Bucket List

In a variation of an old email bandwidth hog theme, I will play along to the Bucket List questions but just put it in one place and save the bandwidth. I got this from Rev Jam, so please send any complaints to him.

( ) Been to Europe

( x ) Been on a cruise ---best vacation of my life, thanks Mom

( x ) Gone on a blind date

(x ) Skipped school .. --if my Mom is reading this, just kidding

( x ) Watched someone die --depends on definition, I never actually saw anyone take their last breath

(x ) Been to Canada --Vancouver top city of the world

( x) Been to Mexico --I can even remember some of the times too

( ) Been to Florida --I might have hit in the tip in my travels but I don't think so. One of only 8 state I haven't seen.

( x ) Been on a plane

( ) Climbed a lighthouse
x ) Swam in the ocean

( x ) Cried yourself to sleep

(x ) Seen the Cherry Blossoms in Washington D.C. --most of my life

(x ) Played cops and robbers.

( ) Flown a plane

( )Owned a boat

( ) Watched grandchildren grow --hopefully one day

(x) Recently colored with crayons --I have kids

( ) Been to the Kentucky Derby --and I never will

( ) Been to Key West .. --hopefully soon and I will meet Jimmy Buffet and we will jam on some tuneage

( x ) Been to a rodeo --live in Tucson

( X ) Sang Karaoke

( x ) Paid for a meal with coins only?

( x) left a tip with pennies for poor service

(x ) Done something you told yourself you wouldn't? --Like I won't respond to mass emails??

( x ) Made prank phone calls --I am looking for Amanda. Amanda Hugenkiss.

( x ) Laughed until some kind of beverage came out of your nose --God please carbon based soft drinks

x) Caught a snowflake on your tongue

(X) Danced in the rain

( x ) Written a letter to Santa Claus

( x ) Been kissed under the mistletoe

( x) Watched the sunrise with someone

( ) Seen the green flash at sunset --sadly no, don't have the concentration to stay focused enough

( x ) Blown bubbles

( x ) Gone ice-skating --ouch, that is all I am going to say

( x ) Gone to the movies

( ) Owned a convertible --rented a Geo Prism convertible for one of my first trips to Tucson

1. Any nickname? don-E, Dude, enod, You, Kim's husband

2. Mother's name? Ina
3. Body Piercing? no habla pain
4. How much do you love your job? mostly a lot

5. Birthplace? Bethesda, MD

6. Ever been to Hawaii ? no
7. Ever been to Africa ? no
8. Ever eaten just cookies for dinner? yes -Skittles too!
9. Ever been on TV? yes
10. Ever steal any traffic signs? no but I have friends to do my dirty work
11. Ever been in a car accident? yes
12. Drive a 2-door or 4-door vehicle? all of the above
13. Favorite number? 3.14....

