With Apologies To Pee Wee King, Chilton Price, and Redd Stewart

I’m responsible for the software that keeps track of our town’s collections, water, real-estate, and motor vehicle excise bills, as well as parking tickets, and most recently assumed co-responsibility for printing the bills as well, so repurposing The Duprees You Belong To Me made sense.

See the water bills along the Nile

Parking tickets step out in style and

Real-estate payments begin to smile ’cause

They belong to me.

Excise service warrants wet with rain

You owe a bundle, and that’s a shame

But pay your bill on time to avoid the pain and

They belong to me

I’m still working on the rest of the lyrics. I find it helpful to bring a positive attitude to work.

And here is the original.

Who’s Navigating In There?

I work with a Vietnam Vet, who, the other day, told me it was okay not to be able to do the things I’ve been doing for years. I think my friend’s being a vet is important, because if he could survive that, his advice seemed to carry a little more clout.

You know the kinds of things we used to do, but cannot do as well now. Removing all the snow from around your house in blizzard conditions, clearing all the neighbors walkways, and generally being Mr. Good Guy of the neighborhood are at the top of my list.

I do not know exactly what it was, but during all these heroics during our recent Blizzard of 2013, something happened to my left foot. I think it might have been taking a Mt. Everest mountain climbing step onto a huge snow pile, or not drinking enough fluids at work.

Either way, my left big toe joint — that is the metatarsophalangeal, or MTP joint really became inflamed. My gait changed,  because I had to stay off my left foot. I went into my doctor, and took a cane. Mr doctor thought I might have gout, and tried to get fluid out of the joint with a needle, not a pleasant experience. Good news, there was no fluid, so gout was unlikely. It’s probably tendonitis, he said. We will see.

I have not been in my thirties for years, but I still feel that way. I am not willing to surrender, at least not yet. But, is it wise to let the older me provide some navigational advice? Will he keep me off the large ice mountain, and make sure I drink my fluids? We’ll see.

Technical Experience and Opposite Directions

Starting out in the computer industry, especially when I became a full-fledged software engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation in June 1985, meant doing lots of work. In software development, that meant writing a lot of program code, technical documentation, and tests. I was getting experience, doing the work I loved to do. That did not change too much over the next eighteen years, except the projects became more complicated, and responsibilities increased. But, I still got to write software.

Now, my technical experience is taking me a way from the technical tasks I enjoy. I review RFIs (Request for Information) and RFPs (Request for Proposal), a couple of tools municipalities use to go eventually out to bid for a product or service, and I had better be good at it, or my lack of reviewing will either scuttle or hamper the project. Even worse, not reviewing well won’t scuttle or hamper the project but scuttle me instead.

But I find it very curious that the more technical we become and the more experience we acquire, the less time we spend doing the tasks that got us there in the first place.

The Printer and The Mailman

Long before my time working for a municipality, our department, the Information-Technology-was-once-called-data-processing department came under an enchantment (of sorts). Our department started delivering interoffice mail between our building and another. Then came payroll and vendor check delivery. The person who printed the tax bills also had the mail and check delivery duties as well.

Well, at the end of last year, the person responsible for those duties retired, and I assumed the bill printing and part of mail delivery. Fortunately, my days as a mail delivery person are about to come to a close. IT work is very interrupt driven, and delivering mail cuts into working on issues. And for the software development and sustaining engineering part of my responsibilities, that time is cut into as well. At the end of the month, mail delivery will no longer our department’s responsibility, and that is a good thing.

Now, the printing is another matter. That is going to be outsourced. Normally, outsourcing jobs is a sore point with me, but if you saw what has to be done to print parking ticket notices, motor vehicle excise, real-estate, and water bills, you would understand very quickly why it should be outsourced. The half-time job is a full time duty.

And although we have a wonderful template based program called Planet Press (a product of Objectif Lune) that helps design, modify, and print the bills , the task of printing bills is nudgy, time consuming, and requires a lot of checking. The only good part of printing the bills is using the Duplo Folding Machine. When it is doing its thing, it makes a delightful, slightly-addictive, thwack, thwack, thwack sound.

But, hopefully, within a year, that job will go away, too, and I’ll have more time to fix programming bugs, occasionally write new software, and do other system administrative-related stuff.

Director of Printing and Engraving

Uh, oh! It’s time for another one of those shepherding out one technology for another periods in my life. Eleven years ago, it was automating a radio station. I helped write a scheduler, my first and worst database project, which allowed people to order songs they want played throughout the day. Inevitably it led to fewer jobs.

Now, it is bill printing’s turn. One of my colleagues is retiring, and he’s been printing the tax and utility bills since before I got here. We are eventually going to outsource the bill printing, but it takes time to find the right vendor, not to mention modifying all the billing programs to create the right kind of output required by the vendor. So, it’s my time to see this old technology out the door.

You might be saying to yourself, what’s wrong with that? Have you ever printing 2,000 water, 14,000 real-estate, or several thousand motor vehicle excise bills? And, they have to go through a folder. Well, there goes my software development schedule.

As my boss said this morning, I’m now Director of Printing and Engraving.

