D-Day

Deployment day is today after several months of work. Finally we are a breath away from go live. It’s been a long project with almost 2 years of unceasing labor, confusion, big breaks, difficult challenges, redemption and resolution. But the way is not clear yet. Today will be the first remote test. But everything will be in place with everybody on call to respond. The ball is with Big Blue who has repeatedly delayed the deployment that caused us to stay the weekend in Nevada. It was a good idea to stay because the allotted 2 day stay was really not enough. But it was a hair rising ride with combination of a structured methodology, agile methods and the usual seat of the pants confusion. Nevertheless, it has reached this point which is a major step despite what happens today.

There are a lot of problems in the start-up and most folks are spinning the story wrongly. One’s perception is the key and despite the difficult journey one feels that definite progress has been achieved. My old boss is leading the charge despite moving to a new position a few months ago. He is still fully invested and there is no way he could leave it alone. He even admits that he caused the mess. Sometimes I feel that he is thrashing out wildly like an old boxer using the old moves to fight the enemy but the enemy has evolved with the rules of the game changing as well. So he is like an old fighter fighting a young challenger with new rules. Fortunately, he is not alone and everyone is pitching in to help move the project along.

It was an eventful trip with a great weekend of travels around the lake, to the nearby mountains and ski-resorts, playing billiards, exploring the casinos and great food in different restaurants. Reno is an old mining town with vestiges of the Wild West. The cities nearby evoke memories of romantic time: Carson City, Virginia City, Border Town, Lake Tahoe. These are cities heard or seen in the old Western television shows or movies with legendary actors like John Wayne, Clint Eastwood or Steve McQueen. It’s a thrill to be in the actual place where all those stories actually happen. There is a large bronze statue in the hotel lobby of a horse and rider in tribute to the Pony Express. The Pony Express is that ancient relic of delivering mail where one rider handed off the mail to another fresh rider until the destination is reached. The bronze plaque says that the record was achieved in delivering the news of the victory of Abraham Lincoln from East to the West states.

Its fitting that the pilot is done in this city of pioneers where individual labor and sacrifice is the key to success. We will find out at the end of the day if everything will turn out well. Last night after dinner we went to the center of town to the excellent hotel Silver Legacy. It’s an old hotel – the best I have seen so far with elaborate carpets and well lighted places with elegant slots machines and gambling tables. This is an old replica of a silver mining rig that looks like the Eiffel Tower in Paris. It was designed by Eiffel himself for his friend, who was the richest silver miner in Nevada, The hotel was built in the site of the silver mine that made him rich. There was painting in the lobby of scenes from the Wild West – cowboys in horses, Main Street with dusty lanes. The huge silver rig in a dome that replicated the sky above gave the exact feeling of how it was like in those days.

Asian Pioneers

The Donner Party memorial is a few miles north of Lake Tahoe. It’s a memorial to the party of pioneers who perished in the terrible winter of 1846 and 1847 on their way to California. The pioneers with their families got caught in a mountain pass in the Sierra Nevada. We went to the memorial after circling Lake Tahoe. We traveled from Reno. It was a spectacular drive with the mountain tops covered with snow. The mountains of the Sierra Nevada surround the city of Reno, which lies on a flat plain. The mountains around Lake Tahoe are snow capped but the mountains towards Las Vegas are semi-desert, with no trees or snow. These mountains are filled with rocks and large boulders and covered with brown earth. It is in striking contrast to the mountains towards California which have fir trees and snow.

The memorial had glass cases filled with old relics. There was one case about the Chinese laborers who worked on the Western railroads. Chinese laborers where often ‘shanghaied’ or kidnapped from China to work as indigent labor. The casinos in Reno are full of Asians mostly of Chinese immigrants. I can’t help but think that these Asians are the descendants of those railroad workers. The exhibit talked about racial purges and it would not stretch the imagination that these purges where aimed at the Chinese communities who have settled near the railroad stations. The nearest town is Truckee with a highway going to Reno. I can see the railroad tracks from the highway as we drove along the highway to Reno. The hotel I stayed in has slight traces of seediness, unlike the one in Las Vegas. These were a lot of young people in the hotel casino and most had their ski gear, ready to ski in Mt. Rose which is north of Lake Tahoe.

