Role Changes

Since my last posting I have had a number of new responsibilities added to my Masonic plate. At the Annual Communication in May our Grand Master, M.W. Bro. Robert Landry, appointed me to the position of District Education Representative (DER) for the 17th Masonic District. The 17th is a Cumberland County region consisting of the lodges in Portland, South Portland, Westbrook, Scarborough, Gorham, Yarmouth and Standish. I have never been particularly interested in joining the purple aprons, so named for the color of a Grand Lodge apron, but the job is a genuinely interesting one.

The DER is responsible for assisting with Masonic education in his District. This includes organizing and hosting the Assistant Grand Lecturer with his School of Instruction, giving education presentations to the lodges, and coordinating other speakers. During the past few months, I have offered since my last posting I have had a number of new responsibilities added to my Masonic plate. At the Annual Communication in May our Grand Master, M.W. Bro. Robert Landry, appointed me to the position of District Education Representative (DER) for the 17th Masonic District. The 17th is a Cumberland County region consisting of the lodges in Portland, South Portland, Westbrook, Scarborough, Gorham, Yarmouth and Standish. I have never been particularly interested in joining the purple aprons, so named for the color of a Grand Lodge apron, but the job is a genuinely interesting one.

The DER is responsible for assisting with Masonic education in his District. This includes organizing and hosting the Assistant Grand Lecturer with his School of Instruction, giving education presentations to the lodges, and coordinating other speakers. During the past few months, I offered a few interesting programs including: “4^th Night” for Deering Lodge and “Masonic Etiquette” for Harmony Lodge. With any luck the renewed Grand Lodge Speaker's Bureau will provide an opportunity for a variety of speakers to get involved with Masonic education the District.

Another appointment given to me by M.W. Bro. Landry is as a member of the MEALS Committee, where MEALS is an acronym for Masonic Education And Lodge Services. Is responsible for managing the DERs and providing materials to the lodges to help them with administration and education. The committee is presently reviewing our "Candidate Instruction Manual," which gives candidate mentors educational ideas for each of the three degrees. Since the manual includes references to Masonic history and ritual development, the review is taking me the better of eight hours for each section. At our last meeting we spent over two hours just reviewing and approving revisions to the Fellow Craft Degree manual. The experience has been educational as I am constantly forced to pry references from my head to back up, or undermine, assertions made in the manual.

I hope, over the next two years, to be able to give Masonic Light back to my District after all it has given to me.

Back to Blogging...

There are two issues which have kept me from blogging as before. First, the mutual eye poking between the Burning Taper and the Beacon of Masonic Light soured me to Masonic blogs in general. I have backed off and read only a few genuinely brotherly and interesting blogs and left the remainder behind. Second, I have been working on a substantial paper tracing the evolution of the Entered Apprentice Lectures here in Maine. It has been consuming a great deal of my time. Nevertheless, back at it.

Reconstruction Hornet Battle

No home project is complete without a war against nature and new tools. I love carpet. I love living room carpet most of all. Tandy...not so much with the living room carpet. She is from the hardwood with a throw rug culture. Ultimately, she had the more formidable arsenal: the girls. They ground things into that poor carpet until even I could bear it no longer. Finally, we agreed to rip it out and remodel the living room. Unlike the previously projects this was not scheduled as a "gut and rebuild" operation. There were only three items on the agenda:

1. Continue the hardwood flooring into the 1960s extension to the living room (only sub-floor back there).
2. Remove the drop ceiling and either repair or sheetrock over the damaged ceiling.
3. Replace the lighting over the fireplace and in the ceiling.

The day we removed the drop ceiling we found about a half-dozen "bees" flying around the room. After no small amount of exploration those "bees" were found to be yellow jackets and the half-dozen turned into two nests. We searched for days for the nest finally exposing it, including a creepy "listen to the wall buzz" moment. I am not a huge fan of bees or "bees," but this was just too much. Fortunately, I have braver friends including Adrian the Amateur General Contractor and Steve the English Hornet Handler. They scared me, they amazed me, they made me slightly ill. At one point Steve was pulling out handfuls of the nest with little more than his gloves on. Yikes!

An individual, who shall remain nameless, did me the favor of cutting through a wire in the first floor knob and tube circuit. I have a very, very healthy fear of knob and tube. Left alone it will continue safely for generations, but once you touch it by splicing into it or cutting away sections, all bets are off. My avowed strategy is to gradually remove items from the circuit, capping off that end point in the box until the whole circuit is empty. Then the dead circuit is removed from the panel, ending it for all times. Fortunately, I always take the precaution of shutting off "at risk" circuits in the panel when doing a project. The nameless individual was not showered with sparks as he cut through the wire.

Faced with the need to replace a whole mess of wiring, now that the knob and tube was tampered with, a new tool was clearly required. To fill the need I purchased a 72" drill bit with a 3/4" bit head. This bit is specially designed for running wire and is used by sliding the bit up (to reach the ceiling) or down (to reach the basement) in an outlet box hole in the wall, then drilling through to reach the desired location. There is a tiny hole bored through the bit face, allowing you to slide a piece of the wire through to pull it down to the outlet box hole. We used this tool more often than you can imagine, particularly when we had to run a new line into the hallway for the stairwell light fixture (rendered inoperative by the loss of the knob and tube circuit). In total we used the bit about nine times to help run wire where there we no existing holes. At almost $40, it hurt light mad to pay for it, but the bit came in incredibly handy.

All in all, the project is going very well. We still have sheetrock to hang, walls to scrape and paint and floors to install and refinish. We are, however, making good time with the help of good friends and the promise of good beer after each day's work!

Crazy License Plate

Been busy...excuses, excuses.

On the way home from dinner with the ladies tonight we saw a vehicle with the license plate: PH2ODOG. There was much discussion over its meaning during the ride. I leaned toward "pee water dog," but I guess that is just me. No one else had a better suggestion. What do you think?

Visual Studio and AccuRev

It has been a while, but work grabbed me with little more than a week between two large projects. We shipped out XMap 5.0 and I jumped right into the selection, purchase and install of new development tools. The upgrade from Visual Studio 2003 to Visual Studio 2005 was actually quite a bit more painful than the upgrade from Visual Studio 97 to Visual Studio 2003. The improved ISO C++ compliance is conceptually great, but when you have a fifteen year investment in C++.... Well, suffice it to say that we realized we had a fair amount of non-compliant code kicking around in the repository.

The more engaging part of this task was replacing our weather-work Visual SourceSafe 6.0d source control control system with AccuRev. We last evaluated AccuRev when 3.5 was the current edition of the software. (cue wavy lines)Back then its integration with Visual Studio (a.k.a. SCCI support) was pretty rough around the edges and the AccuRev Client GUI needed a bit of maturing. The worst part of that eval process was being able to see just how great a heart they had to the product. Rather than select a lesser SCM system, we cancelled the upgrade project a decided to wait... (back to reality) This time through, under AccuRev 4.5, they really spent some time and effort on their SCCI support and client GUI. Everyone on the analysis team was really wowed by the product, so much so, that some of us could not wait to get our hands on it. Though it has not occurred every day, at least a few times a week I run across another great feature which makes me shout, "I love AccuRev!"

The new software packages are finally being deployed throughout the department this week. Hopefully, I will have time to return to my other pursuits. The in-laws bought me a book on Esoteric Freemasonry, which will be a great way for me to start learning about this branch of the Craft.