2,096 karma · joined August 8, 2010
You might see lodges designated "AF&AM" or "F&AM" - that dates back to a minor schism long ago where you had the "Antient Free & Accepted Masons" vs the "Free & Accepted Masons" - all that boils down to these days is minor differences in ritual and ceremonies. That's one of the nice things about visiting lodges in other states - to see how they do things differently!
You'll also see "Prince Hall" lodges - these are the Masonic equivalent of Historically Black Colleges & Universities. Nowdays, a white man can join an PH lodge, a Black man can join an AF&AM lodge, and so forth - and one thing I'm glad to see recently in Texas is that while we've had "recognition" between PH & the AF&AM lodges for over a decade now, we finally have "visitation" - where I can sit in an official meeting at a PH Lodge without having to officially request a visit through the Texas GL, and so on and so forth. This is the way it should have been for a long time, but honestly it took waiting for a lot of old racist guys to die off before we got to this point. Some states still don't have full recognition/visitation between the two and it's really upsetting (mostly in the Deep South).
We're basically a fraternal society with some secrets (all of which you can find out with the right Google searches) - we're not a "Secret Society". A lot of the secrets are just passwords, modes of recognition, and so forth. Stuff that boils down to (in my opinion) "If you can't trust your Brother to keep these simple secrets, can you trust him with anything else?"
Shortest simplest explanation: a bunch of guys who hang out once or twice a week and have a fancy dress meeting once a month, to get away from the wives, have dinner, BS and catch up with each other, and do some good for the community in whatever ways we can. We're there for each other, and anyone else that might need help that we can provide. There's really no "secret advantage" to being a Mason that's different than having friends who own businesses in "normal life" - at one time I joked that my Masonic tattoo might get me a discount on an oil change and I could get cupcakes at wholesale...
There's no "Illuminati" or world-running society. How can you expect us to run the world when sometimes we can't even decide what to serve for dinner?
It's really no different than belonging to any other social organization. My Brethren kept me sane and alive after my wife passed away in 2009 - I'd be sitting here at home alone, would get a phone call. "Hey we're here at Lodge cooking for the meeting on Wednesday, want to come hang?" "Nah, I'm okay, thanks." Five minutes later the phone would ring. "Bill, this is the Worshipful Master, if you're not here in 15 minutes I'm sending a truck full of guys to haul your ass up here.." They knew I needed to be around other people and to be distracted. (the WM is basically the elected president of the lodge for each year)
1999: I was a sysadmin at an ISP in Austin. One day we had a tour come through, people looking to see if they wanted to colo in our datacenter. In walks in the former CEO and most of the technical staff from the Oklahoma City-based ISP I'd started my career at and left in '96. We laughed, shook hands.. and they headhunted me away a couple months later with a 200% salary increase for their new Austin-based startup.
2015: interviewing for a remote sysadmin position at a firm in California. They knew of me through some mailing lists I've run for a couple of decades. A couple of interviews in, I mention that I'd need to get off early on Thursdays to attend Lodge as I was a Freemason. Turns out two other execs interviewing me were also Masons. It certainly didn't hurt my job prospects.. And then after I started the CEO asked "Weren't you mr_bill on efnet #unix IRC in the 90s?" I gulped and said "Yeah..." and he said "Cool! I was on there too..."
And, at my current job, after I got hired, my team lead said "Yeah, (other coworker) said you were cool and said you'd fit in well here..." - turns out the other coworker was another EFNet IRC buddy that I'd never met in person..
So, never lie about a contact or reference and never burn bridges if you can avoid it - you never know when someone from your past may be in a position to influence your future.
It was great when the goal was "solve the customer's problems and get them online".
When they hired an official "Customer Support Manager", it started being all about metrics and went downhill. "How many calls are you taking an hour" vs "how many problems did you solve".
I hear that one of the large hosting providers here in town even does screenshots of everyone's desktops every 30 seconds to a minute. That's insane. My employer, on the other hand, doesn't care what you're doing in another window as long as it's not illegal and you get your job done.
I know that for one position (where I spent 12 years and lived in two different cities) part of why I got the job was that an interviewer said "He's one of the guys that maintains the Sun-Managers mailing list!" (they still had a large number of Sun boxes at the time).
I will say it was weird writing about the VI editor but then having to submit to the publisher in Word/DOC format. Of course I used free/OSS tools to convert to DOC before submission.
I don't remember making more than $500 from any single chapter I wrote - but even that sure came in handy at the time. It was usually done as work-for-hire plus I got a couple copies of each finished book.
Ended up being worth more as lines on my resume than anything else.
You had to hit each key HARD, directly in the center, for keystrokes to register. Touch typing was impossible.
The trackpad wasn't any better.
Ended up selling it to a coworker (with an additional standalone Pine64 board) for $75.
Solaris even ported to PPC (specific RS6K boxes) for Solaris 2.5.1; I've got a copy of that ISO image around somewhere but never had the right hardware to run it.
All my Multias (I owned 2-3 over the years) usually ended up with RHEL on them; nobody in the nerd crowd I was in wanted to run Windows on them. They ran so hot that if you sat it horizontal it would keep your coffee cup warm if close enough.
I believe someone got VMS running on one after some hackery with the firmware/BIOS.
I had two cats, but they've since passed, and even before that it wasn't the same.
It's been almost ten years, and there's not a few days that go by without me thinking that nobody would miss me if I decided to join her.
When I called to have my late wife removed from my insurance at work, the lady who changed it messed up and removed her effective the day before she passed away - so all sorts of insurance claims started bouncing back "not covered". It took me a year and a half to get in touch with someone at the insurance company who said "oh my. you poor dear. let me fix this" and she had it corrected in less than five minutes.. but for that 18 months I had to deal with almost-monthly bills coming in with her name on them...
I was working late to make up some time and had headphones on. Wife told me "I'm gonna go soak in the tub and go to bed, see you in a bit." A couple hours later I finished what I was doing and headed towards the bedroom. I noticed the bathroom light was still on, and found her. Apparent heart attack and she drowned in the bathtub, and she'd been gone a while by the time I found her. Sudden wrenching loss. No opportunity to make up for fights. No goodbye. Just.. gone.
Anyway. This isn't about me. This is about the community helping Matt, in whatever way we can.
Losing your significant other is something that you never get over - you live with the emptiness and the hurt, and you learn to move on and hope that the "fog" eventually lifts. It's something that only someone else who has been through the same experience will understand. I was lucky to meet a friend who had lost her husband a couple years before, and she helped me through the hardest times.
Matt, if you ever read these comments, all my thoughts and condolences for you. I know "thoughts and prayers" does nothing, but a lot more people care than you realize.
Hang in there.