Site last updated:
1 January 2009

What Is This Place?

Random Stories of My Life, the Universe, and Everything. 

If that isn't ringing bells, you haven't read enough of Douglas Adams.

Emphasis on the Random. 

Okay, so I stole this from a Slashdot post (where it may or may not actually have originated):

Jack Sparrow the Programmer: His code is . . . more of a guideline.

Born Old

My Mom says that my preschool teachers accused me of being born old. They said I'd made them feel sheepish in a way that no other child they'd ever met had made them feel sheepish. They had been orchestrating some kind of pretending game in which they were supposed to be circus ponies. Lucy Day the preschooler was not convinced. "You don't look like circus ponies." And indeed they were not cicrusy or pony-like. They were sheepish.

Superior genetic material.

I only grew one wisdom tooth. That means that only one had to be removed. I am the future.

"If it jams - force it. If it breaks, it needed replacing anyway."

This is what happened to the sugar container at work. We used to have one of those glass dispensers like restaurants have, but now we have a Rubbermaid bottle. = )

"If your house were on fire, what single object would you take with you?"

 This is a question that becomes difficult to answer largely through lack of context.

Let's assume I'm trying to pick an object to take OUT of the house.  Let's assume all people and pets are already out.  Let's assume I'm clothed, and I have my wallet/ID and that someone has already called the fire department.  Let's assume that the fire itself does not count as an object that can be removed, safely, by me (otherwise, that's what I'd take out of the house).  Oh, wait, let's assume it's a house, not an apartment.  And that my car is over yonder, not in the house's garage.

This leaves the original intent of the question intact: what irreplaceable thing do I possess that I would most want to save.  Probably my hard drive.  In fact, most people seem to pick binary data, rather than objects.  But I also have old-fashioned photos and even (gasp) written letters.  And books.  Does "book collection" count as one thing?  I couldn't carry it out very fast, that's for sure.  I bet my housefire would hold steady at 451 degrees for a long, long time.

The Silver Tongue of the Native Speaker

My mother once did some work for a private language school that teaches English as a Second Language.  The school is called ESL Instruction and Consulting (online here).  While employed for ESL I&C, my mother was instructed to answer incoming calls by saying, "ESL Instruction and Consulting, how can I help you?"  Now, maybe you've worked some kind of job that involves answering incoming calls, and maybe you haven't.  It's not uncommon to have to answer the phone with something other than "Hello," and it's probably not uncommon for such phrases to be a mouthful at first.  However, there's getting it wrong, and then there's really getting it wrong.  Only in the latter case do you get to tell a story.  So, my mom answers the phone one day and says, "ESL Construction and Insulting . . . wait, that's not right!" 

She and the customer had a good laugh.  Subsequently, however, my mother had a difficult time keeping a straight face when answering the phone, and was always incredibly scrupulous about the words leaving her mouth.  So much for the silver-tongue of the native speaker!

Your Call Is Important to Us...

I called the NJ department of motor vehicles to ask a question about some name-changing paperwork, and their phone system told me the average wait time was "one minutes."  Then it told me to "please stay on the line."  And then?  The light music started, and the song lyrics were, "And I think it's gonna be a long, long time."  Maybe they should stick to classical!

Just Following Instructions...

It must have been when I was in 11th grade, when I was taking AP Spanish, that I went to a state-wide high school competition at Gordon College. Smart and talented students were nominated in a number of academic and artistic disciplines, and sent off in a van to compete. I and two of my friends, Samantha and Justin, were representing Woodward Academy in the Spanish language competition.

Our instructions had been that a judge would listen to the three of us talk to each other in Spanish and give us some kind of rating. We would engage in a natural, spontaneous dialog, perhaps on a topic given by the judge. 

We expected that we'd wait our turn and then be called in to some separate room to speak. So much for expectations. All the competing Spanish language teams were shepherded into one room. The judge sat at the front of the room and each team spoke not only in front of the judge, but in front of all the competitors from other schools! Furthermore, we snotty private school kids were in our dorky school uniforms, and felt we stuck out.

