It’s time for a cool change.
Friday, December 11, 2020
Thursday, June 25, 2015
Hazy Crazy Days of Summer
Ok, so this was the scene today at about 7:00 a.m.
If you download and zoom in on that photo you will see that you can barely see the mountains in the background. It's not pollution that is doing it, it's smoke.
As in from a fire.
Currently, Dillingham is surrounded by six forest fires. Exhibit A :
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| Click to expand. |
It does, however, make one double-check one's location.
• Fire? Check.
• Earthquakes? Check.
• Floods? Check.
• Pestilence? Check.
If I didn't know better, I would say from that evidence alone I am in California.
The Latitude Attitude Adjustment
If you are moving to anywhere in the Alaskan Bush, even Dillingham, the best thing you can do is to leave your attitudes and expectations back in the lower 48. That may come off as snarky or preachy, but it really isn't. It's just good, ol' fashioned reality.
You will discover after you hit Dillingham everything - and I do mean EVERYTHING - runs on "ish" time. When you set a time to do something - ANYTHING - with anyone else it is meaningless. If you want something to start exactly at 5 p.m., you better tell everyone 3:30 p.m. Otherwise you will get people showing up at 5ish, which is to say anywhere between 5:45 p.m., and 7 p.m. It would be better and more accurate if you just said "Tuesday" or "Friday".
It also means when the power goes out, it goes out for a while. If the internet goes out (which it does from time to time), it can be out for 2 -3 days. Rain? Hope you like it in doses a week at a stretch.
It just means your life here will in no way, shape, or form resemble the one you are leaving behind in the lower 48. You may as well figure, unless you are willing to pay a LOT for the privilege, you are going to be stepping back in time about 5 - 10 years. No, the TVs are not cutting, bleeding edge here. No, you can't stream Netflix. No, you're not going to stream Amazon Prime either.
I guess I am trying to say that if you are whiner, don't move to Dillingham. Nobody here wants to hear it. Most of the time they have it far worse than you do. In short, before you come up here make sure you leave your attitude back home. Everyone will be better off for it, especially you.
You will discover after you hit Dillingham everything - and I do mean EVERYTHING - runs on "ish" time. When you set a time to do something - ANYTHING - with anyone else it is meaningless. If you want something to start exactly at 5 p.m., you better tell everyone 3:30 p.m. Otherwise you will get people showing up at 5ish, which is to say anywhere between 5:45 p.m., and 7 p.m. It would be better and more accurate if you just said "Tuesday" or "Friday".
It also means when the power goes out, it goes out for a while. If the internet goes out (which it does from time to time), it can be out for 2 -3 days. Rain? Hope you like it in doses a week at a stretch.
It just means your life here will in no way, shape, or form resemble the one you are leaving behind in the lower 48. You may as well figure, unless you are willing to pay a LOT for the privilege, you are going to be stepping back in time about 5 - 10 years. No, the TVs are not cutting, bleeding edge here. No, you can't stream Netflix. No, you're not going to stream Amazon Prime either.
I guess I am trying to say that if you are whiner, don't move to Dillingham. Nobody here wants to hear it. Most of the time they have it far worse than you do. In short, before you come up here make sure you leave your attitude back home. Everyone will be better off for it, especially you.
Tuesday, April 28, 2015
Leaving On A Jet Plane
By now many of you have heard the news. Our Alaska adventure is coming to an end.
I have accepted a position with a start-up company in Chicago, Illinois and we will be reporting there to begin our Illinois adventure 06 JUL 2015. Needless to say, this is going to be quite the shift from Dillingham to Chicago.
Boy, will it ever be a shift.
You really don't know what quiet is until you hit Dillingham. You just think you know what quiet is. When you get up at 5 a.m. and the only sound anywhere in the town is the gentle thrum of the diesel generators, then you will know what quiet is.
I am not likely to see many moose, elk, reindeer, foxes, or porcupines there either. There are a lot of things I am going to miss about Dillingham, but too many people and too much noise are not among them.
I have accepted a position with a start-up company in Chicago, Illinois and we will be reporting there to begin our Illinois adventure 06 JUL 2015. Needless to say, this is going to be quite the shift from Dillingham to Chicago.
Boy, will it ever be a shift.
You really don't know what quiet is until you hit Dillingham. You just think you know what quiet is. When you get up at 5 a.m. and the only sound anywhere in the town is the gentle thrum of the diesel generators, then you will know what quiet is.
I am not likely to see many moose, elk, reindeer, foxes, or porcupines there either. There are a lot of things I am going to miss about Dillingham, but too many people and too much noise are not among them.
Friday, June 13, 2014
Amazon's Game Changer
Ok, I have to admit I am impressed.
