They Don’t Know

Every day I come home to a lovable ball of fur that I just can’t help adoring despite many nips, growls, and occasional stinkyness.  I also get to see Cairo!

Cairo is an awesome dog, and the lovable proportions of a half-a-dog high and one-and-a-half dogs long make her look like the adolescent version of many other creatures I love.  So now I give you a guide for how to make your own Cairo with fauna that may be more accessible for you.

• Tried and True method:  cross a miniature dachshund with a black labrador.  Mommy will either have to be a trooper or daddy will have to be a jumper.
• Seal it with a kiss:  Take harbor seal, put on diet, fit prosthetic digging feet
• Otterly adorable:  Imprint on an otter pup, thin out hair on tail
• Don’t give a shit:  Take honey badger, keep benadryl handy,  occasionally dip in black ink.
• Prairie home companion:  Take prairie dog, fit prosthetic snout, roll in toner.

I’ve had an odd couple of weeks.

The smattering of crappy workplace situations from last year appear to have congealed into a minor career mess which will require focused efforts to clean up. I got to sit through several meetings which could have been very embarrassing and dis-spiriting but for the folks working with me genuinely wanting me to succeed and get better. It also gave me something I’ve been desperately seeking from my employer: much more focused goals. So I feel like I can move past it all and will do my best not to bitch constantly about the extra work that suddenly appeared, (Also, one of the much more focused goals seems to be “just do the extra work that suddenly appears and try not to bitch so much about it”). Also, instead of being in a project that seems to have me working twice as hard on things I don’t like with no detectable opportunity for leadership (like the middle of last year)… I am in a project that I enjoy which has plenty of opportunities for leadership. Thus, I am keeping my hopes high, my efforts focused, and my tongue leashed. Ultimately, if I can’t get it to work out, I will feel like my current company and I have given each other plenty of chances and I can separate from my workplace citing that we just don’t grok each other.

Cairo giving her “I love you and would prefer not to discuss the chewed-up, excrement soaked/filled shoes at this time because I am vulnerable right now” eyes.

We got a now-3-month old puppy from the Atlanta Humane Society. Her name is Cairo, she’s a Doxidor, a Dachshund/Labrador mix (and as I say to all people after releasing that info… “Don’t take too long to think about the physics of that”). I had my eye on her ever since she was a 2-month-old puppy: the Atlanta Humane Society supplies pictures of their adoptable animals on their website. I fell in love with her soulful eyes and the concept of having a dog that looked like small-to-medium-sized Labrador that had been kneecapped. I also love that she is pretty much the closest thing to an otter I will be able to get.

But of course, this means I am in puppy hell: An dirty upper circle where a slavering fanged beast nips at your hands and ankles and pees on lots of things. It’s amazing that a puppy which can figure out how to get around the barrier, find nibble-able things in the smallest of nooks and crannies, recognize her name and hear treat bottles being opened from 400 feet away…  Can’t understand things like “No”, “Ow!”, and “Stop that!”.

But she is awful cute.  She is also therapeutic.  While Eric and I don’t squabble less, the fallout and resulting “ooooh, why you so mean” cattiness that usually follows our squabbles is shortened dramatically because, well, there is a cute puppy who wants attention, and neither of us is cruel enough to deny dog joys from (or foist all dog-responsibilities to) the other.

Finally, last night I confirmed why I am glad I got the cloth seats in the Miata.  Eric and I were driving around in the Miata with the top down on a beautiful cloudy day… and I went to a friends house for the ending bits of his birthday party (the primary reason for the driving around), left the top down, and it got sprinkled-in.  Luckily my friend alerted me to the drizzles (ironically because his puppy alters her behavior when it precipitates) before it became serious and helped me towel out the one or two millimeters of water and put the top up.  When Eric and I eventually prepared for our wet-butted ride home, it had rally started pouring.

When I got home, I toweled out Amelia the Miata some more, and left the top slightly back, and by this morning it had dried out.  I appreciate the design of the Miata even more now.  None of the instrumentation or other electronics got wet because the steep rake of the windshield protected them, and all the areas that were getting wet were plastic and easily dried/cleaned.   If I had leather seats I might have just shortened the life of it considerably.

So that seems to be the theme of 2012.   New things happen, but the choice to get angered or annoyed by them is up to me.

Post-a-list, engage!

