My web site address has changed to:

*** http://www.nwlink.com/~mwebster ***!!

6-24-01

Climbed at Exit 38 yesterday with a new friend and his family. Years ago, 1979 to be precise, I was attempting to lead a run-out (dangerous) climb high up a cliff called "Lovers Leap" near Lake Tahoe. Sue and I were on a 9 day climbing vacation and had managed to get several hundred feet up a route whose crux stopped me cold. The protection was a manky wired hex on a sketchy arete with big air below. I was retreating down the arete when a friendly party below offered to climb through and give Sue and I a top rope so we could finish the route to the walk off, rather than rappelling from so near the top. Our rescuer turned out to be a flight controller at the nearby Air Force base. We enjoyed a pleasant afternoon finishing out the 400 foot cliff with G and his partner. They walked back down to our campsite with us for a beer and exchanged addresses.
    22 years later, G and I still keep in touch via e-mail, sharing the common bond of teenage children and climbing. His job as a pilot has kept him far away for most of that time, but recently he connected me with one of his flying friends who lives nearby and climbs. Despite the huge crowds brought up by the recent newspaper coverage of Exit 38, we were able to climb steadily all day. My old friend had trained them well, and they scampered up everything I could lead without any noticeable fear. Finally I was able to slow them down a little by leading a hard 5.8 on some steep, smooth stone. This particular route requires some very careful planning, due to it's lack of resting spots and hard moves uncomfortably far above the protection bolts. It scared me badly as usual, but I managed to thrash my way through the difficult sections without hanging on the rope and reached the anchors feeling pretty good. The regular workouts out in the garage have made my arms quite a bit stronger.
    My new climbing friend M and his wife have kids the same age as ours. I listened fascinated as they described their experiences dealing with boys when their daughter reached the dating age. Clint is that age, but doesn't seem at all interested in girls, preferring to lift heavy iron instead. Lisa already has boys calling...and I have no idea how to handle them. I would like to think that she can handle them on her own, but some of those kids are going to have "issues" that may get troublesome. We are fortunate to have lived here their entire lives. Sue knows many of the parents, and Lisa has a large group of girlfriends whom she has known since kindergarten. I hope that this stable base will give our kids the integrity to choose quality kids as friends, but one never knows.

6-21-01

Played guitar with my old friend T a couple nights ago. We drove out to his house after his wife gave me my yearly eye exam at the eye clinic they own. They are what is known as DINKS (double income, no kids). T and I grew up together in Olympia, and stay in touch now and then, enjoying the common bond of music and an appreciation for art. That is, I like making art, he likes collecting it. I've given him at least 3 of my early paintings for free, feeling they weren't good enough to sell. Seeing them all framed and hanging in his house and the office, I was shocked at how good they looked. One was a lovely painting of the State Capitol I had completely forgotten ever painting. On seeing it hanging on the wall of his beautiful home, I recalled painting it and thinking it wasn't very good. I must have been overly critical back then. I liked it so much I threatened to buy it back. He also has my painting of the printshop we both worked in, but that one I made him pay for, since it was a prize winner.
    Sometime back in high school we both began playing guitars, and T focused on the base guitar. One of our other friends B wrote music, and we all used to play at parties together. T and B continued jamming together for many years, eventually forming a solid band, recording a CD, winning a Seattle band contest and touring Bulgaria. The band broke up after that for all the usual reasons. I've continued playing guitar for my own personal enjoyment all along. I go through long periods where I don't enjoy it, then I'll pick it up like a long lost friend and loose myself in the melodies. It's unexplainable how music and art move some people.
     Last night my ear acted up again, causing me to loose my dinner. It looks like I may be on a 9 day schedule. So, now I'm good for another 7 days. I've learned to look on the bright side with this wacky affliction. We had a couple girls from the lawyers office downstairs come up for some foosball after work. It was fun playing against them, me and one of the programmers got soundly beaten. That was almost entirely my fault, since I'm worse than a raw beginner: I'm an old raw beginner. I think it may be a young persons sport. Your wrist action has to be extremely quick and my tired old wrists can only hit a stationary ball. My hands still work just fine, but they have a lot of miles of hard use on them. Windsurfing in the winter was the most brutal thing I've done to them. Hanging upside down from my hands buried elbow deep in cliffs didn't do an awful lot of good either. Speaking of climbing, I have a date this weekend with a friend of one of my old climbing partners. He sounds like he has a lot on the ball. I am looking forward to getting up on the rock again.

