Inside The Perimeter

Tonight I will be going from “XYX Corp” to downtown to Theatrical Outfit for their performance of “Boy”. It does me no good to leave early, maybe I can use some of the later office time to do some German learning.

A Good Walk
Thanks again to ITP-Reader Steve for a three-mile walk at lunch yesterday. Unfortunately for me I was experiencing some painful physical issues, some of which you don’t want to know, and was slow. My afternoon of recover was incredibly painful to boot. Ah the joys of genetics deficiency!

With the exception of the amble that I will be taking to Vespucci where I’ll be meeting my fried Darren (not “Gentry”) for lunch I am giving myself the day off from walking.

ITP Flickr Pic
“Grass, Marble, Denim”

You know that I am notoriously early, right? With fifteen minutes to kill prior to our prearranged meeting time, I shot this outside the Federal Building.

Wanna Get Away?
I do, and I might at least for tomorrow.

Originally I was to go to the theater tomorrow night, but one of my favorite bands, Manchester Orchestra is playing tomorrow night, unfortunately at Tabernacle. I was considering going but now I see that it’s sold out. Oh well.

There will also be many people wandering about East Atlanta Village tomorrow night as the Project Pabst concert rolls into town, this time featuring Iggy Pop and Dinosaur Jr! Whoa, in my little old portion of the land inside the perimeter? Impressive. Hopefully the rain predicted for tomorrow evening will hold off until after the concert.

This will be a bookend weekend of theater for me because on Sunday night I will be once again seeing “Glengarry Glen Ross” at Pinch ‘n’ Ouch Theatre — this time as a one-man play!

And if I don’t get away I will spend time gathering things to expel from the ITP Estate.

Happy Birthday ITP
On Sunday, October 8th, this blog turns fourteen! I started on October 8th, 2004 and because the way we count birthdays it will be number fourteen. Is that right? Hard to believe that one person could whine in public for that long, amirite?

Cheers,
Paulie [eatl/ga]

There are so many things in life about which I am unsure, my feelings about the changes made by Apple for iOS 11 keeps moving up the list. At first I hated iOS 11, now I just strongly dislike it. Perhaps when all of the Apple-following websites spoil the features planned for iOS 12 next year I will have grown to like it.

Since June this blog has been nearly exclusively produced with an iPad, many times it’s been an iPad Mini 4 using a Zagg Portfolio Bluetooth keyboard. It has been extremely useful and incredibly mobile, but there are times I wonder if that I could just convert one or two iOS apps to macOS I’d be better off buying a MacBook or 11″ MacBook Air and giving up on the iPad lifestyle.

The Walking Experiment
Yesterday’s walk back the car was fine, but I was not inspired to take a single photo. I even attempted to spice things up by stopping into The Albert for a beer and a snack.

There were many happy people on the Beltline, unfortunately I was not one of them; I just can’t shake the cloud hanging over me. I tried listening to an audiobook for awhile before converting to playing music via Spotify. Want to guess to what I was listening?

Wrong!

My music of choice yesterday was “Der frühe Mozart: The Early Mozart” an album by Michael Martin Kofler.

I bet you didn’t see that coming!

I have always had tastes for nearly all types of music, with the exception of most rap / hip-hop, and songs by modern-day singers. In recent years I find myself turning a lot to jazz and classical chamber music, perhaps because I wasn’t inundated by these for the first fifty years of my life.

Will I attempt the “MARTA in / walk out” again? Sure, but only when the weather and my schedule permit me to do so.

ITP Flickr Pic
“There’s A Fungus Among Us” (Atlanta, Georgia, United States)

Taken the day before yesterday as I walked around killing time before my German class. I am fascinated by fungi, and would have loved to have a macro lens for this shot.

Where Do The Nights Go?
As I have been toiling at “XYZ Corp” the past few weeks I have been scheming of the work that I will do when I get home at nights. But then I don’t get anything done!

Last night is a perfect example. By the time I got home, no later than 6:30pm, I had eaten dinner and had the night ahead of me. I watched perhaps thirty minutes of YouTube video, started reading a book that I want to have read by the time I go to LEAF in a few weeks, and then went into my bedroom to do some German homework.

