Month: April 2016

Listening to my Prince stuff today and bopping around my music collection.  My personal Prince favorite is that slow, popish, bluesy, “Purple Rain” tune.  I’m not gonna lie, I’m kind of sad about Prince.  The early 80’s was when the clouds cleared and I woke up.  His and Michael Jacksons music was what I really remember.  Heading up to visit IBM in Rochester, Minnesota next week and ill be thinking about him.

Interesting thing today, I finally got back the results from the 23andme genetic testing.  It didn’t tell me anything I really didn’t already know except for 3 things – all 3 were amusing, nothing bad.  First, my ancestry was divided up as follows…  40% Polish,  20% Irish, 40% Dutch German (the amounts were a surprise), second – Photic Sneeze response (I didn’t realize it was genetic), third – I am sensitive to bitterness tastes (which explains why I can’t stand those horrible I.P.A.’s (also didn’t know it was genetic).  What I really wanted to know was if whether or not I was genetically predisposed to one of the myriad of funky diseases (I’m not).

I can’t believe the Blackhawks pulled it out last night.  Oh well, off to TaiChi.  Just got back from TaiChi.  I guess I just missed one of the living masters today.  I will admit that I am bummed about that.  I guess I missed him by minutes.  Maybe some other day.  Next Friday I will go early.  Today worked on inside, defensive, point down, flat bladed, hu bud, knife removals, with arm lacing, and spine stacking – fun.  The time flies by when at the dojo.

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Listening to Scheherazade:Rimsky-Korsakov.  Trying to soothe my pounding headache behind my eyeballs.  Took some Advil to no avail – sinus day.  No fun.  This weekend we looked at houses Saturday, painted the master bath Sunday.  Went to Home Depot for window trim, a doorstop, and some grab-bars.  What a madhouse yesterday.  The parking lot was packed.  Speaking of such, I have to stop at Costco today on the way home.  Also speaking of the Madhouse, listened to the Blackhawks game.  It seems like the “Hockey Gods” are a fickle bunch.  Lots of back and forth.  Maybe they will be in our corner tomorrow night.

We were looking at homes in the Palos, Orland, Tinley area on Saturday.  There are not are a lot of “true ranches”.  There are however, a lot of three step ranches and split levels.  Saw a nice couple of ranches Saturday – the first had potential, the second also had potential.  Neither one was exactly what we wanted though.  The first (Orland) had everything we wanted except that only the kitchen was updated.  We would need to redo a bunch of stuff – including installing, refinishing or tearing out before we could move in.  Lots of carpeting, some hardwood, some hardwood under carpeting.   Carpeting is a no-no for my wife.  At some point, we would need to redo the master bath.  Lots of space though.  We would also need to find somewhere for a stackable washer and dryer on the first floor.  Would need to take the carpeting away from the steps downstairs and some of the basement.  Also we would need to either paint the paneling (there is lots of it) or remove it.  My wife wants an open concept floor plan and that could be done with some beam installation due to load bearing walls.  Unfortunately, the house is around the top of our range and won’t leave much for renovation.  There is one that has it all completed but its over our budget by a slight amount.  It has everything that we want with no work.  We also saw one (Tinley) that was open concept, a 2.5 car garage, kitchen redone, bedrooms separated by a great room, a 3 seasons’ room, redone master bath.  Its downfall is it had carpeting that would need to be replaced immediately (kind of a wash).  Second, it had no basement but that could be slightly offset by 0.5 garage – if garage could be heated (do able).  It had a crawl space for stuff.  No extra room for art.  That would need to be limited by working in either dining room or 3 seasons room, or if a kid leaves the nest.  It had some positives though – first, it had a gas assist fireplace, an updated master bath, a walk-in closet, 3 seasons porch that could be heated, a decent patio, although it faced west and there was no outside respite from the sun.  It had a fenced in yard, and it was within easy bike distance from my brother in law.

My headache is finally easing 🙂  I am trying to get excited about putting the house on the market but its just not coming.  As much as I hate to say it, I love my pergola that hangs the bird feeders.  I look forward to that with the bird bath in the mornings and when I get home.  I like the bird variation.  Haven’t seen a hummingbird yet this year.  The majority are probably not yet here.

