Near the Powell Street BART Station.
March 11th, 1999

Weekend or No
They're finishing up working on the house, getting it ready to turn over to the broker to sell. They came into my apartment yesterday to work on the ceiling above my bathtub (with my permission, no problem there), but they left taking the bathtub plug with them leaving bits of plaster and dirt inside the tub itself. The plaster and dirt I can clean up. Life is short and I don't want to waste it being upset over the little shit, but taking the plug pisses me off. Having said that, I'll get along with it, but why take the bathtub plug? Are they trying to tell me something? I'm betting on stupidity, but you never know.

My attitude has been pretty good. When I was younger and I felt this Last weekend at Union Square in
        San Francisco.way, particularly on a weekend, I'd take a few drinks to slow me down. Don't drink anymore for reasons I don't know, so I guess I'm just going to have to put up with it. I know, this sounds cute, patty cake happy talk that usually makes you want to puke, but to some degree its true. I'll have to think about it. Not so much feeling good, whatever that means, but letting go a little, not worrying about this or that and just going with the ball. My ball, not much of a ball, but the ball, none the less. Feels good. Be curious to see where it wants to go.

We have a meeting once a month of the internal web masters within the company and we exchange information, the tools we're using, the projects we're working on. My page(s) are pretty straight forward static HTML get the information out things, but some of the others are developing serious stuff, patching together programs to push information out to our clients on the fly, interfacing the mainframe and the Oracle databases to the web. Projects that take programmer years to accomplish, juggling things at the bleeding edge without any signposts.

You hear people talk about how the world is changing with the information Mirror at Rockridge BART Station. revolution. Productivity is up, employment is up, inflation is down and that sounds great and you nod your head and space out and think about something else. Then you attend a meeting like the one today and realize there are people throughout my own company, let alone throughout the world, who are working on things that are in themselves revolutionary, that will replace in one step business that has been conducted in the same way for a hundred years.

We are out on the edge with this stuff, its the way we've always worked in IT, but there are others competing as well, scruffy little folks without a clue, of course, but scrambling none the less on our tail. And this is happening everywhere all around the world. Weird, I really don't have a clue. Better have a drink, I think, weekend or no.


 
The banner photograph was taken last weekend in San Francisco. A photographer should say thanks to the gods when he runs across someone sitting on a corner spray painted gold (or blue, or green, or orange, or chartreuse) and playing at being a statue. People like these understand what a photograph is about. Thank you and be well.

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