I found out that the class notes for German had not been posted, so since I took no photo of this week’s assignment I had no clue what I was supposed to do. At this point I should have spent an hour or so learning vocabulary, but I didn’t do that. I could have started writing code at this point too, but didn’t do that either. Instead I started reading again, but not for long.

When I woke up it was a little past 12:30am, and I was probably awoken by the sound of one of my toilets refilling as it has acquired a leak recently.

I woke again around 2:30am, and then once more at 5:45am when my alarm clock sounded.

And that is how yet another night of my life was spent not doing the things that I wanted to do. Well, I did start reading a book, so that’s something I suppose.

Make it a good Thursday. ITP-Reader Steve, I will be at the eagle around noon, if you are able and interested in hoofing it a bit today please meet me then.

Cheers,
Paulie [eatl/ga]

I am experimenting today. Why not, it’s not like I don’t have a million and one things on my plate. This morning I rode MARTA in to work.

If today’s MARTA ride was the norm people would love riding the train. I literally walked down the stairs and into a train at my first MARTA station, and then when I was to transfer to a northbound train I waited less than thirty seconds for it to arrive.

Well done, MARTA, but I am glad that I won’t be giving you an opportunity to ruin today’s opinion later this afternoon. No, instead this afternoon I am going to change into some “walking clothes” and hoof my way from “XYZ Corp” to the MARTA station at which the M6 is parked.

ITP Flickr Pic
“Fox y Lady” (Atlanta, Georgia, United States)

No, my title is not mistyped. Think Spanish, “Fox and Lady”

This snapshot was taken on my return route of yesterday’s lunchtime walk. I played the game a little differently yesterday, pausing for lunch during the journey. From “XYZ Corp” I walked down to The Canteen at Technology Square on 5th Street. At The Canteen I ordered a succulent hamburger and french fries at Fred’s Bread & Meat. The burger was
sloppy and great, the fries were good.

Try Again Week?
This must be “Try Again Week” here at ITP because another once-abandoned practice was rekindled — filling beer growlers.

In the past I’ve criticized the growler movement for it’s price and need to quickly consume the beer once the growler has been opened. Things on these fronts have unfortunately not changed. The cost to fill two, 64-ounce growlers was $33 (rounding down), or roughly $0.26/ounce; two six packs of beer, each containing 72 ounces would cost me no more than $22, or roughly $0.15/ounce. You don’t need to be an economics major to figure out which is the better buy.

It may be time for me to put this practice back out to pasture.

I May Be Hanging Up My Fantasy Cleats
My Fantasy League Football team is now 1-3. Ugh. The past week I lost to a person who had Andrew Luck for a starting quarterback! For those of you not following the NFL Luck has been injured since last year and has not played a single game this year — and I still lost!

It may be time to admit again that I am not good at this, and it doesn’t bring me any enjoyment, and quit again.

Cheers,
Paulie [eatl/ga]

The legs are turning but it doesn’t seem that I am getting anywhere.

Credit Where Credit Is Due
ITP-Reader Barb was right, current Thursday night NFL games are also being shown on CBS. Therefore I could have watched the Packers game on TV last week and not whined about not seeing the game in the blog on Friday.

If only someone who is a Packers fan still read the blog…

I’m Still Struggling At “XYZ Corp”
I need to take this as a gigantic learning experience, but I have accomplished nothing other than working myself into a lather because I have been unable to fix our build process. Yesterday pointed me into a new direction where apparently the build script is unable to unlock the keychain, for which I have yet to find an answer.

I keep thinking that coding at home will be the antidote for my woes, but the night goes by in a blink of an eye (great rhyming song lyric for you) and I wind up getting nothing done there either.

My Mother Has Been Preparing Me For This
I have reached an age where it going forward it should not seem unreasonable for the people I admired as I grew up to die. I have watched my mother go through it, now its my generation’s turn.

At 66, Tom Petty seemed “too young” to die, especially the way he did. One of my life’s regrets was not seeing Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers play the concert in Gainesville, FL (their hometown) when I was a student there in the late 1980s / early 1990s.

