Have you ever done something for the first time? What am I saying? Of course you have. But, have you ever done something that was the first time it had ever been done?
When I was in the 5th grade, my teacher, Mr Mickelson walked from the back of the room to the water fountain and took a drink. He then told us,
What I’ve just done has never been done before. And will never be done again. Never again will there be these exact kids in this room and the earth in its exact location.
He was trying to explain the nature of the universe. It worked. Forty years later, I still remember what he said and more importantly, what he meant.
But, nearly everything we do has been done before. My son hopes to score a touchdown in a football game one day. I’ve told him that when he does, “to act like you’ve been there before.” But, the truth is that a million touchdowns have been scored.
I’ve had the chance to watch three of my children be born. There’s nothing like it in the world. It’s a unique and special event. And it’s happened billions of times before.
But, what if you could attend a truly unique event? A once in a lifetime, a once in the history of the world event? Would you even recognize it?
I attended just such an event last Saturday. My cousin Nick got married.
Marriages, of course are not unique. There have been as many marriages as babies, probably. But, it was not your ordinary wedding. It was a traditional Persian wedding. That’s also not unique, of course. There have been millions of Persian weddings throughout history.
My cousin is not of Persian descent. He married someone who was. His husband’s family is from Iran. Yes, it was a gay wedding. I would imagine there have been very few gay, Persian weddings. Muslim influences and Persian influences are heavily intertwined. The Muslim religion is vehemently anti-gay.
But, there is certainly the possibility that two men or two women who were raised in Persian families chose to get married. My cousin’s husband is also a Trans man. He was born a woman and transitioned to being male.
The odds of there having been another traditional Persian gay wedding where one groom was trans?
Yeah, I’m going to go ahead and say that’s probably not happened more than a couple of times if at all. . .ever.
My cousin’s best friend was part of the wedding ceremony. The friend is an active Mormon, as I am. Another cousin also attended the wedding. She’s an active Catholic. (The Catholic and Latter-day Saint churches do not have a history of pro-LGBTQ policies.) Even more uniqueness. And the wedding officiator was a woman. She joked that her uncle called her a mullah. It was a funny joke, even if I don’t understand it.
I have never been to a gay wedding. I wasn’t sure what to expect. It was a wonderful experience. The grooms were in contrasting green and purple vests under conservative suits. The groomsmen matching them. The people in attendence were a wonderful eclectic mix of dress, ethnicity and gender.
I’ve also never been to a Persian wedding. There’s a spot in the ceremony where members of the crowd who are in stong relationships are invited to come up and sprinkle sugar onto the canopy over the couple. (It’s way cooler than the way I’m describing it.)
You could not have asked for a nicer day for a wedding. It was sunny. Not too hot with a slight breeze. The venue was my aunt’s backyard.
I’ve spent a lot of time in that backyard. My aunt has concord grape vines. Each fall we pick a few bushels full and make a very thick grape juice. The grapes are currently ripe. Visiting after the wedding we even picked a few off the vine and ate them.
The reception, later that night was equally memorable. My cousin’s husband is a member of a community choir, the Salt Lake City Men’s choir. There was a flash mob that sang. There was karaoke. There was something called the Persian knife dance that involved lots of dancing women, a large knife and an awful lot of money changing hands.
I hope my cousin never gets remarried. He and his husband were together for the past ten years and I expect they will have a lifetime of happiness together. But, if by chance he does, I can pretty much guarantee he will never have another wedding like this.
I don’t think anyone ever has.
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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I went to a football game tonight. Pleasant Grove High School’s homecoming game. My son is on the football team and nine of my thirteen kids attended or attend Pleasant Grove High School.
But tonight my son didn’t play and none of the PGHS graduates came back for Homecoming. I attended every high school football game when I was in high school. I was a member of the band, and we played at most of them.
Our high school football team wasn’t very good. Our football program was so neglected we didnt’ even have our own stadium. We had to play our home games at our cross town rivals stadium.
While our team may not have been great, we did have a great player. Ron Holmes played fullback for Timberline High School. He went on to play at University of Washington and later played in the NFL for the Tampa Bay Buchaneers. Sadly, Ron passed away a few years ago.
I hadn’t really been back to watch a high school game until my son started playing last year. WE now try to attend as many games as we can. Last year my son played on the sophomore team. This year he’s playing mostly JV, but is good enough to be considered for the varsity.
Unlike my AAA high school, PGHS is a 6A school. And their football program is really good. For the past two years they have been runner-up in the state playoffs to their crosstown rival, Lone Peak.
But, my son wasn’t playing tonight. We took a family vacation last week to Arizona. We had arranged for my son to stay with friends. But, at the last minute he decided it was important for him to go. The cost was high for a boy that loves football.
