Cedar Fever redux...

Last night, I sat bolt upright in bed and sneezed so hard I chipped a tooth.

Yes, it is that time of year again. When male Ashe Juniper trees spread their powdery joy across the land and throw otherwise normal, rational human beings into fits of sneezing, coughing, and feverish hallucinations. Why is it the human body cannot understand that a simple plant powder is not trying to kill it? Instead, you end up (if you are like me) being caught by surprise with a "sore chest" or even a "stuffy head" one day and then about 12 hours later you are battling for your life in the grips of a 6-hour long fever, immobilized on the couch.

I moved to this town some 20 years ago, from a dry desert climate, and used to poke fun at some of the "weakies" that would whine about their allergies and show up to work with nose dribbling and eyes glassy and red around Christmas. In fact, I used to suspect that some coworkers and friends were just trying to cover for their rampant use of cocaine or some other illicit drug. I mean, who the hell has allergies?

Isn't that something women complain about?

As time wore on, I began picking up little clues here and there about my own susceptibility to these seasonal tormentors. I still remember driving to school one day in 1989 and noticing how red my eyes were in the rearview mirror and how especially sensitive they had become for no reason at all. It had rained the day previous, and this seemed to mark my first exposure to mold sensitivity. Unbeknownst to me, the fun was about to get kicked up several notches in the coming years... with Ashe Juniper (in the Winter), Live Oak pollen (in the Spring) and molds and ragweed (in the Summer).

Spring has definitely become the season to avoid. About the only time I spend outdoors during the months of March, April, and May is the time it takes for me to walk from my car in the parking lot to the building I work in. Thank God for homes with garages. For those laughing right now, I dare you to spend an Oak Pollen season with us and not have to vacuum the yellowy stuff out of your car like so much beach sand after a trip to the coast. Yes. It is that bad. And this year has seen very little rain, so the stuff will be everywhere come 2009. Images of yellowish-tinted cars in the parking lot come to mind. Brrrr... Something tells me M. Night Shyamalan did his research for The Happening in San Antonio.

I find it funny that for a time I considered the Summer to be an allergy-free season where I could be outdoors biking, running, swimming and not worry about any one particular plant singling me out for death. That is until one August, when I began noticing a burning in my chest after a moderate mountain biking session... Unlike a paperback book, there is no way to skip ahead and find out who the killer or antagonist is, so in real life I began putting clues together and finally determined that a slender, ropy and leafy weed growing in some of the creekbeds around that time was the culprit. And while I was dismayed to learn that my (almost) last open window of seasonal outdoor funnery had closed shut, I was still able to schedule around some of the worst periods of plant activity. Ragweed is a particularly nasty plant, and I did not like a single thing I read about it, including its apparently degradory effects on the human immune system. Ugh.

Through the years, it became apparent that the geographical area I now call home was conducive to all this pollination because it is situated perfectly between extremes when it comes to weather events. This is why locals tend to joke about the 4 seasons we experience here: Hot, Hot, Hot, and Warm (Winter). Just tracking frontal passage through the area for a year will show the casual observer that cold air does not stick around long, and consequently, nothing freezes. Including the plants. So without a killing cycle of frost, cold, and snow, the local flora happily pump out pollen at various times of the year, leaving residents to figure out how to live with it - if at all. I have to wonder, in light of recent economic tumult, how long before some of the newly-relocated San Antonians that fled the East- and West-Coast real estate debacles begin to feel the effects of some of the local spore-bearing plant life? Not too long, I suspect.

So as I compose this, I have been confined to the house for about 2 days, tired of lying down as my bones hurt from it and unable to venture outside for long without my skin feeling like it is irritated or on fire. My ears are ringing loudly from an apparent overdose of Acetaminophen and the effects of some horrific cough medicine I found in the back of the medicine cabinet are starting to subside (anyone ever see the South Park episode about Sexy Action School News and the Cough Syrup?) Nothing scares the wits out of me more than enduring a horrific fever, and I will do anything in my power to waylay it. So far, I think things might be looking up.

I was able to smell my cup of coffee this morning.

