Well, howdy. I know I've been sorely negligent in writing lately, and it's my own fault. No, wait, it's not MY fault, it's SOMEONE ELSE's fault. Namely - the MAN. I've been oppressed and beaten into submission by THE MAN, and it's only after my years of struggle and torment that I am finally able once again to freely write a mass e-mailing. Free at last...
The real reason that I haven't written much lately is that work has been utter pandemonium - we moved into a new building. The optical storage group (me, et al) moved from the nice-convenient-enormous-Seagate-facility-located-only-1.8-miles-from-my-house-complete-with-a-cafeteria into an also-nice-facility-that-we-bought-from-Honeywell-over-the-summer-but-we-haven't-yet-finished-the-renovations-and-we-were-in-temporary-offices-for-two-weeks-while-the-heat-was-broken-and-it-was-62-degrees-inside-and-our-equipment-is-starting-to-arrive-but-the-lab-space-doesn't-even-have-ceiling-tiles-yet-and-the-new-building-is-6-miles-away-from-my-house-thus-tripling-my-commute-time-and-no-cafeteria-so-we-have-to-each-out-every-day-which-stinks-especially-when-it-gets-cold-like-50-below-and-don't-even-get-me-started-about-the-wind-chill-oy!
So I've had my hands full. The phone system is very entertaining - we have the ROLM system, which is an all-digital system (I think the D/A converters are in the headset - THAT'S how digital it is!) I've noticed that the phones come in some slightly different flavors: some are genuine speaker-phones, and on others you can only hear through the little speaker - you can't talk back. I guess I have a listen-phone, which is pretty unsettling to the person at the other end who hears only silence. For those of you who have access to the ROLM phones, there is one terrific feature that you won't find in any manual. If you hit *8, then dial a person's extension, you can speak directly to the person's speaker without having the phone ring. For example, I can dial *8 followed by Seth's phone number, and say "Seth, this is God. Give Ron a dollar.", which will come unannounced from his telephone, as if by divine intervention. We don't use this feature much at work because it's easier to just yell over the cubicle wall, but it must be excellent in a dorm situation.
We're getting used to our new little building. There are maybe 20 office-type people working here, and 100,000,000 construction people floating around. When the building is finished and fully occupied, there will be about 250 technical people. And only then will they install a cafeteria. They tell me that's about six months away, but after watching the construction guys in action, I'm not holding my breath.
Since there's no eats in the building, we've been checking out the local restaurants. Aside from McDonalds, Burger King, Wendy's, Arby's, Godfather's Pizza, Subway, LeAnn Chin take-out, that little Greek place that makes pretty good gyros, Byerly's (a supermarket with a surprisingly good restaurant in it), Baker's Square (Denny's, with pies), and an Indian place that I haven't been to although I hear it's good, there's not much around. Is it too much to ask to get a decent healthy meal from any of these places? I will recount my lunch from Wednesday: Everyone else brought his lunch from home (which I hate more than anything else in the world, including dental work), so I was forced to fend for myself. I drove out to White Castle (yes, there's a White Castle less than a mile from work.) and considered my options. In my high-school days, I could put away 10 of the little hamburgers, no problem. I am significantly older now, and thought that it would be unwise to try and top that (not to mention cruel to my co-workers). So I ordered two 42-cent hamburgers, and one chicken sandwich. (I just had to know what the chicken tastes like. For the record, they taste so greasy that I swear they've been deep-fried twice, and they're dripping with mayo. They were quite yummy.) That was enough to suppress my appetite. Later in the day, I got the munchies for something salty, thinking that salt would mop up the grease in my insides. I chose "Sunshine brand Wheat Wafers" from the vending machine, thinking along the lines of "Wheat Thins" - that they wouldn't be too bad for me. Wrong-o. "Sunshine brand Wheat Wafers" contain 10 grams of fat. Is this criminal? This is typical of my daily lunch routine, and I am not too happy.
Two random thoughts that I thought of all by myself: (1) Why are cellular phones getting more and more popular, while broadcast TV keeps losing an audience to cable? (2) What time zone is North Pole in?
We're winding down our outdoor activities at the house. We coiled up the hose and put it in the garage, and now we're waiting for the rest of the leaves to die, fall off the trees, and completely engulf our 0.23 acres of grass. I'd forgotten how much I don't like raking leaves. Margaret has been making some house alterations, like painting and putting up drapes. We had a few tons of gravel dumped on our driveway a few weeks ago. It was deliberate - we wanted some rocks around the outside of the house. It took us two full days and many many wheelbarrowfuls to redistribute them, but the house looks pretty good now. We also resealed the driveway. The folks at Home Depot know Margaret on a first name basis. Oh, and we got a graphite snow shovel from Sam's Club. (we are READY!)