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Listening to Stevie Wonder’s “At the close of a century” album.  What a great musical artist!  Still applying Oracle HFM patching. Finding out that if I just copy and paste from OneNote, due to auto formatting it breaks the lines apart and causes scripting errors.  If you just copy it to notepad, and copy it off, it executes it fine.

I was just admiring my aircraft banners I created.  They are personal photos from the “Chicago Air and Water Show” 2015.  I was out on my bosses boat to watch the show from North Avenue beach – show center.  Awesome seats 🙂  We set off that morning from Michigan City and traveled across the lake to Chicago – which took approximately an hour.  It was really the first time I was using the extra lenses on my Nikon.  I took a butt load (over 350) of pix and only about a dozen were worthy of what I would call art.  The Breitling aerobatic team from France was really cool and it was the first time they did an American Air Show.  They do a lot of formation flying vs. the pizzazz of some of the American jet maneuvers and raw power of the American military.  One thing that I had have never seen before was at the ending of their show, the planes dropped flares.  That was a really cool ending.  Kind of like an air show with fireworks.  Loved the little A4 jet, the Blue Angels, as well as the Aeroshell team.  There was a neat team of aerobatic prop planes that were different colors. It was a long day with lots of sun.  I always like the ride home across the lake.  The waves are usually a bit choppy and we go “balls out” across the lake.  When you pull into the calm bay water before the river, its so serene and calm.  Kind of like the silence is deafening.

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Was listening to Laszlo again this morning but the music was causing anxiety.  Had to stop.  I think I will listen to Lady Gaga.  Much easier on the nerves.  I guess an artist who does music called the “Amygdala Expedition” doesn’t produce relaxing music.  Listen to this stuff while reading H.P. Lovecraft – haa~~~haa…. daydreaming… haa, Cthulhu

Back to reality.  I still have to work.  It’s taking a while to do a data refresh of JDE (amazing), 15hrs+.  We are not even using this much at this point.  Have to go do a meet and greet for an immersion meeting.  Rather listen to ArtPop.

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Listening to Laszlo Hortobagyyi .  Doing cob-cob stick fighting sets last night.  Seeing how those can easily turn into empty hand hits using hubud.  Today, working on applying HFM patches and trying to get development back up to date.  Also doing Tai Chi test today.  Worked on first set-single forms last night and had issues with remembering the nuanced beginnings and moving.  I will need to ask for a review before the test today.

Passed Tai Chi but still need to work on the first set.  Got some cheesy video.  Crazy busy at work putting the HFM patches in.  Bye for now.

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Listening to Led Zeppelin.  Love this shit!  Makes me really appreciate the 70s, sans disco.  Not that I don’t love disco, because I do, but classic rock really overpowers everything else from that decade (which I feel started in 1969 and ended at the end of 1979) IMHO.  Went and looked at homes with my wife this weekend (we are considering moving and downsizing).  I am not sure I am ready for downsizing yet.  I still have way too much living to do and I’m not ready to throw in the towel yet.  I feel that that’s what that signifies.  Doing more with less because less is more important. Because less is easier to deal with.  It’s all about what you can deal with.  Overwhelming an older mind.  Fuck that.  Give me more technology, I will adapt.  Speaking about adapting, I had to laugh, I was heading out this morning to work and I wanted to bring my Tai Chi video to watch at lunch.  I also wanted to refill the suet feeder for the woodpeckers.  So I put the dvd on the chair arm (knowing damn well I will probably get distracted and forget the dvds), went outside and came in and walked past the dvds and went to work.  Now, I know my shortcomings and still didn’t compensate.  Next time I will have to put my car keys on the dvds.  As Clint said: “A man’s got to know his limitations…”.  Speaking of birds, I also put out the Hummingbird feeder.  No Tai Chi Sabre this weekend – bummer.  Had to work and refresh some data in some if the test systems.  I did however get the bathroom ceiling patched and painted.  I’d rather being painting canvas’ than ceilings.   My art buddy is going to leave me in his dust!  For the love of all that is ADD…  yes, this is a rambling diatribe.

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Listening to Coldplay and enjoying the music.  Trying to apply HFM patching on Win2K8R2.  Boy, and I thought SAP was bad.  I keep getting a newfound appreciation for SAP as I try and deal with this ORACLE crap.  So many little OS/DOS based quirks that are not really documented that shouldn’t be show stoppers.  DOS based variables that shouldn’t need system restarts, command line stuff that corrupts for no reason that I can think of save bad programming, not packaging patches in groups.

