August 29, 2003
Things that are easy to write about
- Fictitious chinese fortunes found in cookies (What you just ate was not sweet and sour chicken)
- Inappropriate work behavior (Hot copier sex ruins monthly toner-usage tracking statistics)
- Fake resume in which you say all the things that you shouldn't (Objective: Obtain job in which it is impossible to fire me, office theft is considered "part of the game", business write-offs are considered "right on", and there is little actual work outside of walking to cafeteria and/or taking a shit three times a day.)
- Fake horoscopes (Today marks the beginning of the end for your expired milk)
Suprisingly short lists of things that are easy to write about
August 27, 2003
He got up every morning at 5 and quickly got ready in the dark. He normally didn't have to worry about what he was wearing and didn't brush his hair, cut down to 1/4 an inch it never did anything but stand up straight. His normal shower routine involved about 10 minutes where the water, as hot as he could possibly make it, would just hit his upper back right where he should be standing up straight.
He would gather his gear up in his bag every morning - mainly a check that he had everything or last minute inclusions of certain books depending on what he felt like doing that day - things stayed in the bag once he got home every night.
He prided himself on being the first person to arrive at wherever he was going. The coffeeshop or bookstore would find him showing up about 30 seconds after they opened but never earlier - before the bikers getting a cup on their way to work and before the police shift change. He wouldn't just come in and grab a cup to go, this was his destination.
After ordering a drink, the same thing every morning, he would go put his stuff down at the same table from the day before - reserving it just in case somebody came in - and walk aimlessly through the place looking out the window and just generally wasting time by reading the headlines from the paper that he never bought. Sometimes the girl behind the counter would make conversation with him, to which he would respond methodically. The same person never worked more than a few mornings a week what with the available pool of college workers, so he never really knew if they remembered him or not. They never got his drink started without him arriving, and he insisted on telling them what he wanted every morning; he never assumed that they remembered him.
When they called out his drink order he would turn and thank the girl on his way back to his table. He had found that the table with either a nice view out the window or the table where you can't see outside but everybody has to pass by you on their way upstairs are the best spots. It basically depended on what he had to get done as to which he went with on a particular morning.
He would then fall deep into the unchallenged world of thought - books, programs, writing - and this was one of the happiest times in his life.
03:20 PM part of
stories
I'm not saying that I'm stronger or anything, but I think that I could take Lance Armstrong - in a crotch-kicking contest if I got to go first.
02:24 PM part of
a balanced breakfast
August 25, 2003
Wishful thinking
- The people I work with are professional, smart, and humble.
- The project I am working on is interesting, important, and going well.
- My car does not need some sort of work to prevent it from sounding like a fucking prop plane when going at greater than 10 mph.
- I am not a 24 year-old man with acne.
- I am still in shape.
- My good friends all live in the same city as I do.
- What I do for a living makes a difference.
- I did not just buy a house, thus ensuring that my life will be very similar to what it is now for a long, long time.
08:50 PM part of
personal
August 22, 2003
Buying a house, or talking to people who are involved in you buying the house, means that you get to learn that everyone is motivated by money. The real estate agent gets 3%, the seller's agent gets 3%. The builder makes a small margin (5%) on the house, but marks up the upgrades (85 of them) by 200%. You put down 5%-20%, then pay 4-6% in order to use the money (150-200K) for a few (10-30) years. You pay the insurance people (life, homeowner's, car), mortgage insurance people (1.5%), financial planner (10-85 basis points, or .10% - .85%), homeowner's association ($100), teamsters (as much as they want), union (whatever your representation gets for you), etc. You then go down to the liquor store, where you purchase a case (24) of beer (5%) for a few bucks (.003% of monthly gross income) and get fucked up (3 times/week).
02:23 PM part of
personal
August 21, 2003
Things I am learning as we prepare to buy a house
- It is pretty rare for people to have yards anymore, even in the suburbs. Most people just stay inside all day anyway. Yet every neighborhood has sidewalks all over the place, which you would think would foster a sense of community as people met each other on the street and started talking, but it doesn't because they all just talk about what is on TV.
- Real estate agents have no sense of humor.
- Can the study be converted into a sex dungeon?
- We want a soundproof basement for when the children are bad.
- Would an old person have trouble climbing the stairs to the attic if, theoretically, forced to do so?
- Do you think that the homeowner's association would have trouble with a sex swing on our front porch?
- How about a barbecue pit near our mailbox?
- We will need to put a fence up because we have two cute young velociraptors.
- Buying a house with four bedrooms gets you thinking about children very quickly, and therefore makes you feel very young all-of-a-sudden instead of old as you would expect.
- With that spare bedroom and possible basketball goal outfront there are no more excuses for me not trying out for the Atlanta Hawks this year.
- Cows are not considered 'acceptable' pets, inside or out.
- Just like getting married, getting a house makes you think long-term again only this time you only worry about money.
Editor's note: I originally typed: theorectically above, which gave it a similar meaning but on a different level. We aplogize to any bots that may have picked this up and been offended.
02:19 PM part of
personal
August 20, 2003
What a wonderful week to believe that technology is our future:
02:39 PM part of
tech
August 19, 2003
I don't want to be in control anymore.
You don't have to be, and you never really were anyway.
It is just too hard being a man - I am responsible for my wife, our future family, 401ks, interest rates, down payments, job security, terrorism...
I was once a man.
Yes, I suppose you were, you were a 30 year-old man.
Yes, and now I am here with you on this very plane, and it is going to be ok.
02:42 PM part of
personal
August 18, 2003
"To escape criticism: say nothing, do nothing, be nothing."