• Ongoing resolutions from last year, and probably for the rest of my life
• Health: I am older, bolder, and fatter. I also have creeping blood pressure that spiked horribly after my year and a half California ordeal management. Thus, I continue working out, eating better, and avoiding salt, despite my love for it. I feel like my health zenith is to get back to a 32 inch waist, upon which my knee, blood pressure, and mood shall all improve. Alas, I read the most depressing article that once you take off a significant amount of weight, you basically get to obsess over it your whole life because having the weight changes you physiologically: Your muscle tissue is that much more efficient, your digestive tract treats all food as godsends in a famine condition, and your mind wants to think about the new calorie counting hobby constantly.
• Organization: My house is not an unmitigated mess, but I have piles upon piles of old (if not semi-sensibly organized) stuff that I really don’t need to keep anymore. It’s getting to the point where I have lost a few things just because I hid them in a spot underneath something else that I can not remember which pile was where. As my memory for phone numbers gets replaced by the fancy Google contacts list synced to my smartphone, I hope to go through piles, files, and shelves… find tons of stuff to chuck or gift, and give everything I kept in the house a clear, roomy, obvious home that even my dotty-ness can figure out in a pinch.
• Communication: Communicate better with coworkers, friends, loved ones, and random folks on the Internet who like to read/listen-to my blather. My hope is for more blog posts and podcasts, less friction and more meaningful interactions, better gift ideas, less “crap, what is this person’s name/last-name/rank” moments, and of course… world peace.
• New resolutions for this year… and probably for the rest of my life
• Adjust station within workplace accordingly: Sometime between last year and this year, my company has done its best to clarify what it wants from prior company that got eaten and how we-the-eaten can better portray what we are looking to do and willing to do. My first reactions, after seeing what other consultants in other divisions tended to go through, was to throw an embarrassing tantrum. After calming down, I had an epiphany just in time for the new year (but alas, not the financial new year) that I was barking up the wrong tree with my career path. Thus, I have been having discussions with coworkers and am ready to stake out my position and have my reasons clear, and I think it will get me in a much better place regarding what I want to do.
• Austerity and Economic Recovery: Last year I inherited some new financial responsibilities. I am not hurting by any means, but my occasional sprees which used to just get eaten up as “I saved less this month” are now actual “I ate into savings a bit this month”. Thus, in tandem with an inventory from Organization… I’ll need be a lot more wary about what I buy, when and for whom.
• Read more: I spend a lot of time in a car, and the first thing I do when I get home is put on the TV to some movie I’ve already seen a billion times before. I have a Kindle, and not one of the fancy color ones. I need to get through the books I have there, they tend to be more fulfilling and much cheaper in the long run. I find myself wanting to be appropriately labeled “Voracious reader”

Otherwise, happy new year! Hope you are well.

So, I have been thirty for a couple of months now, and I just went to DC to celebrate two of my good friends turning 30. Here is what I have learned thus far…

• My body is more efficient. Every calorie is extracted from food, and muscle that has already been built will do everything rather than letting new muscle be built. And every pang of stress is turned immediately into another mmHg of blood pressure. Bastardy body.
• I’m more mellow. I tend to go “is there anything I can really do about it, will being dramatic get me anything” and usually the answer is no. I will gleefully poke fun at people when they get that way, however. It’s much too fun to not.
• I go to bed and wake up way earlier.
• I never really drank, but my friends who do I’ve noticed have cut back and switch to water much earlier. The result is a pleasant surprise (“Hey, I was feeling that last drink rather hard, I was worried I was going to get sick or be really hung over but I went to bed and woke up early and felt fine”) as opposed to a nasty one (“I’m sorry my retching and crying kept you up too…”)
• Changes in routine that involve exercise hurt that much more. I went to the Kart track at beautiful Summit Point raceway and did the “Kart till you Puke” deal… which means I did 10 11-minute sessions in karts that could do about 50 MPH (which is almost two hours of rather hard driving) and I have almost lost the use of my right arm. My recently old friends who went with me were complaining of bruised rib cages

Needless to say, work out and eat better now, young’ns.

I have to come out about something to all my friends and loved ones because they sometimes forget and try to convince me to forget.

I do not like bars!

Do I drink? Sure, a little maybe when I am at a restaurant or at my own house. But I never seemed to get into the recreational drinking that college was supposed to have taught me, and I don’t feel particularly addicted to alcohol either.

