Prompt Tuesday (6/16/09) -- Lie to Me

For Prompt Tuesday at Deb's Blog at:

http://sandiegomomma.com/2009/06/15/promptuesday-60-lie-to-me/#comments

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Pride

My upcoming "Rings of the Lord" trillogy. Arch-Angels (Michael, Gabriel and Lucifer) form a pact with each other and each don a power ring of Black Hills gold. But one of the angels falls from Grace, and his ring melts in the fires of Hell, allowing him to rise up and . . . Ah, well. Trust me. It's going to be great.

Envy

My awesome typing speed. 90+.

Gluttony

Two Black Bean Brownies. (Recipe on the WeightWatchers.com website. Yummy!!)

Lust

Really big, historic homes that are already fixed up and have perfect foundations. And big tits.

Anger

That my mother-in-law wouldn't plug in the power cord and hand it to me, so I had to walk all the way around the house to do it myself.

Greed

The bathroom key at the office.

Sloth

I once turned in a math paper by writing all the odd CORRECT answers from the back of the book -- and for all the even answers I put a Zero. My math teacher was so pissed, she ripped the answer appendice out of my pre-Algebra book! What WAS I thinking?

Prompt Tuesday (6/9/09) -- "Decisions, Decisions"

It was so astoundingly simple where before it it seemed hard.

There are not many things in life like that. Fixing a car for example. You have a basic concept of the grease and tools and crawling above and under a car to repair it. Or, for example, if your home's water heater breaks, you generally understand that a plumber will disconnect it and drag it out to the street, drag a new one in, and somehow attach it with his tools and torchy thing.

But this thing before me . . . hmm . . . A lightbulb was going on. If everyone else still thought it was hard, and it was actually really, really as easy as this, I betcha I could make some big-time money here.

It was late 1995. Just months before, I had just separated from my wife and had moved back from the rain-splattered hell they call Eugene, Oregon, and back to my hometown of San Diego. My parents had gracefully allowed their peniless 33-year-old son the use of the trailer on their back driveway to serve as a flophouse. I was working temp jobs, and had somehow ended up at the corporate headquarters of Jack in the Box restaurant, working on technical manuals: basically diagrams of how to put sandwiches together for minimum wage working, often-E.S.L. fast-food workers.

Just two months before, an aquaintenance in Oregon, a former postal worker on permanent leave (due to some form of '60s-drug-induced agoraphobia), had invited me over to his "manufactured home" in the woods past Fern Ridge lake, to hang out. His wife, whom I worked with, could tell that I had been depressed at work, and so, after serving me salisbury steak in a foil tray, Jim got excited to show me something he had discovered on his computer. It was called"MOSAIC." He said it was called a "Web Browser" -- something that he promised would change my world.

He connected his Macintosh with his modem, complete with those all-familiar noises of buzzing and clicking that I had been familiar with from connecting to America Online. But then a small window appeared. And then the magic happened.

Using a large phonebook-sized tome, an "Internet Directory" that he had purchased at a bookstore in downtown Eugene, Jim proceeded to type in string of characters:

http://info.cern.ch

and pressed the key.

I then saw a page of information -- and it looked like a word-processed document. Big deal. However, Jim then explained to me that this information being sent to us from CERN, a university near Geneva. He told me that if someone changed the document at the other end and we clicked refresh we would get the new document uploaded near-instantaneously. He then proceeded to explain what all the blue underlined "links" meant and how they actually jumped us around to other "websites" -- and explained to me the concept of a "web."

It was hard stuff I assumed, though -- programming a website. I had no doubt it required a computer science degree -- and completing coursework to understand network/modem protocols and international telecommunications, special computer equipment. I had never been so wrong.

So that is why, a few months later, when I got a glimpse into what a website really was, the lightbulb went on. And it wasn't just glowing. It was beaming like one of those sky-high spotlights waving back and forth.

This one particular day, around November 1995, a flamboyant Mac consultant whom I'll call "T" had arrived to help some of the graphic artists in our wing with some software installs on the Mac 9600s (a now long-defunct model). "T" had been making the moves on one of our graphic artists, my friend Scott, for a long time, and he seemed eager to impress all of us in the office -- often hoping to extend his morning consulting visits to lunchtime so he could ask Scott to head out for "bite to eat." This particular day, though, I had a problem with my computer and "T" stopped by my desk. It was a quick fix -- done! -- and then the magic happened.