Amazon introduced a real game changer called Amazon Prime Music. If you have an Amazon Prime account, the promise is simple : about 1, 000, 000 songs you can listen to for free. As in free beer. As in ad-free. The kicker : you can download the music to your smartphone or tablet to listen to it offline (for when you have no internet connection).
There are, of course, some restrictions : four devices total per Prime account. Only one can stream or download at a time. If you try to stream from two devices using one account, Amazon simply asks what device you want to cut off.
This would be fantastic - one could almost say nearly perfect - for listening to music... except for the pathetically small data caps we have here in Dillingham. If we didn't have caps here, I would probably have already filled up the memory in my iPhone with songs I want to hear.
Even so... Apple is in real trouble here. They are going to have to come up with something to counter. I am thinking an iCloud subscription service for backup / data storage / music would flatten Amazon. I guess we will have to wait and see what the future holds.
Amazon introduced a real game changer called Amazon Prime Music. If you have an Amazon Prime account, the promise is simple : about 1, 000, 000 songs you can listen to for free. As in free beer. As in ad-free. The kicker : you can download the music to your smartphone or tablet to listen to it offline (for when you have no internet connection).
There are, of course, some restrictions : four devices total per Prime account. Only one can stream or download at a time. If you try to stream from two devices using one account, Amazon simply asks what device you want to cut off.
This would be fantastic - one could almost say nearly perfect - for listening to music... except for the pathetically small data caps we have here in Dillingham. If we didn't have caps here, I would probably have already filled up the memory in my iPhone with songs I want to hear.
Even so... Apple is in real trouble here. They are going to have to come up with something to counter. I am thinking an iCloud subscription service for backup / data storage / music would flatten Amazon. I guess we will have to wait and see what the future holds.
Sunday, February 23, 2014
ASTE 2014 in Anchorage
So I am in Anchorage for the ASTE conference again this year. I am staying on the 11th floor of the Hotel Captain Cook, which is in tower 2. The stay has been very healthy for me, because with only one working elevator it's faster to hoof it up the stairs than wait for the elevator.
Turns out while I wasn't looking, someone advanced the hell out of automobiles while I wasn't looking. I present to you the 2014 Ford Fusion :
Aaaaaaaaand, of course, it took Microsoft to screw it up. There is no doubt this could have been a great interface to the car; naturally, Ford went to the anti-professionals at Microsoft to design it instead of Apple. Do you see that screen on the right? The one with four quarters? Yeah, you can't actually touch any of those stupidly large buttons to do anything. The actual touch interface is limited to a box about 2 inches long, and 1/2 inch high tucked in the corners of the screen. Half the time, even when sitting in Park you can't get the slivers to actually recognize you touched it.
Now stop and think about that for a minute. You are piloting a two-ton-plus vehicle at speeds up to 65 MPH. Which makes more sense :
a) taking the driver's eyes off the road for a split-second to find a stupidly large button, or
b) taking the diver's eyes off the road for several seconds to find a tiny sliver of a button?
If you said "a", then you have proven you are completely unfit to work at either Ford or Microsoft, you idiot. What the hell were you thinking?
Even so, Anchorage and the surrounding area continue to be spectacular. Here a kinda-panorama from my hotel window :
No visit to the big city would be complete without stopping at Fred Meyer. The old joke goes that Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a convenience store, not a government agency. Well, Fred Meyer lives up to that, and more. By God, you can buy guns, groceries, diamond rings, furniture and more under that one cavernous roof. You can also buy things like this :
Huh. If I could have found a way to stuff that in my luggage, I would have taken that bad boy home. I would have made space for it back home. I don't need it, but it's just so cool it's almost a crime to not buy it.
Also decided to take in a couple of movies while in Anchorage. One was the RoboCop reboot, and the other was the Lego Movie. I was surprised at RoboCop. I went in expecting they had screwed it up like every reboot that has come down the pike. I was very shocked and pleasantly surprised they had not totally screwed it up. To be sure, they came at the movie from the opposite direction from the original. They more or less ended up in the same parking lot as the original if not the ballpark itself.
Then again... maybe my opinion was influenced by this on the way into the theatre :
The Lego Movie was another surprise. It has been decades since I have seen a movie this much fun, this entertaining to watch. The kids are too taken in by the eye candy to get the jokes aimed squarely at the adults, but that's their loss. This is a stupidly funny movie that has no reason to exist except to over-deliver and under-promise entertainment.
The running gag throughout the movie is time. Whenever a character tells another to - for example - meet up downstairs in the oddly-specific timeframe of 10 seconds in the future, then the screen is always taken over by a placard that reads "downstairs, 10 seconds later", then immediately cuts to the downstairs scene. It shouldn't be funny, it should be repetitive. But in this movie, in this context, it works so that kids and adults are laughing their asses off. Each. And. Every. Time. I can't wait to get the DVD or download it. This one is a keeper for sure.