-Elbert Hubbard
05:24 PM part of
inspiration
August 15, 2003
Things I learned on my first business trip
- A lot more people fly during the week than I thought, and about 80% of them are flying alone.
- These people drink while waiting on their flights and they talk to each other a lot.
- Taking off from an enormous plane is paralyzingly scary if you are familiar with elementary physics.
- From the air, most towns are very pretty and sincere-looking, with a splash of loneliness added in at the last moment.
- Oil fields are very lonely places, and you can smell them from a long way off.
- Living in a big city you get the impression that most of the country is crowded just because you think what you experience is the norm, but most of the country is empty.
- One could say that a lot of people are empty as well.
- Small planes can turn more easily, and scare you half to death when they turn quickly and drop altitude for the landing.
- It is very difficult to control your own mind - when the body is put in a stressful situation in which it thinks it will be harmed or die, you end up fighting your own nerves more than the actual danger.
- The smell of your own sweat is familiar, but when it is sweat that is created because of fear, it smells different - intoxicating after the fact.
- Jesus will come to you if you call him, and he is all that can calm you down.
02:34 PM part of
personal
When Wired is good, it is really good.
02:22 PM part of
tech
August 12, 2003
Things that they don't teach you in school (Computer Science, IT, MIS, CIS, etc.
or whatever school you weant to so that you could show in some meaningful way that you know how to write software)
- Different programming languages and their uses.
- Anything about the web that matters.
- Anything about software engineering in groups. (throwing people together doesn't mean they are working together)
- Debugging techniques.
- Code conventions, proper commenting.(most places if your code runs they don't really look at it)
- Good system design concepts.
- Where to go for more information.(good books to read after graduation)
- Likewise they didn't tell you about the importance of continuing education. (the fact that you need to go somewhere for more information)
- The fact that most places that you will work care about making money, and will therefore not act like anybody in the academic world in many important ways.
- That there is a history of our craft that dates back a long ways - people have been programming for years and just because it was on some archiac system doesn't mean that the lessons they learned don't matter anymore.
- How to find a job.
- How to act on some basic level in the business world.
- The fact that you don't really know much, and having a degree doesn't change that much in the long run.
03:56 PM part of
tech
"Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on."
-Terry Pratchett
01:14 PM part of
inspiration
August 11, 2003
"An invincible determination can accomplish almost anything and in this lies the great distinction between great men and little men."
Thomas Fuller
02:36 PM part of
inspiration
August 08, 2003
"If we are not engaged in making ourselves into the kind of person we ought to be, we are automatically engaged in making ourselves into what we ought not to be."
—Unknown
04:24 PM part of
inspiration
"I am annoyed to find myself continually described by people whom I have never set eyes on as bad-tempered."
Evelyn Waugh, Diary (26 Dec 47)
01:59 PM part of
inspiration
August 07, 2003
"We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about."
Einstein
04:10 PM part of
inspiration
August 06, 2003
My grandmother died Saturday before last - July 26 at 12:30. My wife and I drove in to see her and were able to before she passed.
I have spent the last hour looking online for a passage that was read at her funeral, during which I was sobbing uncontrollably, because I thought it would make me feel better:
Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.
Book Of Common Prayer, The. Burial of the Dead, “First Anthem,” (1662).
This is derived from:
Man born of woman
is of few days and full of trouble.
He springs up like a flower and withers away;
like a fleeting shadow, he does not endure.
Job 14: 1-2
Normally a discussion of the amazingly wonderful complexity of research would follow such quotes (and she would have enjoyed that), but instead I am just going to say that I loved my grandmother very much for who she was to me. After her death I am left feeling that my life is small, short, and meaningless, but particularly small in comparision to her's, which was large in the smallest of ways: she touched a large number of people just by being kind to them.
A few days after her funeral my brother and sister went to see a friend of the family's who is over 100 years old. I wasn't able to go, but my sister said that she was just sort of dispensing advice as people of that age do sometimes without proding. One of the things that she said was that you didn't need to worry about the big things, but that you only had to do the little things - being loving towards your siblings, being a kind husband to your wife, etc. - and that the rest would work itself out.
My grandmother was a master at getting the details right - she was kind to everyone from her grandchildren running around her house full of delicate antiques (or more like racing around in her wheelchair and running into walls) to the nurses and visitors that she saw when she, an intellectual her entire life, had lost her sight, hearing, ability to walk, and memory. She was somehow able to entertain people up to weeks before her death despite the fact that she was unable to remember who they were most of the time.
I will miss her, and I will also miss the place that I now realize she held in my life: what she represented, or better yet was, since she did not represent something but instead was something that other people weren't. And I am empty.
02:38 PM part of
personal
August 05, 2003
How to run a successful software project 1
- Make a list of all of the stuff you have to do.
- Make estimates of how long you think it will take you to do these things.
- Add up these numbers and compare them to the amount of time that you have before the deadline.
- Figure out that there is not enough time to do them all and rush out to hire more people.
- Spend weeks training the new people so that they are ready to contribute right around the week of the deadline.
- Stall - the economy is bad and the client has not exactly been helpful, what with all the constant phone calls and questions.
- Push back the deadline in the same way that you push back agressive perverts on the subway.
- Blame other members of your team and attempt to destroy their careers (or, at the very least, eat the snacks that they like from the kitchen)
- Finally deliver the product months late.
- Watch the client tear apart your product. Give them a kleenex when they begin to sop at how poorly done the end result is after all of this waiting.
- Begin a list of things that you forgot to include - design oversights, bugs, etc.
- Repeat.
How to run a successful software project 2
- Build a time machine.
- Travel back in time to when you had some sense.
- Start the project over with realistic expectations.
02:09 PM part of
work