Kind of bummed with SAP – I won’t lie.  We were looking for financial/manufacturing software to carry the company into the future and the contestants were SAP (ECC), Oracle (JDE and HFM), and Infor (the current software vendor).  SAP came in thinking that they were a slam dunk and they completely blew it.  Now I’m stuck supporting JDE and HFM.  JDE looks like it was written by 8th graders.  They put a nice HTML front end on it.  Lipstick on a pig.  After a year of support, It still makes no sense.  The only salvation is that it runs on an iSeries which means that its bulletproof.  I have a great appreciation for IBM and the old AS400 platform, but I digress.  SAP had several things going for it and a couple of things against it.  First, SAP had at least one successful implementation (a proverbial foot in the door) of ERP in a billion dollar company.  I will leave that for a minute.  Second, they had licensing sold that was netting them 350K/year for 1 ECC plant implementation.  We bought SCM/APO – implemented it and let it rot, we bought BW, installed it and let it rot, we bought business objects, installed it and let it rot, we bought master data management and let it rot.  So, 350K free yearly revenue for one ECC plant implementation.  The 2 things that SAP going for them was that – they had their foot in the door of a billion dollar company and 350K in free annual revenue.  Oh, and they were up against vintage 1990 homegrown RPG software.  What did they have going against them?  The CFO hated them because he came from a company with a failed SAP implementation, our last megalomaniac CIO who picked SAP and rammed it down the company’s throat was summarily dismissed and the implementation was deemed a failure, even though it still runs the plant today.  The original SAP implementer made some critical errors, first implementing a custom business solution that was designed for a “similar” industry that was never really similar.  That had the effect of shoehorning in a UOM that made no sense, caused confusion and made reconciling financials challenging.  It had so much custom code that it made upgrades extremely difficult and created a nervous atmosphere to the point that no one wanted to upgrade.  Little documentation was created so that in the event of upgrade there were minimum processes to follow. So against SAP – they were hated, they would have had to re-implement, we were paying large sums of cash on maintenance we didn’t want or need.

I just realized that this is kind of decision therapy for me.  Do I stay with my company or leave?  What are the pros of my current company?  I love and respect my boss.  He gives me autonomy and empowerment.  That is a tough one to top.  I get to constantly learn new things.  That is a prime motivator for me.  I seldom get stuck in a rut and if I do, its really my fault.  I get to manage and do some of the management things that go with that like employee reviews, raises, etc..  I get to keep my skills up by being involved with several hardware platforms – iSeries, Windows.  No UNIX or LINUX though but I could set up an LPAR of UNIX I guess.  But with no reason or software to run, it would be a waste of time.  I get to train and occasionally go to conferences that are aligned with our interests.  I feel like I have the best of both worlds – I get to manage and get to keep my hands in technology.  What are the cons?  The company discounts my experience/expertise outside my department.  I never really feel like I know what direction the company is going.  I don’t like how IT falls under finance, I completely don’t agree with it.  That is a company culture thing though.  Either I have to suck it up and shut up, or move on.  Now that I think of it, my gripes are with my bosses boss.  Hmmm.  Somehow I have to manage that.  I guess I will stay.  I have been disgusted and pissed off. At least I have a direction now and some better understanding.

Did I mention I got a plastic sabre and DVD and am teaching myself the basic techniques of Chinese Sabre?  Should be interesting and amusing.

It was a fun day at the dojo this afternoon, love Fridays.  Got to play with sticks.  Learning Filipino cob-cob drills with Danny.  Lots of fun.  Apparently, I need to learn the stick drills with my hands inside my shoulders because this training to fight with machetes.  Also learned some seated hand-to-hand fighting techniques with back against the wall.  Was farting around with Jake re-figuring out “long-hand, short-hand” solo forms for the Tai Chi test Tuesday.

