• Why is Labor Day not a day off for everyone? I mean, most everyone takes Christmas off, and not everybody in America believes in Jesus. But when it comes to a day that’s supposed to be about the working class and their struggles to make an honest buck, we end up … all going to shop and eat and make the working class work that much harder. It just doesn’t make any sense to me. [But hey, I worked some from home yesterday, too.]
• All the drama around the Bengals just about has me ready to give up on them. No, the execrable 1990s Bengals didn’t make me give up on them. But the current personnel gaffes? I don’t know, man. I guess I believed in the Marvin Lewis Era, that maybe there were some adults coming to work here, but … sure doesn’t seem like it. It’s kinda sad. I mean, I don’t want to become a Titans fan.
• I keep waiting for the same people that think a border fence is a good idea to think that a hurricane flood wall stretching from Brownsville to Key West is a good idea. I mean, look … if we can’t properly levy the Mississippi River to keep it from flooding, no damn wall is gonna work. But now that I’ve mentioned it, someone’s gonna think it’s a great idea.
• Since I’m pretty sure of whom I’m voting for, I now just want to put the next two months on fast forward.
• HDTV is evil, because it has me watching college football again. I’m just going to be disappointed. Maybe the Luddites have the right idea?
• Gosh, I really don’t want to do anything today. But they don’t pay me to whine.

Hello, dear friends. Another solar orbit is complete here on my end. Hope this one’s a bit better.

Five years ago, my life changed. Sure, our lives are changing all the time, and small, seemingly inconsequential steps are, in retrospect, life-altering things. Call it a butterfly effect if you will—beauty coming out of chaos.

Five years ago, I was single. Still am. Then I was 23 and fresh from college. I was pining after this girl—she’s all over my writings online from 2002, in ways that seem hard to believe now. [Like, I really thought the Internet needed to know all that? Really?] The week after I graduated from college, I got the royal stiff-arm, and well, I sought solace in a song from Caedmon’s Call: “Table for Two“, Derek Webb’s classic ode to singleness for Christian males in their mid-20s. None of that really matters all that much, and okay, maybe you don’t follow those links, huh?

Anyhow. I distinctly remember the first time I saw [caedmonscall.net]: it was in searching for the lyrics for Tf2. At the time, I remember seeing a link for a forum of fans, but … well, I was leery of it. But come 1 Sep 2002, I dove in—because it was a slow day at work. [As I spent today doing a top-level review of hardware builds by our company in our general product category, I don't know how I had slow days back then---but I had 'em.] I got hooked in pretty quick—by that winter, that community of people largely replaced the community of people that I interacted with in college. Sure, I still hung out with my roommates, but the community space that Bryan Allain built for Caedmon’s Call fans spoke to me. Heck, I gained awareness of Calvinism for the first time there. [Unlike many thinking Christians who come from a non-Calvinist tradition and come across my Reformed brothers, I didn't buy their arguments. I do think, however, that they made me a better Methodist because they caused me to re-evaluate why I believed what I believe.]

Well, you know me. I can never leave well enough alone. I offered to help Bryan out with technical details, and suddenly … well, suddenly I was part of Bryan’s volunteer staff. It wasn’t something that I really sought out. I just fell into it. And then that Derek guy left the band for a while, and things hit this whole other level. We got to publicly break that news first [although lots of fans knew long before I did, because they were and are closer to the band than I'd ever hope or deserve to be], and from there, things just became … well, more important to me. What started as a time-killer became, well, a minor obsession. I quickly went from being the chicken at breakfast to the pig.

Of course, all that is preamble. As I’ve said, that community became terribly important to me for a while. It’s far less so now—I stepped back a year or two ago from day-to-day running the forum, although I still am the systems administrator for the server [with all the pain that causes me]. I was having that discussion with one of the few people with whom I am still close last week, and she mentioned that most friendships seem to have lifespans. I wanted to argue with her, but I think that she’s right. [She usually is, although I rarely want to admit it, and she rarely holds it over me when I do.]

Where the hell am I going with all of this? Well, okay, I’m name-checking a new song off of the CD with this entry’s title: “Hold the Light“. [Wanna hear it? I released an MP3 of it last night.] What always really gets to me is the bridge:

Standing round a willow weeping
We’re praying in the backyard
And the chill of the night, the friendship light reminded me
Who we are

I first heard the song in the context of my trip with Doug to Ohio in May. As he noted, we met up with Andy O then, and Andrew played us some Overdressed tracks and some of his Letters to the Editor, Volume I tracks before giving me a copy of the CD. “Hold the Light” is what struck me on my first listen, and it’s what does to this day: because it’s about a community of people gathering together to share good times, bad times, joys, and sorrows. Acquaintances help you move, and friends help you put your life back together when it’s gone to shit. We’re made for community, and while many in Christendom flail about with what community is, this is it—sharing life together, warts and all.