This marks two of my childhood music idols to have died in the past month. This is one of the many reminders that we should live for today.

ITP Flickr Pic
“Walk Of Art” (Atlanta, Georgia, United States)

Yesterday’s lunch walk found me going around Piedmont Park again. This time I made it up to the north end of the park before bending back south on what I guess is the official Beltline Trail. Along the way I saw a handful of art installations, including this one.

Speaking of walks, I have two planned for later this week — tomorrow I am going to try the “MARTA in, Walk back to my car”, and on Thursday I will do another lunch-time walk (ITP-Reader Steve, let me know on Thursday if you are interested in joining me that day). The goal is to increase my exercise, photography, and potentially my German vocabulary at the same time.

Blast From The Past
German class starts again tonight. I’m not ready. This might be a make or break session for me as I need to start making lasting improvements to my skill level to justify the time and money costs.

Ready or not here we go!

Cheers,
Paulie [eatl/ga]

The results of an effort are relative and rely on the side of the fence on which you stand.

Friday Good For Me
No, not work, that continues to remain bad for me.

After work I drove up to the Perimeter Mall area to meet a bunch of former co-workers at Chuy’s. The meetup was fine, and I managed to abstain from drinking alcohol as well. (Wow!) Of course I planned an after-dinner beverage at The Georgia Chapter Room (nee The Fred), which made the evening easier to swallow soto speak.

Good Days To Be A Pantry/Freezer Item?
Depending on your point of view this was either a really good weekend to be a pantry/freezer item in the ITP Estate, or a really bad one.

For Saturday’s lunch I did my best jazz performer imitation by combining the following into a single meal — a box of garlic-parmesan couscous, a can of spicy Rotel tomatoes, a hamburger patty, two German frankfurters. Yes, it was a bachelor’s lunch, and was quite tasty to boot. I ate the leftovers as part of my day of grazing yesterday.

“I’m Not Indian, But Sometimes I Play One In The Kitchen” (Atlanta, Georgia, United States)

This is an Indian-inspired dish that I made for dinner on Saturday night. I put some cut up chicken breasts into a crockpot with a jar of Tikka Masala sauce. I cooked this on high for two hours, and then added a bag of frozen peas and diced carrots and cooked on low for another two-and-a-half hours. During the last half-hour of crock potting I cooked a batch of basmati rice that I seasoned with an Indian spice blend that I inherited last year. Not bad, if I do say so myself.

For dinner I freestyled again, experimenting more with cooking style than cooking flavor. I took a box of pasta, and cooked it in a pot containing four cups of water, two heaping tablespoons of Better Than Bouillon Chicken Stock Paste, a(nother) can of spicy Rotel tomatoes, and a jar of spaghetti sauce. After cooking the mixture (far too long in order to cook down the liquid, but at least the pasta didn’t disintegrate) I tossed in the rest of the Kraft Grated Parmesan dust in a jar in order to soak up most of the remaining moisture and bring the dish together. If it was my intent to reinvent the flavor of Chef Boyardee Cheese Ravioli in a can then the experiment was a smashing success. However, it was not, so I must give myself credit for trying, but that’s about it.

Of course I have leftovers, and will be consuming them as lunches this week.

The Lazy Man’s Answer
I have not been enamored with what I’ve seen with iOS 11 and was on the path to hold off installing it onto my iOS devices for a while. That all changed when I must have accidentally agreed to install it on my iPhone on Friday night / Saturday morning. When I woke the iPhone had been updated, which is a near-irreversible move. Dangen!

On Saturday morning I noticed that my Mac’s Safari webpages were not showing up in Safari on my iPad running iOS 10. Having recently updated Safari on my Mac I came to the conclusion that it had a bug that caused this to happen. One thing the install of iOS 11 showed me was that this was no bug, because I could now see the Mac’s Safari webpages on my iPhone.

I called Apple out on this egregious behavior and their response was “We recommend that you update all of your iOS devices to iOS 11”. Of course you do. What a lazy answer.

