A guy died and went to the afterlife. He was somewhat surprised when he was met by his Spirit Guide.
Isn’t this heaven?
Well, you actually get to pick your eternal reward. But, you were kind of jerk in life, so you choices are somewhat limited.
What choices do I have?
I’ll show you.
The Spirit Guide took him to the first location. It was the classic picture of hell. Fire and brimstone everywhere constantly burning, but never consuming the poor souls condemned there.
What else have you got?
Next, the Spirit Guide took him to a frigid wasteland. The land, if there was any was buried under ice and snow. The wind howled incessantly as the wretched souls huddled together, freezing, but never frozen.
Is that it?
There’s one more choice, but I have to warn you, it’s pretty bad.
The Spirit Guide took the man to a literal cesspool. The smell was overpowering. He saw countless people standing neck deep in the filth. Other than the smell, the place didn’t seem too terrible.
I guess I’ll choose this one, if those are my only choices.
You’re sure?
Yeah, I’m sure.
Okay, just remember it’s for eternity and you can never change your mind.
With that, the Spirit Guide disappeared and the man found himself neck deep in the muck. Just then an authoritative voice boomed:
Okay, break’s over. Everyone back on your heads.
I spent the day in Sitka, Alaska yesterday. Don’t let my leadin mislead you. I had a great time. We took the city tour. Our guide, Clint was funny, knowledgeable and very, very punctual. The 9:30AM tour left the dock at 9:10. At the first stop he announced we were leaving at exactly 9:45am. He even made us pull out our cell phones and synchronize our clocks.
At 9:45 on the dot we pulled away from the Russian Orthodox Cathederal. The two ladies who stayed to take that one last picture eventually rejoined the tour later in the day, but the trains in Italy should run this precise.
Sitka, has a population less than 10,000 and it’s the 5th largest city in Alaska. It’s located, like many Alaska cities, on an island. The airport and one of the three high schools is located on an another island connected by a bridge. In between the two were a few islands just big enough for a house. The weather was nice. It was overcast and about 65 degrees.
I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, but I’ve lived in the Utah desert long enough to be awestruck by the greenery. We walked through forests of Douglas fir. We wandered along the pebbly beach. We watched sea lions frolicking in the bay. The salmon were running, and the sea lions were taking full advantage of it.
In short, the day was great. It was 100 degrees in Pleasant Grove, Utah yesterday. Knowing that made wandering the temperate Sitka streets even more enjoyable. I think it’s natural when you go on vacation to think, “What if we lived here?”
It would suck.
Seriously, it would be terrible.
My dad used to say,
You have to trade all of yours for all of thiers,
when we would talk about how great someone else had it. We typically pick and choose the exciting parts. We do the same thing with jobs. I love my job. It’s very challenging and I love what I do. There are times where I’m walking through our call center and I get a chance to talk to some of our agents. Many of them are jealous of my job. After all, I don’t have a set schedule. I get to take my cell phone on the call floor. (Something they would be fired for.) I can pull people off the phones on a moment’s notice to help me with a project, or a test. In short, my job looks great.
They don’t have to think about working 70 hour weeks, with no overtime, as I’ve done more times than I can count. They don’t have to be concerned with trying to coordinate 12 different projects, each with its own schedule, but all of which have to mesh perfectly with each other. They don’t have to think about the tens of thousands of miles I’ll fly between now and the end of the year.
All of yours for all of theirs.
Sitka is a great town. We visited the “old prospectors” home. We bought a couple of things from the gift shop. While there we had a wonderful conversation with the woman who runs it. A man from our ship holding a very expensive camera came in and mentioned how disapponted he was that the clouds hadn’t cleared off enough to let him take some pictures.
He didn’t realize that yesterday was a good weather day. In fact, it was a nearly perfect weather day. Think of where you live. Think of the best summer day imaginable at your house. For Utah, it’s probably 85 degrees and a mild canyon breeze, with large puffy white clouds floating in an azure sky. Anything else, is a worse day. Yesterday in Sitka was that day. It’s the height of summer. This was the best it gets.
Sitka doesn’t get a lot of snow, but it rains over 300″ per year. That’s two and a half FEET of rain every year. (EDIT: it’s not two and a half feet, it’s TENTY FIVE feet of rain! Even more a reason NOT to live here year round.) It’s a rainforest. That’s why it’s so green. And that ocean view? There are days that the folks in the houses in the bay cannot go to work because the weather is too bad. Think about how bad the weather would have to be to not be able to make it across 30 yards of inner harbor? Stand on your head, indeed.
