Another Five Seconds of Fame

Yesterday (Saturday) was the St. Charles St. Patrick's Day parade, and as I have for the last several years, I marched with the Tunes of Glory Pipes & Drums. So... when I went to church this morning, people handed me copies of today's Kane County Chronicle:


Would you look at that... the piper they chose to put in the paper is none other than li'l old me. Another five seconds of fame there... at this rate, by the time I'm eighty I'll have gotten the full fifteen minutes that Andy Warhol said we'd all get.

In the accompanying article, columnist Joe Grace talks about how he's never marched in a parade, but dreams of doing so someday. It is an interesting experience--on the one hand, it's fun to see the people on the sidewalk waving and cheering, especially when you get a glimpse of someone you know. On the other hand, there's a lot to think about--playing correctly (and playing the right tune!), staying in step, and not drifting out of position in the group. I have a tendency to take longer steps than most people, which means that if I'm not careful I'll find myself well out ahead of my line--especially if I'm in the front row. In last year's downtown Chicago parade, I got far enough out ahead that another piper grabbed my belt and yanked me back into position--right as we were passing the TV cameras, of course!

It appears we're getting ready to start another tune, which is why I have only one hand on the pipe chanter and am adjusting the bag position with the other. Getting the bag tucked properly under your arm is a bit tricky when wearing the rain cape that was, alas, necessary on this cold and drizzly day.

I don't think the photographer knew me from Adam, and I really doubt that he knew I'm one of maybe two or three people in the band who actually live in St. Charles, but it's kind of cool that of all the people he could have photographed, he chose me. I'd like to think it's because I just look like a "piper," but I suspect the reality is that I just happened to be passing by when he decided to snap the picture.

Unclear on the Concept

Today we have another classic incomprehensible road sign. I photographed this one while riding the Harley down Phantom Canyon Road, between Victor/Cripple Creek and Canon City, Colorado during the summer of 1995. The sign gives the helpful warning that there may be loose gravel on the road.

Uh-huh... the whole road's gravel, of course. Is there any particular patch of it that the highway department wanted to warn me about?

It's kind of like encountering a "BUMP AHEAD" sign in Illinois, where the roads are nothing but bumps, mile after mile of them. I want to ask, which bump does the sign refer to?

Today's Road Sign

I saw this while passing through Yellowstone National Park in 2006.

I'm still not sure whether it's just a road construction sign or a deep philosophical statement about the meaning of life in general.

New Piece Up on Projects At Work Website

The Projects At Work online project management magazine has put up my latest piece, a review of Jerry Weinberg's new book, Perfect Software and Other Illusions About Testing. If you've never visited the Projects At Work site before, you'll need to do a free registration (sigh... is there anything on the Internet that you can read without filling out a registration?). Go ahead... you know you want to...

Perfect Software is a valuable book even if you don't write or test software, because it's really not so much about software or testing as it is about people: why we think we want to test things in the first place, how we see and interpret tests, how we act on their results, and how we mess up. These observations and suggestions are applicable far beyond the world of software. For instance, they could be applied to education--as I was reading and reviewing the book during my slack periods at the high school (I spend a couple days a week as a substitute teacher), I found myself wishing the people who came up with "No Child Left Behind" had read it.

You can read my review of Perfect Software by clicking here.

Yeah, I've Been There

Friend of mine is suggesting we go to Colorado on the motorcycles this summer. OK, Colorado's a pretty state... where do you want to go? Oh, there? Yeah, I've been on that road; it's pretty...

His suggestion got me to thinking, just how much of the Colorado Rockies have I explored on a bike? So I took my road map and a bright orange highlighter, and traced over the roads I've traveled on my various expeditions. It seems pretty close to a complete set (click on the image to enlarge it).

I first put a wheel in Colorado in August of 1977, coming across from Utah on the way back from the Pacific coast. We camped outside of Glenwood Springs in a dreary rainstorm that continued through the next day (during which we had to sit out a long delay near Vail, because a private pilot had gotten in trouble and was trying to make an emergency landing on I-70). The rain didn't end until we passed through the Eisenhower Tunnel (which was, at the time, a single hole with one lane in each direction; the second hole wouldn't open for another two years)... and then we came down the long hill into Denver in glorious sunshine, whisked through town, found a cheap motel in the prairie town of Idalia, turned on the TV and found that Elvis had left the building for good. A strange and memorable introduction to the state...

