The Aerie
Okay, okay, so I haven't posted in a week. I'm bad.
In my defense, I've been investing my writing time preparing for National Novel Writing Month, which begins tomorrow. Supposedly I'll be writing 1,667 words every day: probably I'll be writing 12,500 words every weekend. Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
So what haven't I posted about?
Well, I didn't post about my battery dying and having to take my car to the garage because I needed it to work the next morning, first thing. And I didn't post about how, the next morning, I got a flat within two blocks of leaving my house. And I didn't post about how, after rescheduling several meetings, visiting the dentist, meeting with my accountant, and cramming to get everything at work rearranged, I got chewed out by a colleague for "dropping the ball." I didn't post about any of that.
Probably better forgotten.
I also didn't post about how, with college and Nanowrimo to work on, I spent Saturday facilitating my kids' Hallowe'en party, and then on Sunday we went to see our friend Ellis at the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts at 11:00 a.m., on Sunday night at 8:00 we had tickets to go see the Indigo Girls. So Saturday and Sunday were pretty much a loss, productivity-wise. I hate it when this happens - I want to enjoy myself, but when the entire weekend is left to partying it gets frustrating...
I did manage to get out on Sunday afternoon for a couple of hours to think about my Nanowrimo novel, and at least I scraped a few ideas together. Given the amount of actual, paying work I have to do today, and the Hallowe'en duties tonight, I suspect that the couple of hours I've had are going to be all I get.
As far as Nano goes, I'm considering posting excerpts from my daily writing on here. I can't post the whole thing for copyright reasons - by posting it every day to the world I would have a hard time finding a publisher should it come to that - but I could post excerpts. And that would help keep me on track, if I pretend that my audience (hah!) would object to missing a day.
We'll see! About 13 hours to go!
Hmmm.. Apparently Scott Adams has been following me home...
Ah, I'm happy. I finally had a couple of minutes this weekend to address a burning question - are there any tools out there to help me organize my music collection?
Mind you, after (yes, yes I did) ripping every CD I own into my server, I have north of 5,000 songs online. Well, you may or may not know that most song files come with small, internal "tag" files, that tell you about the song: who wrote it, what kind of music it is, etc.
However, lots of my songs either didn't have that tag information filled in, or in the case of some CDs I found, had erroneous tag information because, when I ripped them, I had no idea what was on them.
Then I found EasyTag!
EasyTag is able to read that information, using the customizable formatting described in the box on the lower left side of the screen. So in this case it reads /genre/groupname/albumname/track - songname. Then it sticks the words it finds separated by the /'es and the hyphen into the tag entries on the right side.
And this formatting can be applied to every file in a given directory, at the same time! Since the albums are usually ripped all at once, that's usually about as good as it gets for song-to-song consistency of naming.
The end result is that everything in the filename gets chopped apart and inserted into the track tag, as at left.
The format of the /'es and the hyphens and almost anything else is completely customizable. For example, I could have added a pair of parenthesis to the format, and pulled out the word "Guantanamera" from the filename of this song. Then I could have put it somewhere else in the tag.
But wait! There's more!
Not only can you change the tag based on the filename, which honestly would have made me quite happy by itself... but you can change the filename based on the tag.
For example, I found a cover of "Big Yellow Taxi" by the Counting Crows, misnamed as "Paved Paradise and Put Up a Parking Lot." However, inside the song file, the track tag not only reflected the proper name of the song, but the album and track from whence it came.
By using the Rename Filter, I was able to assemble the track tag entries into a new filename with the proper name of the song. And not only does the program rename the file, but in this case I didn't have a directory for the album "Films about Ghosts." EasyTag renamed the file, created the album directory, and moved the file into the new directory. You can inspect the bottom line of the image at right to see the final disposition of the song file. As you can see, I could even re-use the %b album tag, both in the directory name and in the file name.
it doesn't take a lot to make me happy: a good cup of coffee, a trip to Germany to get a fresh, warm pretzel, or a pratically-perfect-in-every-way free MP3 tag editor. Not a lot at all! I sat at my desk during one of the execrable post-Tina-Fey episodes of Saturday Night Live, and cleaned up all of the tags in my music files, "A" through "C." Tonight I may sit at the computer while watching the almost-as-execrable "Heroes" on NBC, and try to get "D" through "F" cleaned up.