Bordering on creepy

After a weekend of Slayer-filled mountain biking, I have observed the following strange events:

1) On Monday, as I pulled into the parking lot at work, the truck was almost sideswiped by a low-flying bird carrying ANOTHER BIRD in its talons. I quickly turned the music off.

2) On Tuesday morning, one of the new fancy electronic billboards in town displayed the following message: (some illegible small text) WIN A FLIGHT TO HELL! Listen all day for details! (some illegible radio station ID). Yes, I even triple-glanced at the sign to confirm the word "Hell" with a capital H.

At 6:10, a tear formed in my eye...

Things I learned while mountain biking v.2

After endoing and faceplanting into the dirt while listening to Slayer on the bike, I came up with the idea of sharing a few things I've learned over the past 15 years of mountain biking in San Antonio. Some might be obvious, but here they are:

01) Avoid listening to aggressive music while in an aggressive mood on a machine built for aggression. Ignoring this will lead to spectacular accidents.

02) A little vaseline rubbed into your eye orbits before you ride keeps the sunblock from leaching into your eyes as you sweat.

03) While we're playing with the vaseline, some rubbed in and around your nostrils tends to keep trail dust out of your lungs.

04) There is a huge difference between riding at dusk and riding at night. Night is really really really black when you are in the boonies.

05) You cannot ride at speed in the darkness. Even with that really cool mountain bike light you dropped a hundred bucks on.

06) The sudden smell of cigarette smoke while racing through a tree-shrouded creekbed at night usually indicates trouble. Especially when you don't smoke.

07) No matter how far back you lean, that 80 degree drop is going to flip you.

08) If you hit drop out at a fast enough speed, your foot will come out of your shoe.

09) People really do get hurt from hitting trees.

10) It will be hotter than you think once you get out there and begin riding in earnest. By the same reasoning, it will also be colder than you think after you've stopped for awhile to rest and then get back on the bike.

11) To quote a buddy from the 1990's, "Before you go balls-out on a trail, ride through it slowly to check for dangerous turns and stuff."

12) That sound of motorcycles in the distance as the sun sets? Vampires. Get the hell out of there.

Rapidly approaching the price of a breakfast taco...

Now if we could only fill up with tacos...

Drive Home

(EDIT: YouTube has decided to mute any videos containing any disputed copyrights of music, and this video features about 30 seconds of Robert Plant's "Ship of Fools". I have pulled the video from YouTube in disgust.

Looking forward to a day where we don't have to live with this bullshit anymore.

Have a nice day!)

If we are in a recession, then where do all these cars come from?

Watching the moon set in the morning

It didn't occur to me how much time had passed since I last posted here until a coworker asked me about my blog. Seems I have been creeping some people out with my twitter avatar (which is the same as the one I use in this blog), since no one sees me in a suit on a daily basis. Black concert or skateboarding t-shirts and worn Levis Jeans are the dress code at Rackspace.

And that... is if you feel like dressing UP.

Work continues to dominate all. I am currently in a 6-day stretch that feels like 6 months. A non-stop adventure in short bursts of energy drinks, phone calls, and systems administration on random Linux servers. Nevertheless, I must be doing something right, as many strange people continue to call and ask for me by name or even dial my extension at work directly. I often wonder if this has happened to other techs on the well-trodden path before me or whether I am truly blessed with the ability to speak coherent English and actually know a little something about tech problems-du-jour while I'm at it.

And then I get a tough phone call that puts me right back in my place...

On the weekends (if I am not working) I succumb to my desire to feel human again by mountain biking aggressively through the local hilly terrain. There is nothing quite like the feeling of accidentally hitting a tree at 15mph with your right shoulder or even flipping end-over-end and narrowly avoiding a concussion on sharp limestone rock after tearing through a segment of singletrack in the perverse Fall heat in South Texas to remind you that you are still mortal. Wisps of my competitive BMX past surface and I will take my bike into the air over and over again until I am caked in salt and physically depleted. Which drives home the point I am no longer 20 years old. And that electrolyte imbalance can be deadly if ignored (long story lurking there). I have never been much of a "exercise to be fit" kind of person. Just moreso a "HOLY GOD THIS IS FUN!" kind of athlete. I wish more people in the world could feel this way, although this is an exception given my chosen place of residence. Too much diabetes and sloth in this town. Which is why I will never meet someone who shares my interests. Never.

