Nick

Mexico Update #3

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December 26th

Skipping over the events of Barcelo Maya! and the travel to Playacar for now, i wanted to share a little bit about yesterday – Christmas in Mexico.  Fair Warning – this turns political, and emotional, and “preachy” would not be a far stretch, about halfway through.

It is about ¾ of a mile to the swanky downtown area of Playa Del Carmen from my hotel.  The walk is safe.  Very small Airport on one side and a row of gorgeous, though abandoned or not yet occupied buildings, on the other.

The swanky end of downtown has the nice free public restrooms – always good to know where those are.

I looked around and quickly learned that this too is pretty much like the touristy sections of Virginia Beach or Ocean City or Myrtle Beach – hawkers, overpriced stuff, and large crowds of slowly wandering tourists.  But it was interesting all the same.  I found one of the veggie places from Happy Cow – 100% Natural.  Sadly their site is poorly designed with images and flash instead of text so google translate does not work there.  I did download the menus and did some work con dictionario and learned enough about what was offered.  When i found the restaurant, it was near the beach on one of the main drags – 5th Avenue.  This is what it said on Happy Cow, but on their own website it is listed about 15 blocks away. It looked just like the picture and description from Happy Cow (waterfall!) and the menu was the same.  I did not have enough spanish to find out if there is more than one location, or if they moved – but i have 6 more days in Playacar to figure that out.  The location from the website is very near the natural food store I plan to visit anyway, so I can check those out at the same time.

After noting their location on the map i drew combining info from the phone book and the interwebs –

Highly Detailed Map

i told them i would be back and went off to locate another Happy Cow find – Playa RAW.  This is a vegan, raw only joint.  I have only been to one other restaurant of this style, but the food is better than it sounds.  Vegan Raw lasagna is awesome.  How do they do it?  I don’t know.  It is mind blowing to imagine lasagna prepared without heat, cheese, or dairy – but they do it and i like it.  I have never studied these folks or their methods, but I did learn a little.  They are Vegans plus (or minus).  Heat causes chemical change that decreases the amount/effectiveness of the nutrients in food.  Raw food has maximum effect.  They take the principles of vegetarian/vegan animal friendliness and extend them to the rest of the earth.  Everything needs energy to sustain itself.  We get ours from food.  Eat as low on the food-chain as you can and maximize the effect you get from eating so that you kill fewer things to sustain yourself.  All I know about their cooking methods: some use is made of non-electrical natural-convection-style and/or solar dehydrators.  I don’t know “the best” ones, but if you google it, there are tons of info sites and even DIY youtube videos.

I knew it was going to be a long walk, but i had not managed to get a sense of scale on the maps yet to know if it was 2 miles or 6 miles.  It is closer to 5 miles – one way.  A direct route may be only 4 miles or less, but i was not on a direct route.  I turned around at about 65th Street North.  Playa RAW is near 84th Street North.  Known location for good veggie food, 100% Natural, – about 10th Street North.  Known bathroom – 10th Street South.  I had already walked around 3 miles, and i was getting hungry, and would need a bathroom sooner than later, and you leave the tourist areas and enter the blocks where people live near 20th Street North.

I did not have the sensation of fear walking in these neighborhoods, but i was uncomfortable.  If i had more Spanish, i would have felt a little better, but as with other places where the poor live, it is hard not to feel like you are flaunting your wealth.  It was an odd place.  There was a mixture of absolute squalor – rivaling conditions i saw in the Indian slums around Delhi and the refugee areas (“camps” makes them sound better than they are) around Amman, Jordan – normal poor folk, and even lower middle class/upwardly mobile folks.  There were kids with radio control cars playing in the street and almost every late teen/early twenty year old had headphones on or was playing tunes on their phone in speaker mode.  But right next to these are the people digging through trash looking for anything useful, living in burned out buildings with maybe 3 walls and collapsing roofs, or in abandoned construction sites, or just under a tattered tarp.

I do not have the answers, but i do think it is important to learn to even ask the questions.  Back home i think of myself as poor – or at least economically lower class. Mostly i am just ‘thrifty’ (or cheap if you wish) and the ‘poor’ self-image encourages thrift.  It is a simple but effective tool – you spend less and learn how to do more with less if you tell yourself you have no money.  But there are options and resources available to me that these people do not have.  This is a gross oversimplification but i think it is a great example of the importance of the Big 3 – Economics, Infrastructure, Education.

Politically, you have to find a way to help those who need it – and it takes a lot of money. You have to get people with money to give it to you so you can get resources to the people with no money.  And you have to find ways to generate and retain more people who have more money – Economics.

It is hard to get a job, even a not-very-good job, if you smell bad all the time and have nothing but dirty clothes because you do not have water – Infrastructure.

It is hard to get a better job if you can’t read or write – Education.

I believe that we have been blinded by the pace of life today.  Everything must be said in a sound-bite and issues must be made sexy and fun.  The things that need the most attention and the people that need the most help do not fit into these categories.  It is hard to campaign for office or do fundraising on a platform of sewage, roads, and books – but those are the things that will do the most good – everywhere in the world.  It is embarrassing that we not only have not fixed these things – we are not even really trying to fix them.