To make matters worse, all the other school groups had prepared (read: memorized) elaborate dialogues - skits, really - complete with props and costumes! We had only ourselves and our navy blue and gray uniforms. We began to panic. We had, obviously and tragically, misunderstood the instructions. We tried to plan a little dialog during transitions between skits. Our desperate plan hinged on saying things like, What have you been doing lately? Oh, I've had a lot of homework, how about you?. It was to be an entertaining dialog for sure.

Our turn came. We were supposed to have a skit, and, of course, we didn't have one. We knew it, and soon everyone else would, too. But we couldn't escape the room, the audience, the judging. So we stood at the front of the room and everyone watched us mumble things in Spanish about how much homework we had. Justin threw in a long sentence with a self-conscious conditional clause in it. Just for the sheer grammatical perversity of it. We stuttered to a stop and sat down. Maybe they clapped, puzzled - I don't remember.

Later that day everyone gathered in the auditorium to see the awards given out. Who had won in the math competition? Which chorus was judged the best? Whose artwork? I seem to remember Woodward doing pretty well. And then, the Spanish awards. Which of the elaborate skits would they pick? Justin and Samantha and I groaned and laughed and hid our faces, knowing we'd take home nothing for our team.

To our utter surprise, the judge picked us as the best Spanish-speaking team, and Justin as the best Spanish-speaking individual. We had followed the instructions correctly after all - and no one else had! And it seemed that Justin's single whimsically grammatical sentence had really struck home. We were, if anything, more embarrassed than before - we had to stand up and receive recognition for beating out all the other teams, who had, obviously, put more work into preparing than we had.

And that's what you get for just following instructions.

Learning while Bored

I imagine I could spell German pretty well.  That's because I had a silly summer job once doing data entry at a place in Chicago called the Center for Research Libraries. The project I was working on was to enter in data about a bunch of doctorate dissertations they had stored there. Most of them were in German for some reason. I had to type in the titles of many, many German dissertations, and I had to be able to figure out which words were nouns. The reason for that is that German nouns are always capitalized, and so we had to capitalize them when we entered the titles in the database. However, the titles were often printed in all capital letters on the front of the actual dissertation, so it was impossible to just copy exactly what was on the cover. I used babelfish and eventually got to know which words looked like nouns! I also learned some small between words, too, like articles and prepositions. So I think I have an advantage over someone who has never studied German at all, even though I myself have never studied German at all!

The other thing I learned at that job was to be able to tell some European languages apart. Not all the dissertations were in German, but we had to figure out the language for each one. (this tool was helpful, though there are others online as well)  Some were Dutch, some were Swedish, some were French (those were easy to spot) and so on. Some were in Latin! They came from a time when, no matter what your country's language was, you had to write in Latin for academic publications. Some of those dissertations were 100 or 150 years old, and rather fragile. The older German ones were annoying, actually, because they used a gothic typeface which was difficult to read. So I learned another skill - distinguishing a's and u's and v's and b's and h's and z's in gothic typeface!

See?  Even the most abhorrently boring, hourly wage, data entry typing job yields kernels of wisdom. 

The Sincerest Form of Flattery

Imitation?  Nah.  If you've recently launched a web site and you're not sure whether anyone has actually seen it, vitriol, in the form of badly-typed hate mail, is the sincerest form of flattery.  I still can't believe someone took the time to write me to say this, but it still cracks me up:

you a freak!!! You have very bad tast in books and they are too many cuss
words to discrib you!!!! I can't beleve someone who is stupis and butt ugly
would judge talted writers!!!! Just thaght you should know that u r one of
the bitchest and uglest and biggest freaks I've ever read about!!!!