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…in paradise.  I want to leave work, go home and play with my saber.  “Can’t do it, won’t do it…” (to quote Samurai Mike)  Have to patch some FDMEE software, and to be perfectly honest, I don’t remember what the hell I’m even supposed to do.  I have a meeting now and just waiting for the HFM business admin to give me a direction.  On a different note, my buddy’s got a piece in an art show opening at the college tomorrow night and I’m really envious he gets to be in the show.  His artwork is coming along beautifully.  I know he really hated his new teacher and was going to quit but he is rising to the challenge.  I can’t believe how much an under painting sometimes help with the vividness of the colors.  It’s quite amazing.  Yea, his drawing technique needs some work but his painting quality is great.  Ill take a photograph and post it as a banner.  Scum.  (I’m so happy for him, it really validates his talent)  I wish I got to get back into art.  I guess maybe after we sell the current house and I get the new house in some order.  Hopefully, we get an unfinished basement so I have some room for art (martial and regular).  Hey, just thought of something, I still have a “Groupon” for a photography class. Yeah!  And a certificate for 2hrs of glass fusing… w00t!  Still have to finish the bathroom though – first.  Fucking house.  What a time sucker.  My first year of hiatus is almost completed and I still have nothing to show for it.  That kind of sucks.

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Ok, was just going over my Tai Chi stuff for my test today.  I almost forgot my uniform this morning.  Got to be properly dressed, I guess.  I am starting to become a ball of nerves, which for Tai Chi is the KOD.  Relax, my ass.  Makes me wonder how you are supposed to fight with Tai Chi, adrenalin and all.  Maybe… I don’t know.  The style of Tai Chi I study is called Yang Classic Temple Style.  From what I understand, there are only 2 teachers in the Chicagoland Area that teach this.  Outside of that, there is only one guy I have seen do it (the first section show form) on the internet and he was kind of weird – if I do say so myself.  Two teachers in North America and they both happen to reside within 30 miles of each other.  What are the odds?

Update:  I guess I will get a 1 week reprieve.  It seemed that my teacher forgot that I was doing a test today.  So, I will have one more week to try and memorize the numbering of the sections.  I’m kind of bummed since I was prepared for a test on the second section.  However, she added the first section to the second, so I’m glad for the extension.  I will just keep the uniform in the car.

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Listening to Edger Winter Group – I forgot just how good the band was.  Funny thing, that memory shit.  Saw “Batman vs. Superman” this weekend.  What a good movie!  Very enjoyable.  Some things I liked that they didn’t forget about – that Earth’s sunlight rejuvenates Superman, that you still don’t know what happened to the ship, that it would have been a very short fight if Superman wanted it to be that way, Oh, and I just LOVE the new Wonder Woman.  Some things I didn’t like or that I was mad about – I really liked the General Zod actor, but they made the Zod character such a whiny bitch, he could have been such a bad ass.  Why did they have to dangle him in front of my face again?  And the new characters could have been better defined.

I have a Tai Chi test tomorrow concerning the second section. I feel like I am ready except for remembering all the numbering of the moves. I know the movements and their position but don’t remember all the numbers. Its not like its a Chinese takeout menu.  Give me the number 53: Right and Left Turn Around.  The other day when I was practicing I really felt like the Chi was flowing.  Some days are like that and other days the chi is just turned off.  Very weird. I guess that’s why it takes decades to cultivate.  I read somewhere that chi flow was inversely proportional to the physical effort involved.  Which was why it was never really practiced by the young and embraced by the old.  “Relax” is the age old word given by the masters.  Just try and relax in todays society with the information glut provided from always being connected and catering to our ADD.  There is no refuge from work when your co-workers don’t honor boundaries. Tai Chi seems like a total throwback art. I guess that is what I love about it.  Most things concerning Tai Chi is about neutralization of your opponent, not destroying them.

I’m now listening to the Chris Duarte Group – Lucky 13.  I love all sorts of music – everything except for traditional Country.  I just can’t stomach country music.  I’d rather listen to someone squeezing a cat or a group of frogs like a bag pipe.  Country is like discordant nails on a chalk board.  Better to listen to Christian talk radio.  Anyway, I digress – Chris Duarte is the closest thing to SRV if SRV was reincarnated like The Highlander.  Had to be that way because Duarte was already born when SRV crashed and burned.  Yep, there can be only one…  Call it Texas Rock or whatever but it uses similar guitar rifts and rhythms.  SRV made it his own and Chris just adopted it like he was a flippin’ native.  Anyhoo, Ciao until tomorrow.

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