October was unprecedentedly productive in the literary department even with a week of obscene dental annoyance. No doubt it's attributable to the fact that I've lowered my standards of 'acceptable' literature slightly to include more modern books. Overall I'd say that this batch was pretty enjoyable if not overwhelmingly informative in all cases.
Oh, also, if you find any of these titles interesting please feel free to let me know and I'll happily lend you my copy. All I ask is a short written assessment when you're done to be shared in this venue. (well, and to have the book back of course.)
The Reluctant Fundamentalist [Hamid] - 2007 Booker Prize (Short List) [*****]
In The Reluctant Fundamentalist Hamid follows a Pakistani man who comes to America to get his education and make his fortune in a business-valuation firm. Everything seems to go along quite swimmingly until the 9/11 attacks and our protagonist begins to have some misgivings about his adopted society. While entirely fictional I have to imagine that this storyline has the ring of truth for many immigrants to this country. I can't recommend this one highly enough for it's portrayal of a point of view that we don't see nearly often enough. On a stylistic level, my wife found it a bit difficult to weave her way through though. The book is written as a story within a story wherein the narrator interacts with his audience as the tale unfolds. This can be a trifle unnerving but I found it to be quite endearing.
Citizen Vince [Walter] - 2006 Edgar Award - Best Novel [*** 1/2]
For Vince, after years as a small-time petty crook working for the mob, it was finally time to go straight. Not that that's as easy as it might seem, especially when you're just a baker trying to make donuts for a living. Citizen Vince is a slightly gritty crime novel with a somewhat entertaining twist and a legitimate attempt at a moral. It does little to endear me to the genre but at least was sufficient to make me leave the Edgar Award winners on my reading TODO list.
The Nice and the Good [Murdock] - 1969 Booker Prize (Short List) [***]
This was the last of the 69 Booker Nominees on my TODO list and I think that with one exception I was pretty unexcited about all of them. The Nice and the Good is a unnecessarily prolix morality tale that can be summed up pretty completely by the text of the back cover. Despite the weakness of the theme some of the actual details are relatively entertaining. The novel is rife with sexuality that runs the gamut from homosexual to cuckold to Satan worshiper and while there is a small amount of plot this is a character study. None of them good mind you, merely nice.
God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything [Hitchens] - 2007 National Book Award Nominee [Non-Fiction] [***]
This bit of intellectual argument was the last of eight reads for the month and it almost didn't make it into the list at all. Hitchen's thesis is a very common one and one that I tend to agree with in principle but his delivery is so caustic that it tends to lose both halves of his audience. No religious person will be moved by his statements as he begins with such obvious hatred and disdain that nobody can wade through the maze of attacks the first 20 pages represent. By the time he finally settles down into a less vigorous polemic one cannot help but take all he says with a grain of salt. While I want to believe that the Catholic Church was complicit with Hitler's extermination of the Jews, for example, I find myself unable to take Hitchens' word for it by the time he gets around to saying it. Grains of salt aside though, in those areas in which I have some independent knowledge (nonsensical nature of the Bible, Christian sexual mutilation of male children, devolution of the church into 'entertainment', bizarre origins and beliefs of the Mormon church) I find it hard not to agree with the author almost completely. If even half of what he says is true, we're all in some deep shit. But then again, mankind generally is.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Out of the Valley of the Shadow of... something
Boy, that sucked. I have to say that I really recommend that if you're going to have your wisdom teeth out you should do it when you're 18. I was totally not impressed with this whole procedure. Dentists and oral surgeons are barbarians and every single one of them should be drug into the street and broken on the rack.
I will say that days one and two after surgery were pretty mild. The procedure itself is amusingly painless of course and even the first day boasts no huge discomfort. They send you home with documentation that claims boldly "most pain and discomfort should subside by day four". So when day one rolls around and you're feelin' pretty good and day four should be the the end of it all you get to feelin' pretty giddy. Suddenly the recovery room joke of "remind me before we leave to schedule the next four, I think I have some left" doesn't have quite the same ring of bravery that it did before.
What the literature doesn't tell you is that day one is supposed to be the easy day. Days three and four, however, amount to hell on earth and the surgeon damn well knows it because when you call the office the nurse's response is, "Oh yeah, this is day three. You're going to want to rip the rest of your teeth out with a fork. Just tape your arms to your sides and you'll be fine."
So as day four sets, you find yourself yearning for the nirvana of day five. Oh most precious and jubilant day five wherein all the pain subsides! How we love you! Then day five dawns fresh and new and filled with bullshit as you still want to rip your face off. Now it's clear that someone is stabbing your face with a fork and damn it, they won't stop. Perhaps that explains why your head is the size and shape of a bowling ball as your skin inflates like an airbag on an 06 Dodge Neon trying to protect the annoyed contents of your skull.
Day six you've friggin' had it. By god I'm taking my iron maiden to that dentist's office and I'm luring that sadistic bastard out to the car. Day six, eight a.m., calling the doctor's office... "oh... he's had a cancellation?" (must be someone who reads this blog)... "oh good!... yes, I can come in at nine. Yes, thank you. See you then." This man is mine! Something though... not quite right... something different...
An hour later I'm in the doctor's office admitting somewhat sheepishly, "yeah, I feel kinda silly being here. I don't really have any pain at this point." Hrm. Stupid skull betraying me again at the last minute. And to think I dragged the iron maiden out to the car for nothing. Perfectly good weekend shot to hell too. I'll have you know that Saturday we hosted a euchre party and I laid in bed for the majority of it in a narcotic haze. Worse than that, Sunday was "Swinger's Night" at our church and my wife had to go by herself. In retrospect that may be for the best though; I probably would have drawn that dusty octogenarian Mrs. Shephardson again.
