John Wise

It’s not 1975, but if it were this ashtray wouldn’t only be filled with filtered cigarettes. Where are the snuffed-out filterless Pall Malls and Camels? If this were Europe there might be hand-rolled butts, if people used ashtrays when outdoors. This forest of butts represents about 460 lost minutes of work from the people who left the office building for a smoke. This doesn’t account for the ashtray on the other side of the building that had about an equal amount of filter trees growing in the sand. Then there are those people who hang out by the fence line, under the covered parking, or who pace and toss off their smoldering remnant of a cigarette onto the ground.

So in an office building with about 100 employees distributed across a bit more than half a dozen companies, I’d estimate that these small firms collectively lose about 20 hours of productivity a day. For these employees, they will encounter higher health care premiums and more sick days as smokers are typically sicker longer. Over the course of the year, they lose 218 days where they were paying people to go smoke. Just those days will cost those company’s about $52,200 not including paid sick time and insurance which, according to some studies, suggests amounts to over $100,000. That is the true cost of planting these forests.

Yikes, just sat down at Starbucks and in 15 minutes I need to write something, but I have no ideas about a subject. The reason I’m in a hurry is that I must leave shortly to pick up Caroline from her office. So here are some random observations: One guy just ran in for the toilet. He was smiling on the way in and I noticed a bandage on his elbow like he had been donating plasma earlier. His backpack and state of clothes suggested homelessness, but not in the way that had me thinking he’d been on the street long. He emerged too quickly to stoke the imagination regarding drug use so I’ll let that go.

I see two students studying together, from the size of the books it looks like nursing school. An elderly couple is sitting in the soft chairs reading the newspaper; who reads the newspaper anymore? Across from me is a guy with glasses and full headphones with a large notebook computer plugged in, giving me the impression of a gamer, then I spot the game controller under the table confirming my ideas of pigeonholing him. Drive-thru is keeping the staff busy and a slow trickle of people continually enters the lobby, but it’s slow for a Friday afternoon. There’s a 65-ish-year-old woman sitting out front with short-cropped reddish hair; she’s overweight and reading a book about Berlin. I’m getting the sense of my mother sitting out there, except my mother is dead.

Earlier this morning, instead of writing, I was testing some website functionality that resulted in the owner of the company throwing $100 of free software my way. The guy is Michael Hetrick who makes VST’s a.k.a. music plugins. Years ago, while he was writing his thesis about modular software units based on Eurorack designs, I’d made a contribution to his efforts. Today he said thanks again and let me know that his gift was a token of his gratitude. I am touched by his generosity. Afterward, still before noon, I ran into Kenny from HEK Yeah BBQ at Costco and after completing my shopping proceeded to go to his place for an early lunch. While we were at Costco he picked up some rib-eyes that he would be smoking this afternoon, so that, along with some asparagus, will be dinner.

Currently, it’s a pleasant 72 degrees with cloudy skies while it was over 95 degrees and windy just two days ago. I’m about to turn down the computer after I hit “save draft” as Caroline will go over this for grammatical issues and ensure I’m making sense (not always a sure thing). With the computer packed up, it’ll be time to start our weekend as soon a the wife is in the car.

I’ve been working on writing five different things, but none of them are ready for the light of day yet. One is my version of a fairy tale, one is a dark piece, one about death, another on things mundane, and finally, the last one is a return to the subject of time. Regarding time, this is not a look at my usage of it or others who waste it; instead, I’m looking at the very nature of what it is. Then a hint about the entry on death: I’ll be considering how little I can know about it and that I’ll never be able to convey anything about it from my own experience in a blog entry.

Been dealing with a few dozen loose ends that pertain to many things in our lives as we get ready for summer, a kind of spring cleaning. Finished our taxes today, that’s always a relief. Then there are all the other things that need clearing out before any serious travels can commence.

Trying to get a lens that I’ve dropped repaired for the fourth time, this time to fix a dented front filter ring that is stopping me from attaching and removing a polarizer. It was just this past July that I’d sent it in to repair most of its guts as the auto-focus no longer functioned and some broken interior piece was causing serious zooming issues with the lens when we were in Europe last year. Previous to that it was a dysfunctional image stabilization system. If you think I should change brands from Canon to something else, you’d be mistaken. This 17-55mm f2.8 lens has snapped well north of 150,000 images for me and is simply perfect. That lens has taken photos in the wilds of Alaska for more than 30 days, it’s been weeks in the bottom of the Grand Canyon, visited Death Valley and Yellowstone where it encountered hot and cold extremes.

Today I received the first firmware update to the Bionic Lester MK3 that is really allowing the filter to feel like a real module. Sound in and out is a bit limiting, but with some modulation capability life begins to be injected into the thing.

Caroline had her hair trimmed today by Sydney who’s been taking care of these duties for nearly a decade now. I’m out this evening writing this stuff (look at the time stamp on the iced tea above) because the wife is out for dinner with her coworkers who are dining with a visitor that had come into town. The big news though which should probably be a blog entry of its own is that Caroline is starting to move the ball forward in trying to resolve her need for dual citizenship. You see Caroline is still a German citizen working with a Permanent Resident card a.k.a. the Green Card. There are reasons for desiring both German and American citizenship and maybe someday I’ll write about what they are, as of today it was simply getting some documents notarized for sending them off to Cologne, Germany.

So not a lot to share that has any real novelty. Some might say that has been true of many of my entries, but these are for Caroline and me and the digital memory that will be constructed by an A.I. in the future from these fragments. That memory will effectively be a shadow of me representing an artistic interpretation of a person born in the middle of the 20th century. Hmmm, I should write a blog entry just about that, titled “A.I. John and how the landscape turned digital.”