Oh, and why does this matter? Because my music server can only sort songs based on the information in their track tags. If I want to listen to Classical music or music by Counting Crows, the tags all need to be accurate. Without tags, I end up listening, randomly, to seasonal holiday music all year long. WIth tags, I could decide, if I wanted, to listen to the third track on every album I own...
And that's important! Okay, it's not "How do I escape that tiger?" or even "How to do I find a job?" important, but it's important in a very wealthiest-1%-of-the-world kind of way...
Just back from my wife's family's annual birthday-o-rama. By some twisted coincidence, my wife's sister and their younger-by-four-years brother both share a birthday... as does that sister's daughter! In addition her spouse has a birthday later in the week. So while every year we gather about this time for their birthdays, this time was also the 40th birthdays of my sister in law and her husband.
As a special surprise, his sister who lives in Spain made the journey to help her brother celebrate his 40th... and as a surprise, so did their mother, who lives in Texas. So it was a complete surprise family reunion for my sister-in-law's husband. A very nice time, with lots of really good food provided by various attendees.
Otherwise life proceeds apace: I managed to get to a point in my University of Minnesota homework where I sent it off to my academic advisor to look it over. For the first time in six weeks or so I have a break from that task hanging over my head, which will pick up as soon as she looks it over (hopefully Monday) and sends back recommendations. Meanwhile I have a letter that my lawyer needs written, so I'll work on that and maybe some yard work tomorrow.
The other thing coming up will be this year's edition of National Novel Writing Month, the annual effort to write 50,000 words of a novel in one month. Last year I tried it and hit 35,000 words before my new contract employment jumped up and interrupted progress. This year both employment and schoolwork are a known constant going in, so hopefully I iwll be able to schedule the appropriate amount of writing time somehow.
My wife is one of the Twin Cities area Nanowrimo coordinator, so it's very difficult to avoid participation!
Last weekend she and her co-municipal-liaison (or ML) taught a workshop at The Loft, a noted local writer's organization, on how to participate in Nanowrimo. She barely slept the night before, so beset was she by nerves, but her reviews arrived today - along with a check - and they were rated very highly by their well-attended class. Hooray for her!
Now "the rules" of Nanowrimo state that you should begin writing day one with your mind a blank slate. I did that last year, with only the most general notions in mind, and while I got 35,000 words written, and I liked the 35,000 words I wrote, I ended up in the same place I've ended up before: with 1/2 of a novel and no idea how to tie everything together.
So this year I'm going to bend the rules slightly, and i'm going to plot out the novel in advance and then try to write to the plot. Not to cheat at Nanowrimo but to help myself write something that actually has a beginning, a middle, and an end to it. I'd like to get that done once in the hopes that I could go back to my two half-written novels with more confidence about how to tie their parts back together.
What I've discovered having written 2 X 1/2 = 1 novel is that writing a novel can be like a game of pool: it's easy enough to rack the balls and break them up, but to win the game you have to also put them into the holes. So far I am good at the break.
So I've got a little time tonight and a little time tomorrow, I'll start working on the plot for my Nanowrimo novel. Of course, I have to figure out which one I want to do. Unlike a lot of writers, I have absolutely no problem coming up with ideas - it's just a question of which idea I want to attempt. Right now I have two in mind - a comedy-horror about a Minneapolis vampire, or a slightly more serious murder mystery. A murder mystery might be a bit easier, since the plot is so straighforward.
We'll see!
So life seems to be settling into a rut or groove, depending on your (or my) point of view. I bike to work and back on good days, drive on others. On Mondays I sometimes have an evening meeting; on Tuesdays I sometimes have writing group; on Wednesdays either I have a meeting or my wife does or both. On Thursdays I go gaming at Professor Barker's and on Fridays we often have events. Saturdays we take one or both of the boys to the Monster's Den so they can play games, and Saturday evening something is inevitably going on. Sundays we go to church, and sometimes an extended-family event.