These are not secrets.  It is not hard to reach these conclusions, or build a consensus on the veracity of these claims.  I have no special knowledge, skills, or de-coder ring – these facts are laying out in the open for all to see.   We choose to look away, back to our own lives.  Me too.  I have done charity work, built and repaired with Habitat for Humanity, volunteered in soup kitchens, given money and clothes, built websites and presentations, planned and led events, and designed fundraising strategies for other charity organizations.  But, i spend way more time on selfish pursuits.

We can’t all be “all give all the time”.  I get that.  But why can’t we get everyone some water and some rice, a road to the hospital, and a book?  Why aren’t we trying harder?

Mexico Update #2

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December 24, 2010 (for now – it will pass midnight here while I write – Feliz Navidad!)

Back to the story near where I left off…December 15th.

I was excited to leave Cancun, go to my resort, and to try out the Collectivo.  I had done enough research before leaving the US to know that one of the main North/South Collectivo stops is across the street from the ADO bus station in Centro, which is right by the drop off for the local R1 bus.

I was a little fussed that the HSBC sign I saw near my hotel was for an ATM and not a bank as I needed to change some more money and wanted the best possible rates.  For Cancun, generally, it is said that the worst rates are inside the airport, then your hotel, then the moneychangers on the street, and the best are at the banks.  I did 60 dollars at the airport for around 10.9 pesos to the dollar.  Not great, but my plans required an indeterminate amount of cash.  I shopped around Cancun at the moneychangers on the street and did some more (maybe $40) at 11.8.  But I wanted the best rate for a larger transfer.

Knowing there were plenty of banks in Centro, I headed to the nearest stop for the R1 and was, of course, approached by a few taxi guys.  I liked one of them, Jesus, and remembered the utility of a taxi driver’s local knowledge if you find a nice one with decent English as had just happened.  We haggled a minute and I got a ride to Playa Del Carmen for 400 pesos (it is probably about 120-200 on the Collectivo).  Once in the car, after we had a little get-to-know-you chitchat, I asked him where to get the best rate and he took me to a bank where I got 11.9 and I changed the rest of my cash on hand.

Once I told him the name of my resort, he told me that was perhaps 20 minutes past Playa Del Carmen, but he would take me anyway for the same price.  I was not trying to take advantage of him – I just did not know the difference between Playa Del Carmen and my resort.  It is hard to tell from the maps.

We talked about Mexico and travel a good deal – focused on safety and best practices – through a healthy mix of Spanish and English.  He told me that he thought that Chichen Itza was not worth the cost anymore because of the number of tourists and the general state of things there.  He said that you cannot even climb the temple stairs anymore and they had to do this because the tourists took rocks and wrote graffiti.  He said the site at Tulum was much nicer.  He said that Cozumel has the second best diving in the world after The Great Barrier Reef in Australia, and he said that he and his family never dive – or snorkel in the Centoes, but they do go to swim with the dolphins sometimes.

I asked him about Wal-Mart – how long had it been there in Cancun and what the prices were like.  He said about 10 years and that the prices were probably similar to Wal-Mart in the US – so, cheap, but not as good as Mexico’s Wal-Mart, Chedraui.

He pointed to a bottle of water I bought at Oxxo in Cancun and said it would be half the price or less at Chedraui, and that Oxxo and Wal-Mart had about the same prices.  He pointed out a few Chedrauis along the way.

As he asked me some questions about travel and I told him about living in India, it came out that his girlfriend, before he met his wife, was from India.

We got to the hotel and it took us two tries to find the correct lobby (there are 3 lobbies and many, many buildings at the Barcelo Maya!).

I gave him 500 pesos because he did an excellent job, gave me great intel, took me to the bank, and went much further than we had agreed originally.  He gave me his card and I would call him in a second if I needed a guy, but I have the Collectivo system down now and that should suffice.

I may largely skip my time at Barcelo Maya in the chronicles for now.  With a few standout exceptions – each day was the same beautiful paradise, and creature of habit that I am, I did the same stuff almost every day.

Breakfast was my favorite meal.  The scrambled eggs at the buffet were good and it seemed that there was little chance or reason for any of the guests to mix meat utensils there the way it was set up.  They did have omelet stations – but you never know how good a bet those pans are (for meat purity).  I slapped some fantasic, though simple, salsa on top.  The salsa was fresh cut veggies with a little oil and lime juice (not a tomato paste/sauce based style)– mucho caliente!  I got a roll, some fresh cheese cubes of two varieties, some honeydew and cantaloupe, and a light yogurt.  That’s it.  I did that for 9 mornings and it was awesome.  I took 2 bananas with me when I left the buffet and I ate those for lunch.

I think that’s about it for now.  I have left Barcelo Maya!  I am safe in my new location.  The interwebs here is dependable and free.  I am about a mile from “downtown” and about half a mile from the beach – so I expect to be in my room a little more and will finish writing and posting updates a bit more regularly.

Have a great day with the families and the un-wrapping of gifts.

Leave the Old Testament alone today (and as often as you can – at least avoid Leviticus and Deuteronomy!)  Think less about what the church built and more about what Jesus said and did.  Taking a moment to recall that Jesus was not a Christian does not hurt either.

