Author: Andy Garrison

Voyager, Friends, and Intersections In Life

~ Andy Garrison ~ 6 Comments

A link sent by a friend in Namibia (Mike) led to a rabbit hole of exploration and a deep sense of wonder about how life is sometimes so interesting it is almost palpable. The things that connect us to one another, and the weaving and winding paths we follow in life, can be strange and unexpected. The link was about a 2023 data update to the spacecraft Voyager 2, launched in 1977 and now two billion miles from Earth in interstellar space. The link (Voyager 2 Software Update) got me thinking about friends, NASA’s Deep Space Network, and a maze of other things that revolve around people, friendships, and choices. Bear with me, and it may make sense by the time I’m done! This is a glimpse into an eclectic and interesting life, and there are a few points of intersection with people very much worth knowing.

I am one of the folks who believe everything is connected. It’s one part of my personal interpretation of a god. (Small “g”. That was a teaser for a future post!) The ways in which our lives twist, and the intersections with our interests and other people in unexpected ways, are often not visible but they plant seeds that don’t bear fruit until a few decades later. If we are lucky, those detours and “paths less taken” often put us in contact with people who become invaluable as deeply connected friends that turn out to be fascinating and incredibly rewarding.

That’s what Mike is for me.

Backtrack several decades to when I quit Honeywell as an engineering manager with a pending promotion to Project Manager just to turn down job offers from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and the Lockheed Skunk Works, and went to work as a salesman for ComputerLand selling and setting up early personal computers for my local ComputerLand franchise. Turning down those incredible companies to work as a computer salesman was widely viewed by a lot of people as near insane, and some people still do. It turned out to be one of the most pivotal choices in my eclectic life — a choice and a time about which I have no regrets, only “what ifs”.

(Note: I do have some regrets in life, but not many, and that’s not one of them. My personal belief is that my “life well lived” is bound to have a few regrets or I haven’t stretched my boundaries enough.)

When I made the choice to give up jobs with two of the most prestigious space and aviation technology companies in the world, I went to work for a local ComputerLand franchise owned by Gene and Shirley Thom. Gene had been an engineer for JPL for the Deep Space Network (the first intersection with the link that started this missive) and retired from JPL after a full career. Then he and Shirley bought a franchise that promised to be the latest “sure thing” when retailing technology products was just getting started. Right about then, personal computers, and the IBM PC, became a reality. ComputerLand, and many franchisees, became very wealthy. I was one of the wannabes in the getting rich part of that adventure. ComputerLand, and many franchisees, ultimately were viewed as a “flash in the pan.” As was I.

Shirley was an avid member of The Ninety-Nines, Inc., International Organization of Women, a women’s aviation group (the group is still very active). When I left their store after a year or so to work for ComputerLand corporate offices in finance I stayed in contact with Gene and Shirley. At one point I went with them on an air race, in their Cherokee, around the western U.S. My memories of that flight often come back to me when I drive around Southern Namibia where I lived for eight and a half years until recently. (That’s the second intersection.)

Before ComputerLand tanked, I left ComputerLand, Australia, after moving to Sydney (and THAT is a story on its own!), I went to work as an independent contract programmer. Shortly thereafter, a man I got to know when he was in charge of ComputerLand Corporation public relations contacted me (after he left ComputerLand) and I ended up as the CEO of a startup company named Antenna Technology (AT) in Fort Worth, Texas. AT wanted to design an easily manufactured home receiver/antenna to get TV signals from the then-nascent geostationary satellite TV/Dish systems like HBO in its early days. (Note the intersection here with radio signals to space!)

