An artificial cocoon...

We had the experience of taking a a spur of the moment flight to Atlanta this week.  As we were flying out I started to think about the experience of flying in this modern age of instantaneous digital communication.  Strangely enough the plane is one of the last places where we are forced to be totally out of touch with our friends/family.  Arguably I could go camping and be out of touch also, but in my mind that is a bit more of a choice than airlines forcing passengers to turn off cell phones and not providing an Internet connection.  I'm not trying to advocate allowing passengers to use Internet and cell phones on their flight, but more thinking about the experience itself. 

When we left on our flight we had a lot of things on our mind and we had spent the previous 24 hrs on the phone and on email pretty regularly and suddenly we were spending 5 hrs completely disconnected.  While I didn't forget about everything that was going on in our lives it was almost as though for a few hrs it was not immediately in our face.  Maybe it was a way to avoid thinking about and facing realities in our lives, but it was worth it whatever the cause was. 

Empty homes and memories...

In the last 6 months I have visited two young families that have both moved into their first house, which is brand new.  Both families had moved from relatively smaller apartments or condos and as a result didn't have enough furniture to fill the enormous homes.  However, they have taken this opportunity with little furniture to allow their toddler children to run free. 

As I was visiting these new homes and young families I constantly felt myself contrasting the experience with that of visiting older families in homes they have occupied for 20 plus years.  It is difficult to explain, but having grown up and having watched relatives grow up I feel that I have seen that end often.  However, at this point in my life I'm seeing the birth of families like I have never experienced.  I know both of these families will likely live in these homes for a long time and I can just see the memories waiting to be made.  Good or bad the memories make a home more than the furniture.  When my family moved out of our house after only 8 years I remember looking at the then empty home and thinking realizing how full it actually was.  I look forward to being apart of the "furnishing" process for these young families. 

a parking attendant, an Audi, and Russian hip hop

What do these three things have in common?  I rode to the city in an Audi with a Russian (I think that's what he was) parking attendant listening to Russian (I think that's what it was) hip hop.  It was a very odd experience and one of the two strangest I have had with Casual Carpool.  As I got into the car near Lake Merritt I wondered why was there a early 20s East European kid driving around a rather nice Audi.  My curiosity was immediately peaked when I saw that he was wearing a jacket from a parking garage management company.  As Occam's Razor will show I'm sure there was a better explanation, but the gears started turning and I wondered whether this was even his car.  I figured if I carjacked a car then the last thing I would do is go pick up a bunch of Financial District suits first thing in the morning and take them to San Francisco.  Anyways while we were driving along listening to Russian hip hop a song came on.  I knew the beat, but the lyrics were in another language.  However, I swear that I heard a Russian version of this song. 

There was an article in the paper today about what has become of the once bustling dot com real estate of San Francisco.  I visited the Bay more than a few times during that time and I was thinking back to my own dot com experiences (few and far between that they were).  More than dot com experiences I have strong memories of dot com bust experiences. 

Between '98 and '02 I was in college so I didn't experience the whole live large culture of that time in San Francisco.  I vividly remember friends graduating more than a year before the bust and hearing stories of people going into consulting with HUGE signing bonuses.  At that point to graduate and get a consulting job paying 60-70 to start was very common.  I knew more than a few people that were signing 5 figure signing bonuses.  I remember being wide eyed and naive at my own seemingly imminent employment in the same fashion.  I wonder for a quick second where my life would have taken me if I had landed one of those accenture jobs.  Then the bust started.  I believe the peak of the market was in the spring of 2000, which means that the class that graduated one year before me (spring 2001) got dealt the really bad hand.  They were the ones that didn't know what hit them as they job hunted and got offers 5-6 months after the market peak.  At that point even though everything was declining we hadn't felt the effects yet.  Then as the school year progressed offers started to be postponed (start after the summer...start in the fall...).  Postponement led to offers being rescinded.  I remember hearing about the first people that had offers rescinded.  At this point the company was perfectly fine dishing out a five figure severance package to someone they didn't hire instead of a five figure bonus.  By the time I was graduating we were well aware of what was going on around us and that the chances of us getting immediate employment was slim.  Arguably our class was luckier because we had enough time to consider other options like graduate school. 

My other memory of the dot com times were tracking stocks of companies that I heard or read a lot about.  I remember WebVan and being engaged by the service the provided.  I was convinced they had a good idea and would have bought stock at the time (thankfully I didn't have much money).  I satisfied myself by watching their stock prices somewhat regularly. 

Anyways just my random musings.  I'm not even sure who if anyone is still reading this...not that it matters though as I'll keep writing and posting for your workweek reading.

a turd in a punchbowl...

OK I know the title is weird to say the least, but that's the best way to capture how strange the last two days were.  For those that think I'm to blame for the strange saying it was courtesy of someone I worked with at NARM 2008.

So NARM stands for National Association of Record Merchandisers and they had their annual convention in San Francisco (well as of this writing they are still having it).  What is record merchandising?  These guys are the people that take an album from the record label (distributors) and get it to the stores (retailers).  So this convention was a meeting of distributors and retailers.  After working this convention I realized that I enjoy doing backend work that helps pull off an event like this and I would actually consider working for a live sound company doing events like these.  Why was it odd?  Well it was very surreal b/c the whole thing is about dropping names, dropping cards, and networking like crazy.  I could handle the networking part, but the name dropping and more importantly the card dropping part was weird.  On more than one occasion there were people telling me (or people I worked with) that they were so and so or doing X dollars business and should therefore be let in for free.  I didn't realize how vigilant at conventions like these (where badges cost upwards of 1K bucks) one needed to be to prevent riff raff from getting in.  I was able to work in the press room for a bit and received a very strict explanation about how if we couldn't find an article a "journalist" wrote then they weren't allowed in.  I don't think I have ever been surrounded by so many sales people at one time, which was what contributed to the weird feeling. 

There was another story but that goes in my next post. 

Comments...

So I didn't know I had comments on my blog until yesterday.  One of the comments asked why there was so much security at the mine and why they had to keep our passports.  I'm not sure the reasoning behind keeping our passports, but I think the security is so heavy is because they don't want people unnecessarily there.  Particularly with the more valuable mines like high yield gold or silver, but with copper prices the way they are right now even that's valuable.  Many of these mines are strip mines so the chance of someone getting away with something is pretty low, but I guess they don't want to take any chances.  FYI strip mines are mines that tear away an entire hillside for a yield of 2% or so.  So even if you steal a rock from them it's probably only got a speck of something in it. 

the state of the blogion

When I originally started this blog pre-Lima the intention was to pass on interesting things I found throughout the day.  I did it for a bit, but didn't tell my friends as I wanted to wait until I had a good quantity of stuff.  For a few years several close friends had been pushing me to start a blog...not sure why, but I always fended off their suggestions.  Interestingly, I have always maintained that I don't like to write and I can't say I particularly enjoy it now either.  However, there was something about finding interesting stories and moments in Lima that I enjoyed and I enjoyed trying to convey the moment back to friends and family.  Now I find myself in an interesting position with a blog, no real blog topic (ie I'm in Lima for 3 weeks let me blog about my life)...after all the life of an engineer is a bit mundane, but for the first time in my life I have somewhat of a desire to blog.  I think of it similar to working out I guess where after consistently working out for a while one misses it when they can't do it.  I don't even consider myself a particularly good writer, but somehow it's fun.  Anyways as a friend pointed out I need to find the same moments in Concord that I saw in Lima and manage to make them interesting somehow.  So here's where the next road begins...