By missing a game, he was required to sit out last night’s game. He wasn’t even allowed on the sidelines. He misses the chance to play and he misses the chance to help his team. Fortunately, the team won.
Last night was the last “pre-season” game. PGHS played against non-regional teams. Next week they start playing regional teams, including Lone Peak.
Tonight was a perfect night for football. Beautiful sunset. Warm temperatures, but not too hot. A stadium full of screaming teenagers. And the teams dressed in red and black on a sea of green.
A great Friday night.
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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Everything old is new again
I’ve been in computers a long time. My first computer was a TI99. We got it around 1980. It had a whopping 256 bytes of RAM memory. Not GIGAbytes, or MEGAbytes or even KILObytes. Just bytes.
The computer didn’t have a hard drive. It also didn’t have a network connection. There was no network. There was no internet. The computer used a tape cassette drive to store programs on.
Our first computer with a hard drive was a Zenith Z100. It had a 5MB hard drive. And it cost $5,000. The Zenith Z100 used a system called CP/M to allow the computer to make it’s various hardware components talk to each other. After the Z100, Zenith switched their IO system to IBM BIOS. This meant that all previous CP/M compatible devices were no longer able to be used on future versions of Zenith computers. That included our $5,000 hard drive. My dad was so angry he vowed to never again buy an IBM computer.
IBM has an interesting history in computers. They were one of the original Big Iron computer companies. The original computers were large central processing units. Hooked up to these central storage and processing units were dumb terminals. Without the central unit the terminal was unusable.
Around 1980, IBM launched the PC industry. There were lots of computer companies, Apple and IBM, but also Zenith, Texas Instruments, and many others.
PCs represented a shift from central processing to distributed processing. PC’s were a remarkable achievement. They had their own memory, their own storage and they could operate independent of any central computer.
The internet started as a DARPA, or Defense agency project. Eventually, Netscape created and sold a browser named Mozilla. And the commercial portion of the internet was born. Porn was the industry that really taught people how to make money on the internet.
And of course, eventually Google came along with the “answers to everything.” And then smartphones and the internet of everything. And suddenly we were back where we started.
Computers no longer are really all that useful if they aren’t connected online; email, maps, social networks.
Computers, like life, have cycles. We think we are creating something new, but we’re mostly just rediscovering the old stuff.
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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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)
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LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2019 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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This is Jack Kelly. Jack is an 86 year old Arizona rancher. Jack lives in an old ranch house. You get to Jack’s place by go four miles past where the pavement ends.
If directions to your house involves the phrase, “Turn off the paved road.” . . .you might be a redneck.
– Jeff Foxworthy
Redneck is an interesting word. To people who aren’t one it’s an insult. To people who are, it’s a complement.
Jack wasn’t a redneck in the classic sense. But, he was as country as they come. He gave us a tour around his place. It used to be tens of thousands of acres. Now, he and his sweetheart live on a 20 acre piece that will be protected by the county after they pass away.
Jack showed us a lot of different things on his place. He showed us the pond he’d cleared when he first bought the place fifty years prior.
He showed us a seeder that was originally designed for use by horses that he’d rigged to use a behind a tractor. The equipment must have been at least 75 years old and looked like it hadn’t been used in decades.
My brother-in-law stands next to the seeder he and Jack used a couple years ago, as some of my kids listen
But, my brother-in-law explained that he’d help Jack plant a corn field with it just two years prior. That meant that Jack was driving the tractor at 84. He showed us equipment that was now fit for a museum.
And then Jack showed us something really impressive.
I work on cars. I’m not a great mechanic. But, I’m good enough to know what is hard and what’s possible. Jack showed me this.
That’s a patch. It’s iron? steel? But, it’s a metal patch.
See, what happened was that one day this tractor threw a rod. You know what throwing a rod is, right?
Yeah. It knocks a hole in the engine block. Pretty serious problem.
Yep. Well that’s where she knocked the hole. So, I drilled the hole, tapped em and stuck that patch on there. Filled ‘er back up with oil and she was good as new.
The tractor looked like it has finished it’s last job, but I wouldn’t place any bets on how long Jack will still be working that 20 acres in Arizona.
They don’t make them (or repair them) like that any more.
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’s about 1400 miles from the Mexico border to the Canada border. Of course, it depends on where you start and end, of course. But, if you take I-5 from San Diego California on the Southern border North to Blain Washington on the Canadian border, it’s 1,371.9 miles. (Not sure where Google got that .9, but it’s probably accurate.)
Today, I travelled half that distance. I started the day at my brother-in-law’s ranch in Benson, Arizon. We headed North. We drove around the East end of the Grand Canyon and crossed the Colorado at Glen Canyon Dam.
We drove for hours and hours. We started out in a desert populated with sagura, barrel and pear cactus. The temperatures ranged from hot, 100+, to. . .also hot of 80 degrees. We left at 8:00 AM and arrived around 11:30pm.