The television series ‘Kung Fu’ is about a Shoalin monk and his adventures in the west. A martial arts expert in the land of cowboys and Indians. At that time, it was a unique story because the history of the Chinese experience building railroads, the racial struggles, the rise in prosperities of Chinatown were never known. I had always thought about the rich merchant Chinese who lived in the Philippines and not the indigent Chinese laborers who were exploited in near slavery conditions. Slavery seemed to be the exclusive story of African Americans and the story of the other races that were treated harshly has not been told. So I was glad to see the exhibit about the Chinese laborers in the Donner party memorial. It was like their struggles and contributions are finally being recognized. The Chinese heritage and other Asian immigrants have every right to be in the country because of the contribution by their country men in the country’s development.

It’s like everything is turning full circle. It is ironic that China is buying Treasury bonds to keep the country functioning. Asian sovereign funds are helping Western countries survive their financial problems. Instead of the manual labor of the past, it is the money and skills that are the contributing to the economy. On a personal level, I am here for work, installing software in a warehouse, something that I have done many times in Asia; in Thailand, China, Japan and the Philippines.  Now the assignment is in Nevada, where Asian laborers have toiled in a previous century. In a certain way, nothing has changed and the world has always been a global economy, where different actors from foreign lands have always worked together. The pendulum has swung in the opposite direction with the East ascendant. It feels like one is riding a wave at the right time. There will be opposition as there usually is and the messy deployment in Reno is an example.

Experiential Learning

After going thru the ‘confusion’ of understanding ‘meta cognition’ and writing, one breaks out and realizes that it’s all useless mental churning again. It does provide a few moments of insight but disappears into the every day reality of writer’s block. Understanding ‘meta cognition’ does not provide concrete steps; only theory and eventual confusion. One can’t help but re-read the article and theories again with the confounding remark ‘say what again?’ So it’s back to intellectual masturbation. Happily one forces himself to attend interesting workshops where there are exercises that one does – an experiential type of learning rather than reading the latest studies on writing. I think this maybe the best way to learn ala Toastmaster. Perhaps it’s the best method for me - actual practice instead of book learning (but I do blog which should amount to something).

Another option is to attend a scribbler’s meetings where one gets to read one’s work in front of a group. These meetings are sponsored by the library and one get to listen to other would-be-writers and also get some friendly criticism of one’s work. One gets to share and read out aloud one’s words.  I guess it’s externalizing one’s deeply held ‘private’ work. One realizes that one would not have the confidence and ease to attend workshops or scribbler’s meetings without the practice of Toastmasters. It’s the missing link to one’s development as one would have gotten a fair amount of exposure in public settings without losing one’s composure. It’s like an act or role or armor the shrouds the person’s shyness or awkwardness; providing a basic polish to an otherwise raw exterior. Perhaps it’s also a re-structuring of one’s internal psyche into the glare of social interactions and public acceptance as speaker or writer.

Scribbler meetings are like the Inklings gatherings in Oxford where writers like C.S.Lewis and J.R. Tolkien read their works to their close friends. They would meet after work in nearby pubs or restaurants, drinking beer and having discussion well into the early morning. Great books have come out of these meetings like the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the adventures of Narnia. These are not writers by profession but intellectuals or lecturers in the Oxford university circuit. The library has a new exhibit on the Inklings (after their excellent series on Lincoln) but I don’t think there are any lectures planned. So I borrowed books and DVDs on the Inklings.  The library has held a lot of interesting exhibits and lectures this year on personal finance, legal matters (wills and probates), Lincoln and now the Inklings. It’s the best library system that I have experienced so far, devoted to learning and improving one’s self.

Last Monday, on a dark and rainy night, I traveled after work to the nearby county to attend an interesting writing workshop. It was an interesting seminar conducted by a teacher who attended the famous Black Mountain College in North Carolina. After giving an inspiring lecture, we were divided into groups and went about writing poetry. The first step was to write in free form on 3 photographs one has chosen from a book. The second step was to pass one’s work to your group mate so he or she would encircle interesting passages from their point of view. In the third step, the work is passed to a third person who would list down in another paper those interesting passages. Finally, based on the passages, one would try to make a poem by rearranging sentences, editing, adding and deleting words. It was an interesting exercise where one would create poetry from a photograph after following a series of seemingly random choices by others.

My group individually chose 3 photographs: an old lady sitting in a room, a small town in the plains with a full moon above and snow capped mountains in the distance and a young woman bathing in an underground stream with sunlight peeking through the cave openings. The resulting poem that came out is listed below.

The Essence of Mystery

She is old and young
Arms outstretched
Staring out into the darkness
A windswept white cloud expanse;
She looks out into the distance
Mysterious aging landscape.