I will say that days one and two after surgery were pretty mild. The procedure itself is amusingly painless of course and even the first day boasts no huge discomfort. They send you home with documentation that claims boldly "most pain and discomfort should subside by day four". So when day one rolls around and you're feelin' pretty good and day four should be the the end of it all you get to feelin' pretty giddy. Suddenly the recovery room joke of "remind me before we leave to schedule the next four, I think I have some left" doesn't have quite the same ring of bravery that it did before.
What the literature doesn't tell you is that day one is supposed to be the easy day. Days three and four, however, amount to hell on earth and the surgeon damn well knows it because when you call the office the nurse's response is, "Oh yeah, this is day three. You're going to want to rip the rest of your teeth out with a fork. Just tape your arms to your sides and you'll be fine."
So as day four sets, you find yourself yearning for the nirvana of day five. Oh most precious and jubilant day five wherein all the pain subsides! How we love you! Then day five dawns fresh and new and filled with bullshit as you still want to rip your face off. Now it's clear that someone is stabbing your face with a fork and damn it, they won't stop. Perhaps that explains why your head is the size and shape of a bowling ball as your skin inflates like an airbag on an 06 Dodge Neon trying to protect the annoyed contents of your skull.
Day six you've friggin' had it. By god I'm taking my iron maiden to that dentist's office and I'm luring that sadistic bastard out to the car. Day six, eight a.m., calling the doctor's office... "oh... he's had a cancellation?" (must be someone who reads this blog)... "oh good!... yes, I can come in at nine. Yes, thank you. See you then." This man is mine! Something though... not quite right... something different...
An hour later I'm in the doctor's office admitting somewhat sheepishly, "yeah, I feel kinda silly being here. I don't really have any pain at this point." Hrm. Stupid skull betraying me again at the last minute. And to think I dragged the iron maiden out to the car for nothing. Perfectly good weekend shot to hell too. I'll have you know that Saturday we hosted a euchre party and I laid in bed for the majority of it in a narcotic haze. Worse than that, Sunday was "Swinger's Night" at our church and my wife had to go by herself. In retrospect that may be for the best though; I probably would have drawn that dusty octogenarian Mrs. Shephardson again.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Into the Valley of the Shadow of... something
Alright, yesterday I did something that I've been avoiding for a VERY long time. I had my Wisdom teeth out. So here's the story...
When I was a mere 16 years old, Dr. Wysong told me, "You should have those wisdom teeth out. It'll be much easier on you if you do it before they're fully ossified." My mother, bless her, when i said, "I really don't want to do that" was happy to shrug and say, "OK, Great. Don't do it." because it allowed her to not have to worry about it. Eighteen years later, those words "fully ossified" still haunted me. I was pretty sure that by now, they were about as ossified as they were going to get.
It's not that they were bothering me after all that time except in the sense that my wife was peppering me with semi-constant reminders that I needed to get my wisdom teeth out. Personally, I was perfectly willing to live with them as they were given that the alternative (at least in my mind) was death or permanent brain damage due to the evil chemicals they pump into you while they do these kinds of surgeries. I've never been a fan of chemical-induced catatonia as I've always felt that my grip on reality was infirm enough that I hardly needed to loosen it through chemistry. So, the years turned into decades until we arrive at the present day.
As it turns out, the procedure itself was unwittingly amusing. Pumped full of enough chemicals I was barely able to maintain a straight face and quipped with the surgeons endlessly. I have no recollection of the actual surgery which I assume is entirely by design. I can only assume that it was gruesomely unpleasant. The last thing I remember is entering a sort of hypnogogic state and then being helped from the chair into the recovery room. Whatever evil crunchings and pullings took place in between leave their mark only in my extremely sore jaws and cheeks. I'm told that in 4-6 weeks I'll be as good as new. That hardly seems a fair trade for the 10 minutes of giggling that proceeded the operation. The wheel of karma has cheated me on that account it seems.
In any case, that bit of unpleasantness is over with. One only wonders what future modifications my wife has planned for me now.
When I was a mere 16 years old, Dr. Wysong told me, "You should have those wisdom teeth out. It'll be much easier on you if you do it before they're fully ossified." My mother, bless her, when i said, "I really don't want to do that" was happy to shrug and say, "OK, Great. Don't do it." because it allowed her to not have to worry about it. Eighteen years later, those words "fully ossified" still haunted me. I was pretty sure that by now, they were about as ossified as they were going to get.
It's not that they were bothering me after all that time except in the sense that my wife was peppering me with semi-constant reminders that I needed to get my wisdom teeth out. Personally, I was perfectly willing to live with them as they were given that the alternative (at least in my mind) was death or permanent brain damage due to the evil chemicals they pump into you while they do these kinds of surgeries. I've never been a fan of chemical-induced catatonia as I've always felt that my grip on reality was infirm enough that I hardly needed to loosen it through chemistry. So, the years turned into decades until we arrive at the present day.
As it turns out, the procedure itself was unwittingly amusing. Pumped full of enough chemicals I was barely able to maintain a straight face and quipped with the surgeons endlessly. I have no recollection of the actual surgery which I assume is entirely by design. I can only assume that it was gruesomely unpleasant. The last thing I remember is entering a sort of hypnogogic state and then being helped from the chair into the recovery room. Whatever evil crunchings and pullings took place in between leave their mark only in my extremely sore jaws and cheeks. I'm told that in 4-6 weeks I'll be as good as new. That hardly seems a fair trade for the 10 minutes of giggling that proceeded the operation. The wheel of karma has cheated me on that account it seems.
In any case, that bit of unpleasantness is over with. One only wonders what future modifications my wife has planned for me now.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Rob's Reads: October 2007a
Note: One thing I regret about the way I spend my free time is that I fail to adequately document it all. What good, I argue silently with myself, does it do to read a book unless I make some note of it as I do so? Sssooo... to try to rectify this situation, I'm going to try to give my sumuppance of what I've passed my eyes over in the first 2 weeks of October. If you're VERY unlucky, I'll remember to do it every 2 weeks or so forever.
