Tell me of places long gone…

As a lark, I sometimes do google searches on places from my childhood. I looked up “Mr Foos” yesterday and it returned only one link. Mr Foos was closed long before the Internet existed or maybe it closed when the Internet opened up. I don’t know. But it truly was a magical place. Ostensibly it was a sub shop in Blacksburg but really it was a sleazy beer joint. They served Pabst Blue Ribbon long before PBR was the badge of cool hipsterdom. On Wednesday nights, they hosted “turtle races” although I never saw a turtle there. It basically meant that if you got there at 7PM, PBR was $1 a pitcher. From 8-9 it was $2 and from 9-closing it was then $3. But most of us were shitfaced by 9PM anyway. In fact, I think I would even show up earlier just to get a seat and watch the insanity. The place would get packed – jocks, freaks, geeks and locals all elbowing each other, starting fights and eyeing members of the opposite sex. One night we got flashed by a local girl which in theory sounds exciting but in retrospect was kinda gross (hairy and a bit too much to see in the “beerlight” of Mr Foos). I once threw beer around somewhat because I could and remain anonymous. Why not? Most people didn’t appreciate it but most were too shitfaced to notice. Was it a smart thing for a college bar to offer such cheap beer on a Wednesday night? Sure. Was it a smart thing for college kids to be patronizing such a thing given all the deadlines, homework and tests they were supposed to be studying for on their parent’s dime? Not really.

Ah Mr Foos. I had a Mr Foos t-shirt which among my set was probably only one step below having a blue skull and roses (Grateful Dead) shirt. I wore it proudly for many years after I graduated. I can’t believe I threw it away and I have a theory that somehow my Mom got into my 20-something apartment/rowhouse and “deleted” it from my life like she did so much of my other favorite clothes, comic books, Mad Magaizines, trashy novels while I still lived with her.

Oddly, I think my Mom probably share the same sort of anonymous on the Internet status that Mr Foos does. Oddly.

For awhile Mr Foos tried to get live music and it was kind of cool to be eyeball to eyeball with Killer the bass player and his blue band (they did a killer version of Ring of Fire) but it really wasn’t meant to be a live music venue.

People who worked at Mr Foos were generally failed students who had either gone native or, it was pretty clear, had a drug problem. That said, they were considered very cool and we (my friends and I) would talk about them, guess about their personalities, backgrounds and what they do on their free time (kill puppies, shoot heroin, go bear hunting, etc.). At one point, I even got to know one of them – a fellow drummer who was sort of a countryfried version of the Muppet’s Animal. I hung out with him during a winter break, drank moonshine and went out to help him chop down trees for the fireplace and for a Christmas tree. Of course, we did this while shit-faced.

Ah what else? Everybody needs a good sleazy bar in their youth. A place where you meet friends, talk up young women, fall in love, start fights, lose fights, get consoled with free beer, plot plots (I think we plotted getting onto the roof of the Virginia Tech basketball arena there one drunken evening), dream dreams, learn how to drink and how not to drink. And so on.

Good bye Mr Foos wherever you area. And yeah, there was a Foosball table there – I guess that’s where they got their name. But it was only one table and only the most elite Foosball players used it (you played with them only if you desired to be humiliated).

And their subs were wonderful.

5 ShowTunes I’d give the Queen if I were Obama/Michelle

“You Don’t Know This Man” (Parade)
“Sincerely” (Bye Bye Birdie)
“God Save The People” (Godspell) – as opposed to God Save The Queen, get it?
“Acid Queen” (Tommy)
“When You’re Good To Mama (Mama’s Good to You”) (Chicago)

Four, no Five People I’d Like to Slap Around Just A Little

1. Bill Maher
2. Ashton Kuchter
3. John Legend
4. Bill Kristol
5. The guy who invented the term “digifolk”

2/3/09 Yet another rant on Washington Drivers

I’ve come to respect Washington drivers. Like respect in the sort of dangerous entertainment they provide my morning commute. I mean there’s nothing else you can do but just watch the folly in wonder especially when you are sitting in traffic trying to get around the accidents they cause. Oh the futility of the Washington driving experience! When the weather is good we sit in traffic and when the weather is bad we sit in more traffic. I define two types of “bad” weather drivers and I put “bad” in square quotes because of the wildly differing interpretations. Generally, if there are snow flakes falling it is “bad” weather. However, after a rain falls on heated highways (which causes more slipping than alot of treated roads in the Winter), people drive like “normal” (which is to say sucky but not self-consciously sucky). So if you are ever driving through our area in the Winter, here is what to look for.

