Let there be travel... again!

Whoa. The last week and a half has been work work work. I know I talk about how low key my job can be sometimes, but when we throw down the work, we really do it. All of the sudden I have five projects to work on all at once, and in several timezones.

The main project is for a publisher in Cincinnati, so guess where I am going next Wednesday? Strangely enough Cincinnati's airport is in Kentucky and our client is on the NE side of Cincinnati. I'm only staying for two nights, so probably the most I'll see of the city is when I pass through it in a cab. There's a slight possibility of going into town on Thursday, unless the client wants to take us to dinner. Here's what my unofficial, official travel-guide Fodor's has to say about Cincinnati. And here's a wiki page. Now you know.

What will I be doing, you ask? We're doing an analysis workshop to help them movie from a print-centric publishing model to a single-source publishing model (so they can send out their content into web pages, cell phones, etc). If you're interested in this you can read along at one of my other blogs, The War on Error - a publishing blog. Don't go if you aren't into publishing. You'll be bored. And I need to add more content soon.

Aside from that I am working on a project to automate some publishing software for a company in Australia that makes music lessons. Also, maybe doing some XML training for a company in Washington D.C. I am not even daring to think that I might get to go to Australia this year. That would require a vacation. What happens if I go on walkabout and never return? National Geographic readers will point at pictures of the extremely pale dude playing the didgeridoo next to the natives and remark how badly I need to wash my hair.

Guess it has been a while since I last wrote. Life has mostly been work and play lately. Dawn and I are still enjoying Dallas greatly. We work a lot, then we go out and have fun a lot. We've been working out a lot too - not as much as we want of course, but well more than we did during most of our existence in San Antonio. We make up for it by eating a lot of really good Dallas food with our cohorts Tom and Jen and a few of the other folks we've met. We play World of Warcraft a lot, for stimulating and often bizarre social interactions with the online gaming world. And we slay much evil and are rewarded with phat loot. Shout out to Div, with whom I aggro lots of skettis for epic flying mount rep. Don't worry if that didn't make sense to you.

In closing you will note I am on a different blog server than the one I used for NASA stuff. I'm not terribly happy with blog software these days and since I don't have time to write the code for one myself, I switch around a lot. I'll be posting my travel stuff here for the Cincinnati trip, at least, so check back - put the link for this site in your Favorites, Bookmarks, or whatever the kids call it these days. Check in, anytime. I'll write more stuff about me in here as well, as opposed to stuff about NASA, although you might see some of that here too.

Well that came out of nowhere

Why does my perception of the world seem so fast these days? I got up this morning, early, and we (Dawn, Tom, Jen, and I) went walking on the Katy Trail. I noticed how cold it was, and breezy, and how felt that certain sense of "morning-ness" that you get when you are out walking in the dark on a cold-brisk morning. It's a very different sensation than the conditioned daily office air.

Despite the fresher experience of the walk, I still feel like I was focused just off-center. Like my perception was just behind the present moment. Or just ahead. I didn't feel saturated in the moment like I used to when I was younger. I remember being outside in rainstorms and just feeling the sensation of the storm in the moment -- not when it was going to be done or what happened before. I remember playing outside and feeling a spacious moment around my activities.

Now it seems like everything is so fast - even the slow things, like my focus is always somewhere else. But that somewhere is nowhere.

Then there's other times like when I'm playing WoW where I feel like my attention is hyperfocused and I can handle vast amounts of information happening to me in a single moment. So it's not like I don't have practice or can't handle it... but I just often feel like I am floating just behind or ahead of myself. What's up with that?

Maybe we are all in such a keyed state of hyper-attention we forget the moment point. Or, we haven't accellerated up to the keyed state we are capable of achieving and the off-focus feeling is just wind resistance.

Hmmm. I dunno.

Meanest Mom

Of course I don't mean my own mom.

Check this out - a mom sells her son's car because there was alcohol in it:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/wayoflife/01/09/mean.mom.ap/index.html

Sometimes come around here some more

OK. Well. I spent the last couple years on my auxiliary blog, and now I am feeling like I need a more accessible blog for others to contribute to and read. As a bonus, Blogger, in the last couple years, has added a lot of features I like - such as the update from email feature. I can use this to compose in the way I do to most of my family and friends and just include blogger as a recipient, and voila my post appears. Gonna try this out for a bit.