The Worst Hard Time [Egan] - 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction [*****]
This book is easily the most entertaining bit of non-fiction I've read this year. Egan describes in very intimate detail the tribulations of those who lived through the dust bowl. In school, you breeze over this period of history in deference to World War II and only really talk about it at all as an addendum to the Great Depression. I had no clue just how bad circumstances were; one tends to think, "Oh, a little dust" but Egan preserves for us first-hand accounts of 9-foot dust drifts, animals electrocuted because of the static electricity produced by all that moving dust and countless victims of 'dust pneumonia.' This is a brilliant rendering of a much neglected period of U.S. history.
Glasshouse [Stross] - 2007 Hugo Nominee [****]
It has easily been 15 years since I last cracked open a 'modern' science fiction novel. From my point of view, the genre had completely cracked under the strain and gone utterly and completely commercial with Star Trek clones. I had to admit though that Stross' Glasshouse surprised me. While many of the concepts were hackneyed (instant transportation using wormholes, easy cloning of objects and people at the molecular scale, etc) Glasshouse did a good job of examining these technologies in a much more realistic light. What happens, for example, when someone introduces a worm into a transportation system that fundamentally alters people as they go from place to place and Jordi Laforge can't fix the problem in the span of a 1-hour episode? If this book is indicative of the genre then I'm ready to give it another serious look.
After This [McDermott] - 2007 Pulitzer Prize - Fiction Nominee [**]
In After This McDermott renders for the reader the story of a perfectly normal person with a perfectly normal life. She lives for a while then finds a husband. Then she has kids. The kids move away, go to war, fall in love, get pregnant and do utterly and completely unsurprising things. This is fiction for those with weak hearts who dare not risk their lives with real entertainment. The only aspect of this novel that saves it from getting only one star is the fact that I managed to finish without cheating.
Figures in a Landscape [England] - 1969 Booker Prize Short List [*****]
After After This, Figures in a Landscape was like an icy waterfall washing straight down my pant leg. England follows a pair of POWs as they escape from their concentration camp. For eleven days, they plod through the jungle, are nearly burned alive and are endlessly harassed by the faceless but ever-present helicopter pilot. This is true man's fiction. If you don't want to go for a long hike with a heavy pack after this book then you should probably check your pulse.
The Worst Hard Time [Egan] - 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction [*****]
This book is easily the most entertaining bit of non-fiction I've read this year. Egan describes in very intimate detail the tribulations of those who lived through the dust bowl. In school, you breeze over this period of history in deference to World War II and only really talk about it at all as an addendum to the Great Depression. I had no clue just how bad circumstances were; one tends to think, "Oh, a little dust" but Egan preserves for us first-hand accounts of 9-foot dust drifts, animals electrocuted because of the static electricity produced by all that moving dust and countless victims of 'dust pneumonia.' This is a brilliant rendering of a much neglected period of U.S. history.
Glasshouse [Stross] - 2007 Hugo Nominee [****]
It has easily been 15 years since I last cracked open a 'modern' science fiction novel. From my point of view, the genre had completely cracked under the strain and gone utterly and completely commercial with Star Trek clones. I had to admit though that Stross' Glasshouse surprised me. While many of the concepts were hackneyed (instant transportation using wormholes, easy cloning of objects and people at the molecular scale, etc) Glasshouse did a good job of examining these technologies in a much more realistic light. What happens, for example, when someone introduces a worm into a transportation system that fundamentally alters people as they go from place to place and Jordi Laforge can't fix the problem in the span of a 1-hour episode? If this book is indicative of the genre then I'm ready to give it another serious look.
After This [McDermott] - 2007 Pulitzer Prize - Fiction Nominee [**]
In After This McDermott renders for the reader the story of a perfectly normal person with a perfectly normal life. She lives for a while then finds a husband. Then she has kids. The kids move away, go to war, fall in love, get pregnant and do utterly and completely unsurprising things. This is fiction for those with weak hearts who dare not risk their lives with real entertainment. The only aspect of this novel that saves it from getting only one star is the fact that I managed to finish without cheating.
Figures in a Landscape [England] - 1969 Booker Prize Short List [*****]
After After This, Figures in a Landscape was like an icy waterfall washing straight down my pant leg. England follows a pair of POWs as they escape from their concentration camp. For eleven days, they plod through the jungle, are nearly burned alive and are endlessly harassed by the faceless but ever-present helicopter pilot. This is true man's fiction. If you don't want to go for a long hike with a heavy pack after this book then you should probably check your pulse.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Random Babbling for 10/11/07
It's been quite a while since I've written down any original thoughts so now seems like a good time to do it.
Tomorrow is my bi-weekly 'Lunch with Human' with a co-worker. It's funny really that the more I get to know people the more I enjoy them. Years ago I loved mathematics because I believed fervently that mathematics was the underpinning of all reality. That you could, if you tried hard enough, predict every event in the universe given a large enough sheet of paper. Then I loved computers because they could do math much more quickly and give you a much bigger 'sheet of paper'. Over the years though, I've come to the sad conclusion that the real world is much more complicated than that and that most of that complexity comes about because of people. I love people with all their unutterable emotions and motivations. It makes me absolutely giddy to unravel a person from their outermost appearances down to the Gordian Knot of their immortal soul. My wife suggested recently that I should go back to school to become a psychologist and I'd jump at the chance if it arose somehow. I can't guarantee that I'd be able to resist the temptation to put 'Psychological Vivisectionist' on my business cards.
After almost two months of geocaching I've come to a few random conclusions. Firstly, I'm not sure I'm amused by other people's caches much any more. After you've pulled ten film canisters from trees hanging by christmas tree hooks it tends to get a bit redundant. I wish people would put some effort into these things rather than just randomly hiding things anywhere that comes to mind in the same cliche way. I am, however, much entertained by placing caches of my own though it is a bit nerve-wracking if you allow yourself to conjure up frantic calls to 911 from random unseen onlookers. I've yet to find a consistent geocaching partner of any kind. My eldest now lives in mortal fear of mosquitoes and everyone else I've gone out now claims disinterest. Time to call Jared again I suppose.
