The River

I have spent a significant part of the last two years getting something “off my chest” and “out of my system”. When I was finished, I, at least, was pleased with the result. That effort had become the book that I always said I was going to write, and it got named Screen Saver.

But I had forgotten. Bruce Springsteen had accomplished the same thing with elegance, and he only needed to use four minutes and fifty nine seconds:The River.

Sadness

When I left IBM I was too young and too poor to retire. I waited until later when I was older and too poor before I retired.

In the first phase of my post IBM life I didn’t get very far from IBM. That was because the only post IBM way of earning a living that I was able to find in the short time that I had available for that discovery process was to be an IBM Agent.

Being an IBM Agent was something like being an Agent for an insurance company. The similarity was that, like an insurance company, IBM was a huge international corporation that wanted to reduce or eliminate as much direct sales expense as it was possible to eliminate without losing some semblance of loyalty from that replacement sales force.

For years that had been a work in progress. In Screen Saver I recount a number of stories about that ongoing process, including the time that I spent getting on a plane at LaGuardia or Newark every Sunday and returning from Atlanta every Friday. The week that that traverse allowed to take place in Atlanta had been filled with work on a three person task force which was trying to figure out how to sell new business solutions (small value-added computer systems) through some channel other than card carrying IBM employees. It was odd that the answers that the task force came up with ended up being my third-to-last IBM job and my first post IBM way of earning a living. Those answers were two things: independent businesses to be constituted as IBM Agent Firms and a new IBM function called the Complementary Resources Manager – an IBM employee whose job it was to provide for the care, feeding and IBM interface to those Agent Firms. I was the first CRM in Spokane and I later became the IBM New Business Agent Firm in Seattle.

As things turned out, the Seattle endeavor probably would have been successful, both for me and for IBM if IBM had not perceived itself as being in the process of going out of business. That meant that the expense of nurturing a brand new business long enough to become successfully independent was not an option and what probably needed to be a three to five year transition plan became an aborted one year. IBM tried to dress the abandonment of the Agent Program in its best go-to-meeting clothes, but I had worked for the company for too long to fall for that artifice. So after a year of being an Agent firm with four employees I went to being a loosely affiliated IBM ally with no employees who made more money from consulting and technical writing than I made from the IBM relationship. Ultimately we migrated to being soley a consulting and technical writing firm.

But during that start up year, the full twelve months of the non-diluted IBM Agent relationship, I had a lot of support from IBM. That support included office space for me and my employees in the IBM building, a monthly non-recoverable stipend for each of my sales territories, a variable payment for just taking the responsibility of the territory and commissions for whatever IBM goods and services we sold to our customers.

All of those payments added up over a little time to a surprisingly significant monthly payment from IBM. Those payments came to me in the form of a monthly check from IBM. For whatever reason, it seemed like a good idea to have my business bank account close to the IBM office. The closest bank was a small branch of US National Bank – at that time still a Portland business, and as an almost native Portlander I had had a US National Bank account in my previous life – so it just seemed natural to do business with them.

The branch was in a quaint, old, not many storied building that had somehow evaded the all too prevalent downtown Seattle wrecking ball. After US National, for whatever reason moved from the location it became a Starbucks. It was on the corner of 6th and Seneca.

I had two contacts. One was a dithering young woman who was, she assured me, my Personal Banker. The other was the Branch Manager. I didn’t have much contact with the Branch Manager, but since I was the CEO of a member of the small business community, a new customer, and it was turning out, a fairly significant depositor, my “Personal Banker” had made sure that I had been exposed to that level of executive bank contact.

The Branch Manager was a quiet-spoken, rather slight of build African American. In my little contact with him he seemed to care about his customers, know a lot about his business and how it might be of service to people like me and was credible when he said that if I ever needed help beyond what my Personal Banker could provide that he was ready to serve. I believed it and that was a tribute to his credibility. There are a lot of glad–handers in positions such as his; I felt that he wasn’t one of them.

But that is all told to set the stage for my short, sad tale.

One late mid afternoon I needed to go over to the bank to make a deposit. I left the IBM building and crossed over to the bank, tried the door and found that it was locked. The bank was closed for the day.

The sidewalk, being in the middle of down town, was fairly busy. As I turned to go back to IBM, and as I brushed by a few bustling passers-by I became aware of a person a little farther away from me than those that were immediately around me as I turned from the bank doorway.

I didn’t really look at him, but I must have glanced in his direction. Because I formed the immediate impression that he was a he, not a she. Somehow, because it was downtown and he was coming directly toward me, I formed the immediate impression that he was begging.

As the word “no” was forming for articulation, one additional random piece of data was added to my fairly amorphous grasp of the situation. The guy was African American.

Before I could say my incipient word he spoke. “We’re closed for the day, but the branch down two blocks is open until six.”

“Hey, thanks” I must have said. I never really knew because in that split second I recognized my “Personal Banker’s” boss, the Branch Manager of the bank.

As I walked down Sixth Avenue to the other branch I was unable to stop the instant replay of the whole just-completed encounter. And it always ended the same. And before long the only thing that remained, playing over and over and over until I wanted to crawl into a hole somewhere and not come out until it stopped playing was the same thing.

The only thing that remained, the only memory, the only real and tangible image being flashed by my personal screen saver then, and even now as I write this, was a look of utter and profound sadness.

This Will Be - Mercifully - Brief

Here are two things. They are related, at least in my mind, probably in no one else’s mind, but related for me. Call them threads in a larger, much more heavily threaded cloth of tragedy; call them key elements in the “decline and fall”; call them what they are: stupidity and cynicism. Whatever you call them there is a stench rising from them, although, to the cultured stench detecting nose, they differ slightly.

Abject Stupidity: A majority of Americans have no idea what the larval health care bill contains – as neither do I – but they are “agin” it. I’m not “agin” it.

Cynical emulation of being principled: The republicans have found nothing in anything the new administration has proposed that they can favor. So they say. The facts are, they have a super minority with which, armed with the blanket threat of filibuster, they can bring down a presidency. They hope to then replace it with one of their own.

How nice.

The Bath At Cluny

There are a number of Roman ruins spread around France. Among them are the remains of a coliseum at Bordeaux and the still-being-used coliseum/bullring at Arles. But my favorite is right in downtown Paris. It is the Bath at Cluny. It is on Boulevard St-Germain not far from where Boulevard St-Germain bends to cross the river at Pont de Sully and becomes Boulevard Henri Quartre.

The Romans built it sometime in the early centuries of the first millennium, and, after they left it was turned into a monastery or convent, I never can remember which. Actually I can’t remember whether it was turned into either of those things. But it was turned into something other than a Roman bath, and that something – whatever it might have ever been - caused the then residents to install stained glass windows. I really like stained glass windows, which is odd because I don’t have any affinity for churches or religion.

Actually I have developed a great deal of affinity over the last few years for the cathedrals of Europe. Except for London and Brussels the only cathedrals I have ever actually seen are all in France, but it sounds more impressive – to me at least – to claim affinity with the cathedrals of all Europe rather than just those of France; and cathedrals, I have been told, are churches, although they have no similarity to the down-at-the-heel things that are called churches and are on offer in the United States; and I really like the Cathedrals’ stained glass windows. Even though Cluny has stained glass windows I don’t think it was ever a cathedral.

So that is what is imbedded in the beginning of this little drop of drivel.

I really wish that Blogger would let me, or I could figure out if it does let me and I am just too stupid to figure out how, to put my pictures where I want to put them.

But I guess campared to the implications of the new republican super minority in the US senate, or the bothersome realization flowing from the fact, that, thanks to the strictly constructionist five judges on the supreme court, we won't even get to choose who to send back to Washington to get bought by the lobbyists, my problems are really trivial.