So. That's it for now. More soon.

Don't come around here no more.

In case you were wondering, I don't hang out here as much as I used to. I have my auxiliary blog that I like better and I've been posting there more, so go on over and go catch up!

http://spaces.msn.com/members/auxumbilicus/

Regards,
Michael

Dog's Breakfast.

This morning I woke up abrubtly in the midst of a REM cycle... either one of the cats woke me up by "stretching" (which entails knocking something big to the hardwood floors) or Dawn was reminding me I needed to get going to get to work.

In any case, I woke up stupefied... felt like I was returning from another dimension, my IQ reduced to a mere 4 or so points. I stared at the cat, trying to find something in my head to connect with. Then I stared at Dawn and did the same thing. Something on NPR was talking about terrorism or Bush or big oil companies or the Amazon or something. All things are related.

Shortly, my mind followed suit with my body, yet I remain sluggish today. An appopriate mood to write in.

Reflecting over yesterday's post on originality, I have to commend my new friend Marius on reminding me originality is difficult at best and that one should just do what they do very well. That's good advice, actually. The conflict of being an idealist is that I seem to always need to see the bad side to see the good. This means putting down originality to make my own thoughts seem more than they are, perhaps. I also appreciated his comments about my positive influence on him regarding NASA -- I think we can find a good balance in our discussions and end up with a realistic perspective of NASA. If we do it just right, we may open a wormhole to the future and then go live in a more enlightened age where going to space is easy, fun, and etc. It takes a good person to admit a perspective shift. Marius, you rock.

So I guess I need to figure out what I do well. Hehehe those who know me will be amazed, but I absolutely suck at math. I am good at abstract problem solving (abstract analysis, as found in Calculus) but I never got past Algebra 1 and really was only passed in high school geometry from sheer pity. I decided if I am going to be engineer-like (do I want to be?) I need some better math skills. Since I work for an educational test publisher, we have a pretty badass library and I checked out a textbook to study from. Sheesh. Maybe carpentry. I can't escape the math, either way!!

Someone else at work who I respect said that I have the very rare talent of being a creative technical thinker. I like hearing other people's perspectives on this because to me it seems like an endless stream of complex issues that needs solving by people who aren't familiar with thinking galactic-scale in an infrastructure not suited to innovation. To those at work who are following my blog to find a way to fire me for talking bad about work -- well, I am not necessarily talking about work: I am talking about the world, sometimes. And if I was talking about work (I don't claim I am) wouldn't we want to change that anyway?

Another thing we idealists do: bring in the World when we should bring in only a blade of grass. Everything is interrelated, so a blade of grass leads to... the cosmos (insert space music here). Bringing me back from Earth (I vacation in a little gas giant system in the crab nebula) is a very good idea to help balance the frustration of thinking too large.

So I don't know. Yesterday was frustration with originality. Today is accepting originality as something that's been SO done before. :) Time to go on and do my own damn thing really well.

For goodness sake, someone please tell me what 'WOOT' stands for. Everyone uses it. Not to change the subject.

P.S. I am reading a good book by Greg Bear called "Moving Mars". It's a sweet book published in the early 90s about a future Mars and a science experiment that changes humankind forever. A good, technical read. Pick it up! Do it!!

Originality.

I've been "away" for a while, working on my companion blog, about NASA and the Space Shuttle, and so on.

During this experience and in other areas of my life, I've been grappling with the idea of originality. I realize in an atomic way, my actions and thoughts and so on are unique and original: no one else has the same thoughts and actions in this moment in time as I do, and is therefore original.

This does not really satisfy, however, because thought concepts about what I think about already exist, or other people are better at it than I am. Example:

Throughout my space blog, I starting thinking of space advocacy groups and discovered there already is one. I also thought I was creating a cool blog, but there's other sites that are devoted to space with much more detail and resource than me.

So, what am I contributing? Yes, it's my unique perspective on it all, but how does that further the cause or how does that benefit anyone? For me, it's expression of writing what I experience and hopefully inspiring others (and myself).

Oh well. Here I am again, a new post, a new day, a return to blogger. Let's see what happens.