on wintering

I've spent a lot of time the past 6 weeks or so, scratching my head and trying to remember why, 6 years ago, I swapped warmth and culture for digging the snow and ice out of the path of my car.  To be fair, we've not had that much snow and ice, but where I live now, any snow and ice equates to a few blocks walk to parking I can exit without a shovel.  I remember convincing myself that seasons, with their corresponding changes of lifestyle, appealed because of their perceived diversity.

Winter has benefits.  Once the temperature drops below 20 or so, I have no plans except reading a book under layered comforters.  So I've accelerated my reading.  I've been on a fiction binge, so lately I swung back into non-fiction.  I'm reading "State by state", an excellent set of essays by contemporary authors, one per state.  I also picked up a well-written, accelerated review of statistical methods, well suited to get me ready to fall asleep in about 10-20 minutes.  And I do sleep more in the winter.  If you're not going to go out, and if watching TV is not your drug, then crawling into bed with a book at 9pm starts to look nicer and nicer.

Travel has eluded me this winter.  I'm likely off to Seattle for a few days in late February, on business but also able to visit my son.  And I've been invited to a wedding in June, in Huesca, Spain, in the foothills of the Pyrenees mountains.  The invitation is from a friend from a different era, and while a great excuse for a trip to Spain, I've not gone to visit her in the 6 years since I moved from Miami, so why go now?  She is a drop-dead, gorgeous woman and I've no doubt she's re-married very well.  But travel seems the perfect solution when you're sitting in an under-insulated, under-heated house with nowhere compelling to go, and if the wedding were next week, I'm pretty sure I'd be on a plane.

Wintering is a time of hibernation.  I do not go out as much.  I would like to, I very much love to socialize, but freezing enroute saps most of my libido.  Winter is a time for video, games, and so on.  Winter is a time of very little music.  I've only played [out] 3 times since summer, freelance stuff.  I am playing this afternoon, rock of all things.  I hate playing rock, and everyone knows I hate playing rock, so I have no qualms about turning the music into New Orleans Funk or Latin Rock.  I just hope the guitarist knows more than major, minor and 7th chords.  I don't like to play out in winter because the only thing more miserable than hauling 70 lbs. of bass speaker cabinets is doing so on ice or snow.  But the drummer today is a friend of mine, so here I go.  I'm set up well at home for rehearsing and so from December through March, I pretty much play with myself, entendre intended.

So here's the problem with playing with yourself, or at least, with me playing by myself.  I tend to work on technical aspects, generally overplaying relative to what's expected of a bassist.  I do it to work out my hands, more of an endurance building exercise than what I actually play in gigs.  I do not have high expectations for this afternoon's guitar-rock session.  In fact, I've been warned that the guitarist is basically a blues-God, with fast hands.  This means several hours of 3 or 4 chord patterns, pedestrian rhythms and constant pleas to lower the volume.  I'm not a prude, but high-volumes ought to be reserved for large halls and outdoor performances, not indoor sessions.  One thing rock players seem slow to learn is that volume masks subtleties and mistakes.  Turn the volume down to where you can listen closely to the different parts and the majority of rockers are exposed as lacking timing, mis-fingering out of key, and void of dynamics.

I do need to start playing more, and I've received inquiries about booking my Latin jazz group in the spring.  Work has just been such a bitch lately that I've truly enjoyed a clear agenda on the weekends.  But I need to play live more often, otherwise music becomes strictly therapy.  So I did a session a couple of weeks ago with some straight jazz players, and I need to do a few more to exercise those skills.  I'm also not a big straight-jazz fan, as I find the vast majority of those rhythms to also be pretty limited.  But what straight-jazz does give you is complexity of form, chords and melody.  Fusion, be it Latin jazz, funk jazz, etc. is what does it for me and where my skills are best displayed.

By my calculations, we have 6 more weeks of misery, then the re-birth of spring will begin to be felt.  And I'm really, really anxious to be re-born, to get back out of the house, back into regular performing, and back to a life that's more than work all day, eat, read a little and re-charge.  But with 6 of these season cycles now under my belt, I guess if I'm honest with myself, seasons are overrated.  A perpetual lifestyle of warm to hot lacks some diversity, but the continuity of activities is a better fit for mammals that don't want to sleep through the cold.

on an old puzzle

One of the things I do for a living is applied mathematics.  I've been thinking about the first project I worked on, some 25 years ago, a sort of model of popularity.  At the time, I worked for a freight forwarding company.  These companies operate offices all over the U.S. and/or the world.  They gather shipments up from companies and individuals, and charge a progressive rate based on the size of the shipment.  So a 1 lb. shipment might be charged a $12.00 minimum, then at say 13 pounds, shipments move into a $1.00/lb. price structure, then at 100 pounds, they are rated at $0.80/lb. and so on.  The freight forwarder, or "forwarder", consolidates all of the shipments going to a specific destination and then pays an airline or trucking company to transport the shipments to their sister office in the destination city.