We had two cars. Well, Yukon SUV and a Toyota Camery. It wasn’t supposed to be a trip with two cars. We originally were only going to take one car, five kids and two adults. “Kids” is a bit of a misnomer. The kids range in age from 16 to 19. At the last minute, another kid decided he wanted to go too.
That was last week. We took a trip to grandma’s (their’s not mine) in Phoenix. And then off to a brother-in-law’s farther South in Benson, Arizona.
Today was the return. According to Google, it’s 786.2 miles from Benson Arizona to our home in Pleasant Grove Utah. That’s more than half way across the United States. It used to take weeks, or months to make that distance. We did it in slightly more than the 12 hours, 6 minutes that Google said it would take.
So, we literally went halfway and made it home.
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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We used to take the boy scouts on this hike. It was the hardest hike we did every year. It’s called “The Baldy Hike.” We hike up to Grove Creek Canyon to Indian Springs. Then, we hike across and camp in the meadow.
When we used to take the boy scouts, we would then attempt to summit Baldy. The hike started at about 4500 feet. The hike to Indian Springs is six miles and about 2500 feet in elevation. Baldy was another 1000 feet.
About half the time weather prevented us making the ascent. We would do the hike in May. Sometimes it would snow. Sometimes it would rain. Sometimes it was beautiful. That’s what made the hike so much fun.
I don’t work with the scouts anymore. It’s a volunteer position, but it’s more of a volun-told position. And they volun-told someone else to do it. We were, they still are, a very active troop, camping 11 months out of the year.
I decided that I needed to start taking my own kids on the hikes. So, we did the Baldy Hike. But, where in May there’s a chance of sleet or snow, in August there’s only one kind of weather. . .hot. At least during the day. At night it’s chilly at 7,000 feet.
So, we set out on a Friday in August. We hiked the six miles up Grove Creek Canyon. It was hot. We took plenty of water. Two of my children were available to make the hike.
I’m a slow hiker. I had hoped the hike up the canyon would take three hours or less. You can hike on level ground at about 3.5 MPH. Hiking up hill slows that, of course. I hoped to make 2 MPH. I’m slow. Turns out I was more at 1.5 MPH.
We arrived at Indian Springs about 8:30 pm. We decided it was too late to move on. We camped for the night at Indian Springs. In the morning, we had a decision to make. Battle Creek Canyon, our normal route back down out of the mountain was closed due to an overflowing Battle Creek.
Should we take a route around Baldy and make for Dry Canyon? (That was the route I’d left with my lovely wife. Ultimately we decided to make a day hike up to the meadow. It was a lot different than it looks in May. The grasses were waist or sometimes chest high.
Ultimately we headed back down the Grove Creek. Again, it was hot. Where we had averaged 1.5 MPH on the way up, we nearly tripled that rate headed down. We made it in 90 minutes. In fact, we were down an hour before our ride would have arrived at the trailhead to pick us up. So, we simply continued walking down hill to our house.
It’s amazing to live in a location where I can literally walk from the beautiful high mountain meadows and stark canyons to my front door.
Next month we’re going to the High Uintas. It’s a hike we took with the scouts every September.
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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I attended Timberline high school in Lacey, Washington. Lacey is outside of the captial Olympia. If you don’t know where that is, don’t feel bad. Lots of people outside of Washington don’t. It’s about 40 miles south of Seattle. It’s at the Southern tip of the Puget Sound.
Even though Puget Sound is salt water, it’s not technically the ocean. That’s about a hundred miles away on the Washington coast. Washington coasts are not like the gentler beaches of California with it’s warm ocean currents. By the time the current gets to Washington it’s turned cold. Puget Sound’s water temperature ranges from a chilly 45 degrees in the winter to an only slightly less chilly 53 degrees in the summer. Water so cold that if you were to fall off one of the ubiquitous Washington State ferries, you’d be dead before you could swim to shore.
Cheery thought. I know.
But, the water is warm enough to keep the climate of Western Washington relatively balmy when compared with the frigid winter climate East of the Cascades. Growing up there, I remember it typically snowed once per year. Winters were a lot of gray clouds and rain. The record was set one year while I was in high school. One hundred and five days in a row with rain. The term Black Ice, the phenomenon where the road freezes, but you can’t see it, was coined in the Northwest.
It was a typical winter day in high school. Probably 1981. The temperature was around 55 degrees. Cold enough that we were bundled up in our jackets, boots and mittens.
There was a new kid at school that day. My high school had about 1500 students, so a new student wasn’t hard to spot. He was even easier to spot because he was wearing shorts and a light jacket.
Dude, aren’t you cold?
No, man, it’s not even below freezing.
Well, maybe not technically, but it certainly feels like it.
You guys are wimps.
Were we wimps? Or was he just some super hero with great resistance to cold?