7/13/2003 9:44:59 PM

Toe-String, or, How to Make a Square Braid

Omigosh, I just found (Jan 05) instructions that I've been hoping to find for years!  It's a square braid made out of five loops.  We called it toe-string when I was a kid, and it was so easy and boring that I forgot how to do it a long time ago, and have been trying to remember ever since!  Here are the instructions!  I followed them and it really works!  Plus, there are other patterns I didn't know when I was a kid.  I'll have to try those out too.

My Job at Educational Testing Service (Circa January 27, 2004)

It's a funny story, actually, how much trouble my boss has had with this one project of hers.  She has been using Office Team, a temporary worker agency that I work for now, to find people to hire for her project.  She hired one person to begin with, and that person worked for a few days, and then, unexpectedly, had to have heart surgery.  The person hired to replace her worked for a couple of days, and then, unexpectedly, had some major medical problem with a gland or something.  The next person who was hired turned out to be incompetent, and also to have an incurable attitude problem.  She was fired.  Then I come along, and the work that three people have started is dumped on me to sort out.

After I work for a few days, along comes my boss's boss, and says, "Hurry up," so my boss hires someone to help me.  My boss asks whether I would please show the new person how to do what I had been doing.  She basically put me in charge, which was fine, and made sense anyway.  The new person is a middle-aged lady who had just gotten a degree in library science.  She had a few dopey questions about the software and the project, and my boss said she whined about being bored and wanting to wear blue jeans, but in general she does a good job.  Much better than employee number three, the one who was fired. 

After we work for a few days, along comes my boss's boss and says "Hurry up" again, so my boss hires another person to help me.  He is a Hispanic programmer.  I train him, too.  That was Friday of last week, his first day.  At the end of the day, my boss and I look at his work, and see that he has done almost nothing right.  Oh well, we will have to do a better job of explaining the project on Monday.  Monday comes, Hispanic programmer doesn't.  Turns out that wife of Hispanic programmer has had a baby, Hispanic programmer cannot return until Wednesday.  My boss asks me, "Should we keep him or replace him," and I said, "His work was pretty bad," and so my boss tries to get someone different. 

The someone different is in a wheelchair, and fears that she will not be able to travel in bad winter weather.  We happen to be having bad winter weather these days.  So much for someone different.  We decide to keep the Hispanic programmer.  Library lady and I keep working by ourselves for the rest of Monday.  Tuesday arrives, (that's today,) and my boss says, "Library lady is moving to another state and will be quitting on Friday of this week.  We will have to get someone different." 

I ask my boss, "Was this office built on an Indian burial ground or something?  Perhaps you did not perform the proper purification rites...." 

Random Story from Mom the Teacher

My mother teaches English to elementary school children from other countries.  She was showing her class a book with animal characters, asking the children whether they knew the name of each critter.  She anticipated problems with "Squirrel."

One of the brighter children raised her hand excitedly.  When called on, she said confidently, "Triangle!"

Mom was puzzled by this.

The student realized that this was not the right word.  Then she said, "Not triangle.  Square!"

This, being an "sq" word with an "r" in it, was very reasonable, and explains why she said "triangle" - she knew the name of the animal sounded like a shape, but she initially remembered the wrong one. 

Human brains are so funky.

Clever Microwave Cooking

This is a story about a microwave.  Now, you are one of two kinds of people: either you are the kind of person who knows how to figure out how to operate a microwave, or you are the kind of person who always gets someone else to do it.  I've always been able to push the buttons.  One day, however, using my abilities produced an unexpected result.

It was a day I went to baby-sit at a house I'd never been to.  Or, cooked in.  Now, no one expects a babysitter to cook anything particularly complicated.  The assignment had been to microwave a hot dog.  I put the hot dog on a plate in the microwave and closed the door, and pushed some likely buttons.  No go.  I sought counsel from the babysitee. 

The girl who was to eat the hot dog didn't know how to operate the microwave.  I don't remember how old she was, but she must have been over five and under ten.  And she was hungry.

