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I woke up at the crack of 11:30 AM after the forceful deflation of my air mattress and after a sequence of shit-we-forgot’s and two pizzas which were eaten across from surly old people we made out way Northward.

I got to drive Pat’s Rav4 and being in another person’s car the most dangerous thing I did was drink and drive.

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At a previous point I’d taken a picture while driving and holding my iPod, so this is a cakewalk.  Pat and Joe were also strongly opposed to a practice I call “slap steering” which terrifies both of them.

Around 10 PM we stopped at a Target in Augusta to get a 1/8″ patch cable so I could bore everyone with The Economist audio edition.  The hand dryer was quite potent and my hands came away red with windshear.  On our way out, we hit a T-intersection with no obvious path back to the highway so I picked left at random.  This small change resulted in us taking a sequence of country roads, byways, and semi-paved paths to Acadia through the “drive faster, I hear banjos” portion of Maine.  I got bored and started taking long exposures of lights while driving of which some came out well.

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We arrived at Acadia at about 11:30 PM, several hours after the proper closing of the park.  My concern for lateness dropped when I learned there after-hours check in process was “go to a campsite, and tell us sometime the next day that you’re here”.  We entered our gravel-covered campsite and discovered that one was supposed to sleep on the gravel.  Gravel ranks as slightly below a battery of dull steak knives for uncomfortable sleeping surfaces and the hours taken to actually sleep proved this.

Luckily, the rest rooms were exceptional and even included two-ply toilet paper.  The walls also held some of the most erudite graffiti I’ve ever seen including:

  • A spot-on picture of Master Shake
  • A Sierpinski triangle after three iterations
  • I LOVE HUNGARY

  • Eulers Identity

    Euler's Identity

  • “Go Organic” with an arrow pointing to that phrase with the caption “wow, you convinced me”.

I was impressed.

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I don’t vacation well.  I usually get more excited by sitting at home but rarely do I achieve the To Do List slaying I gun for and I’ve slowly learned that I suck at prioritization until the last minute or when someone else is counting on me.  Joe and I talked of going to Nova Scotia over the summer which slowly turned into a few days at Acadia National Park.  I had an secondary goal of visiting some people and somehow Pat Toye was magically available so he became our Day 1 waypoint.

Joe and I left a spot late around 3:30 PM and shot for the icy north.  Entering NY was an absolute clusterfuck as we tooled along for 20 miles at 10 MPH.  We saw the following:

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And

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Yep, her other car is a broom.  After idling past Scarsdale I fumed at some 200 car pile-up causing the delay when we crested a hill and there the pile-up was.  Not quite 200, but enough to generate a gaper delay that shaved two hours off my life.

We met A.C.E, aka Richard Mercier at Braza, a Brazilian steakhouse in Hartford with the standard gimmick of all food coming from servers with the appropriate meat cut skewered on giant 3-bladed rapiers/sais.  I destroyed a hearty collection of sausages and various meats wrapped in other meats.  I was disappointed to learn that desserts were not served in the same manner and was hoping to see a sword impaling a collection of cheesecakes.

A.C.E mentioned his love of hot wings and brought up some wing joint in Philly with egregiously hot wings.  I began thinking if the hotness would be enhanced by simply using pepper spray on a wing before serving it and thought of starting a business as a pepper spray sommelier for those wanting a more refined tongue-incinerating experience.  Before leaving the restaurant I asked if we’d missed any of the food items to which the host said matter of factly “no, sir.  You ate everything.”  I don’t know in what sense he meant “everything” but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were an airlift from Munich as an emergency restock after I leveled their sausage reserves.

Afterword we hit A.C.E’s house where none of my pictures of his mint-green pool were properly illuminated.  His wife “the Warden” is a wonderful gal and loves to have her picture taken and does an awesome impression of Samara from the Ring.

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A.C.E has a minute computer monitor and I’m not terribly sure how he plays TF2.   I think I’ll start a collection for a real one leading up to his wedding.

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I suppose to a certain extent that was made up for by his much larger DVD collection.

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A collection he rarely gets to peruse for the following reason:

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All my photos of Richard sucked so….

We departed Richard’s home around midnight and arrived at Pat’s Vermont home at 2:00 AM.  Joe and I were immediately struck by the quantity of celestial pinpoints apparently called “stars”.  There are few in Philadelphia and I think we should look into importing them.  We went to bed around 4 AM, about 2 hours after Pat first saying “maybe we should go to sleep soon” and three hours after Joe shared a moment with Pat’s cat.

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I took up residence on an inflatable floor mat and day 1 was done.

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I go out to lunch once a week with an engineer who does pretty well all the work involving sensors and today I told him about the difficulty I’d found with the work tech support and told him about the time someone at camp shoved a fork in a router.  He countered with the time his kids filled his car CD player with change thinking it was a candy machine, I one upped him with the time I added an EZ Bake oven to a computer a brought it to Best Buy.  He topped that as follows:

Him: So my buddy and I are working on this helper robot that follows people around with bricks.  He puts in a circuit board, starts it and this cap blows.  He makes the circuit again, I tell him it’s a bad idea and he turns it on.  The cap doesn’t blow, but the robot goes at him full tilt and pushes him through a plasterboard wall.

He may have won the story content, but we’ve all lost when the robot overlords shove all of humanity through a wall.

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One of my work tasks is printing out large format objects on the 41″ printer.  Someone send me a 3′ x 4′ poster, and I printed it.  After printing the document I found several typographic errors and reprinted it again after checking with the requester.  After the 2nd copy, the requester came to me and had a revision, all the references to the competing company on the poster needed add “(R)” after the name.  So, I checked that all references had “(R)” after it and reprinted it.  I was then told I needed to print another one and received an attached email saying “Sir, you need to replace all instances of (R) with (R) to avoid legal consequences.”  That’s downright Kafka-esque and I double checked the annotated PDF which had circled the (R) with the note “replace with (R)”.  At this point we were sufficiently confused and talked to the legal person.

Me: What does this change mean?
Him: You need to replace your “registered” abbreviation with our “registered” abbreviation.
Me: What’s that mean?
Him: You used parens, R, parens, you need to use what we wrote.
Me: But you wrote, parens, R, parens.
Him: No, that means the circle thing with the R in it.  It’s a common abbreviation.

Apparently when we use (R) it means (R)  when he uses (R) it means ®. How foolish of me not to know.

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A coworker asked me to help him troubleshoot a Microsoft Word problem.  He was trying recreate a hand drawing of how to fold a piece of packaging and he was having difficulty.  Word doesn’t enjoy sub 1/10th inch placement of objects and often raises a fuss when creating a drawing area inside a text area inside a drawing area inside a text area.  He’d created a mediocre hack job but found somethings wanting:

  • A dashed line was created by making a bunch of little lines, spacing them, then grouping them together instead of using the right-click -> format -> line style option.
  • Transparent figures where given white sublayers by creating white borderless boxes.
  • All the text was in a single text box with each piece being located with spaces and tabs of various sizes.

I was able to replace his work with a more accurate drawing in Publisher in about 10 minutes including a narrative of what I was doing.  I ask him how long his version took, “about six hours”.  I asked him if this was average and it apparently was.  This man is probably paid 50% more than me and received healthcare.  I felt bad when it turned out the guy I replaced was 50% better than me at my then job, but I am roughly 60 times faster at this job than he is.  I think I can make a reasonably strong productivity case for replacing him, should it come up in conversation.

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In anticipation of Canada I got a Cot-Tent.  Recently I’ve done poorly sleeping on very hard surfaces recently and I somewhat miss floors, so I opted for the cot tent.  I set it up in my room to make sure it would work and it proved suitable with one exception: My dog, Max, doesn’t know what to do about it.  Normally, he licks my face if he needs to go outside at night and this arrangement required some ingenuity from him.  He came into my room at about 4 AM as I was awakened by the door knob hitting the wall (his normal entrance theme).  He walked over to right next to the cot tent and stood still for a few seconds until he start poking nose into it looking for an opening.  He found the one at my feet which was open and went to the other side where my head was which was closed.  Losing no time his nose started lunging at the zipper opening until he separated the two zippers enough to get his nose in and wedge the flap over.  I thought I had pulled one over on him as during this process I’d rotated in place and now my feet were where my head was.  He now started licking my feet.  Dog logic: The head is at the opposite end of the feet, even if that’s where the feet are.

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At 2:00 AM, Monday, September 14, 2009 a blueberry cake died.  It started off as a good cake, straight muffin mixed and true.  The carrot cake recipe was pushed into service with heavy cream replacing yogurt and shortening for butter to make ends meet.  Instead of carrots of most carrot cakes, this used blueberries, not the freshest but still a blueberry to be proud of.  The batter was poured into a cake pan and the rest has been determined by forensic investigation:

  • 1:12 – Cake batter enters oven, weighted down heavy with blueberries
  • 1:27-The rise in interrupted by the opening of the door to the oven, causing a gust of cold air to blast the top of the cake.
  • 1:30 – The top of the cake solidifies after exposure to cold air preventing the batter from rising properly.
  • 1:38 – The sealed cake top breaks off from the rise of the rest of cake and makes a run for the bottom of the pan.
  • 1:45 – Cake hits boiling point, berries boil and burst, releasing wave of moisture.
  • 1:50 – Cake having just been hit by wave of blueberry burst-induced water vapor beings sagging as foam breaks due to new weight at the top.
  • 1:59 – Cake top has descended, creating an almost perfect spongy square center like some sort of quadrilateral donut.
  • 2:00 – Cake frosting is applied, begins to melt into the central compression where upon the center finally falls into madness.
  • 2:05 – Cake death recorded, given to dog.
  • 2:10 – Dog throws up outside.
  • 2:12 – Cat wants in, confused by dog throwing up outside.
  • 2:14 – Cat salvages cake by spending a solid 10 minutes licking the cream cheese package.

Time to wake up late, hit the bakery, find something nice, slip it into my cake tin and make it look shitty so people think I made it.  I’ve only done this once before, I think people could tell, but they were nice and lied to me.

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My last visit to NYC met me poorly prepared.  I left straight from work, wore poorly supporting shoes and crappy socks and walked around in a light mist.  After 20 blocks of walking I had proto-blisters and a week afterward I had deadskin snowflakes shedding from my feet.

This time I wore normal shoes and socks and resolved to walk the 35 blocks each way.  All went well inbound and I took a sequence of nice building pictures that look like clipart as the overcast of the day registered the sky as RGB #FFFFFF.  I brought my camera in backpack and the combo of t-shirt + oxford + fleece vest + backpack produced more back sweat than I would have liked.

Bringing the gorilla pod proved wise as NECSS was a low-light event.  I giggled as people tried to take pictures with cell phones and pocket point-and-shoots as I sat with my f/2.8 70-200mm on myAPC sensor.  My smile dropped when I saw the guy down the row from me with his camera on a steady-cam setup atop a monopod on his Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III with an L-series 28-300.  One day.

Each panel had a question and answer period after it and the queue quickly filled each time, except for the final presentation by Carl Zimmer.  I <3 Carl Zimmer as his book Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea led me to rework all of Environmental Science merit badge.  I was first to the mic and I choked like a chihuahua swallowing a hot dog.  I’ve asked probing questions of former heads of the military through FPRI, chewed out Scout leaders who probably could have gotten me fired and once called my boss’s boss’s boss and idiot.  But I proved physically incapable of asking a softball question of a blogger.  GHA…..  He was nice about it, my sentences may have properly included the correct parts of speech but bordered on “who do you want me to eat it?” territory.  He looked at me with that exceedingly polite “you could yell something at me in Magyar and I’ll still smile nicely, call you insightful and give you a response that reminds you why you think I’m amazing”.

As I made my way from the venue I received about a 1/2 dozen “you’re the tard that covered the keynote speaker’s face with language vomit” and paid my penance by walking back to the train station in the rain.  My feet are fine…

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I’ll have two updates today, one regarding NECSS and one surrounding the conference.  If you don’t want my stunning recap of my inability to talk, skip to the other one.

NECSS was the sop to those of us who couldn’t make TAM.  The collection of speakers was impressive on paper and NYC Skeptics were spectacular in their dealing with a ticket snafu.  Jamy Ian Swiss served as face of the event and was sufficiently dynamic to hold everyone’s attention.

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Initial impressions of the audience:

  • Shit tons of iPhones and Moleskines.  I was in the elite group of people using both.
  • Had certain aspects of a political rally.  Everyone groaned when someone said Andrew Wakefield and Oprah.
  • Lots of beards, like Linux developer levels of beards.
  • Dress was in three categories: t-shirt w/ponytail, business casual, student formal (lots of sweater vests).
  • Only two black people.

Dr. Paul Offit was the opening speaker regarding why truth regarding health information is so difficult to establish.

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His section on the limits of epidemiological limits was… hilarious, not a term I was anticipating to use.  He described the limits of proof with the example of “you can’t prove I’ve never been to Milwaukee, you can just show a sequence of buildings with me not in front of them.”  Everyone issued a tired sigh when he mentioned chelation therapy and we, as an audience, were able to identify the parade of Nobel laureates.

The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe episode was surprisingly milquetoast with some rough silences, mediocre jokes, and a brainfart from each presenter.

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The picture above is a photo-stitch and is huge should you want to zoom in and see the degree to which looks like each speaker was punched in the eye before the event.  Bob Novella looked like he could rip a phone book in half at various points.

The musical lunch presenter was well-meaning and had an interesting anecdote regarding him yelling “BOO” at Michael Behe but the musical content was mediocre at best.

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The afternoon panels were swell and consisted of people vastly more qualified to talk compared to the audience.  Few people had questions and in most cases merely wanted to state something.  I can’t stand Q&As of that type.  If you have something dumb to say to an audience that will forget you, use twitter.

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The presenters stared off into the distance a lot and there was a wonderful set of exchanges between the skeptic activists blaming the media and the journalism instructor that got the rest of the panel to agree with him.

The closing presentation was by Carl Zimmer on the non-descript topic of errors in science reporting.

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In closing the event was very much a “first annual event”.  The audience was excited, the speakers were unsure, and the venue was crappy.  I look forward to seeing how this develops.