1) Washington “Bad” Weather Driver Type 1 The idea is that if I go REAL slow bad things won’t happen to me. The problem with that theory is that by the time you move over the wet pavement it will have turned to ice or evaporated. Also the 16 wheeler who isn’t from Washington and usually drives through the mid-West whistling through blizzards at 70 mph isn’t slowing down. They also love to hug the shoulder when they arenn’t slowly moving into your lane without a signal (because to move your hand the 2 inches to turn on the signal could mean certain death). Eventually these people are found driving randomly through fields andd frozen to death but still going 1 mile per hour.

2) Type 2 – I guess the theory with this type is that if I go REAL fast then my tires will lift from the pavement and the dreaded ICE will not affect me. They seem to drive like there is an unseen force pressing on the gas pedal and they are just there to vaguely steer the car. They drive like they are in a cut-scene of a disaster movie where everyone is fleeing the monster. Of course, while they are talking on the cell phone – probably telling wifey to stock up on peanut butter, bread and toilet paper.

1/28/2009 Shut up, President Urkel

So I see that it has only taken a week for President Smarty-Pants to stick his foot in his mouth.

President Barack Obama, steeled by many snowy Chicago winters, expressed disbelief Wednesday when his daughters woke up to find that their classes had been canceled for the day. …

Asked if he meant the people of the national’s capital are wimps, Obama said: “I’m saying, when it comes to the weather, folks in Washington don’t seem to be able to handle things.”

Gee, sir welcome to DC. Now shut the frak up and go work on the economy.

Besides, dissing one of your earliest and most fervent supporters (Mayor Adrian Fenty), you just showed us how little you understand about DC. At heart, we are a Southern town. We aren’t machine efficient like all the little Automatons that ran your Inauguration with their twitters and blackberries – which for all that detailed planning wasn’t exactly a smashing success. We have to acclimate to things here in the South. Our climate is not Chicago – snow in the Winter is not a normal thing and we’re almost never ready for it. Because of our geographic position, we also experience lots of shifts between freezing and non-freezing temperatures. Lord knows we try and our last few Mayors have really gotten the city to be more responsive to these types of things. It’s a pretty bad thing if a DC Mayor ignores snow removal.

But here in the South, we realize that we aren’t perfect and we don’t know everything and we fuck up sometimes – unlike certain folks from the Midwest who like to pose in front of Superman statues. So we are extra careful. Every few years we get ahead of ourselves and we don’t want to come home from work and hear about a school bus accident.

DC school systems are also somewhat complex with all the charter schools, private schools and so on. Buses cris-cross the city willy-nilly. Some children use other means to get to school. Alot of them also walk. I was out this morning and I don’t know about Chicago but it takes a while for some of the sidewalks to get cleared. To plow and salt for the school buses here is a massive task and you might want to ask Mayor Fenty how hard it is to raise money for things like this. Unfortunately, our children don’t go to school in armored traffic-stopping limousine motorcades (not that there’s anything wrong with this, I want your daughters to be safe and sound!).

The thing is if we continue to get snow, we get used to it. We learn from our mistakes and we fix them and our administrators get more confident about the cancellation question.

I’m just saying, Mr. President Know It All – you have your job, DC will do its job as we always have. We really don’t appreciate you acting like a first year resident – live here for a longer time and maybe you’ll get this town – and I’m not saying that I “get” this town just that you get more perspective the longer you live here.

You can help in number of ways but you are not helping when you second-guess us, question our manhood when it comes to protecting children and compare us with a large city that deals with snow and ice on a more frequent basis. I should also point out that Chicago has several Congressmen and Senators representing it with real votes so maybe that helps when they are raising funds to keep the roads clear.

1/27/2009 A common common cold

Like an unwanted visitor, Mr. C. Cold crept into bed with me last night so I don’t feel so chatty. This year’s nasopharyngitis seems to fixate on the esophagus. It made it prescense known by boring into that part of my neck and leaving me with a vague itch, an itch which doesn’t scratch unless I try to talk. And instead of talking, what occurs is a cascade of deep lunged coughs each one causing additional aggravation. If you try to hold the cough it just bubbles up through your neck. Minimal nose congestion although, yes, there is phlegm.

This year’s common cold variant also seems a bit capricious. It seemed to go away in the late morning only to return like an annoying child after its nap. I suppose I can look forward to several more days of this. Can’t wait for the headaches to start.

1/26/08 I Often Dream in Parables

Last night I had a dream and when I awoke I realized it was very much like a parable from the New Testament. However, I’m not sure its a religious parable so much as it is a parable for modern project managers… on the other hand, I’ll let the reader decide both to what it applies and what the answer is.