6-16-01

I rode my bicycle to work yesterday. Not from home, just from a parking spot in a residential area. Sue and Clint wanted the Corolla to practice for his driving test and the minivan, with its big rear bicycle rack won't fit into the parking garage without a lot of fear. Breaking news: Clint just drove down the driveway with his brand spanking new drivers license! At lunch I pedaled my bicycle - older than most of the people in the office - up to the old print shop to visit my friends there. It was fun walking in at my old start time. Both the foreman and manager were standing by the press and started laughing when they saw me.

"Hey there's Mark! Right on time. We got some work for you, M. called in sick today. You ready to go to work? There's the job waiting for you."

I considered it for a split second: working the weekend perhaps for some extra cash. They were desperate for some help. Two employees are out with injuries. One crushed his arm in the 50 year old letterpress and the other is getting facial reconstruction surgery after a mugging. It could be fun, flexing my old printing muscles. But the brief glow of nostalgia was quickly replaced with a flood of painful memories. Printing is an extremely complex and frustrating business. I was quite good at it when I left, but the only part I miss is the physical exercise involved in running around the press. A printing job can go wrong in so many ways. The pressman is at the end of a long line of people, each of whom has to do their job perfectly or the pressman gets screwed. Even if everyone does their job perfectly, management may have chosen to let the machine go without new parts, and what should have been easy becomes a constant battle.
      Today I get to install new front brake calipers on the minivan. After that I plan to spend some time with Flash. I've been pondering what area of web design to specialize in. I've been doing it long enough to get a taste for most of what goes on. Yesterday I spent some time adding ADA compliance to some JSP pages. It involves putting special tags in the framesets, tables and images of our web application pages so blind people can apply for jobs with the government online. It's interesting how JSP works, but do I want to specialize in it? I have the feeling I need to demonstrate to them what direction I want to go. I have the ability to learn just about anything, but the high end stuff can't be learned on the job. There's too much work for any of us to start at the bottom of the learning curve. I got pretty good at Flash for a while. It's time to study again....but after the brake job.

6-14-01

L ooking down at the strings of my guitar as I played tonight, I reflected on how the guitar's neck, and the strings 3 millimeters above it can become as familiar as the road to work. My fingers know the way instinctively without the need for conscious thought. I was free to focus on the feeling in the melody, to pour my emotions into the song. When I first started playing again a month ago after a several year gap, I couldn't remember where to put my fingers and the guitar was a stranger. But I persisted, playing a couple times a week, or as often as my sore finger tips could stand the pain inflicted by the steel strings. Now I've thick callouses on my finger tips and my stiff old hands have become accustomed to finding their way around the chords. I play from sheet music that has been retyped with only the guitar chords; as in a line of verse with an "E" or "Cmaj7" hand written above the line. I am free to simply enjoy the songs. This is my current list of favorite (easy to play and sing) songs:

• Seen the needle and the damage done-Neil Young
• As tears go by-Keith Richards
• Headin up to San Francisco-Jimmy Buffet
• Gentle on my mind-Glen Campbell
• Stairway to Heaven-Lead Zeppelin?
• Run for the roses-Dan Fogelberg

As I bang away at the guitar, I see my wife and kids wandering around the house, looking at me from the corner of their eyes and I wonder what goes through their minds. I've not played regularly since the kids were quite small. No one else is into music here. I have no idea why I like all these things that are so unsuitable for a graybeard. I should probably start watching TV and growing a serious beer gut like most of my contemporaries...well, maybe next year.
        I plan to meet my old jamming buddy T next week after work for the first time in a few years. He's never stopped playing since we all picked it up in high school. T had a chance of making a living off music for a while before his band broke up. One of the guys at work says he played around Seattle and Tacoma for 10 years before his band broke up. Many very talented musicians have to choose between their music and their wives. All the people I know chose their wives. We've all heard the stories about playing the same old songs in smoky bars, night after night. I've done it myself, briefly back in the hippie days as an underage harp player. It was fun, but our band was chaos in the extreme. In looking back, I am surprised we even made the shows.
       I've decided to get back into Flash. A friend of mine wants some help, and it got me thinking about how good I used to be at it, and how much I've forgot since becoming an html guru. It's time to get back into some homework.

