Long road home

I've been in a weird mood since I left the client site today.

My time being an elitist technology bigot earlier left me both with gut-pain ( from holding back hysterical laughter ) and despair ( at what I was about to laugh about ).

The clients 'reliable high-end in-office technology center' consisted of a very small, very dusty room full of rather old computers covered in dust. Their server was recognizable as being the machine with the 15" monitor next to it and the sticky-note on the front by the reset button reading "Press Here To Restart Network". Their 'Head of IS' ( if a company has an IS and not an IT department, I have learned to be scared ) decided to call in sick today. I have this nagging suspicion it was to avoid having to show me in-person the network serving running an un-patched, no service pack install of NT4 and Netscape Netserver. As it was, his assistant ( who didn't know where the server room was, we had to follow a network cable back to find it ) didn't have any clue that things were that bad since he just did desktop support. Lets just say that my technology recommendation for their new network server may include some training courses for the desktop guy since I think his boss is not long for that office.

But that left me feeling a little nostalgic, a lot cynically amused, and with a bit more free-time then I expected. Took the long route home, which for me doesn't involve driving as much as catching random buses around town and seeing where they will take me.

Spent most of my life in Portland, a lot of it traveling around town by bus ( ever since I was 6 and would get a quarter or two every week if I did my chores, had to take the bus to get to the comic shop since the grocery store by where I lived didn't stock the cool comics ( which in those days meant random stuff like 'Boris the Bear' )) so a lot of the landmarks are actually more familiar from a bus window to me then they are if I was standing on the sidewalk in front of them.

Love all the 'green spaces' around Portland. Just the random city blocks of park that you come across in the middle of some over-crowded residential neighborhood.

One got added while I was in NC not far from where I grew up. Couple had a big old lot of land, from back when homes in Portland had a huge minimum lot size, and had only a small house on one little part of it and a huge yard beside it. He and his wife used to sit on the porch and watch the kids play there. I remember kicking a ball around there with a friend who lived across the street from it. After his wife died, he subdivided his lot to be just the minimum around the house and donated the rest to the city on the requirement that it get used as a city park. It is named after his wife now and after he died his will had his life insurance payout get used to setup a trust fund to maintain and improve the park.

Strange to ride some of the routes. A lot of them haven't changed since I was a kid so it is the same houses, with a lot more years of wear and tear on them. Strange how some neighborhoods look so much cleaner and more prosperous then they used to and others are filthy now with the hedges untrimmed and the homes all in need of a paintjob.

Tired now and very oddly introspective. Wondering if I could look at myself from the outside for a moment which set of houses I would more closely resemble.