I was being touristy around San Francisco yesterday and had a great time. Alas, when I left DC last week, I forgot two things: my camera and a hat. While my phone takes pretty good outdoor pictures in good light, it's a lousy hat.

Per habit, I droppped by Worn Out West in my travels through the Castro and I found a hat with which I fell instantly in love. It was the only one of its style and to my shock it fit perfectly so I'm taking this as a very good omen. And it was only $16.

After I purchased it, I immediately put it on as I was stuffing my change into my wallet. The salescritter looked up, appeared startled and said, "That really looks great on you!" I'd expect that sort of thing from salesfolks before the sale, but not afterwards so I feeling quite pleased that my initial impression of the hat was shared by at least one other.

Later that same day, I ran into another couple of guys I know. Each one commented spontaneously how much the loved the hat. Great!

( Here's a crappy self-photo with my mobile phone this morning in my hotel room. Trust me, it looks better in person. )

This morning, however, I noticed some odd behaviors by other people.

Few people have ever held a door open for me; certainly, I've never had anyone spontaneously jump up to get the door for me. At a crosswalk, all traffic stopped dead in three lanes and waved for me to cross at my leisure, even though I didn't have a walk signal. At the restaurant where I stopped for lunch, a mother admonished her two kids to make space for the gentleman approaching behind them. Curious.

When I figured it out, I almost spit Coke Classic across the table. With the white beard and the style of the hat, I suddenly look 65+ years old instead of 45. I'm suddenly getting the senior's courtesy benefit. Crap! (I wish I had noted the looks on the drivers' faces when I sprinted across the road instead of edging across slowly.)

So do I want to be seen as a spritely 70 year hold or a slovenly 45 year old?

Tough call.

From this article:

The billion-dollar list now excludes Facebook Inc., which on Friday is set to become a publicly traded company, valued at north of $100 billion. But it does include a large share of high-flying Web players such as file-sharing company Dropbox Inc. and room-rental provider Airbnb Inc., as well as a few lesser-known start-ups such as e-commerce platform company Rearden Commerce Inc. [<--my employer] and business software maker Workday Inc.

Let's hope! I could use the cash.

When I work from home, my regular morning commute is the long slog from the bedroom downstairs to the computer cave. If I'm in a hurry, I can cover that distance in five seconds; if I'm still half asleep, it can take as long as a full minute.

Working from California, however, my commute has grown enormously.


This photo is taken from the couch in my hotel room where I'm sipping a chilled glass of ginger ale. The red arrow indicates my office. The unfeeling bastards make me get dressed every day, walk out of the hotel, across the alley to the front of the building and press an eleveator button to take me to the 6th floor where I then have to walk unaided to my workstation.

The horror of it all is worthy of a Stephen King novel. In fact, it might be the only plot he hasn't used yet in some novel or another. Hey, Stephen! Call me!

As I sit in Dulles Airport, waiting to catch my flight to visit the mothership in the San Francisco bay area, I thought I'd mention my Dear Employer is still hiring. In fact, we have 52 open positions in San Francisco, the US east coast, Arizona and Bangalore!

If you apply for one of these jobs, use me me as a reference... we can split a generous recruitment bonus!

I'm heading to the San Francisco area yet again, visiting my corporate overlords at the mothership in San Mateo. In a nutshell, I'm arriving around noon on Tuesday, May 15, returning in the early morning of Monday, May 21.

Booking this trip was a much more painful experience than it should be. Ideally, I prefer to fly non-stop on Virgin America. My next preferred airline would be Southwest as I'm close to getting some free flights and/or perks. (For the record, I despise American Airlines with the white-hot fury of a thousand suns and wish United would burst into flames before collapsing into a point singularity, taking with them any trace of their prior existence.) I also prefer to fly into SFO since it's just up the road from the office and to stay at the Marriott Courtyard hotel just behind my office building.

That's the ideal trip: flying Virgin to SFO to stay at the Marriott Courtyard.

Problems:

1. Virgin America wasn't showing up in our in-house travel reservation system.
   
2. Southwest had no flights from BWI within my budget within my preferred date range;
   
3. In the range I could afford, there were no Southwest direct flights and none to SFO;
   
4. The Courtyard had no rooms past May 22.

Ultimately, through a painful series of compromises, I'm flying Southwest with a single stop in each direction, Dulles to/from San Jose. At least I get my preferred hotel, thank god, but I couldn't get a confirmation for my rental car so I'll have to do that manually.

I hope the trip itself goes off without a hitch, since booking it took a lot more time & effort than it should.

After last week's work-related ugliness, the weasels in California had a revelation: the problem which we were digging so deeply into turned out to be not in the systems we were told. Indeed, the problem seems to be a coding issue in the back-end core apps, completely unrelated to the web servers and translation proxies they had originally assessed as faulty.

