Dark Horse (1999)

(Something I wrote last week thanks to whoever it was in Room 227 at the Holiday Inn Express I was staying at down in Virginia had their TV turned up way too loud, before I got the nerve to call the front desk and tell them to turn it down)

When you are twenty, you have all the time in the world, but nothing to say. When you are forty, you have something to say but no time (or space) to say it. Tonight, I ran across across an set of old CDs dating back to college. They were mixed in with CDRs (backups I will never ever recover from and long unsupported OS install disks) inside one of those thick translucent CDW bags from the their showroom in Vernon Hills, IL. I was surprised they even worked. Or at least some of them did. Despite four moves in five years, I have held on to them. Mostly for the bag and the memories of driving up Milwaukee Avenue at lunchtime when I worked at Hewitt.

I've always thought we left Chicagoland way too soon, even though I know why. For once, there is no imminent move to bring on the clutter-purge of contractor bags, the sound of Legos vacuumed off carpet, that smell of Murphy's Oil Soap on hardwoods. No more "staging" for the buyer's agents or cleaning the rental and holding your breath during the moveout inspection, wondering how much will get subtracted from your security deposit.

The beltway was eerie tonight in the fog. A brief warming in between twenty degree days.. It was strange to see the spires of Mormon Temple illuminated by floodlights, which normally means you have made it, that traffic will get better, regardless of your direction.

But tonight there was no such emotion. Traffic was moving and moving fast. Only the solace of motion with a musical assist. Not unlike my flights West from Austin to San Jose in the early 2000s, staring out the window watching over the West Texas plains, the Rockies, then the Sierras, then that perilous landing over downtown.

With three kids solitude only comes during the commute or travel. I will be in a hotel room tonight. I will write.

It only took forty five minutes to get Tyson's Corner. The Cure's Pornography played “Strange Days” and it has held up over time. Most of the rest have not. Brute force existentialism seems quaint. Now you have no time for the faux nihilism, critical theory, or other youthful excesses. The soundtrack from the Until the End of the World has held up through the years, however, and “Knocking at Death's Door” seemed strangely beautiful tonight. The movie, itself, not so much. However, the vision of us all glued to our small electronic screens reading our dreams was prophetic and perhaps the EMP blast silencing everything electronic.

I'm so glad I only discovered the Internet in my last year at A&M. I am thankful for all those hours in the computer lab, printing draft after draft of my poems and short stories. Some of these I have kept to. A Liberal Arts major out of place. Marking them up at wherever I went to review them in the pre-Starbucks age. Reading T.S. Eliot. Was it just the other day on the beltway en route to Tyson's I had the urge to read Proofrock?

And Wim Wenders. It was 1992, wasn't it? The Spring of poetry readings, after getting my first short story (and that one poem) published in the campus literary magazine. Readings at coffeehouses. Night stocking at the College Station Kroger on University Avenue. Oscar, the tyrannical foreman, kneepads around the shins of his stubby legs. “Faster, white boy. Faster.” Perhaps I've conflated him with a scene from My Own Private Idaho. Curses in Spanish. The semester my wife and I started dating. January, or was it February? March is the most beautiful month in Texas, weather-wise.

Later, I would learn that in between the 2nd and 3rd week of February is when Spring came to Austin. The twin Elms of our 3/1 barely 1100 square foot house in Brentwood, had blossomed. The night before, returning home from Russia, landing at the Bergstrom, a family, home, for the first time. I trudged to the cheap lot leaving Amelia with a screaming, traumatized toddler running away from her, screaming, while I looked for our Red Dodge Dakota and struggled with a car seat for the first time. There would be a lot of screaming, but by the time we turned onto Anderson Lane (or was it North Lamar) it had stopped. Kolya looked around the small house and knew he was home. "Kolya Dom," we repeated and he pointed at the ceiling fans, bookshelves, and the popcorn ceiling.

Only two days earlier, we had left Moscow. Four days before, had left the snowy Volga at night, our facilitator emptying a whole section of the Tupelov with only whisper, so the Americans (and a lone Scottish couple) could leave with their newly acquired children. Did she buy them off? Did she threaten them? In the airport lounge we learned how Russians deal with hysterical, stressed out women. Phenobarbital.

