Author Archives: Patrick Calder

No rave for me

1 Reply | Posted by Patrick Calder on in friends

I literally spent the entire day — minus potty breaks and a 20 minute bout of sunbathing on the roof — entering information into a website. Not designing. Not coding the site. Not debugging. Not optimizing. Just entering data. I inputted about 350 articles, after stripping them from another, older iteration of the site, and about 100 photos. I still have probably 50 to 75 articles to go. Then the site will have to be debugged. I already don’t know why the “see other stuff like this” box isn’t working. And the calendar is completely batshit.
And I want to have it ready to show the client Monday.
This is one of the reasons I didn’t go to the Rave tonight.It would run till morning, with the inevitable stop for breakfast. And I probably couldn’t get back to my place to sleep ’til noon. I would lose almost a whole day, which I don’t think I have. One of my friends reasoned something to the effect that ‘sometimes you have to suck it up and do the bad stuff instead of having fun’. Which is really kind of crap. The actual performing of the work itself is kind of neutral, enjoyment-wise. The client works for a cause I find very important. And it doesn’t hurt I’ll be making some fairly serious money… mostly due to the work I perform this weekend.
Meanwhile, come Tuesday morning, I can go throw organic debris from the Attack Cat at passing politicians in Lafayette Park if I want to. This is the thing about being your own boss. You really get to do whatever the fuck you feel like. And some of it you get paid for. So I don’t gauge this night of work as “bad”, but simply as a night of work. Tomorrow may be a night of wild sex with a supermodel. Or more work. But I love my work. And I love supermodels. So … you know… whichever.
Said friend has been trashing my career of choice and business in particular since I’ve known ’em. So I don’t get too worked up about such things they say, anyway.
(I really have a hard time using the term “career”. It seems kind of dirty, like “republican” or “Californian”. While I never forget that I may eventually go back to working for someone else, in the meantime, all things 9-5 “for the man” leave a nasty copper tang in my throat.)
The thought of a whole night of Techno kind of scared me anyway. I enjoy some seriously fucked up music… but I still have a hard time calling anyone who can’t get up and perform on a stage in a small club, a “musician”. And I’d certainly be hard pressed to pay the $45 cover charge. For $5, I could have gone to Chiaroscuro and listened to Industrial music until 3 AM, (the drunk, redneck cousin of Techno).
My friends ideas of what it is to get out and have fun doing ‘crazy’ things, lately, kind of disturb me too. Anything that requires you to deal with Ticketmaster is not “wild and crazy”. Things that you plan 3 weeks ahead of time aren’t either. Road trip? Great! To a haven of old, conservative, white people surrounded by family restaurants and tourist gift shops? Um… no.
I’m not asking my friends to be completely insane all the time. I’d have to… you know… beat them about the head or something. But I swear one of them’s gonna be inviting me to a Barry Manilow concert soon. Then I would have to strangle them with their pillow. And I’m not sure I’m strong enough to even lift the water cooler, much less toss it through a window. Even if I did, the resulting hernia would make it hard to run.
I’m not sure any of my friends have a strong grip on reality. Do I attract people with identity crisis? (We’re still a tiny bit young for mid-life crisis).Oh of course they’re good people, or I wouldn’t call them friend; a word that means too much to me. But I’ve got people here who can’t face their professional life; people who can’t face their interpersonal life, people who can’t face their intrapersonal life. (And if they’re out there reading this, planning my slow castration with a rusty spoon… remember… you’ve all told me exactly the same things about yourselves. I’m not exactly Yuri Geller here, delving into the unknown). But just… when do we finally break down, and be honest with ourselves. When do we say “This is stupid. I won’t do this anymore”.
Yeah… I’m not not a shining example for everyone to follow. I’ve always been a bit more grounded… but I don’t think that’s necessarily a good thing. If friends and family knew how far back and to what extent I do and say things because I know ahead of time that “this is the appropriate thing to say to elicit X reaction…”, they’d probably look at me like one of those robots in the movies who’ve become too human. (We’re talking pre-teen, here). More often than not, when I’m being difficult or a jerk, it’s because I’m simply tired of knowing what I should say or do, to make whoever happy.
And only a year or so back, did I notice that the cycles of clarity and depression that started towards the end of college and through my first few ‘reality’ years had vanished. No idea where they went. Seen as how it occurred around the same time I gave up being terminally negative (blame Sara… I know I was much cuter before), I’m sure they’re somehow related. Good riddance, though.
Not that the events of the last year haven’t brought their own unique facets to my life. But that’s a long discussion for another time.
So yeah… about the concert. Okay: 1) Crap music. 2) Expensive 3) No spontaneity 4) Too long. The only thing really making me want to go was to take pictures of people being crazy. But it doesn’t come anywhere near balancing out the other crap.
But I gotta hit the Market in the morning, anyway. Still have to find a present for my father.

