Category Archives: Current Events

Site Privacy

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At some points, this Blog has gotten extremely personal. I’ve always felt if it’s not your cup of filter coffee you can bump along to some other network property that has what you want. The Blog here is an experiment of one. It’s not meant to be socially or intellectually redeeming or damning for that matter. It’s a conundrum. It’s a contradiction. It’s a Blog dammit.

And it’s public again. So I’ll just relate now I am moving to this small financial service company as a Senior Project Manager. It’s the next iteration of the Mike force. It’s more money and definitely more challenge. I feel rather sad leaving Cisco. Such is life.

Let’s all join fucking hands and parade around. Like an archeologist once remarked…

It ain’t shit. It’s dirt.

This is my dirt. Welcome back.

Adios Cisco

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At the end of this month I’m done. Done with Cisco. I’m glad. It had become something else. What it comes down to is I like working with people. I like taking an ideal thing and turning it real. I like taking the risk and challenge and process of effective project management and translating it. Most of all, I like the challenge of not enough time. Too much risk.

Cannot do it.

Turning that into a pathway.

Obviously not something valued. Too bad. They never got all I could offer because they never asked the right questions. My fault perhaps.

Adios. On to a small financial services company I always liked. Extra points if you know which one.

Walking the Walk

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I head out six days per week most of the times in the morning walking. The mornings seem to be the best time to gently propel through 70 minutes of discovery, wonder, music streamed through my Nexus 4. I out a lot of feelings then. Go over the thousands of failures and successes that seem to either damn or bless my life. This last Friday it was a walk after work next to LinkedIn, Google, and Microsoft. I walked for almost two hours then. Down the trails to the water on the SF Bay Trail. I shook my first in the air and screamed. I walked by Nasa and the big hangars. I thought revolutionary thoughts.

I always seem to come back to 2009. I’ve come to the conclusion it’s taken me 4 years to reach a new point in things. Jobs come, they go. People enter and then leave. I wanted a thing in India but have not been able to get it. I got a divorce which I think is something I needed. It’s amazed me when walking how little you really know another. The marriage vows and the union and the joining really are nonsense. We can never walk a mile in someone else’s shoes nor should we want to. We can never either make a person happy or unhappy. They decide to be either.

When I walk in the mornings I know. The rain, the sun, the wind. Just like with RWR so many times. It all comes to me then and I know the zen of the walker. It’s the movement and the ecology. The shoes striking the pavement. The wonder and disgust of it all.

It’s what makes me as sane and as crazy as I am. It propels the words here but leaves me wanting more. More walks. More thoughts. Perhaps more strange and stupid, vapid and full. It all combines.

Got it?

Another Weekend

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Here is another weekend waiting. They all blend into sets of days and nights. Beer is bought. Kids are heard. I sit at home wondering and wishing. Perhaps a new job awaits. I may go back to Visa. More money. Perhaps more challenge. Still chaos. I am a project manager which needs the chaos I’ve found. There are PMs which cannot work surrounded by anarchy. I’m not one.

I need the things to fix. Clients which need me. So now I may go forward to a place I was at before. It’s all relevant and strange. But that’s okay.

I’ll write more when I know more.

This Friday Reserved for Starbucks

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Another Friday comes down the pike. I leave the offices and aimlessly wander to my Starbucks. The one where everyone knows my name. I feel like Herb in Cheers. The barista knows the morning and evening favs for this Mike. She chats and we joke. This place is a home with a big stuffed chair and guys playing chess at the big table. Folks come and then they go.

This is the best Starbucks because it’s actually mine. I can dream, wonder, wander and have the extreme personal moments. No one asks questions like why or why not. How come this. Can you do that. Mind working this weekend. No I don’t mind because the thing we are building is a useful thing and it’s the one thing that gives me a reprieve from the other programs I shepherd along.

So all you Friday warriors enjoy. I could write more but the Nexus 7 calls. Time to munch on wifi. Read the news. Perhaps a book. Maybe Pandora.

Sunday sessions

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Today is my Sunday calendar. First I walk for about 70 minutes. Then it’s off to Starbucks for latte and a breakfast roll. I decided to go do lunch at Dickeys BBQ. BBQ is like a need every so often for me. Now I’m sitting at a lakeside park with my tmobile 4g mifi device and my Nexus 7 writing this post.

It’s a pretty day today. The fractured family took off for an afternoon trip to SF. Why? I don’t really know why someone would drive into SF at 2pm. That’s why I don’t get the big bucks though. I don’t know the why’s or how’s. But like Einstein said, I never stop questioning.