Neither. He had just moved. . .from Alaska. He’d come from a place where his “warm” was still below our “cold.” When he moved to Washington, his body decided it was shorts-weather.
I live in Utah. Our winters are colder than Western Washington, but not as cold as Alaska. During the winter the temperature is regularly below freezing. We regularly don’t figure it’s “cold” until it gets below zero.
My kids regularly walk to church in the winter wearing only shirt sleeves. Is it cold or are they just in the wrong state?
We are going on vacation to visit my mother in Arizona. It’s hot here. And it’s hot there. But, is it? Yesterday it was 97 degrees in Utah. Summers are hot. But, we don’t worry about it too much unless it gets above 100. The dry heat. But, are the summers really hot or are we in the wrong state? Arizona is 105 degrees this week. That’s where we are going.
I enjoy summer. I enjoy Utah summer. I don’t mind the heat. But, I’m afraid I might be in the wrong state.
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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I’m going on vacation tomorrow. Today at work, I painted my house. Well, I didn’t use any paint brushes. I used email.
Have you ever bought a house? I’ve both bought existing houses and during one crazy period, we built a custom home. Oh wait, I did that twice. When you move into a new house, you notice things that you want to fix or change. Some of them you change or fix, some you keep meaning to, but never really get around it.
Sometimes those items are just annoying. I once lived in a house with no baseboards for several months. My house has a faucet that leaks. . .sometimes. Other items are more disturbing. My current house needs a new driveway and my front steps are slowly, very slowly sinking into the street.
But, a funny thing happens with you sell a house. All of a sudden, you fix everything. My baseboard-less house got its baseboards when we were preparing to sell it.
You paint. You fix the leaky faucet. You repair the sagging door. Your house is never in as good a condition as the day you list it for sale.
And that’s what I did today. Except it was with my email inbox. I closed out several open tickets. I paired my inbox down from 135 items to just under 30. I created an out of office message. I lined up people to back me up. But, mostly, I paired down inbox. I sent out status updates. I cleaned the windows.
The ironiy about moving, is why don’t we fix the house up so nicely prior to moving? Why don’t we plant flowers in the front garden?
Why don’t I keep my inbox paired down all the time. Why don’t I send status out?
Maybe I will. Just as soon as I fix that leaky faucet.
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) 2019 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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I don’t care!
That was the response from the Administrator of a Facebook forum I enjoy. But, I’m not enjoying it much now. I posted a message the Admin disagreed with. He deleted it.
It’s what Admins have to do. I’ve managed multiple Facebook groups over the years. I’ve deleted messages. Mostly it’s when SPAM or Porn finds its way into the forum. Personal attacks are also subject to deletion. Also, posts that are not relevant to the forum are deleted.
My post was not deleted for any of these reasons. It was deleted because it was a duplicate.
It wasn’t, of course. My post was unique, but the Admin decided it was too similar to existing posts.
So far, so good. But, it was what happened after. Let’s just say he didn’t take kindly to my objections. More posts got written and then deleted.
And then a long DM conversation happened. The result being that the Admins all posted an update to the rules in the forum. For my part, I took a self-imposed two day time-out.
When I came back, I asked questions asking for clarification on the new posting. They were also deleted.
There are a group of Admins. Two of them were offended by my questions and posts. The third agreed with me, but couldn’t out vote the other two.
He offered me the name of the group founder if I wanted to escalate.
But, please don’t cause a public fight
My friend was responsible for keeping peace in the forum. If I started a public fight, it would make his life hard. And, we both knew how it would end. My posts would be quickly deleted and eventually, I would be banned.
But, I wasn’t worried about that. I wasn’t intending to start a fight. In fact, I wasn’t even planning to follow up with any of the Admins via DM to “discuss the issue with them privately.”
Why would I? The natural tendency when you are challenged is to want to fight back. We feel offended at perceived injustice. Why would I not want to fight back?
Because of the meme that says,
This is Rodney.
Rodney sees something he disagrees with on the internet.
Rodney ignores it.
Be like Rodney
Are they wrong? Yes.
Are they being counter productive? Absolutely.
Is anything I say going to change their mind? Not a chance.
I’ve often wondered what I would do if I were in a truly hopeless situation that I had time to contemplate. If I were on the Titanic what would I do? If I were sentenced to die,, how would I approach it?
I like to think I would approach my untimely end stoically. I’ve always enjoyed the ending of the movie Breaker Morant. Harry Morant tells his executioners,
Shoot straight, you bastards. Don’t make a mess of it!
When there is nothing to gain, stop fighting. The Admins hold all the power. They appear not the least interested in sharing any of that power. And they don’t have to.
I still find value in the forum. I enjoy the people. I’ll continue to visit and even participate.
But, I will not be fighting city hall. And don’t want to.
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) 2019 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved