The Coastal Pacific train runs once a day, and takes six hours from Picton to Christchurch, which is a long time without wifi for three teenagers. Fortunately it allowed a stopover in Kaikoura, and by "stopover" I mean you could get off and catch the next train 24 hours later. Or in our case, 48 hours. (Oddly, it was cheaper to break the train journey into two segments.)
As I mentioned, although Kaikoura is a small town, it is a huge tourist destination because of the Hikurangi Trench. Much like the canyon at Monterey Bay, Califonia, the Hikurangi Trench directs nutrient-rich sediment which supports abundant wildlife including crayfish (rock lobsters), dolphins and whales. (I later learned the best time to visit was autumn; during the summer only male sperm whales were present.) The town has a permanent population of about 3,600 people, it can see 900,000 tourists in a year!
Humorously, I booked the ferry and train first and then discovered there was no accommodation in Kaikoura that could accommodate the five of us. There wasn't even a hotel with two rooms free! Since the kids were already bringing sleeping bags, I suggested we bring tents and sleep on the beach, but my partner pointed out the kids were already packing for nineteen days and would not have any more space. In the end, I found a motel room that slept three but looked like it could hold five. I once smuggled a six-foot iguana into a motel, so I figured two kids would be easy.
Needless to say, everything that could go wrong, did. It wasn't a motel per se, with independent access for each room, but instead you had to go through the lobby, past the receptionist, into a courtyard, and our room was on the second floor. We had a small mountain of luggage -- the kids each took a large suitcase, a big duffel bag, and a sleeping bag -- and the shuttle dropped us right in front of the lobby. I had hoped there would be no need to tell the kids about my duplicitous plan, so of course they started unloading the luggage in full view of the receiptionist! I immediately suffled two of them out of sight, but as I was checking in I looked up to see one of the kids skateboarding around the parking lot!
(That my partner let him bring his skateboard is a whole other discussion...)
I found a back entrance so I sent my partner and one kid through the lobby and took the other two kids around back. Just as we were comng in, the receptionist was coming out to help another couple, who spoke no english. Thankfully, the eldest had cottoned on to what was happening and immediately split off and went elsewhere, dragging the youngest with her. I knew he was getting upset -- like his mom, he does not like being dishonest -- so I needed to get him inside quickly before he made a scene. The eldest went up another staircase but found it did not connect to our room, so we found ourselves making hand signals at the top of the stairs while the receptionist was standing below us, oblivious. You could not make this stuff up.
The receptionist finally went back inside and the kids went downstairs and back up the correct stairs and when we were finally in the room I explained what was happening. I almost had the youngest under control when my partner flipped out and demanded, in front of the kids, I go tell the receptionist what was going on. Perhaps I could have negotiated before I'd paid -- she wouldn't want the room to go unoccupied -- but at this point she could have turfed us out and kept the money, so I wasn't going to do that. After a few minutes of heated arguing -- again in front of the kids -- I went out. The two older kids, who inherited their level of honesty from their father, went with me. The youngest was hiding under the bed.
Needless to say, we did not go out to dinner that night as planned. Instead we invited the kids to pick over what was left from the picnic lunch we'd brought on the train. I'd picked up some milk so I think one of the kids had cereal. It was an unceremonious start to the holiday.
The next day, after a good night's sleep, everyone was a bit calmer. We had breakfast in the room (it had a kitchenette) then we all went out the back entrance and walked into town. After a bit of shopping, we checked out every cafe on the high street, but being a coastal town founded on seafood, finding something vegetarian and gluten free proved elusive, which is how we ended up in a sushi restaurant. The little old Japanese lady was hand-rolling to order, and it turned out to be the best sushi I'd had in New Zealand.
We then walked back to the train station, which is where the whale watch tour departed from, but they were cancelling trips because of rough seas, including ours. The kids were gutted, but I remembered the helicopters and walked over to see if they had any spaces. It was twice as much as the boat, but my partner and I didn't think we could stomach a helicopter ride anyway, so we just booked the kids. The helicopter people then told us they were only tracking one sperm whale, that they tend to dive for about 45 minutes, that the helicopter ride was only 40 minutes long, and there were no refunds.
Forty-five minutes later, after a "safety briefing" that literally featured plastic models of whales and a giant squid, they boarded the helicopter and flew off into the distance. We asked the folks who had just gotten off the helicopter how it was, and they told us they hadn't seen a thing. We were gutted.
Thankfully, the kids not only saw the sperm whale, but watched him dive as well. (After floating on the surface for 15 minutes, he arches his back and goes under, then comes up one last time to expel any air [so his lungs don't explode in the depths] and dives at a steep angle, which is when you see the famous "whale tail.") They also saw a massive nursery pod of dolphins and a bunch of fur seals. I'd given them my SLR and they'd taken so many photos, they'd filled up my memory card, which is something I'd never done in ten years!
We went back to the hotel and celebrated by making nachos in the microwave for dinner. (I should note that neither my partner nor I have owned a microwave in the past thirty years, so we aren't very experienced with it and the nachos were...interesting.) We packed our bags so we'd be ready to check out early, as we had a big day the next day.
I should probably note, to avoid any pretence of a "Facebook family," that the children were absolute snots. If we weren't actively buying them something, they were being rude and obnoxious. Of course, it wasn't all three of them all the time, but at least one or two were being unpleasant at any given point. I kind of expect that from teenagers but my partner takes it very personally, and so there was a good deal of yelling, which is when I have to get involved to let the kids know, in no uncertain terms, that mom can yell at them all she wants and they are not to yell back. I don't like being the big bad bear -- it does affect my nerves -- but it's an unavoidable part of parenting teenagers, especially on holiday. Everyone was getting a bit frayed, and it was only day two of nine.
The next day the shuttle arrived at 7:45am. I'd already secreted all the luggage around the back and the kids had all snuck out around the back, which turned out to be for nothing because reception didn't open until 8:30am! The shuttle took us back to the train station to stash our luggage for the day, and then dropped us off at Kaikoura Kayaks, which was going to take us on a "half-day expedition" to see fur seals. However, that half day turned out to be mostly waiting for people to show up, driving to the drop-off point, going through safety and rowing demonstration, getting dressed and launching the kayaks. In the end we had about an hour on the water, but that was more than enough for my old bones.
The weather was perfect but, not knowing any better, I'd opted for a waterproof parka along with the neoprene skirt and life vest. After 20 minutes I was overheating, and it was a lot of work paddling around the surf. Thankfully, once we got to the seal community we could relax for a bit, and watching the seals (actually a type of sea lion) in its native habitat was exhilirating. Coming back was when we found out how the earthquake had affected the area: It was high tide at the time, and the guide said that was the equivalent of low tide before the earthquake. That is, the sea bed had risen so much that features that used to be submerged all the time were now only submerged at high tide! Of course the irony is that since it was high tide at that time, it looked the same as before the earthquake...
We finished at noon, had a bite to eat, my son said he was going skateboarding at a little skate park and the daughters said they were going shopping. This was good because they'd been snots again all morning and my partner was plotting how to leave them in Kaikoura while we continued the holiday. We went to the local ice cream shop (there's always a local) and tried to relax. Within five minutes, we were getting barraged with text messages: Our son had spreained his ankle and the girls wanted our credit card details. We ignored them.
(To be fair, if our son had actually sprained his ankle, he would have called us, not sent a text; he just doesn't know the difference between twisting and spraining. We caught up with him later and he was fine.)
The train was due at 5:20 but at 3:30 I got a text it was running 40 minutes late. Unfortunately we'd run out of things to explore so we all ended up at the train station, on our phones, waiting for two hours. It had been a very warm day, and coming from Wellington we weren't used to the heat, so we were all feeling a bit miserable. We had free wifi and I was able to have a video call with my niece, which is the first time I've "seen" them since our visit 18 months ago. Of course, just as we were talking, the train pulled in.
Friday, January 4, 2019
Thursday, January 3, 2019
The $5,000 vacation
It's no secret that money has been tight. In the four years I've been in New Zealand, I haven't worked for two of them, and the kids' father hasn't paid child support in over a year. (He owes almost $30,000* but the IRD -- the NZ equivalent of the IRS -- won't do anything to help collect it.)
So holidays have generally involved camping, and even then not going very far. Last year we pitched a tent in Paekakariki, about a half-hour drive from our house. Two years ago, we spent three days on Somes Island, a 15-minute ferry ride away. Three years ago we took the ferry to the South Island and stayed at a friend's bach (pronounced "batch," it is a small holiday house) at the top of the south island. Four years ago, the kids did something with their dad, and we didn't do anything at all.