I'm not certain what started it, perhaps that he saw I had a "Netscape" icon loaded on my desktop -- but "T" was suddenly showing me how to create my own web page using a very simple language called HTML in a Text Editor. He said it was NOT a programming language -- just a markup language. (I still don't understand why the consultant didn't meet with our Creative Services director and offer to create a website for us. His oversight was my gain, though.)

It dawned on me at that very moment that Jack in the Box had no website. And maybe, if it were as simple as I thought, I could create one. That same day, I drove to a computer store across the I-15 and picked up a book called HTML For Dummies. That night, I read it nearly cover to cover. I began to realize that this was clearly something that people thought was difficult to do -- but was actually very, VERY simple.

Within 2 days I had created the very first JackintheBox.com website -- and worked with a friend in the M.I.S. (now "I.T.") department to launch the site. Of course, I touted my highly-specialized technology skills to our P.R. department and explained to them that they would need a "webmaster" (a term I had picked up from the Dummies book). Of course, I knew of just the person they needed: me. My position was expanded on the spot -- and I found myself as the first "Webmaster" of JackInTheBox.com.

I made daily changes to the site and expanded it with more and more photos and sections. I submitted the site to a pay-per-entry web-design "contest," and garnered an award for myself.

I was now an award-winning Webmaster for a Fortune 500 company's website -- all within a month's time and very little effort. Of course, I exaggerated my own importance to everyone who would listen, obscurely referring to the complexities of web programming and HTML.

The following week, I overheard a temp I hired, named Deb, talking about trying to get website-development work at Qualcomm -- an up-and-coming company not far away. She even mentioned the hiring manager's name. It was a cinch to call and get the hiring manager's fax number and start faxing my resume over. And the rest is history. After being hired by Qualcomm in September 1996, I have slowly built up my web development resume. I am now a Sr. Software Engineering specializing in web programming for a San Diego-area defense contractor.

Eventually, though, the magic at Qualcomm faded as everyone and their grandmother started creating their own webpages with WYSIWYG web-development tools such as FrontPage and DreamWeaver -- and the technical regard of webmastering died out. In true "Who Moved My Cheese" style, I had to learn to keep changing and growing into new areas of web technology (but that is for another post).

Before that fateful day at Jack In the Box, my career path had been aimed toward journalism and magazine editing (per my Journalism Degree, SDSU, 1992) -- a choice that would have certainly spelled low wages in a dying industry. I can't imagine how my life would have been different if I hadn't decided to get that HTML for Dummies book that first day I saw how easy it was to create a website "under the hood."

Now I keep thinking -- what is the next "hard thing" that is actually really, REALLY easy. Programming for the iPhone? Hmmm. I've got to look into that.

Thanks for readin! :)

Prompt Tuesday, 5/5/09 -- My Favorite Toy

My favorite toy remained unchanged from about age 4 through my early teen years: Blocks. And marbles.

I would construct fortresses with blocks that I would roll marbles into. They marbles would cascade through the small tunnels through twists and turns -- and then roll out through a little exit tunnel at the end -- making a plinking noise as the marble cascaded down the ramps.

I was fixated on this game, Mouse Trap, at the time, but my parents didn't want to buy it for me ("The plastic parts will only get lost or break, honey,") and so, I continued with my blocks.

Later my dad built me a large HO train board with its own mountain and even a little HO-scaled Western town. However, my attention would soon run dry and I'd find myself, yet again, laying on my orange shag rug, laying down the blocks, and rolling marbles through them.

Watching my kids grow up with race car tracks and roller coaster "kinex" and Harry Potter Legos and robots and then Rios and now iPod Nanos and various computer games (Wow, Starcraft, etc) -- I wonder how much more fun that all is compared to constructing your very own marble factory.

Now where are my blocks? I'm beginning to feel that they are my "Rosebud."

The Little Things that Make All the Difference

I was on my way to NYC to fly out of JFK to Prague. To make the trip more enjoyable, my friends, David and Ray, and I were driving across country -- stopping in Albuquerque, New Orleans, and New Jersey before I was to meet my sister in Albany just days before my flight to Prague.

Whereas my arrangements had placed us with friends in New Orleans, my friend David's girlfriend Ray had arranged for our accommodations in New Jersey. It was on the Jersey shore with an old friend of Ray's mother, a woman named Pat, who met us graciously and took her into her home. She had hot pastrami sandwiches awaiting us -- and good spicy brown mustard. Her condo had rust-colored shag rug -- and 1980s furnishings -- but her view across the highway to the shore was stunning. She had prepared clean sheets on the fold-out bed for me in the living room. My friends stayed in the back room by themselves.