I’ve gotten a better sense of all of this through the last five years. I’m still learning and growing—and always will be, and will always need it.

Last night, I broke out Eric Clapton’s Unplugged. At the time, I tweeted, “Breaking out Eric Clapton’s /Unplugged/. You may hate it, but this was 1992 for me.” As I listened to “Lonely Stranger”, I had a memory and a revelation. The memory: I had a line from the song, “Some will say that I’m no good / Maybe I agree / Take a look then walk away / That’s all right with me” in my MSMS application essay until Mom made me take it out. She had my best interests at heart, to be sure—I didn’t need to be the cocksure kid who didn’t care if he got into MSMS or not. [After all, they were really interested in taking kids who wanted to be there, because it was so damn hard. Honestly, I really wanted to be there, but man, I just didn't care about shit at that point in my life.]

The realization was simple: I self-identified with “Lonely Stranger” because it was really the first time in my life where I didn’t have anyone close to me. I can count on one hand the number of people from my old high school that I even bother to keep up with anymore—and two of them are married to each other, which makes that easy enough. For people that know me now—the person who networks relentlessly, even putting together two folks a time zone away—you might be really surprised to see me back then. Sure, I was still my talkative self, but I rarely if ever truly engaged with any of those folks. Kari has often expressed some … well, I guess concern … about how I consider my life in Mississippi pre-MSMS from when we’ve talked about it. I think that she’s right to do so, but honestly, I think that a lot of it comes from the fact that I was first depressed there—without realizing it until years later—and so I associate all the crappy, negative stuff about myself with that place, which is neither fair nor healthy.

Lately, I’ve found myself pretty much lacking in creative energy—and when I have the energy, I have no focus. These things happen.

But I write tonight not out of joy but out of sadness; my sister-in-law, Cindy, should have turned 35 today. As joyous of a day as Palm Sunday always otherwise is, my day today is certainly tinged with sadness. We know now what took her from us, but a how doesn’t give a why, not that we’d be likely to understand or accept it.

But we go on.

I feel compelled to explain why I’ve just not made many tracks on the Internet lately, but … I guess that if you’ve followed along, you understand why.

I think that, like the rest of my family, I just feel pretty wrung-out right now. The hard part for me, I think, is that I’m usually such a verbal person, and when not verbal, I write. Words are how I deal with things and how I think things through. [Just yesterday, a colleague of mine---who is, himself, notoriously verbose---asked me to "use shorter sentences". This was on a teleconference, so the co-worker on my end and I had a good laugh at that.] My way is certainly no better than any other; it’s merely what works best for me.

So when I’m at a point when the words don’t come easily, things are definitely sucking.

I think that part of the issue lies in the fact that I feel like I have to dam a lot of the flood of things going on in my head. I mean, for my brother’s sake, I should shut up and stop verbalizing all this crap, because, on the scale of things, we all know that his life’s been far more rocked than mine. And as with the passing of any family member, the absence of Cindy in our lives merely reveals the flaws in all other relationships, as those relationships become strained as we all struggle to cope with this new existence. But as with many such things, the strain also strengthens things. [You can take the boy out of mechanical engineering, but you can't take the mechanical engineering out of the boy.]

But in the midst of everything else, well, my sleep pattern is radically off. I put some of that on environment—I never sleep well away from home—but that surely can’t be all of it. All I do know is that my body really struggles to know what time it is right now. [At work, all it knows is that it must be quitting time somewhere.] That’s just sapping anything else that I’ve got going, and it’s making me damnably ineffective at anything I try my hand at. Of course, that’s always a dangerous spiral, because I have this weird conception that, if I’m not any good at something, I just don’t do it. But right now, that’s being a bad negative feedback loop—not coming up to par on anything that I’m doing, I don’t feel like doing anything. And that, well … that’s bad.

So I’m trying to take it a step at a time—writing it out a bit, and also seeking to take some better care of my sleep habits with the idea that being rested will have positive benefits. Here’s hoping. [And if you're saying, "Yeah, he wrote himself out of this even as he talked about writing out of things," you've gotten the point. This is far more for me than it is for you. It's probably only for you if you have to put up with me. ]

Well, I’m officially breaking my make-to-be-broken resolution tonight; I’m behind enough on laundry that I won’t be laying anything out tonight for work. It’ll still be in various states of being laundered when I go to bed [an hour fast approaching, honestly]. In fact, it’s a strong possibility that I’ll be 0-for-3 on the resolutions, but … that’s okay. Doug called Dad and I “my right arm and my left arm, and most days, my right leg and my left leg” the other day. That’s enough for me. Silly resolutions pale greatly in comparison to being there when your family needs you. And boy, did we need to be there.