Well, I finally broke down and bought a computer. After leeching off other people since Jon's Commodore 64 in 1982, I finally own a computer. I got a 166 MHz Pentium, 32 MB of RAM, 4 GB SCSI hard drive, crapola monitor, and a CD Writer. Yep, I am going to great lengths to write my own audio CDs. I have a few blank CD's left over from Kodak, and it would be a pity to waste them by not having a CD-R machine, so I bought one. My first project was to transfer my cassette copy of the very first American Top 40 show (7/4/70) onto CD, so I can hear my idol Casey Kasem introducing songs by such nobodies as War, Crosby Still Nash & Young, Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Stevie Wonder, as well as such visionaries as Mark Lindsay, the Flaming Ember, Crabby Appleton, and the Poppy Family (featuring Terry Jacks of "Seasons In The Sun" fame). Just for the record, the #1 song was "Mama Told Me Not To Come" by Three Dog Night. Keep your feet in the ground, or you'll float off into deep space and die a grisly and horrible death.
I caved and got Minnesota license plates for my car. Now it looks like all the rest of the cars in the state. My New York license expires in five days, so I'll have to get a MN license, too. Now THAT's assimilation.
Saw a few movies lately, most on the VCR:
- City Lights - an extraordinary silent film, with Charlie Chaplin. Everyone should see this movie.
- Horse Feathers - one of the lesser-known early Marx Brothers films. Very funny. The password is "swordfish".
- Midnight Cowboy - Jon Voight & Dustin Hoffman (his first film after The Graduate.) Outstanding character study film, and made even better by the 1994 25th-anniversary-rerelease on video, with interviews on the tape after the film.
- Barbarella - high-camp sci-fi trash from 1968, starring Jane Fonda in a role she disavows. Hyped before its release as one of the two major science fiction films of 1968 (the other being 2001: A Space Odyssey), this film disappoints on every level. So bad, it's still bad. It has a character named Duran Duran, which gave the new wave group its name.
- L.A. Confidential - it's in theaters now, and I think it's worthy of its comparisons to Chinatown. Great from start to finish. Four stars. Two thumbs up.
- Devil Doll - it showed up on Mystery Science Theater 3000, and their demolition of this early '60s possessed-ventriloquist-dummy flick is on par with Manos The Hands Of Fate, Pod People, and Santa Claus Conquers The Martians. If you're not watching MST3K (Saturdays 5-7 and 11-1 EST on the Sci-Fi channel), you're missing out.
- "Bad Case Of Loving You" - Moon Martin. The original version of the Robert Palmer tune.
- "It's So Hard To Say Goodbye To Yesterday" - G.C. Cameron. The original version of the Boyz II Men tune.
- "I Feel For You" - Pointer Sisters. Recorded between Prince's version and Chaka Khan's version.
- "Schock Den Affen" - Peter Gabriel. "Shock The Monkey" sung in German!
- "Dancing Queen", "Mamma Mia", "Knowing Me Knowing You", and "Fernando" - Abba. All sung in Spanish.
- home demo versions of "I Missed Again" and "In The Air Tonight" by Phil Collins.
- Sheryl Crow's unreleased album from 1990. It's produced by Hugh "Melissa Etheridge" Padgham, and it's not bad.
- the first two Alanis Morrisette albums. (released in Canada.) They're bad. Real bad.
And finally, we found out that our furnace works (heat! yay!) and our air conditioner probably doesn't. When we bought the house, it had one of those in-the-window AC units. Well, Margaret discovered that it wasn't secured to the window frame at all; it was just resting there and held in place by the window itself. So when Margaret opened the window to check out the caulking, gravity took over and our now-unsecured air conditioner landed squarely on the concrete slab outside our kitchen. It didn't bounce or shatter - it just came to rest, thud. We now have a slightly dented air conditioner sitting in our garage, and I don't think I'll be plugging it in any time soon.
Well, nothing else happening. The two cats are fine. I'll be spending the Xmas holidays in Houston with Margaret's extremely pregnant sister and her husband. She's due sometime around Thanksgiving, so by Christmas, she'll presumably be smaller and the house will be infested with baby things. Blech! At least this diverts attention from Margaret's mom away from us...
See ya, and write when you can,
Ron "Wake Me Up And Make Me Cocoa" G