At the doctor's office today for a checkup, I was reminded of how routine my life has become, despite the daily swings I experience in emotions and anticipations that can be handed you by the nature of your job. Or even the by the passerby mentality of your bathroom-mirror life.

Do you ever wonder why no one says you look older anymore? Compared with when you were a child and your relatives at odd intervals in time would exclaim "how much you have grown!" (annoying cheek pinch)? It is because you see the same you over and over in the bathroom mirror every morning, and every evening.

To YOU, well, you have never changed in the slightest.

But as we all know, this is an illusion.

The banking crisis summed up in one photo...

The Truth behind Lehman

(borrowed from Financial Armageddon)

The Truth is that Merrill, Morgan Stanley, and even Goldman are all in the same boat. The Fed and Treasury actions have given them roughly six months to "cut that crap out", but they didn't. They didn't sell off their portfolios of junk, but what they did do was take the liquidity they were given and speculate in the commodity markets, earning a nice profit and allowing them to report better-then-disaster "earnings" while hiding the trash in "Level 3" buckets on their balance sheets.

The entire game was predicated on the idea that the market for housing and commercial real estate would turn within six months to a year from last summer.

We now know, of course, that this is total garbage; housing and commercial real estate are long-cycle businesses that average fifteen to eighteen years from cycle top to cycle top, and there is absolutely nothing you can do to change that.

As a consequence every one of these firms that has tried to "hide the sausage" is ultimately going to die. They have made the critical mistake of trying to play games instead of selling off their portfolio of trash last summer when it was still possible, and now are going to have to eat it - with disastrous results. It is highly probable that three years from now none of these firms will have survived in their present form.

Did something just flash?

Holy God.

Half the time, I think I see things out of the corner of my eye, the other half I am talking to total strangers on the phone about their e-commerce sites.

I have become a creature of immediacy.

If you have a problem, we will address it NOW. Otherwise, someone else will handle it later. This approach obviously has its consequences, especially if you apply it to real life. I can't think of the times someone has opened their mouth in query only to have me put them on the spot for resolution. This trickles down to weekend behavior as well, only having a moment to piss off the random passerby or bum panhandling at the intersection, or random driver to the left of me.

HOMELESS VET? Well get the hell off the street and apply for a job at the restaurant 50 feet from you.

HATE JOB? Get your ass out of the building and walk 100 yards to the competitor.

PROBLEM WITH HOA? Mow your lawn.

Tonight, I came home to find an errant trash can sitting at the tip of my driveway. It sure as hell isn't mine, and I wasn't about to call the City to determine what serial number belonged to whom, so I made a quick observation on who was missing a HUGE BROWN TRASHCAN in their driveway, and casually walked the can to the nearest neighbor who had none. Problem solved.

Or at least out of MY hands.

Life is like this: You will avoid problems, or face them head-on. Given the limited amount of time we walk this earth, you might as well take some action and push beyond the situation. While this doesn't solve EVERY problem out there, it definitely avoids the logjam effect, which will ultimately affect EVERYONE. Whether you like it or not.

Coming from a rampant bureaucracy, I guess this is just my natural way of rebelling against inaction.

So get up, get moving, and get it done. No one else will do it for you.

Your party may not be seated if not all present

Two months have whizzed by at Rackspace, and while life remains essentially the same, I keep noticing more and more California license plates on cars travelling the roads to- and from-work.

This is disturbing on several levels, but I will point out the most important.

My aunt in Sacramento works THREE jobs to keep abject poverty at bay: 1) Real Estate agent, 2) Insurance Claims agent, and 3) Paramedic. This should say something about the state of things in old Cali', including the level to which So-Cal and Nor-Cal transplants are willing to stoop to make ends meet. Couple this with the inherent desperation in your average South Texan resident to "just have a job" and you get a monumental clash of ideals in an otherwise sleepy town. I say this because I come from a background where hard work is the order of the day - regardless of whether you are payed well for it or not. I have no builtin desire to scam my fellow man, unlike some of my peers, so I remain overworked and underpayed. But generally happy.