Someone whose blog I read semi-regularly did a mimi about what books she's read this year which put me of a mind to take a look back at my own logs. I was astounded to realize that I've finished at least 3 books every month this year. Usually I get distracted for at least a few months a year and read nothing. Apparently I'm just more amused by my choice of literature as of late. I'm looking forward to the end of year literature wrap-up.
As I was driving for 23 hours last week I listened to some talk radio. Whenever I actually sit and really LISTEN to talk radio, I'm always astounded by just how screwed up we are in this country. But then I hear something that makes me nod my head and say, "yeah, you're exactly right." Some Ohio-local disembodied voice was reporting that the evangelicals were threatening to start a third party if Giuliani got the Republican nomination. His response simply, "Good, go build a third party. We're better off without you." Without the religious influence, he argued, the Republican party would drift back from the extreme right-wing theocracy it represents into something that much more people could agree on. I for one agree with him. The Republicans have some good points on their side. I don't like the welfare system as it stands, I think Government is too big and too wasteful, I don't think we should pull babies halfway out of their mothers and then crush their heads. And the Republicans agree with me on that. Unfortunately, I can't vote for them because they represent a collection of theocratic drones. If a Republican party sans religion can appeal to someone as liberal as I am then they'd win in a landslide.
Alright,that's all I have to say about all of that. Must go now as I have people banging on my window wondering what the 'Word of the Day' is going to be.
Tomorrow is my bi-weekly 'Lunch with Human' with a co-worker. It's funny really that the more I get to know people the more I enjoy them. Years ago I loved mathematics because I believed fervently that mathematics was the underpinning of all reality. That you could, if you tried hard enough, predict every event in the universe given a large enough sheet of paper. Then I loved computers because they could do math much more quickly and give you a much bigger 'sheet of paper'. Over the years though, I've come to the sad conclusion that the real world is much more complicated than that and that most of that complexity comes about because of people. I love people with all their unutterable emotions and motivations. It makes me absolutely giddy to unravel a person from their outermost appearances down to the Gordian Knot of their immortal soul. My wife suggested recently that I should go back to school to become a psychologist and I'd jump at the chance if it arose somehow. I can't guarantee that I'd be able to resist the temptation to put 'Psychological Vivisectionist' on my business cards.
After almost two months of geocaching I've come to a few random conclusions. Firstly, I'm not sure I'm amused by other people's caches much any more. After you've pulled ten film canisters from trees hanging by christmas tree hooks it tends to get a bit redundant. I wish people would put some effort into these things rather than just randomly hiding things anywhere that comes to mind in the same cliche way. I am, however, much entertained by placing caches of my own though it is a bit nerve-wracking if you allow yourself to conjure up frantic calls to 911 from random unseen onlookers. I've yet to find a consistent geocaching partner of any kind. My eldest now lives in mortal fear of mosquitoes and everyone else I've gone out now claims disinterest. Time to call Jared again I suppose.
Someone whose blog I read semi-regularly did a mimi about what books she's read this year which put me of a mind to take a look back at my own logs. I was astounded to realize that I've finished at least 3 books every month this year. Usually I get distracted for at least a few months a year and read nothing. Apparently I'm just more amused by my choice of literature as of late. I'm looking forward to the end of year literature wrap-up.
As I was driving for 23 hours last week I listened to some talk radio. Whenever I actually sit and really LISTEN to talk radio, I'm always astounded by just how screwed up we are in this country. But then I hear something that makes me nod my head and say, "yeah, you're exactly right." Some Ohio-local disembodied voice was reporting that the evangelicals were threatening to start a third party if Giuliani got the Republican nomination. His response simply, "Good, go build a third party. We're better off without you." Without the religious influence, he argued, the Republican party would drift back from the extreme right-wing theocracy it represents into something that much more people could agree on. I for one agree with him. The Republicans have some good points on their side. I don't like the welfare system as it stands, I think Government is too big and too wasteful, I don't think we should pull babies halfway out of their mothers and then crush their heads. And the Republicans agree with me on that. Unfortunately, I can't vote for them because they represent a collection of theocratic drones. If a Republican party sans religion can appeal to someone as liberal as I am then they'd win in a landslide.
Alright,that's all I have to say about all of that. Must go now as I have people banging on my window wondering what the 'Word of the Day' is going to be.
Monday, October 08, 2007
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
8/28/07 Random Updates
And so we conclude with St. Thomas Aquinas. While I wouldn't call it exactly the pinnacle of entertainment I will say that it wasn't nearly as dry and crusty as I might have expected. After wasting a month of my life with Harry Potter it was surprisingly refreshing to get something to read that had real content. All that said, I wasn't quite interested enough in the content to push onward into the second bit of the book with it's endless essays on the deeper implications of Thomist theology for the world today. Ah well, one can't have a deep and insatiable interest in absolutely EVERYTHING.
Next we push on into some more 'A' works with a bit of softer fare. There's a bit of Jane Austen I haven't hit yet so let's proceed with 'Sense and Sensibility'.
On a personal note, I think I may have found (thanks completely to our neighbors at cox-tv) the answer to my 'too bored to exercise' quandary. Today I set out on foot for the nearest Geocache around lunchtime and an appropriate exercise period later I'd returned with the laurels of success. This city is literally afloat in random bits of hidden 'treasure' and it's much more motivating to try to exercise if you actually have somewhere to go or some reason to go there. (Even if it's a bit silly really.) So from now on, all my exercise periods will be of the form: "Find a cache; find a parking space within say a mile of it; go find the cache." After 20 or 30 caches maybe these chest pains will go away.
Let's see... what else could I babble randomly about. Um, work maybe? Well, work is pretty much falling apart. Probably construed as my fault somehow but I'm going strictly to the 'following orders exactly as given' routine for a bit. If I do things right, they'll offer me a job in the department that rises from the ashes of this one.