Visual High Tech Elixir

Feeling down? One thing that might help is a large computer monitor. Despite the trend towards smart phones, smart tablets, and more, you are still seeing the world in miniature. For me, nothing beats seeing things large.

After years of feeling guilty, I finally asked for and received a 24″ rectangular monitor at work. The brand/model is an Acer V243H. It’s a thing of beauty and frightening enormity. Now, almost my entire computer world including mistakes, pestering email requests, software-under-edit, and more can appear at once on my screen just like musical theatre.

So my reality might not have gotten better, but I have been able to dupe myself safely into thinking everything is big and rosy.

It is great living large.

Halloween Includes Dru

Happy Halloween

From Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s second season, is a wonderful Halloween episode. It contains truly funny dialogue between  Drusilla played by Juliet Landau and Xander Harris played by Nicholas Brendan. It’s one of my favorite episodes if for no other reason, it is humorous.

“Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered (#2.16)” (1998)

Drusilla: Your face is a poem. I can read it.
Xander: Really? It doesn’t say “spare me” by any chance?

Drusilla: How do you feel about eternal life?
Xander: We couldn’t just start with a coffee?

Spaghetti Hawk

In their native habitat, Lovebirds eat millet and sorghum. In captivity, we struggle to get Lovebirds, other members of the parrot family, as well as finches and canaries as close to nature’s diet as possible. Our Cockatiel and Lovebird eat mash made of brown rice and other grains, as well as Nekton vitamins, fresh corn and carrots.

Pookie The Cockatiel prefers junk food, if he can get it, which is almost never. His preferred junk food is potato chips, but he’s been kept away from that stuff, and is 21 years old as of October 12, 2012.

Zephy, our slate gray Lovebird, likes rice and spaghetti, as this picture shows. Pookie is very non-chalant about his comings and goings, and is literally a ninja bird, if he chooses to be still and invisible.

Zephy, on the other hand is right out there, declaring her desires about everything, including dinner.

A Lovebird in her [almost] native habitat raiding the fruits of a spaghetti dinner

True Grid

I admit that when I am not at work, I’m like a Toyota Prius at a traffic light. The engine goes off; and only the display seems lit up. Taking care of the birds, gardening, and doing various other errands starts the engine up once again.

In the good old days, when 1200 and 2400 bps modem dial-up lines were the rage, and Digital Equipment Corporation paid for a second telephone line into your home, I was not as connected to my job. I spent a lot of time at my job, but when vacation time arrived, that time really was a vacation; I was not tethered to work.

Then came email; followed by cell phones. Those were followed quickly by ISDN, a clean, dedicated 56K bps line into your home, and ISDN was followed closely by the first DSL lines. The work tether bridge building had begun. Today, we are in constant contact, tethered together almost like the Borg.

Recently, I tried to take my October vacation. It started off with my working both weekend days on a nasty problem involving a root kit virus and a mail list server. The problem is still not solved completely, though people can use the list server for its intended purpose. We still have another weekend ahead to complete the job.

Then, I made the mistake of answering an email on Monday. Why I logged in to view my email was neither my boss’ requirement nor anyone else’s. It was just habit. After that, I went off the grid, and have not listened to a work voice message nor read a work email since.

In most businesses, let alone municipal government, staffing just meets demand or is not enough. A lot of people might not want to believe that about municipalities, but it is true. I am virtually the only person who does what I do, and while I am working to change that — even involving some job risk in the process — nothing changes immediately. So, I am essentially on call, unless my vacation includes going to Antarctica or North of the White Mountains. However, being on call is not the same thing as checking constantly to see if an emergency exists.

I strongly suggest that people go off grid at least once in a while. Who knows that the person who cannot contact you might gain some independence.

The Prius’ Driving Modes

I learned to drive in a Chevrolet. I took a Ford Cortina to my driving test; I passed. Since then I have driven tractors, a 1926 Rolls Royce Phantom I, with rod brakes and manual steering, and large Chryslers. I have always preferred maneuverable, smaller cars, but can drive just about anything. That is until my wife bought a Prius.

My wife usually does not get sucked into trends. She avidly recycles, but is not crazed about it. She tries to combine multiple trips in the car to conserve on gasoline, but if an extra trip has to be made, it is not the end of the world. That is until the Prius came along, because it seems to be exercising mind control.

It is no longer about how to get from point A to point B; it is all about how you drive there. If you perform a ballet of releasing the accelerator and braking a certain way, you get points, as in miles per gallon at the end of the trip.

I strongly recommend if you buy a Prius, do not use any of the special modes — EV, ECO, or Power — at all, at least not until you are used to the car. From the description of EV, you are only supposed to use that at night around the neighborhood, so you do not disturb your neighbors. It is silent. I thought if it is silent, burglars might like the Prius, too. Well, at least they would be robbing your house environmentally.

I have never used Power mode, but imagine doing so would be recorded in some log stored in the universe where at the end of my life, I would be lectured for using power when I did not have to.

ECO mode seems to be the trickiest of all. I am actually feeling badly if my mileage is low, having traversed up and down hills in my town. Fortunately, I do not drive my wife’s Prius often. Maybe I won’t get too programmed.