This year was our last opportunity for a proper family holiday before the eldest goes to Israel for a gap-year programme. In addition, where my partner and I work both shut down over the holidays, forcing us to take some of our annual leave over the period. (Yes, this is legal in New Zealand.) So we were both on holiday for two weeks, between December 22 and January 6, whether we liked it or not. Staying at home, or taking the kids camping right before summer camp, both seemed like a waste of time.
I sharpened my pencil and decided we could afford about $5,000. (Mind you, this is on top of paying $15,000 for the gap year programme, $5,500 for the middle child to go on a school trip to France, and $8600 for the youngest to get braces, which their dad has already said he's not going to contribute anything towards.) We looked at an island resort -- Fiji, Bali, Samoa -- but they started around $7,000 for five people for a week.
I still haven't seen most of New Zealand, so we talked about a driving vacation which would have been affordable, but I hate driving so it wouldn't have been a holiday for me. (Plus we still had memories from last year, when we drove from Wellington to Auckland to visit the kids at summer camp, and I developed shingles in my eye and was in excruciating pain the whole time and ended up being hospitalised for four days...)
In the end, we decided to visit Christchurch, the third largest city in New Zealand and the biggest in the South Island. In February 2011. a 6.3 earthquake hit Christchurch, causing 185 casualties and destroying hundreds of buildings. (This was actually an aftershock of a 7.1 earthquake from September 2010, but that was located outside the city and not nearly as destructive.) The photos are absolutely devastating, but over the past seven years the government had spent hundreds of millions of dollars to help rebuild. The kids had never been and my partner hadn't been since the earthquake, so we were all keen to see it.
One thing working in our favour is that the kids always go to summer camp in Auckland. To encourage participation from non-Aucklanders, the camp charges a set price for everyone and then pays for the return flights. This year the camp was starting on 4 January, so we got them to pay for the kids to fly from Christchurch instead of Wellington. Of course this had a logistical impact, as the kids now had to pack for 19 days instead of ten!
In November 2016, a 7.8 earthquake struck Kaikoura, about 100 miles north of Christchurch. It is a rural town, so there were only two casualties, but the seabed rose between 3 and 7 feet, and the infrastructure damage was extreme. There were more than 50 landslips along Highway 1, and the town was completely cut off for over a month. The train tracks looked more like a roller coaster ride, and and it took over a year to get freight trains moving, and two years before it was deemed safe for passenger trains. Of course I didn't realise any of this until I was researching this trip, and stumbled upon the Coastal Pacific train re-opening in December. For roughly the same price as flying to Christchurch, we could take the ferry and the train! (And we could stopover in Kaikoura, which was a tourist destination in its own right.)
So the plan was set. The eldest, who'd finally started a job in November, gave notice at the beginning of December. I spent a ridiculous amount of time researching and booking hotels, activities, shuttles, car rentals and even a family-friendly Irish ceili (dance) for New Year's eve. When I was all finished, I tallied up my expenses and found it came to *almost exactly* $5,000! I was quite proud of myself, until my partner pointed out I'd forgotten to feed the kids...
* Based on his past income, the IRD assessed him at NZ $3,058 per month -- about $680 USD per child per month -- which is already on the low side, but he then claimed that he was unemployed and the IRD reduced his child support to $74/month. That's USD $17 per child per month!! Can you imagine telling your bank you lost your job and them reducing your mortgage to $74/month? Of course not, but the IRD sees child support as completely discretionary, and thinks we should be grateful for any money he deigns to give us. Had they maintained the $3,058/month payment, he would owe $96,000, but it's a moot point because he still wouldn't pay and they still wouldn't care.
So holidays have generally involved camping, and even then not going very far. Last year we pitched a tent in Paekakariki, about a half-hour drive from our house. Two years ago, we spent three days on Somes Island, a 15-minute ferry ride away. Three years ago we took the ferry to the South Island and stayed at a friend's bach (pronounced "batch," it is a small holiday house) at the top of the south island. Four years ago, the kids did something with their dad, and we didn't do anything at all.
This year was our last opportunity for a proper family holiday before the eldest goes to Israel for a gap-year programme. In addition, where my partner and I work both shut down over the holidays, forcing us to take some of our annual leave over the period. (Yes, this is legal in New Zealand.) So we were both on holiday for two weeks, between December 22 and January 6, whether we liked it or not. Staying at home, or taking the kids camping right before summer camp, both seemed like a waste of time.
I sharpened my pencil and decided we could afford about $5,000. (Mind you, this is on top of paying $15,000 for the gap year programme, $5,500 for the middle child to go on a school trip to France, and $8600 for the youngest to get braces, which their dad has already said he's not going to contribute anything towards.) We looked at an island resort -- Fiji, Bali, Samoa -- but they started around $7,000 for five people for a week.
I still haven't seen most of New Zealand, so we talked about a driving vacation which would have been affordable, but I hate driving so it wouldn't have been a holiday for me. (Plus we still had memories from last year, when we drove from Wellington to Auckland to visit the kids at summer camp, and I developed shingles in my eye and was in excruciating pain the whole time and ended up being hospitalised for four days...)
In the end, we decided to visit Christchurch, the third largest city in New Zealand and the biggest in the South Island. In February 2011. a 6.3 earthquake hit Christchurch, causing 185 casualties and destroying hundreds of buildings. (This was actually an aftershock of a 7.1 earthquake from September 2010, but that was located outside the city and not nearly as destructive.) The photos are absolutely devastating, but over the past seven years the government had spent hundreds of millions of dollars to help rebuild. The kids had never been and my partner hadn't been since the earthquake, so we were all keen to see it.
One thing working in our favour is that the kids always go to summer camp in Auckland. To encourage participation from non-Aucklanders, the camp charges a set price for everyone and then pays for the return flights. This year the camp was starting on 4 January, so we got them to pay for the kids to fly from Christchurch instead of Wellington. Of course this had a logistical impact, as the kids now had to pack for 19 days instead of ten!
In November 2016, a 7.8 earthquake struck Kaikoura, about 100 miles north of Christchurch. It is a rural town, so there were only two casualties, but the seabed rose between 3 and 7 feet, and the infrastructure damage was extreme. There were more than 50 landslips along Highway 1, and the town was completely cut off for over a month. The train tracks looked more like a roller coaster ride, and and it took over a year to get freight trains moving, and two years before it was deemed safe for passenger trains. Of course I didn't realise any of this until I was researching this trip, and stumbled upon the Coastal Pacific train re-opening in December. For roughly the same price as flying to Christchurch, we could take the ferry and the train! (And we could stopover in Kaikoura, which was a tourist destination in its own right.)
So the plan was set. The eldest, who'd finally started a job in November, gave notice at the beginning of December. I spent a ridiculous amount of time researching and booking hotels, activities, shuttles, car rentals and even a family-friendly Irish ceili (dance) for New Year's eve. When I was all finished, I tallied up my expenses and found it came to *almost exactly* $5,000! I was quite proud of myself, until my partner pointed out I'd forgotten to feed the kids...
* Based on his past income, the IRD assessed him at NZ $3,058 per month -- about $680 USD per child per month -- which is already on the low side, but he then claimed that he was unemployed and the IRD reduced his child support to $74/month. That's USD $17 per child per month!! Can you imagine telling your bank you lost your job and them reducing your mortgage to $74/month? Of course not, but the IRD sees child support as completely discretionary, and thinks we should be grateful for any money he deigns to give us. Had they maintained the $3,058/month payment, he would owe $96,000, but it's a moot point because he still wouldn't pay and they still wouldn't care.
Tuesday, November 20, 2018
Asking Santa for a Magen David
Funny the things you remember from your childhood that seem perfectly reasonable, until you think about them and realize they're completely insane. I was taking the trash out tonight and noticed my neighbor has a five-pointed star with old-fashioned Christmas bulbs in his window. I had a similar star when I was a kid, which made me think about the circumstances around it.
It must have been December, and I must have been 9 or 10 and starting to question the existence of Santa Claus. I must have been to a friend's bar mitzvah because I'd only been to one bar mitzvah and I can't for the life of me think where else I would have picked up a small, blue, plastic six-pointed star. I really liked that star and carried it everywhere until, probably Christmas Eve, it broke. What I should have done was put it in the trash and forgotten about it. What I did was write a note to Santa asking him, if he was real, to get me another star. And, I added for no reason at all, it should be a big one.
