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I returned to my previous job today and found little had changed:

  • Someone had broke the hydrogen sulfide generation and detection test unit, a complicated device whose mastery has given me the title “The fart whisperer”.
  • A coworker wished me a “happy Columbus Day Observed”.
  • Someone came in looking for test items that had been brought in on Friday.  My coworker was unsure where it was and he told the requester to “ask Terry, he’s been here for a while” except that I had been back for three hours at that point.

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I loathe seeing movies that in any way having a technical component for a reason explained by Penny Arcade so was avoiding “The Social Network” at all costs.  The combination of Aaron Sorkin and my social cadre’s interesting in seeing it drew me there anyway, so I took some notes:

  • Network Solutions charged $34.99 to register a domain in 2003.
  • A girl referenced “I hope it’s more cats that look like Hitler, I can’t get enough of those”.  catsthatlooklikehitler.com wasn’t created until 2006 while the period of time of the movie then was 2003/4.
  • Trent Reznor did the arrangement of “In the Hall of the Mountain King” used during the crew race.  Also, they used tilt-shift a bunch to get a ridiculously narrow depth of field at the race.
  • The color temperature of the lighting was heavy-handed.  The Mark Zuckerberg character was alternatively lit warmly and coolly depending on if he were friend or ruthless-web-exec.
  • The film had a “flame artist”, which I think was only used during the scene where a scarf is lit on fire.  The job also listed of “file wrangler” seemed much tougher to me.
  • During many of the scenes where it appears Mark is doing FB stuff, the address is shown as 127.0.0.1 which is the localhost and probably wouldn’t be connected to anything.
  • There’s a scene where the Winklevosses both appear features a guy with an Arm & Hammer shirt, I giggled.  (The Winklevosses were played by Armand Hammer).

For the first 90 minutes Mark was my hero to the point where I wanted a halloween costume of him which was then reversed during the supposed Shaun Parker-induced backstabbing of Eduardo which, like the break-up of Mark and his girlfriend, is not an accurate representation of what happened.  The wit and speed of the dialog is vintage Sorkin but I largely agree with Lawrence Lessig that the writing missed the point.  Lessig does a wonderful job explaining the magic that I only noticed because I read his review first but may have colored my opinion.

Finally, the closing where Mark refreshes the page waiting for his former girlfriend’s response should have had “I Promise You” by When In Rome playing as it faded out.

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I’m attempting to judge more often and volunteered to do PA States. I haven’t done States in ages and I quickly remembered why I hated this first Constructed event of the new Standard; people are playing under-tuned decks against other under-tuned decks resulting in a lot of upsets across player skill-level and a slightly higher than usual number of calls that are the judge equivalent of “what’s 2+2?”  to which the correct answer is “game loss”.  Besides this, I had a spot of a cold and the Philadelphia Convention Center was also holding a large Yu-Gi-Oh! tournament which meant we had security.  Yes, we need a security guard to protect Magic players from sticky-fingered Yu-Gi-Oh! players.

The event opened with an underwhelming 72 people which filled a 1/3 of the room resulting in us renumbering after the first round.  I don’t know why, but a lot of players said to me “thank you, Terry, I knew you were behind the renumbering”.  In round 2, we noticed a guy had his girlfriend sit behind his opponent and send text messages to him, presumably about his opponent’s hand contents, but not until a point where we couldn’t catch him doing it so we couldn’t quite DQ him.  The irony gods saw it fit for him to lose two games, then matches, due to tardiness, and get a game loss for failing to desideboard.  The last caused him to scrub out resulting in the loss of more points than if he had just been disqualified.

For lunch, I went to the Reading Terminal Market and went to a taco stand that offered “Mol Chicken” which I assumed was chicken with guacamole not the chicken with mole sauce I received which tasted like burnt toast mixed with sweetened squirrel meat.  I later found out that mole is a colloquial term for “concoction” in Mexico and that many mole sauces contain hints of chocolate.  The lunch strangeness continued when I went to the Amish bake counter and the attendant who was a girl of indeterminate pre-woman age was whistling “Ghetto Superstar”.

You may not see me at States 2011.

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I prepared pork cuts today for dinner for my father and myself but had sized the meal for nine people so I could have some leftovers for the next few days.  It turns out that neither of my housemates had eaten so they joined and there were four of us around the table and things got very quiet.

Housemate 1: The rice is strong.
Housemate 2: Yes, but it is less strong if you mix it with the pork.
Housemate 1: Yes.

—Silence—

Me: How were the rolls?
Housemate 2: Fine, except for the burnt part I had, that was not fine.
Me: Yes, the burnt part was not supposed to be burnt.  Sorry.
Housemate 2: That’s ok.  The rest of it was fine.

—Silence—

My dad: These pork chops were big.
Housemate 1: Yes.
Housemate 2: Yes.
Me: Ok

—Silence—

I think we need to work on our small talk.

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Before restarting for my next 24 month stint as general technical guy I had to complete some re-employment paperwork for the contracting agency.  I arrived and was seated in a waiting area surrounded by people ranging from those applying to maintain surgical robots to people that would be grocery stocking agents.  The paperwork had some interesting sections:

  • The papers were presented out of order and didn’t include a declarations section which would normally define what things like “The Company” and “The Contractor” meant.  So, I read the re-employment documentation as if I were literally working for The Company®.
  • The room next to me had thin walls and I was hearing a conversation between two people about how one of them wasn’t ready for the responsibility of being a stock person at Crate and Barrel.
  • One document had an explicit warning on it “This document does not constitute a legal agreement.  Failure to comply with this document will result in termination”.   Sounds kinda legal to me.
  • Another document contained the line “This document may only be modified by the president”.  This was struck through with pen as were a few other sections.  That’s  a pretty good work around.