Read a few passages from another religion’s sacred books.  Check out the Eight-fold path, read about the Tao, the Ramayana, Mahabharata, and the Bhagavad Gita are all filled with great stories and insight.  The Bill of Rights is always worth another look…  (We have to live on this ball in space together.)  Them’s my thoughts for now.

Adios!

Mexico Update

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View from my room in Cancun

December 18, 2010

The trip has been lovely so far and I imagine it shall remain so.

I drove through the snow to get to BWI on the 14th, and the coldest day here has been quite comfortable.  Even when the sky has been overcast, the clouds are lovely to watch, as well as their shadows on the water.


I can assure you that this will not be my last trip to Mexico.  One or two people suggested that I make my plane tickets changeable so I could come home early if I wanted to – another inquired what I would do for 23 days of vacation all alone.  I planned on and am accomplishing a gigantic amount of nothing.

I have walked on the beach, sat in the sun, and read two and a half books so far.  I only brought eight so I might have to slow down, though I did locate a fantastic bookstore to check out in Puerto Morelles before I left the US, and I will probably re-read a book I am editing, but I only have that digitally and I don’t care to take my laptop outside the room.  I have not used my phone (aside from some “I am safe” texts to the fam), watched tv, listened to music (that I brought with me I mean – the bands are good here), or had my headphones on since I left the plane.  That has been lovely for my ears as I usually have my headphones on constantly in America.  The internet was free at my hotel in Cancun, but it is 12 bucks a day on the Rivera Maya.  This is the first day I have turned it on and it is slow enough (and liberating to live without it – and to have no need for it) that I may only turn it on again one more time, the day before I leave for the next leg of my trip just to go over arrangements and maps and check back in with the family.

Since this is the first time I have even taken my computer out of the bag (3 days, my personal best in many years – I used to travel with my desktop tower system and at least a 15” crt back in the day), I have not done much writing.  I have made some notes to help me remember a few things, but my handwriting is so terrible and it gets worse all the time, that even I have trouble reading it.  This is my message to the kids – learn good penmanship when you are young, and develop an actual signature.  Somehow it was either never made clear to me, or it simply did not sink in that one’s signature is important.  I do think it is kind of unfair that we need to use (and are frequently judged by) something “vital” to self-identification and officialdom as adults that we come up with when we are wearing blankets as capes.

Before any more info about the trip, I am going to share with you one of the greatest things I have ever seen.  I have loved service workers in general and food service workers in particular for as long as I can remember.  Maybe it is the general default friendliness, maybe it is the relative sameness of the dining experience (not in the generic amercian bland food way, but in the mechanics of the experience) that provided unconscious comfort to a fellow who moved around a lot.  Whatever the cause, I love me some restaurant people.

I was finishing a meal in the buffet area on the 16th and I was watching the busboy do his thing and admiring the system the hotel set-up as well as this guy’s individual chops when he blew my mind.  He was changing a trash bag, something we all have done 5 million times.  He shook it out to fill it with air as the “particular” ones of us tend to do to try and ensure that the bag is actually open in the can, receptive to receiving items and flushed out into the corners.  Being a “particular” sort of fellow myself, I admired (though expected) that he did this.  Then it happened – and this busboy changed my world.

Visualize, if you will.  He shook the bag open semi-filling it with air, then he gave it a quick twist at the top!  Now he was able to very easily fit the bag into the can without having to put his hand down inside the trash-can.  It fit easily and opened all the way because it was full of air.  He quickly untwisted it and sealed it to the edges and was done.  Beautiful.  I almost clapped – but I was too stunned.  I have not seen any of the other guys do this move and I have been watching.  That, my friends, is innovation!

Some details: As I suspected, Cancun is not for me.  This is why I only have two days booked for Cancun total.  But, next time it will be only one, or maybe none.  My flight home is not until 2:30 in the afternoon, but I end my trip down in Tulum which is 2-4 hours from the airport, depending on your mode of transport.  So, the night before leaving, I do want to position myself much closer, but staying in Cancun the day I arrived was totally unnecessary.  I am not much into the discothèque side of life, and it does not seem to me that there is much else to do there in the Hotel Zone.  It was still pleasant to be on the adventure, to have my very own room to sleep in, and to walk on the beach.  Things are just really expensive and kinda fake there.  All the local people I dealt with and talked to were nice.  Most of them are trying a little too hard to get you to buy stuff, but that is to be expected and not really to be held against them.  I am sure it is different in Centro – downtown, and what I saw of Centro confirmed this.  But getting to know a city designed for locals and not tourists tends to take longer than a day.  I like cities, and it may be worthwhile to explore Centro, but I did not want to dedicate the time on this trip to learn the non-touristy sections of Cancun.

I have not jumped feet first into the cheapest local travel yet – the Collectivo, but that time is coming soon.  I had planned to take the ADO bus from the airport to Centro where you change to a local bus for the Hotel Zone.  I liked one of the last guys who talked to me about going in his car instead, and I took a kind of collectivo from the airport to downtown.   The ADO bus was not there yet and there was no sign of it, and we did not pass it leaving the airport either, so while that would have been cheaper, it would have been a longer wait.  He wanted to get me to pay more and let him take me to the Hotel Zone, but I was only willing to do half the compromise.  It was me and two Mexican ladies in the van to Centro, so I also felt good about that – both safety and not getting gouged for being a tourist.

