Begin Again

First day of school for the 2014-15 school year was yesterday, for Miss Anna Banana Fo Fanna and me. She's in 8th grade now. Me, a little hard to say. Junior-ish. Whatever.

Actually, the UT fall semester doesn't start until tomorrow. Austin Community College, where I have two classes, started up yesterday. But one of those is a compressed online course which doesn't kick off until 9/22. So, yesterday, I took off work at 3 PM, biked up to UT, declared my major as Rhetoric and Writing (not marketing; surprise!), and had my UT ID made.

Big mistake.

Campus has changed a bit since I was a regular there, and what I once knew as the Undergraduate Library (UGL) is now the Peter T. Flawn Academic Center (FAC). It's not a library at all anymore. There are computer labs, and it's where you go to get your ID made. Well, when I was a (cough, cough) sweet young thing, we called the UGL the "Ugly," and apparently this is where karma comes back to bite you in the ass, because when you're 45 and hydrate like a mofo and you bike to school when it's 101 degrees and have your picture taken at the FAC, well, "pretty" is not the first word that comes to mind.

Seriously, I might drive there Saturday and have them retake it.

Anyway, classes did start at ACC yesterday, so I showed up enthusiastically at my Texas State and Local Government class. Instead of feeling self-conscious about the fact that everyone else in class is younger than my second child I should just take shameless advantage of my inside knowledge as a state government employee and try to nuke the curve. This does concern politics, after all.

A young lady arrived early and was sitting front and center 30 minutes before the start of class. She was reading Ayn Rand. So all hope for the future either is or is not lost, depending on where you stand. Do I cancel out her effect? Or do we both contribute, equally detrimentally, to the current Texas political Gestalt? Discuss.*

I fired up the computer tonight to complete my first, practice, not-for-credit writing assignment for this class, and found an email from my Advanced Writing class at UT - one of my upper-division major requirements and a class I'm extremely excited about, although I also have to take an Intermediate Writing class (it's not a prerequisite) and it seems odd to do that one afterwards. I am wondering if I can just turn in my blog and get a B.

My writing professor has just gotten jury duty. Jury duty! So we can't have class tomorrow; it's a Monday-Wednesday class, so no meeting Friday; next Monday is Labor Day, so... Well, I have some suggested reading to tide me over, but I have to say I'm a little disappointed. Are university professors not exempt? Could he not have submitted a written excuse that would have blown the court's judicial socks off? I mean, you know, writing. Right?

He obviously isn't a state government employee.

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*Preferably in German

The Right Start

Yesterday morning my cube neighbor rushed his kid to a band trip, arriving just in the nick of time, only to discover he'd forgotten the kid's trombone.

There's a special sound effect tailor-made for just such an occasion - but you need a trombone to make it.

Sometimes life is like an O. Henry story.

But then, sometimes, it's like this:

This is my new morning commute, the boardwalk I was looking forward to a few months ago. It's so worth the wait. The boardwalk portion is about two miles long, and completes the 10-ish-mile hike-and-bike trail loop around the river-shaped lake thingy in the middle of Austin.

It's about a half-mile coast down a quiet neighborhood street to the boardwalk ramp off of Riverside Drive. It's a beautiful ride in the cool of early morning, with the last of an overnight mist burning off the smooth surface of the water.

Unfortunately, you can't follow the same route back because the afternoon traffic pattern is much less conducive to jaywalking across Riverside - traffic is backed up just enough to get good and angry, without quite coming to a stop - so you have to cross half a mile away at the light and climb up a much steeper street. And it's 97 degrees.

But you don't need a trombone, so that's something.

But What Price Victory?

Software approval WIN! I finally got ArcMap installed on my work computer!

ArcMap is great for many purposes related to travel and tourism. It’s rather a pity, then, that after a year and a half of making logical, convincing, nay, even impassioned arguments for approval to get it installed, I can’t remember much about how to use it, have no clue how to connect to the geodatabase(s) I need, and months ago suffered an epic friendship fail with the GIS analyst who was going to help me out.

In contrast, you get all the Novell products you could ever want* just by showing up to work – at least in theory. “You’ll have to call me when it’s ready,” my cube neighbor told someone over the phone yesterday, “my GroupWise is down. Again.”

There was a pause. “That’s our email system,” she explained.

Early in my career at Sematech – which was federally funded at the time – we had something called cc:Mail. What a baffling name for an email client. “I’ll send you a cc:Mail,” people in the office would say blithely to outsiders, who no doubt wondered why the sender wouldn’t simply address it to them directly? Perhaps if you worked for the CIA, you had bcc:Mail.

Before that we had – and I can’t believe I’ve never killed off the brain cells that remember this, while the neurons that know how to use Arc have gone to the big happy cerebral cortex in the sky – an email program in VAX/VMS, displayed in white dots on a screen the shade of blue now reserved for letting you know you should’ve bought a Mac.

GroupWise may be an improvement over cc:Mail, but that’s only because it’s fifteen years newer. It seems to be the system of choice for government agencies. Which makes sense: it’s slightly outdated and sluggish, with a stodgy, joyless interface; it may also have something to do with the state mainframe, which is housed (unless someone in my old division accidentally vaporized it by hitting the F12 key) in San Angelo. What does a mainframe even look like? I picture a dark, massive, Nixon-era hulk with lots of switches and random blinking lights, crouched ominously on the grounds of San Angelo State University, rumbling low in its bowels, occasionally belching out bursts of steam. There might be punch cards involved. I bet it eats microwave popcorn, too.

About a hundred yards to the west-northwest of where I work now is my old building, chock full of people who remember punch cards, eat microwave popcorn, and have a rudimentary understanding of Arc, but – how shall I put this – whose collective work ethic might not always be said to include a strong predilection for service to others. My remaining GIS-using friends have scattered to the four corners of the globe.** ArcGIS is only used by one other person in our division, so our IT guy can’t really help me out; and my pushing so hard for Arc kind of trod on that other person’s territory, so I hesitate to approach him. I find myself therefore unsupported, not to mention insupportable.

But dammit! I got the software!

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*Assuming you had taken such complete leave of your senses that you wanted any Novell products
**A globe doesn’t even HAVE corners. And they call themselves geographers!