Sometimes I think, "What are the odds?"

My most pervasive "What are the odds?" question has to do with having been born and raised as a member of the white middle class in the United States. What percentage of the world has this leg up as a matter of the luck of the draw, just by being born? What a huge advantage I started out with! Oh sure, I could've been born with even a bigger advantage, I suppose, by having been born into great wealth (or even moderate wealth; my family belonged to what I think is called the "working class"). But the odds are so much greater that a baby born in 1956, as I was, would be born in the third world, in abject poverty.

[And allow me to ignore the entire gender issue, except to mention that being male is clearly an advantage with regard to achieving financial and political success in this world, and those women who do achieve greatness have to overcome an additional barrier.]

I wonder, is it possible that my soul, my persona, whatever it is that is me, would still be the same thing if it were inside a different body, one that was born in a different part of the world without the big lead out of the starting gate? And if it is, would that "me" overcome the disadvantages I haven't had to overcome just because of the luck of the draw?

We hear a lot about people who overcame significant disadvantages and disabilities to achieve greatness. We like those stories, I guess. But aren't they the exception? I'm guessing that most people who achieve greatness (however that's measured) start out with that big lead, even bigger than mine.

It makes me put my complaints, my troubles, my woes, such as they are, in perspective. Even on a bad day, my life is so much better than a huge percentage of the rest of the world, and it's not because I'm more entitled to a better life. It's just because I was lucky.

What are the odds?

I should make a New Year's resolution out of this, I suppose. I should resolve to be more deserving of my good fortune. I should resolve to give back more by volunteering and by contributing to charity. I should resolve to do less to adversely affect the environment.

But I don't believe in New Year's resolutions. So I'm just going to make a commitment every day to make a positive difference in the world.

Happy New Year to the handful who read this. And wishes of better times ahead to the victims of tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, and immoral military actions.

I guess I'm supposed to do this because Melissa is making me. She calls it a meme, and she says she was tagged and now she's tagging me.

According to The American Heritage Dictionary, a meme is

A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another.

And at I Am Pariah it appears that there is a long list of memes for bloggers. He says

In Blogspeak, a meme is an idea that is shared and passed from blog to blog, like a question posted in one blog and answered in many other blogs.

Shows how out of the loop I am: I don't speak Blogspeak. Anyway, since Melissa passed this on from her blog to mine, I guess there is a sacred pact among bloggers that requires me to go with it.

It's called 4.


Four jobs you've had in your life: Busboy at Coco's Restaurant in Massapequa, NY; clerk/helper/lackey at Ed's Tropical Aquarium in Yonkers, NY; Associate Professor of Music at Eureka College, Eureka, IL; Technical Consultant for eBusiness at Premera Blue Cross in Mountlake Terrace, WA.

Four movies you could watch over and over: The Women, Singin' in the Rain, All About Eve, Breaking Away

Four places you've lived: Massapequa, NY; Princeton, NJ; New Orleans, LA; Boulder, CO

Four TV shows you love to watch: 24, Desperate Housewives, The Amazing Race, My Name is Earl

Four places you've been on vacation: Alaska, Nova Scotia, Normandy, Venice

Four websites you visit daily: my personal website, Ameritrade, The New York Times, Google

Four of your favorite foods: Pad See Yew from Phad Thai on Greenwood Ave. in Seattle; the deep pan pizza from Leonardo's in Peoria, IL; a traditional Thanksgiving dinner of turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, with gravy and all the trimmings; the coconut cream pie at The Dahlia Lounge in Seattle.

Four places you'd rather be right now: At a Broadway show; touring Italy by train; having a full-day excursion at Ummelina International Day Spa; on Brokeback Mountain

Now I guess I'm supposed to tag someone else with this meme, but honestly, I don't know any other bloggers. So if you read this and the mood strikes you, email me your responses.

Fifty-five minutes.

That's how long it took me to get home from work yesterday. Four miles. Fifty-five minutes.

The funny part is I really wasn't ready to go home. I wanted to keep working on my project. But I was already a few minutes overtime. I'm tempted to stay extra hours without recording them. I don't know if that's unethical or super-ethical, or a violation of some universal law of contracting. But if I start falling behind on the project, I'm going to want to put in extra hours because I want them to hire me and they're more likely to hire me if I can get my project done on time.

Anyway, I have to go north on 15th Ave. across the Ballard Bridge to get home from work, but in order to get onto 15th Ave. northbound, I have to go south a bit, make a left, cross this maddening overpass with two four-way stops, and then make another left.

My first indication of trouble was that the backup at the first four-way stop was two blocks long. Then I saw that northbound 15th was jammed and not moving. So I decided to go south a bit, cross over Queen Anne Hill, and go north on 99 instead.

That was all good until I got to where I had to turn to get onto the street that leads to 99. There, it seemed, everyone else who decided on the same alternate route I did was lined up.

Okay, well there was one more alternate route: head on north to Nickerson and take the Fremont Bridge.

Not knowing my way around Queen Anne, I decided to take 3rd Ave. to Nickerson. When I got to Nickerson, well, that was backed up just as bad as 15th Ave. It took a full half-hour to get to the Fremont Bridge, maybe a half mile.

It turns out that some construction was going on just north of the Ballard Bridge, and this was what was causing the backup.

It also turns out that my ignorance of back streets sent me on wildly roundabout detours. I was just looking at a map of Queen Anne and marveling out how far out of my way I went.