At first I could not figure out the bus station.  I saw all the places to book passage to Rivera Maya and Tulum and elsewhere, but I cold not find what I needed, R1.  Less than an hour on Mexican soil and my brain was not fully into travel mode yet, much less Spanish mode.  I found a friendly looking lady and asked her, and she pointed out the corner to wait on and verified that I bought my ticket from the driver, which was what I was expecting.

I was the only person on the bus going to the Hotel Zone who did not work there, and somehow, it must have been near a shift change because it was totally full and I rode in the stairwell for the first 15 minutes.  If you recall, I set this trip up pretty fast and was largely relying on my traveling wits and a tiny bit of preparation to get around.  The Hotel Zone is a one-way loop, and I knew that my hotel was on the Ocean side and not the Lagoon side, and the trip starts on the lagoon side.  I was safe and fine on the bus, but a little uncomfortable (physically) and truthfully in the way for everyone else.  I remembered that my hotel was near the convention center so I just got off there and did not have to do the entire Hotel Zone loop standing in the way.  But, 8 pesos is a cheap ride.  I used my best guess from what I remembered of the not too highly detailed maps of the area and picked a direction and walked.  Two minutes later I could see the hotel.

The rest of Cancun was largely uneventful.  A little money changing, found a place to buy fruit and water, had a few cervezas, long walk on the beach, broke my brand new camera the exact same way I broke my last camera (there will not be as many pics on this trip as anyone – myself included – was expecting), and had an awesome sleep.  Since I got up at 4am, I think I was out by 9pm.  I enjoyed the wi-fi computing in bed the next morning, had a great walk and some more fruit and then the next part, the “real” vacation began.  But a few more notes on Cancun before that.

I guess everything is not actually super expensive in Cancun, but it is about the same price as things are in America.  At the bank in Cancun, you get 11.9 pesos for a buck.  Tecate and Sol (cheap Mexican beer) are 16 pesos a can at the store.  That is actually more than they cost in the US, though not by much.  An Applebee’s type restaurant (and they were all that type) was showing burgers for about 180-300 pesos depending on the specifics.  I have not bought a burger in a very long time, but I have sadly eaten at these types of places in the US and for a vegetarian, you are paying 15 bucks for not very good food, that probably has some meat contamination anyway.

I did not want to let breaking my camera ruin my trip, and I did not want to obsess about money either, but I am going into debt for 100% of this trip, I was in a bit of a poopy money related mood and I was not going to add to it by overpaying for food I did not even want in the first place – but I was desperately hungry.  Finding the bananas and apples was awesome.  They were probably cheaper than back home.  The bananas were fantastic.  The apples lacked charm or really character of any kind, but they were food.  And that broke the last cord of the foul mood, and the rest of the trip has been really fantastic.

That is it for now.  I will write and share some more after a break for some sun.

Buzzzz Buzzzz Buzzzz

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I have been a busy little beaver, or i guess busy bee goes better with the title.

New resume is done, distributed to 8 senior leaders and several of them have already passed it on to their networks.  I updated the RAI site with this version of the resume, fixed a few things at RAI while i was there, and made a downloadable pdf version so i do not have to have a paper copy with me at all times.

Got my domestic references together and alerted to pending contact.

I have a few mails out to the international crowd to add some of those to the list as well – but at least i can roll with what i have right now.

One meeting is set for Thursday, and i hope to get at least 2 more this week, but the Thursday one is pretty cool.

A few more tasks to complete for MINDS tomorrow, and some shopping, research, and pre-packing.  It looks like i can leave Monday at the latest, but hopefully sooner.

 

 

Buenas Noches!

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Hola Amigos!

Last night’s research on alternatives to the Singapore trip spilled over into this morning.  The original plan is now almost totally dead (put on hiatus – i still want to go) and the back-up plan is now the first string plan.

I was very excited to go and visit my friend in Singapore and then go further into SouthEast Asia, but it does not look like the schedules are going to work out.  My friend is getting delayed, and her two-week vacation for 2010 is valid until the end of January, so she has much more wiggle room than i do.  I really need to be able to be back in the US and either working or looking for work full-time at the dawn of the new year.   I had a great time researching for this trip and that information will not go to waste.

We have been talking about this Singapore/SouthEast Asia trip since 2005 or so, and we will get there one of these days.  I did learn that it is much easier for vegetarians to travel in Thailand and Vietnam than Cambodia – which was interesting and timely.  We actually discussed all three countries, so i do not think it will be a big deal to shift the plans for that trip around.  Eating in Phnom Penh is OK, but once you leave the capital, it gets more complicated, and we both wanted out-of-the-way beach time.  But that is good news.  It is cheap and easy to travel in the region so now i can think about a trip to Phnom Penh for a few of the temples and a sampling of Cambodia and beach time at either or both Vietnam and Thailand.

The present trip however is sunny and closer to home.  I am going to go to Mexico.  At first it was a little disheartening to have to change a long anticipated trip with a buddy in SouthEast Asia to a solo trip to Mexico, but i got over it quickly.  From two months ago up to 2 weeks ago, i could fly round trip to Singapore for about $1400.  Now the cheapest flights are about $2200, and climbing daily.  Round trip to Cancun – about $240.  I still have some more research to do, but i think i will fly into Cancun and go from there.