Please keep in mind that this post is more than 6 years old. Who the hell knows what I was thinking back then?! Damn kids... get off my lawn!

Shitty jobs and hot hookers

1 Reply | Posted by Patrick Calder on in design

I had dinner tonight, in a little “those who survived our old job” gathering., hosted by our former boss. Generally it was okay, for a gathering of people who managed not to kill each other when we saw one another every day. There were just one too many digs, though, that brought back old feelings that weren’t pleasant the first time around, and certainly didn’t age well.
Consciously or subconsciously, I was always left with the feeling that in that office I was ‘tolerated’ and ‘dealt with’ by the people who ran things, rather than as some productive asset. And that they weren’t shy about letting me know that.
There was even a joke tonight about why did they wait six years before firing me. And if it wasn’t for the fore-mentioned years of being made to feel like a drain on the company, I would have surely felt like it was just a joke. But instead, it just left me fuming quietly. Not least of all because saying I was fired was stretching the truth quite a bit. At the time, I was specifically urging them to close down my department. They should give up on the failed side of the business, so that they could focus on what they do best. And I very specifically wanted them to close down my department, instead of me simply leaving, so that I could move on and take the remaining clients with me. Which is what happened in the end. Would I probably have eventually been laid off if I hadn’t made the move then? Sure. But lets remember what actually happened.
And how well the company did while I was there, and what decisions were made back then, were really none of my concern. I can, and have, spoken at length about the problems my old company had. (Read some of my old entries for details). After years of trying to help make improvements, and years of asking for the authority to improve things and be responsible for the results… and every single time being rejected…
Don’t even come to me and try, before I was fired, or at a dinner afterwards, to say that I was somehow responsible for … anything. I wanted more than anything to be responsible.
It’s easy to look back now see how stupid it was to stay in a situation like all that. I even knew it at the time. But regret is the biggest waste of an emotion. I love what I’m doing now. My clients are so much happier than I ever saw at the old company. Economically, I’m doing about 250% better that the old company was by the end. And my skill, technically and artistically, have dramatically improved.
And the hell I went through is one of those things that lets me be happy today. I’m a definite believer in the idea that you are a composite of everything you’ve experienced. I couldn’t have had the wonderful year I just did, without the things I learned at the old place — both the good and the bad.
Plus… you know… I’ve got hookers as neighbors. And when is that not a good thing?

Please keep in mind that this post is more than 6 years old. Who the hell knows what I was thinking back then?! Damn kids... get off my lawn!

a little house-cleaning

Leave a comment | Posted by Patrick Calder on in news, rant

From Randi Rhodes, a terrible radio host, who stumbled on a few good ideas for news media:

First, Congress must act to adopt standards for labeling a broadcast as NEWS. There is a right to a free press expressly guaranteed to each and every one of us, and yet there are no standards for corporations who brand themselves as news providers. We had standards for sitcom families and their sleeping arrangements. We have language standards for radio stations, but no news standards that define what journalistic principles must be present in order to brand as news.

If I may insert a note here: Wether you know it or not, this has actually gone to court. In an unlawful termination case against Fox, the court eventually ruled that there is no requirement that the news be true.

