So far the transition from Biden to Harris has gone swimmingly. Record numbers of people are filling stadiums to listen to these great orators wax poetically about the type of future that is possible while giving Orange Jesus some of his own. Recall in 2016 Michelle Obama’s mantra “When they go low, we go high” and how well that didn’t work out for democrats. That’s because Trump is a different kind of animal. You gotta get down in the mud with him, but without using too many words. Keep it pity. Call republicans weird and tell them to mind their own damn business. Share a cartoon that exposes the stupidity and/or hypocrisy. I’ve been saving up images from social media and now seemed like a good time to share some of the better ones that send the message in the strongest possible way.
Trump, attention seeking whore that he is, from the very beginning has had a strategy (some would say a need) to always be in the news cycle, even if it was bad news. In 2016 he promised to build a great wall on the border with Mexico and that Mexico would pay for it. The media fell for it hook, line, and sinker and ran with this story for weeks, allowing him to hand-wave when pressed for details on how any of this might get accomplished. Once the hysteria died down over that canard, he had to come with another outrageous claim to get back in the news cycle. He said he would “ban all muslims” from coming to the United States. Regardless of how unlawful or impractical a solution appeared to be, the media took the bait and ran with it. Meanwhile the other republican candidates (all 17 of them) were trying to get in to the news cycle and couldn’t get any attention. He completely sucked all the oxygen from the room, meanwhile, coming up with clever nicknames for each opponent: ‘Lil Marco. Low-energy Jeb. Sleepy Joe, Crooked Hillary, Lyin’ Ted. It worked. I will give credit where credit is due. He’s good at it.
Fast forward 7 years to 2024 and Joe Biden has just pulled the rug out from under the republican presidential campaign by withdrawing from the race with just over 100 days to go and passing the torch to Kamala Harris. Democrats rally around this news with enthusiasm and hog the news cycle for 3 whole days. All the cool kids are joining in and republicans are freaking out. It turns out Kamala is popular after all, especially with voters under 35. Now we just need to make sure they get out and vote.
I cannot wait to see what outrageous, bizarre move comes out of the Trump campaign next. It’s coming, we just don’t know what it is yet. He simply cannot stand to not be the center of attention. I’m anxiously waiting 3, 2, 1…
Privileges at work are easy to give out but hard to take back. This has been true for working from home which was absolutely necessary during Covid, but now some companies are starting to rescind those privileges for various reasons. I’ve been reading about a lot of pissed off workers who have been ordered to return to work full time “just because.”
It turns out “just because I said so” isn’t a very compelling reason for people to hop in their cars and commute two ways to work, deal with day care, and other conveniences they had when they were allowed to work from home. They want to know what changed? Why the mandate? If there’s a good reason, sure, I’ll get on board. Otherwise I would like to know what’s behind the new mandate.
My perspective on this may be a little unique on this issue. While I loved the flexibility of WFH, after 7 years I really missed some of the human interaction. Being isolated at home makes it really difficult to have work relationships in the same way they can develop with face time. At the same time I found it hard-er to get my projects done if I had to come in to the office every day. It’s often noisy and people like to interrupt me when I need to concentrate. WFH allowed me to go head down and really get some isolated time to think through technical issues without being interrupted. So can we compromise here? Yes. Yes we can.
I once had a job and a manager for about 18 months that was absolutely perfect with his WFH policy. In talking to him about it I came to the conclusion that yes, the job requirements will be best met if I utilize some face time with the developers. Whiteboard sessions were extremely valuable and the tools for doing that at the time using Teams were terrible. There wasn’t any way of getting out of coming in some of the time. Fine by me, I like having some element of human interaction anyway, so I’d be glad to come in. How much? I reckoned that I could have a nice balance of WFH and face time with developers if I was in the office about half the time, so 2-3 days a week. Done deal. The best part about it was he empowered me to select which days because it was going to depend on when I could get face time.
The key word here is empowerment. Some managers just aren’t comfortable with it, but some are. Most professionals don’t like to be micro-managed. I realize that some people take advantage of the hands off approach but I tended to reward managers that trusted me to deliver. I preferred if they checked in with me about once a week on how’s it going and then leave me alone and I will for sure try to deliver what they asked for and expected… and then some.