I'd tried pushing numbers.  I'd tried to find the button you have to push before you push the numbers, but wasn't having much luck.  I decided I would try pushing a button labeled "popcorn".  It might not let me set the time, but at least it would turn the machine on, and cook a hot dog.  I explained my plan to the girl.

She was skeptical.  She thought that if I pushed the button for popcorn, it would make the food pop, even if the food wasn't popcorn.  I said, no, it'll just turn the microwave on.  It'll make it go.  It doesn't make everything pop. 

So I pushed the button, the microwave turned on, and we watched the hotdog rotate inside the lit box. 

After a minute, the hotdog made a sudden, loud noise.  A popping noise. 

The reason it split was that I hadn't poked holes in it with a fork first, but, of course, the girl was convinced that the reason it split was that I had used the "popcorn" button on the microwave.  After all, I'd said that the hotdog would not pop, and it had.  Just like popcorn.

She ate the hotdog, we played cards, she went to bed happy, I went home happy.  End of funny story?  No, not really!  You haven't even heard the funniest part.

I had many other babysitting jobs, but I didn't baby-sit for that family again for a couple of years or more.  By that time, the girl was almost able to take care of herself. 

This time, she made herself some soup using a new microwave (they had had their kitchen renovated).  While she was eating, she said: "Back when we had this other microwave, this one babysitter tried to cook me a hotdog, and she pushed the popcorn button on the microwave to make it go..."

What Not to Do

While we're talking about microwaves, have you ever microwaved something metal by accident?  When I was in maybe 5th or 6th grade, I did.  And I never will again.

I remember it really well because it scared the living daylights out of me when it happened.  I had (part of) a big, thick chocolate Santa in a metal wrapper, and the remaining bit was too thick and hard for me to cut or bite.  I had the idea that I could microwave it to make it softer, the way my parents occasionally microwaved stubborn ice cream. 

Said parents were apparently not present while I was attempting to eat said chocolate, perhaps because I was attempting to eat it surreptitiously at an inappropriate time.  The result was that no one was there to remind me to take the wrapper off the chocolate before putting it in the microwave.  I knew good and well that you don't put silverware in the microwave because it was metal, and I knew that metal could damage break the microwave or something, but I suppose it didn't register that the wrapper was a bad idea for the same reason. 

I remember seeing blue lightning inside the machine when I turned it on.  I still don't know how there could have been blue lightning inside the microwave, and I don't know why the microwave has always worked fine since then.  I don't remember whether I confessed to having caused blue lightning in the microwave, and I don't remember whether or how I ate that hunk of chocolate, although I imagine I managed it.

But I remember the blue lightning, and I still don't understand it.  And I don't have to.  It simply remains a symbol in my mind of What Not to Do.

Update: My understanding of the interaction between microwave ovens and metal objects has increased.  See these links for more information on What Not to Do.

• Warning about microwaving metal
• Microwaves, metal and arcing
• Breakthrough in microwaving metal
• Microwaving experiments
• More microwaving experiments

There's a Park Named After Me!

Just kidding.  But there is a park called Lucy Day Park:
http://www.hpl.hamilton.on.ca/Collections/PARKEX/lucyday.htm

Genealogy 1 2 3!

I'm apparently a descendent of George Mason (on my mother's side):
http://gunstonhall.org/masonweb/i0007146.htm

Rant about Icky Art Class

I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. As part of the core curriculum, students are required to take a quarter of art. I chose a sculpture class which turned out to be terrible.

From the first day my professor was obviously anti-art. He spoke of his enthusiasm for Cubism, which, he said, set painters free from the limited perspective they had always had. He claimed that "there is no right or wrong" in his class. He didn't want us to think that just because he was teaching the course, our opinions and answers were subject to his judgment. He refused to reserve the right to judge our projects, because, he said, "that would make me the art dictator" and he didn't want to impose anything normative or objective on art at all. In fact, he told us that "subjective" was one of his favorite words. Beats me how he assigns grades.