Today we are off to Ketchikan, Alaska. I’m sure it will be memorable. It might even be the perfect Alaskan summer day: cloudy and 65 degrees.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2017 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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Have any of you gotten the WiFi to work on the ship?
My brother asked me as we waited for the B.B. King tribute band to start their first set.
Yeah, I used it to update my blog the last three nights.
Was it hard?
Not really. You select HOLLAND-GUEST as your WiFi, and then open a browser. If the page doesn’t redirect, type in LOGIN.COM. Then, you have to create a ship account and tie it to your cabin. After you login with your new account, just select PAYMENT PLANS. You have the option for buying minutes. I just use the $0.75/min option. Takes about 3 minutes to upload the blog.
The group just stared at me.
That’s way too much work!
Hey, I’ve updated my blog every day for four years. I’m not going to let a little seventy-five cents per minute charge break my streak. Next week, when I’m camping with the boy scouts, I’ll write it on my phone and then drive out of the main highway to upload it.
Why don’t you just write them early and schedule them?
I’m too lazy.
For some reason they didn’t see my current approach as the “lazy” approach. Then, they decided to “help.” Something you need to understand about my brothers and me, we are a little competitive. Okay, maybe more than a little. My younger brother brought two pair of basketball shoes on the cruise because he knew his brothers would be here and the ship has a basketball court and he didn’t want to let the excuse we didn’t have shoes stop us.
Today was a “sea” day. The ship stopped at a glacier, but we stayed at sea the entire day. They were looking for contestants for a shipboard gameshow. I met my brother at the sign up desk. Fortunately, they put us on the same team. We won fairly easily.
So, my brothers, with plenty of encouragement from my sister-in-law and my brother’s girlfriend, decided they were going to force me to update my blog early.
Go ahead, we’ll each say a word and we have to keep the story going around the circle.
My brother John is an accountant, and a really good one. He’s not really a writer. I just pointed out to them how rude it would be for me to type away on an iPad while the show was going on.
When I was in high school, I made the decision to not drink. It was just something that I decided I didn’t want to experiment with. I have a pretty addictive personality anyway and I didn’t need any encouragement. My high school friends didn’t all make the same choice. I don’t mean to say that they put themselves in dangerous situations, but they would drink a beer at a party.
But, a funny thing happened as we got a little older. I’d had the same friends since I was ten years old. By the time we got to be 17, when we attended a party, I didn’t need to tell anyone that I didn’t drink. When the host would start passing out beers, my friends would speak up,
Oh, Rodney doesn’t want one. He doesn’t drink.
It became easy for me not to drink. My friends knew it was something that was important to me. And while they didn’t make the same choice, they respected mine and wanted to do their part to help me keep the standard I’d set for myself. I’m still friends with those men today. And they will still explain to people that “Rodney doesn’t drink.”
Lots of people say they want to be a writer. The piano player on the ship, Pearson Keating explained that he wanted to be a writer. Becoming a writer is the easiest thing in the world and the one of the hardest. Pearson and his partner Rachel Solomon do a dualing pianos show. They are both amazing muscians. I tried to explain it.
Look, here’s the thing. If I wanted to be musician, I’d have to have at least a modicum of talent. I couldn’t just announce that I was going to be a muscian without a lot of work.
Yeah. . .
But, you could become a writer right now today. All it takes to be a writer is to write. You don’t even have to write good.
Writing is the easiest thing in the world. Scribble some thoughts on a piece of paper. It’s not rocket science. And yet, there are many people who, as a writer friend of mine said, “Like to have written,” but not necessarily to actually write. There are people who will spend a lot of time convincing themselves that they cannot write without a prewriting ritual. Or, if it’s inconvenient. Or, if they don’t feel inspired.
Is it inconvenient to write on a cruise ship and arrange to upload it every day? I guess so. But, it’s not really about the convenience aspect of it. It’s about the process and the content. I’m not really a great writer. I think I’m getting there. I enjoy telling stories, as anyone who’s taken a dip through the archives will tell you. I’m learning to put two or three thoughts together and find some point. I know I’m a better writer today than I was four years ago when I started posting these scribbles to the internet. And, I would hope that four years from now, I’ll be better.
I know many musicians. They occasionally play gigs. I know many comedians. They occasionally tell jokes on stage. I know actresses and actor. They sometimes perform on screen or stage.
But, the writers? The writers write. My friends who are writers write every day. Sometimes the stuff they write gets published or posted online. Other times, it doesn’t. Writing is a solitary exercise. So, I’ll take the teasing from my family. But, then, I’ll pay $0.75/min to upload these musings using the ship’s WiFi, and next week, I’ll drive out to the main highway to post five updates.
