Why Don’t You Get Off My Back?

Today, for the first time in a little over a week, I was able to do some running. It wasn’t my usual three mile jog on the treadmill, which I try to get  in every other day. Rather it was a little over two miles of running and then another thirty minutes of walking (all on the treadmill). The reason for my recent inactivity was a lower back muscle strain that I have been hobbled with since last Saturday morning. Now, I’d like to tell y’all that I strained my back as a result of some intensely masculine activity like lifting a fallen pine tree while clearing brush or delivering my signature devastating cross-over dribble while playing hoops against one of the three stooges. But, alas, I am afraid the episode was of a domestic (and frankly much more embarrassing) nature. I am filing this post using the cloud label "aging gracefully”, but there is nothing inherently graceful about any of this.

Last weekend was the first weekend in a bit that wasn’t accounted for in terms of either a Duke game to attend or “work work” to handle. We had just completed the last development sprint on the current release of the product on November 9, so I wasn’t even going to think all weekend about the day job that pays all the bills. With all of this free time, from a planning perspective, I had been eyeing the weather forecast all week and it looked like Saturday and Sunday were lining up as perfect days to attend to the blowing, raking, and bagging of the gazillion leaves that I had permitted to pile up over the previous three weeks or so. So that activity was on the docket for sure. I also had my eyes set on the SEC Game on CBS (Alabama and TA&M) and the PSU-Nebraska game as well. (Since Pitt got its crap-the-bed-this-week loss out of the way on Friday – sigh – I wouldn’t have that emotional challenge to deal with over the weekend.)

Toilet Humor

Weird department meeting at work a couple of weeks ago. The department meeting is contrasted with the many project-related meetings that are held each week. For example, I have six regularly scheduled project meetings each week that are basically just related to gathering and reporting project status:

• I am a Scrum Master so I hold a 30 minute Scrum Meeting on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday with my team of 10 Scrum Team members.
• There is this Scrum-of-Scrums that all the Scrum Masters have to attend on Monday and Thursday. This covers project-wide communications between the various team leaders and the project leadership (Release Manager, Project Manager, and Chief Programmer).
• There is a weekly project status meeting on Wednesday that has all the various project stakeholder sub-teams (development, test, writers, localization, etc).

Department meetings, on the other hand, are usually scheduled every couple of months. Their primary purpose is to allow your manager to cover topics that are typically of an Human Resources-related nature. In the first part of our last department meeting, The Boss covered vital topics like how to deal with contractors and where to go during a fire drill (stressing that one shouldn’t stop to pick up their smart phone or block exit ways by checking their Facebook status during the drill – you can never take anything for granted with engineers).

Rush Concerts

(This one really belongs in a journal instead of a blog as its utility is mostly limited to moi, so it won’t get publicized with a FB link. In a couple of years, by which time I will have completely lost my mind and my memory, I will need all the help I can get to recall this sort of data. So without further adieu, an inventory of the four Rush concerts attended over the last thirty years – and what I can remember of them.)

Date: April 4, 1983

Venue: Civic Arena, Pittsburgh PA

Tour: Signals (Set List)

Ticket Price: $11.50

Age 20. Junior year at Pitt, right at the start of Finals for the Winter Semester.  The same Monday evening that NC State shocked Phi Slamma Jamma in the NCAA 1983 Final. Went to show with a bunch of guys, most of whom at I met as a freshman (Dutch, Hoagie, Joe Long, Bob P, et al). Pre-concert “Arn City” brews (enjoyed responsibly, albeit underage) in the dorms at Litchfield Towers C before moving our party to an apartment in South Oakland and then hopping on the PAT 61C Bus for the four-mile trek from Oakland to “Dahntahn”.  Awesome set list.  Was already hooked completely on the band by then, but, like about 8 gazillion other fans, completely related to “Subdivisions”. Ged subbed in “One likes to believe in the freedom of baseball”  in TSOR (Bucs opening day was the next day – the golden days of Johnny Ray and Jose DeLeon). Sat in section C8 at the Igloo (roughly center ice) on Alex’s side. Opening Act: Jon Butcher Axis.

The Nanny State Vs. The Mommy State?

I have a Voice-Over-IP (VOIP) phone system in my home in addition to my cell. This is of course one of the clearest indicators that I am indeed “Old”. The VOIP number really doesn’t get a whole lot of use. Every year around this time, I’ll noodle on whether I really need to carry this line item forward into next year’s budget. The chief reason I keep it is for the infrequent occasions where (for whatever reasons) I need to take work-related conference calls at home. I think I have worked from home a grand total of 1.5 days in 2012, so the cost/benefit equation is probably heavily skewed toward the cost side. The VOIP line is provided via Vonage.

One unintended side benefit I have derived from the VOIP line over the last few months is the (somewhat juvenile) pleasure I get from reading the various butchered translations of political advertisements left as messages and converted to text by Vonage’s Visual Voicemail software. Of course this pleasure will all come to an end on Wednesday. As with most of the VOIP systems, Vonage can be configured to send email to you when messages are left by callers. The email will include an attachment that includes the encoded audio file for the message (to which you can listen) and also the text of the message (output from the Vonage Visual Voicemail speech recognition software).