The first project was to create a sculpture inspired by an Emily Dickinson poem about pain. I made the figure of a girl, hunched over, hugging her knees, out of paper mache newspaper colored blue. I kept it in my room for a while after the project was due, but it was so successful in evoking pain and sadness that I decided I didn't want to look at her any more.  [See photos below.]

With a couple of farcical exceptions, no one else's project even portrayed a human figure. One of my classmates tried to create "the abstract physical idea of pain", or something like that. He made a large black cube out of cardboard, and hung it from the ceiling. My professor compared this cube to my figure, and mused aloud as to which method, the figurative or the non-figurative, was better at communicating a theme or an idea to a viewer. Someone else presented a plastic sheet hung from a string, with holes burned in it. Whenever someone presented his or her project, we would all stand around and look at it and discuss its deeper meaning.

How did he expect us to reach the deeper meaning? He used Plato's allegory of the cave as an analogy for the way we should think about art: look deeper, beyond the things you see. Another reading with this theme was a passage from Moby Dick where the mad captain Ahab is raving about what the white whale represents to him: another reality. "All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks..." he says.

With that in mind, we compared two sculptures both entitled, "The Kiss," one by Rodin and one by Brancusi. Brancusi's looked like a brick, or like an ancient symbolic Mayan carving. Rodin's looked like two ideal human beings drawn together in passion. And my professor had the gall to say that Rodin's sculpture is more shallow, that the more abstract (less lifelike) a sculpture is, the more meaningful it must be. At the same time, he complained that Rodin's sculpture was too unrealistic, because the bodies of the humans were too perfect. He said the same of Michelangelo's depiction of Adam receiving life from God on the roof of the Sistine Chapel.

The professor had encouraged us to talk to him if we had any questions or complaints, so I went and spoke to him about the second project I turned in. I'd gotten a lower grade than I had been expecting, and I was curious as to how he hadn't managed to find enough "deeper meaning" in it. After I spoke to him he declared that he is on many occasions quite wrong and mistaken, and that he would reconsider his evaluation of my project. Later that week, he said that he hadn't changed his mind about my project, but that he would raise the grade anyway, just because I had come to talk to him.

I and my classmates had to give presentations on readings that had to do with art. The topics assigned were Modernism, Postmodernism, and Feminism. Newly equipped with knowledge of these movements, we were given our final project, the one which counts as the final exam. It was to "make something postmodern."

Here are some statements that stand out in my mind. They are opinions my professor has expressed in class. He believes that art consists of "non-objective objects." He believes one of the greatest things about going to college is finding out that knowledge is elsewhere. He said to us, and I quote exactly, "the more you read, the more beautifully confusing everything gets."

I will add a few more comments here: the original rant was limited in length because because it was a post I sent to a mailing list.  I've left out quite a lot:

• Description of class time allocation
• Description of 2nd project
• Description of final - mine; the bananas
• Other homework assignments: movie "traffic" and architecture write-up

The Emily Dickinson Project:

The photos I took without the flash are blurry, so that looking at them makes you feel like you're crying, too...

Relatively unexpected money landed on me

I am bad at looking for jobs.  I don't have the right networking skills, I think.  One result of this lack of mine is that I got a job working for ACE - American Computer Experience computer camp - in the summer of 2001. 

I was home in Atlanta after the second year of college, and I didn't have a summer job.  A friend of my mom's suggested I call this computer camp (my mom actually does have networking skills), so I did.  It was Friday afternoon. 

They said, "Can you start on Sunday?"

I think it was only afterwards that they asked me whether I could teach C++.  Luckily, I decided I could.  I had studied it at school during the past year in college.  So, I started on Sunday. 

Clearly, something was wrong with this camp.  Several somethings. 

