Carol H Tucker Passionate about knowledge management and organizational development, expert in loan servicing, virtual world denizen and community facilitator, and a DISNEY fan
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beladona Memorial Be warned:in this very rich environment where you can immerse yourself so completely, your emotions will become engaged -- and not everyone is cognizant of that. Among the many excellent features of SL, there is no auto-return on hearts, so be wary of where your's wanders...
What is my relationship to Baltimore? I was born in a South Baltimore Hospital. I was raised in east Baltimore County [Rosedale and Middle River], just over the city line, as was my parents. I have lived downtown [with Bob], in a western suburb right outside the city [in Woodlawn, ten years with Chuck] and NW of the city [in Randallstown 22 years with Frank and after he died] until I relocated to White Oak [or Silver Spring] MD, which is outside DC in 2007. I moved because my last four jobs were around DC and I wanted to cut down on the lengthy commuting. Tom and Gem were born in Mercy Hospital, which is in downtown Baltimore, as was Annelise and the new grandchild will be. I have worked, shopped and spent a lot of time in downtown Baltimore all of my life.
In the past couple of days, I have heard so many ridiculous things about Baltimore that I have been been pretty much keeping my mouth shut. Told Tom to check and make sure that his father [Bob] was okay since he still lives in the city. I wonder if the people in Ferguson were left just shaking their heads over what they read about their town too? I have read some pretty outlandish statements about the police, about the protestors, about Freddie Gray, about the mayor, about Martin O'Malley [what did he have to scurry back from Europe for? Not like he can help!], about the O's playing to an empty stadium, about the riots in 1968. Not one of them sound to me like they really know what they are talking about. CNN is covering the story with a breathless kind of sensationalism that puts my teeth on edge and if I read one more set of self-righteous do-gooders pontificating about how horrible the city is.... Baltimore has problems, there is no doubt. Every major metro area does -- and it is all acerbated by income inequity and a lousy educational system. Like too many other things, we have gotten what we paid for, neh? It does have a grittier feel than many East Coast cities because it is more blue-collar and it is one of the few places that you can go from downtown to country in about 45 minutes.
And Baltimore is and always will be my hometown. I don't know what else to say except none of us are giving up on it......
Online I seem to fall into the same patterns -- I either become that person who shares link after link of items that have peaked my interest in hopes that it will peak someone else's or I fall silent. This has held true since I first became active online and the venue doesn't seem to matter whether or not it is in a gated online community such as Brainstorms [http://www.rheingold.com/community.html if you are interested] or a social media site like Twitter [I am @CarolHTucker], Pinterest, Ello, G+, or Facebook. In Brainstorms, Ello and G+ I am all but non-present, at the most I lurk and read. On Twitter [87 followrs] and Pinterest [239 followers] I am fairly active and post almost daily, and what is posted there goes automatically to my Facebook [459 friends] timeline. I should point out that many of those followers and friends are duplicates, people who have connected with me in more than on venue [because they are glutons for punishm.... I mean because they really like me], so my actual social media footprint actually isn't that impressive.
Let's look at what kinds of things I put out online by taking a look at yesterday, Friday April 24th
getting a Bitcoin mining server for almost $500 and a hat tip to The Worst Things for Sale blog for finding that item
a comment about finding a blog post of mine from 04.24.2011 [courtesy of the "on this day" feature of Facebook], realizing that the picture I used in the post -- because the only way to post pictures on this blogger platform is by linking to an url where it has already been posted -- was now missing. I asked how many people go back and scrub their blogs?
a comment that you know it is Friday when you don't have to set your alarm for tomorrow
three posts about the 25th anniversary of the HUBBLE telescope -- one connecting to their interactive webiste at http://hubble25th.org/ , one referencing the story behind the project, and one with my blog post
an article about fracking and injecting wastewater causing earth tremors
the National Raisin Reserve that the US government maintains [who knew?]
Diablo III is launching in China
Steam is opening a market so that users can sell mods to game platforms, starting with Skyrim
The melting of the last snowbank hereabouts
why the paperless office hasn't happened
The moving of more of the Enchanted Forest
DC's #1 import is medicine -- well we need something to take when all these politicians drive us bonkers, neh?