My parents, bless them, should have written back, "get stuffed." Instead -- and although I was completely ignorant at the time, I can now visualize it as if it were a movie -- my dad would have found the note at 9pm after we'd all gone to bed, rushed out into the insanity of last-minute shopping, gone to ten shops before finding a large, five-pointed star that lit up with old-fashioned Christmas bulbs, gotten home at 11pm and, rather than just put it under the tree, he took out his tall, rickety ladder, attached it to the chimney above the basketball hoop, ran an extension cord through the window and then wrote on my note, "Look outside."
I woke up, saw the note, went outside, looked up at the glowing star and...was disappointed it wasn't a six-pointed star. I let my parents know that Santa had failed. (Even at such a tender age, I was a complete shit. Of course, they had no idea how much worse I would get.)
So that's the story. I had that star for another 20 years, long after you could find replacement bulbs. Every Christmas I would hang it up and think of my dad. I think my ex-wife got the star, but maybe it's in my mom's garage; I don't really know. (I think my ex-wife kept all of my baby photos, as well.) Of course, if I'd kept the star I'm not really sure what I would do with it now.
In hindsight, maybe a little goyish boy asking for a Magen David at Christmas was a portent of things to come. Or maybe it really was just insane. The only thing I can say with any certainty is that my parents were saints and that star was a testament to their love.
It must have been December, and I must have been 9 or 10 and starting to question the existence of Santa Claus. I must have been to a friend's bar mitzvah because I'd only been to one bar mitzvah and I can't for the life of me think where else I would have picked up a small, blue, plastic six-pointed star. I really liked that star and carried it everywhere until, probably Christmas Eve, it broke. What I should have done was put it in the trash and forgotten about it. What I did was write a note to Santa asking him, if he was real, to get me another star. And, I added for no reason at all, it should be a big one.
My parents, bless them, should have written back, "get stuffed." Instead -- and although I was completely ignorant at the time, I can now visualize it as if it were a movie -- my dad would have found the note at 9pm after we'd all gone to bed, rushed out into the insanity of last-minute shopping, gone to ten shops before finding a large, five-pointed star that lit up with old-fashioned Christmas bulbs, gotten home at 11pm and, rather than just put it under the tree, he took out his tall, rickety ladder, attached it to the chimney above the basketball hoop, ran an extension cord through the window and then wrote on my note, "Look outside."
I woke up, saw the note, went outside, looked up at the glowing star and...was disappointed it wasn't a six-pointed star. I let my parents know that Santa had failed. (Even at such a tender age, I was a complete shit. Of course, they had no idea how much worse I would get.)
So that's the story. I had that star for another 20 years, long after you could find replacement bulbs. Every Christmas I would hang it up and think of my dad. I think my ex-wife got the star, but maybe it's in my mom's garage; I don't really know. (I think my ex-wife kept all of my baby photos, as well.) Of course, if I'd kept the star I'm not really sure what I would do with it now.
In hindsight, maybe a little goyish boy asking for a Magen David at Christmas was a portent of things to come. Or maybe it really was just insane. The only thing I can say with any certainty is that my parents were saints and that star was a testament to their love.
Sunday, October 21, 2018
Finding God
I may have mentioned before, when I told my mother I was converting to Judaism, I was surprised she was so enthusiastic. I asked her why and she said, "I'm just happy you've found God."
Except, I hadn't. In fact, I embraced Judaism - reform Judaism, to be specific - because it challenge me to find my own definition of God. At the Beit Din, the conversion Court, I told the rabbis, "I believe there are a lot of things that we don't understand, and possibly never will understand. If people choose to call that God, I'm okay with that."
At a Limmud event, I heard a debate about which were more important, beliefs or actions. One argued that if you believed in God, then you would want to act according to his (hers?) laws. The other argued that first you had to perform the acts, and only then could you understand enough to believe.
It seemed pretty chicken-and-egg, and irrelevant to me. I even gave a talk at a local Limmud event about converting to Judaism whilst remaining an atheist. Nobody was particularly bothered.
For seven years now, I've been doing the acts: I attend synagogue, I light the candles, I make the prayers. I prefer saying the prayers in Hebrew because, even if I understand the words, I know I'm performing a ritual, not acknowledging an invisible God.
Except, I'm not. I am grateful to an unseeing hand that has brought me to this time and place, given me a loving family, and enriched my world immeasurably. Had I not performed the acts, I don't know where I'd be, but I cannot imagine it could be better than this.
So who do I direct this gratitude towards? The universe? Karma? I lack the words, the subtlety to express myself. If I say I'm grateful to God, people may have a different understanding of God, but they understand exactly what emotion I'm trying to convey. And that's the point of communication, isn't it?
So, I've realised why my mom was so enthusiastic when I told her I was converting to Judaism. Maybe she knew I hadn't found her God, but she knew I was engaging with something bigger than myself, and by converting I was committing myself to a path--that it wasn't just an intellectual exercise--and that if I performed the acts, I would eventually believe.
Last week I watched all three kids on the bima. When I'd first met them, the eldest was preparing for her bat mitzvah; now the youngest was celebrating the first anniversary of his bar mitzvah. I marvelled at how they had all changed in five short years, and I thanked God for letting me be part of their lives.
And as they came off the bima and took their seats, each one hugged me and told me they loved me, and I know that was God answering back.
Wednesday, October 10, 2018
Deedee
Today would have been my friend's 84th birthday. She died three years ago, and I didn't even mention it in my blog. To be fair, I had literally just arrived in New Zealand and was dealing with my pop-up family, but it is high time I made up for it.
So that's the story of my oldest and longest friend, who watched me grow up and helped me pull my head out of my ass. She was around through three failed relationships, and passed away just as I started my next one. She knew me when I was flat broke, when I was flush with cash, and when I was flat broke again. She never made any demands on me; she always accepted me as-is, where-is. If I treated her to something, she was always extremely grateful. She didn't have a mean bone in her body, and if it hadn't been for her sons she would have led a happy and fulfilling life. She taught me what unconditional love looked like, and she taught me that you can't save other people.
I met Deedee when I was 14 and she was 50 Of course, I didn't know how old she was at the time; I only found out later that she had attended the same high school as my father, and then I found out she was one year ahead of him because he was in her yearbook. Actually, to go right back to the beginning, when we first met I didn't even know she was a woman.
Christmas 1982, my parents bought us a brand-new Atari 1200XL computer with all the peripherals. Why they did this is still beyond me: they didn't have any money, none of our friends had a home computer and there was no guarantee we'd actually use it. Sure, we had an Atari 2600 game console, so perhaps they thought it would play better games? (It didn't.)
The peripherals consisted of a floppy disk drive (considered optional even though the system didn't have a hard drive!), a dot-matrix printer and this crazy thing:
My brother and I literally had no idea what it was for, but we discovered that if you connected it to the computer and whistled into one of the rubber cups, random characters would appear on the screen. I'm embarrassed to say, but this kept us entertained for *weeks* before I finally read the manual to discover it was a "300 baud acoustic-coupled modem." "Acoustic coupled" meant you dialed a phone number and then stuck the handset into those rubber cups!
"Baud" meant bits per second, and one character was 8 bits, so 300 baud meant it could download 2,250 characters per minute. A screen held 2000 characters, so it took nearly a minute to update one page (and there were no graphics). Someone actually posted a YouTube video showing how painful this was:
Of course, this only worked if you had someone to call, and it was another 6 months before the movie "War Games" came out to show that you could use one of these to break into highly secured government networks and override the launch codes. (It was also 16 years before Google was invented.) I did dial into Compuserve but it wasn't a local call, and when my parents got the next phone bill they put a stop to that.
Somehow--and I have no memory how--I did find out about some local bulletin board systems ("BBS" as we called them) and dialed in. I discovered people posting messages on all sorts of topics, and I was immediately hooked. If my parents thought I'd use the computer to play better games, they must have been sorely disappointed that I was using it to read text scrolling very slowly across the screen. And I spent every free moment doing it.
One particular bulletin board had a higher level of discourse than others, and I lurked in the background for a month or so before I couldn't contain myself and I just started typing. The messages had a character limit and I ended up writing 27 messages in a row. 35 years later, it's still cringe-worthy, and it immediately got me banned from the BBS.
Of course, I didn't realise that was a thing; I thought it was some sort of technical error, but since I couldn't even log in to tell the operator there was a problem (email as we know it hadn't been invented yet!) I was a bit stuck. However, there was one person on that BBS that I'd seen on another BBS, so I left them a message on the second BBS. They had actually read my 27-message screed and thought there was a hint of intelligence somewhere in there, so they intervened on my behalf and I got reinstated with a warning not to do that again.