This is very exciting.  I dusted off my old spanish for travelers books.  I fired up some spanish podcasts, downloaded some free grammar and vocabulary apps, and began working my foreign language muscles. I have found several great sounding and inexpensive lodging options, explored some of the local things to do, and it just feels great in my brain to say it and think it – “i will be on the beach in Mexico in about 10 days!” That gives me a full work week to get through my most critical 3 meetings in DC, though hopefully i can arrange a few more, and a few days for last-minute planning and then i am out!  If i can get everything done in DC Monday or Tuesday – I could be in Mexico on Wednesday or Thursday!!!

I have some more research to do.  Whenever i leave, i want to stay through the new year and come back around the third.  So, i am going to work backwards from that and go for as long as i can afford to.  I expect that i should be able to handle three weeks without too much of a struggle financially.  I want to compare some package deals with the do-it-yourself options i have checked out already.  If i can do a combination of both, that might be good.  I am generally not a “package deal” guy, and these are not generally aimed at single vegetarians – but you never know.  Since i should have about 21 days to play with, i might mix it up. I am not opposed to spending the full time in one place relaxing, but i will probably travel around a little at first to get a better sense of some locations than i have now. Getting an in-country perspective and talking with locals and other travelers will help me flesh out from the general plans i have now. Cancun itself is an X factor.  From the little bit i know now, Cancun seems like a split personality place – romantic trippers/adventurers at some of the places and the rest a bit of an out of control frat party with fewer rules and oversight. I am not going on this trip to bar hop or go clubbing or any of that, so Cancun will probably see very little of my hard-earned credit that i am about to get a job to pay for!  But – you never know.  I do have a fairly specific (though extremely “un-programmed”) trip planned already, i just have some hesitancy about throwing it up on the web for all to see until i get back.

I do not have a lot of money, and with where my head is at right now, and since i am going alone, i am really looking forward to low-key experiences.  I want to walk/run on the beach, swim, read on the beach, unpack/blowout my head, and do some writing.  I am interested in snorkeling and diving and other adventurous things, but i think i will save those for a better funded trip with a companion of some kind.  Three weeks of little-to-no responsibility, agenda, deadlines, objectives, or obligations sounds awesome right now.  I can’t know exactly what my next job will entail, but i know quite a bit about the world i am about to re-enter and this may be my last chance for full relaxation for a little while.

I made great resume progress today and it is good enough to go now, but i have not seen Vance’s edits yet.  We talked for two hours tonight about timing our work tomorrow and talked through interview questions and remembered jobs we have done and crafted language.  I have to force myself to sleep tonight (the excitement is hugely distracting) so i can get up early and get to it.  Vance and i will finish workshopping the resume, and i will put in the final edits.  I have to write three specific business mails and send that out with the resume, then craft a form letter version for other colleagues, and a third version that is for a less personal audience.  I have a few tasks to finish for MINDS and a report to write for the BOD.  And there is loads of fun to be had with the research and the language study.

I am looking forward to something like this…

Christmas 2004 - Wakra, Qatar

…though it will be a little less hairy this time, followed by lots of this…

MILIPOL - Doha, 2004

…also with less hair – though i do fit in that suit again now!

 

Bits and Pieces

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Another random mash-up today.

Future Work:

I got some excellent resume feedback from two non-local editors and went over that material with my local editor.  I did not get to incorporate all the changes yet, but should be on track with that tomorrow morning.  I shared more details of my plan with my dad and he is also confident that things will work out.

I may come back to some of this when more free time appears out of nowhere, but this is the general idea:

Finish resume and send out to certain sources tomorrow, and call a few interested parties for possible meeting times.  Do a little interview/job talk prep and practice Sunday.  Go to meetings in DC (hopefully) Mon, Tue, Wed – as needed. At a meeting on the 18th, my dad spread the word about my job search and several of our colleagues were interested and three requested that we meet after Thanksgiving and before Christmas, for specific projects to begin soon.

Finish travel planning and leave for Singapore as soon as possible – probably around the 12th (hopefully sooner).  About one week in Singapore, then off to Cambodia for about 2 weeks, back to Singapore for a few days, then back to the US.  Finish securing new job and move to location (in/near DC) convenient for new job.

The wild card in the travel plan is my friend in Singapore.  It is the end of the year and pre-vacation crunch time and they are in and out of time zones from London to Australia, so getting time to finalize things has been difficult.  I am brewing up secondary options in case the first trip concept falls through.  It will involve warm, beach, cheap, and probably not in USA – maybe Mexico/South America…

Webwork:

I did not finish the resume work for a few reasons, one of which is that i spent the better part of today updating and fixing lots of tiny issues on one of the sites i built and maintain.  The Board of Directors had a meeting this week and that usually results in some tasks for me, so i tend to schedule regular site maintenance around these times when i will need to look under the hood anyway.  It is not perfect, but this is one of my favorite sites that i have ever worked on.  It looks both professional and pretty. The navigation is reasonable.  And it remains fairly easy to change and expand.  I still have tasks on my short, mid, and long-term lists for this site, and i have some bigger overhaul/redesign concepts and tasks on deck as well, but those never go away no matter how well you design and build.