Oh... let's see... our eldest was practicing her spelling words today and I could not for the life of me figure out why she spelled libraries: libearies. It made no sense. Then as we were coming out her 'back to school night' I noticed the display. There were Teddy Bears. They were reading books. The sign said: 'LiBEARy'. Now how in the name of Nathaniel Webster do you expect kids to spell things properly if every time they go down the hall they see a blatant misspelling. Feh.
Ah, yes. I tend not to wax technological on here because computing and technology are really (ironically) the last things I care about but I saw a new headline that made me blink: Acer buying Gateway. I'm sure I'm behind the times but since when do rinky-dink computer manufacturers sold primarily on the Home Shopping Network buy behemoth computer companies like Gateway? It's like ... um... Tandy Co buying IBM? I dunno, something like that. Clearly I've not been keeping up with the news (nor do I intend to start).
Also technews related (I swear, this is the last thing I'll bring up in this calendar year) I wondered today if the leadership team at my company read this article about the increasing ickiness of hosted software solutions.
Anyway, I think that's all. Having gotten somewhat lukewarm responses bthe first two people I approached, I've got a confirmed Geocaching partner for this weekend and make no mistake about it: we will find your little box of random junk and we will trade your inane items for our inane items. Count on it.
Next we push on into some more 'A' works with a bit of softer fare. There's a bit of Jane Austen I haven't hit yet so let's proceed with 'Sense and Sensibility'.
On a personal note, I think I may have found (thanks completely to our neighbors at cox-tv) the answer to my 'too bored to exercise' quandary. Today I set out on foot for the nearest Geocache around lunchtime and an appropriate exercise period later I'd returned with the laurels of success. This city is literally afloat in random bits of hidden 'treasure' and it's much more motivating to try to exercise if you actually have somewhere to go or some reason to go there. (Even if it's a bit silly really.) So from now on, all my exercise periods will be of the form: "Find a cache; find a parking space within say a mile of it; go find the cache." After 20 or 30 caches maybe these chest pains will go away.
Let's see... what else could I babble randomly about. Um, work maybe? Well, work is pretty much falling apart. Probably construed as my fault somehow but I'm going strictly to the 'following orders exactly as given' routine for a bit. If I do things right, they'll offer me a job in the department that rises from the ashes of this one.
Oh... let's see... our eldest was practicing her spelling words today and I could not for the life of me figure out why she spelled libraries: libearies. It made no sense. Then as we were coming out her 'back to school night' I noticed the display. There were Teddy Bears. They were reading books. The sign said: 'LiBEARy'. Now how in the name of Nathaniel Webster do you expect kids to spell things properly if every time they go down the hall they see a blatant misspelling. Feh.
Ah, yes. I tend not to wax technological on here because computing and technology are really (ironically) the last things I care about but I saw a new headline that made me blink: Acer buying Gateway. I'm sure I'm behind the times but since when do rinky-dink computer manufacturers sold primarily on the Home Shopping Network buy behemoth computer companies like Gateway? It's like ... um... Tandy Co buying IBM? I dunno, something like that. Clearly I've not been keeping up with the news (nor do I intend to start).
Also technews related (I swear, this is the last thing I'll bring up in this calendar year) I wondered today if the leadership team at my company read this article about the increasing ickiness of hosted software solutions.
Anyway, I think that's all. Having gotten somewhat lukewarm responses bthe first two people I approached, I've got a confirmed Geocaching partner for this weekend and make no mistake about it: we will find your little box of random junk and we will trade your inane items for our inane items. Count on it.
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Visiting Yesteryear - August
Someone asked me about my blog at the company meeting and I gave a sort of vague response on it as recently I've not been thinking about it much. The purpose of this blog has shifted dramatically over time but in every case the key point was to archive some things about what was going on that I've completely forgotten. To be really useful in that regard though you have to actually go back to those old posts and look at yourself as you were a year ago or five years ago or whatever. It makes me wish I had some written record of the rest of my life. At any rate...
A year ago I was having fun reveling in my first real wordworking project having just sold off my coin collection to buy tools. When I wasn't doing that though I was giddly being amused at my own silly interpretation of Genesis Chapter 8. For some reason, I now see that assessment of the Bible as somewhat stupid. The literal words of Genesis are, frankly, meaningless. The important part is how they've been used to form a whole body of belief for millions of people. I'm still not ready to join them in that but the odd traditions of thousands of years ago are meaningless to any argument of validity in the belief system itself. I guess as long as I was amused at the time it wasn't a total waste. *sigh*
Most importantly though, I was apparently assessing myself in a number of goals I'd set that June. I threw away the obnoxious habit of 'collecting' things with no practical purpose. Of the 5 goals I had at the time that's the only one that was really all that important and it seems to have left a positive mark on the subsequent year. I'm not attached to meaningless 'crap' any longer but I have had the nagging urge to learn a language again for no good reason. That, at least, is a bit of suffering that I think I can live with though.
A year ago I was having fun reveling in my first real wordworking project having just sold off my coin collection to buy tools. When I wasn't doing that though I was giddly being amused at my own silly interpretation of Genesis Chapter 8. For some reason, I now see that assessment of the Bible as somewhat stupid. The literal words of Genesis are, frankly, meaningless. The important part is how they've been used to form a whole body of belief for millions of people. I'm still not ready to join them in that but the odd traditions of thousands of years ago are meaningless to any argument of validity in the belief system itself. I guess as long as I was amused at the time it wasn't a total waste. *sigh*
Most importantly though, I was apparently assessing myself in a number of goals I'd set that June. I threw away the obnoxious habit of 'collecting' things with no practical purpose. Of the 5 goals I had at the time that's the only one that was really all that important and it seems to have left a positive mark on the subsequent year. I'm not attached to meaningless 'crap' any longer but I have had the nagging urge to learn a language again for no good reason. That, at least, is a bit of suffering that I think I can live with though.