I feel like I'm simultaneously doing everything, and nothing. I'm going around and around in a week-sized circle, doing everything that must be done, but as for actually 'getting anywhere,' well, progress is slow. Yes, if I do this for two more years, then at the end of that time I will have 1) paid off our debts, 2) maybe gotten my degree, 3) kids who are about to graduate from high school. But TWO YEARS. Bah. I'm too impatient.
Meanwhile I'm here, beating the children to do homework, beating them to do their chores, beating them to get off the computer and get some exercise, and beating them to play their piano. By "beat them" I mean of course "nag them," since we don't lay a finger on them otherwise, but the sentiment is the same.
Tonight we have parent-teacher conferences at my younger son's school. This will be difficult, because I will want to bite people's heads off, and my wife will not want feathers ruffled. Our differing metaphors are bound to clash and result in ruffled heads and bitten-off feathers.
My problem is that this school has been terribly abused, both by slashes to education spending and by mismanagement at almost every level of administration. A principal who lasts two years is exceptional, and every single year all of the teachers are laid off in the summer and rehired randomly in the fall, resulting in a chaotic reassignment of students to teachers that, this year, is still ongoing. Yes; six weeks into the school year, they are ending the term early so they can reallocate students to teachers yet again.
On top of it all, the boy has a teacher who, by his reports, has twice made what I consider "smartass" comments to him. The latest was that when he failed to turn in a form on time, she said to him "Too bad, so sad."
My wife is quick to point out that this is just HIS story, but I am not inclined to care. I am so sick of this ruinous school situation I can hardly stand it, and he has to be there two and a half more years. I wouldn't let the boy mouth off to a teacher like that, I won't let the teachers mouth off to him, either. Grr!
So I'll go and I'll stew and I'll keep my mouth shut if I can. Like last year, when my wife repeatedly wrote to one of our older boy's teachers, and he didn't reply to her for three weeks, until AFTER the mid term grades were set. Of course, he was too busy campaigning to become the president of the Minneapolis Teacher's Union to respond to e-mail. Or teach, apparently. We went, and I did speak firmly to the man about replying in a timely fashion to communications, but as we now know he didn't give a rat's ass about is 40-person civics class held in a 12x12 windowless concrete room, because he was off to bigger and better things.
I should have bitten his feathers off.
This kind of crap is why I can understand those people who pull their kids out of public schools. Of course those same people ELECT the people who cut the funds which result in this crap happening, so it's a kind of a self-fulfilling policy.
All I want, and is it too much to ask, is to have my kids get a solid basic Three R's education, in rooms with a teacher-to-kid ratio that allows for some individual attention. All my kids are gifted - all my kids are bored shitless in the classroom. The present system hammers down their pointed exceptionality into blunt little nubs of boredom.
If these people who pull their kids, if they would pitch in with a sense of civic duty or connectedness and help improve the situation, then it would get better for everyone. Instead by deciding to go it alone and looking out for themselves, they leave the rest of us with a more and more dire situation. How does a community support itself when no one is willing to share the good and the bad?
Anyway, after conferences tonight I'll be off to a friend's house for the evening. And then tomorrow is Thursday, and then it's Friday, and then it's the weekend.
And then it starts all over.
Sigh. Just a year or two of this, and then maybe it'll be time for another home exchange or something. I can make it. I know I can...
"So are you for war, or peace?"
This is what the fellow behind the counter at the Border's Cafe asked me when I ordered a latte.
"Um," I hesitated, wondering what he would squirt into my beverage for which answer. "Peace," I finally said, firmly. I'm already drinking decaf, no point in adding war to it and lying awake all night anyway.
"Hm," he commented, looking troubled. Fortunately, the latte-making process seemed to be proceeding without unusual adulterations.
"Why do you ask?"
"Well, I was just listening to this guy who said people who wanted peace were weak."
Gosh, I didn't say, that guy wouldn't be drug-addled gasbag Rush Limbaugh, would it? The bloviating moralizer who got caught bringing illegal Viagra back from a trip to the Western hemisphere's sex-trade capital of the Dominican Republic?
"It's not a question of strength versus weakness," I replied conversationally, "It's a question of courage versus fear."
He continued knocking together my latte for a moment. "Well, are you for the war or against it?" he finally asked.