Geeky Tech talk Revisited:

In the last post i talked about google chrome.  I used Chrome most of the day today and i figured out some more of the personalizing to try to put it on par with Firefox.  Of all the extensions i installed that i have had time to play with, the Ad Blocker is the clear winner.  All the ad problems i referenced have disappeared. {And there was much rejoicing – (5 points…).} The other two key custom features i miss from Firefox are clocks and weather.  I did find semi-reasonable replacements.  The weather one is almost as good and easy. I can still glance at my browser – click nothing – and know the temp, which is useful before dog walking.  I have to train myself to look top right instead of bottom right, and there is less info available in that quick glance with the Chrome extension than there is in the Firefox add-on, but it is ok.

The difference maker may end up being the functionality of world clocks. In Firefox, i can glance at the bottom left of my browser and know what time it is in as many places as i like.  I don’t do quite as much varied international calling or business calling in the US as i used to, but it is really nice to glance down and see West Coast, Texas, London, Dubai, Doha, Delhi, and Singapore at once with no clicks.  The extension i settled on for now in Chrome lets you add as many clocks as you want, but you cannot move/re-order them.  So if your needs change, the list becomes disorganized or you have to delete your entries and add them back according to your chronological or geographic preferences.  And you have to click the icon to bring up the list.  The second fault, having to click instead of seeing them displayed on a bottom status bar, is not really a deal breaker (and i imagine Chrome will have to add something like this in the near future if they want to increase market share).  But the lack of reordering/editing capability is a killer.  I can’t be fussed to delete and rebuild these lists every time my needs change and if i have to talk regularly with someone in Germany or Australia for a few months, and then i need Israel – you get the idea.
(Though i imagine the developer might fix these as well…).

I love computers.  I used to build them (assemble really).  If i am not building them, i do custom order the parts of machines i buy.  Now that i have finally made it into macland (over a year!!), i still love hardware, the choices are just easier and simpler and require so much less research and support time from me.

Where the magic happens...


A little resume and lots of geeky tech talk

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A) I finished a reasonable draft of my resume last night, crafted for the current first phase of the job hunt, and have it out to three editors.  I was jazzed and could not get to sleep until about 3:45 this morning, so i am a little tired.  Once i incorporate the feedback i will have it online should you wish to: read it for pleasure, help with edits, hire me…  You can read the old version if you like.

Initially, i will simply replace this existing resume with the new one, but i am also crafting a narrative style bio for the web to replace the resume. Though for ease until i get hired somewhere else, i will probably implement a ‘download pdf resume’ button.  With the resume “nearly done”, i can press forward with slightly less unsavory tasks – finishing re-writing the rest of the RAI website.

Meeting of the MINDS - DC 2004

B) I am still working on transitioning to a self-hosted environment for this blog.  So far i am still stalled at the initial phase.  I have all the pre-pre work done, but the true first step “install WordPress on your website” – that one is still holding me up.  I did find and fix a slight (though probably inconsequential) error in the sample php config document the comes with the WordPress install download package, that you have to edit so that it will talk to your MySQL database, but that has not made everything groovy yet.  I do think it could have helped because i am getting different error messages than i was before.  I thought i had this all figured out, but i took a shortcut that may or may not have made any difference.  After deleting all the old install files from my site, and deleting the first database as well – in order to do a fresh and clean install, i assigned many of the same values in the new (second) database that i used in the first database.  Probably should not matter, but i do not really know what was wrong the first time, so i am trying to catch any useful details.  Today i shall start again.

C) Related to B) a little bit – web browsers.  I decided to try checking out the self-hosted blog in a wider variety of browsers instead of just 2 – Firefox which is my browser and Seamonkey which is my web design platform.  At least it has been for html – i do not yet know if i will need something else to develop php and css chops because i have not started figuring all that out yet.  So far in the reading, it seems that PHP and CSS are done more by actual coding than the GUI html approach dominant in the past, so people are doing it in simple text editors.  The nicest part of starting over with an issue like webdesign is that this is not a bad time to be doing it.  People have figured out a lot of mistakes made and have largely agreed on some decent standards.  So, i hope to continue to learn more about designing to current standards and getting rid of some old crap like the prevalence of tables in html designs.

I installed Chrome for the first time and dusted the cobwebs off of Safari.  I have never really liked Safari.  It works fine, but i don’t like the way it looks, you can’t customize your tool/nav bars as easily as some others, and i really hate the way it deals with and displays bookmarks.  I have used Chrome before on other people’s machines, and i figured that what i did not like were things i could fix through preferences on any machine of mine, and i had a good feeling about it since i like most things google makes.  I think that the gmail web interface is the only thing google makes that i do not like.  I love gmail, it just always bothered me that google decided i did not need folders anymore and i cold not have them.  Since i have been working in a fully portable high-powered laptop environment for a decade or so, i don’t need the web interface and I solved this by using gmail in the mail client of my choosing, formerly Thunderbird while i was still stuck with Windows, and now Mac Mail.

It was interesting to note that the self-hosted blog looked different in the different browsers.  Actually it looks the same in every browser except Firefox.  The blog would load in Firefox but would not in the other browsers.  The error messages i could see were useful, but still interesting that they did not come up in Firefox (and for other geeks out there, it was not a cookie or cache issue).