There’s some risk for managers to follow the empowerment path but keep in mind that there’s also risk in micro-managing professionals. We don’t like it and may seek a different role where we don’t have to spend as much time explaining what will get done vs. actually working to try to get it done.
What about accountability? Absolutely. If an employee can’t manage their time with the freedom offered then get a different employee, but don’t randomly come up with policies that are based on power trips. Policies that make it clear who is in charge and knows best. If you already know best about everything what do you need me for?
Sometimes a work related social media post will trigger a bunch of thoughts. I want to make sure that I navigate this topic thoughtfully and people understand that I get it.. there are two sides to this issue. Some companies have no other choice than to install a strict set of rules around response time for customer issues. While the post below may be on the snarky side, it does convey a good point.
Not THE reason, but one of the reasons I retired a little early from my role as a Site Reliability Engineer was because of a BRUTAL on-call schedule. Not everyone at my company viewed it the same way I did so I can only speak for myself, but being on a short leash doesn’t set well with my physical, mental or emotional well-being. I HATED PagerDuty and everything about being on-call. The job was otherwise fine. On-call, not so much.
It’s totally my fault for signing on with a company that I knew might eventually lead me to on-call responsibility. It was a choice, and a bad one. A bad one because the pluses didn’t outweigh the minuses. A bad one because my anxiety was off the charts. I’m talking having to take new meds off the charts.
In my role as an SRE I probably earned $10-$20k more than I may have in some other engineering role. For that $10-$20k I gave up my freedom to move about the cabin. The expectation was 5 minutes until hands on keyboard from being paged. I couldn’t take a walk around the block, go to the grocery store or be more than 5 minutes away from my laptop at any point for two weeks. That’s because we got assigned a week of secondary on-call where we acted as a backup to the primary on-call followed by a week of primary on-call. Did we get a ton of calls? Nope. Several in a week’s time but it wasn’t constant. It didn’t matter. I was still on a short leash and tied to my laptop. If life were to offer me one mulligan I would definitely use it to find a role that didn’t include on-call.
But Bill, you’re not a company guy then. You’re a lousy teammate!
Bullshit. At a different company I worked several off hours release deployments that kept me up until 2am and I didn’t mind it one bit. Why? Because I could plan it. I knew it was coming and the company knew that those poor souls who were up all night deserved a little bit of comp-time to compensate for the extra mile they just donated.
I personally never minded extra hours if the project I was working on was interesting. Been there, done that many times. Probably too many times.
So in keeping with the goal of addressing both sides of this issue, I get it. Sometimes there is no other choice than to use PagerDuty and enforce an on-call rotation. But I think what employers would do well to remember is to not take the intrusion of work interfering with family life for granted. For some people it’s a very impactful feature of the job.
Worker bees should think long and hard before accepting a role that has on-call. Will an extra bit of money be worth having to carry your laptop with you everywhere? Will you be checking Slack for security breaches in bed when you’re supposed to be sleeping? Will you freak out if you can find your phone in the moment because you may have missed a page? If any of these things are true then I would suggest not agreeing to take on that role in the first place. Draw a line in the sand and stick to it. Family is more important.
One of the most interesting jobs I had growing up was working as a ticket taker, concession attendant, projectionist and assistant manager at the Village Theater in SE Portland. I can still smell the popcorn.
Working in the movie business came with the side benefit of having access to other theaters in the Luxury Theater chain to watch movies pretty much anytime I wanted. This became my go to free time activity because it was 1) Free and 2) An awesome period for movies! The Godfather, Animal House, Saturday Night Fever, The French Connection, Dirty Harry, all those disaster movies “Earthquake, Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure, Jaws, Airport 1975…
And this doesn’t even take into account the other more controversial movies that were coming out at the time during the tail end of the so-called sexual revolution. As a 17 year old junior in high school, let me just say, I had a strong dose of curiosity about these things. Suddenly they are in my purview.
