I couldn’t end the night without commenting on a interesting event that occured Saturday night. Kelly, Hallie, and I were winding down after an exhausting day spent walking around downtown Asheville and hiking Mount Pisgah. Hallie was not falling asleep like she normally does, only settling after about 15 minutes of holding her (and 45 minutes of her crying before that). I walked into the den of our cabin and plopped myself into a chair, picking up a copy of Mountain Express to read while Kelly read her book on the couch.

I was deep into the newspaper when I noticed something move across the room right above my line of sight. A faint white blur about the size of a baseball made a tight loop on the wall above the window.

Um, okaaaay, I thought, as I checked the level of wine still in my glass. I knew I was dog tired. It must have been my imagination.

I continued reading the paper. A few seconds later it happend again, this time a few feet to the right of the last place. Once again it was a swirling motion, like someone waving their hand. All right, I thought. I did not imagine THAT! I folded the newspaper and stood up.

Being of a relatively open mind, I am not averse to the idea of the existence of things yet unknown. That said, I was stumped to simply explain it away. Twice I saw it. As the saying goes, “fool me once…”

Kelly didn’t look up from her book when I began to pace the floor, trying to justify what I saw and debating whether to tell her. Gosh, what if my wife thought I was, well, weird?

“Uh, honey,” I finally said. “I think someone is trying to get my attention.” Kelly looked up but didn’t really buy into what I was saying. She was way too sleepy at this point for a deep metaphysical talk. I proceeded to start one, anyway, but gave up when I saw I was losing my audience. We went to bed soon afterward.

I have never claimed to see ghosts. I wouldn’t know what one looked like if it shook my hand. And I’m not sure what it actually was that I saw. Still, I could find few possible logical causes. Darkness had long since fallen on the cabin. Nestled in the woods, there was no chance that the light was caused by a stray headlight. Though Kelly was reading behind me, she had already removed her jewelry. Even if she hadn’t, she was reading by a floor lamp reflecting light on the ceiling. No chance for a glint of light to be cast from her ring or necklace. I could blame the light on nothing other than my imagination or an actual event. I was willing to chalk the first one up to imagination, but not the second one.

As we packed up this morning, the owner of the place stopped by and asked us about our stay. “How was the cabin?” he started off. I listed a few mechanical things we had noticed – like the tub not draining properly. You know, nothing major. After every item, he said “Thanks a lot. I wouldn’t otherwise know these things since I don’t live here anymore.” Though all I wanted to do then was get going on our trip to Linville Falls, it occured to me later that his statement had to be a lie. How can you own a house for 10+ years, rent it out, clean it after every rental and then plead ignorance to its problems? It didn’t wash with me. Just one of those things that made me wonder if he had a secret.

Later in our drive, I began to suspect the owner may have been “fishing” for information. After every minor annoyance I would report, he would say “and anything else? Did you notice anything else?” His odd questioning only made me more convinced I had not imagined what I saw. It made me wonder if I wasn’t the first guest to notice something unusual in the cabin.

So, was I imaging things? Or is it time I checked myself in to Dorothea Dix? Or long past time? What do you think?

I just finished up a relaxing few days hiking and enjoying the Asheville area. It was the first vacation with the kid along, marking another milestone we can check off the list.

We hiked Mount Pisgah and Mount Mitchell, though only the shorter trails (no more than 2 miles, though we wound up hiking much more than that). More detail on the trip can be found on Hallie’s page.

I didn’t have enought time to fully check out the wireless scene in Asheville like I’d hoped. The main, uh, stumbling block (thank you! I’ll be here all week!) is that the network drivers for my wireless card in my Zaurus aren’t equipped yet to do sniffing. The drivers I found for my Socket low-power wifi card won’t compile cleanly on my ARM cross-compiler. I didn’t have time to fix this in the past few weeks but may revisit it soon since wardriving is soooo 1337.

The cabin we stayed in was on top of a 2,000 ft hill in Fairview, NC. The cabin not only had no Internet access (gasp!), it also had an incredibly bad telephone line; one that made dialup access impossible. Still, I couldn’t help but see all the SLCs alongside the road and wonder if DSL was available. I also wondered just how far up the mountain an 802.11b signal could travel, bringing high-speed access to the wilderness.

On our Saturday climb up Mount Pisgah, I was one of the few hikers who was more interested in the radio tower behind me than the breathtaking view in front of me. Yeah, yeah. I’m a hardcore geek. But at least I had my with me and got in a long-range QSO.

