Second City Bound

Back in February, an ill-timed rupture of my appendix (and a 5-day hospital stay) rudely prevented a long-overdue anniversary getaway. We had to cancel the trip, but were allowed to defer our plane tickets provided we used them by the end of September.

With September now quickly coming into view, we've opted for a family trip to the Windy City. We'll hit the planetarium, introduce the boys to the hallowed grounds of Wrigley Field, and hopefully enjoy a break from the southern summer heat. The only anxieties I have about the journey is putting myself and my family completely at the mercy of public transportation. I'm just not a big-city guy. I'd prefer to drive, but dealing with a rental and parking with our itinerary simply isn't practical.

Still, it should be a fun trip, and despite the miserable season the Cubs have had, I have hopes that breathing the rarified air at Wrigley will do wonders for my spirit. At the very least, we'll have the opportunity this coming month to create some new family memories for my quickly growing boys. It'll be good.

My Room

At long last, I have my own room. At least I'd like to think so. After two years, a lot of effort and more money than I'd prefer to think about, the bonus room over the garage is done, and we have begun to "move in." I am sitting here with my back toward the afternoon window, looking out at a still mostly unfurnished room - there is a trundle bed for guests, and a recliner that was a bigger pain to move up the stairs than I had bargained for. The wall of built-in bookshelves are still empty, but hold the promise of a quiet reading-room to be. I am typing this on my laptop of course, sitting behind a new dark wood desk, boasting a classy modern black finish with matching two-shelf stand and a 2-drawer file cabinet right behind me. To my right is a recently purchased HP TouchPad, currently linked to an internet radio station playing the smooth sounds of big band and swing. Or, with the touch of the screen, I can be logged into a web service that allows me to play digital audio files from our CD collection (which are stored on the media computer in the kitchen). The TouchPad is connected via stereo cable to a set of Bose speakers behind me, which fill the room with whatever soundtrack I desire.

This is to be my place, my refuge where I can escape the world for a few moments at a time and indulge my desire for solitude, and perhaps to write whatever words may come.

Of course, it is not just my room. Before very long, I'm certain it will become Grand Central Station (as attested by the arrival at this precise moment of my youngest son, trying to look over my shoulder). But aside from the interruptions, it is still nice to have a place to go, to have a space more or less my own.

I have long wanted a place to write and to read, a place to study and research, a place to rest that "feels" like my own. Although, I can't say whether the words will come any easier this way (indeed, I'm finding it quite tempting to let the music play, cut the lights, and nap in that recliner over there). But at least I'm nearly set up for the endeavor.

Yet the real world continues to breathe heavily down my neck. I have 6 months of work to do in the next 3, and I have more than a little anxiety about the outcome, not to mention the personal cost of associated with achieving success. I hit burnout 7 months ago, and have found little relief since then. Still, I am enslaved to the deadline before me, so I will give up my Sunday afternoon and soldier through it somehow.

But that can wait a few more minutes, while I close my eyes and immerse myself in the music filling this space, taking for myself a moment of solitude, rest and escape in this delightful sanctum that is my room.

O Waly, Waly

Sometimes, a melody seeps its way into your mind and takes up residence, like an old friend whose name you cannot quite remember, but remember him you do, and fondly. Such is the nearly 400 year old folk song known as "O Waly, Waly." I have heard this in many places and in many forms over the years, never really knowing or remembering its origins - I may have even played it once or twice. It is a lovely and haunting song that truly plays on the heartstrings, like a memory.

I present two versions of it for you tonight. The first video is of the Eleva Chamber Players performing the 3rd Movement of Suite for Strings by John Rutter. The second is a live vocal performance by Hayley Westernra. Beautiful, haunting, and strangely comforting despite its melancholy.

Arrested Development

I feel as old as I have my whole life. The world I perceive through my eyes changes frequently - and often dramatically - with the passage of time. Landscapes once as open as the expanse of nature are turned over to the migratory expansion of man, while old haunts are either paved over or left to rot. Faces I see begin to reveal lines once hidden, whereas the young seem ever younger in comparison. I even look in the mirror with puzzlement, because what I see is a disconnect between what my mind says and what my eyes see to be the impact of time.