So far I am not a fan of iOS 11, especially on “older” iOS devices.

And In (My) Sports
Good Day: Gators fan (though not for much longer I assume), Jets fan (though they tried hard to make it a bad day)

Bad Day: Mets fan (who am I kidding, this whole season has been bad), Falcons fan (don’t know what to think about this team)

Boring Day: Werder Bremen fan (I had to include a new category for a team that has now played consecutive 0-0 matches, oh, and has yet to win a game this season)

I bid you good day.

Cheers,
Paulie [eatl/ga]

I have to be at the Woodruff Arts center in about forty-five minutes, which considering that I am currently sitting at “XYZ Corp”, is not that great of a hardship. After today’s Creative Mornings Atlanta event I have challenged myself to do to the first-ever (as far as I know) post-talk mixer. Yes, I am going to try being a normal, social person again.

I Would Walk Three Miles
Yesterday’s walk with ITP-Reader Steve was great. The only thing that could have made it greater would have been the temperature being 10-15 degrees lower.

The three mile mark is a good one for me, because I have mapped out a walk from “XYZ Corp” to the Inman-Reynoldstown MARTA station that is just about that length. In the near future I might experiment with parking, taking the train into work and then walking back to the M6 a couple of days a week.

Seeing The Old Coworkers Tonight
Tonight there is a meetup of former Echostar employees at Chuy’s near Perimeter Mall. It’ll be good to see some people that I have not seen in awhile. Next Monday marks the one-year mark since Echostar shut down the Atlanta office.

FU NFL
As you may know, I am a Jets fan. Ouch, it hurts to admit that in public these days. Through my association with the hash, and more specifically with the Raleigh Royalty, I have become a fan of the Packers as well. After a tough day at “XYZ Corp” all I wanted to do was flop down and watch last night’s Bears v. Packers game. I knew the game was being streamed on Amazon Prime, which is fine for me since I’ve been a long-time subscriber, and dutifully pulled it up on my iPad. Then, to watch the game on a much larger screen I turned on AirPlay to cast it to my television via the AppleTV only to be thwarted with a dialog box alerting me that I was not allowed to stream the game to a “connected device”. With no Amazon Prime app currently on my AppleTV I had two options:
1. Watch the game on the iPad.
2. Tell Amazon and the NFL to go fuck themselves and find something else to do.

I think you know me well enough to figure out which I chose.

Focusing On Myself This Weekend
I plan to spend a lot of time at home alone this weekend. I have plenty of software and German skills to improve and want to dedicate some time to them. There are also some chores around the ITP Estate that need to get done, I might even have time to do them since I won’t be watching much football this weekend.

Hope you all have a nice weekend.

Cheers,
Paulie [eatl/ga]

I find it ironic that in order to make myself happier in the long term by losing weight so that my clothes fit better and I have more confidence in presenting myself to the world, that I must give up, or at least severely limit, the things that make me happy — eating and drinking beer — in the short term. This makes me sad. Ironic, isn’t it? Or maybe not, maybe I have an Alanis Morissette concept of irony.

Yesterday’s “Walk for My Cause” was a trip on foot to Target in Atlantic Station. Perhaps the irony of this journey was that when I arrived at Target I realized that I really didn’t need anything from there. I walked around briefly, picked up a couple of things including one thing (9v batteries) that I realized later I had already purchased elsewhere, and started my journey back to the office.

On the 17th Street bridge I stopped to attempt photos of Atlanta’s traffic and skyline, but the amount of bright light and lack of dramatic clouds made for rather pedestrian photos; fitting, I suppose. I really needed a split-density filter to bring down the exposure of the sky while not messing with the exposure of the buildings and traffic. That’s what I needed, not that I have one of these for my Nikon 1 V1.

I fought what has become significantly worse traffic lately, and instead of stopping into a bar for a few beers and dinner like I wanted, I made it all the way back to the ITP Estate where I warmed up leftovers and drank water. Oddly my evening was a short one as I was unable to keep my eyes open much past 9:00pm, which is a shame given that I have so much non-work work to accomplish when I am at home.