It wasn't all that bad, though, because I kept thinking how no one would believe me when I told them it took almost an hour to get home from work. In fact, I was a little disappointed when I pulled into my garage and realized my drive had fallen just short of a full hour.

And I was so thrilled to be working somwhere so close to home, with such an easy commute. Ha!

I was working on my big project today at POP, busily plugging away, and all of a sudden it was 4:30 and time to go home. If I weren't a contractor, I'd have stayed a while longer. I love it when the day goes by so fast. I made good progress today, the first day of really doing serious development on this project. I was really proud of myself for figuring out one thing after another, getting stuff to work, one piece at a time.

On Monday we had a kind of a kick-off meeting to orient me (as the new guy) to the project, and they asked me to start by doing a build plan. I said I'd never done a build plan before and asked if they had a sample. They said no, just put the features into a spreadsheet, prioritize them, and schedule them based on how long I thought they'd take to complete. So I did this, not having a clue how long it would take me to do any of it, and then we met yesterday afternoon to go over it. They thought it was great, and the technical manager asked me if he could use it as a sample for future build plans. I felt like a school kid whose teacher reads my paper out loud to the entire class.

I decided to leave my former web host (iPowerweb) and switch to a new one. I could hardly believe what happened. The Windows hosting service I was registered for included support for traditional ASP and ASP.NET, but although the ASP hosting has worked fine (I have had my family's forum hosted there), my birthday web site is an ASP.NET site, and I couldn't get it to work. On their support site they have a sample aspx file to upload and test to verify that ASP.NET is working properly on the server. I did that, but it wasn't working, so I called their tech support and opened an incident with them. After two days, they responded that they couldn't figure out why it wasn't working. They suggested I upgrade my service (for a fee!) and then maybe it would work. I was flabbergasted. I was trying to think of an analogy. It's like if you had basic cable, which is supposed to include local broadcast channels, and you couldn't get those channels, and they told you you have to buy a more expensive service.

Anyway, I've completed switching to a new web host (M6), and so far I've been really pleased. They respond to my questions quickly and everything seems to be working. I've had to spend the last few days downloading and uploading files, but if any of my one or two fans is reading this, they wouldn't even know that it's coming from a completely different server.

But either way, they (you) really should click the link to tell me where you're from. It's fun to see where people visiting my site are from.

I toyed with a lot of different ideas about how to celebrate my 50th birthday, but I ultimately decided to stay in Seattle and party with friends. I have reserved a suite for myself at the Alexis Hotel, and I'm in the process of planning activities. I'm going to have a party at the hotel on Saturday night, brunch on Sunday morning followed by an outing to see the new Broadway-bound musical version of "The Wedding Singer," followed by game night back at my hotel room. Then on Monday (my actual birthday) I'm going to spend the day being pampered at Ummelina Day Spa, and follow that up with dinner at the Dahlia Lounge, my favorite Seattle restaurant.

This is going to cost a fortune (even with my guests paying their way for everything except the Saturday night party), and it has me questioning the sanity and wisdom of spending so much money all in one weekend. But, hey, what the hell!

I've built a little web site for my invitees to learn about the events and RSVP, but my web hosting doesn't seem to be supporting ASP.NET properly for the time being. I've opened a ticket with them, and I'm hoping they resolve the issue soon so I can get it posted and start planning based on how many people I expect. I had a lot of fun building the app, but I want to be able to use it, so they'd better get it fixed!

Meanwhile, at work, I've been put onto a big project. Lots of responsibility, lots of effort, and not a lot of time. But I'm exciting about getting started on it after spending the last month doing maintenance and bug fixes. I'm going to be revamping the entire subscription ticketing area of the Seattle Symphony web site. It's mostly back-end, integrating with Tessitura, which they currently use for their single-ticket functionality. It's the first site here that is doing subscriptions in this way, so I feel good that they are giving me this responsibility, especially since there is no real model to base it on. I'm pretty nervous about it, but I feel confident that I can pull it off.

I'm on my lunch break at work, so I thought I'd see what words come out of my fingertips.

Yesterday afternoon there was a technology team meeting, and, since I'm "just" a contractor, I wasn't invited. In addition, a new person started yesterday on the same team I'm working on, and she was brought around and introduced to others on the team, but not to me.

I know that as a contractor I'm not supposed to be involved in things like team meetings and all, but I've never been good at feeling left out. Or I guess what I mean to say is I'm very good at feeling left out. I wonder if it stems from growing up with sisters. As a kid, I often felt unincluded in stuff that they and my mom did, or they and their friends. Oooh, early hints at gender confusion? Perhaps. Not that I wanted to wear dresses or makeup or anything...

When I was in the sixth grade a broke my nose at school playing softball. For three days I needed to stay home to avoid being bumped into or anything; but my mom had a ton of shopping to do to get ready for my older sisters' Bat Mitzvah, and I had to go with her so she could keep an eye on me. I didn't love shopping, but I felt so included. We went to a hamburger joint for lunch, across the street from May's in Levittown, and I have a vivid memory of sitting there with my mom eating my burger, barely able to open my mouth wide enough to take bites. It's just a flash of memory today, 40 years later, but it's one of my happiest memories from my childhood.

Tomorrow is my one-month anniversary of starting work here. I'm eager to talk to people about the potential to stay around long-term. But I think I'll hold off until after the new year.