We were exhausted from our drive, but I had some difficulty falling asleep. Pat sat not far from me in the kitchen with the light on, smoking cigarettes and coughing, and doing a crossword puzzle. I remember thinking that she was coughing very hard. I popped half a Xanax, as was my custom to fall asleep in a strange locale, and drifted off.

That evening, I was awakened by my friends' crys to call 911. I thought I was dreaming, but it was a different kind of nightmare. Pat had coughed so hard during the night, she had burst a vein in a lung tumor. She was able to rouse my friends from the back bedroom, make the international sign of choking, before running into the bathroom and collapsing on the bathroom floor, where she bled out, entirely, through the mouth, covering the entire floor with the majority of her blood.

"Don't come in here," David yelled to me in the hallway. "You are not going to want to see this. Trust me." To this day, I owe David a debt of gratitude that I don't have that memory etched into my brain.

What I hadn't been told is that Pat was a New Jersey Police Detective who had recently retired after putting away some mobsters. When her fellow police officers arrived on the scene and saw Pat in a huge pool of blood on the bathroom floor, and three strangers in the house, it was a no- brainer to interrogate us.

We were separated by the police officers while forensic specialists examined the Pat's corpse. As the sun came up over the Jersey Shore, I was asked repeatedly about why I was in the house (just to crash, I said) and how I knew Pat (I didn't, I said), and what I did to Pat (I ate a sandwich with her and wished her good night, I said). Luckily, I was still slighly high on Xanax.

Within the hour, Pat's doctor was summoned. He told the detectives that Pat had terminal lung cancer. She knew that she could succumb to the disease at any time. She chose to take us in and give us a place to stay, taking a chance that she would be fine during the 12 hours of our stay. What she didn't know is that we would arrive just hours from her imminent death.

In many ways I'm glad I was there for Pat's death. Oddly enough, not only was it exciting to be interrogated for Murder, but I found out later that my friends were there at Pat's side, holding her hand, and easing her fear as she left this life into the great unknown.

We all had separate plane tickets, so I left David and Ray behind that morning and drove to Albany, as was our plan.

Ray naturally was depressed by all of this. When I next saw her, in Prague, she was clearly shaken by Pat's death. This, however, was my post-divorce, never-been-to-Europe trip, and so, perhaps selfishly, I resolved to leave the both of them. I arranged to meet them in Warsaw . . . and then reversed direction and instead journeyed southeast by myself through Hungary and Romania and Bulgaria into Turkey, traveling with whomever I would meet in the local pensions who were heading my direction. It turned out to be the trip of a lifetime and I met many friends from many far-flung places: Australians, Irish, Chileans, Kiwi's . . . and without Pat's death, I would never have made the decision to travel on my own. Traveling on my own became a liberating experience that has changed me profoundly to this day and given me a boost of self confidence in traveling, life in general, meeting new people, experiencing new things/places and personal relationships.

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After a seven year break in our friendship, I recently met up again with my old travel companion David. David had just exited a rehab program for heroin users -- and became employed by the Seattle needle-exchange program. After an accident left him with a broken leg, he moved back to San Diego, and found me. We met up at a local museum for a special event, had a cocktail or two, and started talking about the old days . . . our college days at Pt. Loma College, old friends, and our Eastern European trip. Ray had never quite gotten over the death of Pat, he told me. She fell into a depression that trip that caused their relationship some problems, and once they returned to Seattle, she shortly left David for another man. She got pregnant, and had a little girl with the new boyfriend, which was enough closure for David to move on.

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"Ray is dead," David told me recently. His lips tremored. "Her boyfriend shot her."

He explained that both Ray and the little girl were shot in a murder-suicide by the depressed boyfriend one rainy Seattle day.

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I have a photo of us three that I put on my website back in 1996, shortly after returning from the trip. Here's a photo of us three on a roadside stop in Baton Rouge, LA. I'm kneeling in the middle. Ray is on the right.

http://www.paulwade.com/travel/new-orleans/images/no_three.jpg

Ray had such beautiful red hair and such a wonderful singing voice.

I look at this photo now, and think about the little decisions in life that can change a lifetime: The decision to crash at Pat's place, my choice to travel through Europe alone, Ray leaving David for another man.

Those little details of life, those "sliding doors," they always make all the difference.

-- Wade Nash
(San Diego, CA. 4/21/09)