Just like yesterday, it was snowing the morning as we left the orphanage. Perhaps because we were the youngest couple (we had not suffered through years of failed fertility treatments before deciding to adopt,) standing outside in front of the Detsky Dom, we were interviewed by Russian television. Did that ever air? Paranoia causing us to lie and say we still lived in San Antonio because that was what was on our paperwork. It was the final days of Yeltsin. They knew Putin was coming, or so we were told over homemade fruit-flavored vodka.

"The dark horse," the only English-speaking Russian on our floor in the suburban Moscow flat, called him. Our final night in Moscow we stayed a block from Red Square but only ventured out one time to a supermarket for kefir and chocolate. It was too cold and we were too exhausted.

Altitude Induced Peace and Grown Up [Security] Jobs

So while en route from PHX to BWI, late Thursday night after a couple of (what appear to be) successful days onsite with a new-ish client, I couldn't help but a feel a bit of satisfaction, or perhaps, more importantly, lack of restlessness that has characterized much of my infosec^H^H^H^H^Hcybersecurity career. Things actually made sense. My career had some sort of meaningful trajectory. I had not just been hopping around every 18 months for the the last decade. There was a method to the madness.

(Perhaps it is no coincidence that the we've finally settled and bought a house north of Baltimore, that I wasn't on pins and needles while out of town when talking to my wife, or that the start of the school year has gone surprisingly smoothly for my two oldest children, or that my oldest's BPD, et. al. is reasonably under control, but I digress)

Around the turn of the century (and perhaps longer), I definitely had a case of the what do I do next? What is the next big thing? How can I scratch that itch?

I got my start as a trainer, which was a monkey I had on my back for a few years, only made worse that I had a B.A. in English and History from an engineering school and that my first job out of college was as an 8th grade reading teacher of all things!

So I relished the chance to leave Trident (only after my stock options from the Veridian acquisition were safely deposited) on to a all too brief stint as a security consultant at SBC (where I mostly wrote proposals and coded tools nobody would ever use) to my 5+ years at Cisco (internal consulting, then R&D, then back again) which was just as frustrating as it was rewarding. Politics. Personalities. My own naiveté. But exposure to Big Corporate life and a hell of a lot of cool technology. Then, fleeing to a small company, which was also as rewarding as it was frustrating. Mostly the working at home thing and not having enough people to work with, which was maddening, because I found out I was more social than I thought, culminating in that fateful move to Chicago for operational IT work and a hell of a lot of Ruby coding. On call. Weekend upgrade. BSD! Then back to training because I was burned out of ops work and wanted an easy way to move back East. And I actually enjoyed teaching. Adults (in the military) and kids (when I was a middle school teacher).

What triggered my thoughts at 28,000 feet (or whatever 737-700s fly at Eastbound) was recalling how natural early in the morning it was to be up at the whiteboard in the meeting I was having: drawing network diagrams, proposing solutions, debating implementations, cracking jokes. How this was just like teaching--or at least how I liked to teach. And I realized that there was no way that I could have felt this comfortable if I hadn't had the last two (no, scratch that, three) jobs.

One of the best things about teaching at Tenable (more so with the Enterprise classes than my Nessus classes) was how I'd get all sorts of weird questions based on peculiar aspects of a student's network (or political) environment. This kept me on my toes. And before then, at Hewitt, getting just enough of a taste of the keeping-shit-running hell of operational work and large, complex, global networks that makes a SCADA system seem simple. And before that all the lessons learned from Dale (who was channeling Tom Peters) about projects and clients and who you really are. So despite the fact that I still haven't stayed in one place for more than 18 months in the last two years

But the "grown-up" part in the title? What is that about?

Perhaps because I was (or still am) only a mediocre bug-hunter (or pentester or whatever, though I loath the term) but that of vulnerability sort of work I did at Cisco (and later at Digital Bond) never seemed to make a difference. And if I'm honest about it, the learning about a new product, application, protocol, or whatever was more interesting than actually finding flaws in it. Besides, you never really knew would be fixed or not--certainly was not in the critical path, was only at the tail end. Maybe things have changed now in appsec as it has gone mainstream? Maybe I got involved in that field too early. I know I got interested in fuzzers way too early. That's for damn sure.

Although I still do some of this sort of work, these days most of what I do now involves building things, not breaking things. And it is in the critical path. Secure network & system design is in the critical path. Hell, even compliance work is in the critical path.