So the idea of having a little building where you stand around and drink is about as appealing to me as a little building full of exotic rubber nipples on display. I won’t seek them out on my own, and I’ll only go hang out with you in one if I like you and I’m not too hungry or tired and don’t really have much better to do. If I am tired or hungry or have something better to do, I will not join you. And if I become tired or hungry or find something better to do, I will probably leave you rather quickly if you’d rather stay at the bar, and if that makes you sad… don’t be, it’s simply because I don’t like bars.

Bars tend to be loud, smokey, and standing room only. These things make me surly on their own… but the whole notion of “why the hell am I here anyways” tends to make me outright cranky.

Yes, even if the bar has pretty good food. Because it’s bar food… which means it’s greasy finger food that doesn’t do my figure any favors and I was hoping to get the salad and chicken sandwich.

Yes, even if coworkers are going. I’d rather head home or to the hotel and fart around on the internet than drink with coworkers. I know I’ll have more fun.

Yes, even if the bar has naked people. Because bars full of naked people are full of non-naked people who are distracted who step on me and spill drinks on me.

Yes, even if the bar has an amazing beer menu. I don’t like beer that much, and the types of beers I do like are the watery american pilsners that taste like bread smells which means the bar owners will give me that sad look that lets me know I am held in contempt for not knowing what I am missing.

Yes, even if your friend(s) is/are there or there is an awesome social scene. I would rather go to the restaurant or the ice cream shop to meet your friend(s) and people watch because there will probably be better parking, service, and I won’t count the minutes wondering when I can leave.

Let it be known that I don’t like bars. Don’t be surprised or anguished when you drag me to one and I proceed to not have a good time.

So, my history with banks is a bit sordid. I’ve always been a bit mistrustful of them as they seem to be more into screwing people over at every turn to make more profit. I never had any large tussles with them, and I remember the pure power of capitalism I felt when I got my first checking account with attached debit card at 16 years old. I also am happy to say I think I only ever overdrew my account once and it was back in the days when the overdraft charge was about $10 (IE, before banks started to get really evil).

My first series of banks was with a rapidly-growing institution famous for having a CEO that whined about bad banks getting money during the initial financial meltdown, thus ensuring good banks got money too. My experience with them can basically be summed up as “they always set things right, but I always had to visit a branch twice or more: The first time trying to do something not complicated (like a deposit), the second (and subsequent) time(s) to try and fix the screw-up.” The incident that made me leave them was when I tried to deposit a rather large personal check to cover some student loan payments, only to have the branch I looked up on the Internet not be open at the slated time… making me deposit it into the ATM… which means I got a call later saying “sorry, this check is so large we need to have a 10-day hold on it to make sure the check clears”… WITHIN MINUTES of me setting up the student loan payment online… thus making me go in to do a cash advance from a credit card to cover the loan payment… which the teller assured me didn’t have any fees… and then having to go back when there were fees and beg for them to refund them… which to their credit they did. Needless to say, I decided my time with them was complete and went elsewhere.

I chose to go with a new regional bank. I liked them the most because they seemed to be big without being huge… and I had a fear of huge banks because they seemed to just be more expensive and meaner than smaller regional banks. I also loved that they had adorable mini-branches in local Grocery Stores around here with Saturday hours. For them most part this new bank was delightful for many, many years. The branch staff was friendly, I never remembered having any issues, and I loved the grocery store mini-branch.

Then, Debit-Card-Pocalypse happened. My bank sent me a letter (and an email) about 6 months ago detailing changes that will occur by the end of next month (and I credit them sincerely for giving me lots of time). The letter/email can be summed up as: “We’re ending free checking due to banking regulation changes. It looks like you qualify for fee-free basic checking because you use Direct Deposit. Please check the website to see if it is right for you”. So I went to look at the terms for Basic Checking and found a nasty little surprise in the form of a $5-a-month fee to use a debit card. I had the option to upgrade to a nicer account to avoid the debit card fee, but that either required refinancing my mortgage with them, or taking several thousand dollars out of my High Yield Internet Savings Account (1.24%, sorry, they’re sold out of them) and placing them to fester in no-or-low interest checking. I decided to shop around.

