RHAPSODY Link

RHAPSODY Link
The Engineers Don't Wave form the Trains Anymore
Recorded by The Lynn Morris Band
Written by Tom T. Hall

I remember riding in my Mom's Ford LTD listening to country music 8 tacks. One of my favorite songs was "The Year Clayton Delaney Died." It was my first introduction to the Music of Tom T. Hall. The idea that a song is supposed to tell a story is always something that stuck with me. Even now, as I play my banjo, I find myself latching on to longer songs that paint a picture.

The Engineers Don't Wave from the Trains Anymore is a wonderful song about how technology and the pace of the modern world isolates us. It's kind of ironic that I'm writing this on a blog. I think we all yen for a simpler time when we know everyone in our neighborhood. Most people would love to be able to know the person who rings us up at the grocery store and have the neighbors march our kids to our front door by their ear when they see them doing wrong. In the age of Wal Mart, 24/7 banking, 2 income families, daycare, and one our commutes it hardly seems possible. We're often unable to keep up the relationships in our own families.

Weren't cell phones, pages, the Internet, and telecommuting supposed to allow us to spend more time with our families? I guess I'm digressing here, but you see where I'm going. The pace of life only seems to get faster and faster with each passing year. A friendly wave to the neighbors across the street is often as much as I muster after logging 10 hours at the office. I'm guilty too. It would certainly rock my world to have an engineer wave to me while I drink my coffee and talk on my cell phone in my car while wonder what meeting I'm going to be late for. Who knows, it might inspire me to talk to the neighbors when I get home.

This song is an excellent example of clawhammer banjo. Clawhammer is a very old time way of playing without picks. The player strums the banjo with the front is his or her fingernails while simultaneously thumping some strings with their thumb. It takes a lot of practice. Lynn Morris and Co striking an excellent balance between well played old time melodies and wainfully straightforward vocals.

Well here I am

Greetings. Anyone reading this? Heh heh.

So it's a little after 10:00 pm and I'm supposed to be working on a paper about social engineering for a college course on information security. It's a great topic. I've got a touch of ADD though, so I always get distracted and wait until the last minute on projects like this.

I'm a student at the Twin Cities campus of St. Mary's University of Minnesota.
www.smumn.edu
The school is most famous for an incident where 3 kids at the Winona campus got trashed and drove their SUV into the river. Anyway, I'm majoring in information technology in an accelerated program. I've got about four classes left until I graduate. That assumes that I get the credits I anticipate for independent learning. It also assumes that I won't take an accounting or statistics class to improve my chances for admission to business school.

I've been going to school off and on since December of 2000. This accelerated program is taking forever! I look forward to the day when I can spend a weekend at home and not have to worry about some impending paper or doing some reading for a class. It feels like I'm always pinched between school and work. Classes are all 7 weeks long, so they really cram a lot of stuff into them.

I'm specializing in systems management. I work on a team that manages the severs of a large multi-national company. I can't say that I've really become much more technical since I started going to college. In fact, I know I've become less technical. I guess I'm kind of sick of trying to stay on the bleeding edge of technology only to throw away all the stuff I just learned 3 years later. Besides, I've been busy writing fucking papers ever weekend for the last few years. It's hard to find time to read the technical journals and tinker.

Do I really want to go to business school in fall of 2005 an write more papers? Maybe. Time will tell I guess.

Thanks for reading. I need to get back to the old paper.