So say for example that a forwarder has received 3 shipments to Los Angeles, a 1 lb. shipment for which they'll receive $12.00, a 2 lb. shipment for which they'll receive $12, and another 3 lb. shipment also worth $12.00.  The forward then has a total of $36 in revenue.  They hand over a consolidated shipment to an airline that is 3 pieces weighing 6 lbs.  The airlines have a different price structure.  Let's say their minimum price is $25.00, and they charge $0.50 per pound above that amount.  So in this example, the forwarder takes in $36 and pays out $25, making a profit of $11.

Forwarders ship to about 300 U.S. airports.  They have hundreds of local customers.  The problem I was tackling was to find out how many shipments a local forwarder office needed on an average daily basis to become profitable.  The customers a forwarder services don't all ship to the same places.  So if you were a forwarder and received say, 10 shipments in a day, probably 2 would be for New York, 2 for Los Angeles, 1 for Atlanta, 1 for Chicago, and so on.  And there'd probably be 1 for Des Moines, Iowa too.  So this is a popularity model of sorts, in that big cities with lots of commerce will "attract" more shipments than will small cities like Harrisburg.  Basic probability theory.

The result then, is that as your daily shipment count increases, your likelihood of getting 2 (basically break-even) or 3 shipments (and therefore profitability) going to a single destination increases.  And that is what I found, and determined the point (I don't remember what it was, but somewhere around 45 shipments a day) at which a forwarder was likely to have enough profitable consolidations to offset the losses associated with the "orphans", such as the single shipment to Des Moines, Iowa.  It is the popularity of Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and so on, that allow profit.  If all cities were equally popular, then the break-even point would be many shipments per day higher.

So that's both obvious and boring, but here was the surprise.  Except at the lowest levels of shipments, there was an almost constant 7 orphan shipments, no matter how high I modeled daily shipment count.  So say at 150 shipments you were pretty likely to pick up a second shipment to Des Moines, Iowa, but you were also likely to pick up a new orphan to Harrisburg. And when shipments increased to 250, Harrisburg paired up, but a new shipment was received for Sioux Falls, South Dakota.  And on and on, always with an average of 7 orphans.  I took the model up to somewhere around 1500 shipments a day, and the 7 orphans rule continued to that point.  Obviously, there is a large number at which point all 300 unevenly popular destinations would attract enough shipments to eliminate all orphans, but I didn't have the time to explore that.

This is probably true across all types of data where there exists uneven popularity.  The number of points a given node will receive at different volume levels is addressed in probability theory, but the steady state of orphans I've not seen addressed.  So, help if you can!

on the wisdom of Luddites

So, another Christmas has come and gone. I did this one without any family around, having just come off of a vacation in Utah with my brother and father. But it was fun, with friends and my girlfriend’s family to keep me occupied. I spent about 50% of my purchase dollars online this year, and only at the 11th hour realized that in doing so, I’d negatively impacted the economy of the area. We should I suppose, spend our dollars locally so as to boost the neighbor merchants and the local employment rate. But I wonder to what degree this is just naïve denial of unstoppable economic evolution? Clearly online merchandising is the future for commodities that don’t require a face-to-face examination, so not unlike the auto bailout, is buying your Wii gift from a local electronics store really going to save them over the next few years, or just slow their death? And to critics, I would ask whether the real time to fight this fight was not 10-15 years ago, as national chains like Best Buy, Circuit City, etc., sterilized the land of homegrown competitors?

In today’s economy, perhaps a job at Circuit City is still worth saving? After all, Joe’s and Bob's electronics had only one owner each, and the several employees they hired became only a little, if any, worse off working for Circuit City than they were for the local concerns. So the impact of national chains a decade or two ago affected mostly a handful of local owners. The internet promises much more severe disruptions. The clerks and salespeople of Circuit City aren’t needed in Harrisburg if everyone buys their electronics online, as I did.

If we want to stop the impact of internet shopping on the local economies, and the corresponding demise of local retail jobs, we need to favor online sales taxation and online sales transport tax increases to make that source a more expensive option. A Draconian solution to be sure, but the alternative of few retail jobs in most population areas might favor such a severe, economic engineering approach.