Second, I think we need to bring back the Fairness Doctrine which served this country well from 1949 through 1987. It simply guarantees competing viewpoints on issues of public importance. There’s never been and Equal Time requirement as is widely believed. We viewed station licensees to be “public trustees” and therefore, they had an obligation to present different viewpoints on issues of public importance. License holders were also required to actively seek out stories of interest to the public and air programs addressing those issues.

Thirdly, finally and most importantly, we need to protect our journalists. They must be free to report and never be penalized with lost access to the people they cover or with retribution from partisan employers. Journalists have died covering Afghanistan and Iraq in numbers that surpass the numbers of lost journalists in Viet Nam. And that is saying a lot. Coverage of Viet Nam went on in earnest for 12 years. Yet in just 2 and a half years there have been more journalists killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Dunno if I agree with number 3. How the hell do you “protect journalists’. If anything, I would prefer journalists had less to do with American soldiers and such. I think if you’re going to travel into a war-torn area to talk to and take pictures of lots of people, then you better fucking well be prepared for the consequences.

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Google owns Blogger, right? And Google has a half decent translation service for web pages. So why don’t they add a “translate this page” link to the blogspot header on Blogspot-hosted pages?

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brought to you by the Washington Post and several administration officials who wouldn’t know ethics from a hole in their backside:

“The White House said Wednesday that changes in government reports on global warming by a former oil industry lobbyist were part of a normal review and did not violate a pledge to rely on sound science.”

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On the party in power refusing to give credentials to people who didn’t support them in the last election, to attend a telecommunications conference in central America:

The White House admits as much: “We wanted people who would represent the Administration positively, and–call us nutty–it seemed like those who wanted to kick this Administration out of town last November would have some difficulty doing that,” says White House spokesman Trent Duffy. Those barred from the trip include employees of Qualcomm and Nokia, two of the largest telecom firms operating in the U.S., as well as Ibiquity, a digital-radio-technology company in Columbia, Md. One nixed participant, who has been to many of these telecom meetings and who wants to remain anonymous, gave just $250 to the Democratic Party. Says Nokia vice president Bill Plummer: “We do not view sending experts to international meetings on telecom issues to be a partisan matter. We would welcome clarification from the White House.”

— TIME.com: Any Kerry Supporters On The Line? May. 02, 2005
So we’re so concerned that certified experts in telecommunications be supportive of the administration — not the country, but the administration — that we won’t let them talk to other people about… you know… telecommunications.
More and more there’s a disconnect between the US and the world. I mean… literally. I’m constantly being reminded of the scene in Channel Zero where the protagonist, after being exiled from the US, discusses with a foreign reporter the difference in realities, between what you see from within the united states, and what you see from the outside. An all pervasive control of reality, at the borders.

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There’s something wrong with running hot dog and Perdue chicken commercials on Animal Planet.

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And only two years after I first brought it up, the FBI finally arrested the Pentagon employee who was passing secrets to Israel. If you can’t find a way to get out of the country to somewhere without an extradition treaty in two years… well you probably deserve what’s coming to you.

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Anyway… if I may paraphrase an email I recently sent Lea:

“Me? Now? I work. I work a lot. And, you know, then I work more. Working for myself, I have worse hours and longer days than I did with other jobs. But I don’t hate it. I ended up hating my last job, with passion. When I climbed in the elevator every morning, it felt a little more claustrophobic each day. So while I may panic now about a schedule, and am never sure where the next job is coming from… I feel like every day is lived in a wide-open space. (I take the stairs a lot.). And hey… the next job keeps coming.”

Please keep in mind that this post is more than 6 years old. Who the hell knows what I was thinking back then?! Damn kids... get off my lawn!