"Which war?" I replied. "I'm FOR the war in Afghanistan," I said, overstating that support a bit, " and I'm AGAINST the war in Iraq. I wish we had stayed in Afghanistan and set that country up right, like the Marshall Plan after Germany. If we had done that, and caught Bin Laden, that would have been a big improvement in the world. Instead the Taliban are back, and Bin Laden is still free."
"My father told me that people who are against the war are cowards."
I shrugged, "What takes more courage: attacking a country too weak resist us, or sitting down to negotiate with people who don't agree with us? This government is selling fear: they scare us with stories of terrorists, but they let North Korea develop a nuclear bomb."
He handed me my drink. "So do you believe that if you just think about peace that peace will happen?"
"What? No, of course not. That's magical thinking. But if you VALUE peace, if you intend to achieve peace as your goal, then you'll make the choices necessary to achieve peace. Maybe sometimes that path will lead into war and back out again, but not too often. Most of the time it will lead to the conference table."
"But isn't that just being too afraid to fight?"
I had my drink I and I could leave, but he seemed to be sincerely pondering these questions so I stood with my hot paper cup and kept talking. "Fighting is not always a sign of courage: if you back a coward into a corner he'll fight to get out. But this administration promotes fear. It encourages fear. It tries to scare us over and over again, and then it tells us that it will keep us safe."
I thought I might point out how promoting fear, promoting terror, was in fact terror-ism, but I decided not to go that way. Instead I said,
"But you know what I want? I want leadership - and I don't care which party it is - that promotes COURAGE. I want leadership that calls us to be the best we can be, not the least. We're Americans - we're the goddamned City on the Hill. If we had a leader who called on us ot be brave, to follow the Rule of Law, to set an example for the world, we'd have no need to fear anybody. Instead we slog through the muck of corruption, we filthy ourselves by breaking our own laws, and international laws. And we make the whole world sick when we justify using torture, because we're so goddamned SCARED we pretend it's necessary.
This isn't America; this isn't American. This is cowardice and fear run amok. Weakness? Weakness is when you torture a helpless captive. Strength is when you hold your ground, even when you know the danger. That's strength."
Someone was approaching the counter, so I wrapped up.
"You want courage? Courage is when you know you're going to suffer, but you do what's right anyway, that's courage. Fear is when you're willing to abandon decency and do something you know is wrong because you want to be 'safe.' People can show courage in war, but they can also show courage in peace by sticking to their principles, and by doing what's right even if it's dangerous."
Now here's where I am supposed to play humble, and say that I didn't put all this stuff so succintly or clearly. But actually I did, and I was kind of proud of myself for having done so. For his part, he really seemed to be listening to what I said, even if it wasn't all making sense for him right there. But as he turned away to help his next customer he said, "Hey, thanks for taking the time to talk with me."
"No problem," I answered, "I think this is stuff that's on a lot of people's minds these days."
Apparently it's been on mine.
Ever since I posted last week that I have a new office with an actual VIEW of downtown, everyone has been writing to me and writing to me, saying "Please, please, post a picture of this fantastic new view that you have!"
Actually that's not true.
Actually, nobody has written to me to ask for a picture of my fantastic new view.
But I figure, hey, I'll nip this possibility in the bud right now. I will pre-emptively post a picture of my new view in order to head off the inevitable flood of e-mails certain to be generated by last week's controversial post.
Of course, to begin with, I need to post you a picture of the old view. Now, the old view was from a cubicle on the 18th floor of the City Center building, a cubicle that II shared with a very nice East Indian fellow. He and I sat nearly elbow to elbow for nearly a year, and I think we exchanged less than 100 words in that time. And really, that was just fine.
Anyway, sitting in that cube, on the 18th floor, my view was what you see to the left. That's because I was sitting deep in a cubicle farm, far from the windows. My employer actually has policy - at least in their City Center building, of prohibiting contractors from sitting near windows. Must be afraid we'll jump out.
They also have a rule requiring us to sit two to a cube. Even when, all around us, are empty non-window cubes. Along with other policies and behaviors, I get the impression that my client wants contractors to feel unwelcome, even shunned. There are people, not everybody, but a lot of them here, who will talk over or ignore contractors who dare to speak during meetings.