8/18/07 - Leftovers
Well, now that we have the company meeting post off our backs it may be time for a few other random tidbits from my notebook of things to remember to write about. At the time, I'm sure they all seemed like deep and immensely interesting topics but now... well, I'm not quite so sure.
Not too long ago I was at ye local CVS buying some non-Diet soda because, of course, the average computer person runs primarily on a mixture of soda and chips. I took my purchases of soda and chips to the cashier and was surprised to learn that they were actually on sale. Finding this ironic and practicing my new 'extroverted and ton of fun' personality I cracked wise to the Asian cashier and said, "Oh, that's nice. The drugstore puts all the best and most nutritious food on sale. There goes my diet." She looks up at me surprised and says, "Oh no, you no need diet. You look really, really good." Alright, as flattering as that is I'm still not sure the drugstore should be encouraging ANYONE to buy soda and chips.
As I charged the humongous total of $6.50 or so my mind wandered again. I felt bad that my choice to charge that purchase rather than pay cash might have had a negative impact on CVSs ability to make a profit. I further wondered how many transactions of $.25 they would let me make before stopping me or simply going bankrupt. THEN it made me think what a strange thing it was to worry about the profit margin impact that my choice of payment method had on a store. I'm betting that none of you have ever felt bad when you were forced to charge $2 because you realized that the credit card transaction fee might actually make the transaction unprofitable for the store where you were making the purchase. I'm sure they take that into account somehow in their pricing but it still makes me a little bit sad to see 15% of a transaction wasted in fees.
After that bit of pondering was concluded between the checkout and the car I, of course, proceeded to drive home. As I was doing so I noted most frighteningly that my ability to drive had seriously deteriorated. After sitting at home and driving only tiny distances for the better part of 15 months I'm a scarily bad driver. I've completely lost my touch. During our team outing I drove our Geocaching team around for a couple hours and I could almost feel their hands around my throat as I stopped for yellow lights and allowed other cars to pass me without trying to start a race of some sort. Perhaps grandmas don't drive slowly because they're old but more because they just don't get out enough to practice.
I submitted what I considered a damn important This or That topic and it has completely failed to come up. The question seems innocuous enough and almost stupid at first glance. It's simply this:
2 Minutes Late or 20 Minutes Early
That's it. Nothing tricky or complicated. Why, might you ask is this 'damn important'? Well, let's look at this a bit more closely. If you choose 2 Minutes late then that means that you really don't mind if someone has to wait for you for 2 minutes. If you're willing to have someone wait on you then that means you think your time is more important than their time. Alternately, if you choose 20 Minutes Early then that indicates that you hold the other person's time worth more than yours. Personally, I think this is a matter of simple respect for others. I'm always early to everything because I hate the thought that someone else would have to wait on me or wonder where I am. Whenever I have a meeting with someone else I always take reading material for exactly this reason. I expect to have to wait for them. In fact, for most people I know running 10 minutes or more late for everything is completely normal so I tend to get a lot of reading done in these little interregna. Sadly, my number has not come up on the cox-tv wheel of This or That fun so I have no idea how the rest of humanity feels about this topic.
Finally, I have concluded my foray into children's literature with the completion of these 'Harry Potter' books. Over 3,000 pages later I find myself mildly disappointed. The story was cliche to the very end. Those who you thought were villains really were. Those you thought were good and would survive really did. After all that time and all that attempted development it turned simply into a 'happily ever after' despite the fact that she had prepared us for a much better and potentially more meaningful conclusion. But that, I suppose, is all we can expect from mainstream fiction today. More of the same old story. It's just unfortunate that life does not more accurately reflect our interpretation of it. At any rate, our next literary foray finds us wandering into St. Thomas Aquinas' works of seven centuries ago. I'm sure he will have more of relevance to say than our friend Mr. Potter.
Not too long ago I was at ye local CVS buying some non-Diet soda because, of course, the average computer person runs primarily on a mixture of soda and chips. I took my purchases of soda and chips to the cashier and was surprised to learn that they were actually on sale. Finding this ironic and practicing my new 'extroverted and ton of fun' personality I cracked wise to the Asian cashier and said, "Oh, that's nice. The drugstore puts all the best and most nutritious food on sale. There goes my diet." She looks up at me surprised and says, "Oh no, you no need diet. You look really, really good." Alright, as flattering as that is I'm still not sure the drugstore should be encouraging ANYONE to buy soda and chips.
As I charged the humongous total of $6.50 or so my mind wandered again. I felt bad that my choice to charge that purchase rather than pay cash might have had a negative impact on CVSs ability to make a profit. I further wondered how many transactions of $.25 they would let me make before stopping me or simply going bankrupt. THEN it made me think what a strange thing it was to worry about the profit margin impact that my choice of payment method had on a store. I'm betting that none of you have ever felt bad when you were forced to charge $2 because you realized that the credit card transaction fee might actually make the transaction unprofitable for the store where you were making the purchase. I'm sure they take that into account somehow in their pricing but it still makes me a little bit sad to see 15% of a transaction wasted in fees.
After that bit of pondering was concluded between the checkout and the car I, of course, proceeded to drive home. As I was doing so I noted most frighteningly that my ability to drive had seriously deteriorated. After sitting at home and driving only tiny distances for the better part of 15 months I'm a scarily bad driver. I've completely lost my touch. During our team outing I drove our Geocaching team around for a couple hours and I could almost feel their hands around my throat as I stopped for yellow lights and allowed other cars to pass me without trying to start a race of some sort. Perhaps grandmas don't drive slowly because they're old but more because they just don't get out enough to practice.