6-10-01

W ent to a party last night at the home of one of our programmers. I found it interesting from the standpoint of the generation gap. In switching careers to high tech, I have jumped into a world populated by people who could be my children. This programmer only works part time for us, spending the bulk of his work week working for a friends guitar making company. I knew his guitar making friends would appreciate seeing my 23 year old acoustic, but their reaction was far beyond what I expected. From the moment I removed it from it's case, their eyes lit up, as if seeing a rare Van Gogh masterpiece in person for the first time.

"Look at the wood on the top, that must be Sitka Spruce, you don't see that anymore. It's all gone."

"Yeah, and check out the straightness of the grain, not a single burl"

"Turn it over, I'd like to see the back...oh man, that mahogany is awesome, you can't find that any more at any price. Look at the way the grain is perfectly straight throughout the entire side panel. They were famous for that. "

"Yeah," I said, "But weren't there other good guitar makers back then, like Gibson?"

"Oh yeah, Gibson made some good guitars, but the people who made this guitar carried their standards to a much higher level, and much more consistently. If they got in a beautiful piece of mahogany, they'd toss the whole piece if there was one tiny curve in the grain."

"Here, do you want to play it?" I asked.

"No, no, my liability insurance isn't high enough. I can't take the chance."

On and on they went, exclaiming in technical guitar making terms over this detail or that. My programmer friend winked at me, saying, "These guys know wood".

I was disappointed not to see more people from our office, and left just as the party was heating up. On my way out, carrying my guitar, which I had only played briefly, his wife asked me if she could see it. I unlocked and unsnapped the bombproof armored fiberglass case and held it up. She asked me how old it was. When I told her I had bought it in 1977, her eyes got real big.

"Dude, I was born in 1976".

These people truly are from a different generation than us graybeards. Earlier I had seen a Jim Croce songbook in a bookcase and commented that it didn't look like their kind of music.

"Oh, my husband got that from his dad. We listen to modern music, but a lot of it is just noise without any melody. So when we want to learn to play music ourselves, we study the old stuff. It's so much easier to pick up. We all grew up listening to it in our parents houses anyway and know the songs."

 

6-8-01

W hat's an online journal without a little chaos and desperation? I like to think I have a pretty good life...and I usually do, except when my ear acts up. I have an on-again, off-again relationship with a disease called Menieres Disease. It's a disorder of the balance organs in the inner ear and usually strikes people in mid-life, if it's going to strike at all. I was first diagnosed while working my way through college about 2 years ago and experienced incapacitating attacks of vertigo that lasted up to 6 hours and occurred every 3 to 6 days. About midway through college the seasickness like attacks began to back off. After about 8 months all symptoms were gone except some deafness in the affected ear. After a year of almost no symptoms, the dizzies have paid me a few visits lately. I think it might be because during me recent yearly check up, my allergy doctor recommended squirting salty water and nose sprays up into my nostrils. This is all just speculation, but I have to wonder about the coincidence of a few dizzy episodes with the sinus treatments.
Short list of facts about Menieres Disease:

• It starts with ringing in the ear
• At it's worst, the vertigo will put you on the floor with a bucket
• It won't kill you
• It isn't contagious
• It usually burns out in a year and leaves you partially deaf in the affected ear
• It can come back
• It can affect the other ear
• there is no cure
• surgeons love to hack and slice with little success

I could tell it was making the rounds yesterday and skated at lunch in an effort to forestall it. My doctor tells me a low stress life and exercise helps prevent the disease. When I got back and sat down at my terminal I felt the old familiar spinning sensation coming on. Coincidentally, or perhaps not, I had a big project due on a deadline, with my boss, who usually runs interference for me, out of town. I tried to stare straight at the screen to minimize the spinning sensation brought on by moving my head. Unfortunately, I don't work in a vacuum. I have to get up, check other computers and interact with the other people in the office. Whenever I stood up to walk around, I felt like an elephant must feel on a unicycle: not near enough control for the awkward pedaling. Am I exaggerating? Maybe a little. Still, it was a very uncomfortable afternoon. By the time I had to drive home, the dizzies were gone but a lingering nausea kept me from moving around very much until bedtime.
     When my world turns upside down like this, one of the things that keeps me calm and functioning is remembering how many people are far worse off. I think of my old climbing partner and best friend Paul, moldering under the ground now for almost 6 months. It could be worse.