The affect of a (e.g.) $10.00 delivery tax against online purchases, excepting digital media such as music and movies, would transform the internet into a mostly convenience option. It would hamper innovation and growth in this space, to be certain. It would increase the carbon footprint of purchases as many of us would jump in our cars and shop semi-local stores instead of spending a few minutes online. But it would also serve to slow the deterioration of neighborhood retail jobs, and I’m not sure that doesn’t balance out the equation.

on acting one's age

I have in my hands, one of AARP's semi weekly requirement offers.  There are great deals in there, and I'm being a fool to ignore them, but it's a passage of time I want to ignore.  I try desperately to ignore.  Even though I am more than 1000 days away from the golden 55, they start their lobbying early.  And I fight falling into that hole with all my might, kicking and screaming like a child.  I eat with a woman half my age in Issac's Deli, apparently a haven for the retired crowd ("Top Senior Restaurant Award, 2008!").  But we were there because it was convenient to the Gucci State Wine and Spirits outlet in West Short Plaza, the one place I know of where one can find gift-level bottles of wine, and it is getting to be that season.  

In the geriatric deli there is one of those generic, segment magazines for the over 50 crowd (I qualify there) and I thumb through the ads for assisted living, assistance in choosing a Medicare Part D plan, and various ads for Viagra to assist erections, prostate reduction drugs to assist pissing, vaginal lubrication enhancement to assist monogamy, life insurance to assist your conscience, burial insurance to assist really anal retentive types, and on and on.  

These magazines have no local flavor whatsoever, aside from the advertisements.  One article asks why people think there's something wrong with saying "Merry Christmas", a fascinating essay on how political correctness is ruining our core values.  Want to piss off a 27 year old woman on a lunch date?  Grab a magazine with a title "Top 50+" and start reading off the titles.  Maybe if you weren't 50+ it would be acceptable humor.

I bought an Apple Time Machine and Airport Express, doing my part to salvage as many jobs as I can, and jobs that are clearly go-forward, unlike big 3 auto workers.  I had successfully switched from persistent, plastic media (CD-ROMs, burned MP3 disks, etc.), and it was time to make sure those iTunes dollars weren't going to be casualties of a computer disk failure.  The TimeCapsule cost $500, a ridiculous amount until you consider just how valuable those Bytes of data on your hard drive have become.  The advent of iTunes, Amazon and so on, with music and video downloads, has "monetized" your disk, turned it into a substantial investment.

Anyway, I now have a really nice set up.  The TimeMachine provides 80211.n wi-fi, and then an ethernet cable at 1Gb/s connects an Airport Express, to which the stereo and a printer are connected.  Alternatively, I could set up a separate wireless network, but then I'd have 2 radios blasting the nuclei of my cells, and who needs that?  Maybe it's harmless, but we just don't know, do we?  I can broadcast iTunes to the Airport Express, and the stereo has been significantly updated thanks to my brother, who shed his high-end system when we moved him from a house to a condo last month.  It's not 5:1 or 7:1, but the instrumental isolation and imaging are spectacular.

The woman likes video games, especially on big HD TVs.  It's the thing that drives me the most nuts about younger people, their inability to break themselves loose from machines.  I contemplate this while broadcasting  5MB/s to my Time Capsule, broadcasting Israeli bassist Avishai Cohen via iTunes to the stereo, telling myself as convincingly as possible that I'm sometimes better, writing my blog on the laptop that is glued to my lap.  But she's turned on the Wii, so there's no denying the conflict.  Earlier, she was angry when I hit about 100 on 581,  crossing back over the river.  She doesn't enjoy speed.  Generational differences and tensions are manifested in silly ways between parents and children, but that's nothing compared to a May-September (OK, October) relationship.  I pick up the Top 50+ magazine I brought home from Issac's and start reading aloud from an article on how best to deal with inconsiderate spouses of children during the holidays, and she ignores me, killing ludicrously grinning rabbits with toilet plungers.

We dine at La Dolce Vita, my favorite, local BYOB restaurant.  We dine with a couple in their 60's.  This is one of the few couples who say nothing about the age difference.  They're renaissance people, former lawyers/actors/other things.  They get bored and move on.  It's no wonder why I feel an affinity with them.  There's another couple in the same age bracket we sometimes dine with.  The female in that relationship visibly disapproves of our age gap.  I sometimes wonder why, if it's the threat of loss in her own home or a contemplation of their daughter.  The next night we're out with some of her friends, and after several beers, the 20-something woman asks how I handle questions about the age difference when with my peers.  "She's bright" I say.  "It's not like I'm dating some bimbo half my age, she's probably smarter than me."  I add that given a choice between two equal intellects and personalities, who wouldn't go for the perky, young breasts?  This embarrasses her, but if she ponders it long enough it will ring true.