I am as old as I have been my whole life. When I was a teenager, I constantly wrestled with the meaning of manhood, the meaning of being an adult and the nature of the boundary I presumed I would have to cross to finally and fully become "grown up." Yet I'm beginning to wonder if such a boundary even exists, or, if it does exist, whether I will ever reach the border and cross it. Because despite being a husband and father, despite being fully employed and owning property, and despite carrying the burdens typically associated with being an adult … I'm still not sure that I've "grown up."

Is it a case of arrested development? So many of the insecurities I had at 12 I still have now at 40. The uncertainty and obsessions that have driven me all my life still drive me. Coming to faith in Christ changed some of that, but every time I stop to take measure of myself - of who I am, or who I am becoming - I feel less sure that I will ever arrive at that place of wisdom that I imagine to be the hallmark of an adult. What does that even mean?

The world I perceive is constantly changing, but who I am seems to be unchanged, from behind these eyes anyway. Or perhaps that's not true at all, and I am changed and still changing on account of life's many experiences, but am just unable to see it clearly for myself.

Or maybe still, this whole notion of being a grown-up is a false construct. What we are, we are. Perhaps wisdom, as a measure of … something … only has meaning when it is placed in context, to compare or contrast.

I am as old as I've always been. And perhaps there is nothing really wrong with that. Maybe, I just … am.

Google Buys Motorola - For Patents

I meant to sit down and comment yesterday on the news that Google plans to purchase Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion. It is a staggering development that furthers the downward slide of Motorola as an innovating technology pioneer and bellwether.

The deal marks the end of independence for a company that helped pioneer mobile phones and introduced its first consumer handset in the early 1980s.

Motorola announced a plan to spin off its mobile-phone business in March 2008 amid market share losses and pressure from billionaire Icahn. The company completed the split in January, after the global recession delayed the deal. Motorola Inc. became Motorola Solutions Inc., which makes radio equipment for emergency workers and scanning devices for retailers.

I began my career with Motorola, first working for the company (then well over 120,000 employees worldwide) as a cooperative education student until graduating from college, then joining one of the company's telecommunication equipment making facilities as an electrical engineer doing modem design and product sustainment. In my naiveté, I really wanted to be a "company-man" and stay a Motorolan for my entire career. The 1990's saw a fierce battle waged for market position as enablers of the "Information Age" as it was so often described. When I started, we were developing 9600 baud modems, 2400 cellular modems (the beloved "bricks"), and CSUs/DSUs on the digital side. Then as analog communication standards were approved we quickly ramped to 14.4 bps, 28.8 bps, 33.6 bps all the way to the fight for 56K, then purported to be the fastest speed you could get over a standard phone line. Shortly afterwards, however, Motorola pulled the plug on the effort. From a cost of business standpoint, the company just could not compete. For despite the fact that Motorola quality almost always ranked near the top, thanks in part to a rigorous (and over-burdening) quality process (think Six Sigma and blame it on Motorola), the "cost" of that quality made our products less than price competitive. By 1998, the plant was shut down and operations consolidated elsewhere. I tried to stick with the company a little longer, accepting a transfer to the Semiconductor Products Sector, but in time I was forced to accept that unless I was willing to move to Schaumburg to work a Quality Management job, Motorola would not be in my long term future. So I moved on.

I continued to watch the company, although I'm not entirely sure why. I watched over time as they poured more and more resources into cell phones and pagers, and then dropping pagers. Eventually they sold (or spun off, depending on who you read) their semiconductor business. Recently, the company split in two, forming Motorola Mobility (the cell phone / smart phone commodity business unit) and Motorola Solutions (radios, IT and enterprise infrastructure). Now the latter is all that is left.

That the company was bought by Google is a little disconcerting. I find it funny how people scream about oil companies and profits and the like, when in my view the more suspect corporatist machinations revolve around the information industry (Google, Apple, Microsoft). What this deal gives Google is control over all the patents Motorola owns dating back to the early days of cellular and communications technology. Motorola once was an innovator. Now, it seems their value is based less on the work they do now, and more on work done in the past. It is sad, as an ex-Motorolan, to see the one-time leader fall so far. What they have left leaves them as one of many. Motorola is not dead, but they are no longer something special.