The megabank that holds my mortgage seemed like a logical choice, because they finance my house and car, but they didn’t really have any bonuses for shared accounts like my regional bank did, and news was breaking about them “experimenting” with debit card fees in Georgia. While it was nice the closest branch was within walking distance of my house, work, and seemed to be the default ATM in every mall, airport, parking lot, and random social center, I couldn’t bring myself to go into a branch and ask because I was pretty sure they would just become mean and/or incompetent like all the other banks sooner than later.

So I ended up researching and applying to two credit unions. The first was an internet-only affair that had a really cool “take a picture of a check to deposit it” feature that I found out I didn’t qualify-for after signing up (I’ve since un-signed-up). The other was a local credit union. Within a day, a polite loan officer at the local credit union was contacting me about the credit card, asking if I wanted to refinance the Miata (2%, get them while they’re hot), and helping me set up my new accounts. I spent a week or two making sure all linked accounts and bill payments were transferred from the regional bank, and just last week I closed my bank accounts for good.

I for the most part like the local credit union. I get good rates on basic savings and even on checking. I can use a smattering of ATM’s around town in places like grocery stores and pharmacies. The branches are not convenient, but I can keep my errands under and hour so long as I don’t try to go at rush hour. They also have really low rates on auto loans and mortgages. I also feel like I’m helping a local community non-profit grow, as opposed to condoning evil for-profit banking.

I also will probably not use my free debit card with my new credit union very much. In the scores of tips and tricks about how to try and get a free debit card now that banks seem to be punishing customers for governmental regulations, I came across an interview with Frank Abignale Jr. (of Catch Me if You Can fame) saying that really, debit cards are insidious in that they are attached to your money. The nice thing about Credit Cards is that if they get used for fraud, whatever miscreant is spending someone else’s money… so if you go “hey, that wasn’t me”, then you basically aren’t on the hook for paying it back. If a criminal steals your debit card info, they rip-off your checking account, and suddenly that three or four business days to return cash to said checking account is much more dire. Thus, I barely touch that card. I basically use it in ATM’s and will probably only use it to buy a $21 pack of gum if I am way outside my home state.

Here’s to hoping the credit union continues to be better than any bank. I am under the impression they won’t really have to try very hard.

I just can’t feel that terribly sad about the “world’s loss”.

I’m sad Steve Jobs had to die earlier than he was probably anticipating at a time when the company he created was doing so well, and that he had a very tough road for the last years of his life… but I don’t see him as some tremendous innovator or brilliant mind. Steve Jobs really only had three things going for him: He knew what people would pay a lot of money for, he knew how to surround himself with and use/abuse brilliant people to build those things, and he know how to charge within $5 of a consumers maximum allowable price point. Other than that by all accounts of the folks who worked with him, he was a stubborn hard-driving ass that makes Bill Lumbergh of Office Space look like everyone’s favorite manager. I mean, he was pretty much neck-and-neck with Bill Gates for most cut-throat pirate in Silicon Valley during the 80′s.

Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, iMac, Macbook/Pro/Air, iPad… he didn’t invent or envision those things, he walked around One Infinite Loop in Cupertino and saw someone else making them, went “that’s cool and I think we can convince people pay $100-500 more than the comparable product if we get the interface slick enough” and then rode the butt of that someone else until they were about ready to punch him in the face. That’s when he wasn’t outright taking innovations from other companies (that whole ‘mouse’ thing? That was Xerox’s baby). Meanwhile other employees were terrified of him because he’d fire folks and cut teams left and right if he thought they weren’t making cool stuff or if he suspected them of leaking product details.

Meanwhile he had the best PR team in the world. They asked what he wanted and he showed them Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and said “I want to be like Gene Wilder’s character!” And they pretty much pulled it off.

So yeah. RIP Steve and all that, I hope he wasn’t in any pain for those last couple of years there. But realize that the best thing for Apple at this point, nay, the key to it’s very survival, is people realizing that Steve was merely the figurehead and helmsman of an otherwise really impressive company… not the inventor and innovator and world changer that everyone is giving him credit-for.

Edit: I’ve finally been able to epitomize my issue with all the hero worship: Steve Jobs was this generation’s Thomas Edison; Not this generation’s Nicola Tesla: He knew how to assemble amazing teams of talented people, figure out what consumers wanted, and run a company like a sumbitch. He’s not taking several secrets of industrial design to the grave with him. GE is still around and a strong company today, so it’s not like Apple won’t keep making stuff that makes you feel a deep sense of shame for not buying.