There were going to be two unique values to our product: UPS shippable (others were not, due to large antenna size), and self-aligning so a technician didn’t have to install and point it to a geostationary satellite—one that always stays over the same spot on earth so if you “aim” an antenna at it, it just stays on the signal. We had a computer engineer plucked out of Apple Computers to design the receiver unit and the computer driving the whole thing. Shortly after arriving, we hired Gene Thom (who had closed (or sold?) his ComputerLand store) to be our antenna designer/engineer. (Another intersection!) And the design and effort, and the team, worked! We had an operational prototype! Then, when oil prices tanked in 1986 we had to dissolve AT, and lay off about 30 employees, because the AT holding company used the entire AT line of credit with our banks to purchase additional stock in the oil industry just before oil prices dropped by over 50%. The holding company had technology recovering “heavy oil” believing the oil price reductions during the period 1981 to 1985 were temporary, and they would make a killing buying all that speculative stock. (This was in East Texas, unsurprisingly.) The only killing that resulted was that of Antenna Technology, Inc. And my stock was essentially worthless. The trend to notice here is the sudden decrease in my bank account and future prospects.

I went on for several years of surviving, sometimes flourishing, sometimes scrambling to pay bills. Once again losing my “life savings” with the dot.com crash of 2003 when was working as Manager of Consulting for Netcentives.com and my stock was added to my stack of potential wallpaper. Thereafter, I did pretty well in consulting/project management but never made my hoped-for fortune. In 2013 I had worked my way out of debt (again), but at age 63 was “less of a hot item on the job market” as they say. Plus, I was sick of corporate America having avoided it for much of the past 40 years or so, and regretting the times I didn’t avoid it. I wasn’t penniless, and thanks to a friend with a wonderful family who hired me to work with them as a family business, I was OK but had no prospects for a decent retirement.

Not having great economic prospects, and missing international travel and work that I’d had a lot of in the past few decades (that part isn’t included in this story), in 2015 I ended up being accepted by the U.S. Peace Corps working in Katutura, Windhoek, Namibia, for two years in Community Economic Development, then transferring to Oranjemund, Namibia, and extending my Peace Corps time to four years instead of the usual two. In Oranjemund, I met Mike. He became a very good friend in the six and a half years I lived in Oranjemund, owning a home there for over four years. I often was invited to have Christmas dinner with his family, and he and I would sit in his office just before the end of the day at the store he owned (with two other partners) once or twice a week and talk for ninety min or so about Africa, Oranjemund, politics, people, local news, world news, families, and often about our common passion, space and cosmology. Both of us were very lucky to find people with tendencies to geeky interests in that small town in a remote area of the Namib desert who had similar curiosities. A few days ago, about a month after I left Oranjemund, I spent an hour and a half video-chatting with him and reproducing some of the hours I spent in his office. It was great – I felt at home for the first time since leaving Oranjemund.

Yesterday he sent me (from Namibia to the U.S.) a link to an article about a recent software update that was sent to the Voyager 2 spacecraft. That’s the link in the first line of this article. It took over eighteen hours for the signal from Earth to reach Voyager 2 about two billion miles away! It takes about 8 minutes for light from the Sun to reach Earth. Think about it.

It seems almost as improbable that I would be sent into a deeply nostalgic memory of working in the Aviation Industry by a close friend in Africa about 15,000 kilometers away and in the Southern Hemisphere. Point being; an Engineering Sciences/Astrodynamics major and fighter pilot from the Air Force Academy ends up linked to a Scottish grocery store owner in Namibia by a link to the Voyager spacecraft and a trip into interstellar space! Losing my life savings a few times made a trip to Africa possible, where I was lucky enough to meet Mike and several other people from Namibia who became very good friends. I would have never met Mike, or the other amazing folks I know in Oranjemund, had it not been for the twists and turns of event-filled lives and accidental conjunctions. We just never know how things will turn out.

Honestly, how do people get bored?

Back At the Keyboard

~ Andy Garrison ~ 2 Comments

With apologies for being so quiet for so long, I needed to keep concentrating on moving my home, protecting my health, and living life the way it actually occurs instead of what we had in mind. But I’m back, and I plan on staying back.

As you may know, I have two websites that “kind of” interlink. “LifeAtSea.Blog” about a three-year trip around the world living on a cruise ship, and “WITWIA.COM” which stands for “Where In The World Is Andy,” a blog site I started in 2015 and posted in, sporadically, while I was in the Peace Corps in Namibia. This particular post is going on both of them.