Needless to say, that person turned out to be Deedee. BBSes often organised social activities so I eventually met her, and I found out she lived not far from my school so I would occasionally walk over to her house after school. She was a single mom with three kids in their 20s; two still lived at home and were heavily into drugs. She had developed rheumatoid arthritis in her 30s and was badly crippled; she could walk with crutches but sitting was a chore (she had to literally throw herself backwards into a chair) and her fingers were so curled it was hard to believe she could type. (In fact, she'd gotten a computer because she didn't have the strength for a manual typewriter.) She had a gang of misfit friends, and somehow a 14-year-old just fitted in. Perhaps it was just a more innocent time, but nobody seemed to question our unlikely friendship except my mother, who seemed to think it was more Harold and Maude.
In hindsight, I can't really blame my mom; it was weird, but it worked. We both loved computers, 60s rock, Arby's, sci-fi, plus she had a car. We were best friends and completely inseparable for two years, and then she moved in with us.
Now, before you rush to judgment, I mentioned two of her kids were druggies, and the eldest went on a cocaine bender and started destroying her house. I did what any friend would do: I told my dad. My dad had a heart beyond reckoning, and I remember to this day he never hesitated: He drove to her house, picked her up and gave her the pull-out sofa for as long as she needed it. It turned out she needed it for three years before her son took himself off to Northern California to get clean. My parents handled it with such grace that today I find it awe-inspiring. My mother even helped get her a job with her company, and they carpooled every day.
The irony is that Deedee and I had grown apart. I started dating a woman, and when I was 17 I moved in with her while Deedee was still living with my parents! I still kept in touch but I started working and didn't have time for BBSes. I'd go visit Deedee a couple of times a year, and often it was out of guilt. That's because not long after she'd moved back into her home, her youngest son discovered crack cocaine, and he continued for another 25 years. He stole everything he could to fund his habit, leaving her completely destitute. The only time she had any respite was when he was in jail, but at some point he married a similar piece of trash and moved her into Deedee's house, so even when he was in jail his wife was still there. She refused to throw them out, and eventually all of her friends deserted her because it was an impossible situation. I think I was one of two or three friends that continued to visit.
In hindsight, I can appreciate how afraid she was of getting old, and not being able to take care of herself, and she clung to the belief that her son would take care of her despite all evidence to the contrary. When he wasn't high, he was perfectly fine, but those times were few and far between. The house was in a horrific state, but she wouldn't accept help cleaning it up, as she became a bit of a hoarder. I think everyone needs some degree of control in their lives, and she had precious little so she just kept what she had.
Just before I moved to the UK in 2008, I took Deedee on a road trip to the Grand Canyon, because she'd always wanted to go. It was a crazy, impetuous thing to do, especially with a frail 75 year old, but she loved every minute of it. On the way back I took a sidetrip to Vegas, although that turned out to be a mistake: There was a huge boxing match in town and hotel rates were eye-watering. Between the room, dinner and a show, I think I maxed out my credit card in one day, but she was so happy.
I saw her once in 2010 and again in 2013. That last trip was particularly memorable because I was with my friend Lucy, and knowing me I didn't tell Deedee I was coming. (I always did crap like that to her.) I showed up at her door and was shocked when she answered: She'd tripped and fallen face-first onto the floor--her joints were so bad she couldn't even lift her hands to break her fall--and the bruising had just started fading, leaving her in shades of purple and green. Worse, her dentures had been giving her problems and she couldn't afford to replace them, so she had been eating soft food for the past couple of years and had lost about half her body weight. Her skin hung off her like drapes. I may have been taken aback, but Lucy was in complete shock.
I saw her once in 2010 and again in 2013. That last trip was particularly memorable because I was with my friend Lucy, and knowing me I didn't tell Deedee I was coming. (I always did crap like that to her.) I showed up at her door and was shocked when she answered: She'd tripped and fallen face-first onto the floor--her joints were so bad she couldn't even lift her hands to break her fall--and the bruising had just started fading, leaving her in shades of purple and green. Worse, her dentures had been giving her problems and she couldn't afford to replace them, so she had been eating soft food for the past couple of years and had lost about half her body weight. Her skin hung off her like drapes. I may have been taken aback, but Lucy was in complete shock.
I got Deedee in the car and we drove to the nearest Arby's. She didn't want to get out of the car so we drove to the local mission and parked in the shade by the rose garden, and we reminisced about the last 30 years. I knew I'd changed a lot since I was a snot-nosed 14 year old, but at 80 she seemed exactly the same as when I'd met her. She complained about her son, of course (who was now in his 50s) but I let that go. There was no point in arguing with her anymore; I just listened.
Lucy had gotten out of the car and came back with a perfect red rose for Deedee. (I'm sure you're not supposed to pick them!) We took her home and said goodbye, then drove up north to see my family. That was the last time I saw her. In March 2014 she sent me an email which started with, "Tell Lucy that her beautiful rosebud lasted a whole week and bloomed all the way out to a full rose." She complained about her son, who had moved some junkies into her garage, and one of the wild cats was about to have a litter, so she was trying to sort homes for them. Her last words were, "Hope everything is going well for you. Love you much." I sent her a couple of emails but never got a response.
In August 2014, on the day I was flying to New Zealand, I got an email from her son letting me know she'd had an aneurysm and was in a medically-induced coma. She'd just turned 81, which was longer than any of us thought she'd make it (rheumatoid arthritis tends to shorten the lifespan by 10 to 15 years). A few weeks later her son asked me for my address, because Deedee had asked to be cremated and her ashes split between her three best friends. (I didn't honestly expect her son to follow through, and I never received her ashes; I have no idea what happened to them.)
In August 2014, on the day I was flying to New Zealand, I got an email from her son letting me know she'd had an aneurysm and was in a medically-induced coma. She'd just turned 81, which was longer than any of us thought she'd make it (rheumatoid arthritis tends to shorten the lifespan by 10 to 15 years). A few weeks later her son asked me for my address, because Deedee had asked to be cremated and her ashes split between her three best friends. (I didn't honestly expect her son to follow through, and I never received her ashes; I have no idea what happened to them.)
In August we used to watch the Perseid meteor shower, and in March we'd go see the poppies, I have her to thank for introducing me to the Moody Blues, the Limeliters and Arby's Jamocha shakes. I hope Deedee found peace, and I hope she knows that I'll always remember her fondly, and that I wish I'd been a better friend over all those years.
P.S. That Atari computer was the most used gift ever, and I credit it with my entire career. I held onto it long after I'd switched to PCs, but when I was 26 or 27 I had a general clean out, and it went in the trash along with the floppy disk drive and dot matrix printer. I'd long since upgraded the 300 baud acoustic-coupled modem to a 1200 baud direct-connect modem, then 2400 baud, then 9600 baud, then a staggering 14.4 kbps, then 33.6 kbps, and finally a 56kbps modem (even though that was only a theoretical maximum that could never be achieved in the real-world). Today my VDSL modem gets 42Mbps download, which is 140,000 times faster than my original modem. Sadly, there's no way to whistle into it to get random characters to appear.
Monday, October 8, 2018
Camping
It's birthday season -- two of the kids have birthdays in October, right around school holidays -- and the middle child, who is turning 16, wanted to go camping for her birthday. With boys.
Now, frankly, I'm not sure she'd know what to do with a boy. She goes to an all-girls school and all her male friends are "nice Jewish boys." The closest she has ever come to having a boyfriend was when she was 12 she announced on Monday she was dating a boy, and on Wednesday announced they had broken up. She said she couldn't understand why people on TV make such a fuss about it.
So we were ok with the camping and with the boys -- we would still chaperone, of course -- so she went and told all her friends we were going camping on October 6. Two of her friends in Auckland booked flights and all of her friends in Wellington told her they couldn't come that weekend.
So somehow the plan got changed that we would go camping with her Auckland friends this weekend and her Wellington friends in two weeks time. In hindsight we should have just let her go with her friends, but instead we told the other two kids they could invite a friend. We ended up with eight kids, four tents, and making half the kids take the train to the campsite while we transported the luggage.
I should also note that on Friday night, when we should have been getting prepared, we hosted a dinner party. To be fair, it had been on the books since before the camping trip, but again in hindsight we should have cancelled it as the house was a disaster area of tents, sleeping bags, pillows, etc. I also got stuck at work finishing a report so I arrived *after* the guests.
I'd like to say when they left, we got busy loading the car, but in reality we just had an argument over something silly, and I went to bed. It didn't really matter much because we couldn't load the car -- we needed to transport five kids to synagogue on Saturday morning. It was the anniversary of the middle child's bat mitzvah, and she not only wanted to read from the Torah, but to also be the cantor that day. (She did it beautifully.) Her mom led the service and I gave the drasha (sermon) so it was a real family affair.