I also started looking at why I really need a laptop even these days. It seems I can do everything on my nexus 7 or 10. Are laptops becoming another extinct species for someone with my use case? I think so. I’ll never travel again for pleasure with one. Battery life, weight, size. They all conspire against the type of travel I like to do. Next trip will be with the nexus 10. It’s become a really nice piece of kit with android 4.2.2 on it. The nexus 7 might work but I think I would prefer the extra inches and still enjoy the advantages.

So there you have it. My day captured on my tablet. A nice day in a life. Maybe I’ll get to see my old friend Art this week. That would be nice. Have not seen him for a year.

Saturday trance

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It’s Saturday folks and that means I have drank of the nectar of the gods. Last night I visited India and specifically the taj mahal. The taj mahal ale is sold in a bigger bottle which reminds me of evenings spent in Chennai at the Raintree Hotel on the the roof above sea level. I sat very still watching a group of shows and ending with a western slugfest named Sabata with Lee van Cleef. Fun shooter with the requisite less than serious moments.

I also am missing some family members which took off for the exinlaws. Not sure what they are called but I don’t miss most of it. I do miss one sister in law which was always more than the rest. The remainder are stuck in some past which carefully recedes with each passing event.

On Saturdays I enjoy listening to the news, sipping coffee and reading stuff on the Nexus 10. It’s really a nice companion and replaces the need for a laptop almost all the way. I get news, can watch streaming shows on xfinity or Netflix, or just play a game. At some point the entire laptop experience will be gone completely. The tablets are just so much more portable with great battery life and the android experience is sharpening. I am spoiled with the use cases for the Nexus 7 and 10. The 7 is really great for mobile moments and still garners comments at Starbucks from a variety of folks. It’s the size I think and the most commented is the cost compared to others. Performance is no slouch either and while I have only got the 16gb version I have not had any storage limitations yet. Most of my stuff is out in the cloud though. Photos, music, docs are all out there. I also lock down information on Dropbox where necessary using either encfs or keepass databases. It creates a great mix of use and security for me.

Now it’s after 10am. The house is quiet. The Nexus 10 moves along. I see this and read that. Life is good being newly divorced. Now I know what I suspected for those years. It was all broken and I was just blind. That’s okay though. You always evolve and change. Now I know. Happy Saturday you all. You deserve it :-)

Friday Beer Night

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Last night was beer night for me. Sometimes I think enlightenment will strike somewhere in-between my first and second PBR. Yes PBR;  because Neil demands it ;-) . I spent the evening looking at stuff on my Nexus 10. I subscribed to Pandora One and have decided that its really nice and the quality of the music is way up there.

I still don’t miss Facebook even though I miss some of the friends there. I figure though if they want me they know the email address. I do hang out on Google+ because the discussion there is around Linux, Android, the Chrome web browser, and other more interesting stuff.

Now its Saturday so I guess I forgot to post the blog post from last night due to some level of happiness. I’ve been reading all sorts of rumors about Android 4.2.2. Its coming next week. It may not get here until some other time. It may be called Key Lime Pie. I doubt that one. I think Android 5.0 which comes in May or June will have that moniker. We will get a 4.2.2 which hopefully fixes some instability on the Nexus 10 and makes bluetooth work on the Nexus 7. I consider the Nexus 4 to be just about perfect with some recent kernels which diddle with the color calibration a bit. I was lucky in every regard to get the Nexus 4 from Tmobile the first time it came up as an upgrade for me. The best android phone I’ve ever owned. I would prefer a backing that is not glass though.

My Nexus 7 runs these things if you are curious:

Rasbean Jelly. A very nice AOSP-ish rom which I believe is lovingly crafted and actually has entry points on all my devices.

Metallice Kernel. What can I say about this kernel other than wow! So much that it does for the Nexus 7. Incredible battery life. Great stability. If you want to mess with the kernel you have to use a CPU toolkit.

Part of the fun is being able to install kernels, new ROMs, fiddle with things on it to make it either break or run better. The Nexus 7 is a fun and hackable little device which is incredibly stable and pretty darned fast with its Tegra chipset. But you can lower the CPU cores and then make the max CPU lower and have a device which really lasts.For these kinds of reasons, I’ll never buy a device again which is not a Nexus. Its just so darned easy to mess with it.

Next…

There is always a next to come. I’ve kinda wondered where I would vacation this year since I went nowhere last year. I’m always tempted to head back to India or Singapore or Japan. Truth is; I’ve been to those places. I’ve decided instead to go to Istanbul. The place where east meets west. The mysterious wonder of cultures and history. I’ll go for a week to 10 days in August. See things, walk the city. Take pictures. Maybe catch a bus to Ankara.

I’ll need that trip this year. I’ve been working for a year now without a real break.