Asheville also has the distinction of being the first place I’ve ever seen a real-live Segway. A bearded, pony-tailed guy in a tie-died T-shirt (ok, that described half the men in Western North Carolina) was standing on one on Battery Park Avenue while talking to the Asheville police. The police had just finished taking a police report when the guy rolled up to them. Like nearly everyone else who sees a Segway, the cops were grinning at the guy and asking him all kinds of questions about how to ride one. I imagine car owners must have gotten the same attention back when horseless carriages were just taking off.

Tomorrow I start my new job, so I’ll wrap things up. After being so lassiez-faire with my time the past few weeks, it will be strange having to live by the clock again. Strange, perhaps, but wonderfully welcome, too.

I’m writing this from outside the Old Europe Coffee Bar on Battery Park avenue in Asheville. As my previous post suggested, there is a knee-high access point near the table, allowing anyone within range access to the Net. I think the access port is a great idea, only it’s too low to really get good range. As far as I can determine, I’m the only geek one here using it. While I’m here typing away, though, Kelly is devouring the creme brule that we agreed to share.

The weather here is phenomenal. It’s mostly cloudy but we’ve seen enough of the sun to make it fun. There’s a slight breeze, too, making it a challenge to keep the napkins on the table.

There are so many people walking around downtown it’s amazing. Hallie has been especially happy watching everyone walk around her. It seems to me that Asheville has more life downtown than any other city I’ve been to in North Carolina. Kelly has continuously heard me remark about it – probably to the point that she wants me to shut up. 🙂 This place really is cool.

At lunchtime I was reading a boy’s T-shirt at the table next to us. It said “Boeing”, and it sparked an association in my mind with the city of Seattle. Asheville is like the Seattle of the South. Same kind of energy.

Lunch was fun. We ate at the Bistro 1886. Food was great. As I said before, Hallie had a ball just watching people and playing with her spoon.

The cabin is actually in Fairview, south and east from Asheville. It’s way up a mountain, and has an excellent view over Fairview (when the view is not fogged over, that is). It’s a little smaller than we thought, but the view more than makes up for it. The owner lives in the house yards to the right of it and spent the evening walking past out cabin. I told Kelly today that there was something a little weird about him and she agreed. I just get the feeling he’s not entirely sincere, but that’s nothing to stop our fun.

We’re going to explore downtown for a little while longer and then find some trails to go hike in the afternoon. It’d be great to come back downtown this evening when things get hopping, but with the Buggle in tow I don’t see us soaking up the nightlife this time around.

Well, my creme brule is calling me and the Big Girl looks bored, so I’ll stop geeking out so we can have more fun.

We’re heading to Asheville for a few days of mountain R&R. While I’m there I plan to explore some of the wireless hotspots in the city.

A few links provide a good starting spot. Full report coming soon.

National Geographic is displaying the first picture of Earth ever taken from another planet, Mars. Amazingly beautiful, isn’t it?

Seeing this today reminded me of a Carl Sagan speech I read on my friend Chris Hedemark’s website two days ago:

We succeeded in taking that picture, and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

We need pictures like these to remind us how precious our planet really is.

The Stokes county manager has been spending his $74,000-a-year job apparently doing nothing but downloading pr0n..

After a former county manager resigned, officials found he had spent 60 percent of his time downloading more than 27,000 pornographic photos onto his office computer.
…
“This is abnormal,” Commissioner Joe Turpin said. “He had a massive amount of categorized information on there. It had been categorized, alphabetized. It was all archived.”
…
County officials said that there was so much material they estimated Greer must have spent at least 60 percent of his work hours downloading photos.

So, my question is, how did this yo-yo get by for three years apparently doing nothing else but looking at dirty pictures? Is our government really that inefficient? Is Stokes county really that ass-backwards? And how does someone this stupid get a $74,000-per-year job, anyway?

I’ve been thinking about broadcasting a lot lately. A few weekends ago, TriLUG was at the Durham Hamfest, where amateur radio operators from the area gathered for a swapmeet. I was there to help explain Linux to hams, but my real goal was to put faces to the names I’ve been hearing on the air.

I don’t feel comfortable speaking to people I don’t know. Or more specifically, I don’t feel comfortable speaking without something specific to say. I’m a lurker on the ham repeaters where lots of hams will “ragchew” all day long, seemingly saying nothing at all. So the idea of speaking into a microphone with potentially thousands of listeners is a bit daunting.