I should note that at her bat mitzvah three years ago, she'd given the drasha and I still had a copy, so I read it -- word for word. Expressing all my hopes and aspirations for starting high school in 2016, the rest of the congregation were a bit confused, especially because the cantor was laughing her head off.
So we didn't even start loading the car until 1pm in the afternoon. Gratefully, the weather couldn't have been nicer, the campsite was only 45 minutes away and all the kids pitched in, so by 4pm we were set up and enjoying a (very) late lunch. A friend who lived nearby came over, and in the evening I dropped him at home and picked up ten pizzas from Domino's, so everyone was happy.
The campsite had strict rules to vacate by 11am but we weren't even out of our tents at 10am. It was overcast and cool and the kids were whining about going home, so I was getting pretty annoyed. However, the sun finally burned off the haze and it turned into a glorious beach day, and the campsite was only 100 yards from the beach. The kids made pancakes and packed up the tents (somewhat grudgingly) and we finally left the campground at about 1pm, parked the car on the street and parked ourselves on a picnic blanket for the next two hours.
The eldest child was supposed to be in Auckland for two back-to-back seminars, one on leadership and the other on her gap-year program in Israel. For some reason she decided not to go to the first one, and so was going to fly on Monday to attend the second one. We pointed out we were working on Monday and she'd have to take the bus to the airport. Now, it's 8 miles from our house to the airport and there's a bus that runs practically the entire way (it's about ten minutes of walking) so this wasn't some fantastic hardship. She contacted the organisers and got them to put her on a Sunday flight instead.
So at 3pm we had to leave the gorgeous beach, drive an hour to the airport, quickly drop the luggage on our front porch, drop off two of the kids, drive 45 minutes back to the campsite to pick up the remaining kids, and come home. I remember my dad doing such crazy things when I was a child and I thought about the circle of life, and how some things never change. I had a lot of time to think over those three hours.
Finally we were home, exhausted, with four children who were badly sunburned because they didn't have the sense to re-apply sunscreen every two hours. (New Zealand has the highest rates of skin cancer in the world so kids are taught from preschool about applying sunscreen, and they still don't listen.) They'd also bought into the myth that apple cider vinegar cures everything, including sunburn, so the middle child took a bottle up to her room to apply it. To her credit, she did have the sense to think pouring apple cider vinegar onto a washcloth in her room might be a bad idea; however, her solution was to open a window and pour apple cider vinegar onto a washcloth outside. She dropped the bottle, which fell two stories and smashed on the front porch where all of the camping gear was still sitting.
So now the gear is still sitting on the front porch, waiting for the smell of apple cider vinegar to dissipate. Hopefully it will be gone by the time we next take the kids camping, in two weeks...
Wednesday, October 3, 2018
Chaos Monkey
This is hilarious, had to share: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Monkey
Every company pays lip service to the idea of "resiliency" - that is, the ability to carry on business-as-usual in spite of technical issues - and vast amounts of time and money are spent setting up "solutions" which are only ever tested when something bad does happen, and then rarely work as expected. Netflix decided to turn this on its head and in 2011 created "Chaos Monkey," a tool that would, at a random time, disable a random server, just to see what would happen. As someone described it, "Imagine a monkey entering a data center and randomly destroying devices. The challenge for IT managers is to design the information system they are responsible for so that it can work despite these monkeys, which no one ever knows when they arrive and what they will do."
Every company pays lip service to the idea of "resiliency" - that is, the ability to carry on business-as-usual in spite of technical issues - and vast amounts of time and money are spent setting up "solutions" which are only ever tested when something bad does happen, and then rarely work as expected. Netflix decided to turn this on its head and in 2011 created "Chaos Monkey," a tool that would, at a random time, disable a random server, just to see what would happen. As someone described it, "Imagine a monkey entering a data center and randomly destroying devices. The challenge for IT managers is to design the information system they are responsible for so that it can work despite these monkeys, which no one ever knows when they arrive and what they will do."
While intentionally shutting down a production server in the middle of the day seems crazy, it's exactly what a resilient system is designed to handle. And of course it's not just a server crashing but network problems, security issues, etc. Netflix eventually built the "Simian army," a collection of chaos monkeys designed to find faults or problems. (My favourite is the "Chaos Gorilla" that shuts down an entire zone!)
That said, most of us don't manage a system like Netflix, don't have a need for constant uptime and don't have the time or resources to "design for failure." But if we don't regularly change our tyres on a sunny day, how can we be expected to change a flat in the middle of the night in the pouring rain? We throw a spare tyre in the boot but then never check it until we need it, and hope it's okay. Having two servers running in two locations doesn't give you "resiliency" as much as it gives you "complexity," "synchronisation issues" and "maintenance headache."
So what are the other options? Today a co-worker proposed a purpose-built emergency system, something I'd never considered before. Rather than complicating and overloading your production system, most of which isn't even required in an emergency, build a parallel system that is just the bare essentials. Since it's a separate system, you can test it easily and control it better. You know exactly what capabilities it supports and it's available at a moment's notice. Think of it as a the nuclear bunker of backup systems.
The only problem is business mindset, because by defining an emergency system the business has to decide, "What is important?" which is one they never like to answer. In addition, the business has to spend money to create a system that they never plan to use, as opposed to hiding the cost of "resiliency" in a new system. And of course not every failure constitutes an emergency, so if one server fails and a system goes down you wouldn't invoke your emergency procedures, but you will lament that particular system was not "resilient."
Of course, there's no one-size-fits-all solution, which is what keeps me employed.
Wednesday, August 15, 2018
The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
Today was one of those days, where you regret getting out of bed and every time you think it can't get any worse, it does. The only thing good about today was reaching the end, and knowing tomorrow has to be better.
It started, of course, looking like a pretty good day. That's how they get you. If you were expecting a bad day, it would just confirm your worries, but by teasing you with a glimmer of hope, it can crush you completely. That glimmer was that I had a fairly light day -- normally I'm in meetings five hours of the day, and then trying to pack eight hours of work into what remains. Today I only had two meetings -- one at 10:30am and one at 1:30pm. I had scheduled a dentist appointment in the morning and was meeting my partner and a friend for lunch at noon. I even thought I might be home on time for once.
My bike was in the shop so I had the car; thankfully my partner didn't need it that day. The dentist appointment ran late, but I didn't have any cavities, so I was happy right until I got back to the car, when I saw three messages on my phone:
1. A meeting with senior leadership had been scheduled for today at 9am. It was now 9:20am.
2. My partner, it turned out, needed the car to get to a school meeting at 2:30pm. (The child in question had sworn it was on Thursday, but thankfully my partner checked and it was today.)
3. The bike shop sent a text saying the bike was ready.
At this point, I should have driven straight to work to salvage what was left of the meeting. It turned out the meeting invite was accidentally sent to my co-worker. Yesterday at 4pm he realised it was for me and so forwarded it without telling me I had to be there at 9am, and of course I didn't check my email after 4pm so I had no idea.
However, I made the (unwise) decision to go pick up my bike instead. My logic was this: Parking around the office is a nightmare, so by the time I got in I would have missed most of the meeting, and then I would have still had to sort out the car for the afternoon. Better to cut my losses and cycle in.
I got to the bike shop to find my bike on the rack, being worked on. I said I'd gotten a text saying it was finished and the tech told me he'd lost one of the nuts so he'd jimmied something together, but he just found the nut so he was putting it back on. That was slightly disconcerting, since the nut in question held on the derailleur, and I wondered if he'd planned on telling me about his makeshift repair, but I decided it wasn't worth making a fuss about it and waiting for him to finish. He took ten minutes.
Now it was closing on 10am and I was getting worried I'd be late for my 10:30 meeting as well! I then made the (unwise) decision to drive in after all, and pray to the parking gods to have mercy on me. Except the new car doesn't have a bicycle rack and the bicycle takes up the entire back seat, so I couldn't leave it in. I drove home, left it in the hallway (I could have just as easily put it in the garage) and raced off to work. The parking gods were smiling, but at me rather than on me, In fact, they were practically crying with laughter. After driving around for 10 minutes I ended up parking 15 minutes from work, in a 2-hour zone. (Cycling would have taken less than 20 minutes.) And it started to rain. I was in a suit with no raincoat or umbrella.
I arrived for the 10:30 meeting panting, wet and in agony because Sunday I'd just bought a brand new pair of leather work shoes, and today was my first day wearing them. In the shop they'd been really comfortable, but today they were rubbing me in all the wrong places. Of course, having walked on the pavement for 15 minutes, they are now mine to keep. (Hopefully I'll break them in eventually.)