Microwave

Leave a comment | Posted by Patrick Calder on in memory

I think the best monetary investment I’ve made since moving down to DC is in my microwave. I’ve had the damn thing since 1998. There’s no other piece of electronics in this apartment that’s lasted that long, other than maybe a few watches missing their bands.
I bought it the first day I moved into this apartment. After my uncle had helped me move my shit into this place, I immediately took off for Sears, back out in Bethesda, where the day had started. At the time, it was the only place I was aware of that sold such large appliances. I was pretty excited. There was something so empowering and adult about buying a microwave. (yes, I have been a geek for a long time).
I picked out a reasonably sized one. Didn’t really think I needed the one’s large enough to dry laundry in. They sent me around to the back of the store — literally — to the pick-up counter. A ridiculous amount of time later, someone brought out my new thing.
The back of Sears, out at Montgomery Mall, is sort of around the corner, 90 degrees from the bus stop. I’m no small person, for sure, but even so, it was a pretty large box. Not heavy… just unwieldy. But now that I had it, I needed to get it home. And my only option was public transit. Of course, as I rounded the corner, I noticed the bus was already sitting there, loading passengers. I have no idea how, but I managed, carrying this box as big as my upper half, to jog across a mall parking lot. I have this picture in my mind of the little kid with a school bag three times his size, trying to run.
I wrestled it onto the bus, and apologized to each passenger who couldn’t get by me. I must have transferred to the subway at some point, but I don’t even remember how I navigated the escalators. From the subway, I would have had to carry it at least another 5 or 6 blocks to my apartment.
I’m a notorious saver of boxes. I always feel as if I may need it again, should I decide to sell or ship an item. But as soon as the microwave came out of the box, the box went into the trash. Well… you know… once I figured out where the trash room was. This was still my first day in the new apartment.
The microwave fit perfectly on my counter. It always sits in the same place. I’ve used it every day, without fail, I’m sure. Always works exactly as expected.
A good buy.
I sat back to rest and try to watch Hercules on a really scratchy channel, before I started to unpack.

Please keep in mind that this post is more than 6 years old. Who the hell knows what I was thinking back then?! Damn kids... get off my lawn!

PGP in OS X’s Mail.app

Leave a comment | Posted by Patrick Calder on in photo

I mentioned this a while back, and am finally getting ’round to it. I want to wipe out my iBook, and this was the only thing I couldn’t remember how to recreate, so bear with me, while I do it here. It is, as I remember, easier and more publicly well known that the whole SSI thing.
Pre-first thing is: you must, must, must have installed the BSD subsystem when you installed OS X. End of story. It comes on your OS X install disks, so no purchase is necessary. And it allows you to run oh-so-many wonderful unix tools. You will also need to be running system 10.3 or later.
Next: Download GPG (GNU Privacy Guard). It’s easy to install. You won’t see any new programs anywhere. It’s one of those ‘invisible’ unix apps that you access from the command line.
I already had a set of PGP keys, created with the official PGP software. If you don’t already have your own, you can use GPG to walk you through the process of creating and publishing your own keys. If you do have PGP keys, you will need to import them into your ‘GPG keyring’. First step is to export a copy from PGP, (File > Export). I then had to ‘clean up’ my old PGP keys, because they were generated long ago in a galaxy far, far away, under OS9. You need to swap the end-of-line characters to something Unix-compatible. There is an application at the above site that can do it for you, or you can do it from the command line with:

tr -d '\r' ‹ myMacOS9ExportedKeyring › myMacOSXImportableKeyring

You’re then ready to import. Now, in Terminal, you will tell GPG to import the cleaned-up keys. Type:

gpg --import --allow-secret-key-import < keypair.asc

With "keypair.asc" being the name/location of your cleaned keys.
You're done in terminal.
The program on the front end, for OSX Mail is Sen:te's GPGMail. This software will install a 'bundle' in Mail, allowing you to set your preferences, (under "Preferences"), and to encrypt and specify recipients and keys, all from a new message that you're composing. Very easy to install. Restart Mail once you're done.
This should all now work. I glossed over some of the details. But if you didn't understand any of it, you should probably stick with the standard PGP package. If and when I wipe out my iBook, I will update this article if need be based on that experience.