6-6-01

M y friend from college finally got a job. It took him a long time but he appears to have hit the jackpot by going back to work for the company he left when he entered web design college with me. His web skills, and his print background should serve him admirably in his new position in marketing/communications. One of the students from my old class came by to apply for an internship last week. I didn't know who she was at the time or I would have said hello. She was taught by a couple of my former classmates, as well as my old teacher, at least until she quit.

I rollerbladed at lunch today around Tacoma, ending up hot and sweaty on the front steps of our building. As I was pulling off my skates, one of our other html, css guys came out for a smoke. We talked for a while about the state of the Internet, and our place in it's future. It's hard to believe the pessimism in the press about the web when we see it so busy. It's true we don't do many new web sites, but then we aren't trying very hard to find new ones. We seem to have our hands full with the customers we have already. I would like to see us do more "new" web sites just for the challenge of creating new interfaces. Still, I am not complaining. I love working day shift and the fact that I work with nice people is an added bonus.
      My coworker is also an html/css instructor at a college in Kent and tells me that a couple of his students have gotten jobs or internships working for the government doing web development. Clean, well thought out html that works across all browsers and platforms is a marketable skill. Even more important is an upbeat, "willing to try anything" kind of attitude. Attention to detail, persistence and listening skills will come in very handy in any field, and this one is no exception.
     I say this as I sit here typing into the design view of Dreamweaver, using as much html skill as Microsoft Word. But I do know what Dreamweaver is doing in the code and that's the difference. Clint got his first job working in a plant nursery nearby. Sue wanted to pay half his car insurance for him, and let him earn the rest with casual part time jobs. I held out, maintaining that the right to drive a car was something that had to be earned with a real job. I argued that driving driving a car isn't just paying the gas and insurance, it's having the cash to pay the $500 dollar deductible when you dent a fender or grill, as we all did in our first few years of driving. I wouldn't be at all surprised if he is a perfect driver. He is very smart, and doesn't need to get his thrills in large metal boxes on wheels, preferring, like his dad, to get them in muscle powered sports.

6-1-01

I sat out in the sun today working on battery power to troubleshoot the dead links on this web site. My old server was not near as particular about the use (or misuse) of capital letters in my file names. Over the four years this site has existed, my skills have climbed the standard learning curve of homepage design, with long stops at ignorance, confusion and negligence. My worst error has been my handling of file names early on. One of my old software programs, not sure which, had a bad habit of saving files in all caps, or at least the letters after the "dot", as in .jpg and .gif. Four years ago when I wrote the html for the thumbnail tables I didn't pay attention to the upper case/lower case issue. Now that I've transferred some of this old residual code to a more particular server, the old code broke at the links.
    Sunlight is hard to find in our yard, surrounded as it is by 130 foot fir trees. In the afternoons there is usually a 20 foot wide patch of sunlight where one can enjoy the warmth, as long as one is willing to get up and move the chair every 15 minutes. Out of the sun it was cool and windy enough to be raining pine cones...I am trying to write some good English here, but the sound of my wife's nagging is reaching uncomfortable decibel levels. Something about a leaking faucet that needs fixing, bills that need paying and drawers that broke 16 years ago and never got fixed. The list never ends. I take a few things off the top of the list and several more get added to the bottom of the list.  When the little things start to get me down, I remember what my mom used to say, "Things really aren't all that bad Mark, you need to stop and count your blessings".   

I got an unusual e-mail a few days ago from Karl Kelly at the Mount Vision Pastel company. He had somehow gotten my e-mail address and sent me a nice "hand" written e-mail saying he was starting a pastel making business and looking for artists to test his product. I wrote back immediately and told him I would be a good tester since I have made a few myself and own most of the major brands. When I walked in from running errands today I was surprised to find a package containing 10 fat pastel sticks on the table, fresh out of Mount Vision, New York.
       They seem to be excellent quality with a stick diameter of 15mm compared to Schmincke's 13mm and a softness between Sennelier and Schmincke. They do have the initial stroke feel of a Sennelier, but once you smear the stroke with your finger, they feel more like a Schmincke as the stroke spreads out. One of the colors he sent me is a dark forest green that can be very hard to find in any brand and is given the color number: 392. I'd love to try them out on a real painting but the weather has not been cooperating. As a substitute I've been getting my guitar out now and then. I kind of figured I'd start playing and painting again once I got on day shift. It's nice to see dreams come true.

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