I just posted a longer blog under “WITWIA > Thoughts” which is the section of that website dedicated to whatever the hell I want to talk about. The other major sections of the blog are about Namibia, Oranjemund, and the shipwreck of the Bom Jesus. Any posts prior to 2023 are in the archived section. There isn’t much on the website as yet, but it’s coming. If you want to see the latest post, just click this link.

I’m working on a new blog post for “LifeAtSea.Blog” and will have it up before the end of the weekend, I hope! I might have bitten off more than I can chew with having two websites. That’s my usual M.O.

Thanks to all of you for hanging in there. I’ll do my best to make it worth your while!

To What End?

~ Andy Garrison ~ Leave a comment

As a new blogger, my inbox is jammed with offers to:

  • Optimize my website for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) so a post will appear higher on search results,
  • Show me how AI will allow me to never write another line of content to publish on my website,
  • Sell me lessons on how to write “correctly” for the market, and
  • Show me how to make millions by monetizing my website.

All of them think of various enticing ways to say “It’s so easy! Just give me some money and I’ll show you how to live your most fantastic life dreams with hardly any effort!” or to just “Sign Up and get some REALLY USEFUL INFORMATION FREE, and then give me some money.” Not that some of it isn’t worth some money, some is.

But none of those things are of particular interest to me, although all of them have elements that are of background interest.

The problem is that, as usual in life, there are a few things buried in the piles of crap and clickbait that are worthwhile, particularly to a new blogger trying to figure out a lot of things about the blogging arena. But if my primary interest isn’t to make money from a blog, most of this stuff is not so helpful and the sell, sell, sell aspect of it becomes tedious. This is over and above dealing with the complexities of setting up for three years on a work-at-home cruise and writing about seven decades of life experiences. These are the “subjects” of my two blogs: “LifeAtSea.Blog and WITWIA.com”. Neither of them are monetized.  … yet? We’ll see, but it will be years, if ever.

One potential approach to making my websites work is to almost randomly publish writing put down as a train of thought when the writing mood strikes me. Kind of fun for me, arguably cathartic, and maybe good for you (doubtful, unless we’ve become good friends over a period of time) for a short while but not worth sticking with for the long haul. So – I need to figure out (1) how to be a good writer, and (2) how to structure these writings and websites so they add value to your life as well as create interesting stories.

I consider those to be fairly lofty goals – at least for me.

This specific post (I am publishing it on both websites) will hopefully clarify to me, and to you, why I’m doing this to begin with – “to what end” have I created these websites and set up my life to see them through to being successful, however I define that.

I am an intuitively-driven person notwithstanding my fact based background and tendency to overengineer almost everything I come near. To my financial detriment (which I state without much remorse), I am not formulaic. I’ve designed dozens, probably hundreds, of processes for various consulting clients, and for myself, over five decades of working life. The endless lists of “best practices” are valuable as resources for an imaginative and responsive solution to what we have been trained to call “challenges” instead of “problems”. There is a lot of value in that training, and many, many tools (technology among them) emphasize how to do it better, cheaper, faster, etc. I don’t look at them as a recipe for how to do it.

My belief is that in the final analysis only people make a real difference between it happening, or not Happening. We use tools such as best practices, technology, and moral guides to help us determine what to do, but our actual advice, and actions, always come down to what we think is right and then (the critical element) doing something about it. That may be to only follow best practices rules to be safe, or to simply keep doing the same thing over and over because that is how we will make money. I’ve never been particularly good at that last skill mostly because I don’t care about it, and I get bored way too easily.

Living on a ship for three years, most of it at sea, and wandering around the world with no purpose in mind – just to talk, hang out on the deck or a bar, be entertained and see stuff – sounds utterly horrid to me. Bits of all of these things can be great, but nothing else but that would be stultifying. I’m not entirely kidding when I say I may not even survive three years of that. I need a purpose. So I’m coming up with a few.