Because, if there’s one true rule that I know: Writers write.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2017 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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I almost got stranded in Juneau, Alaska yesterday. Juneau is only accessible by sea and air. We arrived on a cruise ship about 1:00PM. We had a full afternoon planned. As we prepared to disembark, the captain reminded us that we needed to be back on board by 8:00PM and the gangplank was going to be raised at 8:30.
The day in Juneau was very fun. I’m on this cruise with my mother, my stepfather, my brothers, sister-in-law, brother’s girlfriend and my sister. Let’s just say I’m here with my family. We all had the same shore excursions planned.
We started with a tour of the city of Juneau. Juneau is a small town. There’s not a lot to do in Juneau, and with four cruise ships in port, the town’s population doubled. The city tour driver was entertaining. He’s a native Alaskan. He is an artist who carves totems and paddles. He works at Tesoro “turning on the pumps” during the winter. He also works as a plow driver. In the summer, he drives a tour bus. His name was Fred. Well, except he explained his native name translated as “Makes Wind.” Yep. He went there.
The city used to be a mining town. They took 70 tons of gold out of the mountains around Juneau. It’s the capital of Alaska and probably one of the smallest state capitals in the country. Juneau has no roads that connect it to the rest of . . .anything. The farthest you can get out of town in Juneau appears to be about 30 miles and then you run into the Juneau Ice Fields, 1200 square miles of glacier maker.
The city tour was an excuse to get us on a bus that eventually dropped us off at Mendenhal glacier. There’s nothing special about this glacier, except that Mendenhal is the closest glacier to Juneau, so it’s the one that the tour takes you to. The glacier is named for some physicist. I couldn’t find anything explaining why a glacier in Juneau Alaska is named for a physicist from Ohio.
After the glacier was the highlight of the day, whale watching. We got on another bus that took us to the waterfront where we boarded a boat captained by Jason and crewed by Jeremiah, and Carter. Jeremiah explained that we would be seeing humpback whales. Unlike the Orca, or Killer whales that I was familier with growing up, humbacks are bigger and tend to travel alone. They are in Alaskan waters right now getting fat for the long trip South.
We saw two whales in our tour. The most impressive sight was the tail as it dove in the Alaskan version of the fjords. It was amazing to think these creatures are 45 feet long and weigh literally tons.
We turned for shore about 7:00. It was about an hour back to shore. Several passengers asked about making it back to their respectrive ship in time. The ride from the dock the tour ended on to the ship was about an 18 minute ride by bus. The tour had obviously gone long and now we worried about the ship sailing with out us. Well, I should say, they worried. Personally, I wasn’t the least bit concerned.
You might find this a strange attitude. Why wouldn’t I care that I was potentially going to be stranded in Juneau Alaska?
Microsoft.
Microsoft taught me not be concerned with being left. I worked for Microsoft for almost a decade. During that time I travelled a lot. I went to United Arab Emerites, Greece, Mexico, Brazil and other countries, spending anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks in each country. But, how did this help me not stress over getting stranded?
Because, during that time of travel, several things came up that might have thrown my trip off schedule. In every circumstance, I knew that Microsoft was only a credit card swipe away. I had a corporate AMEX card. If anything went wrong, I could fix it with my Microsoft credit card. Stolen wallet? No problem. A few calls and I’d be back up and running? Missed flight? No worries. I just book a new one and figure it out after the trip.
It made my international travel almost stress free. I still had to be careful, but mostly, I could relax knowing that if something happened, I was prepared. Generally, anything that might go wrong was out of my control. If I cannot control it, why bother worrying about it? I didn’t.
As we sat on the bus yesterday, waiting for the second boat to come in and realizing that if we sprinted from the bush we’d still miss the 8:30 gangplank being pulled up, we’d still be too late, I thought about my time at Microsoft. I asked myself some questions,
Are we going to make it back on time?
Probably not.
Can I do anything to get us there quicker?
Not a thing.
No need to worry, I can’t change it.
I was completely at peace with our trip back to the cruise ship docks. I was not just pretending to be okay with the delay, I really was. I didn’t consult my watch once. We eventually made it back to the ship at about 8:31. The gangplank was still down and there were no lines since nearly everyone was already on board.
We had a late Dinner on the Lido deck and finally at about 9:10PM we felt the ship shudder and pull away from the pier. I never assumed they were going to leave us anyway. The fact we left 40 minutes late simply confirmed my suspicion that the cruise ship wasn’t going to let us be stranded in a strange city with no where to go.