After getting my knuckles rapped for missing the 9am meeting, the rest of the meeting went fine, but only because my boss had forgotten about the three things he assigned me two weeks ago which I still haven't finished. (See "5 hours of meetings per day," above.) I got out of that meeting and had half an hour to respond to my emails before running off to meet my partner and friend for lunch.
We were meeting at my partner's work, which is only a ten minute walk from my work, but I had to move the car before the 2 hour window expired, and it was in the opposite direction. I texted my friend and partner to start lunch without me. Of course, I tried to move the car closer to my wife's work, but again the parking gods were pissing themselves with laughter, and after 15 minutes of circling I ended up parking even further away than where I started. I walked to our designated rendezvous point, texting my partner and wondering why she wasn't texting me back. It turned out she'd gotten stuck in a meeting, so our friend had just been wandering around for 20 minutes looking for either of us!!
We finally met up, and my partner joined us a few minutes later, but by then our friend had to leave, and I had to get back for my 1pm meeting. We tried to get some food but both cafes had a long queue so I gave my partner the car keys, took her bike and left without eating. As soon as I started cycling, it started raining again.
The 1pm meeting was very frustrating because it was with a user who believed the IT department was only there to make her job easier. If you are still under such illusions, let me tell you: The IT department is there to make your job go away, period. Last week I was in a meeting with a different group who were arguing that spending $30,000 on a new system would be cost-effective because it would save their team 10 hours per month in manually preparing reports. I first pointed out that even by their calculations, it would take 2.5 years to see a return on the investment, and then I pointed out that unless someone was being fired, there was no actual cost savings. They didn't get it.
So this user had the same attitude: I don't want to look in two systems for this information, so copy all the data from one system into the other system, and then keep it in sync. I politely pointed out three times that she had no business case to justify this, but she was firmly of the opinion that I was just there to do whatever she asked. Thankfully, after the meeting I had a good idea: I sent a message to senior management pointing out that they wanted this system right away, but if I did what she asked it would delay implementation by at least three months, so we should put that into "phase 2." They immediately agreed, and I'll be sure to kill any "phase 2."
That high lasted all of 5 minutes, when my boss decided to share his vision of the future. He passed me a sheaf of documents which he'd been quietly running past the CEO, and he felt the seeds were starting to take root. Unfortunately, I looked at the papers and realised it was a stupid idea.
Trying to be as polite as possible, I pointed out he was shutting the barn door after the horse had bolted. His plan to create a "data czar" was fine, but about 15 years too late. Data was already replicated and duplicated across the enterprise, and it was tied directly to the applications, so you couldn't just magically declare the data was "controlled." First, you need to physically put something between the app and the data, then you can start to claw back the data. I'd already started to put plans together to do just that, but it was at least a two year project, and there was no point in brining someone on board before then.
My co-worker also pointed out that he'd had a data architect, whom nobody liked so he got rid of him earlier this year. However, instead of firing him, he'd made him redundant, and under NZ law if you make someone redundant you can't create a similar position for at least a year! (I did not know that.) On top of that, there is already a team in charge of "data services" so this new role would be a direct challenge to them. So this plan was just a disaster waiting to happen. Of course he didn't listen to us.
When confronted with ignorance, I always turn to pictures. The aforementioned data architect had tried to make some system flow diagrams, but he'd managed to make them so overly complex that they were completely useless, and I had to start from scratch. I drew up the "current environment" and the "future state" and just capturing the number of systems and data feeds I was aware of, it took six hours. (It also highlighted how little I still know of all the systems and data feeds.)
It was now 11pm, and I still had to bike home, in the dark, wearing a suit and uncomfortable shoes, without a jacket. (Did I mention it's winter in New Zealand?) I texted my partner hoping she'd take mercy, but she'd already gone to bed, I normally wear a hi-vis vest but of course I didn't have that, either, but someone had left a bright green towel hanging outside, so I wrapped it around my shoulders. I'm very grateful I did that because as soon as I struck out, it started raining. Then it started pouring. Then it got very windy.
I was soaked like a rat. My glasses were covered in raindrops and I couldn't see a thing. The towel miraculously stayed on even in the blowing wind. (I had visions of it flying off and landing in a puddle, but because it was someone else's towel I would have had to stop and get it and carry it home!) Thankfully there were very few cars out, but surprisingly there were several people. I'm sure they will all be telling stories tomorrow about the guy in a suit with a green cape cycling in the rain at 11pm the night before.
I was so grateful when I got home, but it was clear I was the only one who felt that way: The porch light was turned off, the table was cleared except for my dinner dishes, and the remnants of dinner were sitting, ice cold, on the countertop. It was quite depressing. I left my partner's bike in the hallway (it would have been just as easy for me to put in the garage as well) so the kids will have fun maneuvering around two bikes tomorrow. I made myself a grilled cheese sandwich and a cup of tea, and then wrote this as a form of catharsis, to let the day go. Of course, it's now 1:30am, I have to be up in six hours, and I get to do it all again tomorrow...
It started, of course, looking like a pretty good day. That's how they get you. If you were expecting a bad day, it would just confirm your worries, but by teasing you with a glimmer of hope, it can crush you completely. That glimmer was that I had a fairly light day -- normally I'm in meetings five hours of the day, and then trying to pack eight hours of work into what remains. Today I only had two meetings -- one at 10:30am and one at 1:30pm. I had scheduled a dentist appointment in the morning and was meeting my partner and a friend for lunch at noon. I even thought I might be home on time for once.
My bike was in the shop so I had the car; thankfully my partner didn't need it that day. The dentist appointment ran late, but I didn't have any cavities, so I was happy right until I got back to the car, when I saw three messages on my phone:
1. A meeting with senior leadership had been scheduled for today at 9am. It was now 9:20am.
2. My partner, it turned out, needed the car to get to a school meeting at 2:30pm. (The child in question had sworn it was on Thursday, but thankfully my partner checked and it was today.)
3. The bike shop sent a text saying the bike was ready.
At this point, I should have driven straight to work to salvage what was left of the meeting. It turned out the meeting invite was accidentally sent to my co-worker. Yesterday at 4pm he realised it was for me and so forwarded it without telling me I had to be there at 9am, and of course I didn't check my email after 4pm so I had no idea.
However, I made the (unwise) decision to go pick up my bike instead. My logic was this: Parking around the office is a nightmare, so by the time I got in I would have missed most of the meeting, and then I would have still had to sort out the car for the afternoon. Better to cut my losses and cycle in.
I got to the bike shop to find my bike on the rack, being worked on. I said I'd gotten a text saying it was finished and the tech told me he'd lost one of the nuts so he'd jimmied something together, but he just found the nut so he was putting it back on. That was slightly disconcerting, since the nut in question held on the derailleur, and I wondered if he'd planned on telling me about his makeshift repair, but I decided it wasn't worth making a fuss about it and waiting for him to finish. He took ten minutes.
Now it was closing on 10am and I was getting worried I'd be late for my 10:30 meeting as well! I then made the (unwise) decision to drive in after all, and pray to the parking gods to have mercy on me. Except the new car doesn't have a bicycle rack and the bicycle takes up the entire back seat, so I couldn't leave it in. I drove home, left it in the hallway (I could have just as easily put it in the garage) and raced off to work. The parking gods were smiling, but at me rather than on me, In fact, they were practically crying with laughter. After driving around for 10 minutes I ended up parking 15 minutes from work, in a 2-hour zone. (Cycling would have taken less than 20 minutes.) And it started to rain. I was in a suit with no raincoat or umbrella.
I arrived for the 10:30 meeting panting, wet and in agony because Sunday I'd just bought a brand new pair of leather work shoes, and today was my first day wearing them. In the shop they'd been really comfortable, but today they were rubbing me in all the wrong places. Of course, having walked on the pavement for 15 minutes, they are now mine to keep. (Hopefully I'll break them in eventually.)
After getting my knuckles rapped for missing the 9am meeting, the rest of the meeting went fine, but only because my boss had forgotten about the three things he assigned me two weeks ago which I still haven't finished. (See "5 hours of meetings per day," above.) I got out of that meeting and had half an hour to respond to my emails before running off to meet my partner and friend for lunch.