Native actors refusing to work on a movie where they feel their names are degrading
a Bitcoin company filing to become a bank with a question -- if Bitcoin is "property" as the IRS has ruled, then what will the new bank use for capital and currency?
pictures of a cartoon that amused me, a Genie Plush Bear that I would like, of my 2nd Life, and of earthquake zones in the US
A couple items were favorited in Twitter, two likes in Pinterest and a couple in Facebook. One discussion about WASD VS mouse navigation in games on Facebook. One rather cool discussion on the Hubble post and I found out that one guy I knew actually worked on it and another friend's parents were both involved
So I don't blog that often, but I am "out there". Is that an effective way to manage an online identity? Good question.....
Where were you this day 25 years ago? That was the day the Hubble Telescope was boosted into the sky. Astronomy didn't change immediately and there needed to be some tweaking -- the crew of the shuttle had to get out and do some repairs five times from 1993 through 2009. The cost of the program have mounted and in 2010 it was esitmated they had reached a cumulative total of roughly $10 billion. But from what was originally projected to be a twenty year mission? It is still going strong and over the years there has been an impressive set of images [like the 25th anniversary one below] that have emerged. Check out their website for more information!
I awake with the alarm feeling bleery and disoriented. The rain is beating on the windows and the river of lights that is the morning traffic is sweeping past in the view from the balcony. It is going to be a long day today, I fear....
Quote of the day: “I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next.” ~ Gilda Rander
Back home from a great vacation out in Las Cruses, NM. Unpacking, doing laundry, fitting back into the everyday routine that I managed to escape from for a whole week that seemed to flit by far too quickly as all vacations are wont to do. And Kula has decided that next time, he is going too....
The office move is completed. A couple of things went wrong -- one of them is that the two-drawer lateral and three-drawer pedestal for my cubicle have to be re-ordered because they sent the wrong color, so I have to work out of boxes for the time being. And I am back to having a fishbowl for a workspace.
Mondays are tough. The weekends just seem too short whether or not they are busy and jam-packed with activities [meaning I am on the go], filled with home chores [meaning I actually do something around the apartment], or quiet and contemplative [meaning I get to be totally lazy and just read or play online] and there doesn’t seem to be enough time to recharge.
One has to work on being appreciative of being able to get out and get out – grateful for the health and wellbeing that allows you to plunge into another week and glad to have a job to go to. I’m ….
On Friday, March 20th, 2015 at 6:45 PM EDT, Spring supposedly arrives. Of course, it is preceded by a Winter Storm Advisory with a prediction of anywhere from 1" to 5" of snow to be dumped on us before the precipitation changes to rain.....
Because I hit an all-time high on Twitter followers this morning, I sat down and took an inventory of my social media footprint. I was pretty surprised to learn that as of today, 1,610 people have connected with me in different venues. Grant you, some folks are gluttons for punishment and connect with me through more than one medium, so that figure is inflated, but still that means that there are somewhere in the vicinity of 1,000+ folk out there interested more-or-less in some of the same things that I am, neh?
Pinterest 239 followers
Twitter 87 followers
Facebook 462 “friends”
Google+ 378 have me “in their circles”
Ello 29 “friends”
LinkedIn 308 connections
GoodReads 107 connections
And none of this includes the communities in Second Life, which is a whole different set of connections then the rest of my online presence. And it doesn’t’ include online communities like BrainStorms or FetLife – which is okay because I haven’t been very active in either for the past couple of years. And CeoExpress doesn’t give me any data on this blog; no idea of the readership here.
So if I wanted to reach out, if I wanted to really say something…. If I wanted to take a stand or espouse a cause or bare my soul or write something creative or had a really great idea, would anyone actually notice? It would make a difference?
When I was 8 years old, while I was in the third grade, I had to get glasses. No big deal, both my mother and father wore glasses so in a way, I was pleased. When driving home from the ophthalmologist, I remember jumping up and down in the back seat of the car, lunging forward to read different street signs [er, this was long before folks were strapped in with seat belts]. I kept pointing out things and finally my father wearily told me that it was no big deal, EVERYBODY could see that…..