14. Favorite movie? Pulp Fiction, Magnolia, Boogie Nights, Dark Knight

15. Favorite holiday? Thanksgiving

16. Favorite dessert? my mom's fat man's crack cookie and pecan baby pies

17. Favorite food? Thai

18. Favorite day of the week? Any day I don't work
19. Favorite brand of body wash? Soap

20. Favorite smell? can't smell much

21. How do you relax? Play guitar

22. How do you see yourself in 10 years? broke

23. Furthest place you will send this message? ends of cyberspace

24. Who will respond to this the fastest? daemon@blogspot.com

Ok, now my additions:
Favorite song I ever wrote- Higher
Where would I like to work-Google, Bell Labs, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Line 6
Where would you like to live if not where you are now- Redondo Beach, LA, CA
Where do you want to go to see: India, Japan, Kenya
What would be your request as a time when your life was would be so great you could stand having a heart attack: Seeing my Mom and wife join my sons, Sam and Tom, onstage as they accept the Fields Medal
What would you do if talent or experience was not a requirement: Mathematician
And because they never let me finish this thought, for my sons:
Acceptable schools for Sam and Tom: Stanford, Cal-Berk, MIT, NYU, Duke, UCLA, Texas, Harvard, Berklee, and AZ and MD if they rank in top 10 in the field they want to study.
What I really want to do before the bucket is kicked:
Learn Spanish (and remember it)
Live in Mexico
Ride another 100 mile bike race
Lose weight
Learn Kendoyo Karate to Black Belt
Meet Jackie Chan
Get another degree
Finish one of my screenplays
Finish my music theory treatise
Code something truly wonderful
Be a grandpa
Write a song that my grandkids will sing
Let everyone I love --walk the earth every day-- knowing that I loved them

the orgin of my name

When someone asks me how I got my name, I usually say it is a long story. But now, I got a little bit of space to explain it better. It breaks down like this:
Me and Steve Martin tell a similar tale (clip from the Jerk if you don't see the video)
I was born in Bethesda, Maryland on February 23, 1966 as "Donald Eugene Hill, Jr." My paternal father wanted to call me "Jesse James" and I think that, despite my mother's veto of this name, my life would been much better with this moniker. It sounds more like me. But it didn't matter because my bio parents split and my mom married my Dad, technically my stepdad who adopted me, and I became "Donald Eugene Merson" or "Donnie". Donnie Merson was the name that I used up until about 6th grade.
I loved Basketball and due to my size (already 6 foot in elementary school) my friends started to calling me the "Big E". Elvin Hayes, a NBA hall of famer who everyone called the big "E", was the center of the NBA champion Washington Bullets and a big celebrity in the Chocolate city.  My friends started calling me "Don E" as a morph of these ideas and it stuck. I added the dash but I am not sure why. Mostly I think to make it clear that my name was "Don E" not "Don Knee". This spelling stuck like this until college when I became a huge fan of e.e. cummings.
e.e. was an important 20th century poet who played a lot with puncuation in his poems to extract different emotions.
i thank You God for most this amazing day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything wich is natural which is infinite which is yes (i who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth day of life and love and wings:and of the gay great happening illimitably earth) how should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any-lifted from the no of all nothing-human merely being doubt unimaginable You? (now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
Note the proper noun "I" is "i" and God and You are capitalized. e.e. only put caps on the important stuff. Everything else is lower case and this shows a relationship of things within the poem. Check out this classic poem which was really how I felt about religion during college.
the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds (also, with the church's protestant blessings daughters, unscented shapeless spirited) they believe in Christ and Longfellow,both dead, are invariably interested in so many things- at the present writing one still finds delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles? perhaps. While permanent faces coyly bandy scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D ....the Cambridge ladies do not care,above Cambridge if sometimes in its box of sky lavender and cornerless, the moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy
Great poem for sure and when you note what is important via the caps it really pulls out some extra meaning. The important thing to the ladies is where they are (Cambridge), Christ and Longfellow who are not around and their latest cause-the Poles, and the scandals and gossip (Mrs. N and Professor D). A very cutting poem to say the least and I really liked the way the poem visually looked after he took off the tatters of convention.  So I became inspired to look at the way words laid on the page and figured how their look could be made to convey extra meaning. What I decided was that like a character in an e.e. cummings poem, my name wasn't important enough to justify it's capitalization.
don-e merson looked good but it didn't convey what I wanted to say with my name. don-E however did convey this. don-E showed humily to my place on earth but also conveyed that there is still something important yet to come. A few years ago I started to try and capitalize the front letter again but it never took. I could never get over the feeling that something important is not waiting in for me in the future. Even to this day I still feel like that. Something is still waiting for me to do and I can only see it if I take the hit and realize that I am not as important now but I must wait for my time. Kind of like a century plant. Maybe it is that time. I don't know. Don-E still doesn't look right as don-E to me.

Ok, since I have been self indulgent I must repent by making fun of myself with this video.

why facebook might matter

Back in the day (meaning when I had hair and wasn't fat-I mean I wasn't as fat) I was known for repeating one saying over and over again.