I enjoyed using Chrome.  It was super quick to set-up and i got it customized to about 90% of where i wanted it to be inside of 5 minutes.  I have not yet researched the last 10% but i bet it is possible.  Chrome looks slick and things work well, and having google search incorporated into your address bar is awesome.  I have only been playing with it for a few hours, but i don’t understand why all the ads?  There are ads at the bottom of people’s posts in my google reader, ads on my facebark, ads on some search pages, and it frustrates me.  Admittedly, i may be spoiled, but this does not happen to me in  Firefox. In Firefox, i have no ads in google reader ever. I have no ads on facebark ever, and i have no ads on search pages.  The ad banner that loads at the top of “free hosting” accounts with godaddy (which is where my self-hosted blog lives for now until i see if it is worth paying for) – i don’t even see that banner in Firefox.  I may look into seeing if i can cut the ads out of Chrome, but i bet not.  Mozilla has a different mandate than google.  I can’t blame google for wanting to make money, but i don’t want to see the ads.  It is a slippery slope between having a few ads and becoming godaddy.*

*Note – do a host provider write-up soon to get input on what other people are using.

Summation:

Hopefully you guys will help me with resume feedback after the new one gets posted.

Hopefully i can get WordPress to install correctly today.

I will play with chrome a little more, but most likely i am sticking with Firefox.

Godaddy frustrates me very much, but it is like having an old car and not being able to afford a new car.  Do you stick with the one you have, fixing the things you know are broken, or do you buy a different used car having no idea what is about to break on that?  Further discussion pending…

The ladies of Red Bull - Doha 2005

Yesterdays (in keeping with the recent Billie Holiday theme)

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The past few days have been pretty weird.  There is a cloud of multi-flavored nostalgia following me around – sometimes it rains good memories, sometimes bad feelings, and not a few lightning storms of unresolved issues.

I sent two emails to family members to follow-up on some thanksgiving conversations.  One dealt with web design and made me think about my guys in India and my success and failures there.  Our corporate websites and domain names expired quite recently and were not renewed.  I have not really done much with any of those companies in two years, and the websites were not very good – they served more as examples of why I chose to leave than as examples to steer international customers to our shop – but it is still sad to see them go.  I do still talk with my partner Ram regularly and we still talk about and share business ideas, and I do still plan to start more companies outside the US, so you never know what may happen in the future.  The patient was on the table for a long time before anyone had the guts to call it, but the “death” of Red Bananas is still sad.

Me and RamKamal - family celebration at an employee's house
Me, Vijayraj, Ramkaml, and Govind - the birth of Red Bananas

I played some harmonica during thanksgiving which led to a discussion that revealed that a few folks did not know I played harmonica in a metal band for a few years.  So, I wrote a brief thing on being in a metal band and gave a link to the band’s MySpace page which has a few sample tracks, one of which has me playing harp. I had to find a very brief way to mention in the mail to my cousin that this MySpace site does not have my name anywhere.  Truthfully, I am not really sure why that is.  We had a very nice run together.  Things got a little tense between two of us towards the end of my run in the band, some of it musical/band related – some of it personal, but I don’t get it.  So, it just brought up memories of bad times a little more than good times trying to figure out something that I don’t think I ever could figure out.  I try to focus more on the good memories; touring, performing, bathing in creeks, cooking food in parking lots on camp-stoves, feeding XstraightXedgeX kids, coining the catchphrase we put on our business cards “…the straight edge metal band that drinks”, performing on the radio live, playing CBGB, getting to open for Sliang Laos!, and all the rest of the great shows and good times.

I have been thinking about a few cyber-reconnects with folks from the past recently.  Some are comical and fun and some can be confusing.  I have two cyber friends that one could qualify as long lost loves {the loved from afar, love your best friend, never really worked out kinda loves – not the other kind(s)}.  Sometimes it is a little tempting to drop the “so what the hell happened” bomb, but that is actually way more fun to think about (which is not a lot of fun) than it would be to do.  I have been on the other side of some somewhat similar coins, and have actually put some time into thinking how I might answer such a question as well as wondering if I should prepare and freely offer up this info, and the answers just are not fulfilling for the “injured” party.   What can anyone say: I just did not love you, I did not love you the way you loved me, I was a stupid kid and wanted some hot semi-random sex more than poetry and flowers, i did not know you cared, i did not know i was that important to you, your intensity scared me, I did not realize it was such a big deal for you, I know you think you loved me but you did not even know me, I was a big fat faker and did not really know who I was, you did not know who you were, seriously – how could you have loved me, you are great and I was in a terrible place, this is great but i learned i do not want it – take a few minutes and you can continue to fill in this list, none of the answers, even the deeply true ones, provide comfort or itch that place inside you that still needs scratching.

One of these lost loves was with a lady who did have some real problems and seems to be doing very well today.  It makes me really happy to see that, and it makes me want to say that, but I don’t have confidence that I can do it without in the end (or the middle, or near the beginning) turning it around and making it about me – or the me I was then, which by default, makes me try to make her into the her she was then, and that is (in simplistic terms) the person in the time that was having the troubles that I am supposedly so glad that they have overcome?!  And it all gets twisted and fracked up pretty quick.  So, I step away from the keyboard and just be happy from afar.