We were meeting at my partner's work, which is only a ten minute walk from my work, but I had to move the car before the 2 hour window expired, and it was in the opposite direction. I texted my friend and partner to start lunch without me. Of course, I tried to move the car closer to my wife's work, but again the parking gods were pissing themselves with laughter, and after 15 minutes of circling I ended up parking even further away than where I started. I walked to our designated rendezvous point, texting my partner and wondering why she wasn't texting me back. It turned out she'd gotten stuck in a meeting, so our friend had just been wandering around for 20 minutes looking for either of us!!
We finally met up, and my partner joined us a few minutes later, but by then our friend had to leave, and I had to get back for my 1pm meeting. We tried to get some food but both cafes had a long queue so I gave my partner the car keys, took her bike and left without eating. As soon as I started cycling, it started raining again.
The 1pm meeting was very frustrating because it was with a user who believed the IT department was only there to make her job easier. If you are still under such illusions, let me tell you: The IT department is there to make your job go away, period. Last week I was in a meeting with a different group who were arguing that spending $30,000 on a new system would be cost-effective because it would save their team 10 hours per month in manually preparing reports. I first pointed out that even by their calculations, it would take 2.5 years to see a return on the investment, and then I pointed out that unless someone was being fired, there was no actual cost savings. They didn't get it.
So this user had the same attitude: I don't want to look in two systems for this information, so copy all the data from one system into the other system, and then keep it in sync. I politely pointed out three times that she had no business case to justify this, but she was firmly of the opinion that I was just there to do whatever she asked. Thankfully, after the meeting I had a good idea: I sent a message to senior management pointing out that they wanted this system right away, but if I did what she asked it would delay implementation by at least three months, so we should put that into "phase 2." They immediately agreed, and I'll be sure to kill any "phase 2."
That high lasted all of 5 minutes, when my boss decided to share his vision of the future. He passed me a sheaf of documents which he'd been quietly running past the CEO, and he felt the seeds were starting to take root. Unfortunately, I looked at the papers and realised it was a stupid idea.
Trying to be as polite as possible, I pointed out he was shutting the barn door after the horse had bolted. His plan to create a "data czar" was fine, but about 15 years too late. Data was already replicated and duplicated across the enterprise, and it was tied directly to the applications, so you couldn't just magically declare the data was "controlled." First, you need to physically put something between the app and the data, then you can start to claw back the data. I'd already started to put plans together to do just that, but it was at least a two year project, and there was no point in brining someone on board before then.
My co-worker also pointed out that he'd had a data architect, whom nobody liked so he got rid of him earlier this year. However, instead of firing him, he'd made him redundant, and under NZ law if you make someone redundant you can't create a similar position for at least a year! (I did not know that.) On top of that, there is already a team in charge of "data services" so this new role would be a direct challenge to them. So this plan was just a disaster waiting to happen. Of course he didn't listen to us.
When confronted with ignorance, I always turn to pictures. The aforementioned data architect had tried to make some system flow diagrams, but he'd managed to make them so overly complex that they were completely useless, and I had to start from scratch. I drew up the "current environment" and the "future state" and just capturing the number of systems and data feeds I was aware of, it took six hours. (It also highlighted how little I still know of all the systems and data feeds.)
It was now 11pm, and I still had to bike home, in the dark, wearing a suit and uncomfortable shoes, without a jacket. (Did I mention it's winter in New Zealand?) I texted my partner hoping she'd take mercy, but she'd already gone to bed, I normally wear a hi-vis vest but of course I didn't have that, either, but someone had left a bright green towel hanging outside, so I wrapped it around my shoulders. I'm very grateful I did that because as soon as I struck out, it started raining. Then it started pouring. Then it got very windy.
I was soaked like a rat. My glasses were covered in raindrops and I couldn't see a thing. The towel miraculously stayed on even in the blowing wind. (I had visions of it flying off and landing in a puddle, but because it was someone else's towel I would have had to stop and get it and carry it home!) Thankfully there were very few cars out, but surprisingly there were several people. I'm sure they will all be telling stories tomorrow about the guy in a suit with a green cape cycling in the rain at 11pm the night before.
I was so grateful when I got home, but it was clear I was the only one who felt that way: The porch light was turned off, the table was cleared except for my dinner dishes, and the remnants of dinner were sitting, ice cold, on the countertop. It was quite depressing. I left my partner's bike in the hallway (it would have been just as easy for me to put in the garage as well) so the kids will have fun maneuvering around two bikes tomorrow. I made myself a grilled cheese sandwich and a cup of tea, and then wrote this as a form of catharsis, to let the day go. Of course, it's now 1:30am, I have to be up in six hours, and I get to do it all again tomorrow...
Saturday, August 4, 2018
Parashat Eikev
In today’s portion, Moses continues his speech to the Israelites, reminding them to keep God's commandments when they enter the land of Israel. This year’s triennial begins with Devarim 9.4: “And when the LORD your God has thrust them from your path, say not to yourselves, ‘The LORD has enabled us to possess this land because of our virtues’.” As a rallying cry for battle, it sucks, but as an eternal truth, it’s perfect.
It is human nature to believe that when things go well, it is because of ourselves, and when things go poorly it is because of others. The axiom, “Success has many fathers but failure is an orphan” actually goes back to the 1st century CE, when the Roman Tacitus wrote: “This is an unfair thing about war: victory is claimed by all, failure to one alone.”
However, so much of our success is the result of circumstance, timing, our families, our schools and teachers, the people we know and those who went before us, and a large dose of luck. Thomas Edison said, “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” His first commercial success was in 1870, when he made a stock ticker based on the telegraph. Forty years earlier, Samuel Morse had patented the telegraph, but adoption was hampered by the cost of land rights to run the cables. In 1851, railroads allowed the cables to be run alongside the tracks, so telegraph operators were located at the stations. In 1860, a 13-year-old Edison got a job selling newspapers at the local station. The station agent befriended him and taught him how to operate the telegraph, and he was an operator for 7 years before creating the stock ticker, which earned him $40,000 (about $750,000 US in today’s money) and allowed him to become a full-time inventor. If any one of those hadn’t occurred, we wouldn’t be discussing Edison right now. He should have said genius is one percent inspiration, five percent perspiration and 94 percent happy circumstance, although admittedly that’s not as catchy.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with taking pride in our efforts, accomplishments, children, etc. The problem comes when we believe our success is solely due to our own actions, because we then must also believe other people’s failures are solely due to their actions. If we are successful because of our hard work, then less successful people must be lazy. If we are wealthy because we are careful with money, then poor people shouldn’t be trusted with money. When our children do well at school because we are good parents, then children who don’t do as well must have bad parents.
Rabbi Shira Milgrom writes, “We forget that in the web of the universe, we are all connected. We forget that our successes depend on the successes and sacrifices of countless others, we forget how dependent we are on a larger society, on the planet and its health. We forget our obligations to others—and, we forget that with all this material wealth, we will not be happy or even satisfied without gratitude.”1
Moses was warning us that when we take our success for granted, and assume it is because of our virtues, we cut ourselves off from G-d, our community and the rest of the world. Rabbi Paula Feldstein wrote: “The family into which we are born, the schools we attend, and the communities in which we are raised all play a major role in who we become and how we succeed… We should respond to our prosperity with recognition of the factors that lead to our success and with humility before God.”2
The term ‘humility’ has gotten a bad rap; after all, it has the same root as ‘humiliation,’ from the Latin humus (“soil”). Dictionaries define humility as a low self-regard and sense of unworthiness. When someone said Clement Attlee was a humble man, Winston Churchill said “he has plenty to be humble about.”
However, that is not the original definition. Rabbi Louis Jacobs, founder of the Masorti movement in the UK, wrote, “In the Jewish tradition, humility is among the greatest of the virtues, as its opposite, pride, is among the worst of the vices. Moses, the greatest of men, is described as the most humble: In Numbers 12:3, ‘Now the man Moses was very meek, above all the men that were on the face of the earth.’ In Genesis 18:27, the patriarch Abraham protests to God: ‘Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, who am but dust and ashes.’ Greatness and humility, in the Jewish tradition, are not incompatible.”3
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes, “Humility — true humility — is one of the most expansive and life-enhancing of all virtues. It does not mean undervaluing yourself. It means valuing other people. It signals a certain openness to life's grandeur and the willingness to be surprised, uplifted, by goodness wherever one finds it."4
C.S Lewis wrote, “Humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less.”
So being humble does not mean feeling bad about yourself, or debasing your own efforts and contributions; it only means acknowledging all of the contributors to your success. Isaac Newton wrote, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” Every week, as we recount the stories of our ancestors, we remind ourselves we stand on the shoulders of giants. Humility frees us from judgment and allows us to connect with one another, to lift up others and to recognise our place in the world.