Information wants to be free

If you were so unlucky to know me at this time you probably heard the full out saying.

Information wants to be free. Information longs to be free. Information is power and when it is free we all will be free.

I now hear this echo in my brain all the time now because it is starting to matter again. I feel it when I see funny Irish dog pictures, laughing babies and other eye candy that I find along the way in facebook. Back in the day (meaning the 90s) I was an avid Wired magazine fan because Wired was a beacon for the digital emergence. Their patron saint was Marshall McLuhan and they stood for the quest of technology to make a better life. Every month I would turn to the back page and read Nicolas Negroponte's columns like a monthly meditation. Wired was about technology for change, not changes in technology. This didn't last because the editors became more interested in a good IPO and the soul of Wired was sent away to the wilderness. Negroponte has continued his work with his laptop project and MIT and other centers of the digital world still plucked away. But wired magazine started interviewing venture capitalists and trying to make them sound like Italian renaissance men. Wired is now about changes in technology. I had lost faith. No one spoke the mantra anymore.

Information longs to be free

Why does information long to be free? Because information only exists when it is free. Information is "the difference that makes a difference." Information comes into being when it is noticed. Information wants no barriers, it wants to be actualized. But when you trap information, you can build power by "seeing" the difference that makes a difference and hiding this from others. In the most extreme this is information like how to build a nuclear bomb. In you have this information, you want to keep it to yourself. It gives you power. But to flex this power, you need to show it and information peeks out. You only have power if someone else knows you have the biggest bomb in town. But if information gets out too far, you lose your power because your rival has that information also. Back in the day (when I had really long hair), I worked for a company whose name rhymes with "Not In To It" as support lead for Mac, internet products and electronic filing. I had the pleasure of actually verifying that our electronic filing center (who was a subcontractor) had been compromised. So I got to hack into a tax return center as the request of work. One of the weirdest days of my career for sure but what does that have to do with information you say? Well, you see the problem was the Mac tax return uploading software wasn't working for a customer and he was getting very frustrated because he wanted to file his return. He noticed that when he ran the program a text file was created on his hard drive. After careful study he noticed that the phone number and the username and password were printed out in that file. He used that info to upload his file and sent a note to the NY Times. They made a few phone calls and that ending up with me trying to hack into a site on company time. This is a perfect example on the power of information and our schemes to control it and how they can fail. I think the Joker says it best. You need to have information on how to upload a file. You want people to upload their files but you don't want to tell them how you do it. In the process of showing people that they can upload files, you show them hints on how you upload the file This is how information yearns to be free This is what makes facebook work. facebook is simple and really does only a few things but does them well. facebook does authentication(who are you?) and authorization (what are you allowed to see). It does this in a manner that allows you to link with your friends and then your friend's friends can link back to you. facebook is also an open platform that allows people to build applications that have the power of facebook's security built in and facebook's sharing abilities to grow that application. But what struck me was that facebook also allows you to share information from other web sites. And that the other web sites encourage that. When I finish posting this blog it will appear in my facebook news feed, the two sites are linked. I post a picture on Flickr and my picture appears on facebook. These two sites and many more are linked by my email account through Microsoft. Every site wants to know what you are doing elsewhere so they are willing to give up some power and let everyone else know what you doing when you visit their site. This is information yearning to be free. But facebook is also important because it is a multilevel sync\async push\pull system. Let me back up a minute to explain what this means. Media geeks like me have several classifications for media products. Media like newspapers are asynchronous push mediums. The paper pushes its information to you and you can consume it at any time. Basic TV is a push system too but it is synchronous. Heroes is on Monday nights at a certain time and if you want it, you have to be there. A VCR makes the TV asynchronous because you can tape and then watch it whenever you want. TiVo adds to this and allows you pull only the shows you want. TiVo also adds an agent that tries to find programs that you might like. But most media communicates between a person and an entity. facebook is about person to person also. facebook does it all it. I can talk to my friends, people who share my interests, clubs or businesses, and every strange morphing that can exist. I can leave a message for friends on my wall or a message(async-push). I can chat to a friend via facebook (sync-push/pull). I can look at messages posted to my friends walls (async-pull). I can send messages to blogspot from my phone that end up on my facebook stream (async-push). I can get friends wall messages sent to my phone (async-pull). I can get even get pictures that my friends send to flickr to appear on my phone when they are sent (sync-pull). facebook allows you to connect to friends that you would feel awkward to call but really want to know how they are doing. facebook can be a confessional to allow you to say things that would be hard to do face to face. facebook isn't a replacement for human contact but it is an extension of it. facebook allows you to connect and share information in new ways due to its open architecture. But it is also not just for geeks. Odd as it seems to me, people like to send virtual hugs. facebook meets people where they are at and doesn't require much more than being able to click and type. So for these reasons I think facebook matters. Now I will let Steven Perry sing us out of this post. The old geek has hope again and information still wants to be free.