I submitted what I considered a damn important This or That topic and it has completely failed to come up. The question seems innocuous enough and almost stupid at first glance. It's simply this:
2 Minutes Late or 20 Minutes Early
That's it. Nothing tricky or complicated. Why, might you ask is this 'damn important'? Well, let's look at this a bit more closely. If you choose 2 Minutes late then that means that you really don't mind if someone has to wait for you for 2 minutes. If you're willing to have someone wait on you then that means you think your time is more important than their time. Alternately, if you choose 20 Minutes Early then that indicates that you hold the other person's time worth more than yours. Personally, I think this is a matter of simple respect for others. I'm always early to everything because I hate the thought that someone else would have to wait on me or wonder where I am. Whenever I have a meeting with someone else I always take reading material for exactly this reason. I expect to have to wait for them. In fact, for most people I know running 10 minutes or more late for everything is completely normal so I tend to get a lot of reading done in these little interregna. Sadly, my number has not come up on the cox-tv wheel of This or That fun so I have no idea how the rest of humanity feels about this topic.
Finally, I have concluded my foray into children's literature with the completion of these 'Harry Potter' books. Over 3,000 pages later I find myself mildly disappointed. The story was cliche to the very end. Those who you thought were villains really were. Those you thought were good and would survive really did. After all that time and all that attempted development it turned simply into a 'happily ever after' despite the fact that she had prepared us for a much better and potentially more meaningful conclusion. But that, I suppose, is all we can expect from mainstream fiction today. More of the same old story. It's just unfortunate that life does not more accurately reflect our interpretation of it. At any rate, our next literary foray finds us wandering into St. Thomas Aquinas' works of seven centuries ago. I'm sure he will have more of relevance to say than our friend Mr. Potter.
Annual Company Meeting
Well, here's the story... well, at least the background to the story. Every year our company has an all-out meeting where everyone in the whole place (with I think one exception in customer support) comes to Indy. Since our company of about 90 employees is about half Indy-based and half based in random cities throughout North American this involves a lot of people flying in and getting hotels, etc, etc, etc.
So 90% of this has little to do with me except that in the 3 days this meeting spans I am forced to do something that I don't really ever do any other time of the year. I'm forced to go and meet people and talk to them. In many ways I dread these 3 days but in other ways I suspect they're really good for me as they draw my attention away from the things I usually do and onto other people. I'll give the detailed results of this particular company meeting below because otherwise I'll not remember a dern thing about them later.
Day 1 was a 'meet and greet' at some local restaurant. The pointedly memorable bit was seeing my coworkers each take a microphone in hand and introduce themselves giving name, rank and favorite toy as a child. The most intellectually stimulating bit of this was to notice the incredibly wide range of comfort levels people had in front of the crowd. I have no idea how I looked up there but others ranged from "completely casual" to "looking as if they would rather eat the microphone than speak into it." For the record, my self-introduction was something along the lines of: "I'm Rob S, Junior Web Developer Third Class and my favorite toy was anything but a microphone." Not my best material by far. My other choices for a favorite toy were somewhat obvious: "fire" or "rocks and a sharpened stick (when I could get it)."
Day 2 was an all day event and did honestly seem to drag on forever. It consisted of the usual company rah-rah sessions about the state of things and a motivational speaker who had a series of VERY obvious things to say about how to be successful in a job. Afterwards we traipsed endlessly around the zoo in a non-competitive race/scavenger hunt. I'm somewhat powerless to explain my team's motivation to complete this activity given that it detracted from one's ability to simply enjoy the zoo. There was apparently a secondary assignment during the activity to 'observe' your coworkers and when one of the remote employees sought to 'observe' me I wove a string of increasingly unbelievable falsehoods for the observer.
Day 3 was another all day event that I managed to partially skip out on due to previous work commitments to customers. By the time I'd returned to the meeting I'd completely missed the activity in which teams built sculptures from non-perishable food to later be donated to charity. I'm almost sad I missed it (and not just because it was my uncredited idea in the first place.) The Q&A session that followed was, as always, amusing. Some of the questions were just obnoxious and I found myself glad that none of them could be pinned on me. I'd forgotten to ask my obnoxious questions this year. The day closed with departmental outings. Every department had something planned ahead of time with the exception of ours (or so I'm made to understand). I'm not entirely sure what that says about our department but I'm dead certain that it's not flattering. Luckily, one of our more inventive employees was able to come up with a spur of the moment Geocaching race that I thought went extraordinarily well. (Well enough to cause me to add something to my amazon.com wishlist and create an account on this site anyway.) Initially I was, I'll admit, a bit piqued that the person who organized the race actually won the prize but after due consideration it seems appropriate considering he pulled our chestnuts from the fire and kept us from sitting through some idiotic transformers movie or something equally inane for a departmental activity.
Now that you have the unnecessary detail, what did we learn/observe at the meeting?
One of my coworkers told me (as she seems to whenever we talk) that she was talking to some other people about me. She's apparently been telling people that I'm funny if you can get me by myself and not in a big crowd of people. They've also given me a nickname of 'Eeyore.' I guess I can, if I try hard enough, not get offended at being compared to the greatest stoic of children's literature.
Along the lines of our glum Eeyore, at several points I got the impression that people think I'm incredibly negative. I've suspected this for a while but it's *SO* not true. The simple fact here is that I just don't say anything unless it's necessary. If things are going well and everyone's happy I have no need to say a word. It's not until something is amiss that I feel the need to speak. Since things being amiss tend to cause negative utterances one tends to hear nothing but negativity from me. All the positive things are shrouded in contented silence. So yeah, stop promulgating some bullcrap about me being negative.
Our company used to have these annual 'STAR awards'; basically an employee of the year. It seems to have dissipated for some reason. No doubt some people got offended that we didn't all get one.
After speaking with a few more people I hadn't in a while, I think I need to do a better job of seeking out human contact as some of the humans I talked to at the meeting seemed pretty interesting. Pursuant to that, I'm starting up the 'Lunch with Human' series again. Any humans reading this who'd like to have a bit of lunch should drop me a line to get on the circulation list. Lunchees should come prepared with an idea of where they'd like to eat.