A rich man gathered his household on a late Summer day and informed them that soon they would be leaving the Summer house and moving to a warmer climate.  He told them to make the normal preparations for the trip but to also prepare for a work crew who were to perform renovations during the long Winter months.  He then left to visit his relatives and say his goodbyes for the season.  The servants went to work packing and obtaining the horses and equipment needed for the move.  They also provisioned supplies and created a barracks near the home for the workers to sleep and eat in.

On the eve of the trip to the South, the rich man once again gathered his household.  He was very unhappy.  “I told you to prepare the house for the workers,” he explained.  “Why did you not remove the rugs and put them in storage for they are to build a new marble floor to cool our feet in the heat of the summer.  Why did you not remove the pictures and tapestries for they are to paint and ornament the walls to cheer us up?  Why did you not clear the garden of the sculptures so they workers could plant the trees that will provide the house with shade?”

But the workers pleaded with him that they had no knowledge of his intentions.  He said, “if that was so, why did you not ask me or send word to me with your questions?”

“Now I must decide whether to leave you to complete this work or hire a separate host of workers to complete the task!”

Now who is at fault here?  The rich man for not stating in more detail his requirements – or the workers for not asking for more detail?

Who should pay – the workers by being left behind to complete the job or the rich man by hiring other workers to do it?

1/23/2009 Meanwhile, at an undisclosed location…

I spent most of the work day at one of those non-descript, barely marked facilities that encircle this Great Beltway plotting through the details of a large project we have been developing over the past few months.  This was a sort of impromptu strategy session that arose when I realized we had several problems in our plan.  Problems arise from several areas – in this case, what do we do if the technology doesn’t mature in time for the project, how do we solve some of the issues in the project we have little expertise on and finally how do we address our vulnerabilities to the various hungry wolves and sly bandits that inhabit the The Great Beltway.

So it goes.  Our weapons are our brains and our delivery platforms are Powerpoint.   The military has an unwieldly term for it – DOT-M-LPF.  It’s an acronym (of course) where the “M” stands for Material (or is it Materiel).  Techonlogists usually just focus on the Materiel part.  We work it in the lab and our testbeds and assume it’s just a simple exercise for the reader to figure out how to use it in a real enterprise.   The DOT and the LPF stand for six things (and there are probably more) that should be considered – Doctrine, Organization and Training as well as Leadership, Personnel and Facilities.  I’ve seen this concept simplified somewhat into the term Mission Capability Packages.  I assume there’s something similar in the business world – mostly likely in that fadotype of several years ago – “change engineering”.  The thing is we, the enterpreneurs, don’t know what the Doctrine is, we have a little idea of the Organization that will be needed to support the enterprise and while its boring we can probably suss out how to do the training (of course, who does the training is more to the point).  Leadership is really another term for what we genially call “Socialization” — that is getting the Big Dogs on board, finding a Champion (or preferably Champions) to help you keep the hounds at bay.  Personnel is really about more than assembling the development and implementation team it’s about who sustains the thing once we move on.  Facilities, finally, is sometimes not pertinent but in our case it will be — where is the equipment going to be powered, cooled, floored and so forth.  Even down to answering questions like, will the elevators handle the load and are the computer racks too high for the doorways.

Compared to yesterday, though, even though at the end of the day we had a dirty whiteboard, it felt more rewarding than getting assigned “action items”.  Ah, “action items” – I find these things often best forgotten.  If they were important I’d be doing them already.  Why do I need some sniffly management type to assign me an “action item” and then insolently “track” said action item.  Should said sniffly management type instead go somewhere and stuff himself and take his sniffly ass off the project so I can hire engineers who can program, analysts who can think and admins who can, uh, admin or whatever it is they do?  Most of the projects are so overweighted with sniffly management types and their action items.  It’s not a job, it’s a career.  I’d say other nasty things but its best not to think about such things at the end of a day.

1/22/2009 A crispy basil duck kind of day

It’s one of those days which at the end you wonder why you do it.  Why do you get up early to prepare for a meeting with an obstinate ass who has been playing beaurcratic avoidance games for the past THREE MONTHS.  When you finally do get him “cornered” you find he’s a lamb, a pussy cat who just wants to be stroked and some minor cosmetic concessions to your proposal.  He’s also got technical information which in a one-on-one basis, he’s willing to provide.  It provides pieces to a puzzle for which if you had had three months ago, would have saved much time and money for your customer.

The next injustice of the day is the business teleconference.  Here you sit gathered around a black box dealing with people who are unprepared, unintelligent and uninformed.  Basically, they are the “uns” who like to do teleconferences.  They need their hands held, basic truths explained in detail, many times over.  They have something that you want and usually the good thing is that they don’t even know it.  They make you hate yourself for having to be so manipulative to get it but in the end everyone’s gonna be happy so why not pull their strings.  The thing is it’s stuff that’s so intuitively obvious to me and many of those around me.  And yet… three hours later.