So I went out exploring Anchorage a little bit and then it happened. The Holy Mecca of Outdoors anything came into my view :
But then all hope was lost as quick as it came. The sign draped across the front stated it was opening April 10.
Crap.
Oh, well. I suppose we can make the pilgrimage sometime after that. In the meantime it's back to work for me.
Turns out while I wasn't looking, someone advanced the hell out of automobiles while I wasn't looking. I present to you the 2014 Ford Fusion :
 |
| It has more knobs, dials and switches to adjust than a woman. |
Now stop and think about that for a minute. You are piloting a two-ton-plus vehicle at speeds up to 65 MPH. Which makes more sense :
a) taking the driver's eyes off the road for a split-second to find a stupidly large button, or
b) taking the diver's eyes off the road for several seconds to find a tiny sliver of a button?
If you said "a", then you have proven you are completely unfit to work at either Ford or Microsoft, you idiot. What the hell were you thinking?
Even so, Anchorage and the surrounding area continue to be spectacular. Here a kinda-panorama from my hotel window :
No visit to the big city would be complete without stopping at Fred Meyer. The old joke goes that Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a convenience store, not a government agency. Well, Fred Meyer lives up to that, and more. By God, you can buy guns, groceries, diamond rings, furniture and more under that one cavernous roof. You can also buy things like this :
Holy Art Deco, Batman !
Huh. If I could have found a way to stuff that in my luggage, I would have taken that bad boy home. I would have made space for it back home. I don't need it, but it's just so cool it's almost a crime to not buy it.
Also decided to take in a couple of movies while in Anchorage. One was the RoboCop reboot, and the other was the Lego Movie. I was surprised at RoboCop. I went in expecting they had screwed it up like every reboot that has come down the pike. I was very shocked and pleasantly surprised they had not totally screwed it up. To be sure, they came at the movie from the opposite direction from the original. They more or less ended up in the same parking lot as the original if not the ballpark itself.
Then again... maybe my opinion was influenced by this on the way into the theatre :
To give you a sense of scale, that podium came
up to my waist.
The Lego Movie was another surprise. It has been decades since I have seen a movie this much fun, this entertaining to watch. The kids are too taken in by the eye candy to get the jokes aimed squarely at the adults, but that's their loss. This is a stupidly funny movie that has no reason to exist except to over-deliver and under-promise entertainment.
The running gag throughout the movie is time. Whenever a character tells another to - for example - meet up downstairs in the oddly-specific timeframe of 10 seconds in the future, then the screen is always taken over by a placard that reads "downstairs, 10 seconds later", then immediately cuts to the downstairs scene. It shouldn't be funny, it should be repetitive. But in this movie, in this context, it works so that kids and adults are laughing their asses off. Each. And. Every. Time. I can't wait to get the DVD or download it. This one is a keeper for sure.
So I went out exploring Anchorage a little bit and then it happened. The Holy Mecca of Outdoors anything came into my view :
 |
| Imagine Handel's Messiah as the background music. It's what I was hearing. |
Crap.
Oh, well. I suppose we can make the pilgrimage sometime after that. In the meantime it's back to work for me.
Wednesday, August 21, 2013
Leaving on a Jet Plane, Part II
Here are couple of more pictures :
The queen couldn't be interested less in aircraft, and wished us a bon voyage when we went out to the airport. Turns out she and Brittany were making brownies and pumpkin muffins while the guys were off doing 'guy stuff'.
I can't say who the pilot is or what he is doing here, but just put it this way : think of anyone famous you have ever heard of in the last 20 years, and he has probably been their pilot.
Yep. Him too. Uh huh. Him too. Yes, her many times. Them, too.
So we have been killing him with kindness at the Thai Inn, so he invited me out to give it a tour. If you think the outside is something, you should have seen the inside. Wish I could have taken pictures.
UPDATE : They are gone. What a beautiful, picture perfect take-off. Now I can post something that shows mere mortals are not cut out to pilot these things :
Don't forget : there are even more knobs, dials and switches above that didn't make it into the picture.
The queen couldn't be interested less in aircraft, and wished us a bon voyage when we went out to the airport. Turns out she and Brittany were making brownies and pumpkin muffins while the guys were off doing 'guy stuff'.
I can't say who the pilot is or what he is doing here, but just put it this way : think of anyone famous you have ever heard of in the last 20 years, and he has probably been their pilot.
Yep. Him too. Uh huh. Him too. Yes, her many times. Them, too.
So we have been killing him with kindness at the Thai Inn, so he invited me out to give it a tour. If you think the outside is something, you should have seen the inside. Wish I could have taken pictures.
UPDATE : They are gone. What a beautiful, picture perfect take-off. Now I can post something that shows mere mortals are not cut out to pilot these things :
 |
| Piece of cake. |
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