and Twitter. These services are used by the people I follow the most, technology insiders like Chris Pirillo, Robert Scoble, Louis Gray, Dave Winer and Leo Laporte, to name just a few. Every day they post comments I like and comment on. But this is primarily a one-way street. The posts I make are rarely liked or commented on by them, even though most of them subscribe to me.

The reason for this is that we inhabit two fundamentally different worlds of interest.

Most of these people are in their 20s and 30s and are employed in technology or closely related fields. As I said, they are techo-insiders; they either work for companies heavily invested in cutting-edge technology or they own a brand identified with that world.

My world is a bit different.

My introduction to bits and bytes was in the 1970s, when I enlisted in the Army and was privileged to be assigned to the National Security Agency as a member of the Army Security Agency. There are two primary types of people employed by the Agency, cryptographers and analysts. Cryptographers write and break codes. They are mathematical wizards, comparable to programmers in the software industry. I was an analyst. We took the decrypted intelligence and studied it for patterns and created estimates based on the data we collected. We didn’t break the codes. We tried to make the intelligence useful to our customers. I used a Cray supercomputer for my work and was trained in Fortran and Cobol even though neither was necessary for analysis.

Shortly after I left the Army I moved to Idaho and was uninvolved with technology for the next 13 years. Those years saw the birth of the internet and the development of the personal computer. I was only vaguely aware of all this. I still loved technology but I was totally out of the loop.

It was around 1997 that I once again found myself in San Diego and around those who were fascinated by this fairly new World Wide Web. I was quickly hooked and it wasn’t long before I bought a shiny new Gateway computer with a massive 500Mhz processor and a membership in AOL. I learned as much as I could about computers and in a couple of years I felt I knew enough to want to share what I’d picked up. I found Chris Pirillo’s newsletter and shortly after that his forum. At the same time I joined Scot Finnie’s forum, also based on technology. There I met people whose interests mirrored mine. They were building their own computers and sharing websites they found interesting and informative. While I had accumulated a reasonable amount of knowledge about hardware and computer security that I could pass along to those in the forum, I realized at heart I was still an analyst. My primary interest was in making sense of the various opinions I encountered. I would read and listen to those with more knowledge than I possessed then try to distill that wisdom into something comprehensible to those just getting started. I truly enjoyed being able to pass along esoteric knowledge to those in need, in a form they could easily grasp. In a way I was performing the same function in the world of technology that a priest plays in the world of theology. I was taking obscure wisdom and attempting to make it intelligible to the common man. But where a priest is deeply involved in the world of theology, in the world of technology I was still an outsider. I had an opportunity to listen to those on the inside, but I was not a member of the club.

Primarily through my association with Chris and Scot I’ve been allowed to eavesdrop on conversations I might otherwise have never been privy to. I’ve learned who the influential are. They are those who have worked at Microsoft since the early days, they own start-ups, they write software, they often determine what will become popular among the rest of us users and what will fail to attract attention. They write for industry magazines or have websites that constantly rank in the top 100 of influential sites.

I’m not one of them.

I’m an analyst, a writer. I enjoy writing humorous commentary. My primary focus is social, not technological. I want to make technology understandable to others less out of a love of technology than a deep concern for people. Where once I had wanted to become a priest to bring god to the masses, now I’m a priest of the internet. I want others to get as much out of this medium as I have. My websites are concerned with the social issues I believe are important to humanity. I espouse social reform and technology plays a major role in that.

As a result, my contributions to social networking sites are seldom noticed and rarely commented on. The movers and shakers are focused on technology, I’m focused on humanity. We live in two different worlds that occasionally overlap. Social networks, for me, are one-way streets. I try to make my voice heard above the chatter about the latest service, the newest shiny gadget. But my input is of little value. They know I’m not one of them. I’m an interested voyeur, a watcher, a listener. I’m a simple techno-priest among the internet gods. My understanding is far below theirs.

Still, I love the networks I inhabit. I enjoy my role, even when I post an insight that’s overlooked but widely commented on when repeated by one of the insiders. I’ve learned to accept my position as a guest in the technorati society. I hope others who often feel left out of the conversational flow in their favorite network take my tale as encouragement to stay involved, keep connected. What you learn is as important as what others might learn from you if they would only listen. We can all drive on this one-way street. Some of us just have to accept that this particular road isn’t leading toward our destination. It’s still a fun ride, though.