No more than Microsoft would have left me stranded in some other country rather than buy me a ticket home.
I’m feeling the Zen.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2017 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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Hey, are you related to that writer guy?
The question was directed to my older brother. The question was asked by a young piano player on the cruise ship Osterdam about 80 miles off the coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia Canada. My brother had gone up to request a song and the question caught him completely off-guard.
Ah. . . I think you may have me confused with someone else.
No, the guy who was down here writing yesterday. He knows all the words to the B-side of Billy Joel songs.
. . .
. . .
Yeah, I am. But, how did you know that?
My brother is Richard Bliss. He has travelled all over the world delivering speeches. He hosts an award winning podcast caled “Funding The Dream.” He’s written books. He’s an acknowledged expert in several areas in and around the IT world. In other words, if you get with the right group of people, he’s famous.
As kids we used to compete. . .a lot. We competed playing games, of course. We also competed in school. We competed for parental affection. We even competed when it there was not a competition. I still remember the day as teenagers that we met a friend of my brother in a grocery store. He wanted to know if I was older. Richard was not happy and 40 years later, I still remember it. It became a running joke to ask people who had just met one of us who they thought was older. We are about 2 years different in age. As kids we liked being the older looking kid. We are both now well into our 50’s. Now we compete on who can be mistaken for the younger brother.
When I left Microsoft in 2001, we found ourselves working in the same field supporting Novell GroupWise. When people would meet me for the first time, they would notice my name and invariably ask,
Are you related to Richard Bliss?
Yes, but only by blood.
I’ve had some success in some areas. I’ve written a couple of books. Many of you are kind enough to follow my scribblings here at www.staging.rodneymbliss.com. Still, it’s much rarer for someone to ask him
Are you related to Rodney?
And for some random performer on a cruise ship to Alaska to ask seemed absolutely improbable.
The performer is a talented pianist and singer named Pearson Keating, who is working on the cruise ship that my brothers, our wives, my sister, my mother and my stepfather are on this week.
The piano bar has become a favorite end of the day destination for us. The first night I stayed up for the all request show. I requested “Summer Highland Falls,” a beautiful but rather obscure song off of Billy Joel’s album “Turnstiles.”
Billy Joel happens to be Pearson’s favorite performer. I own a copy of every Billy Joel album ever made. I’ve seen him in concert multiple times over the past 20 years. Suffice to say, he’s my favorite. Pearson and I got to talking the first night. He wants to be a writer. I am a writer and I tried to explain that the only difference between those who want to be a writer and those who are writers is that writers write. Even if no one is listening or reading, a writer is a writer by virtue of writing.
In fact, Pearson and I met because I sat at the bar between shows writing on my iPad. Writers write.
That still didn’t explain how Pearson guessed my brother and I were related.
I don’t know. You guys just look a lot alike.
So, which one do you think is older?
Let’s just say that Pearson is a better piano player than he is at guessing ages. But, knowing that my brother got to be known as “related to that writer guy” made it worth it.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2017 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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I have been in the reply business for so long that now that it’s over I don’t know what do with the rest of my life.
– Comedian Steve Hofstetter upon finally clearing out his Inbox.
It was a momentous day for me yesterday. I’ve worked for my company for nearly four years. In all that time, I’ve never accomplished this. But, yesterday, I finally cleared out my Inbox. It’s the type of event that you write down in your journal. . .or post about online.
I get a lot of email. Everyone says they get a lot of email and everyone is right. It’s relative. In my case, it’s not unusual to get 100 or more emails everyday. Many of them are replies to earlier messages also in my Inbox. So, that tends to inflate the numbers a little. But, still, it’s a lot.
When I sit down and create goals for my day I pick a number, typically 50, as my goal for the maximum number of emails still to be dealt with. During the day, I’ll build a table that lists the current number of unread and total emails. Then, every 30 minutes, I’ll make a mark and record my progress. On a good day, I can cut the number of emails in half every hour. So, if I start the day at 300, by 9:00am, I can cut that number to 150. By 10:00, if I really focus, I can be down to 75. By 11:00, assuming I haven’t gotten distracted, I can account for the new ones and still cut the number to 40. That’s often all the time I have to devote to email, and anything below 50 is a good day.
Fortunately, email doesn’t interfere with my job. Email, often is my job. By closing out emails, I end up making progress on my current projects. But, there’s always more to do. There’s always those ones that have to wait on a reply from someone who’s on vacation, or notes for an upcoming meeting. Occasionally, on a Saturday, I might get below 20, but that’s an exceptional day.