on visiting my dad

I spent the last four days with my dad and his wife. He'd turned 75 back in July, but I was too sick at that time to join him and my brother up in Salt Lake City. He's getting old, though he won't acknowledge it. We entertained each other arguing politics and telling stories, mostly from the distant past. His versions of my life's stories are mutating rapidly. He once spotted a very beautiful girl working in a 7-11 down the street and by chance, I'd already asked her out that same 1976 afternoon. In the new version, it becomes a cavalier and effortless conquest on my part, with me responding to his discovery with an "Oh yeah?", and then storming out of the house and wooing the girl into my room in a matter of an hour or two. An episode with a drunken harbor skank who one night asked everyone in the group I was performing with to sign her breast has now become a gorgeous playmate-type who, overcome by some magical charisma, begged me to take her and only accepted the autograph as a consolation prize. He married young, trapped by my conception, and thereafter lived vicariously through my life. Since the reality of my life is mostly pretty tame, he's taken to letting go of some of the reality.

We hung out in his garage, below the eastern cliffs of Utah's Pine Valley Mountain, a canyon land that if relocated to Pennsylvania would overnight be granted national park status. He's getting older and his verbal delivery is full of recall struggles, delays and corrections. This past summer he flipped his ATV on a steep hill climb, racing with his buddies and failing to stand up on the pegs and lean out over the nose because his knees were worn out. The machine, almost 700 pounds with fuel and spare parts, almost crushed him. I suggested a 200 lb. dirt bike as an alternative. He used to race them in the deserts and mountains of Southern California. He said no, his knees couldn't handle the strain of a bike. I think he's lived enough and no longer cares if he's crushed, provided it kills him and doesn't leave him crippled or in a coma. I tease him about having to take away his drivers license in a few years. He suggests I bring an army with me on that date.

We drive to a shooting range, rains having turned the canyon lands we'd normally use to mush. I tell him the story of picking my son and his girlfriend up at Dulles airport early one Sunday morning. The girlfriend, exhausted from the red-eye flight, fell asleep in the front seat. An hour later my son asked me to show him how fast the (then) new car was so I accelerated. She awoke as we surged past 135 and seeing the blur of passing landscape, screamed. By the time her scream ended we were through 145 and I hit the brakes, so as to make the off ramp only a half mile ahead. My dad smiled, no doubt logging the event, but then he turned to me and said - "You know, they'll be taking your license away long before they take mine."

My dad is a man's man. When I was young, we bonded over dirt bikes and motorcycle mechanics. Now we discuss every nuance of maintaining his RV and ATV, until any non-relative would have killed themselves to escape the monotony. We finally switch to politics and international affairs. He's convinced that Islamic terrorists may someday explode a nuclear device in L.A. or nearby Las Vegas, and that hordes of Mexicans, mostly illegal, will drive north to pillage and plunder his possessions. I tell him that I worry more about a comet strike, but he either doesn't get the jab or chooses to ignore it. We shoot handguns at the new gun range at Hurricane, Utah, for an hour or so, something I've not done in a couple of years. It's full of white males, practicing with defensive guns, not a hunting rifle in sight. Driving back to his home we travel north ten or fifteen miles into the hills, then up into the canyons for a couple of miles off the freeway. I've not seen a Mexican since I left Las Vegas, two hours to the south-southwest.

He's afraid. He has a very nice custom house and lives in a remote, isolated stretch of high desert that looks across the valley towards the entrance to Zion National Park. The neighbors are all retired professionals and business owners, and they all own five acres of boulders and cactus, surrounding their high-end Santa Fe villas. A couple of doors up (about 1/2 mile) the Mormons maintain a retreat for their president. He's afraid that someone who doesn't deserve it is going to come and forceably take away his things. He's afraid that irrational actions, impractical people, are going to rise up and destroy all that he's worked for. When I was growing up near Los Angeles it used to be the blacks in Central L.A. or Watts that he worried about. Now it's Mexicans and Islamic terrorists, reacting to financial collapse or cultural intrusions, respectively.

But he's bright too. We debate the question of haves and have-nots as it affects international policies and economies. On our last evening he notes that the irony of his life's politics is that in the end, we're all going to wish that communism had stuck, that we'd never pushed democracy and capitalism because they were the artificial dampeners that held the economies of China and others at bay, that allowed our own lifestyles to be so dominant and extravagant. He rants again about Islamic terrorism but notes that their desire to keep the Middle East in the stone ages actually helps, not hinders, his preferences.