I still remember dancing out in front of the old Broadway Theater in downtown Portland after seeing Saturday Night Fever with some co-worker friends. The Blazers were winning, the free movies were flowing and I was almost 18 and a free man. The 70’s were great. It was a very memorable time.
Disclaimer
My lists are undoubtedly biased towards movies from the 1970’s. As I reviewed various lists like “IMDB Top 250”, “Rotten Tomatoes”, “Top 100 from Rolling Stone” and various other sources, I realized I had not even seen many movies on these lists. That alone should disqualify me from being a credible movie critic, however, that’s not going to stop me from making a list of my own preferences based on what I’ve seen over the years. People can judge for themselves. I’m hoping it’ll make it entertaining to compare notes with anyone else who has bothered to make such a list.
I have titled the list “Favorite 100 Movies” as opposed to “Best 100 Movies” because these are based on attributes of movies that I identified with in some way, or tickled my funny bone or had a storyline that gripped me from the start. That’s all it takes to get on the list.
LOTR? Star Wars? Not my jam, didn’t make the list. Gone with the Wind? Casablanca? Great movies long ago but didn’t make the list. You won’t see a ton of romcom’s or horror movies either. Romcoms can be well done like When Harry Met Sally but for the most part, meh. Horror Films, apart from the I Know What You Did Last Summer, Exorcist and maybe The Omen, I wouldn’t recommend spending 2 hours of your life on.
I’m more into movies with trickery and double crossing, and about how the good guys eventually trick the bad guys and win the day (see The Fugitive, The Sting). Count me in on movies about mobs and Cosa Nostra, prison breakouts and capers where the poor guys outsmart the rich guys. When one unsuspecting tough guy meets up with a guy who knows martial arts (whoops!). Suspense movies where I’m on the edge of my seat but without gratuitous violence. Anything that can make me laugh is a possible contender and I’ll throw in a movie or three with strong sexual tension just because I left the theater going “wow! Did I just see that?
I’ve added comments in a few places that hint at the reason why a certain movie made my list in case you’re interested. Note: You may need to scroll to the right to see comments.
As I was going through this exercise I began to wonder if it wouldn’t be productive and informational to first list all of my favorite actors and from there I could more or less go top down. I’ve taken a stab at those lists as well.
Just as important as knowing a person’s favorites is being provided with a list of absolute duds. I will throw in a few of those because I think that says just as much about the writer as the favorites do. See the “Head Scratchers” Table
[Note: Scroll to the right in tables to read comments]
Let’s start with the good news. 2023 was great for our overall health and we are both loving retired life.
Pickles is starting to slow down just a little. She still loves her walks, her treats, and adores any humanoid instantly. She’s not satisfied until she says “hi” to everyone in the park. She’s always run with reckless abandon and it caught up to her this year when she went headfirst into a shrub and poked her right eye. It’s healing well now, but not without a fair amount of veterinary intervention. Tomorrow she gets to take her cone off. She’s excited about that.
Donna decided to get a series of 9 golf lessons at Redtail Golf Course and is striking the ball with authority these days. Just ask the guys who were trying to clear off the 3rd green at Sahalie! Just kidding, she didn’t do that, but she has hit long off the tee on some par 3’s. She got her first birdie before she got her first par which is rather unusual. I saw it myself and vowed not to let her beat me on any more holes the rest of the day.
She spends her days taking care of the garden and yard, having happy hour and other activities with friends, working on art projects in her shop and participating in a monthly music group (more on that later). We venture out together to estate sales, music events and whatever else suits us that week. Next year she’s signed up for a metalsmith class in the hopes of adding that skillset to her repertoire. She’s never at a loss for something to do.
Bill (that’s me) had a very enjoyable year in so many ways. I took a job umpiring baseball games for Lake Oswego Little League which kept me really busy from April through June. The grand finale was 7 All Star games at the District 4 Tournament for 10 and 11 year olds. I had a blast and learned a lot. During the summer I built a playhouse for the grandkids in the back yard and a few other things (see pictures). There was sawdust flying everywhere for a couple of months. Donna decked out the inside of the playhouse in her inimitable style.
