nightmare.org

One of my favorite scenes in A Christmas Story is when Flick has his tongue stuck to the flag pole when the bell rings and all the kids instinctively turn to leave him. When Schwatrz suggests that they do something to help Flick, Ralphie insists (and rightly so) that “The bell rang! The bell rang!”. Such is the power of the bell. I mention it only because I have become the keeper of the bells at school and have to change them all around today. It was when I was granted this loft responsibility that I knew I help the real power.

After four months at the school only now do I feel like I’m really coming into my own. The first few months I felt like if someone found me at the wrong place I’d be sent to the Principal’s office.

In other news I have completed CERT school and am almost done with the South Euclid Police Academy. I also finally got around to taking the Technician Amateur Radio exam, which I passed, and I am now the proud owner of the call sign KD8JQU. I’ll be ordering my new license plates soon to publicly celebrate this advanced level of geekdom.

i spent the best part of the day cleaning up the back yard. this enraged the chipmunks and squirrels who live back there since i carted their food source off of the yard and into the yard waste compost heap in the back back.

i’ve been trying to restore all the old, lost blog posts over the last couple of weeks but I think I have given up. i lost a bunch of pictures and posts but have restored most of my favorite ones. many of the old links and pictures are broken, sorry about that if you are going through my old posts.

in unrelated news i got this terrible invitation:

twenty year high school reunion, how the hell did that happen? i have no idea if i will go or not, it depends on if my high school minion chris from out of town comes in from virginia for it. probability is low.

speaking of school, things at new work are going well, two and a half months into it, although i’m still convinced they have me listed with the wrong group of individuals. it definitely stinks of management. how the heck did that happen? thanks to christian for writing my bio for the website, although it just reminds me that i really should have polished off the masters degree in linguistics. oh well.

i had my school picture taken but i can’t find a digital copy of it. i look disturbingly old in it. i think i need a botox injection around my crow’s feet, or just need to completely cut out smiling. i’m still in shock that i (1) got the job at the school and (2) love the job at the school. i was reviewing old emails with the wife from when i was going through the whole process and she never doubted for one minute that i would get this job. i have no idea where that confidence in me comes from but i am very thankful for her support even as we enter this new stage of our psychologically counseled marriage.

chris swung through athens last week and sent me this (among other) pictures:

cert school ends this week, thursday is the last class and then we have a practice call out/disaster on saturday. if it goes too long into the evening i may have to feign death and sneak out to make it to the nearest large screen high definition tv to watch psu crush, or at least beat, osu on saturday night. cop school has been going fine and is much more interesting that cert school. next week we will do traffic enforcement training and the week after that we get to shoot guns in the pistol range. how cool is that?

we traveled to kentucky last weekend for the annual hay ride. before we left on the trip into the woods we launched a kite into the clear blue kentucky sky. it came with 150′ of string, to that i attached another 500′ and let it go. see if you can spot it (click on the picture to get the very large version of the same picture):

we finally got some good pictures of the spooky house on the hay ride which i might submit to abandoned places.

you can find the rest of the hay ride picture here, as well as pictures of the st. greg’s bonfire and dedication of madda field.

in other news i am finishing up CERT training in a couple of weeks and starting the community police academy tonight. i have become _the man_.

i think this is the first time this has ever happened and probably the last time it ever will. my new desktop background.

last night in cert training we learned about fires, specifically how to put out small ones and get away from dangerous stuff. then they let us play with some fire extinguishers.

i have survived my first month transitioning from corporate america to non-profit america. the first order i placed from cdwg was shocking in that there was no tax and no shipping costs.

i have survived the first meeting of the technology illuminati working group that was responsible for bringing me into the school. after one month they are happy with my progress and want to disband or reorganize the group for another purpose.

i have survived the return of the teachers.

i have survived the return of the students.

i have hung kramer in my upper school office.

i have been in contact with the holders of my great swaths of retirement wealth that i cannot touch for another twenty eight years.

it has occured to me that i have only worked professionally for twelve years and i have to work more than twice that period before i have access (without great penalty) to my great swaths of wealth.