In my garage, on my workbench, is an old 1950's era AM radio built by Motorola. Although slow to power up, it still works. But largely, it is a forgotten artifact buried behind piles of toolboxes and scrap wood. Hopefully, the company will fare better than that radio. Because even though I haven't worked for the company in 13 years, I still would like to see them succeed.

NASA Looking to Retain Institutional Knowledge

I've written previously about my concerns with regard to the potential loss of scientific and engineering know-how that may be inevitable with the (temporary?) grounding of NASA's manned space flight program. While the privatization of space flight capabilities carries with it the opportunity to press forward into that last frontier, it does not in itself negate the impact of losing 6 decades of knowledge and experience in the design of vehicle and propulsion systems. This is a real possibility if the program stays grounded for too long.

Fortunately, NASA is taking steps to retain that technical knowledge, through the creation of the National Institute for Rocket Propulsion Systems (NIRPS):

HUNTSVILLE, Alabama - There's an urban myth in the rocket world that today's engineers couldn't recreate the mighty Saturn V F-1 engines that took Americans to the moon if they wanted to. Critical technology has been lost, the story goes.

Not exactly true, say today's propulsion experts at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. Some techniques are no longer available, it's true, but better ones exist.

"Building on the knowledge base left to us by those old-timers," Marshall's Dr. Dale Thomas said Wednesday, "we can today build a better F-1 than they did."

The key to understanding Marshall's new push in propulsion is in the first phrase of that sentence: "Building on the knowledge base left to us."

That's the first thing that Thomas, Marshall's associate director for technical issues, and his boss, center Director Robert Lightfoot, want to do with Marshall's planned new National Institute for Rocket Propulsion systems (NIRPS). They want to preserve today's expertise so it can be there tomorrow.

...

Lightfoot wants the institute to be a "strategic asset" for the country, and he said basing it in Huntsville at Marshall just makes sense. There's already Department of Defense and industry knowledge nearby, and there's the treasure trove at Marshall, NASA's home of propulsion.

This strikes me as a brilliant, common sense idea. If indeed NASA is reverting to more of an R&D business model, less oriented around the sustainment of an operational supply and delivery system, then it strikes me as wise to capture the critical knowledge of propulsion technologies and engineering that produced the systems of the past, to inform the design decisions of the future.

Here's hoping the idea, er, takes off.

A Cacophony and a Horrible Realization

After another mind-numbing day at the office, I arrived home this evening to the sounds of a cadre of concert musicians warming up for a performance in my living room. It was indeed a cacophony of sound, with snare and bells from the percussion family, and a coronet and a trumpet from the brass family. That only three members of my immediate family could alone produce such a sound was remarkable to say the least.

My oldest son has elected to take band this year, and brought home the percussion set. Actually, it is quite remarkable, with his off-the-charts mathematical aptitude and an ear for pitch, he picks up rhythms quite easily, and was playing a selection of music from Harry Potter, the 80's band Europe, and Halloween (a movie he is far to young to see). Almost a natural at piano, I imagine he could play almost anything he wants.

Of course, my younger son wanted to play something too, so my wife got down her trumpet and coronet. Together, they blasted the brass and rattled the windows. Finding that the woodwinds lacked representation, I naturally pulled down my clarinets (I have two) to see if I could still rip a chromatic scale.

Too my horror, and near utter devastation, I couldn't play it cleanly. Not even sort of. The fact that it has been nearly 10 years since I picked up the horn doesn't matter, because to my way of thinking, I should have been able to play a chromatic without a single mis-fingering. Instead, I sounded like 8th grader who skips too many lessons and never practices.