I got out about once/week for some golf at Charbonneau with my buddy Glenn Smith while the weather was good. As if that weren’t enough fun for one year I signed up to referee basketball with PBOA and CYO and am now a first year referee (probationary status 1). They keep sending me paychecks so I must not suck too bad. BLEEP! WHITE 22, ON THE ARM, 2 SHOTS! It’s actually harder than it looks.
The year wasn’t all fun and glory however. We lost my cousin Mike Eady in August. Mike was a one of a kind guy. I wrote a blog post/tribute to him here. We miss him dearly. He was soooooo funny, a diehard Duck fan, and such a great writer. See a hilarious sample of his writing here.
We also lost my step brother Gary Hicks, a character if there ever was one. Gary had to deal with blindness his last year of life which was very difficult. I was able to get over there and assist him doing small things that were inconsequential to me, but made a big difference to him. Gary was my brother from another mother. I miss him and his very unique sense of humor.
Donna and I are anxiously awaiting the re-opening of the new Lake Oswego Municipal Golf Course! It’ll be an executive par 30 course, just right for us old geezers who like to get a par once in a while. No big plans for the coming year, just enjoying the hell of of not working and the anti-stress lifestyle associated with that.
On the music front, we both attend a monthly group of musicians hosted by our awesome neighbors across the street Patt and Don where we get to play a song or two to the crowd. Donna has a couple of duet partners (violin, piano) that she has a lot of fun collaborating with. We’re regulars now and look forward to our monthly “gig.” I did manage to add one recording to YouTube here.
Other than that we plan to continue to hit the estate sales because there’s no possible way we have enough stuff yet.
The Fam
On a sad note we went from having all of the grandkids around to 3/5. The Gilpin’s moved to Goodyear, AZ during the summer and headed for warmer weather. To heck with Oregon and Sherwood! We miss them and going to the GKs sporting events and other get-togethers.
The Grandkids, whoo-boy. They are growing up fast. Kaden is 15 (almost 16), a sophomore, driving and pitching JV for his high school in Goodyear, AZ and swings varsity when his team needs an extra arm. Karter is 13 and active in football and baseball and swimming in his new pool. They are the nicest boys ever. They make us proud every time we see them.
Emilia is 4 and like her dad, quite the character including back seat song critic. She played soccer this year and enjoys pre-school. We love everything about Emilia. She’s a sweetie.
Gwennie is also 4 and tried soccer this year and does dance lessons as well. She’s very focused on getting her dance routine right and does a great job. Her sister Ellie (2) as best we can tell spends a lot of time trying to keep up with Gwennie. The girls are a heavy dose of cute and going to be so much fun to watch them grow up in the coming years. Lucky us!
Images from 2023
The PlayhouseEmilia checking out the inside of the playhouseKaden and Karter taking a golf lessonGwennie and Ellie showing us their findings from inside the playhouseKarter (catching), Kaden (umpiring)Gwennie and Ellie at Chuck E. CheeseDonna’s Arts and Crafts Work BenchAriana, Donna, and Emilia during a soccer timeoutEllie sampling an apple from the back yardPaver project. Not the funnest project ever. About the hit the links at SahalieGwennie made a few bucks at her lemon-aid stand this year at OCF. Silver Falls HikeEstate Sale Find and Fix-up. Art drawers. Flattened out back behind the shed with some RR TiesYou’re Out! Lean-to for storing patio furniture during the winterMe and Kelli at a concert. What the heck is she drinking? Ellie Checking out the toys insideEmilia and Gwennie making big plansDonna and Pickles at Haystack RockRob (coach) and Emilia on a typical Fall SaturdayBumper crop of 6 gallons of apple sauce this year from the back yard.I dunno, I thought it was funny! These are original Bill Toner designed bumper stickers. Get one while they’re hot! Limited supply!
So no judgement here to those who enjoy their wine, beer or cocktails. I was a light drinker for about 30 years and moved up to a moderate to sometimes heavy drinker later in life.