The Joys OF Adobe Illustrator: Part Two

Recently my son sent me an email with this raster image – it was a bitmap (bmp) file. He asked me if I could work any magic that would improve it. At least that was what I interpreted his email to say. Emails from Joe are always terse to the point of incoherence. But that is what I interpreted him to be asking.

Imagine my excitement when I saw before me another chance to use Adobe Illustrator to make the world a better place. It looked to me as if just getting the clear color of a vector image to replace the muddy color of the starting project would be an improvement. I assumed that the ability to “scale” the finished vector product would be a plus. Scaling allows the finished product to be made massively smaller or massively larger, or any stop in between those extremes, and retain perfect clarity and resolution no matter what the level of the scale. That means an Illustrator file can be used for anything from logos on a business card to pictures on a billboard. I was not at all sure what anyone might want to do with the “challenged boaters’ forum” crest, but I figured that scalability couldn’t be a bad thing.

So, my return email said “I can and I will”. And then I set out to do it.

With Illustrator one uses “layers” and “sub layers” which are digital versions of acetate overlays. To use them it is desirable to decide ahead of time what the individual components of the illustration are going to be, what their layer order is going to be, and what if any sub-layers are going to come into play in each component layer.

In the case of this project the choice was obvious - at least to me. I started out at the lower left and planned to go to the right and up through the image.

Without going step by step through the nuances of how I got the thing finished, it is at least worth mentioning that the apparently easy starting point – the white flag with the red parallelogram – almost brought me to my knees. But I finally figured it out and ultimately triumphed.

Here is the finished product.

The Joys Of Adobe Illustrator: Part One

A number of years ago, for no apparent reason, I decided that I needed to enroll in a certificate program at Bellevue Community College. Actually I had a reason, but I really didn’t realize it at the time: it wasn’t until some years later when I had the time – time be damned; it was the inclination – to reflect on what I laughingly have refered to as my life, that I realized that I had been subject to the subtle influences of “they”. You know, “they” say that one needs to network; “they” say that one needs to have a number of different resumés; “they” say that one needs to keep getting additional education – and all of that “they” stuff.

Somewhere I had heard that Bellevue Community College had a really good multi-media authoring certificate curriculum.

I had no idea what multi-media authoring might be. In spite of that fact it just sounded good.

This had occurred at a time when I was in the midst of teaching myself HTML, with the help of Laura Lemay and her amazing how-to book for HTML 3.2. I was fascinated by it. I had never encountered anything that resembled computer programming that had such an immediate positive or negative reinforcement component. Having completed a chunk of HTML code – using MS Notepad as the editor – all I had to do was save it as HTM or HTML, click on it and get an immediate “it works” or an immediate “what were you thinking?” back from the browser. I used Netscape in those days since MS Internet Explorer was so rudimentary that it shouldn’t have even been called a browser. (The distance Microsoft travelled in almost no time from that Explorer to the one that they unleashed on the market shortly after the morning that Bill Gates must have awakened and realized he was about to lose the whole game if he didn’t turn his company on its axis, was nothing short of amazing; but the Explorer available when I was in my HTML-coder days was a joke.) Anyway, I was having more fun than it ought to be possible to have building my first web site from scratch. I was otherwise employed as an entrepreneur running my own IBM Agent and Wholesale Distribution Consulting and Technical Writing business with my wife, but I had plenty of time – sometimes until three or four in the morning - to pursue the HTML wil-o-the-wisp.

Somewhere during that time I heard about the curriculum at BCC. Under what must have been the influence of “they” (“they” say that multi-media authoring is the next big thing – perhaps) I decided to look into it.