Now this is all changing.

While having to only compete with fellow South Texans in recent years, I suddenly realize that Californicans are relocating to this state at such an alarming rate they are skewing the average price of everything in the market. Whether that means higher energy rates or increased DMV taxation it doesn't matter - the influx of the "holy crap, I can't believe how CHEAP everything is down here in Texas!" crowd is destroying our finely-tuned economy.

Case-in-point: Up until about 2 or 3 years ago, the average lunch at the average San Antonio restaurant hovered around $5 and change. Today it is $8 and change. Same for the energy rates (like electricity and natural gas) - once pennies per kilowatt, now increased seasonally and "special adjustments" due to increased consumption. This also rolls over to inflated housing prices. Once a relatively stable buyer's market, San Antonio residential real estate has now been thrown off kilter because most Californians cannot understand our ridiculously skewed school tax valuation scheme, which means your average $500k home in Cali is worth about $150k in South Texas (what a STEAL!). Until you figure that your property taxes will come to about 3% of your home's annual appraised value.

Ouch.

Guess no one looked at that chapter before they relocated here.

Of course, the saving grace is how repulsed the average Californian feels when trying to negotiate a living wage for whatever skillset they offer. I have seen situations where the wife of a husband who was relocated here flippantly figured she would get a "temporary job" at someplace like Starbucks or Walmart until she could get a higher paying job in her field, only to find out she is COMPLETELY WEDGED OUT of the cheap-labor market by thousands of other native San Antonians who are just looking for a regular job!

If you don't believe me, browse the Jobs section in sanantoniocraigslist.org and see for yourself.

Having lived here for some 20 years, I can now say with authority that this town is NOTHING like your last place of residence. The key is to understand how useless you are in an entertainment and hospitality based economy and then make an appropriate decision on what level of mid-management you wish to aspire to. Don't think for a moment that you will usurp existing potentates just on skill alone - Noooooooo...

It will take much more than your Prius and unflappable optimism in humanity to come to a rest in this part of Texas.

Meanwhile, enjoy the crappy chain-restaurants and dollar tacos!

Aw crap - They're a CHRISTIAN BAND?!?

Dammit and double-dammit.

I stumbled across a badass metalcore band this weekend and was utterly amazed at the drummer's skill! Matt Greiner holds his own when it comes to percussion panache, but I was a bit disturbed by some of the rumors I started hearing about 2 hours into their music... That is to say...

HOLY CRAP - THIS IS CHRISTIAN METALCORE!!

NOOO!!!!

I am a bit perturbed about this, being a Recovering Catholic and all... You see, when I was young and growing up in the 1980's, the ONLY local radio station was owned by a Born-Again Christian who outright refused to play the "Devil's Music" - which at the time was about the only thing I wanted to hear (i.e., Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Iron Maiden, Pink Floyd, etc). I still remember laying awake at night hoping HOPING that I could get a phone call in to the DJ that might just play that one track from Dokken that I wanted to dedicate to some Junior High crush of mine at the time. In fact, I think they actually managed to bend the rules one night and play something for this platonic love of mine in the 8th grade. Of course, they screwed her name all up on the radio, but whatever. I had broken the "barrier" of Christian Censorship and gotten them to play Satan's Music in my tiny little hometown! (ironic that the virtuoso guitarist of Dokken later went on to play Country Music after the eventual fade of 80's Hair Metal...)

So here I was, some 20 years later, listening to a tinny YouTube video of Matt Greiner kinda hoping that this band wasn't Christian and that they would really kick some serious ass. Well, they DO kick ass, but there is a hint of preachery in some of the tracks. Still, the average person won't be able to pick this out considering they are YELLING most of the time. Which brings to mind an interesting concept. IF (and that is a HUGE if...) I were to consider being a missionary or whatever the fuck gospel bible punching callings exist out there, I would prefer to SCREAM THE NAME OF THE LORD JESUS INTO YOUR FACE over any other approach. Maybe this is why bands with a religious underpinning in America seem to attract an instant following if they tap into the underlying anger and angst of the next generation of teenagers...