Except until I had gotten glasses, I couldn’t see that. I sat back and experimented – glasses off, there was just a blur or smudge on the sign. Glasses on, and there were words and pictures and colors. It was my first foray into the philosophical question that has haunted me to this day: How do I know what others see -- or smell or taste or hear or feel -- of the world? How do I know what the world seems like to anyone else but me? I learned pretty early on that camera’s DO lie because few of pictures have been taken that look like “me”. I learned that there was no such thing as a “historical fact”. And I learned that relationships were very dependent on the point of view of the world being congenial between two individuals.
Now and then I am reminded that I cannot see the world through any other lens than my own mind, no matter how much I read or think or try. And that is why I read up so much on #TheDress – once again I was reminded that perception is very much a personal thing and we can only struggle to understand…..
So, what do you see when you look at this picture? Faith? Trust? Hope? Foolhardiness? Desperation? Daredevil abandon? Ingnorance? Are you curious about what happned to him?
A strange dream where I did something wrong with the filing of a financial statement for a customer. Apparently I had left out some pages of a document [whether that was deliberate or when I had scanned them pages stuck together was not clear and apparently didn't make any difference]. For some reason, it became a legal issue that meant I was not only going to be fired, but both PBS and I were going to be proscecuted by the Fed for fraud. Bossman was both stunned and pleased to find out that he could heap all the blame on me, even though he understood that I hadn't done it on purpose - he did ask me what in the hell I was thinking and if I understood that I was going to go down over this. I was talking to our company's lawyer on the phone and numbly listening to his legal rigamarole when I woke up amd laid there for a minute with all the emotions chasing through my body, mind and spirit. The most outstanding thing I felt was befuddlement and bewilderment accompanied by a feeling of overwhelming desolation -- I knew that I had not meant to do anything wrong, but I couldn't argue with the appearance of wrong-doing. I got up much earlier than I intended to, shaking my head to dispel the lingering aftereffects. Regret is a strange emotion, you try to learn from your gaffes but you can never erase them, neh?
After that, this picture seemed to speak to me. And yes, despite having declared that I would never ever smoke, I smoked for almost a year back when I was in Alaska. Did I stop because of the health warnings? becasue of the cost? because of the smell of smoke? Nope -- just suddenly noticed that the only way I could really get rid of the taste of a cigarette in my mouth was to have another cigarette. Instead of lighting up, I went to the bathroom and flushed the remaining pack down the toilet and quit.
I still can't get past the atrocious writing in the Gor books or in 50 Shades of Gray to even be able to relax and enjoy the soft porn.
last line of Katie Roiphe’s 2012 Newsweek cover story on Fifty Shades:
"If I were a member of the Christian right, sitting on my front porch decrying the decadent morals of working American women, what would be most alarming about the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomena … is that millions of otherwise intelligent women are willing to tolerate prose on this level".
That just about nails it for me -- I might catch the movie on DVD *shrugs*
Google Talk was a nice little application that lived happily on the corner of my desktop, very unobtrusively, only the icon blinking when someone wrote a message. Of course it would open a window the first time that I got a hail, but it was a little window that didn't bring up the whole browser. On the iPad and the iPhone, it played nice with such third party messanging services as IM+ and Trillian.
And like Goggle Reader and the Destop applications, it is being axed. Not just "unsupported" but eliminated. This morning I logged in to this message: Google Talk app for Windows will stop working on Feb 16 2015. It is replaced by the new Hangouts Chrome app. Install the Hangouts app from http://goo.gl/yglfk6
Hangouts. Hangouts that opens a browser window, that insists on loading when the PC boots up, that wants to hijack the entire monitor with great regularity. This doesn't work for me!
It is no use complaining to Google -- they only care about what they want even while touting every change as an improvement in the user experience. It isn't, and saying that it is doesn't make it so! Just like "Inbox", you are replacing my own structure of files and folders with your own concoction and expecting ME to change to accomodate you.