My most recent visit was in May of 1999, too early for my own good (but timed to match a business meeting). I rode west out of Colorado Springs, and just west of Wilkerson Pass on US 24, I ran into a snowstorm. Luckily, it was a short one, and it was spring so it melted fairly quickly, and I was able to go on my merry way.

I still don't have the complete set: 13 north of Meeker, 139 south of Rangely, 141 through Gypsum Gap, 491 north of Cortez, 140, 172 and 151 around Durango, and the little stretch of US 40 between Granby and I-70 have escaped... for now. But summer's coming...

Technologies In Mirror May Be Closer Than They Appear

After ordering a cup of the restaurant's strongest tea, Jape pulled a rolled-up sheet of black material from a pocket of his cape and spread it on the tabletop. "Softscroll, activate," he whispered, and within a few seconds the featureless surface came alive, displaying windows filled with words and pictures.

--From The Last Protector

I first wrote about the "softscroll," a futuristic personal computer built into a thin, flexible sheet of plastic that Jape, the time-traveling Ranger, could just roll up and stuff into a pocket, almost ten years ago. At the time, it seemed like a pretty far-out concept. But today, while subbing in the science department over at Saint Charles East, I saw a presentation on nanotechnology, and a part of the new tech being displayed was... you guessed it, "stretchable silicon," which is supposed to lead to such things as a TV that's just a paper-thin sheet of plastic you roll out on the wall, or cell phones that roll up inside a pen, or... yep, a flexible computer.

Granted, the stuff that John Rogers of the University of Illinois has created won't do quite everything the "softscroll" does... yet. And flexible computers aren't on the market... yet (good thing my book came out last May!). But "stretchable silicon" does illustrate one of the problems of writing science fiction: technology is moving forward so quickly that by the time you've written, sold, edited and released a book incorporating a "far-out" new gadget, you may find the gadget isn't very far-out at all! My friend Jerry Weinberg wrote a book called The Aremac Project, which featured a machine that could read your thoughts, and now, just a few years after its release, he's worrying in his blog that technology may have already caught up with him. He advises writers to set their SF books far enough into the future that something like this won't happen. And to get back to nanotech for a moment, it's starting to look like carbon nanotubes may very well make the "elevator to orbit" concept feasible... rendering obsolete all those great SF books in which people fly around in rockets.

I wonder if this rapid advance of technology, which makes SF gimmicks obsolete almost overnight, is part of the reason fantasy's taken off in the last few decades. Odds are the University of Illinois won't develop your story's central gimmick if it involves magic. Then again, as Clarke observed, sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic...

It's Good to Know Where You're Not

Here's our Highway Sign of the Day:

Where I come from, you don't very often see signs that tell you what road you're not on, but in some parts of the country that's an important thing to know. This sign is (or was; I shot the picture in 1981) on Utah Route 46, just south of its intersection with US 163. I suspect the sign's there because this is pretty empty country, and if you find yourself on 46 (headed for the tiny town of Paradox, Colorado) when you meant to be on 163 headed for Monticello, you may go quite a ways before realizing your mistake.

So what was I doing here? Looking for the empty country; in particular, heading off to see the wild and scenic desert alone on a big Japanese dirtbike that I'd modified for long-distance touring. In other words, I was on something of a fool's errand, almost in the same league as that "Into the Wild" guy who walked into the Alaskan wilderness figuring to live off the land. A breakdown, a bad crash, or just a big error in my trail guide (no GPS or satellite navigation in those days!) would have meant the buzzards would get a bigger-than-usual meal. Looking back, I think I must have been slightly crazy to make this trip. But, obviously, nothing too awful went wrong, and I returned sunburned, bruised and more than a little humbled... and the buzzards went hungry. You can read about the trip, and see some pretty neat pictures, here.

When I was putting this story together, I visited a lot of web sites to make sure I had my facts more or less straight (it has been 27 years, after all). And I found that things do seem to change over time. A landmark that was called "Prostitute Butte" in '81 now sports the more politically correct name of "Lone Rock." I have a photo of a natural arch that doesn't seem to have the same name now that it had then... but it also doesn't look the same, even though it's in the same place. The creek's changed its name, or at least the spelling of the name, and the particular Jeep road I took now seems to be parts of three different Jeep roads... or perhaps it's now a mountain bike trail. And I don't recall having to pay a dollar to cross the last six hundred feet of private land.

Memory is funny stuff. Memories change over time, but reality also changes, it seems.