That cool, technical work where you could wear shorts and sandals into the office every day and never had face to face meetings with your clients and never had to record time or worry about how much time you are billing, burn rate, or profitability--that was not in the critical path.

As much as I miss Austin, that is what I'll be thinking of when I head down 95 and pull into the office in the BWI flight path tomorrow morning for the first time in a week.

Snow Photos and More

In lieu of Facebook. Recent birthday party, lego club, and more!

blizzard09

Choose Civility?

Once in Austin we had a Great Horned Owl in the large Elm in our back yard. As I was watching it, my wife walked up behind me and scared me. We have a running joke about being scared of owls and birds of prey carrying off pets and small children. So last night during supper when I saw the flash of large wings through the side window and I rushed outside and brought our overweight Boston Terrier inside to spare her from this unknown bird of prey.

On our front lawn all of us (including Sam, our 20 mo old) watched as a large vulture tore up an unidentified creature into pieces no larger than a small child's fist.

It turned out to be a possum. I and the two oldest walked over to investigate, or as close as the flies would let us.

Then we went to Rita's to wash the taste of buzzard out of our mouth.

Choose Civility

Grampa, where did you live during the "Long Depression" that started in 2008?

Richard Florida's article How the Crash Will Reshape America captures a lot of what has been on my mind (and occasionally blogged about) since we left Skokie last June. 

From the packing up and leaving what my son called "best house ever" (the shaky footage is his) without a sold sign out front to some motel thoughts on the trip to premonitions of the impending collapse back to July (more specifically the non-sustainability of suburban sprawl) to the "discussions" my wife share on how long we should rent and when and where we should buy a common thread is that where you live matters.

It matters a lot. A hell of a lot. Your future may depend on it.

In October, less than a month after the financial markets began to melt down, Moody’s Investor Services published an assessment of recent economic activity within 381 U.S. metropolitan areas. Three hundred and two were already in deep recession, and 64 more were at risk. Only 15 areas were still expanding. Notable among them were the oil- and natural-resource-rich regions of Texas and Oklahoma, buoyed by energy prices that have since fallen; and the Greater Washington, D.C., region, where government bailouts, the nationalization of financial companies, and fiscal expansion are creating work for lawyers, lobbyists, political scientists, and government contractors.

Back in September, in the early days of the of the financial crisis, I thought about it a lot as I would look out into the Catoctins from the little park in our subdivision while my kids played (oblivous to what was on the radio) and I started to feel the first hint of Fall, that reminded me of 1987, my first Fall back in the states after living in Malaysia for 2 years. 

It was scary. With dozens of showings since our house went on the market on April 15th, 2008 yet not a single offer the constant talk of the forelosure crisis on the NPR, to say that it was stressful, it was an understatement.

Why did we buy in Chicago when we did? Why did we buy in one of the most overpriced suburbs on the Chicago North side? Well, because we couldn't afford Evanston or Winnetka and because of Skokie's diversity. We did not want our adopted Chinese daughter to be "the Chinese girl" in her pre-school class. Yes the schools were full of industrious recent immigrants. Immigrants that didn't care for the red brick Cape Code with the master bedroom where I sometimes bumped my head on the ceiling or the hardwood floors. All they wanted was space.

Multiple generations would fill the ugliest split level boxes you can imagine adjacent Crawford or Dempster. We heard from our realtor only the split levels were selling and how the demographics of the visitors were "different" (she was trying to abide by some regulations)  between our house and the those on nearby streets. Yes, so much was different between Austin and Skokie. Our first house two blocks from North Lamar (and where you could hear the music from Threadgills) sold on the first day. Those were different times and different places. 

Mostly white folks in their late 20s and early 30s. The hint of pot when you walked down the streets, some which had sidewalks some that did not. Certainly a larger percentage of Gay/Lesbian couples than in our previous neighborhood in San Antonio. Small three bedroom houses (if you were lucky) built in the late 40s and early 50s during the postwar boom. Aging water mains under streets and periodic electric outages. DSL was just starting to roll out. 

I remember seeing the street literally explode in front of our house on Brentwood: the last affordable neighborhood south of Anderson lane. Stay at home moms with graduate degrees. At the Elementary School meetings I felt out of place because I was sans tattoo. If I recall, our first night in Austin was on Halloween of 1999. The dotcom boom was in still in full swing and drcoop.com still held prime real estate overlooking MOPAC. 