Cleo, my love

It has been a year since there was a dog in my life. I had forgotten what a wonderful addition they are to a person’s life, especially a single-person-who-spends-too-much-time-in-front-of-a-computer-keyboard’s life.

A few weeks ago Cleo entered my world and I remembered all the great reasons for having a dog around.

Cleo and me

We’ve gone for long walks together, visited leash-free parks where Cleo has been able to make new friends and play to her heart’s content. She insists I take frequent breaks from the computer to go outside and toss her favorite ball so she can chase it down.

Cleo is an amazingly well behaved and calm puppy. She’s only 17 weeks old yet behaves better than other dogs I’ve taken through training classes and spent months trying to impress. She goes to work with me every day where she is now the official greeter. The customers love her almost as much as I do. Some of them bring treats from Petco, half a block away. We even have customers who come in just to visit with her though they don’t need to purchase anything.

Everyone who meets her remarks first on her interesting appearance, then on her mellow personality. She not a barker, not a digger and walks on a leash like she’s been doing that for years.

I could go on for many more sentences extolling her virtues. She is a dream dog, the dog I’ve been hoping to find all my life.

She’s also the last dog I’ll probably ever own. I’m 54. If she lives out a normal lifespan of 12 to 14 human years I’ll be in my late 60s and too old to find another companion. I may still have cats as I do now, since they’re rather self-sufficient. But most likely Cleo will be my last canine roommate.

Please, if you like dogs but don’t currently have one, consider adopting one from your local shelter. There are so many wonderful dogs there waiting for a good home. Many of them are only in shelters because their families just couldn’t afford, in money or time, to properly care for them anymore. They will introduce an element of joy into your life that no other creature can.

If you’re ever in my neighborhood come by and say hello to Cleo. She’d love to meet you.

Chris Pirillo, Birthday Gnome

Today is Chris Pirillo’s birthday. If you’re new to the internet or have just emerged from a cave, here’s a brief introduction;

Chris Pirillo (born July 26, 1973(1973-07-26) in Des Moines, Iowa) is the founder and maintainer of Lockergnome. He spent two years hosting the TechTV television program Call for Help before parting ways with the company. He also hosted the first annual Call-for-Help-a-Thon on TechTV. He now hosts videos on several internet sites, including CNN.com, YouTube and his own website.  (Wikipedia)

Chris was born the year after I graduated from high school.  That means today he is 35 and I’m as old as dirt.

By virtue of my advanced age I was a geek while Chris was still learning to go potty by himself.  In 1976 I was working with a Cray supercomputer and various in-house built systems at the National Security Agency as a member of the Army Security Agency.

In the 80s and early 90s I was living in Idaho, far from any connection to the world of computing and computers.

Chris, though, was busy learning all about technology, gaining the knowledge he would later employ to help others find their way on the newly created information superhighway.

Chris had already made a place for himself on the internet by the time I got involved in personal computers.  He had a successful email newsletter, had written a book and started an online community forum for those who needed answers to their cyber-questions.  The forum was where I first encountered this whirling dervish of all things tech.

Since joining the forum I’ve unashamedly followed Chris around the web, getting involved with nearly every activity he’s started.  I do so because I admire Chris on both a professional level and a personal level.

Not only is he a walking knowledge base of Windows (and now Macintosh) systems and online communication, he uses every venue imaginable to share that knowledge with everyone.

In the personal, non-tech world he’s a wonderfully compassionate person.  When I couldn’t find a way to attend my dad’s funeral a couple of years ago, Chris made it possible.  He’s been a true friend on so many levels that if he were to retire from the internet tomorrow I would still count him as one of my few close friends.

And yet I still have never met him in person.

Chris is a class act.

The internet is a complex world.  Chris has dedicated himself and his vast Lockergnome enterprise to making that world more comprehensible to the rest of us.

Head on over to his web page and wish him a Happy Birthday.

Is a criminal cracking jokes a Comicon?

I hope not because I’ll be there this Sunday.

Like wannabe Dark Knights answering the call of the “bat signal,” throngs of grown men wearing tights and capes converge this week to revel in all manner of superhero lore and merchandising at the 39th annual Comic Con Convention.