ITP-Reader Steve, I have clothes for walking at lunch if you are still game. Since it’s still goddamn hot outside I will be changing into non-running shorts, t-shirt, and sneakers since I am a sweater. Also, the shoes I wore to work are not ones in which I wish to walk any distance. There will be food trucks abound today, perhaps post walk that can be my lunch. If you are still game shall I meet you at that statue outside your building around 11:30am?

Hope yours is a good Thursday.

Cheers,
Paulie [eatl/ga]

My attitude toward my day can be altered significantly based on when I get out of bed. It’s currently 8:05am EDT, and while I have showered, I’m not ready to leave the house yet. I feel behind on a day when I need to deliver something, something with which I have been struggling, at work.

ITP Flickr Pic
“Fractured Time” (Atlanta, Georgia, United States)

This anomaly occurred as I was driving home last night. Time for me to reboot my Apple Watch.

I Hope They Enjoy Phoenix
With my end of the InterAmericas Hash registration transfer done I’ve started spending the money transferred to my PayPal account by the purchaser. I was going to wait until after the event occurred, but why should I? I hope that they enjoy the hash, as I have started enjoying their money.

ITP-Reader Barb, convince you to meet up for lunch or dinner one day/night (except Tuesday night) next week? Or will you be too busy getting ready to go to Phoenix?

Make it a great Wednesday.

Cheers,
Paulie [eatl/ga]

I’m typing this morning inside Midtown Wash, once again aggravated with the tightness of my pants, and hoping that I can get back into the swing of doing work again. At least I know that I will have clean clothes in ninety minutes, so I’ve got that going for me.

Body Moving
Given my current mindset regarding my weight I am trying to eat less and move more. After eating lunch yesterday I went on an hour-long walk down, and then back up Peachtree; it’s a start. Along my way I ran into a former coworker from “XYZ Corp”, and exchanged pleasantries.

ITP Flickr Pic
Really? Yep.

“Finding Something You’ve Never Seen” (Atlanta, Georgia, United States)

On my walk yesterday I noticed this house on Peachtree. For all of the times that I’ve driven up and down this section of Peachtree in the past twenty-two years I had never noticed it before. This house is located on Peachtree near Pine. According to my internet searching this is the Rufus Rose house, erected in 1901, and one of four Victorian houses remaining on Peachtree.

No German Class, Must Study German
As with the rest of my life I am struggling with trying to get myself to study German. Classes start again next Tuesday, but I have been out of the studying habit for nearly a month. I am making an attempt to carve out time to do one hundred flash cards a day (if I could mate this with walking that would be amazing) and reading about German grammar. It’s nearly time for me to start planning my next trip to Germany, I’d hate to be a worse speaker of their language than I was on my last trip.

Make it a great Tuesday.

Cheers,
Paulie [eatl/ga]

Today is another day to try and do better.

Weekend Was Okay
I failed miserably at being social on Friday afternoon, leaving the Trees Atlanta soirée after one beer and King of Pops, and being unable to muster the strength to talk to anyone. The positive spin on this night was that I returned home and cooked up a pot of my improvised jambalaya.

Saturday was a drunken mess. I saw a lot of friends at EAV Strut, heard of others who were there that I did not see, and hung out with some getting trashed. The positive spin on this day is that I did not lose my wallet, nor did I drive anywhere. I think I was passed out in bed by 8:00pm.

Yesterday was spend working on a coding tutorial before spending far too many hours watching football, both European and American. The positive spin on yesterday was that I cooked up in a crockpot some chicken with frozen vegetables and a bottle of some sort of red curry sauce I bought at Trader Joe’s; all of these were in my pantry/freezer so I used up things that I had already purchased.

Sleep Late, Start Late
I brought my dirty laundry with me this morning, but traffic was so bad that I decided to put off the task of washing it to either tonight or tomorrow.

I Need To Make Time To Exercise
I probably should have tried riding my trainer while watching sports yesterday. Huh, wish I had thought of that then. Maybe I can make time to do something, anything, in the name of losing weight by exercising.

Hope yours was a good one.

Cheers,
Paulie [eatl/ga]