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When I came home today after a day out I found the regular spots were full so pulled to the right to park but there was a problem: there was a pile of cardboard there that was on fire.  I guess this is the suburban equivalent of a brush fire.

Turns out a housemate wanted to get rid of some boxes but didn’t want to wait for garbage day.  Carpe blowtorchum.

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After my treadmill time today I went to take a shower and there was no warm water so I did my wuss shower using a wash cloth coupled with a sink to wash my hair.  I came down stairs and found on the door a note that said “Warm water off in our bathroom, use the other shower. -Dad”

Periodically my dad gets seized with a bout of “I’m going to fix this” which results in days lacking a basic resource, normally the casualty is our power supply or the water writ large.  Just the hot water is a new one, and I’m glad my dad has found new ways to temporarily break the house.

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My grandfather, Edward Wardle Robinson, was an active member of the Society of the Cincinnati (which I always mis-spell), a now historical society that still uses lineage to relay status that has been the alternative friend and foe of the likes of Pickney, Franklin, Jefferson, and Knox.   He died in 1996 but up until today mail from the Society still came to our house where my father dutifully opened it, read it, and then trashed it.  For a solid decade my father asked their roster to be updated through post, phone, and fax but with no success so he resigned himself to the fact that the Society would assume a centurion scion of the Robinson line were still alive and kicking in PA.  I wonder if it was farce or futility that was the dominate emotion in a man who couldn’t convince one group that his father was dead.

Today I took a shot in the dark and asked Google about the group.  He returned me a few contact names which were then put through Facebook and Linkedin resulting in a contact email address for the PA branch of the group and its head.  I shot an email into the dark, explaining the Robinson lineage since the death of my grandfather, and the subsequent death of my father’s older brother who would have been next.  I fudged my knowledge of primogeniture and indicated that with my uncle Ted dead that Richard, my father, were next.  About six hours later, I got an email back from a fellow named Lucius that he checked the Archives and simply needed to add the death dates for the names mentioned and my father would become the hereditary officer for my line.  This whole process maybe took 20 minutes, including the time to find the scan I had made of the appropriate death certificates.  That’s probably a hundredth of the time I witnessed my dad spend on phones, and writing letters to update the records of a society who now in its third century should be good at this stuff but instead retorted with deafness.

20 minutes of Google, Facebook, and Gmail.  It made me feel guilty for not having done it sooner to spare potential suffering.  Still, 20 minutes.  Sometimes I feel like I’m cheating.

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The dawn came early as I saw a battalion of cross-legged people move about the event field trying to find out why the bathroom door was locked.  The lush that gave me the the storage key hadn’t disabled the timer so no one could pee until 8 AM.  A mother told me that this wasn’t a problem and went on to talk about her outdoor bathroom practices using the phrase “pop a squat” at least five times and this was more my punishment for not thoroughly reviewing my needs with the park before hand so much as the crush of people searching for a place for their son to tinkle in a park with over 400 wooded acres.  The local Hess station probably saw a lot of visitors.

The closing ceremony was at 8:00 AM and at 7:40 a man approached:

Him: Can I have the completion certificates for my unit?
Me: I’m giving them out at the closing ceremony in 20 minutes after the Scouts’ Own Service.
Him: Oh, we’re not staying for that.
Me: I guess you’re not going to complete the weekend then.

He frowned and hurried his kids to his car.  I think he was the same adult that thought I was paid.

I brought everything home and here were my spoils:

  • 15 lbs of penne pasta
  • A box of Frosted Flakes
  • 120 eye droppers
  • 3 gallons of open fruit juice
  • A pair of prescription sunglasses, a pair of prescription non-sunglasses, a albuterol nebulizer, and a webelos neckerchief slide

I like the last the most, as my lost and found for the weekend contained five entries of “Webelos Neckerchief Slide” along with “shirt” (no additional detail given).

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I met Dawn at 8:10 at Sam’s to do food shopping; we chose that time instead of 8:00 as we wanted to sleep in.  Shopping was easy, a fact that Dawn attributed to there being no Scouting professional present so every question of “A or B” was answered with “the better one, we’re worth it”.  I quickly racked up $800 in groceries and when I found that they only accepted debit I had to log into my ING account via my phone to move the cash to the correct place.

OfficeMax was out of the toner cartridges I needed only having the $150 high capacity versions.  I yelled in my head, bought the cartridges with the intent of buying replacements online and returning those.  Printing was done and I found my dad removing the non-return valves from the rocket rigs.  He said he was trying to reduce resistance, I said it was going to just force water into the base, he said he was going to put the return valves back in.

I arrived at 12:30, about 45 minutes later than I wanted and the parking lot already had about 40 cards in it.  Registration continued for a little over an hour and we started at about 2:00 with the Mentos+Diet Cherry Pepsi rocket.  The following conversation happened about six times:

Parent: Do you use diet because of the aspertame doing something?
Me: No, sucralose would do the same thing as would regular.  Diet isn’t sticky.
Parent: Does the cherry add anything?
Me: It’s what I had in my house.

The rotations were uneventful and the 10 minute break for a snack was appreciated.  The next evening activity was my science demonstration of which the magnus opus was making little clouds using dry ice, water, and soap.  I made a few dozen softball-sized bubbles and we tried putting them on different surfaces to see what would happen.  They figured out that temperature was unimportant and that texture and material was more important and I was quite proud.  This faded when kids started popping the bubbles by licking them where they then observed that “CO2 tastes like soap”.  Little Einsteins.

The final learning moment involved the cardboard oven pizzas, where a foil-lined boxed served as an oven.  After several boxes caught fire we had to issue the reminder “do not put the charcoal in the oven until it’s no longer flaming”, then all worked well.  The day was done and no one died.