I returned to Harrisburg late last night. This morning, still off from work so as to take care of Christmas stuff and re-adjust to the time zone, I struggled out of bed at 6:45, showered, and warmed up my car before heading out for espresso and a breakfast sandwich. Eight days in normal vehicles re-sensitized me as to just how fast the car is. I wandered through the city gently to keep it from lunging every time I shifted. There was a twisty, 15 mph-posted warning road and I pushed the car to 45, then 50, the tires squealing but holding their grip. I pondered the degree to which owning this car was a reaction to my dad's life, or possibly a continued effort to feed him an alternative narrative.

It's overcast and drizzly now. Compared to the grandeur and cleanliness of the intermountain landscapes, Harrisburg is a dirty, decaying, and depressing mess. I stop for coffee and order a bagel, obviously not very fresh. I ask them to toast it twice and it arrives with darkened edges. The coffee shop is filled with blacks and Hispanics, though probably not Mexicans. I sit and enjoy my bagel because carbon is a spice, especially when the bread is stale.

on moving my lil brother

So I'm out helping my younger brother downsize from a house to a condo. Watching the stuff go into the apartment I was convinced he'd dramatically over-estimated the cubic capacity of the new place but now, a day into re-assembling everything and putting stuff away, he's proven sharper at visualizing than I thought.

I'll skip the whiny narrative about helping someone move at my age, the moans about the aching back, and so on. Suffice it to say that I popped Alleve and downed 1/3 of an $82 bottle of Lagavulin single-malt Scotch at the end of the move, a decision I'm paying for today in both visual unfocusing and multiple naps, but I survived. No, what's incenting me to comment is the concept of moving back into apartments. It works for me. He had a wonderfully charming house up in the foothills of the Wasatch range, and now he's on the 12th floor of a 1960's building, with the plain floorplan one associates with 1960's highrises. Yet, it works. And the compression of possessions, the weeding of stuff, that works for me too.

Brother's girlfriend drops a cheap mirror and breaks it. And while it did hang in my parent's house it was not, as I told her, the only rememberence any of us had left of our grandparents. The move over, we drink heavily with his Indian co-worker and her husband, also a co-worker. I find a great little iPhone language translation application and start channeling emails to her from her mother. "You should be giving me grandchildren, not drinking expensive whiskeys with older, blonde men." That sort of thing.

The next day, suffering from altitude adjustment, move trauma and a kick-ass hangover, we slouch and put stuff away. Little of substance gets done. And yet, by evening, we're zooming up to Park City to see an old school friend that I at least, haven't visited with in 12 years. And I'm in rare form, forgetting that I'd also met his wife at that time. Now at about 7500 feet, the two micro-brews quickly do their magic. Those of you from the greater Harrisburg area won't understand this, because everytime I go out with someone in Harrisburg, we inevitably run into half of their graduating class, but I've seen only this person and one other in the 30-odd years since I graduated from school, and as I said, less than once a decade. And so it is somewhat disconcerting to see an old friend aged, and he much more healthy than am I. It makes me realize just how old I myself must look if only the mirror wouldn't lie to me. The old friend asks where my blog went? I promise to send him the new, anonymous blog link and explain the financial reasons I went undercover.

The next morning I wake everyone up at 4am, my body unable to let go of the 6am EST religion. His girlfriend says nothing to me as she heads off to work a couple of hours later. My brother heads out on errands and I walk the mile down the hill to the nearest Starbucks. Life is good again, but by 9am I'm ready for a nap. Alas, my work doesn't have the concept of a true vacation, and I spend a couple of hours over a VPN connection. Finally a nap begins about 3pm, and soon it's time to go drinking for the final time in SLC. I should note that there are a lot of protests around the country about the LDS church (Mormons) and their financial aid for proposition 8, including calls for economic boycott. For my part, I didn't drink in a single Mormon bar. I did flirt with the cute waitress at the Lebanese restaurant that night, and she with me, until I got just a little too aggressive and she shot me down with a "fiance" reference.

This morning, the last morning, we dress and decide to go to the gun shop, as brother is considering trading for a small, concealable handgun. But first, we do laundry. And while downstairs waiting for the dryer to finish, he recalls that maintenance will be coming by that morning and he's left his big, current handgun on the table. Hmm. We go upstairs and sure enough, there's a "Maintenance Man Inside" sticker on the door. He's a little old guy, probably almost 80, and he's really nice to me. Except that about 5 minutes into the light conversation, I realize he thinks I'm my brother's gay lover, no doubt a militant one at that, and possibly in SLC to shoot Mormons for their role in proposition 8. My brother picks up on this fact and sets him straight (no pun intended). It was a great trip. Now, off to the airport to buzz down to Vegas.