I got a wakeup call with a stroke on December 24th 2012. Slow learner than I can be at times, it took me another 12 years to see the obvious. That alcohol wasn’t adding to my life in a positive way. I know that’s not true for everyone but when I was honest with myself I had to admit that it was doing more damage than good.
Post-stroke I’ve had to take an impactful list of medications that have side effects of their own, and as the labels clearly say, they don’t mix well with alcohol. I’ve had issues with dizziness, brain fog, and feeling lethargic. In the end it didn’t make sense to add more fuel to the fire.
Roll the tape back 30 years and what I found out about myself is that I have an addictive personality. I was addicted big-time to caffeine for decades. I quit and restarted caffeine no less than 50 times and immediately endured the severe headaches that come along with that, only to start again. I’d rotate between coffee and pop. At its worst, I’d brew a pot of coffee in the morning (I had a coffee pot in my cubical at work) and refill it a few times. If it was diet soda I’d bring in one of those small college refrigerators to work and fill it up with cans of Diet Pepsi or Diet Coke. I knew it was getting bad when it wasn’t enough to bring in a 12 pack every couple of days and switched to carrying around a 2 liter bottle with me. All day long. Some of the times I quit it was because I got tired of having to find a restroom every hour.
Alcohol wasn’t the exact same experience for me. Quitting was actually easy. I didn’t have any side effects at all. Didn’t need to go to AA or take one day at a time or any of the 12 steps. I don’t think I fell into the typical alcoholic label because I never craved it. I just enjoyed having some wine with my meals and often times a 2nd glass and maybe a 3rd. That be fine if it were once a week but I seemed to find an excuse to open up a bottle just about every night.
The only thing I miss about it today is having a glass of wine handy on those rare occasions when I’m in the kitchen cooking. Other than that, I’m good. Ordering at restaurants doesn’t bother me. Soda water it is. Deal.
Since retiring I’ve had a goal of betting back into some semblance of shape as well. Alcohol was dragging me down make me feel tired so that I missed opportunities to exercise because I was just out of energy. Getting fit requires a combo of dietary changes and cardio/physical workouts. With its sugar content, wine wasn’t helping me keep my calorie count down either.
Everything in moderation? Sure, if you can do it. I had a hard time, but that’s just me. It’s a very personal choice.
Looking back on a whole year without alcohol I can honestly say my year’s list of accomplishments is way up. I feel better more often and with process thoughts with more clarity. As with caffeine I just tell myself I had a pretty good run with it for a number of years. I used up my lifetime allotment in less than a lifetime so that’s enough I guess. If this helps a reader in some way, great. If not, carry on and do what works for you.
One can’t argue with the fact that the Benghazi hearings were wildly successful at smearing Hillary Clinton in 2016. Such a large dose of media attention focused on questioning Secretary Clinton’s motives and competence did real damage to her campaign and allowed the media to “both sides” two candidates, even though one of them had been caught on tape bragging about being able to grab women by their private parts because he’s a celebrity.
The republicans aren’t all stupid but after the unanimous impeachment inquiry vote it would appear they are desperate. So desperate that they realize their one and only chance at reclaiming the White House is to implement Benghazi 2.0 in the form of making up conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden. It’s a Hail Mary if there ever was one but it’s all they have.
I’d like to predict an embarrassing failure but 2016 has taught me that we can’t trust the media to not “both sides” issues like this one. Instead we have to rely on getting out the vote in record numbers.
With Joe Biden joining the picket line with union workers in Michigan recently it appears that the tide may be turning with regards to the union vote. Even though Reagan did all he could to bust unions back in the 1980’s it seemed like the Republicans somehow successfully stole the support of union members and it’s stayed that way. Until now.
Recall that in his 2008 presidential campaign John McCain successfully made a connection with the labor movement by trying to help “Joe the Plumber.” Joe was your average private business owner out there trying to scratch his way to the American Dream and finding it difficult. McCain was there to help and it provided a boost to his campaign. The average “Joe” connected with the idea.
Given that unions are making a comeback and republicans are no where to be found for support, I came up with a novel idea for democrats to latch onto for 2024.