This is no small thing, though you may laugh at my musical misfortune. I am usually not prone to bragging, but in reality I was quite good at the instrument. I've played the clarinet since I was in 5th grade, which was, let's see, 30 years ago (!). I played straight through high school, worked my way to 1st chair, participated in a number of honor bands, solo and ensemble competitions, and so on. I played in symphonic bands and concerts bands. I took a year and half away from it when I started college, but eventually came back to play with the Auburn Symphonic Band, and also with the Auburn University Marching Band until graduation. For the first several years after our marriage, my wife and I would return to play with the alumni at Homecoming. But then came the boys, and life, and I put the music away.

To this day, whenever I hear a piece that I've performed, I am often transported somewhere else, because when I played, it was an experience of total immersion. It's as if I remember every note, every sound, and how my part blends with the whole. Putting that part of me away was a practical, if somewhat unintentional choice. But I've always known that if I chose, I'd be able to pick it up, and continue to play.

Of course, I'm subject to the truth as is everybody else. If you don't practice in 10 years, you're probably going to be a bit rusty. But to be sure, after about 15 minutes, I stopped thinking quite so much and just allowed my fingers to move. The horn needs some repair, but the skill that lies dormant is there to be awakened someday. See there, the illusions I have which were so rudely shattered can once again be reassembled. I feel a little better now.

One thing is for certain. Music (and rhythm) will be returning to our household. And no matter how it sounds in the early going, it will be a symphony to my ears.

New Look

In honor of finally finishing off the bonus room upstairs (other than actually moving in), I decided to keep the renovation spirit going with an upgrade to the blog design. Well, okay, these events actually have nothing to do with each other. Truth is, I was bored with the old look, and some of the features were no longer working correctly due to recent updates by Blogger.

It'll take a little getting used to, but I think I like it.

"Don't You See?"

Ordinarily, I don't enjoy songs with overt political messages. Patriotic, yes. Political, not really. But the feature embedded below (which mind you is audio-only, no video) caught my attention the other day while listening to a podcast, so I figured I'd post it despite its overt message. A message mind you, that I've already expressed here in a number of ways.

The song is entitled "Don't You See?" and was produced for a contest run recently by the folks at Powerline blog. According to their site, it was written by Jason Nyberg and performed by his nine-year-old daughter. Follow the link back to the Powerline post, to read up on the background and to see the lyrics. You can even download the song for your own use there for free. And there's even a chord chart available. They clearly want this to go viral.

It's a fun song, performed well, and I largely agree with the lyrics.



(h/t): Powerline

At Some Point, You Have to Stop Digging

I've shied away from commenting on the debt ceiling circus these past few weeks, mostly out of fear that I'll develop a blood-pressure problem. With so much invective being thrown every which way, I find it hard to keep it all in perspective. For decades, the political class has widened the gulf between it and the citizen class, tinkering with a massive Leviathan it no longer understands, much less knows how to control. Sometimes I wish I could just tune it all out. Easier said than done for a news junkie like me.

Tonight, I read this headline: "US borrowing tops 100% of GDP":

US debt shot up $238 billion to reach 100 percent of gross domestic project after the government's debt ceiling was lifted, Treasury figures showed Wednesday.

What does that mean? It means that our national debt is now greater than or equal to the entire domestic output of our economy. Think about that. As a nation, we owe more than we produce in a year. While not an exact analogy, it is akin to having a personal credit card debt that is greater than your total annual income. It basically puts you at the point that if you don't make changes, you will be unable to keep up in servicing that debt, much less paying it down. Nothing good comes of that. For whatever reason, these people seem to operate under the assumption that you can dig your way out of a hole. Newsflash: it doesn't work that way. You cannot spend your way of out debt.

I've been a part of two corporate downsizings. When your revenue declines, you have to reduce the cost of doing business. The only way to do that is to restructure, and sometimes that restructuring is drastic and painful. You cut big chunks out of your labor, and your business model or market. You divest yourself of non-producing ventures or liabilities.

At some point, I keep hoping that these folks on the hill will figure out that you have to stop digging. That's not going to happen anytime soon, and by the time the next election rolls around, we will be over $2 trillion deeper in debt than we are right now. The debt will increase faster than the cuts they promise will come.

But they just keep digging, singing:

We dig dig dig dig dig dig dig in our mine the whole day through
To dig dig dig dig dig dig dig is what we really like to do

Heigh-ho. Ugh.