I'm not sure why this counterproductive culture exists, but I suspect it has something to do with resenting people who get paid a lot more.
So to be sitting here, alone in a cube, next to a spectactular view of downtown Minneapolis across the Cedar Lake parklands, well, it's downright naughty!
The weekend was largely uneventful, except for the events. Saturday passed in a blur of nonproductivity and procrastination. I wanted, the entire day, to go for a hike, but I kept telling myself that I had too much work to do. So instead of doing the work, I puttered, procrastinated, and finished re-reading the latest "Harry Potter" book.
Sunday I decided resist the urge to go straight to my homework, and forced myself to take a hike along the river bluff. That was a very nice time, although I should have left the camera home. Nothing bad happened, it's just all that much harder when climbing with a walking stick, a camera to catch the colors, a hat, and a cell phone to call for help when I fall and break my leg. But I got a few snapshots which I'll probably link to later.
The problem, of course, is that the colors are always the same, and I always take the same shots of them. This year was a little different because I usually go out along the old railroad bridge to take my pictures, but they have effectively barricaded the railroad bridge against trespassers as part of installing the Midtown Greenway over the summer. The bridge has a remote-controlled gate that the engineer can presumably open and close from the cabin in the oncoming train. The gate spans more than the width of the bridge, and two wing shaped fence panels extend out on either side, making trespass an exercise in acrobatics that most people will eschew.
I will have to cross the river and see if they thought to put the barricade on the other side, or if they only put it on the Greenway end of the bridge.
But I went for my hike, snapped a few pictures, and got home before the rain hit.
Spent the afternoon doing my homework, and did all the assigned reading. Still didn't work on the Degree Program document, however. I'm procrastinating on that thing real good now. Sigh.
In the evening we went to the new Guthrie theater for the first time. It's only a couple miles down West River Road from us now, instead of all the way across town within the nightmare tangle of the Loring Park neighborhood. Having a world-class theater close enough to the house for the kids to bicycle to is a great thing.
The theater building itself, well, let me preface my opinion by saying that I have no education in or knowledge of architecture or theater construction. So, speaking merely as a layman, I have to say that the design of the new Guthrie is simply crap. "How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways..."
It's built right on the Mississippi river, with beautiful views available of downtown and the lights of the east bank warehouse district and the Stone Arch Bridge. Accordingly, whoever the moron architect is decided that the building should be built with the minimum number of windows allowable by law. What windows exist are recessed inside three-foot deep holes in the walls, lined with reflective metal. The building is designed to shun the gorgeous views around it.
Upon entering you find yourself in a tall, narrow aisle or hall leading through the building's center from the river to the street. The ceiling is quite high, but the overall feel of the space is "alley." I kept expecting muggers, or a guy to selling cheap Rolex watches from inside his overcoat.
Upon arrival, the ubiquitous ushers herd everyone onto a ridiculously long escalator up through a dark, narrow chute. I fully expected to be brained at the top like a steer in a slaughterhouse.
Upstairs the ceilings are low and the feel of the place is claustrophobic and cramped. A ramp leads up and out onto the cantilevered walkway, offering narrow slits for viewing the outside world.
The view from the end of the walkway is worth the trip - once out in the fresh air there is a marvelous view of the river and downtown. A pity that the only decent view in the building has to be stuck way out at the end of a pier to nowhere. When I was there it was mainly being used, not by smokers, but by folks trying to get a decent cell phone signal: apparently the interior of the Guthrie is not cell-friendly, which isn't an altogether bad thing unless you're waiting for a kidney.
The one sensible thing that they've done with the interior is added a sizable bar and restaurant area on the top floor. The worst part about the old theater was that intermission involved waiting in lines first to dispose of your prior drinks and then to obtain and finish your next one. I haven't used the restaurant yet, but it seems a reasonable addition that would allow theatergoers to sit down for a bite before or after the show.
The theater space we saw (there are three) is very nice, extremely reminiscent of the old Guthrie to the point of deja vu, and without a bad seat or a blocked sightline that I could perceive.
Unfortunately our show was Neil Simon's "Lost in Yonkers." I normally despise Neil Simon anyway, but this show was particularly reprehensible. Maybe it was the fact that nothing happens, storywise: in fact, the play violates Chekov's Law. One character displays a gun in the first act, but the gun is never fired.