More than 125,000 people are expected to attend the four-day event, which opens Thursday, to indulge in a veritable feast of the latest in comic-related books, movies, toys, games and memorabilia.

(Reuters)

No tights or cape, I’ll be dressed more like Bruce Wayne than Batman. Lacking x-ray vision, I’ll be relying on video and digital cameras to take in the festivities.

I’d enjoy meeting any of you attending the Con. Let’s hook up via Twitter or Brightkite.

I wish I were a horticulturist

Then I might know what these plant are. Check out my Flickr set and let me know if you can help me identify these two little fellows.

Both were given to me about 5 years ago.  Every Winter they drop their leaves and hibernate.  Every spring they put out new leaves.  One has leaves that remind me of a tree, while the other has thick leaves reminiscent of a succulent.

A word from our publisher

video-3

One chore, no more

When I moved into the bungalow that I currently call home last year, I had hundreds of boxes of stuff – my stuff, my late mom’s stuff, my former roommate’s stuff – that had to be relocated in a short period of time. There was no storage here, so I piled everything up in two huge stacks near the bungalow. I covered it all with tarps and crossed my fingers during the recent rains.

I had a $300 storage shed that had to be built and required two people to construct it. It sat in pieces all Winter and last week I gave up hope of ever seeing it built and sold it.

Last week I started using the base I’d already built for the shed as a base for the boxes. Today I finally completed getting all the boxes stacked on the base well covered with several tarps. Many of the boxes are falling apart, and I lost count of the number of Black Widow spiders I displaced.

I saw a lot of things that will need to be thrown out someday, a lot of books and pictures that were ruined by the rain. It’s kind of sad that for 12 years I was able to keep everything high and dry in a rented storage shed at the old house only to lose a lot of things in less than a year moving them here. But most of my CDs are OK, many pictures did survive and everything that was irreplaceable appears to be dry.

It’s a huge chore to have finished, even if it is temporary. I don’t need to cringe every time I hear about rain on the evening news now.

I really need a shower, coffee and some dinner. It’s been a long, but good, day. I hope your weekend was enjoyable and productive as well.

Remembering the wildlife

I was writing a very good friend tonight in reply to a really cool picture of a deer in her backyard she sent me. It evoked a memory that took long enough to compose as an email that I’m loath to attempt to recreate it here. So I’m going to cheat and copy it here. It’s a good memory, worth preserving.

I’m approaching the age where you have to write things down before they leak out of your brain. Of course you immediately lose the note and in your frustration manage to forget what you wanted to remember. Old age sucks in many ways. I’m not even all that old, my mistake is I live in a world populated by people half my age. Peers are fewer. My real-world boss could be my son. That could almost depress me if I could remember it. So those around me make me feel older than I am. It’s their fault. Inside I’m still in my twenties.

The following describes a Winter trip John and I took from Eastern Idaho to Jenny Lake so he could make drawings for some paintings he had been commissioned to paint. He was quite successful, and I enjoyed being with him and watching him work. I was a photographer, and his framer, so I had my own reasons for tagging along on these trips, beside getting to spend some quality time with John. And the dogs loved these trips. Colin was a keeshond and Bob a Malamute/Sheperd mix. Both happy in cold weather. I spent 13 years in Idaho. Many good memories, many bad ones. That’s life…

I miss living among wildlife probably most of all when I think about the things I hate about living in the city. Some of my most vivid memories invlove wildlife. I don’t romanticize the situation, though. I know that lovely deer can instantly become a liability by eating plants it shouldn’t or wandering into a glass door and wrecking havoc in its panic.

I remember the times I went to Yellowstone and Western Montana. Pure cowboy country. Even I got all macho and “Cool-hand Luke” whenever I spent time there. Did you know a lot of young cowboys are really cute? Oh, yeah, anyway… Several times I warned first-timers to that area that elk were not to be messed with. Where a deer can be dangerous, an elk can be deadly. They wouldn’t do it with malice. They just don’t appreciate how fragile humans are.