Even so, I’ve had a lot of my friends tell me that I’ve got a radio voice. My answering machine message garners the most comments – and I admit I kinda ham it up there. But to consider doing voice work seriously is something I have never really considered.

Like a lot of kids fresh out of high school, I had no clue what I wanted to do for a living. It took me a while to even consider going in the military the way I eventually did. I knew, though, that broadcasting appealed to me. I was a big fan of the Greaseman, DC101‘s shock jock. I was such a fan that I recognized his wife when she visited the drug store where I worked. I also treasured the DC101 T-shirt I got autographed by the Grease. Oh yeah, I was into it big time.

Thinking of exploring radio as a career, I responded to an ad I heard for a local “radio school.” It was a vocational school located in Vienna, Virginia, near where I was living at the time. I followed the directions to a nondescript two-story building in one of the ubiquitous strip malls that litter the area. Stepping out of the rainy cold, I climbed the stairs to the second floor.

I walked into a room filled with aging sound boards. Countless cables snaked their way across the floor. A staff member talked with me a bit and pointed me towards a sound booth in the back of the room. Then I put on a pair of headphones and read a script from a piece of paper in front of me.

After a few minutes of talk, the staff member came back in and told me I had what it took. He told me the course would cost around $1500 and I could start immediately. I thanked him for his time and went home, not really convinced the $1500 would buy me anything I didn’t already have.

What it certainly wouldn’t buy me is an education in how most modern DJs were little more than a voice behind the microphone. The more I found out about the job (low pay, little creative control, dullness), the less it appealed to me. I put it on the back burner and rarely looked back.

At the recent hamfest, however, I ran into one gentleman I’d been hearing on the repeaters quite often. Bill “BJ” Jenkins has a voice made for radio. Even before I heard him mention his 30 years in broadcasting, I could tell from his voice that he knew what he was doing. I had to ask him about broadcasting when I saw him at the hamfest.

BJ is a wonderful guy and was more than happy to talk about his career. I mentioned to him that I had considered it once. He encouraged me to pursue it, saying that I had good diction. But he then said something else that changed my perception of the job.

BJ mentioned how local homeboy Rick Dees got started. Rick is now a radio superstar, hosting the “Weekly Top 40” program which is syndicated coast-to-coast. Rick also anchors the top-rated morning show in Los Angeles. In radio, he’s about as big as they come. At a recent radio gathering at local station WKIX, Rick told people how last year his show had 500 million dollars in billings.

I almost spit coffee out of my nose. The “Disco Duck” guy clocking half a billion dollars? No way! But that’s how BJ quoted him.

Clearly, my view of radio as a dead-end job wasn’t entirely accurate, to say the least.

After hearing this and about Doc Searls’ broadcasting days, I may just go audition for some voiceovers after all.

I got a congratulatory email from a fellow blogger and new friend, Lady Sun. I dropped her a note after reading her blog and invited her to read mine. I was amused to find an email from her today, congratulating me on getting a job. Truly a small world, isn’t it? She arguably knows more about my life’s current events than some of my own family members.

Lady Sun (hi there!) lives in Iran, a country shrouded in mystery (in my mind at least). As a sailor cruising the Persian Gulf in the early 1990’s, I would often stare over at the Iranian ferries steaming beside my ship through the Strait of Hormuz. The people staring back were just that – plain people. Everyday folks. Like me, they were probably wondering what the other side was really like. When I waved to them, I got a wave in return – a small token of friendship shared across a mile or two of blue water.

Anyhow, I’d like to welcome Lady Sun to my little blog, a slice of America. Thanks, Lady Sun, for helping bridge our worlds.

I came home this afternoon to a message on my answering machine. It was LabCorp, probably calling me back to schedule an in-person interview. The LabCorp job was exciting to me since its a company which leverages Linux like very few companies do. I don’t think I’ve ever dealt with a company that was as committed to Linux as they are.

I had my phone interview with them a few weeks back. Frankly, I was convinced that I wouldn’t be called again. The phone interview went well enough, but I was left with the feeling that my lack of recent management experience was a deal-killer. It seems I was able to convince them otherwise. 🙂

The big drawback to that job was its location in Burlington. The thought was that my family and I would move to Durham in order to ease the commute. While we may still wind up in Durham someday, moving became just another hurdle.

This job search has been an amazing trip for me. I was down on myself at the start but continued to work hard to find the perfect fit. My work paid off when Oculan came calling, and I’m fortunate to be joining such a high-caliber team.

Now it’s time to put my job search behind me and actually get to work.