Then its onto one of the verities of working in this age of globalization — conferences with people who are on timezones 14 hours apart (or 10 hours depending on which way you are travelling).  They’re bleared eyed and waking up while you are tired and thinking about home.  The “uns” are here too but usually as strap-hangers, harmless yet still impediments to efficient information exchange and collaboration.

But why for the love of God does DC still have to be grid-locked at 7PM?  Is everyone else also a workaholic or dealing with partners 180 degrees away on orb we call home?  No, it’s probably Yet Another March – in this case the whining pro-lifers and their annual inanity.  Poor folks though had no President to address their gathering this year.  Current one kinda has more important things to do.

Speaking of the current President, I know you think you are smart what with this built-in babysitter (your mother-in-law) but please don’t be one of those Presidents that’s always got to go out at night and mess up traffic.  Some of us work late and we’re REALLY beat and the last thing we need is your motorcades stopping traffic in all directions so you can go sip wine with Oprah or break bread with Warren or whatever gajillionaire you folks are so attracted to this week.  Say what you will about Bush but he was a homebody who was tucked into bed early.  Clinton was workaholic who worked late at night and partied at home.  Really, if your chef can’t cook it, then fire him or her and get a new one.  And learn your lesson well from all those Clintonite you hired — there’s always delivery.

I have to say the biggest wuss of this week has to be this guy who is threatening to sue Dionne Warwick because she cancelled her Inauguration Ball and didn’t give out refunds right away.  He really sounds like a whiney bitch, come on, dude.  Man up a little.  Do what I do when you’re handed lemons.  Call up Thai Coast and order a crispy basil duck dinner and some steamed dumplings.  Crack open that bottle of wine and prepare yourself for another day of injustice and maybe a little bit of joy.  It can happen.

1/21/2009 zeppelins are the future

H. came by the office all excited about zeppelins.  He says zeppelins are the future – specifically mounting Super HDTV camera on them – that its big enough to handle the large cameras, travels at the right speed and altitude, etc. etc.  He found a company that is flying the only zeppelin in the US.  Mayhem will no doubt follow in the wake of this idea.  He’s also excited about marrying a program from Microsoft with a SuperHD camera to create near-real-time high resolution 3-D motion imagery.  Microsoft used to be part of the evil empire (along with, of course, Cisco).  

DC seems to be picking itself up and dusting itself off.  There still seem to be alot of people in town, possibly folks who bought week long leases and are now out sight-seeing or perhaps basking in the glow of Obama.  I drove through the mall and it looks pretty devastated but no more than it does/did after the last Inauguration or Million whatever marches.  Despite what I saw, I understand there was some harrowing moments with crowds especially people trying to get off the Mall after the ceremony ended.  My biggest criticism (at least from my vantage point) was that there wasn’t alot of “shared situational awareness”.  The National Guard did’nt know the town.  I had to explain to one Guardsman, god bless him, what the Washington Monument was and where it was.  They didn’t even have maps and it wasn’t until one of them came over that they got one from me.  Had I known that they were this unprepared I would have given them maps earlier.  Alot of people were asking them directions and I got the vibe that some people thought I was selling something and were giving me wide girth.  

Back to my point — even though Metro was sending out SMS, common and accurate information was not being distributed.  If we had known they had shut down the 7th street exit in SW, we could have told people to expect this and work their way down to 14th street.  DDOT had radios but that was mainly just for coordinating at a tactical level.  I didn’t even see whether the Guardsmen had anything — sure didn’t look like it.  They were mainly given some simple orders – guard this street and only let X, Y and Z through and that’s abou tit.  

 I am an information junkie and naturally want to see what’s ahead of me.  It improves my attitude when I’m not behind a bus in some unforseen traffic jam.  Most of the information we got was rumor.  One guy was getting information off of Twitter.  Was it accurate? Maybe.  I was getting SMS from Metro and that at least prepped me for my route home.  Just seems to me like all the different agencies could come up with a single feed of information that’s vetted and trusted and that could go out to people with mobile phones.

C. tells me he is sick and caught a bug over the weekend.  Poor guy.  I’m pretty good this year.  I’m hobbling around from using a different set of muscles over the past few days and still recovering from some dental work but nothing serious.  yeah, I think colds can get serious.  Guy next door died a few days ago from insomnia.  Granted he smoked a horrendous amount of cigarettes and was up there age-wise.  He was a nice guy, though.  Retired lawyer, long divorced that spent alot of time on some patch of land he owned where he set up a garden.  I won’t miss the smoke that would seep through my bathroom vent but I’ll miss him.