The most wonderful time of the the year

Image that your next raise worked like this:
The company has only so much money to give in new revenue and they are going to implement an awards system that allows every employee to get a weekly reward based on their performance against others in the company. Each week everyone who helps in the company's success from the janitor to the CEO has a shot of earning some money based on performance. At the end of the year the employees who earn the most in each section of the company get into a secondary reward system to see who gets the big prize.

So Joe in the cleaning crew saved the company two grand with a new idea on switching to another cleaner and he gets a chance to compete with Jack the CEO for a share of the profits from the company in the final weeks of the fiscal year. Billy from accounting made the firm 2 million this year but came in second to James who made 4 million in accounting. For one week, everyone competes in their respective division to see who makes/save the company the most money. For every top performer in this week they automatically get a better chance at being in the final tournament to get the biggest prize. Billy, who made 2 million, had some hardship in his personal life that week so he didn't win the tournament and wasn't the top performer but he need not worry because a committee is being put togethor to select individuals to compete in the final tournament. Since Billy was still a top performer he gets invited to compete for the big bucks too. Joe in the cleaning crew had an off week and didn't win the weekly tournament, Lindsay won it with a new idea. Lindsay gets an automatic bid into the end tournament and cleaning crew Joe has to wait and hope the comittee gives him a chance to take a shot in the big tournament.


Of course everyone in the biz is argueing about who should get a chance for the big bucks, Joe the Janitor, or Sissy, the so-so sales girl. Sissy made more for the company but had more chances than Joe. The committe picks the finalists are and they go off to work every week trying to earn/save the most for the company in one wacky tournament. Joe probably won't win because he has limited resources but when he does he lifts the hearts and souls of his colleagues beyond compare.

That is the NCAA tournament.



Jack the CEO-Top teams from the ACC, Big East and Big 6 conferences. These are teams filled with future millionaire pro players.


Joe- Butler university, a big fish in a little pond






Lindsay-Clevland State, an upset that almost stole Butler's bid


Sissy - A team with the ability to get bigger bucks because they play with the big boys. For example, MD and AZ, a medium sized fish in a big pond


Billy - A great guy who got an injury at the wrong time, this year that is UCONN and OK


Committee-well there are the people who decide what is what.


So who are you??? Who do you want to win???
Could you imagine how great it would be if that nice janitor lady got a bonus instead of that bratty sales guy who smells like a strip club???
Join in the glory and, as the ending song of the final four says, it is one shining moment and let's remember what is it to be alive.

gringo Agave

In the last week my soul has awoke like a Century Plant.

What once a dormant weed has now found its purpose.

What once was easily passed by now is large and unwieldy and gaudy.

Cut into my heart and you can make Mesquite to intoxicate your senses.

I know this glory will end quickly and without warning just like it began.

But the shoots from my stems will continue to grow long after my glory has set.

I am Agave Americana-Gringo Agave.