One of the most seriously frightening moments of one visit to Jenny Lake, just outside the Western side of Yellowstone, was when a moose was crossing a narrow road over a bridge about 3′ in front of my small Ford pickup. There were two of us in the cab, John, my painter/boyfriend, and I. In the bed of the pickup, covered only by a tarp as it was snowing at that moment, were my two dogs, Colin and Bob, barking their fracking heads off at this weird and fascinating smell. I couldn’t back up because there were cars behind me, it was late at night so not only were the dogs going to get us killed by this moose but would also seriously piss off every other nature-lover for twenty miles in all directions, there was a river running under the bridge so the idea of jumping in it was truly a last resort (and when do you ever get to the last resort? As long as you’re alive, there’s always at least one more resort than what you’ve resorted to yet). John and I were sitting looking up at the moose. It was at least 8′ tall at the shoulder. As a wildlife biologist might observe, the motherfucker was huge. I knew in my heart that if it attacked the dogs there was no way in hell I could hope to come to their rescue. The best I could do was try to watch for a way to get John and I the hell away from danger. Humans first… Perhaps that attitude is less than noble, but my inclination nearly all my life has been to rescue humans. I’ve always been fascinated by my own species, and when push comes to shove, I usually side with the homos (sapians, that is).

Anyway, all the worry was for nothing. The damned thing stopped half way across, looked long and hard at the pickup (John was trying to sketch it the whole time) then slowly and with more dignity than a drag queen sauntered off the bridge and John and I started breathing again. The dogs both stopped barking almost immediately. Being both mellow by character and naturally dim, they generally didn’t bother to bark at things. It wasn’t worth the effort.

GoDaddy – Thieves or Incompetents? Conclusion

GoDaddy – Thieves or Incompetents?

Last March I received a phone call at work from GoDaddy to notify me that my oldest domain, svarri.com, was up for renewal. This is the only domain I have registered with GoDaddy. All my other domains are registered through 1and1. This incident illustrates just one reason why.

The caller offered me a good deal on an annual renewal, so I agreed to pay $107 for a year’s renewal of the domain and hosting.

On April 12th I received an email.

Per your request, the items listed below have been cancelled
from your account, xxxxxxx:.COM Domain Name Registration – 1 Year: svarri.com

I made no such request. In fact that’s exactly what I paid $107 for in March. I replied informing them that this was obviously in error and asked that the situation be cleared up promptly.

I received no immediate reply and presumed the matter had been resolved and they would be notifying me of that shortly.

The next day I received a reply informing me the domain was now the property of Andrew Browne, a resident of Port Huron, MI. I don’t know Mr. Browne and have no reason to believe he’s anything more than another victim of GoDaddy’s screwup. Now they’ve gotten paid twice for the same domain.

I’ll be calling GoDaddy tomorrow to demand either a return of the domain to its rightful owner, me, or a full and complete refund of my renewal payment. I’d really like to have what I paid for, but on the other hand perhaps a refund would be more acceptable. I have full backups of the database and content of my “former” domain. And once I have my refund, I will no longer have any reason to deal with GoDaddy. No more will I fall victim to their poor record keeping. Never again will I have to suffer from trying to navigate their horrible home page, strewn with more ads than links to useful content, a perfect example of “user unfriendly”. I will never have to wonder if I should recommend them as a web host.

I’ll be posting follow-ups to this.

Another one of life’s little mysteries

I don’t believe in miracles, but I can’t deny that sometimes weird things happen without cause or explanation.

My truck’s turn signals haven’t worked for over a year. I suspected the switcher unit had burned out, it’s happened in other vehicles I’ve owned. I bought a replacement, but since I have to disassemble half of the under dash cover to get to it, I’ve been putting it off. I could still make the turn signals work manually, flicking the turn signal arm.

Tonight on the way home I noticed that my turn signals are once again working.

Why? Who knows. What was wrong before? Who knows. Am I pleased? you bet.

Zing! A reality check.

I’ve been put in my place:

Twitter Quotient for : ‘jeber’

459 Updates, 42 Followers

Babble index

10.9 updates for every follower

It’s people like you that make Twitter so f*cking slow! Shut! Up! Already!

77 Friends, 42 Followers

Popularity index

0.5 followers for every friend

They’re just following you out of politeness (sorry)

77 Friends, 5 Favorites

Usefulness index

1 useful update for every 15.4 friends

At least some of your Twitter friends have a brain.

Thank you, readers

Though the readers of my musing appear reluctant to leave comments here, I have received some enlightening email from several.  To you, my thanks.  Your missives have encouraged retrospection and introspection.  I am indeed grateful to have such individuals reading my humble postings.