I take it as a matter of faith that y’all will respect the radio silence around here. I’m still finding words for the thoughts going around in my head. And all this feels very cheap to write, because, well … you know, I’m not Doug right now, who has a far heavier burden to bear. He’s not bearing it alone—thank God for that, quite literally—but it’s a heavy burden.

God? This sucks. But you didn’t promise us a bed of roses.

My, I’m out of the habit of writing here. I refuse to let GFMorris.com become only a set of all posts related to my 2006 resolutions!

Someone brought up first impressions today on the Rumor Forum, and I was reminded of something Stephen and Misty said to me about six months ago or so: that, at first, they thought I was a complete jerk, and that they’d never be able to relate to me. Now I’m over at their house at least once a week, and usually twice. In fact, when I mentioned earlier this week that I’d dropped in on the Creekmores on Saturday, Misty said she went all, “Awww, he usually comes here!”

While this entry is a vain, shameless attempt to get Misty to tell the story of their first encounter with me, I’ll note that I barely remember that they were there that night. What happened? Well, suffice it to say that the second Lord of the Rings movie was coming out the next night, so all the geeks gathered together to watch the first movie … the extended version on DVD.

For those who’ve never had the … “fun” … of watching a movie with me, let me tell you: since I suffer from Nerd Attention Deficit Disorder, the act of watching a movie and doing nothing else while watching it is anathema to me. When I watch TV at home, I am always doing something else: working on the server, writing, consuming feeds, something. Gilmore Girls is not able to get my full, undivided attention: mainly because I spend every episode writing Kari an email about every bit I do and don’t like about a show. [Mostly what I hate.] [[And Kari is a sweetheart not only for reading those emails, but responding to them. Have I told you lately that I love you, Kari? Totally in that "you put up with all the insane emails I send you" kind of way.]]

Anyway, yeah … Geof + movie + no distractions = FIDGETING. LOTS AND LOTS OF FIDGETING. The Granades, poor folks, were new to town, looking for friends, and they had to put up with my endless twitching through the movie that never ended. [Did I like it? It was ... okay. Not my thing, really. I appreciate all the awesomeness, but I don't enjoy it. I feel the same way about figure skating---I recognize that there's a lot of skill and grace going on, but ... meh. If folks are going to be on skates, they should have sticks in their hands and be chasing a puck. Just the same way, I have friends who find hockey fascinating but don't enjoy watching it. C'est la vie.]

I’m aware that this is not the only instance of a bad first impression that I gave. I can easily get wrapped up in myself or whatever I’m thinking about, and I lose all self-awareness. [No, I haven't read the bit in New Scientist about how the brain shuts down self-awareness when it gets overloaded that Marginal Revolution pointed to today ... I've been too focused today to get to that. Okay, now I'm lying ... because I linked to it, I decided that I had to read it really quickly.] Thanks to my NADD and all the crap I’m always thinking about—some trivial, some not—I am not very self-aware. Because of that, I know I make bad first impressions.

So, feel free to share your first impressions of meeting me in the comments. I won’t edit or delete a one of them.

Right now, I’m doing really well to tread water. Yeah, you could say that I’m busy at work. Unfortunately, the nature of my job description these days is that I can’t put aside all the interruptions to get done what I need to get done. I feel like a human network router most days lately, and the moniker fits.

That said … I’ve got to take some time soon to unplug from all the distractions and do just one thing at a time for a few hours. It’s somewhat interesting to me that, while I was really tired yesterday and just wanted to come home and go to bed, going to choir was a really wonderful thing for me to do instead—I conjoined fellowship with singing. Best of all, I got into a state of flow with the whole singing bit, and large chunks of what we were doing with the music just flat-out opened up for me.

A lot of my life is spent with tiny chunks of discreteness: emails, feed items, the tiny bits of paper and knowledge I move around the office in my never-ending battle against the Fuck-up Fairy, you name it. It’s like one of those classic kung-fu fight scenes where you see the protagonist take on eight or nine ninjas or something. You know it’s unreasonable to expect that they’ll all take this guy on singly or in pairs, but yet you enjoy the twists, turns, and flips that provide machinations to watch Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee, or Chuck Norris to whip everyone’s ass and bag the girl in the end. That’s my life, except I’m single, out-of-shape, and … oh crap, that analogy’s elasticity just went plastic.