• Their website said that they go through a careful interview process to select only the best camp counselors from around the country.  Hah!  They hired me on the phone after 30 seconds.
• I started work before they showed me the contract and had me sign it. 
• They were supposed to provide me with teaching materials.  They didn't.  But someone happened to have a copy of the C++ book I had been using at school, so I used that to teach from, basically.
• They were supposed to give me a staff T-shirt for every day of the week, so I would always be "in uniform".  They gave me one.
• They said that the maximum class size would be 8 students per teacher.  For part of the summer, I taught 12.

Teaching at ACE was an interesting and instructive experience.  I could talk more about the computer part, the teaching part, the interacting with kids part, or the interacting with other counselors part, but I won't. 

I intend to tell you about the them-not-paying-me part. 

I worked at ACE for six weeks.  I was paid at the end of week two and the end of week four.  At the end of week six, the camp had gone bankrupt.  I was not paid at the end of week six.

Until a couple of weeks ago.

The camp's only asset was its mailing list.  It sold the mailing list, and paid some of us some of our money, after a long bout of legal paperwork etc.

I hadn't been expecting to see any of the money again.  So it was relatively unexpected when it landed on me.

Everyone fell ill

As soon as Aquinas and I got back from Portugal, four entities were struck with viruses, almost all at once: Me, Aquinas, Whizzy and Fizzy, the latter of which were my two ancient 6GB hard drives.  The common cold that I presumably caught on the plane on the way back from Portugal is pretty self-explanatory, and I'm not surprised Aquinas got it, either.  But what happened to my computer remains something of a mystery.  It was very unpleasant for a while, though, I gotta say.

I was able to turn my computer on and do some stuff, but then I started getting some error.  I figured it was one of those things that would go away if I were to restart my computer.  So I told my computer to restart.  It wouldn't boot.  Something was wrong.  I showed Aquinas.  It wouldn't boot for him, either.  Or for the Dell tech support guy Aquinas called.  Apparently, my computer wouldn't recognize the OS on my primary drive, and wouldn't recognize my secondary drive at all.   Needless to say, my primary 6GB drive was not backed up.  I'm embarrassed to say, it contained all the electronic data I've ever generated - it's the heart of the only computer I've ever had.  I was pretty sure the secondary drive had mostly just music from CDs I own on it.  But not totally sure.  The Dell guy gave us the phone number for an emergency data recovery service.

A nice lady answered at the recovery service.  She has to be nice, said Aquinas, Just think of the state of mind people are in when they call an emergency data recovery service!  Well, we were in quite a nervous state of mind after she told us about the data recovery fees: $500-$1900 for the "economy" service.  And they might not be able to salvage anything, anyway.  (If they didn't retrieve any data, the cost for having tried would only be $200.)

Plan B.  We took the drive we thought had my data on it (somehow we weren't sure which physical drive was the primary data drive) and plugged it into Aquinas's office computer, and booted to Aquinas's healthy drive.  But we could see and copy the files.  This was indeed the primary data drive!  So we copied my whole drive onto his computer. 

The other drive failed to elicit any recognition from Aquinas's office computer. 

Did I mention that the secondary drive had a big burn on one of the chips?  No?  Well, we figured it was fried.

Enter Ed, my friend the PC support guy at PUPress.  He examined my primary drive.  He said it was fine, that I just needed to take the drive home, plug it in, and repair Windows: the failure to boot was due to software failure, not hardware failure.  Phew!  I took it home, and Aquinas plugged it in and repaired Windows.  Then it worked.

But it had a virus which caused it to shut down as soon as it booted up.  So Aquinas had to look up how to fix the virus.  We fixed it.  Then I judiciously downloaded several Windows security updates and ran a virus scan and a spyware scan.  No more problems.

What about the burned disk?  Ed said he couldn't get it to wake up.  The electronics are dead.  However, all is not lost, nor need I call the expensive folks.  Ed says, go on eBay and buy an identical, functioning hard drive, and unscrew the electronic part.  Switch the working green board with the burned green board, and then you not only have a working drive, you have a cool burned out green board to show people. 

Exhibit A, the burned-up drive made by Quantum.  And guess what model it is? 

It's a Fireball.