Please keep in mind that this post is more than 6 years old. Who the hell knows what I was thinking back then?! Damn kids... get off my lawn!

You go your way…

Leave a comment | Posted by Patrick Calder on in design

My sister may be suffering from penis envy. Or… wallet envy. Whatever. The basic idea is that I have something at the moment, that she doesn’t. And in a manner that could seem random and unfair.
I’ve been in business for a little under a year now. (I’m about 2 weeks shy of the full term). And while it was a rough start, today I am doing okay. I can’t foresee tomorrow, but I take my concerns one day at a time*. And… you know. Starting a business is an incredibly risky and stupid thing. Even more stupid is my insistence on sticking to my work as a business rather than to myself as a freelancer. (As a freelancer, I could pick up a lot of work by going into other people’s offices and working on short-term projects for them.)
Meanwhile back home in New York State…
My sister and husband bought a house, which even in a small town, ain’t cheap. Shortly afterwards, her husband was fired for questionable reasons. Spent probably six months on unemployment. He’s found a job, but a job that pays considerably less than the previous one. In the mean time, they had an accident that wiped out their only vehicle. They’ve since replaced it with two more. And these are people who say they never had much money before.
I’m aware enough of my roots to easily see how it could seem unfair of life to to treat each of us these ways. Shouldn’t dedication and hard work be more greatly rewarded than risk and dissatisfaction? I see how I could have those same feelings, had small things in my life gone differently. I just think they’re crap, though.
First of all… relatives or strangers… we all live our own lives. Like an explosion set off at birth, we all take off in our own directions, right from the start. To wonder why you don’t have Donald Trump’s life misses the point. You have you own life to make do with what you will. Outside of a bad Disney movie, you’re never going to trade places with someone else. You’ll always be you. Stop giving a fuck about what the other person did, and do something with yourself.
Being brother and sister, raised in the same household, we did share as much in common as any two people could. Nothing outside of chance and genetic mutation favored me any more than her. You have no right to be pissy just because I temporarily have some success that you don’t. Not when we were both given the same building blocks. Not when you have successes in your own life that I only wish I could achieve.
And what if you aren’t pissy, and you just think I am full of myself? Well.. I probably am. You gotta be a little conceited to try some of the things I have. But honest-to-God… what’s the point of being family if we can’t be there for each-other. And right now, I’m probably more needy than my sister. I have great victories, wonderful successes, and brilliant ideas. But who can I share them with, without coming across as a braggart. And for every joy I wish I could share with someone, I promise you I have a dozen fears, misgivings, and doubts. I spend more time now doing things that I have no idea how-to than I ever have in my life. So, yeah, many of the things in my life, good or bad, I want to talk with someone about. And if not family, then who? I’m lucky enough to have a couple friends with whom I can share some of it. But family are really the people who should offer you their shoulder regardless of what has transpired between you. (The battles and resulting cold war between my sister and father are epic. But even so, I can tell they would both drop their harsh feelings instantly if one of them could muster the strength to be the bigger person. But you want to talk about a pig-headed family? I have aunts still arguing over who took care of who 35 years ago.)
And if you think I am conceited about whatever commercial success my business might have, then you have no idea how I’m gauging success. The money has always been just a means to an end; not an end unto itself. Even running a successful business is just another means. A-#1, right there at the top of my “why I’m happy” list, is the amount of self-determination I now have. I no longer cede 40% of my life to someone else to dictate how it should be spent. I no longer leach money from someone else’s cycle, but instead generate it on my own; like enjoying the fruits of planting a vegetable garden. Nobody has the power anymore, to use the phrase “or else”, with me. I am also now able to live my life completely by my own ethics. And as far as getting something good out of all of this, when a client comes to me and says how happy they are with the results of our projects, it’s all about me. “Look… I did that. I made someone else happy!”.
Certainly all that freedom and choice comes at a cost. I work incredibly hard and suffer from the previously-mentioned, self-induced stress. I take great chances with my own standard of living. And while I’ve been incredibly fortunate so far, not every project will end with good results. Even with the best of intentions and all due effort to succeed, fate will occasionally slam you face-first into a brick wall. If I stay on this course, I’m bound to have clients someday that go completely blinking nuts and try to reek havoc in my life and business. And as my careful wording of all this rambling probably betrays, I’m careful never to forget that all my business could simply disappear tomorrow. I will have finished everything I was working on, and simply not be able to find more work. It’s a thought I’ve gone to bed with on more than one night.
So yeah… we’ve led completely different lives. I genuinely hope my sister is as happy and satisfied with her choices as I am. I may find myself working at McDonald’s a month from now, and she could win the lottery. But as long as we can talk openly about why we are where and what we are… well… that’s family.
*I blame my parent’s for never-ending exposure to that slogan.

Please keep in mind that this post is more than 6 years old. Who the hell knows what I was thinking back then?! Damn kids... get off my lawn!

Interlude.

2 Replies | Posted by Patrick Calder on in tinyfunnythings

Happy Birthday to Me.
Happy Birthday to Me.
Happy Birthday Dear Me.
Happy Birthday to Me.
Oh my God… my mom should so hate me for waking her up at this time of night.
And if you’re looking for that perfect gift to bribe me with…

Please keep in mind that this post is more than 6 years old. Who the hell knows what I was thinking back then?! Damn kids... get off my lawn!

Printers

Leave a comment | Posted by Patrick Calder on in design

I think salespeople are the last humans on earth who still email people Word files as a default method of communication. As if putting the text in the body of the email, so that I didn’t have to launch a huge, slow, ugly, expensive program just to read it, would make it any less official. Yes… they’re often contracts with a line for a signature at the bottom. But I haven’t signed one of those in years. A verbal okay or written confirmation has become standard. And you know… I really don’t care about your logo so much that needing to see it outweighs my desire to have instant access to the information I requested.
And for God’s sake… if you absolutely must email me a document, make it a PDF! They’re cross-platform, light-weight, and easy to use. Never has a PDF crashed my computer or infected my machine with viruses.
Why do salespeople suck so much at the little things?

Please keep in mind that this post is more than 6 years old. Who the hell knows what I was thinking back then?! Damn kids... get off my lawn!

Wrong from the start

2 Replies | Posted by Patrick Calder on in rant

My sister is frequently too self-righteous and pig-headed for her own good.
I called to offer her a free computer last night, since I knew of a cache of them being given away. Her immediate response was to rail against Macintoshes. There’s no way she would ever want one. She doesn’t know anything about them. Her husband is an ‘expert’ in Windows, because he is always repairing his mother’s Windows machine. And apparently I am a bad, vain person for offering her one, because not everyone “can be a computer genius”.
Several thoughts:

  1. Last Christmas, I watched her husband, the ‘expert’, take several hours, with the help of his cousins and uncles, figuring out how to download pictures from a digital camera.
  2. So according to my sister, a Windows machine like her mother-in-law’s is better, because it’s more common. Despite the fact that her husband, as she said, is over there constantly fixing it?
  3. Apparently I’ve learned much in recent years, because the last time I gave her a Macintosh, she got rid of it because she refused to believe me when I told her she could get online with it. Now, though, I’m a computer genius.
  4. Best of all… I never offered her a Macintosh. I offered her a computer. There are a couple Windows machines in the cache being given away.

But by the end, when she finishes up a five minute rant by insulting me for offering her a free computer, well… she can kiss my ass. I briefly considered sending her the Windows machine with a little note saying “I didn’t offer you a Mac”. But that idea was quickly discarded when it occurred to me that my sister of all people wouldn’t have the grace or humility to feel bad about the way she treated me. She’d just complain that it was too old or didn’t come with whatever. She can go spend a $1,000 of her own money, which I know she damn well doesn’t have.

Please keep in mind that this post is more than 6 years old. Who the hell knows what I was thinking back then?! Damn kids... get off my lawn!