I recognize that the multi-tasking is taxing the fool out of my creative energy these days, because it’s really killing my ability to focus. I’m learning to recognize this and to shut down as many non-essential interactions as I can. This was hammered home far harder today when I was lying in the dentist’s chair having an impression made for my crown: the entire design case for the small set of CD shelves I want to make just came together as I laid there, staring at the ceiling. Why did it pop out just then? I wasn’t trying to force my brain to do anything else, and … blammo!

As I’ve been writing this entry, I’ve become conscious of my subconscious back-and-forth here in the office: think while staring at monitor tied to Mac; look at unpowered TV monitor; cycle further left to monitor tied to PC running Azureus to watch the happy numbers spin by; look back to WordPress window. I sigh, realizing that I’ve set myself up for failure here, because I’ve made this whole setup be about doing lots of things at once rather than one or two things really well. No wonder that I don’t feel like I’m getting much done at home these days—I’ve built a crapload of interrupts into my very enviroment!

Hm. I think I’ve gotta rethink my office layout before I multi-task my brain into a pile of jelly. For now, I’m going to go and do one thing at a time … read, or maybe just listen to the radio. Let the brain spin down. Should help me unwind. Lord knows I’ve got the wound-tight thing down to a T.

From my reading of Maslow:

Compulsive-obsessives try frantically to order and stabilize the world so that no unmanageable, unexpected or unfamiliar dangers will ever appear. They hedge themselves about with all sorts of ceremonials, rules, and formulas so that every possible contingency may be provided for and so that no new contingencies may appear. … If, through no fault of their own, something unexpected does occur, they go into a panic reaction as if this unexpected occurrence constituted a grave danger.

I’m reminded, as I transcribe that, of the memorable refrain of the about-to-die test pilot in Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff: “I’ve tried A! I’ve tried B! I’ve tried C!” This isn’t to say that fighter pilots are obsessive-compulsive; it’s just that we’re all prone to like our routines and our normalcy, and that OCD folks can probably best understand the panic that Wolfe frames well in that phrase.

But in my own sweet way, I’m mildly OCD. I’m a fairly whimsical person, but I’m also routinized in weird ways. A for-instance: the bills in my wallet will always be in there, facing the same direction, highest denomination at the back, lowest denomination at the front. My keys will be in my left front pants pocket, my Treo in my right front pants pocket, and my waller in my right rear pocket, always placed with the fold facing my spine. And as fanatical as I am about this—if I’m handed a wad of cash, I pretty much have to stop what I’m doing to fix it, including pulling over from driving to handle it—I also try to take different routes home each day. This was far easier when I lived on Monte Sano and had two points of ingress and three or four equivalent routes to these same points of ingress; nowadays, I have only one efficient way home, and it drives me up the wall.

I fully recognize that, in all of this, I am an amalgamation of my parents—Dad, who always has to be the last one in the house to check that the doors are locked, regardless of how much he might trust me to do it, and Mom, who used the multiple-ways-to-get-somewhere tactic to drive Dad nuts all those years. [Now that Mom doesn't drive, I'm sure she's the one going nuts, going the same way every time. She exacts her revenge, though, when we go out driving and Dad has to play "follow the finger". Meanwhile, I sit in the back seat, softly laughing to myself.] But yes … as someone who is OCD about things, it’s also really contradictory for me to be very much extemporaneous in others.

I think this contributes to my kookiness, and I know that it drives people around me nuts. I think it’s charming, though, in my own sweet way.

“Plan B? I’m still working on Plan A!”

If you’re looking at the desolate page here—past the dust and the tumbleweeds—and asking yourself, “Is Geof examining his life at all lately?”, well, I have an answer for you.

Not really.

:sigh:

There’s a lot to be said for being in the moment, but I have probably been too in that moment, flitting to whatever amuses me at that moment. That quest of self-awareness? Lost in the fog of war—war with victories to be won, war with self.

Depressing, yes.

Hopefully tomorrow … hopefully, I’ll remember this and, remembering my frustration, capitalize upon it and stop, step back, and …

Examine.

So, TrackBack spam.

At this point, a nice specification is being used to spam the crap out of people. [It's kinda like RFC 822. Of course, now that I say "RFC 822", I have to ask, "Is that really the email RFC?" I Google RFC 822, and it is, and I again sit amazed at the amount of useless crap that sits inside my head. Anyway.]

What’s needed here? The idea that’s popped into my head today is some kind of challenge/response system. Of course, the next idea is user reg, but that’s fraught with peril—because centralized user reg means that someone has to maintain the spammers, or that you have to build a system on top for people to rate the centralized users, and in any regard, you’re creating a shitload of work; elsewise, you’re asking me to user reg every site I want to TrackBack? Oi!.