Finally, it has become obvious that the people who plan company meetings really don't know how to deal with introverted people. This isn't really all that surprising though since most planners of such meetings are themselves extraordinarily outgoing. At several points during this this year's events I felt that someone was REALLY trying to push me into getting to know people but going about it in totally the wrong way. So, for the benefit of meeting planners everywhere, here's the easy key for getting people of all types to get to know people.
Extroverts: Whatever. If you throw an extrovert into a room with 20 strangers for an hour then at the end the extrovert will have made 20 new friends and have 20 new business cards. It's like some sort of personality magic.
Introverts: If you throw an introvert into a room with 20 strangers for an hour then at the end you'll have one exhausted introvert and 20 strangers asking themselves, "What the fvck was HIS problem?" Introverts don't do well in crowds. We get to know other people one or two at a time. If you put us in groups we'll shut up like clams and make people think we're just being snooty.
All that said, it's good to have that over again for another year if for no other reason than I can get back to an appropriate summer haircut.
So 90% of this has little to do with me except that in the 3 days this meeting spans I am forced to do something that I don't really ever do any other time of the year. I'm forced to go and meet people and talk to them. In many ways I dread these 3 days but in other ways I suspect they're really good for me as they draw my attention away from the things I usually do and onto other people. I'll give the detailed results of this particular company meeting below because otherwise I'll not remember a dern thing about them later.
Day 1 was a 'meet and greet' at some local restaurant. The pointedly memorable bit was seeing my coworkers each take a microphone in hand and introduce themselves giving name, rank and favorite toy as a child. The most intellectually stimulating bit of this was to notice the incredibly wide range of comfort levels people had in front of the crowd. I have no idea how I looked up there but others ranged from "completely casual" to "looking as if they would rather eat the microphone than speak into it." For the record, my self-introduction was something along the lines of: "I'm Rob S, Junior Web Developer Third Class and my favorite toy was anything but a microphone
Day 2 was an all day event and did honestly seem to drag on forever. It consisted of the usual company rah-rah sessions about the state of things and a motivational speaker who had a series of VERY obvious things to say about how to be successful in a job. Afterwards we traipsed endlessly around the zoo in a non-competitive race/scavenger hunt. I'm somewhat powerless to explain my team's motivation to complete this activity given that it detracted from one's ability to simply enjoy the zoo. There was apparently a secondary assignment during the activity to 'observe' your coworkers and when one of the remote employees sought to 'observe' me I wove a string of increasingly unbelievable falsehoods for the observer.
Day 3 was another all day event that I managed to partially skip out on due to previous work commitments to customers. By the time I'd returned to the meeting I'd completely missed the activity in which teams built sculptures from non-perishable food to later be donated to charity. I'm almost sad I missed it (and not just because it was my uncredited idea in the first place.) The Q&A session that followed was, as always, amusing. Some of the questions were just obnoxious and I found myself glad that none of them could be pinned on me. I'd forgotten to ask my obnoxious questions this year. The day closed with departmental outings. Every department had something planned ahead of time with the exception of ours (or so I'm made to understand). I'm not entirely sure what that says about our department but I'm dead certain that it's not flattering. Luckily, one of our more inventive employees was able to come up with a spur of the moment Geocaching race that I thought went extraordinarily well. (Well enough to cause me to add something to my amazon.com wishlist and create an account on this site anyway.) Initially I was, I'll admit, a bit piqued that the person who organized the race actually won the prize but after due consideration it seems appropriate considering he pulled our chestnuts from the fire and kept us from sitting through some idiotic transformers movie or something equally inane for a departmental activity.
Now that you have the unnecessary detail, what did we learn/observe at the meeting?
One of my coworkers told me (as she seems to whenever we talk) that she was talking to some other people about me. She's apparently been telling people that I'm funny if you can get me by myself and not in a big crowd of people. They've also given me a nickname of 'Eeyore.' I guess I can, if I try hard enough, not get offended at being compared to the greatest stoic of children's literature.
Along the lines of our glum Eeyore, at several points I got the impression that people think I'm incredibly negative. I've suspected this for a while but it's *SO* not true. The simple fact here is that I just don't say anything unless it's necessary. If things are going well and everyone's happy I have no need to say a word. It's not until something is amiss that I feel the need to speak. Since things being amiss tend to cause negative utterances one tends to hear nothing but negativity from me. All the positive things are shrouded in contented silence. So yeah, stop promulgating some bullcrap about me being negative.
Our company used to have these annual 'STAR awards'; basically an employee of the year. It seems to have dissipated for some reason. No doubt some people got offended that we didn't all get one.
After speaking with a few more people I hadn't in a while, I think I need to do a better job of seeking out human contact as some of the humans I talked to at the meeting seemed pretty interesting. Pursuant to that, I'm starting up the 'Lunch with Human' series again. Any humans reading this who'd like to have a bit of lunch should drop me a line to get on the circulation list. Lunchees should come prepared with an idea of where they'd like to eat.
Finally, it has become obvious that the people who plan company meetings really don't know how to deal with introverted people. This isn't really all that surprising though since most planners of such meetings are themselves extraordinarily outgoing. At several points during this this year's events I felt that someone was REALLY trying to push me into getting to know people but going about it in totally the wrong way. So, for the benefit of meeting planners everywhere, here's the easy key for getting people of all types to get to know people.
Extroverts: Whatever. If you throw an extrovert into a room with 20 strangers for an hour then at the end the extrovert will have made 20 new friends and have 20 new business cards. It's like some sort of personality magic.
Introverts: If you throw an introvert into a room with 20 strangers for an hour then at the end you'll have one exhausted introvert and 20 strangers asking themselves, "What the fvck was HIS problem?" Introverts don't do well in crowds. We get to know other people one or two at a time. If you put us in groups we'll shut up like clams and make people think we're just being snooty.
All that said, it's good to have that over again for another year if for no other reason than I can get back to an appropriate summer haircut.
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