Until yesterday. I honestly thought my copy of Outlook was broken when I later opened it and none of my email showed up. “Oh, that’s right. There is no email.” But, as exciting as this event is, and I really can’t adequately explain the sublime feeling of accomplishment, it’s all a waste. I won’t get to enjoy it.
I’ve bought and sold multiple houses over the years. There’s something magical about buying a house, about owning the building. When we bought our first house, it was a small 1100 sq ft two story home in Spanish Fork, UT. The first night we attempted to get our queen sized mattress up the steep stairs. The doorframe at the bottom of the stairs limited the amount of room we had. Try as we might, we couldn’t fit the mattress through the doorframe and then get it up the stairs. In a flash of new homeowner enlightenment, I realized that . . . I could just break down the wall above the door. . .This seemed wrong. There had to be someone I needed to ask, a parent, a landlord, someone?
I pulled out my large framing hammer and somewhat hesitantly smacked the sheetrock above the door frame. After the first blow, I actually paused to see if anyone was going to object. My new bride thought it was hilarious. But, this was serious stuff. I soon literally got into the swing of it. Sheetrock rained down on the carpet as I gleefully destroyed a section of my new house. After the sheetrock was gone, I went to work on the cripple studs and then the doorframe itself. I new exactly how I was going to redo this doorway. I would get a nice ten foot long 1×6 and replace the doorway. The trim would run all the way up to the ceiling and it would open up our cramped house just a little.
That was the plan. It was about 6 months later that I finally got around to installing the wood trim piece. And another month before I managed to get it painted. That’s the other “magic” about owning a home. The list of projects become ever larger. It’s never ending. Well, it’s never ending until you decide it time to sell the house. We built a house in Maple Valley, Washington and decided we’d do the trim ourselves. We moved out of the house about two years later and one of the last things we finished was the trim.
The problem with that method is that your house is always in a state of disrepair until right before you leave. You never get to enjoy the finished baseboards, or the painted kitchen, or the empty Inbox.
Today, I’m out of the office (more on that later this week.) But, back at work, people will be doing work, holding meetings and sending emails. I emptied my Inbox in preparation for going on vacation. And I don’t get the enjoyment and freedom of not being tied to my email.
I’m not complaining too much, of course. An empty Inbox means that hopefully I managed to arrange for people to cover all of my projects for the next two weeks. I hope they enjoy the finished baseboards.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2017 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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I know why it says it, but I still like to hear it. It’s not even sincere, but there’s just something about positive validation that makes me feel better. . .even when it’s a credit card machine that is validating me.
It’s stupid. I was buying something today and I paid with a debit card. I haven’t actually had a credit card for nearly 10 years. I think there might be one in my name still, but I’ve long since lost the card somewhere in one of the “junk” drawers in my house.
A debit card gives you all the same protections as a credit card. The difference, of course, is that you can’t run up a big bill on a debit card. You can only spend the money you have in the bank.
Several years ago, my family went through a really tough time financially. I ended up $80,000 in debt without a job and my family living in my brother-in-law’s horse barn. That was kind of a low point. We didn’t declare bankruptcy, but it was close. We eventually paid off all the debts. I drive an old car with a lot of miles, but it’s paid for. We owe for the house, but that’s it. It’s a wonderful feeling of freedom.
So, that’s why I use a debit card. The worry with a debit card is that someone will find out your PIN. Even with the new chip cards, the PIN is still a weak link, security wise. Many stores offer little shields around the keypad to help you hide the numbers from prying eyes. I’ve found a foolproof way of hiding my PIN.
When you go to enter your PIN, put your first three fingers across the keys like this.
Now, when you need to push a button, just depress whichever finger is over that key. Slide your hand up and down for the other numbers. I defy you to watch me enter my PIN and be able to capture my PIN.
Being a good father, I was explaining this technique to my 17 year old son.
Yeah, I know I already do this.
Really? Where did you learn that?
I watched you enter your PIN one time and realized I couldn’t tell what numbers you were typing.
Oh. . .wait a minute. . .
After you enter your PIN, the reader goes out and checks your bank account and transfers to the money. And that is the point at which I always smile. Oh sure, I’m happy that I have money in my account, but the part that makes me smile is when the machine announces that it is okay with my life choices. I feel unjustifiably validated when the card reader announces that I’m
APPROVED
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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It was like I never left. Just like that, I was back to being 23 and all it took was a kick start.
