Fall 2010 Foliage

October is such a refreshing month in the North Carolina Piedmont. From June to mid September, it is just so hot and humid (average high temperature in July is 89 degrees). In addition to the soup though is this depressing overcast haze that frequents the late afternoon, often accompanied by thunderstorms or the threat of them.  Think DC in August. Yuck.

In October, the average high temperature drops 10 degrees from September to 71, which is just about perfect. October is also the driest month of the year. It reminds me of late August and September back in Pennsylvania.

Property Values in the Hood

This story in the online edition of the Altoona Mirror describes a conflict between the Blair County  Commissioners and the Altoona Area School District over the commissioner's plan to sell 10 dilapidated properties at below market value. Addresses for all 10 properties aren’t provided but at least several of the properties were in my old neighborhood of Fairview. Pretty depressing stuff.

One property in particular, 1523 10th Street, was right across the alley from my house growing up. The valuation of this property is currently $360! (I didn’t miss any zeros there). A bid of $200 was made for that property.

The Market Has Spoken – Sort Of

In one of my earlier posts on my Baseball Trip 2010, I described the noise level associated with the fairly recent packaging that Frito-Lay has introduced for Sun Chips. This packaging is bio-degradable and compostable but is quite rigid and, frankly, loud as hell.

Well Frito-Lay has apparently received lots of feedback on the packaging and will stop using this cacophonous packaging on 5 of its 6 Sun Chips flavors. It will retain the strident packaging on its Sun Chips Original product, which is the best-selling of the 6 offerings.

Which is kind of weird. Our customers have told us that they don’t like the packaging. Since we are market-driven and aim to provide the highest customer satisfaction possible, we have elected to fix this defect in all but the most popular version of our product. Say what?

Is There a Hidden Meaning in There Somewhere?

For several months now, our mini-kitchen area at work has featured a poster next to the trash receptacle entitled “Data Security Starts With You” or something like that. It is a friendly reminder to the worker bees about how we need to protect all of the various valuable data and information assets that we deal with at Big Blue.

The picture features five clean-cut and professionally-dressed IBMers in increasing levels of depth and decreasing levels of sharpness. The first two folks, a black woman and white woman #1, are in sharp focus. Then there is white boy #1 who is a bit blurry, white women #2 who is even blurrier, and finally white boy #2, whose features are barely distinguishable. (What the hell happened to the brother?)

(A picture is worth a thousand words. I would have taken a picture of this poster for my blog, but digital cameras are not permitted to be used in IBM development labs. That would be different – violating IBM security policies by blogging about an IBM security poster.)

I have read the text of the poster closely and, for the life of me, I can’t figure out if there is some data security-related significance to the gradual blurriness of the five folks or if it is just some shitty photography.

The poster reminds me of a scene in the classic Cameron Crowe flick Almost Famous when boxes containing the promotional tee-shirts for the band Stillwater arrive in the dressing room of the band. In the photo on the shirt, all the band members except lead guitarist Russell Hammond are blurred out in the background which prompts a big back-stage fight between Russell and other band members.

Russell Hammond: Can we just skip the vibe, and go straight to us laughing about this? 
Jeff Bebe: Yeah, okay. 
Russell Hammond: Because I can see by your face you want to get into it. 
Jeff Bebe: How can you tell? I'm just one of the out-of-focus guys.

Duke vs. Wake – September 11

For the first time since 1998, we did a road trip to Winston-Salem to watch the Duke – Wake Forest game on September 11 at BB&T Field. In addition to Chris and Tony, Chris’ roommate David also joined us.

Though Winston is only about 80 miles from Hillsborough, I got a little nervous the day before when Duke put out some travel advisories for fans making the trip because of some construction that closed portions of I-40 in Greensboro and because of the Winston-Salem Air Show show that was scheduled to run concurrent with the game at nearby Smith Reynolds Airport. So the guys worked out an alternate route where we could pickup I-40 after the construction closure. It was smooth sailing the whole way. Got up to Greensboro by around 7:35 AM and we pulled into the parking lot at around 8:10 for the 12:10 kick.

Duke vs. Elon – September 4

(I have a bunch of posts that I have been tardy in getting published. What do they say about too busy living life to write about it? Anyways, weekends during the entire month of September were spent tailgating, drinking, and enjoying college football. In other words, a pretty freaking awesome month!)

There was a death in the family in August. My tried-and-true Thermos 4656110 Grill-2-Go Gas Grill bit the dust after 8 years of faithful service. The Grill-2-Go was a fine grill, but had been showing its' age in recent years.

It started with the ignition failing, requiring manual lighting. No big deal on that one. Then, the grease receptacle started melting away at the inlet where the grease flowed from the grilling surface. As a result, the hot grease would periodically trickle down onto the plastic legs. This made cleanup a pain and started tearing away at a joint connecting the supporting leg with the rest of the unit.

Guess Who Wears The Pants in That Family?

A couple of hours into our tailgate at the Duke-Alabama game on September 18, an Alabama fan named Harold ambled over to our tent to chat with me. Harold had traveled to Durham from his home in Florence, Alabama. He hadn’t missed a Tide home game since the mid-70s and was a very friendly guy. That is Harold to the far right of the picture below, wearing white baseball cap and red shirt, getting ready to toss the bag in corn hole.

The only problem with Harold was that he was a bit of a close talker. Chris, who was throwing the football during our extended conversation, was busting my chops about that after Harold returned to his corn hole game. That was a bit awkward – he sort of had me pinned between my tailgate canopy and the Civic.

Lost Opportunity

You may have heard about an unfortunate situation that fell upon Chad Ochosinco recently. The controversial Bengals’ receiver and reality TV star has a new cereal out - Ochosinco’s – Honey Nut Toasted Oats in an O-shape. Now I am not a big Ocho fan, but the proceeds from his cereal are funneled toward a really good cause - Feed The Children.

Unfortunately, on the cereal box, there is a misprint of the Feed The Children telephone number. Rather than directing consumers to the number where they can find out more information about the charity, the number is actually associated with a phone sex service. Talk about awkward.

(I have to admit that when I first heard this story, I briefly considered that maybe this was done intentionally. After all, there is no such thing as bad publicity for attention whores like Chad or TO. But even someone as jaded as me is going to give Chad the benefit of the doubt on this one.)

Ochosinco’s misfortune reminded me of a lighter episode that occurred at one of our defect meetings held at work in the spring of 2007.