  1. I have some time left in life, hopefully a few decades, but my time is coming to an end. There is no sign that taxes are actually not inevitable, so I have no reason to think death will be any different. There are one or two things I want before I go away. I don’t know if it’s a result of nature or nurture, but I’ve never had a particularly strong sense of self-worth. If that surprises you, it’s because I usually don’t bring it up as polite dinner-table conversation. But this is my blog, and I’m getting old, so there it is. I was drawn to acting because (at least the kind of acting I liked) it was all about being genuine with a feeling and being willing to “put it out there.” It takes courage to experience and consciously display your authentic self, even crafting those reactions to fill the purpose of a script while remaining true to the experience in the moment. (If you’re not a trained actor, that may sound like gobbledygook, but I assure you it is not.) Writing is the same thing to me. This entire paragraph and many as-yet unwritten paragraphs distill down to my goal for the next three+ years:

    I want to be a good writer.

    I’m honestly not sure exactly what that means, or how to measure it, but hopefully you will help me figure that out over time.

  2. I want to be able to say I’ve done my best to help build a community.

    I have not been able to forge a strong nurturing family with deep personal connections, and my time to be able to do that is either at an end or very close to it. While I can easily point at some of the outside influences that made it difficult for me, I am also acutely aware of my contributions to the end result or lack thereof.

  3. And this last goal is extremely important, but sensitive.

    I want to leave a body of work for my daughter.

    She wants to have kids one of these days but it is possible I’ll never meet them. She was not able to meet my father since both of my parents passed away before she was born. Also she and I have not been able to talk as often as I would like the past several years. This way, she can always go back and get some idea of who I was.  Love is like that, I guess.

The purpose of the LifeAtSea.Blog is to document the experience of doing all kinds of cool adventurous stuff with a relatively small population of people over a long period of time in a contained space. I want it to be entertaining, thoughtful, inclusive, and easy to read. The “touring” part is actually secondary and provides topics that will grow into interesting stories and other types of prose.

WITWIA.com (Where In The World Is Andy) is about me and things that are near and dear to my heart at this stage in my life:

  • Telling people about Namibia, a country that I have come to call home and is one of the most fascinating and overlooked places I’ve ever been, and it touches my soul.
  • The tragedy of an opportunity being left to slowly deteriorate that has enormous promise to the people of Namibia – that opportunity being the shipwreck of the Bom Jesus in 1533. I want to bring international attention to it if possible. It’s worth it. And,
  • Being able to pontificate if I want about whatever I want to talk about.

So there you have it – what I want to do with these blogs and with my life from this point forward. Me being me, I could write or talk about it almost indefinitely, but to actually do something about Goal #1 (To be a good writer) I need to edit it down. And to do something about Goal #2 I need to actually do something about it, not just talk about doing something about it.

I hope you will join me on this journey and let me know what keeps you involved or what would keep you involved if it were only there, somewhere. I hope to get to know you through comments and Direct Messages. Let’s make it fun.

The “About the shipwreck of the “Bom Jesus” from 1533″ Category

~ Andy Garrison ~ 4 Comments

With apologies, I just realized these new posts are being emailed to the OLD WITWIA mailing list, and you would have already gotten two of them. Sorry! I am refreshing the WITWIA site, and will turn off the automatic emails until I complete the work, then let you know.

This is being done as part of my NEW blog “LIFEATSEA.BLOG”, which is, and will be, the story of my upcoming three-year cruise on an around-the-world trip, working aboard, while stopping at 375 destinations, 135 countries, and 7 continents. For more information, see LIFEATSEA.BLOG.

The Category will include information about a shipwreck found off the shorline of Oranjemund in 2008. It turned out to the the artifacts from the “Bom Jesus”, a Portuguese trading vessel lost at sea in 1533. It is a fascinating story all through the current situation with lots of amazing history and has turned into a passion of mine since arriving in Oranjemund. Stay tuned for the stories to come.