In part I bring up the “love stuff” because I did get that call recently – the “what in the hey-heck-ho-de-do happened” call and I am not entirely sure how to respond.  This kind of area is one of the only ones in which I have issues wrestling with “the truth”.  In almost every circumstance, I do believe that the truth is the best policy, if for no other reason than it gives you less stuff to remember.  But there is some distinction between leaving things out and lying, and I never know how to deal with this.  When I look back, it seems that all of my “high-minded” attempts to save someone’s feelings by hiding some of the truth did not work out too well.  But this is a different kind of thing.  I am not so much troubled by trying to obfuscate real issues to ease the blow, I am struggling to leave out stuff that is probably not useful or relevant but just hurtful (though entirely true) that I am tempted to say out of my hurt and anger.

And, I have not been in this situation for some time.  I have only really dated two people since about 2000 – one in 2006 for a few months, and one for about a year from 09-10.  There was also one brief fling in the early aughts, and one false start in a long line of false starts with a recurring love interest from high school in 04, and what could have been a complicated sticky international potentially un-requited love mash-up in 05, but – for once – I kept my mouth shut, silently loved from afar, and enjoyed the friendship.

All of these things are fogging up my brain and I am trying to figure out how to vacuum up the thoughts, send them to the right place and make room to get back to work at looking for work.  The situation is getting desperate now as I continue to run out of money and lose sanity living with my folks.  I am still on my most recently developed timetable and things can still fall in line if I manage to hold down my end and put forth appropriate effort, but like sands through the hourglass, these are the times that try men’s souls – or however that goes…

Grrrrr

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Today, I am recovering from the thanksgiving trip: laundry, general office admin, back-up the “new” digital Billie Holiday, catch up on some correspondence and article reading.  I need to implement the resume changes i have made mentally into the actual world, but i am a bit drained today.  In order to stay productive, i thought it would be a good day to activate my self-hosted WordPress blog.

I re-read all the instructions from a few sources as well as a few user testimonial/tutorial/feedback articles.  The process was easy and simple – up to a point.

I did not like the idea of having to create a new user to activate and complete the install of WordPress and access my blog.  I already have a user account.  I know that technically these are two separate things and they have no way to talk to each other directly, but it still bugs my brain.  And, i know that i can set-up the “new user” the exact same way as the “old user” and not really feel any difference.  But like i say – it just bugged me.

Of course, it does not look like my blog once i do finish the install, it looks like a brand new blog template – duh, i have not uploaded any of my content yet – but i take a little tour, and the horrors begin.

Ok, these are actually small on the scale of “horrors”, but in terms of little digital bastards i now have to fight – they are pretty big to me.  The horror is two pronged: I think it involves a (probably simple) issue with the php admin file (and I don’t really know anything about php, so I do not know how to find any errors) – and I do not know the right words to use to describe the rest of the problem appropriately so that google will tell me what to do next.

The short version: my admin page is all fracked up.  Instead of the standard view I am used to from using the WordPress hosted blog, there is no header/title bar with drop down menus, there is no narrow nav bar on the left with two “content pane columns” in the middle and on the right.  What I have is a giant ball of text.  It is not exactly like reading code, but it is close.  The GUI is all munged up so that all the “weeee” is gone and I am left with just the “goo”.

When you read this mangled mass of words, you do see that it seems that the key nav structure is still sort of present, but it is very different.  And, when you do click on anything like “Posts” or “Themes”, the “new” information comes down at the bottom of this long jumbled list of words, and that too is jumbled and difficult to read and use.

So, I am frustrated.  I did a little bit of searching for terms like “wordpress install admin panel problem” – adding/changing with “self hosted, dashboard, godaddy, php” – none of these lead me towards anything like my issue – so far.

One site I forgot to bookmark during research (grrr) referenced something about (paraphrase) “when you change the php admin page make sure not to do X, Y, and Z, and if your page does not display correctly there is probably space before this initial set of symbols or after this set of final symbols”.

I did nothing but what I was instructed when I edited my php page, but I did read all the stuff there and noted that the initial and final sets of symbols were not the same or mirror images of one another as I would expect.  But I can’t find that page and again, I don’t have the proper vocabulary to describe this stuff well enough (especially when I am frustrated).

So, I did get this blog exported and imported, and I thought I might as well go ahead and slap the right theme on, but there was again thwarted by the nearly impossible to use flawed admin panel.

I gave up and went to practice some golf.  That started off well.  I was hitting my 9 iron straight (mostly) and pretty near the pin.  Then with about 6 balls left, I switched to the driver.  On my second ball, the shaft broke where it meets the club-head and my club-head went about 75 yards down the range.

I tried to shake it off and went to do short chips around the putting green.  That went better and after 120 short chips (good results), I packed it in and came home to write, eat, do something else and start again tomorrow.

I have to, have to, have to, do resume work first thing tomorrow morning once i “clock-in”.  But, when I do get back to the blog issues, I will first do a re-download, unzip, and upload of the WordPress files.  If that don’t work, I will try another search for sample php pages (today’s searches did not lead me to the opening and closing symbols section) or just general php writing info.  I will probably re-do the php page in question and see where that leaves me.

Or – I will discover that some smart person has replied to this entry and told me the magic answers!!??!

No mo bed head - 1
No mo bed head - 2
No mo bed head - 3