I am not happy with you, Google. Not happy at all. Now I have to find a replacement application that meets my needs.
A time for new beginnings and goals for the coming year -- I always liked the idea of not having New Year resolutions but instead waiting a month to see what the year will bring before trying to decide what I will do with it
It is also Groundhog Day and all I have to say is that if that miserable rodent really did see his shadow this morning, it HAD to be from artificial lights because it was very cloudy and rainy! Six more weeks of winter indeed.... Bah. Humbug.
The world looked cold and gray this morning with the snow on the ground and still clinging to some trees and bushes, the fog shrouding the morning light. Although the temperatures were hovering right at the freezing mark, the roads were fine and I spent the drive in reflecting on killing demons. Not the ones in Diablo III [which was the start of the pondering] that can be wiped out by pressing a mouse button, but the cankers in my heart and soul that have to be searched out and banished one at a time, then pop back up unexpectedly. And then I ask -- why is it that I am so unkind to myself? In the search for improvement, I constantly look at the things I am not, that I have to change and have forgotten how to celebrate the things that I am....
I always thought this was a perfect description of a relationship.... From the images to the lyrics of the song, it speaks to me, and apparently I am not the only one. And the world spins madly on....
Another Monday and this one with an icy cold rain that is one or two degrees away from freezing and with loan review in the house.... Can't come up with a cheerful, inspirational message, but this is a nice picture with which to start the week, neh?
I can do this. I can get into that stream of cars full of people who have been on holiday for the past week or so, go to work, and get something done. I can, I can, I can....
Vacation is over and after the weekend, Monday looms. As always, it went far too quickly, one day melting into another. I got done everything that I had planned to do but I didn't get back into the habit of the bike with any kind of regularity. Spent nine hours in MiddleEarth. Spent a lot of time with my 2nd life. And we didn't hit the lottery and the Publishers' Clearing House hasn't shown up with a check yet....
He was tired, and moving slow that morning. One of those days when you just can't seem to get it together and get out of the house, puttering and piffle-fiffling, fusing about wanting to retire, grumbling about the cold that bright Thursday morning. I had to go get ready to go for the commute to my job and in the end, I kissed him on the cheek, said we would talk about it when he got home and went to take my shower. He let himself out - one of the handful of times in almost twenty years that I did not hold the door for him, did not tell him that I loved him and to be careful. It was just another morning, simply routine....
And then, at 9:35AM ten years ago today, while on duty, he left this world.
Day 4 and I am rested up, I think. Didn't take a nap yesterday or today and did over three miles on the bike today. Spent most of the day enjoying my 2nd Life:
Day 1: slept in -- all the way until 8:30AM! Yup, part of being an adult is that "sleeping in" takes on a different definition than you once had....
I had decided today was going to be a day to be totally lazy and I accomplished that goal magnificently. I did manage to do 2.25 miles on the bike though.... Stupid cable in the back bedroom is acting up -- will probably end up having to call FIOS about it.
Most of the day was spent in my 2nd Life:
Some serious redecorating of the lighthouse interior is needed I think....
There are many things that are chasing through my mind at the moment:
my one and only political statement after the 2014 elections, and no, despite the title of this blog I do not consider myself a "bleeding heart liberal", just a person who thinks John Calvin has too much influence today in US society as a whole
a rant about "entitlements"
chronicling my descent into Medicare now that I have found out it is legal for the insurance company to force me on it when I turn 65 even if I am still working. This one is going to be recurring as my medical expenses just for wellness care are about to triple for insurance coverage and quadruple for actual medical costs!
But as the holidays, and the ten-year anniversary of becoming a widow, approach the cone of silence seems to have descended [AGAIN] and trying to articulate in any depth greater than "oh look at this" seems to be a lost cause whether it is a blog post or an email or a letter or IMs.
CEOExpress
A time for new beginnings and goals for the coming year -- I always liked the idea of not having New Year resolutions but instead waiting a month to see what the year will bring before trying to decide what I will do with it
Some serious redecorating of the lighthouse interior is needed I think....
