Content-type: text/html Ray Manning

Monday, April 29, 2002 11:41 AM

Scorecard Blues


Wednesday night is Grand Central station at Ray's house in Long Beach. After a visit with the chiropractor and fending off looks of incredulity when I show him (and his receptionist) the new motorcycle and them them how fast it will go, there are many, many telephone calls and conversations. I try to get to sleep by 11pm, but the telephone keeps ringing. The final telephone call comes in at 2:30am (on Thursday now) as plans are finalized (and we try to make some money off the rebounding Nikkei index).

There are meetings, dinners, outings, and things that keep me busy for the beginning of the week. On Thursday, after a productive set of days at work, some of my personal life dilemas hit me. I stop by the liquor store on the way home and buy wine coolers and a lottery ticket. After lifting weights I break out the wine coolers and try to stay productive and keep my mind off my problems. I brush the dog (Big handfulls of fur come off as Nopester continues to shed his winter coat.), oil some of the wood furniture, print 500 envelopes for ResourceScout, apply and remove an exfoliant, and watch the Kings' win their playoff game in overtime.

Now the wine coolers are finally starting to kick in, but I can't keep my mind off my problems. I consider updating my website with a glossary of terms and a scorecard of all of the players (with names and alphanumeric designations), but I realize that I'm limited to 10 Megabytes of storage space on my website and the scorecard would probably exceed this size. I get a bit more frustrated. And then I list the people who are currently "in play". "Oh my", I say as I realize that the current list cannot be counted by the fingers on one hand. I get a bit more frustrated.

And now, there is only one thing to do. Crank some ecstacy-induced trance music and geek-out. I manage to construct a cool little agent that goes out to the Internet, grabs financial data for desired stocks and mutual funds (as provided by the ticker symbol), and updates a database of financial numbers. This is not enough, so I go back and streamline a little previously-written agent that takes an address, city, or zipcode, goes out to the Internet to retrieve GPS coordinates, and returns the corrdinates to a database. This is now much faster and more fun as I gear the data towards a M2M application (i.e., mobile-to-mobile application).

I have told the audio-editing team that I cannot stay involved because I am over-booked. I provide the code, the filters, and the other tools that I have written and wash my hands of the project.

On Friday I am riding the old motorcycle up to West Hollywood to meet Person M_K for dinner. We have a reasonable dinner but I'm headed home early because I have a bicycle ride the next morning. So here it is, cold and windy and starting to rain and I'm on the motorcycle. The roads are slippery, I can't see a d%*# thing (because of the fogging of the helmet), and everyone is driving like they're in stolen vehicles. I manage to get up to only 100 or 105 mph because of the aforementioned reasons. I'm bummed.

When I get home I have an approximately four hour conversation with Person G. We cover a wide range of topics.

Saturday is a productive day of laundry, lifting weights, a bicycle ride (minus Person E who wimped out because it was threatening rain), oiling wood furniture, looking at windows, walking, and etc. Brandon calls and invites me to go with Joe and Harris to a club. Because I'm a bit tired, I hem and haw and finally decide to stay home. I don't need any more people "in play" right now.