There is a character who is pursued by the Mob... but the Mob never appears and the character is never confronted. A sick, widowed father is twice hospitalized with a bad heart... but does not die. A woman threatens to emancipate herself from her mother in pursuit of true love... but manages only in getting the old woman to put up with playing the radio of a Sunday afternoon. And two boys ages 11 and 15 wear the same clothes at the beginning and end of the play - despite the fact that one or both of them would have grown a couple of inches over the 10 months of the play's duration.
It's a stupid, mawkish play about a dysfunctional family, and it offers us a mentally handicapped woman who can't remember that her sister-in-law has died, but "speaks truth to power" by incisively telling off her domineering mother. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama... and it made me want to barf.
Which is not to say that I didn't have a good time: I did. Despising Neil Simon can be entertaining, and it was fun to see the new, abhorrent Guthrie. The actors were okay, except that the lad playing the eldest boy still hasn't learned the difference between bellowing and projecting his lines.
Afterwards we went back to the parking ramp, where I was embarassed to be unable to exit. Embarassed because this was the very first American incarnation of the ramps that I had become accustomed to in Germany - fully automated, with a pay-ticket system upon exiting. I should have remembered this from Europe, but I wasn't expecting it, and so I had to back away from the gate and go pay for parking, much to the annoyance of the folks behind me.
The way these ramps work is, you take your parking tag with you, and when you return you put the tag into a vending-style machine to pay, prior to going back to your car. If, like me, you drive to the exit with an unpaid ticket, it doesn't let you out.
How much harder would it have been, do you suppose, to put a credit card slot in the ticket reader right by the exit?
Ah well.
So all in all a good weekend, except I still haven't gotten my homework done. And now I'm out of the "I need to blog" excuse to save me from having to work on it...
So I've sussed out my new route to work, and in so doing learned a lot about the 80 miles of bike trails that thread the city like a series of secret passageways in a big mansion.
My new route to work is indicated by the black line above, crossing from the east side of South Minneapolis to the west side, and curving north. That's where my new desk is at, out at Highway 394 and Penn Avenue. That's about five miles west and one mile north of my home. Despite that, it's a terribly, terribly safe route. Thanks to the Greenway running along the old rail lines, I cross about three major streets, then turn north to follow the bike path round Cedar Lake.
Prior to now, my route to work followed the black line until it diverges and heads north into downtown Minneapolis, and the corporate center. Now, that route is pretty safe until downtown, with only a couple of major streets to cross. But once downtown all bets are off: a pair of painted lines on 5th street defined a bikeway, but that's no protection against the swarming downtown traffic. At every moment I expect to be crushed between two vehicles, or run down by some cell-phone-talking latte-sipping knee-driving dingbat.
So despite the fact that I'm travelling twice as far, most of that route is very very safe.
The red line on the upper map indicates the OTHER bike path I found, leading from behind my new office into downtown. The bike path around Cedar Lake crosses this bike path at the bridge spanning the rail line, so the two do not directly intersect. Either I'd have to carry my bike down a flight of stairs, or ride down the steep slope at the back of the building's parking lot (indicated by the red line in the map at left). Incidentally, my new fourth-floor cubicle is next to a window, and features a beautiful view of downtown Minneapolis (yellow arrow). Considering that a little over two years ago I was working at a client who stored me three floors underground, and that up until a week ago I was sharing a cubicle, this is a markéd improvement....
Certainly riding down the slope is more interesting! And, frankly, falling down a flight of steps while carrying a bicycle can't be any more likely to break your neck than riding pell-mell down a grassy hill.
Anyway, when I need to ride downtown for a meeting, or when I need to ride to the University on Wednesdays, then I take the red route indicated in the upper map. That empties out downtown near where I was working before, so I follow the blue route either home, or I turn off to the U of M on the green route.
From the U I take the purple route home, which is of course the same route I used to ride when I worked at the University a zillion years ago... when we bought our house.
And now it's time for me to hop on my bike and ride along the red route, pick up a prescription, then ride the blue route back to the black route and home. While I'm riding my bike, you can amuse yourself watching this car...
Now you know why I ride a bike.