i have engaged the cfo i share an office with to ensure that my great swaths of wealth will be more expansive than planned in may of 2036.

i have built a retaining wall around the deep side of the pond.

i have taken two pictures of it.

i feel young. again.

i’ve been back to school for one week and i must say that, other than the first job i ever landed in IT back in ‘96, i’m pretty sure this is the best career move i’ve ever made. not that i’ve made a lot of career moves, but still.

today i had a meeting with a couple of guys on the technology review board who had interviewed me, one of whom was a particular “thorn” in my side during the interviewing process and i was a bit nervous about today’s two hour meeting at which i set the agenda.

things went well as we discussed the current IT issues at the school and somehow we got onto the topic of my interview and i was told by “the thorn” that i had done particularly well at the technology interview compared to the competition.

for maybe the third time in my life my jaw literally dropped. not to the floor, to be sure, but i became aware of the position of my jaw after a few seconds and secured it back into its correct location. after which i croaked something to the equivalent of “you’re kidding me?”

he assured me he was not kidding me and i, in turn, shared with him the fact that after interviewing with him, feeling that i had done so terribly, i was going to call off all of the rest of my interviews for the day and just bow out of the whole process. he told me with a completely straight face: “oh, we wouldn’t have let you.”

i hated that guy. i’ve been on a few interviews in my life but i never, ever, felt like i tanked an interview, especially a technical interview, like i tanked that interview. i know a thing or two about what i do. i am not an expert in anything in IT and i don’t claim to be, and that is one of the things that i feel is one of my high selling points. i can learn anything, fix anything, do anything in IT but i am the expert of no particular domain.

this guy’s questions made me feel like i didn’t know shit. i fielded the questions as best i could, with the knowledge i had. it felt like a heavy weight fight and i was a feather weight and the blows just kept coming and coming. at his last question, which had to do with remote learning and video over the internet, i threw in the towel. i had some knowledge of all the previous topics he queried about but i had nothing for this one. i answered in turn: “i have no idea. i have never done anything with video over the internet but that’s the kind of thing i will never learn about where i am now and would love to learn about it.”

i learned later he has a patent in video over the internet.

i went a couple of rounds with the rest of the powerful group on the conference call; a woman in virginia, the vice president at morino institute and a big wig from carnegie mellon. i felt i managed those questions ok.

but then it was back to “the thorn” who had just one closing question for me before the end: “what port does ntp run on?”

my brain would not work at that point. i knew the answer, its ntp after all and dammit it all rhymes! ntp 123 udp. but i couldn’t think of it, i was spent. the best i could offer was “i can’t recall it right now but if you slide me over your laptop i will tell you in about 15 seconds.”

interview over. slumped over the steering wheel, i almost cancelled the rest of the day, two more interviews with three people.

they were exhaustive in their interviewing process.

back to today, and i get the behind the scenes story. “the thorn” tells me he is a particular stickler when it comes to interviewing and will just ask question after harder question which can generally not be answered just to see how the interviewee reacts to the situation. he wants to see if you will panic, if you will get the “deer in the headlights” look, or just outright lie about what you know. he has all the answers, he is working from a script; you are on your own and even though it’s a technical interview, for him, it is all about how you deal with the pressure.

i hated that guy. i really thought that interview cost me the job, but at least i didn’t lie or exaggerate.

i hated that guy, until about 9:43 this morning. now i kind of like him. he is plugged into an IT community in cleveland i had no idea was out there, not the least of which is free microsoft support which is normally $400/hour. the whole school is plugged into scary resources.

i offer one quick picture, my office at the lower school campus that i share with the cfo. i’ll add a picture of my upper school office once i am able to hang up “the kramer”.

in other news, bachelor week begins tomorrow until wednesday.

today at work the landscapers managed to fling a large stone into one of our glass doors and shatter it. they denied it but the video/security replay confirmed it was them.

and then i found out that my parent’s shed burned to the ground last night in what could only have been a deliberately set fire. first a fire around the corner, then a fire across the street, now this. arsonists must be roaming the streets of south euclid. time to move to sagamore hills.

today i went back to school. and all i could wonder was what took me so long to get back there.