February 14th is coming up in days. Used to be special. Now is just another day. No big issues any more. I feel like one of those Galapagos Island survivors that have morphed to meet a ecological demand. Now I’m different and can take advantage of my new reality.

 

Beer, Nexus, ROM, repeat

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Last night was my beer night. In honor of that the Google Android team released a new entry into AOSP which fixes a few things it appears. I have 3 Nexus devices now. One is the hard to get Nexus 4 which came to me as a long awaited Tmobile upgrade. The second is the 16gb Nexus 7 which I have had since they were announced last year. The last is the Nexus 10.

I’ll talk about the Nexus 10 first. First off, its a wonderful tablet with great specifications and looks. It has the classic Samsung look but it also has the Nexus brand on the back. It had issues since it came out like locking up at various times. Chrome seemed particularly prone to cause problems. The last thing was the overall Location Services component in the OS. By turning this off when I was running stock; I could get around the problems.

Now though; I’m running the glorious and fun and funky rasbean jelly which has the latest goodness in it plus a nice and minimalistic black look to the UI. I now run the same ROM on all devices which means about every 4 days I update.

Last night since it was beer night and since the Android team released the JOP40G base into AOSP, I determined to flash away on all devices. I also installed custom kernels because the default kernels do not do things I want. All devices went well as usual except on the 10, I had installed a different google apps archive and this messed things up when I reflashed so I wiped the thing and started over.

So, after three beers I had flashed three new ROMs, three new kernels and started checking out things. There were bugs fixed. It appears that a few of the little irritations in the earlier release were ironed out so automatic brightness is not so quirky now. I think there are other things which I shall investigate as well.

Now I was done with the flashing of custom things on my devices so it was time to wonder, wander, drink, and feel splendidly drunk by 130am. I sat in the house (not home) checking out movies, wondering what would happen next, and remembering some advice RWR had given me so many times about knowing where I am and what I am doing. Priceless for its meaning. I would not say I lived my life to those words but being divorced does have an upside. I don’t have to do the things which I hated before but was kind of told I had to do them.

So by 1am I had polished off the beerage. I sat still and waited. Waited. WAITED.

Was something going to happen?

No.

And its okay. All the things which were supposed to have happened did happen. There are things waiting in the wings which I can’t see; but those are hidden for a reason. Drunk or sober, happy or sad, mad or glad; I cannot see them. Its for the better. Because ever since I got divorced, I can honestly now say I know where I am and what I’m doing. And it feels liberating. This house will also pass and my life will become yet again something else. Its the one promise of the whole condition folks.

The blog also persists. It records all these places I stopped but its served well and I’m glad to be writing here again. I’ll hit the road later this year for a new place. I will take 3 weeks off and venture forth. The plans are being put down. The airline tickets purchased with my mileage. Travel is also a necessary condition just like using Android over closed systems which leave nothing to the imagination.

Its back

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I spent a few weeks taking stock of the blog, the life, the conditions I find myself in. Had lunch with a few friends, listened to some advice well-intentioned. I found myself wanting to start blogging again mostly because this thing has become like an appendage. If I cut it off, it would pain me but sometimes it frustrates and irritates me.

Lets cut to the chase what I’ve decided to do with this blog though. The blog fulfills some kind of need still. I read back on the years of writing this thing and its painful. The years 2009 and 2010 were swell times for me at a few levels. I worked at Celestix Networks then and found myself challenged at so many levels professionally even though the personal thing was painful. The travel I did was like some kind of narcotic then. It dulled the pain of the evolving divorce at home; but its like the drug in so many ways. Soon it ends and you’re left with the gauntlet here. Then 2011 and 2012 came. Years had gone by. How long is one supposed to live in the situation? There is no rule. No metric. If you live through divorce, remember no one can really write up your feelings. Perhaps a blog is the answer. It has been cathartic at times. Finally 2013 and perhaps a break through for me. I have a decent job which is not the end-all and be-all. Its more like a means. A means to get me to a point where I can assess the next. So that brings us to date. To date in Mikes Thoughts. To date in the life of me.

A Japanese friend once remarked to me that we all have like 3 different personas rolled into one.

  1. There’s the one others see. That one may be incorrect and often up to the vagaries of people, places, times.
  2. There’s the one you see. That one may also be incorrect. Maybe its biased because of the singular view.
  3. There’s the one you really are. That one is invisible and perhaps you see it only on rare events. Perhaps you cannot really impact it and it lives both outside and inside you.

Lets see where things go next. Not sure which one I’ll post as since I seem to have three different personas. Maybe even more. My posts are sprinkled with Android, Linux, Anthropology and reflections on the cost of a divorce to a person. I’ve never claimed the blog fulfilled some higher purpose though.

Thanks for reading along and wondering. Mikes Thoughts does live.