Do you know what a DOS prompt is? DOS stands for Disk Operating System. It hasn’t been used for about 20 years. It used to be what your PC needed to boot up. If you are on a Windows machine, try this. Go to the start menu and type CMD. You will get a rather bland looking window with some white text.
In Windows parlance, this is called a Command Prompt. (That’s why you typed C.o.M.man.D.) But, most old folks call it a “DOS Window.” You can do a lot of interesting things from the command prompt. Try typing
ipconfig
and press ENTER. The information in that window is your computers IP or network address as well as information about how your computer gets to the internet. In addition to IP configuration information, you can use a DOS Window to move and delete files, copy to a thumbdrive, completely destroy your hard drive. Yes, that functionality is in there. No, I’m not going to tell you the command, that’s what Google is for.
When I started in IT, I worked for WordPerfect corporation. Most of my time there was as a support engineer. People called and asked questions about WordPerfect’s email product. Later, I went to Microsoft and did the same thing for Microsoft’s email products.
When people would call in, my computer was limited to DOS. There was no Windows. There were no background apps. In fact, there was no internet. Yup, DOS (and me are older than the web.) I was really good at my job. We all had to be. We couldn’t remote into a customer’s computer. We had to rely on them to tell us exactly what they were seeing on the screen. I spent a lot of years staring at the DOS screen and imagining what the customer was seeing.
But, it gave me an apprecition for DOS that has stayed with me. If you need to delete a file, Windows can do that easily. If you need to delete 100 files, Windows can do manage that. If you need to delete 10,000 files in a folder (DOS calls them directories) Windows is no longer your friend. But, in DOS, that command prompt you opened you can type
DEL *.*
and press ENTER and the files will be gone. Okay, actually, you should type
DEL *.* /Q/F/S
Please don’t try this at home. I’m a trained professional. That command string will delete all files in the current folder without asking your permission (/Q.) It will also delete all READ ONLY files (/F.) And it will do the same for all subfolders (/S).
When I’m presented with an issue that lets me break out my DOS skills, it takes me back to being a brand new operator at WordPerfect. I fell 23 again.
I didn’t use DOS to accomplish some cool feat today. But, I didn’t get to feel 23 again. I got on a motorcyle for the first time in decades. Okay, truthfully it was a moped. It didn’t matter that it was a 200cc scooter. I got on an open road and opened it up and I was right back to being a young twenty-something.
A family friend gave us the moped.
His kids have all grown and he no longer needs it. Our kids are begging to be allowed to ride it. Today, I got a helmet, got my motorcycle endorsement renewed, and got the scooter registered. And then, I spent an hour just riding around the neighborhood. The thing won’t go faster than about 40 mph. This makes it perfect for the kids. I experienced the joy of riding. Not of going somewhere, but the sheer joy of literally having no where to go and then going there anyway.
I started riding minibikes when I was about five years old. I road them off and on into my twenties. At 23 I got married and we started a family. I decided motorcycles were a risk I wasn’t willing to take. Not while we had young kids at home. I understand the danger. I explained to my son,
You must ALWAYS assume the cars cannot see you. And assume that those that do see you are actively trying to kill you.
My kids are growing up. My youngest will be out of the house in a few years and I’ll buy another bike. I road offroad bikes most of my life. But, I’ll probably buy a Harley Davidson in a few years, when the kids are out of the house.
As I cruised around our little town at 30 mph, I found that the reactions, the training, the experience came right back. It really is just like riding a bike. And I realized that I missed this. It has been over twenty years since I drove anything that didn’t have a door.
It felt good to be 23 again. Even if it was just for an afternoon.
The end
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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Facebook popped up one of those “reminder” posts. It was exactly a year ago today that my family was enjoying Yellowstone National Park. I didn’t work that vacation and it was a near disaster. As much time as I’m taking this summer, surprisingly today was our only family vacation day.
We headed up to Bear Lake in Northern Utah. We took 8 of our kids with us. The plan was to rent paddleboards, rent a pontoon boat and a tow-behind tube and make a day of it. We really only felt we could carve out a single day. My lovely wife did the lion’s share of the planning.
You’re going to be there, right?
What do you mean?
Wednesday the 12th, you aren’t going to schedule anything else!
I assured her that I would block out that day. Of course, stuff came up. It always does. My client announced they were flying in from Jacksonville for a two day visit starting on the 11th.
I’m sorry. I won’t be able to attend any meetings on Wednesday.
We moved all my parts to Tuesday. I cancelled other meetings. I frontloaded tasks. And then I went through the process of getting a backup for any escalations.