I started this thinking that challenge/response along a user reg system would work, but man … it’s still a hell of a lot of work. Of course, so is cleaning up TrackBack spam.

But … TrackBack was originally, in some ways, a nice way to say, “Hey, I linked to this, or I saw that your entry had something to do with it; I think my words on this are worth your time to read, so I’ll send you a TrackBack ping … and you can do with it what you will!”

All of that was meant, originally, to save people the time and the … embarrassment factor of saying, “Yeah, I wrote something about this … I’d love your feedback” in comments. Because, really, if Brad posts something cool, and that inspires me to write something in response, well … where does the conversation go? Ideally, I want my feedback to happen on my site, because that’s where I want conversation about what I said, and not what my thoughts on someone else’s thoughts are.

I’m beginning to wonder why I even bother with TrackBack.

That’s kinda sad.

Brad … John … Jeff … any ideas? Anyone?

Someone [okay, so it was Alex] asked me today, “So, how do you determine what goes on which site?”

This is a question I get often about this site and The Indiana Jones School of Management, which you might or might not realize is also mine. The other question is, “Why two sites?”

I’ve probably answered this before, but it’s worth answering again: I leave more of a purer Weblog over there, and leave here to be more about me. That’s why the domain with my name on it gets stuck with stuff that’s primarily about me.

Is there overlap? Sure. Some entries are mis-filed [and I can probably fix that in the medium term, whenever I get out from under the pile of stuff to do, that is!], and for a while, IJSM was borked and GFMorris.com wasn’t.

But really, I do try to let this be about me, and let the other be about more than just me. I’ll kvetch about work or muse on things over there, but the reason that I do that there is that short bitch sessions about what’s pissed me off at work that day don’t fit in here with weightier thoughts.

At least I’d like to think so, anyway.

It will be easy for you to tell when I am too busy to spend good time thinking and writing: the content output here will drop to record minimums. But since I’d like to think that you use a syndication feed to check this site, you don’t have to load it all the time.

One of these days—probably about the same time my truck gets cleaned out—the whole GFMorris network will come together. Then you can really get scared. Then you can ask, “Why four sites?” The answer will be pretty simple: “It suits me.”

Asking why and expecting me to answer you honestly and correctly is not worth your time. The answer usually is, “I don’t know myself.” Like I said when filling out my Orkut profile: “When I can fill out this box that tells me to “describe yourself” accurately, it’s time to die.” The day that something about me is not evolving, is not changing, is not reforming … I might as well pack it in, folks.

If I confuse you, realize that I confuse myself, too.

Whoever gave the wedding party this cold stuff must pay. I don’t know about Stephen, but I’m getting tired of coughing. My cough’s only gotten bad in the last 36 hours; I broke down and went to cough medicine. Yay.

I’m probably a third of the way through the burning copies portion of the Great CD Preservation Project. I’ve got 52 CD’s in the binder to my left, exactly 25% of what it holds at maximum.

Work could easily go bat-dung insane tomorrow. Why? We’ll be having external customers in for an FCA/PCA [uhhhh, Functional Configuration Audit/Physical Configuration Audit, I think] tomorrow and Wednesday, and … despite everything to the contrary, I just have this weird feeling that I get to spend the next two days sitting over there with my laptop. Note to self: bring laptop to work. Note to self: see if Anthony has Project 2000 at home so you can install it.

While I love October [I mean, it does start with my birthday, ya know], October in Huntsville always means indecisive weather patterns. I want it to be no warmer than 60F during the daytime like right now, but Mother Nature does not agree with me. This frustrates me greatly. Of course, it could be that cool tomorrow and run up to 80F on Wednesday … then spawn tornadoes on Thursday.

NPR just said, “Students tend to forget what they’ve learned by the time they graduate.” No kidding. Because I don’t use it, I can barely remember anything from any of my aerospace classes anymore. The brain’s a muscle … NPR’s making this comment about med school students, but this is so true of everyone. I think this is one reason why school is highly, highly overrated—the happy little degree to my left just says that I was there, not that I remember any of it anymore.

I think it’s time to go home now while I have some sense of my brain working left. I’m going home and crawling in bed.

In a while–probably even in a couple weeks–we’ll all look back on Sean and Katharine’s wedding with joy, mirth, and glee.

Right now … out-of-town wedding in the big city … lots of variables outside of my control … outdoor wedding in the early fall … yeah, minor case of nerves here. Could be worse … could be me getting married. We’d need sedatives.

I have the best man’s speech completely squared away in my head, though. I have the perfect story and years of oratorical experience.

This is going to own.