I dunno..

For one thing, I enjoy drinking too much to be Muslim, and I am too damned humble to try and ram Jesus down people's throats. I guess that's why I continue to enjoy the staccato riffs and double-bassy drums of Heavy Metal music. Because at some point in your life, whether you are Born Again Christian or Born AGAINST Christians, you will have to face the truth that your musical interests sing exclusively about:

1) Drug Use
2) Alcohol
3) Sex
4) Money
5) Jesus
or
6) Their Cawks.

I'm somewhere between Cawks and Drug Use. With a little Yelling Jesus thrown in.

Tattoos on women...

(once again, I hate copy/paste in my blog, but this is worth it!)





Tattoos are creative and awesome no doubt.

The big problem that women will face is the daunting reality that once they get a tattoo, they will date themselves forever...

Girls who get tatoos tend to be the same that are in step with pop culture and up on the latest style, unfortunately will be the same girls who get bummed that they have to stick with the trend and style they pick forever! They will face their biggest critic; younger girls! It would be like hanging at the latest club hot spot and try compete with the younger prettier girls, and have a big tattoo across your shoulder that says ” I am 36 years old! “, even if noxema and a gym membership gives you a body of a 25 year old. Imagine if you were a girl who had to wear those bell bottom pants that came back popular in the early nineties….FOREVER. That would be like a jail sentence for the fashion forward.

Same goes for men… do you think that the Tasmanian Devil tattoo or the barbed wire tribal tattoo wrapped around your bicep says…hey look, ” Havasu Spring Break 1993″?

Posted by: Mason | July 21, 2008 at 05:46 PM

Keep me on your No Fly List...

Hello Yusuf!

I have met some interesting folks during my tenure at Rackspace, but Yusuf stands out. A young man born in Saudi Arabia, he is the first Muslim I have run across in my personal life that represents everything I've THOUGHT a Muslim should be - honorable, faithful, and personable. This is in stark contrast to everything the average American has been taught to believe about Muslims - the dark, scary "threat" to their freedoms after 9/11/2001.

Honestly, you guys need to get out more.

I've already known that an overwhelming percentage of the world's population is Muslim - from Asian to Indian to German to American. About the only people threatened by this are the average Christians, who I must say are just about as paranoid as the average American when it comes to understanding World Religion.

I'm sure Yusuf was suprised that I remembered the 5 Pillars of Islam from my research. Or the significance that he was born in Saudi Arabia. But what he did NOT count on is my immutable ability to upset the status quo. That's right - I don't sit well with the "don't rock the boat" crowd. This is why my blog is entitled "Keep me on your No Fly list", because after posting my recent picture, I will probably not get through TSA checklists very easily. No problem. I will deal with it when it comes.

Yusuf helps contribute to a pretty cool "modern" Muslim video-blogging website that has some interesting things to say about life as a Muslim (especially in America!), and while I remain a Recovering-Catholic, I can honestly say I'm one step closer to understanding why Islam is such a convincing religion. I used to joke that it was a "man's religion", considering how it REQUIRES the growth of facial hair in men...

I once again profess that the hardest thing to do in life is remain flexible. Yes. REMAIN FLEXIBLE. Whether that means you are a young Muslim adapting to culture at "The Rack" by eating a tasty hamburger at Chester's Hamburger's or a apparently-white-skinned Mexican seeing faith in action by one of your coworkers, that is something you have to contend with.

Now, if we could just all get along outside this whole "oil" thing...

Ummah Films

If there was ever a "Man's Religion", it was Islam.

I still remember the 5 Pillars of Islam from a course I took many, many years ago in a junior college. I happened to have run into several Muslims since that time and have never come across anything resembling the negative stereotype portrayed by popular US media. I'm sure I risk some form or "Carnivore" or "Matrix" style meta-searching for saying this, but despite the fanatacism of the average Muslim I've known, not a SINGLE ONE has advocated any violence against any living creature in ANY way.

So recently I discovered Ummah Films.