We sat in the swings in Pease park that Thanksgiving, childless, awaiting what would be our final referral from Russia that would arrive in a matter of weeks and we would discuss it at the Little Deli on my lunchbreak, short 5 minute drive from the Southwestern Bell office on Huntland, adjacent to I-35. 

And all that we now know was still ahead of us: the letdown of Y2K, the NASDAQ crash in the Spring (I remember a day-trading colleague who had just joined from Dell) losing a lot that spring. I joined Cisco right after the last stock split in May 20o0 and I remember someone from SBC saying something about how I "was set" and could "retire." 

Yes, Austin is/was one of Florida's poster children for these new creative cities.

Thirty years ago, educational attainment was spread relatively uniformly throughout the country, but that’s no longer the case. Cities like Seattle, San Francisco, Austin, Raleigh, and Boston now have two or three times the concentration of college graduates of Akron or Buffalo. Among people with postgraduate degrees, the disparities are wider still. The geographic sorting of people by ability and educational attainment, on this scale, is unprecedented.

The University of Chicago economist and Nobel laureate Robert Lucas declared that the spillovers in knowledge that result from talent-clustering are the main cause of economic growth. Well-educated professionals and creative workers who live together in dense ecosystems, interacting directly, generate ideas and turn them into products and services faster than talented people in other places can. There is no evidence that globalization or the Internet has changed that. Indeed, as globalization has increased the financial return on innovation by widening the consumer market, the pull of innovative places, already dense with highly talented workers, has only grown stronger, creating a snowball effect. Talent-rich ecosystems are not easy to replicate, and to realize their full economic value, talented and ambitious people increasingly need to live within them

Returning home right before noon on that fateful blue September morning in 2001 after we watched both towers Fall live in the conference room. Watching the Reserve and National Guard Intelligence units gradually get activated and a getting a call from my XO down in San Antonio saying my name was on the list to deploy to Fort Belvoir. Packing my duffel bag, sitting around the table of our retro kitchen table and trying to explain to a toddler that Dada was going to go away for a while. Of course the orders were rescinded but my son and I were baptised in the Episcopal church anyway that Fall. There was more to it than that of course, but that was Austin. 

Years later I would grow restless and leave Cisco and work (virtually) from coffee shops on Lamar, Burnet, and Anderson and from my hot home office that used to be a kitchen and where supposedly a previous resident had died.  From the heat and the solitude I would slowly go crazy and would start looking to find a new job where I could work in an office again. I would strike out in Seattle (yeah I wrote that after bombing my AMZN interview, badly) but cool clarity would come soon. 

Giving up on big West coast software companies, I dug into the SCADA Plugins and a recruiter from Hewitt called, offering crazy money, a chance to run/develop Open Source security boxes in a large company and not do vuln work which I'd grown, a sweet relocation package,  and a way to escape the Texas heat. 

* * *

We will see if it is true but one of the more important (and troubling) charactization of our current malaise, elswhere Florida says our depression has more in common with the "Long Depression" of the late 19th century than the Great Depression:

Economic crises tend to reinforce and accelerate the underlying, long-term trends within an economy. Our economy is in the midst of a fundamental long-term transformation—similar to that of the late 19th century, when people streamed off farms and into new and rising industrial cities. In this case, the economy is shifting away from manufacturing and toward idea-driven creative industries—and that, too, favors America’s talent-rich, fast-metabolizing places.

And on the importance of geography:

To a surprising degree, the causes of this crash are geographic in nature, and they point out a whole system of economic organization and growth that has reached its limit. Positioning the economy to grow strongly in the coming decades will require not just fiscal stimulus or industrial reform; it will require a new kind of geography as well, a new spatial fix for the next chapter of American economic history.

Suburbanization was the spatial fix for the industrial age—the geographic expression of mass production and the early credit economy. Henry Ford’s automobiles had been rolling off assembly lines since 1913, but “Fordism,” the combination of mass production and mass consumption to create national prosperity, didn’t emerge as a full-blown economic and social model until the 1930s and the advent of Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. 

And, among other things, the foolishness of the American Dream of owning your own house. Thank God we're still renting.

On one level, the crisis has demonstrated what everyone has known for a long time: Americans have been living beyond their means, using illusory housing wealth and huge slugs of foreign capital to consume far more than we’ve produced. The crash surely signals the end to that; the adjustment, while painful, is necessary.

But another crucial aspect of the crisis has been largely overlooked, and it might ultimately prove more important. Because America’s tendency to overconsume and under-save has been intimately intertwined with our postwar spatial fix—that is, with housing and suburbanization—the shape of the economy has been badly distorted, from where people live, to where investment flows, to what’s produced. Unless we make fundamental policy changes to eliminate these distortions, the economy is likely to face worsening handicaps in the years ahead.

Suburbanization—and the sprawling growth it propelled—made sense for a time. The cities of the early and mid-20th century were dirty, sooty, smelly, and crowded, and commuting from the first, close-in suburbs was fast and easy. And as manufacturing became more technologically stable and product lines matured during the postwar boom, suburban growth dovetailed nicely with the pattern of industrial growth. Businesses began opening new plants in green-field locations that featured cheaper land and labor; management saw no reason to continue making now-standardized products in the expensive urban locations where they’d first been developed and sold. Work was outsourced to then-new suburbs and the emerging areas of the Sun Belt, whose connections to bigger cities by the highway system afforded rapid, low-cost distribution. This process brought the Sun Belt economies (which had lagged since the Civil War) into modern times, and sustained a long boom for the United States as a whole.

But that was then; the economy is different now. It no longer revolves around simply making and moving things. Instead, it depends on generating and transporting ideas. The places that thrive today are those with the highest velocity of ideas, the highest density of talented and creative people, the highest rate of metabolism. Velocity and density are not words that many people use when describing the suburbs. The economy is driven by key urban areas; a different geography is required

Of course a lot of this (as well as the stimulus package) hinges on whether or not the era of manufacturing jobs is truly gone.

Almost makes me wish I was back in Chicago

See the slideshow from Grant Park and the live footage on MSNBC.

It's on you

In the last twenty years I only voted in two presidential elections. Four years ago I voted against the obnoxious Michael Moore left and cast a ballot for W, voting against my Central Austin neighbors with their Impeach Bush stickers. And, first, in 1988, when I came back from basic training, and voted for his father.

I sat out the 90s, cynical, and still complained, believing the line about if you don't vote, you can't complain was utter bullshit. (I still believe that actually)



When I cast my vote for Obama in the Illinois primaries it was more a vote against Clinton than for Obama. On that snowy day in Skokie, I still had respect for McCain.

When I go to downtown New Market, past all the McCain-Palin, signs, and vote against, once again, in the minority, I won't be voting against anyone.

Once in your lifetime, you can lose the cynicism, fear, and apathy and believe again, if only for a little while.

It doesn't hurt, much. At least not right now.

Do the Right Thing.

We will see

Heady stuff, we'll will know in a week about the youth vote.



Was down in DC at Children's National today for my daughter's eye surgery. Lots of Obama ads on the TV in the waiting room, a bunch of nervous parents watching his PA speech live while their kids were in surgery. Nodding heads. A couple of middle-aged white women talking about how Palin scared them. A handful of African-America. A granola-looking white woman with an African-American husband. She said she was a Christian (responding to a spot on CNN) and was voting for Obama. A handful of Spanish-speaking families and Asians.

Good to be back in Real America. Real 21st Center America where whites hardly break 50% of the population (think California and Texas or even NOVA) vs. the racist hinterlands feeling sorry for themselves. Went pheasant hunting up in Western. Once again am struck how the most beautiful plasses in the land are often the most backwards.

After a decade and half in Texas and a year in Skokie, these racist, low-class xenophobic, anti-immigrant, white f***s that seem to be everywhere here in Maryland -- talking about "Mexicans." Please.

It is difficult to take. Nobody would dare make those comments in Texas, even if they thought them. God, I'm turning into a reactionary.

Leaving Chicagoland: Reflection & Closure

With the exception of one late night blog from a motel outside Toledo while my 9-year old, two dogs, and an old cat slept soundly (well, maybe not the cat) I really haven't engaged in that much reflection (too painful), but there has been a whole lot of 2nd guessing and too much worrying.

Why did we ever leave Texas? Should we have stayed in Chicago? What were we thinking buying an expensive house in Skokie as the housing market started to tank? And on and on. As much as Illinois is and was a strange and foreign place to briefly live, a few moments stand out.

Many of these are bittersweet, like the excitement and expectation in November 2006 when we stayed in the Embassy Suites downtown and visited the Children's Museum at Navy Pier, first feeling the wind off lake Michigan, taking the news from our realtor back in Austin that we had received two nearly fully-price offers on our house back in Allandale.

Driving through the Skokie and Morton Grove streets for the first time (the mounds of leaves still piled up neatly on the side) noticing how ugly the houses were compared to Texas. The bleakness of split levels. Could we really live here?

The 3-day road trip from Texas in our new Honda van. Christmas in Vernon Hill in corporate apartments.

A year later, having survived our first winter, we would be used to it and we would experience the first amazing Spring in a temperate climate. A Spring that counts, like nothing you would see in Texas. Ever.

The long morning-sick summer of Sam, when I was Mr. Mom. The awful humidity of a Skokie August. My nerve racking first Annual Enrollment. Constantly fighting the PF bugs. Compaq. DL-380G3, DL-380G4, DL-385G1. What, no SMP? Watching state tables, interrupt load, and Intel packet drops. The Black Monday when the Internet went down that I had saw coming on a Thursday morning, helpless with my Ruby statistics monitoring scripts. DL-145s with shitty ILOs. Bill's mysterious lockups.

The bleak sickness (of a another type) of a year ago. The tense days adjacent to the birth of Sam. One too many special education meetings.

Back and forth on Dempster from the Psych unit at Advocate Lutheran to the maternity ward at Rush North Shore. On one of the darkest days my mother in law, praying, convinced that something good would come from all this. And she was right.

The fresh snowfall on the morning we would drive Sam home, greeted by two parking tickets from the village.

And some time in January when we would decide to try to move back East.

Proving I do more than blog on weekends

2008 Summer-Fall

Historic Days, Historic Times

Sure there is a lot of the same old stump speech here, and yes there are way too many promises, but in the rain yesterday that has drifted in and out of the Mid-Atlantic states, in the darkness, with his sleeves rolled up, you get glimpses of of Big-H History is happening. Something is going on here.

Twenty years ago I went down to Texas to college, but now I'm full circle. And what stands out over the past two decades.

The collapse of the Soviet Union. The Fall of the Berlin Wall. The night the first bombs fell over Baghdad. The loaded railcars from Fort Hood going through College Station, some vehicles painted brown, others still the woodland camo for the Fulda.

The long superficial years of Clinton interrupted by Waco and Oklahoma City. Watching the TV's in JFK (en route to Moscow where we'd adopt me oldest son) about the DDOS. The Dot Com crash. And 9/11 and shell's of half-completed office parks in Austin when the money ran out.

And now.

FredNeckSec 1: Next Thursday

I put the announcement up on citysec last week. I'll be at Barley & Hops around 7 +/- 30 minutes in the bar area. I'll have something with a Cisco logo on it and will probably be drinking one of their mediocre stouts. There should be handful that may make it, but it will be interesting how many security folks there are in this neck of the woods. Feel free to drop me a note or just show up.

To Actually See the Sky Again!

Took the dog out one last time tonight and was surprised to actually see stars amidst the drone of traffic on I-70 and Maryland 75. Didn't I write about that in one of my first short stories, alluding to Robert Frost's lesser-known (and rather nihilistic, which somehow seems quaint approaching 40, although amazingly I got carded for a 6-pack of Shiner Hefeweizen tonight! ) poem, "Desert Places."

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it--it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less--
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars--on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Yes one more data point (as if all the white people didn't weren't enough) that we are actually back in "the country." Well, that and that the lack of the detergent-like smell that was so pervasive in Chicagoland. Like you were standing next to a dryer-vent. The air smelled like that.

Obama's Patriotism Speech (and the Call to Shop)

I need to be working on my slides and lab exercises for a course I'm going to be teaching later this month but text of Obama's patriotism speech is worth checking out.

Sadly, in recent years, in the midst of war on two fronts, this call to service never came. After 9/11, we were asked to shop. The wealthiest among us saw their tax obligations decline, even as the costs of war continued to mount. Rather than work together to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and thereby lessen our vulnerability to a volatile region, our energy policy remained unchanged, and our oil dependence only grew.

On Sunday, as I was wandering the newly-discovered Sprawl in East Frederick, near the intersection of I-270 and I-70 I was thinking about the last 20 years and what had changed (funny how you only notice the changes when you leave a place) and I was thinking about Bush's call to shop after 9/11 and the growth in buying power (and debt) and decline of savings that occurred in the 90s. That still continues.