My son Rob is a 2nd year plumber apprentice. He too is out there trying to make some scratch towards the American Dream and he’s a proud union member, solid democrat and about as anti-MAGA as a person can be. Maybe Biden should latch onto this idea and mimic McCain’s successful attempt at connecting with the working class. It’d be fun to turn the tables on those guys.
I feel like the movie should have been subtitled: Learn to quit while you’re ahead.
The original Woodstock Story made history because it attracted 400,000 people — well above the estimates, featured a long list of breakout bands, sent a message to “The Establishment” to watch us spend 3 days focusing on free love and peace without being uptight about anything (thanks in part to a plentiful supply of marijuana) and got a little crazy after some rain (those crazy kids slid around in the mud and some took their clothes off. Oh my!
Woodstock ’99 made the headlines because it was one of the biggest clusterfuck events in Rock ‘N Roll History. Let me count the ways:
In 1969 Michael Lang was in his early 20’s but managed to get himself a job as one of the promoters having co-organized the Miami Pop Festival where an estimated 25,000 people attended the 2 day event. Lang re-appears in Woodstock ’99, again as a promoter, much older and clearly aloof when it comes to taking any personal responsibility for the failures of the festival. The film documents clearly how event organizers tried to whitewash the multiple disasters as the product of “a few bad apples.” Hardly.
From the looks of it, the event organizers put their energy into figuring out ticket pricing, distribution and how to prevent the free-for-all entry that happened at the original Woodstock festival in 1969. It’s clear they were determined to make a profit this time. Nothing wrong with that but they failed at every other aspect of the event planning and execution.
There was no plan whatsoever to have the kind of infrastructure necessary for a crowd this size, and this time they had a good idea of how many were coming so there’s no excuse. It looks like they hired a vendor to drop off a bunch of port-a-potties, hundreds fewer than what was needed, with no plans to service any of them during the 3 day festival. The predictable happened. Shit piled high everywhere stinking to high heaven.
In their quest to make a profit they enacted a rule that festival goers could not bring in their own water. Bottled water was available from vendors for $4/bottle (price gouging in 1999) and there wasn’t nearly enough of it. The vendors were only too happy to raise the price as the supplies got low, enraging the crowds.
Perhaps the biggest miscalculation was the odd mix of bands they invited to perform. Sheryl Crow along with Limp Bizkit, Korn and Megadeath? Sheryl Crow is one of the greatest singer/songwriters of the last few decades. The other “bands” stood up there and played power chords at high volume while encouraging the crowd to participate in a no holds barred rave at high energy. The band’s purpose was to whip people into a frenzy and if that’s what the organizers wanted, then mission accomplished. The problem is it wasn’t safe for anyone out there. People were legitimately getting hurt. Which brings me to the next notable failure
The organizers saved a ton of money by not hiring any security. In their place they hired “Peace Organizers” who were outnumbered and helpless against a raging crowd.
The biggest miscalculation of all was to arm each festival goer with a candle. The must have envisioned some kind of Kumbaya moment to end the festival. Really? To the Red Hot Chili Peppers? What the got instead was burnt towers, semi trucks and fencing. A pissed off crowd added anything burnable to the conflagration.
Of course part of a Peace and Love festival is going to be about mind altering drug use. It was in 1969 and you could count on no drug sniffing dogs being deployed at Woodstock ’99. The difference is the type of drugs used. Woodstock was about marijuana and maybe some LSD. Woodstock ’99 was about ecstasy and heroin. People were legit having very serious medical problems with virtually no way for an ambulance to gain access.
What struck me the most about the movie was the interviews with Michael Lang. He took absolutely no responsibility for the failures. My impression was he got lucky in 1969 and got elevated to the post of festival guru when in fact he was way over his head from the beginning and shouldn’t have been there in the first place because he didn’t know what he was doing.
The movie had great footage that captured pretty much everything. The interviews were revealing, except for Michael Lang who seemed to oscillate between trying to polish this turd to the best of his ability and pretending to care at all.
View from my PDX Window 