The Talmud states, “The word of God can only be heard in a humble heart.”5
We all know Aesop’s fable, “The Ants & the Grasshopper.” The ants are busy all summer storing grain, while the grasshopper plays his fiddle. Come winter, the grasshopper is begging for food and the ants mock him and turn him away. However, worker ants generally live only a few months, so the grain they were eating in winter was collected and stored by a previous generation.
Every spring, Monarch butterflies migrate 3,000 miles from Mexico to Canada, but they only live 6-8 weeks and it takes 4-5 generations to cross that distance. The ones who left Mexico will never see their destination, but they start the journey anyway. I’m not sure the Pirkei Avot had butterflies in mind when it said, “It is not your responsibility to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it,” but it certainly applies.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been collecting photos for the Temple’s 59th birthday, which is next Sunday. Seeing people I’ve known for a couple of years engaged in Temple life twenty or thirty years ago has been delightful. These are not people who took the Temple for granted, nor believed they alone could support it. They recognised the Temple as an inheritance, and that their hard work was needed to continue it for the next generation. They did not do it for glory or recognition, but out of a sense of responsibility. These are humble people in the truest sense and I, for one, am very grateful that I can be here today because of them.
Of course, I don’t want this to go to their head. As writer E.D. Hulse said, “Humility is a strange thing. The minute you think you've got it, you've lost it.”
The last verse of the triennial is Devarim 10:11: And the LORD said to me, “Up, resume the march at the head of the people, that they may go in and possess the land that I swore to their fathers to give them.”
Shabbat shalom.
4 https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/83807/jewish/On-Humility.htm
5 Taanit 7a
It is human nature to believe that when things go well, it is because of ourselves, and when things go poorly it is because of others. The axiom, “Success has many fathers but failure is an orphan” actually goes back to the 1st century CE, when the Roman Tacitus wrote: “This is an unfair thing about war: victory is claimed by all, failure to one alone.”
However, so much of our success is the result of circumstance, timing, our families, our schools and teachers, the people we know and those who went before us, and a large dose of luck. Thomas Edison said, “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” His first commercial success was in 1870, when he made a stock ticker based on the telegraph. Forty years earlier, Samuel Morse had patented the telegraph, but adoption was hampered by the cost of land rights to run the cables. In 1851, railroads allowed the cables to be run alongside the tracks, so telegraph operators were located at the stations. In 1860, a 13-year-old Edison got a job selling newspapers at the local station. The station agent befriended him and taught him how to operate the telegraph, and he was an operator for 7 years before creating the stock ticker, which earned him $40,000 (about $750,000 US in today’s money) and allowed him to become a full-time inventor. If any one of those hadn’t occurred, we wouldn’t be discussing Edison right now. He should have said genius is one percent inspiration, five percent perspiration and 94 percent happy circumstance, although admittedly that’s not as catchy.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with taking pride in our efforts, accomplishments, children, etc. The problem comes when we believe our success is solely due to our own actions, because we then must also believe other people’s failures are solely due to their actions. If we are successful because of our hard work, then less successful people must be lazy. If we are wealthy because we are careful with money, then poor people shouldn’t be trusted with money. When our children do well at school because we are good parents, then children who don’t do as well must have bad parents.
Rabbi Shira Milgrom writes, “We forget that in the web of the universe, we are all connected. We forget that our successes depend on the successes and sacrifices of countless others, we forget how dependent we are on a larger society, on the planet and its health. We forget our obligations to others—and, we forget that with all this material wealth, we will not be happy or even satisfied without gratitude.”1
Moses was warning us that when we take our success for granted, and assume it is because of our virtues, we cut ourselves off from G-d, our community and the rest of the world. Rabbi Paula Feldstein wrote: “The family into which we are born, the schools we attend, and the communities in which we are raised all play a major role in who we become and how we succeed… We should respond to our prosperity with recognition of the factors that lead to our success and with humility before God.”2
The term ‘humility’ has gotten a bad rap; after all, it has the same root as ‘humiliation,’ from the Latin humus (“soil”). Dictionaries define humility as a low self-regard and sense of unworthiness. When someone said Clement Attlee was a humble man, Winston Churchill said “he has plenty to be humble about.”
However, that is not the original definition. Rabbi Louis Jacobs, founder of the Masorti movement in the UK, wrote, “In the Jewish tradition, humility is among the greatest of the virtues, as its opposite, pride, is among the worst of the vices. Moses, the greatest of men, is described as the most humble: In Numbers 12:3, ‘Now the man Moses was very meek, above all the men that were on the face of the earth.’ In Genesis 18:27, the patriarch Abraham protests to God: ‘Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, who am but dust and ashes.’ Greatness and humility, in the Jewish tradition, are not incompatible.”3
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes, “Humility — true humility — is one of the most expansive and life-enhancing of all virtues. It does not mean undervaluing yourself. It means valuing other people. It signals a certain openness to life's grandeur and the willingness to be surprised, uplifted, by goodness wherever one finds it."4
C.S Lewis wrote, “Humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less.”
So being humble does not mean feeling bad about yourself, or debasing your own efforts and contributions; it only means acknowledging all of the contributors to your success. Isaac Newton wrote, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” Every week, as we recount the stories of our ancestors, we remind ourselves we stand on the shoulders of giants. Humility frees us from judgment and allows us to connect with one another, to lift up others and to recognise our place in the world.
The Talmud states, “The word of God can only be heard in a humble heart.”5
We all know Aesop’s fable, “The Ants & the Grasshopper.” The ants are busy all summer storing grain, while the grasshopper plays his fiddle. Come winter, the grasshopper is begging for food and the ants mock him and turn him away. However, worker ants generally live only a few months, so the grain they were eating in winter was collected and stored by a previous generation.
Every spring, Monarch butterflies migrate 3,000 miles from Mexico to Canada, but they only live 6-8 weeks and it takes 4-5 generations to cross that distance. The ones who left Mexico will never see their destination, but they start the journey anyway. I’m not sure the Pirkei Avot had butterflies in mind when it said, “It is not your responsibility to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it,” but it certainly applies.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been collecting photos for the Temple’s 59th birthday, which is next Sunday. Seeing people I’ve known for a couple of years engaged in Temple life twenty or thirty years ago has been delightful. These are not people who took the Temple for granted, nor believed they alone could support it. They recognised the Temple as an inheritance, and that their hard work was needed to continue it for the next generation. They did not do it for glory or recognition, but out of a sense of responsibility. These are humble people in the truest sense and I, for one, am very grateful that I can be here today because of them.
Of course, I don’t want this to go to their head. As writer E.D. Hulse said, “Humility is a strange thing. The minute you think you've got it, you've lost it.”
The last verse of the triennial is Devarim 10:11: And the LORD said to me, “Up, resume the march at the head of the people, that they may go in and possess the land that I swore to their fathers to give them.”
Shabbat shalom.
1 https://reformjudaism.org/learning/torah-study/eikev/all-you-need-love
2 https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-challenges-of-humility/
3 https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/humility-in-judaism/2 https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-challenges-of-humility/
4 https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/83807/jewish/On-Humility.htm
5 Taanit 7a
Wednesday, May 16, 2018
Postcodes
In the UK, postcodes were introduced in 1857, but not standardised until the 1970s. Each postcode has four parts: area, district, sector and unit. (For example, RG4 8BW.)
Today there are 1.8 million postcodes and each postcode covers an average of 15 properties. However, a single large building can be split into multiple post codes, and some high-volume organisations are allocated their own postcode.
Today there are 1.8 million postcodes and each postcode covers an average of 15 properties. However, a single large building can be split into multiple post codes, and some high-volume organisations are allocated their own postcode.
In the US, zip codes (short for Zone Improvement Plan) were introduced in 1963, and zip+4 was introduced in 1983 (and still not used today). There are 41,682 active zip codes, although about a third of those are used for PO boxes, military or individual organisations. It's remarkable that the USA is 40 times bigger than the UK, but the UK has 60 times as many post codes!
Each zip code covers an average of 7800 people, but that varies dramatically with population density. (Texas and California have about the same number of zip codes, but California has 12 million more people.)
In New Zealand, postcodes were introduced in 2006. They are 4 digits, with 1,856 postcodes currently assigned. On average each postcode covers 2,500 people.
Fun fact: The New Zealand post recognises both English and Māori placenames, so the following are equivalent:
Māori Language Commission
PO Box 411
Wellington 6140
PO Box 411
Wellington 6140
Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori
Pouaka Poutāpeta 411
Te Whanganui a Tara 6140
Pouaka Poutāpeta 411
Te Whanganui a Tara 6140
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