First off, I am not Muslim. In fact, I am what is humorously known as a "Recovering Catholic." Despite having excelled in my courses in private school, I have always wondered "who was right?" when it came to faith and, more loosely, religion. While I am still leagues away from any formal understanding of some of the world's most popular faiths, I have a more tolerant view of Islam than your average American.

Ummah Films just happened to drop into my lap as part of the diversity I experience at Rackspace every day. I am a firm believer in "keeping an open mind", and while this is an easy phrase to type it is an infinitely impossible mindset to keep. Just try it. Try to overcome your stereotypes when you walk through an urban area packed with homeless people. Or when you see that average teen with bleach-blonde mohawk and

Let's get Illegal this 4th of July

I have two funny stories about America's Independence Day as seen through the eyes of a Gen X'er:

FIRST:

A random mid-afternoon in the 1980's when I was crouched over a small glass bottle (possibly a Coca Cola?) trying to situate two bottle rockets for synchronous flight as the sun baked onlookers. The atmosphere was triumphant - A new suburb in a small metropolis where the average resident was busy either drinking beer or fussing over a barbeque pit or pawning off fireworks to the "kids". I was old enough to know how dangerous fireworks could be, but toiled busily over what I thought would be an impressive beginning of a fireworks show.

We were all faced North in this small cul-de-sac, all at once waiting for something and for nothing. No one crowded me as I contemplated my little pyrotechnics display.

Suddenly, while trying to light two disjointed bottle rocket fuses, a large hand intruded into my pyromanic fit.

"Hey - You're doing it wrong!"

I tilted my head to see a fully-uniformed San Antonio Police Officer addressing me. Before I could break a panicked sweat, he had manipulated the bottle rockets into one large cluster of twisted fuses and goaded me to, "go ahead - light it!"

It wasn't rocket science to know that a 10-year-old would put a cheap cigarrette lighter to a mass of fuses just to see what happened...

A trailing burst of gunpowder later, we were all "ooohs!" and "aaaahs!" while the policeman winked and nodded at my newfound technique. The rest of the afternoon was an impressive one-up on the local kids, trying to see who could blow their fingers off with a random assortment of fireworks as a varied mix of community professionals gawked on. Yes, there were firefighters present, but only to enjoy the free beer that was making the rounds!

How times have changed. I can still smell the burning cordite and the starch in Officer McFriendly's shirt.

SECOND:

Flash forward to the year 2007 and making a chance stop at one of the still-remaining fireworks stands at the outskirts of town. Not really knowing what to expect in my late 30's, I was surprised to see a Fire Marshal standing at the counter, resplendent in full uniform and radio and incognito pickup truck. BEXAR COUNTY FIRE MARSHAL, in case you didn't see the reflective 3M tape on his jumper.

As luck would have it, this fireworks stand was right next to a small Mexican Restaurant, so being the ever-paranoid White Guy, I quickly veered to the parking lot of El Chapparral to "get a Taco" while Mr. Enforcement was looking busy and agitated at the lack of customers at the stand. In about 5 minutes, I was back at the fireworks stand ordering all sorts of incendiary goodness. Even the employees were breathing a sigh of relief that the wet-sponge on the whole affair was gone for awhile.

Sadly, most of the fireworks I bought that afternoon were duds, but you can bet I'll be back there this Friday just on the whim that my niece or nephew would enjoy one well burned firecracker some 30 years after we didn't have to look over our shoulder before we indulged in a little harmless fun.

Paranoiacs, you may now water your roof.

Yard Sale Nation

***** PERSONAL NOTE: I hate copy/paste of someone else's blog entry, but I have a hard time disagreeing with this recent entry from Jim on the Clusterfuck Nation blog:


--
This isn't so funny anymore. Intimations of a July banking collapse rumbled though the Internet this weekend while mainstream news orgs like The New York Times and CNN pulled their puds over swift boats and Amy Winehouse's performance technique. Something is happening, and you don't know what it is, do you Mr. Jones...? to quote the master.

What's happening is that American society is sliding into a greater depression than the one Grandma lived through. On the technical side, there has been unending controversy as to whether we're gripped by inflation or deflation. It's certainly deceptive. Food and gasoline prices are rising faster than the rivers of Iowa. But the prices of assets, like houses, stocks, jet-skis, GMC Yukons and pre-owned Hummel figurines are cratering as America turns into Yard Sale Nation.

