blog (category: work)
Rat Attacks MidTown
A few of us gawked out my cubicle window, guessing what the giant rat across the street was wild eyed about.
Ilya thought our neighbors were celebrating the Chinese New Year, (2008 is year of the rat,) to one-up their Christmas decoration. AsiaTown is on the other side of MidTown, though.
I wondered if the rats in Public Square had fled uptown, escaping the poisoning of their boroughs.
John guessed correctly: a showing against non-union labor. We hadn't seen the scab on the rat's underbelly, but it was grossly apparent when I went outside to shoot {photos of / the bull with} the guys making their stand.
4415 Euclid recycles
Cleveland Midtown Innovation Center finally has a City recycling dumpster. :)
It was over a year ago that John McGovern referred me to Cassandra Moore, (Project Director for the City of Cleveland's Division of Waste Collection,) to request a city recycling dumpster in my workspace parking lot.
Our building owners and management were open and enthusiastic, (thanks, Michael Fleming, Heartland Developers, 4415 Euclid LLC.) Being publicly accessible 24/7 by Euclid and Chester made our location an easy sell to the City, we just had to wait on the new containers to arrive and be painted. A year of predictions, postponement, recontacting.
I've been collecting recyclables in the CleveMed kitchen for a few years -- in cardboard boxes from the water jugs we'd buy -- and toting them to City dumpsters every couple weeks. Until I'd drive my car to work, the filled boxes would stack to form a wall next to my cube, and the heap in the kitchen would tend toward constant overflow, pissing off the germ-paranoid.
Great, then, to return from California this week and find that our dumpster had finally arrived, and that the company switched from gallon jug shipments to a tap-water purifier.
An opportunity for us to collect more materials. Get some real bins, better publicize, and (hopefully) have the cleaning crew take the recyclables out with the trash. That's less crushing, stacking, and transporting for me.
I've added this to the Cleveland Recycling Locations Map (about).
ingenuity: progression, projection
Cleveland's 3rd annual Ingenuity Festival is already a week past, and I haven't yet squeaked about it here. I wrote half an entry the week prior, intending to promote the fest and my part in it, but I was too tangled and busy preparing, and left it undone.
In Ingenuity's first year, I walked through the festival a few times and paused for some music. I spent a lot of time at last year's 2.0, digging great music/dance (DJ Spooky and SAFMOD beat me up,) art installations, and goodfun (get-down in the rain,) and did a brief Capoeira performance with Shakthi and Taliesin on stage with Moises Borges and his band.
This year we made a somewhat bigger Capoeira roda for the festival's opening Samba of 1,000 Drums parade, but that was mostly just a break for me on Thursday evening before returning to my cube at CleveMed for a late night, prepping software and devices for the next day's Cavani/FES/CleveMed collaboration.
Friends from the Cleveland FES (Functional Electrical Stimulation) Center (Katie, Andy, Juan, and Dimitra) asked if CleveMed and I would like to work with them in a collaboration with the Cleveland Institute of Music's Cavani String Quartet. Over a number of months we experimented in acquiring EMG from the musician's muscles while they played (using CleveMed's BioCapture and Kinesia systems), and capturing motion data with FESC's equipment to generate model~animations.
Day-of-show -- at CleveMed in the morning and State Theatre in the afternoon -- was one of the most stressful I've known, but everything really just came together by evening performance-time, and both shows were about as good as I could've hoped. The members of Cavani are amazing musicians and people, and their delivery of Dvořák's "American" was beautiful. The devices and visualizations provided another (sometimes stunning) dimension to the music, as hoped. All of the projections, stage calls, queues, and speaking parts (probably the root of my greatest stress) went smoothly, as a result of focus, attention, and generosity from everyone involved.
Photo by Imagine24 (Some rights reserved.)
More pics: 1,
2,
3
I owe thanks in a lot of directions: FESC friends and colleagues, the Cavani musicians, the stage management and ops people at Playhouse Square, my supervisor, Craig, (both granting me this freedom and for life-saving pair-programming assistance in the final moments,) the rest of my conspirators at CleveMed for making top-notch tech, and Rich Weiss from Ingenuity for gluing us together with logistics and motivation.
I'm already looking forward to next year's festival, and forming vague plans for a project. The intersection of art & tech is one crossroads where I could set up shop, (or at least be happy just hanging out on the curb.)
today's private enterprise
Every modern career is heading for entrepreneurship.
The "I work at one company for the rest of my life" is gone.
In fact, you are becoming a small business, or you're becoming somewhat of an entrepreneur -- even if your elected career path is "I work for this company, and then I work for this company, and then I work for this company,..." -- because you're transferring jobs between them, and you have all the issues that a small business or entrepreneur cares about: the brand of you, what you do, that sort of thing.
The skills learned from entrepreneurship are applicable to any career path.
-- Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn,) Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lecture: Choosing the Entrepreneurial Path (Stanford Technology Ventures Program) [starting at 35 minutes; my minor edits]
Early in the same talk, Hoffman compares entrepreneurship to jumping off a cliff and building the airplane on the way down.
I remember my bridges and ledges; the longer I'd stand and peer over the edge, the more difficult the leap would become.
Peak Suburbia, and Suburbia 2.0
we had better prepare to make other arrangements for living in this country, by which I mean specifically re-localizing, de-globalizing, with an emphasis on local agriculture wherever possible, the emergency restoration of passenger railroad service and related modes of public transit, the rebuilding of local commercial infrastructures, and a radical rethinking of how we inhabit the landscape under New Urbanist lines.
In any case, those who keep wringing their hands over the bulldozers leveling the plots of prairie, or cornfield, or desert -- those distressed folks can direct their anxiety elsewhere. Worry less whether one final strip mall will tilt up out in gloaming, and think harder about how you are going to feed yourself and your family in a couple of years when the stupendous motorized moloch of American life begins to sputter, and the Cheez Doodle shipments can no longer make it to your supermarket shelves, and all that is "normal" melts into air.
-- James Howard Kunstler, Peak Suburbia, (Clusterfuck Nation)
I've been tossing around some ideas for a plant/seed/produce/tool-sharing site to grow a community around local gardeners, (urban, rural, and in-between.)
It seems a nice blend of [my interests in] web, software, ecology, and local community -- helping to build that economy/ecosystem that'll become necessary as our current concoction collapses, (as Kunstler continues to promise.)
I need a good project, but it might be more than I'm up for right now.
go home-office, Go Media
Go Media is a print/web design shop in Cleveland doing some very cool stuff.
I briefly met Bill and Chris at their headquarters and house, a new condo on Cleveland's West, at a party for Bill's birthday. Bedrooms on the 3rd floor, kitchen/livingroom on the 2nd, and office on the 1st.
Lean, sharp decor. Their print product, framed -- mostly concert posters -- lines the entrance hallway and the trim (but potent) office.
Some PCs with giant LCDs, a whiteboard (on which was written ~you can stop working when you're dead) a few shelves of books, and a door opening on a small patio where young bamboo strains toward fencehood.
One of many possible dreamlands.
Signed, Sealed, Delivered
I had the extendo-weekend in San Francisco to consider the offer. Yesterday morning I signed contract to become a full-time, salaried employee of Cleveland Med1cal Dev1ces, (name changed to avert googling,) as Software Engineer/Network Administrator.
Welcome to the machine.
attempt to redefine my daily guidelines
read, write, sit, shout, sing, and push
These are my new expectations for each day. I won't tell you what they all mean, but the first two are pretty obvious. Running isn't included; it's more than expected.
I've failed in most of those today, though. It's past 1am and I haven't yet left work. I've been here since before 10am.
I've actually been feeling better about things lately. I've had a few less stresses at work which'as allowed me to get a thing or two done. I've been building a company web-based intranet with Apache, Perl, MovableType, php and Smarty. MySQL will be the next friend to come play along, but the tools aren't really that important. I've got to begin doing some reading on intranets in collaboration & knowledge-management. I really want to be creative with this, but ultimately, I can't let usefulness out of sight.
a case of the mondays
My workworld is spinning. Administering a Windows computer network is something like raking a cheese-grater back and forth across your face. I'm becoming more and more proficient, but it just hurts more. I'm constantly talking about trying to make the infrastructure here more efficient and self-administering, but every time I try to concentrate on one task, ten others present themselves.
Today has been virus/worm/trojan/etc day. That's not a hell of an exciting day, but I chalk it up, as usual, to teaching me a bit more, and forcing me to button down the systems here further. We have a long way to go though; I refuse to let things teeter constantly on the edge of disaster. Well, maybe disaster is an exaggeration. Right now the status bar is yellow and half-full at "bothersome and prohibitively time-consuming." Got to get back to green.
MyCoy Tyner's Enlightenment is knocking down doors through my headphones and into my brain.
hollow weaning
Rolled to work at 11 this morning, and left the building around 9:30pm. I slid my schedule forward today so I could tear out cables and redesign some of the network tonight when no one would be around needing a connection. I've spent probably half of these first couple days at work in that server closet, organizing and configuring. I'm anxious to straighten out as much as I can of my domain here -- streamline as much of the monkeystuff as possible so I can pursue more interesting aspects of the job.
I'm confronting initial troubles in shifting from unemployment to full-time. The past months' leisure time wasn't enough for me to do all I wanted; now I'm not even close to that. I've got to get over this first hump of weariness. I come home and am too drained -- especially if after going for a run -- to try and tackle any of the social/geeky/housewarming/&more goals I have.
A few tricks & treats are up my sleeves; I've just got to get the shirt out of the closet.