Well, this week was crazy, between work and classes starting. For work I had to drive out to LAX early on two mornings and deliver computers and printers to a group of people from my company’s corporate office who were working with the new Transportation Security Authority (mainly formerly private sector security, newly federalized) to fingerprint and ID all the people that work at the concourse stores in the American Airlines terminal. “Hello, can I have a Maple-nut scone with a small C-4 latte to go?” You get the idea. In the past months, security had been putting passengers through the wringer, not allowing unticketed people on the concourse, but waving by anyone with a vending badge. It was a big hassle trying to get through security with the computers even though I had the head of the TSA team with me. Very few people in the security infrastructure have the ability to make decisions, or even move six feet from their assigned mark on the floor. I won’t go into much detail, but it turned out the first day that I went down that the security director for this particular airline that had insisted the night before that she needed two computers was mistaken, so after going through the work to get the systems to a ready-made security field office in the concourse, I waited three hours for this personage to arrive and affirm that she was wrong. So I trundled everything back out, through security (it’s easy leaving), out to the parking garage, stuff too much stuff back in my Tercel, etc. Par for the course: around 2 1/2 hours through my three hour wait I realized that my fly had been down…

That night I got a call from one of my company’s people at the airport that they needed a printer to print out fingerprint cards, since airport security staff “needed to have something to staple to the employee security applications.” Since all the fingerprints are taken with a very cool optical scanner, saved with a data about the applicant and burned onto CD’s that are shipped to the FBI and a couple of other places, the process is supposed to be paperless, but you can’t really staple a CD to an application now, can you? So the next day I went back with a printer. Same hassle, different day (except that they truly needed and kept the printer). I only stayed an hour or so after I got through security this time though, so I didn’t waste most of a day. And my fly wasn’t open, so that was cool.

I read a daily e-mailed newsbrief called NewScan that I really like. It usually has six to nine single paragraph synopses of news articles related to technology, education, and privacy issues. It also has a “FlashCard” (quote of the day) and an “Honorary Subscriber” segment that is a lot of fun to read. An Honorary Subscriber might be anyone from Rudolph Diesel to Pontiac to Hamilton Fish. It’s a great way to learn about figures in history. Alternating with the Honorary Subscriber feature is the “Worth Thinking About” feature, which usually has a three or four paragraph quote from a book on a topic related to culture, technology, philosophy, etc. As if this wasn’t enough, there is a “Weekly Mailbag” feature that prints the responses and thoughts of subscribers, and once a week one Newscan subscriber gets self-written bio published in the newsletter. All this to say that this week it was Espen Anderson who was profiled, and I thought that the name and life looked familiar. Turns out that I’d found Mr. Anderson’s personal web site a few years ago while I was doing research on my would-be son’s possible names. Espen.org, it seems, is taken, but Mr. Anderson, who runs the site, had an etymology page of sorts about the common mispellings of his name. I wrote Mr. Anderson a note about his NewsScan profile, his web site, and my son’s name and he responded nicely.

I ended up getting my Espen a mini baseball mit and ball for his birthday. He has a good arm when he’s not feeling too crazy, but he can’t catch for beans. His ratio’s around 1:20. The ball and mit are a velcro combination, so it should help out some.

I started listening to two new books on tape at the beginning of the week. A lot of my friends have seen the Chevy Chase movie “Fletch,” and talk about it from time to time, so I decided to see if the book was any good. I’m pretty sure that this might be one of those rare cases in which the movie is better than the book. The book has a good plot, which is a great thing to hang a movie off of, but not much else. I imagine that Chase brings a lot to the main character. I finished that, and I’m now listening to Mary Webb’s Precious Bane. Gosh, I don’t know how much is attributable to the wonderful audio narrator, but I love this book. It was written in 1924 and takes place forty or so years earlier in the Shropshire countryside. The heroine and tale-teller is a girl with “a hare-shotten lip” who goes on to endear the reader to the generosity of her heart and her general take on the events that surround her. I’ve only heard the first third, so I can’t say too much more yet.