We're a very different country than we were in 1932. In that earlier crisis of capital, few people had any money but our society still possessed fantastic resources. We had plenty of everything that our land could provide: a treasure trove of mineral ores and the equipment to refine it all, a wealth of oil and gas still in the ground, and all the rigs needed to get at it, manpower galore (and of a highly disciplined, regimented kind), with fine-tuned factories waiting for orders. We had a railroad system that was the envy of the world and millions of family farms (even despite the dust bowl) owned by people who retained age-old skills not yet degraded by agribusiness. We had fully-functional cities with operating waterfronts and ten thousand small towns with local economies, local newspapers, and local culture.

We had a crisis of capital in the 1930s for reasons that are still debated today. My own guess is a combination of a bad debt workout that sucked "money" into a black hole (since money is loaned into existence, but vanishes if the loans are not systematically paid back) plus a gross saturation of markets, meaning that every American who had wanted to buy a car or an electric toaster had done so and there was no one left to sell to. (The first round of globalism -- 1870 - 1914 -- had shut down after the fiasco of World War One.)

Our debt problems today are of a magnitude so extreme that astronomers would be hard pressed to calculate them. By any rational measure our society is comprehensively bankrupt. From the federal treasury down to the suburban cul-de-sacs so much loaned money is either not being paid back, or is at risk of never being paid back, that the suckage of presumed wealth has passed through an event horizon out of the known universe into some other realm of space-time, never to be seen again in this realm. This would seem to be the very essence of monetary deflation -- money defaulted out-of-existence.

This condition is partly disguised by both the loss of credibility of US currency and real-world scarcities of oil and food, but the upshot will be something at least twice as bad as the Great Depression of the 1930s: people with no money in a land with no resources (with manpower that has no discipline), hardly any family farms left, cities that are basket-cases of bottomless need, comatose small towns stripped of their assets and social capital, an aviation industry on the verge of death, and a railroad system that is the laughingstock of the world. Not to mention the mind-boggling liabilities of suburbia and the motoring infrastructure that services it.

The banks have been doing their death dance for an entire year now, pretending that their problems are those of mere "liquidity" (i.e. cash-on-hand) rather than insolvency (no cash either on hand or in the vault and nothing else to sell to raise cash except worthless "creative" securities that nobody would ever buy). But the destruction of money (resulting from loans not paid back) is now so intense that the game of pretend has reached its terminal point. The question for the moment is exactly who and what will be crushed as these institutions roll over and die.

Complicating matters is a global oil predicament that is really not hard to understand, but which the organs of news and opinion have obdurately failed to explicate for an anxious public. Call it Peak Oil. There are only a few elements of it you need to know. 1.) that demand has now permanently outstripped supply; 2.) that new discoveries are too meager to offset consumption; 3.) That under under the circumstances, the systems we rely on for daily life are crumbling. I've called this situation The Long Emergency.

Our chances of mitigating this, and of continuing our current way-of-life is about zero. I've tried to promote the idea that rather than waste remaining resources in the futile attempt to sustain the unsustainable (i.e. come up with "solutions" to keep suburbia running), that we should begin immediately making other arrangements for daily life -- mainly by downscaling and re-scaling everything from farming to commerce to the way we inhabit the landscape -- but my suggestions have proven unpopular even among the "environmental" elites, who are too busy being entranced by new-and-groovy ways to keep all the cars running.

So where we are at now is the equivalent of standing in the slop by the ocean shore under a gathering hundred-foot-high wave that is about to come crashing down on our heads. Since I sure don't know everything, I can't say how this will all play out in the months ahead, especially with the presidential election coming at the exact moment that voters will be turning on their furnaces for the cold and dark winter beyond. I would venture to say that so far our society as a whole has done a piss-poor job of comprehending the situation. But there is still the possibility, with four months of politicking left, that the nature of our predicament can be articulated in a way that few can fail to understand, the way Mr, Lincoln articulated the terms of the Civil War on the eve of its fateful outbreak.

Drinking from the Firehose (TM)

Interesting how little you tend to follow American News when you are drinking from the "tech firehose"...

I enjoy my time at Rackspace.

Yes, I know that few people can honestly say they like working at work, but I have a personality that craves intensity (and sometimes praise), and Rack fills that need. Today was no exception - considering how many people out there expect to make a buck off a fairly generic Dell rackmount server and a few customized Linux apps.

What is the crux of Linux Support at The Rack?

Easy.

You take 1 part detective work and 1 part "people skills" (aka, talking on the phone) and you have a recipe for figuring out what ails your customers. This is simpler than it sounds - most folks running a LAMP server (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) can get stuck in some interesting quandaries. And it is up to YOU to figure out how to pull them out of the muck.

One might relegate this form of fanatical support to a thing of the past, perhaps the 90's Venture Capital Startups, but I beg to differ. If you remember back then, EVERYONE had a million-dollar idea that could be webified. The difference between you and the bike-tech-turned-net-security-consultant was that you KNEW how to get a business off the ground with tried-and-true concepts. Not brick and mortar business smarts, but the basics of what made America great - Sweat and Tears and Hard Work..

With so few Gen X'ers around in tech nowdays, at least those who slog the front lines, one often wonders if they will ultimately figure out that "hard work" will not pay off for them like it did for their parents.

And they will leave in droves. Or already did.

Nevertheless, I am happy to be in the minority of techs who trudge onward, hoping to make a difference in a few people's lives before I grow too jaded about life and its just rewards...

True hard work never hurt anyone. It just seems to hurt at first.

The rewards are infinite.

A penny a day - redux.

In the pseudo-science of Numerology, one could say we are in The Year of a New Beginning.

That is to say, the year 2008 adds up to 2+0+0+8=10=1+0=1.

1 - a new beginning.

Some of my friends remember when I first made this numerological observation in the year 2006. That year happened to have added up to an "8", which signified (among other things) the "return of wealth" or return to wealth, or money. As it just so happens, that year saw one of my biggest windfalls in the US Stock Market. An experience that all-at-once awed me and humbled me. I learned quite a few things about financial markets that year, but also of a most curious side effect.

I began noticing, at odd times of the day or night, a penny.

Usually laying on the ground. At entirely random locations. And this was usually at the rate of about a penny-a-day.

At first, I was somewhat amused, and the thought of the "8" year was fresh in my mind, so I chalked it up to just being more observant.

But over time, I began to notice pennies at an increasing rate - something that made me question whether I was losing my sanity or not. A thought began to form in the back of my mind - "What if this goes on for a whole YEAR?!" And guess what? With the exception of maybe four weeks or so, it DID.

Around February of 2007, the pennies stopped showing up in my daily soujourns. Even though in some cases, I was actively searching for/waiting for a penny to show up in the periphery of my vision. In fact, one of the weirder episodes of "penny spotting" ocurred late one night as I was leaving work - in near pitch black darkness. If it wasn't for the glint of moonlight off the shiny penny laying about 30 feet from where I was walking, I would never have known.

Talk about your paranormal experience.

So flash-forward to the year 2008. The "new beginning".

Not much of a believer in established religion, but I was vaguely aware of what had happened with the pennies in 2006 (don't ask me about 2007). Obviously, it takes a bit of faith to believe that something other than blind luck was causing me to notice the pennies... But I'll leave that up to individual judgement, should a reader happen to stumble into the same karma one day.

So...

Here I am in 2008, experiencing an amazing change in my life (for the better - thank you!) and despite the overwhelming urge to accept the idea that Numerology somehow predicted this, it wasn't until I started noticing NICKELS and DIMES in the streets that I began to question my sanity once again!

I have just returned from a weekly run, during which I ran across not only a shiny silver nickel, but a copper (clad at least) penny!

This on the heels of finding a dime in the parking lot of a local merchant the other day.

I have no idea what, if anything, this all means.

My firm belief is that, like the pursuit of happiness, if you make it your obsessive goal in life - you will have NONE.

Better to leave serendipity alone and move forward.

It might be time to start working on Oil Rigs again...