In almost no time I was attending the first night class of what was going to turn out to be one of the three classes that I had signed up for that quarter. Before I finally became a community college drop-out I had accumulated almost sixty credit hours, had an almost four point GPA, and had learned a lot of stuff that was going to prove to be a fortuitous addition to my life as I entered unemployed – some call it retired – old age. I had learned how to make movies with Adobe Premiere, how to invent my own world with Adobe Photoshop and, I wasn’t really sure to invent what, with Adobe Illustrator.

Premiere and Photoshop, each in its own manner – Premiere with aggressive abandon and Photoshop with a passive-aggressive turn of character – deal with raster files. Think of Georges-Pierre Seurat’s paintings and you know what a raster file is. Raster files are goldmines of possibilities: they can be cloned; they can be flipped; they can be warped and woofed and reflected and distorted; they can be gray-scaled and they can be RGB’d or CMYK’d; they can be overlaid with varying transparencies to reveal their inner meaning; they can be selectively cut and pasted. If they happen to come with sound and thirty frames per second they can be cut, overlaid, titled and faded to black or white or in some inventive flow of imagery be rolled over to; those are called movies. The possibilities are apparently endless. But they always end up being in some way or another, just a subset of what all those pixels were when one started to manipulate them. And that is the point. A raster file has to already exist to be dealt with.

But Illustrator is different. Illustrator generates vector files. Think of Albert Einstein with a black board full of equations to understand what a vector file is. Because each line, shape, color, font, line thickness or drop shadow exists only on the basis of its co-ordinates on their page and on the basis of the mathematical characteristics that have been told to tag along with those co-ordinates. With Illustrator one can start with a blank page on a blank art board and, with various tools, keys and drop down menus, create a world from one’s mind where only blankness had existed moments before. To do that, of course takes artistic talent.

Lacking that one can trace things. That’s what I do.

But even tracing takes some talent and some imagination. Illustrator gives one more brush strokes, line segments and polygonal possibilities than it is possible to absorb in one, or even many, sittings. So, as one stares at the template of some raster file that is about to be traced to its eternal improvement, the choices of how to do it become something of an exercise in itself. And once the choice for any particular piece of the tracing has been made, the actual execution of that choice can become a career in itself. Making just the right curve – a curve that perfectly overlays that which is being traced – with the Bezier curve tool (called the “pen” tool because if you can make the thing do your bidding it produces lines that flow as if they had been produced by the quill of an old fashioned ink pen) can take many tries and require one’s entire cache of colorful expletives.

In the world of vector based artistry, the world of Adobe Illustrator, one can swear and draw, swear and draw, and swear and draw. But in the end, if one perseveres, one can produce something almost from nothing.

And that is a good feeling.

Ultimately the raster-based world has the last laugh, however. The World Wide Web only understands raster files, and of those file types only a few of that large family of image file formats. Chief among those are the JPEG and the GIF.

So, if one wants to promulgate the work of an afternoon’s (or a month’s) vectorizing to the Web, one ultimately needs to bite one’s vector-based tongue and export the masterpiece to one of those formats that the Web understands. Then it can be uploaded.

Here is the first major tracing that I ever did.
Several Years later I did this one, which I posted last year on this blog.

The Pipeline Is Dry

The Economist constantly points out that the US has the best University system in the world and that there really isn't a country in second or third place. In an annual survey by the Chinese (they are trying to figure out what they need to do to get to best of breed status, and they are moving forward with vigor) on the top 20 list they are all American Universities (I can't remember whether Harvard was first or not) except for Oxford and Cambridge which were both in the top ten. No French, nor German, nor Japanese were on the list. The U of Washington was number 20, interestingly enough.

Anyway, we - the United States of America - are imminently in position of pissing that advantage away. If the kids entering the system can't read, write, think or talk coherently, and don't know math and have no idea about where anything is in the world or what has happened in the world over the last three or four thousand years, (unless Bishop Ussher's statements which are believed by many of them are taken as valid history) the system won't last very long. And it takes years to fix that problem. An empty pipeline is probably going to be a major contributor to our undoing.