Our Account Management team has agreed to be my backup. Mine is a technical role. They are not a technical team. The way we set it up is I write them out a playbook for how to handle escalations if something breaks while I’m gone. Then, I sent email to several dozen people telling them that I will be out of the office and who my backup will be.
But, there’s a catch. Part of my agreement with the Account Managers was that I would take calls if I’m able. So, my email to the various teams I work with says, “Call me first. If I don’t answer then call the backup.”
We left our house at 7:00AM this morning headed for the lake. My phone rang at 7:45AM. My Rockford site was having an issue. Normally when I work an outage call I use two phones. This time I only had my cell phone. My lovely wife kept the kids quiet, while I toggled back and forth between a call with my team and a call with the client to resolve the issue.
The trip to the lake takes about three and a half hours. I managed to wrap up the call after about three hours. I invited my backup, Craig, to join the call so that he could see how outage calls typically run. We rarely have more than a single outage in a day, so I assumed that Craig was safe. He wasn’t.
At the lake, I left my phone on but in the car. Coverage was spotty and we were in and out of the water all day. As we headed back to the van about 6:15pm, my phone rang. It was the client following up on an outage that had been ongoing for the past four hours.
I called Craig to get some background on what the issue was.
Rodney, I have a much greater appreciation for what you do now.
The outage was mostly winding down. I helped wrap up the call and scheduled a follow up for 9:00PM to make some changes to the system that would hopefully correct the problem. We were still driving home at 9:00PM. We have another call scheduled for tomorrow morning at 6:45AM to test the fix.
My kids had a great time at the lake. I had a great time at the lake. Even though it’s only a single day, my kids seemed to appreciate the “family” vacation. The fact I ended up working for about 5 hours wasn’t surprising.
Compared to the issues with taking a non-working vacation last year, today’s experience was great.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2017 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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It could have had a tragic ending. This week a camper at a summer camp in Colorado woke up to a bear chewing on his head. Fortunately, the camper, a 19-year old staff member named Dylan, wasn’t seriously hurt. The black bear that attacked him earned himself a death sentence.
Colorado is next door to Utah. We have more deserts, they have higher mountains, but we are both smack dab in the middle of the Rocky Mountains. We take our scouts out camping 11 months per year. And we stress that they are always in bear country.
Generally when there’s this type of unprovoked bear attack, the fault lies with the camper. A tent is absolutely zero protection against a bear. It’s thin nylon designed to keep out mosquitos, not a creature with claws and teeth. But, bears don’t generally attack sleeping campers. Apparently we don’t taste all that good.
But, bears love to eat the same things that scouts like to eat: chocolate, beef jerky, candy, chips. Pretty much anything. And bears have a great sense of smell. We constantly warn our boys to not have any food in their tents. Several years ago there was a tragic case in American Fork canyon, a location we camp at least a couple times per year. A young boy was attacked in his tent and the bear drug him off and killed him. As horrible as the act was, experienced campers pointed out that the bear was probably attracted to the candy and chips the boy had in his tent. In that case, the Division of Wildlife Services also tracked down the bear and killed it.
In the case last week, there was no food in Dylan’s tent. In fact, Dylan teaches Wilderness Survival. He undoubtably knew not to keep food in his tent. In fact, he appears to have done everything right, including attacking the bear as he was being drug away.
I don’t blame the bear.
In my house, I kill spiders and flies. (I know, if I leave the spiders they will help with the flies, but it’s not a tradeoff I’m willing to make.) And yet, when I’m outside, I will step around a bug on the sidewalk. My thought is that in my house, I will banish or kill anything that invades. My house is for people and I’m going to put their needs not just first, but second, third and all the places down to “Let’s try to keep the fish and hermit crabs alive.”
But, I figure when I go outside I’m in their territory. Not only should I not senselessly kill animals (even bugs) but I should be aware that the fauna may want to defend its territory just as I defend my home. And that’s why I don’t blame the bear.
Bears live in our mountains. Actually, they are their mountains. We’re the visitors. We explain to our scouts that even though we are literally camping in a canyon in our own backyard, it’s not Disneyland. It’s dangerous. We don’t go looking for the danger, but we also don’t pretend it doesn’t exist.
Bear attacks, while extremely rare, are a fact of life in the mountains. We do everything we can to avoid encountering a bear, but when we do, it’s not the bears fault. Even in this most recent case, the bear was doing what bears do. It’s a wild animal.
Too often we remove every risk from our children. It’s important to let kids learn they can do hard things. I hope my boys never encounter a bear in the woods. But, if they do, it will probably be because the bear is doing what bears do. Most times, they will simply leave.