As I was entering (and exiting, having not purchased anything) the Best Buy, I thought about 1987, when I moved to Frederick, or even when we lived north of Baltimore in the early 80s. There was no Best Buy. For electronics (in the age of Atari and Commodore) you went to Service Merchandise. Where have they gone? There was no Fry's. There was no huge Walmart full of amazing cheap stuff from China. When did Whole Foods come about. This is the gift of Clinton. The excesses of growth.

In 1999 we bought our first house in Crestview (that's in a hip part of Central Austin where prices are still skyrocketing and is no longer the last affordable place inside 183) on the first day we saw it, the downpayment coming from Trident stock options from the Veridian acquisition. From 1994 to 2004 my yearly compensation increased almost 6-fold (I started low, as a public school teacher in Texas and there were some good bonus/stock option years after the "100 year flood") but in 2008 what do we Americans have to show for this prosperity?

In this so-called recession, this "crisis," (as I drive down I-70 I year ads for Information Assurance programs and CDW-G security solutions spiels, there is no crisis in my line of work) I'm amazed the parking lots of the big box stores are still packed full. Is this one last binge? Forget about Reagan's line about 4 years, are we really better off than 10 years ago? 20? What is the cost? For some reason, it is not hard to imagine the big box parking lots of the suburbs like Route 85 in Frederick, 183 near Cedar Park, or 1604 in San Antonio like in the The Road (not Kerouac) emptied in 50 or 100 years. The pace of the beloved 90s (all those Clinton-lovers) is simply not sustainable. Your losses cancel out your gains. Everything catches up with you sometime.

Leaving Skokie

My 9 year old took these pictures on Friday.



With all this Hillary nonsense behind us, the Rustbelt never looked prettier!

Should you work where you want to live? (or vice versa)

So my oldest son is pretty nervous about our move from Skokie to Frederick and our old cat that won't die and I are the only one's that can't sleep in a LaQuinta somewhere in Ohio. This time, my son and I (and the three pets) are make the final drive from Illinois to Maryland.

As we were driving across Indiana, he asked, "Dad, how do we know we are making the right decision?"

Kids are funny that way. I have been asking myself the same question. Of course the brutally honest answer is your really never know. You have a set of data at a given point in time and you go for it. You make your best effort and you could be wrong and you recalibrate as your dataset changes. But you don't tell that to a 9 year old that is anxious enough already.

* * *

When it came time to leave College Station in 1994 we picked San Antonio because it was a large city in Texas that I sort of familiar with (I had drilled at Camp Bullis) and because it wasn't Houston or Dallas. I had lived in Houston when the Oilers had a good team and never much cared for most folks that said they were from Dallas (or Plano or Richardson) while at A&M.

We really liked Austin, but we weren't sure if we could get teaching jobs there. And we just barely managed to find jobs before September, but San Antonio was definitely not our kind of town. Eventually we started driving up to Austin almost every weekend. And finally I managed to get a job working out of the Huntland office for Southwestern Bell. Then Cisco 9 months later. And we loved it. Too bad I got sick of Cisco and working at home at Digital Bond. I tried hard for Seattle getting shot down at both Amazon and Microsoft after the on-site interviews. Then Chicago came up -- with Hewitt. We felt we needed a change. Our last Summer in Austin sucked the life out of us, old houses with weak AC's and minimal insulation -- my wife said move somewhere cooler or put in a pool. The job was good. A more security ops related role that involved Open Source and development and the money was good, so we went for it.

That was 18 months ago. I really don't know how long we would have stayed in Chicagoland even if there hadn't been the an "act of God".

Skokie was definitely a unique plassI've been meaning to blog on it and I'm sure I will in the coming months, but it really wasn't us. And I'm not sure anyplace in Chicago was, either.

* * *

So I asked my son, "What is different about moving to Maryland than when we moved from Austin to Chicago?" And I managed to get him to admit that we know people there, we have family there and "I have two friends there," he said, referring to the two girls of my Dad's executive assistant that live on a farm.

And I told him that (like Austin) we picked Maryland -- then I found a job there. I'm not sure it put his mind at ease that is good enough for me.

Keeping the Creative Juices Flowing

Not that I've needed that the last few days.



More energy drinks and 3mm contractor bags please!

How long did it take you to figure out what this commercial was about?