So the many hours spent on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and all day Friday turned out to be a complete waste. Total.

You can imagine how happy I was at this news.

Since we didn't get to the trailer, we had an otherwise free weekend so I determined I should try to do what I was going to at the trailer anyway: cut myself off from the world and just read.

In all, I started & finished three books and got a good start on a fourth. We visited kent4str's mother in the rehab facility for her mild stroke --she's doing very well but still has some weakness on her right side. (She'll be released back into the wild in a couple of weeks.) And I wrote some good C2 choreography last night to be used later this week.

The reading helped improve my mood quite a bit. Paying some bills also lifted my spirits, even though the bank deposit from my latest pay period still doesn't reflect my raise or back pay yet.

My plan is to have a relatively relaxing Monday --as relaxing as Mondays can be-- and then join the gang for half-price burgers at Mr Henry's tonight. If I can, I'll try to generate a few more square dance sequences before the day is through but that'll be a bonus.

The utter lack of civility, courtesy or thoughfulness on the sd-callers mailing list continues to astonish me. It's embarrassing to read.

CALLERLAB officially announced yesterday that the Advanced call "half-breed thru" is being renamed to "brace thru." There has been low level grumbling for many years that the term "half-breed" was demeaning and insulting; I have cringed every time I've had to use it, and have taken great pains to avoid using the call unless absolutely necessary. Personally, I'm relieved it's being renamed to something innocuous.

I suspect a huge portion of the square dance world would shrug its shoulders, realize very little has changed and move on as though nothing had happened. Of course, those who object to the renaming are incredibly vociferous in their objections --after the fact.

I find the basis for the objections a little odd. For the most part, there are three lines of argument.
1. "I'm not insulted by the term 'half-breed,' therefore no one else could be. This is just political correctness!"
2. "I'll have to redraft *all* my choreo cards!"
3. "Change?! I demand a vote!"

Argument #3 is easily dismissed. Calls are determined by program lists issued by CALLERLAB; each list is maintained by a particular committee with open membership. Want something changed? Join the committee, lobby for your change and vote in committee. There is no cost except time. These things aren't done in secret by a cabal in a secret chamber in some faraway island. If you didn't know the change was coming, you weren't paying attention. And now that the change has been made, the same process can be used to change it back: those complaining have every right to join the committee, propose the change and vote as they wish.

Argument #2 is also pretty easily demolished. It's just a name change: there was no change to the definition or the program list where it resided. One can either just scratch out the old name and scribble in the new one, or just leave the cards as is and mentally substitute the new call on the fly. Any caller worthy of the title should be able to do this.

Argument #1 seems to be the most common reaction on the callers' email list currently. As you can guess, I don't give it much credibility. Whether a term is insulting or not is subjective, not objective; just because a handful of people don't find it offensive doesn't mean others can't. Social context matters a great deal too: an intimate friend calling me a 'dumb bitch' over cocktails at happy hour is a world apart from, say, a manager at a business meeting.

As square dance callers, the words we inject into a microphone are amplified by both the sound systems and by our position as community leaders. Verbal missteps by dancers are forgotten in seconds, missteps by club officers in hours or days, missteps by callers might as well be etched a mile high on the side of a mountain for eternity. What we say to whom and when matters enormously. Even if one could imagine a world where 'half-breed' wasn't an insult, the universe isn't static: there was a time the infamous n-word was commonly heard in even polite conversation but few would accept it today.

I think there may be an age split on the 'brace thru' renaming issue, but it's hard to tell. My perception (and it is only that, a perception) is that no one under the age of 40 has objected while those who complain the loudest are 50+ years of age. However, this may be because the number of callers under the age of 40 is miniscule compared to those aged 50 or more.

In any case, I follow CALLERLAB rules and heartily embrace this particular list change. And I can finally use the call without cringing.

Early morning flights are a pain in the butt but it's a necessary evil. *sigh*

We're heading to southern Ontario this morning to celebrate my grandmother's 85th birthday in Drumbo, ON. Our little jaunt this morning will take us from home to BWI Airport, then a quick hop to Buffalo, NY, where we'll rent a car to drive across the border into Canada and to Toronto where we're staying with friends.

Planned side trips this weekend will also include a visit to my financial advisor, a meal at Swiss Chalet, a visit to the St Lawrence Market and at least one meal with the clan aside from Grandma's event. We may yet squeeze some other stuff into the schedule but this trip is primarily about family until they drive me freaking nuts and we need to escape.

Pray for all involved.

A headhunter with which I've done business in the past is looking for a Linux engineer for Arlington, VA. If you're interested, ( click here )