So, if I don’t blame the bear why do I agree that the bears in these situations needed to be killed?
Because, even though we are in their house, people still come first. A bear that attacks a person is much more likely to attack again. And if it’s a matter of us or them, I’ll take us. . .everytime.
So, I’m glad that Dylan is okay, but I certainly don’t blame the bear.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2017 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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Old friends
Memory brushes the same years
Silently sharing the same fearTime it was
And what a time it was
A time of innocence
A time of confidences
– “Old Friends” Paul Simon
Had it been more than five years? It must have been. I moved into my house five years ago and he claimed he’d never visited me in this house before.
How long a separation could your friendship withstand? A year? Five? More?
I have to admit, I questioned if we were still friends. You drift apart. People change and grow. What gives friendships their strength, a set of common shared experiences, can also kill them if not nutured. You don’t have to spend time in physcial proximity, of course. In the case of my friend the issue was that we lived 5,000 miles apart. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland and I live in central Utah.
There was a time we saw each other often. We both worked in IT focused on email. He reminded me that it was during my time at Microsoft that we first met.
Your brother Richard did a presentation about GroupWise and at the end he gave his email address as [email protected]. But, he then joked, “If you can’t remember my address just send it to [email protected].” So, I did. I think that was when we first met.
I was the “[email protected]” person. Eventually, I left Microsoft and started working as a consultant. (None of us are ever unemployed, we’re just “independent consultants.”) My friend got me a gig doing a Microsoft Exchange to Groupwise migration. It put food on the table for a long time. I later had the opportunity to recommend my friend as a fill in when one of the other consultants became unavailable.
He’s been to my house, well, my old house, many times. Typically while he’s travelling to Provo, UT for business. He hosted me at his house in Scotland for three days during a business trip to Europe. And when one of my daughters was sixteen, she went and spent a month with my friend and his family.
But, the last few years our visits had grown more infrequent. Facebook announced that he was back in Utah, but there were no visits to our house. We still exchanged pleasantries on birthdays, or special family events. But, no more than I would with my neighbors from church.
Perhaps it was the Christmas season when I posted a picture of a new nutcracker I got as a gift that had a kilt and bagpipes.
Our new nutcracker. He will tell interesting stories. . .some of which may be true.
Last week, Facebook once again announced that my friend was travelling from Scotland to Utah.
If you have some time, you’re invited to come visit. Would be great to catch up.
It was the same message I’d posted other times through the years. But, this time the response was almost immeadiate and it was different.
That’s the plan.
That led to him sitting in my living room last week. He came bearing literally pounds of european chocolate. And it was as if we had last parted only a few weeks ago. We hadn’t, of course. In the ensuing months and years, my sixteen year old daughter grew up and got married. My kids wandered through the living room as we talked. Once they found out he had chocolate, they became more attentive. But, most of them had only vague memories of the man who spoke with the funny accent and came bearing chocolate.
His life had changed too. He’d lost his parents, wonderful people that I met when I visited him. He had to shut down his business. His family member had been diagnosed with cancer, that was thankfully later found to be something less serious.
In other words, life happened. I realized that especially for the past year, my friend had an overwhelming amount to deal with. He wasn’t ignoring me, he was focusing on him. . .and his family. But, that’s the thing about old friends. If the friendship is rooted strongly enough, it can survive the winds of change and time.
As we shared stories and memories, my seventeen year old son joined us.
I remember the sight of your dad walking into a Hooters in Fargo, ND. He looked more than a little uncomfortable.
What’s Hooters?
It’s a bar. .
It’s a RESTAURANT!
It’s a bar with waitresses in extremely tight uniforms.
They have great food. And it’s called Hooters because of the Owls!
Like I said, he was pretty uncomfortable.
My friend was excited to learn my son shared an aversion to glutan. They were both celiacs.
You know, you can’t drink beer.
He’s SEVENTEEN! He’s not going to be drinking anything.
However, you can drink whiskey, and wine is, of course perfectly fine.
Could you stop giving my underage son drinking advice?
He’s only underage here in the USA. He’s well above age in Europe. You should come out and visit us.
UNDERAGE! NON-DRINKING Family!
And now, my son is planning a trip to Scotland!
When will my friend and I see one another again? I literally have no idea. I hope it will be sooner than 5 years, but if it’s not, I’m sure that we will still pick up directly where we left off. Old friends are like that.
Are you calling me old?
I didn’t think I needed to state the obvious.
May you be blessed with at least one good friend in your life. Cherish those friendships. Like a fine wine, they grow richer with age.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2017 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved