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Today, Suzie and I visited Banks, a friend of mine from Team Interrobang that has reached autonomy with me meaning our friendship doesn’t require the excuse of Team Interrobang. I didn’t expect this to happen as Banks and I have little in common on a superficial level except for maybe our common love of Napoleon Dynamite. Banks and I are on the same ethical page in most cases and follow a motto of action of “you do it because it’s right”. He and I have different epistemologies powering our decision engines but even from such a disparate base the synchrony of our conclusions is striking.

From 2012-02-17 Banks'

Banks’s second daughter very much took to Suzie and showed both Suzie and I her collection of Star Wars figurines and her talking Storm Trooper helmet but only Suzie received privy access to the contents of her Nintendo DS.  I think kids from the ages of 6-20 have a sense for when someone older than them is closer to their age than their parents and generally take to them.  I’ve experienced this a lot in Scouting and I regret that this will flip for me within the next five years.  For Banks’s daughter, Suzie is on the youth side of that divide but I’m fine with being some variant of “Uncle Arcanus” and simply being the bringer of cookies and cake balls.

From 2012-02-17 Banks'

As always, Banks provided me and mine a nice dinner and Suzie and I departed northward shortly after.  I had a large dinner, had sat most of the day, and was feeling somewhat loagy so when we arrived at Peter’s I used the gym.  I changed and Suzie commented that I tucked in my exercise shirt.  I do but mostly to prevent chaffing from the elastic band of the waist and to help restrain my gut but this sartorial choice was still chuckle-worthy.  I responded by hiking my shorts up to around nipples and lacing them behind my head.  Someone has a cell phone shot of this.

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I’ve made the drive from Feasterville to Florence a number of times and it consists of three distinct segments:

My driveway to New Staunton – I’ve driven this segment so many times that I don’t really have any good benchmarks. I get gas at approximately the same place every time and take breakfast at the same Wawa.

New Stanton to the Centennial Barn – PA, WV, and Ohio progress in a 200 mile blur of unremarkable America. The area around 70 and 270 is invariably a clusterfuck unless it’s before 6 AM or after 8 PM. Here regionality between Appalachia, the High South, Coalville, and Rusttown blend varying strips of the forgotten with the forgettable.

Centennial Barn to Florence – The Centennial Barn is about 75 miles out from Cincinnati and is painted to commemorate the bicentennial of Ohio. It’s my “Almost there” mark and near there I stop for lunch at McDonalds. I’ve never passed it in the rain and I’m unsure of why I always notice this.

The above is a little over 600 miles and I usually have it done by shortly after lunch.

This time I met up with Suzie and Brad and we went to the Cincinnati Union Terminal.
Cincinnati Union Terminal

The Cincinnati Terminal is bathed in golden light at dusk diffused through a Brobdenagian American flag and soft boxed by murals.

Museum Center Flag

It is bright without being garish and the empty fountain outside waits more than being victim to disuse. I’m curious if it acquires a sense of bustle at some point and what it feels like.

Dinner was at The Melting Pot, a fondue place that was a bit costly but still tasty. One chooses a dish selection and a number of people to serve and the server provides instruction, refills consumables, and proffers light banter. The three of us ate for around $100 and I’d say a 1/3 of that cost was because it was “neat”. While there is some value to a showy presentation like the flaming column below, I guess I find it underwhelming as someone who regularly uses a blow torch in the kitchen.

Notes on Melting Pot

  • The three course set for two will serve three people who aren’t incredibly hungry.
  • Oil fondue is not for the neophyte but will probably produce better results along most spectra of taste.
  • Potatoes take a month to cook.
  • Some items receive free refills.  Slam on those like a 10 year-old playing Street Fighter II.
  • Each course has a set up so plan on more time between courses than at a regular restaurant.  Where I saw this apply was with tables that purchased alcohol.  I’m used to someone going through 2-3 drinks in an evening, here 4+ seemed to be common.
  • Overcome the pronunciation barrier.  While listening to other tables order, I felt that people were shying away from foreign terms.  Caribbean jerk is good, but the real home of veal is bechamel sauce.
I wasn’t sure what to make of Brad.  He seems like a sharp fellow and is nearing graduation and lacked a concise answer to “what do you value”.  He doesn’t need one, as I think we’re entitled to a quality quarter century before one needs an answer.  He seems about 10% unsure of himself at almost all times and this can be a useful attribute in the hands of the considerate.  I look forward to (possibly) seeing him again.

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As much as one wishes not to stereotype, there are some common inclinations among people of a given department.  Marketing tends not to be action-oriented but creative and R&D a bit of the opposite.  My new boss mentioned to me that the clock in their area kept falling behind and they were tired of updating it. I changed the battery in it and was greeted as “Terry, Clock Saver”.  This act would not make me worthy of the bards in my homeland.  Later in a meeting, I made a dull pun that made the marketing folks roll their eyes.  That act, on the other hand, would.

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I go through about 1.5 liters of soda a day and have tired of bringing new bottles into work each week. I can feel the receptionist judging me as I walk by with a armload of 2 liter bottles although, being a receptionist, she is judging me regardless.

The setup is simple and operation easy. Here are my thoughts:

  • The notion of “fresh” soda is alien to me. Some things don’t get better fresh. I don’t care about fresh sugar, rice, nice or oatmeal, nor do I care about fresh soda.
  • I’m a procedure person and the quality of bottle to bottle seems hard to keep.
  • I do like the ability to adjust the level of carbonation.
  • Most of the flavors are just far enough off to what they emulate that it’s a bit too ersatz for me.
  • The exception to the above is “Diet Energy” which is a spot on copy Red Bull for about 1/10th the price per serving.
  • The fruity flavors lack in fruitiness.

The cost effectiveness for most of the regular flavors is debatable as a serving clocks in at about 55 cents per liter.  This is only a bit below the 66 cents per liter I pay for name brand when purchased in quantity while on sale and is well above what I would pay for a store brand at around 44 cents a liter.  Iced tea runs me about 35 cents a liter and bottled water 32.  I’m paying for convenience EXCEPT in the case of Diet Energy which is ludicrously cost effective.

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New Boss: Terry, I need you to come to my office.  Having computer troubles.
Me: On my way.
*Walks to office*
New Boss: Something’s broken, I have this meetingnotes.txt file I’m trying to open and every time I do it bring us this minimalist Office thing called “notepad”.  Should that happen?  How am I supposed to make it an outline or change the fonts?
Me: *changes file associate for .txt files to Word* Text files are popular among neckbeards and hipsters, they like it because it’s retro.  You should now be able to work with it and save it fine in Office.
New Boss: Thanks.

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While driving today I saw three cars involved in a collision on the side of the road with no apparent cause.  The only thing I could think was “fucking toe pick”.

If this post makes no sense to you, please read yesterday’s entry.

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Randy, Kelly, Kacey, and I went ice skating at Grundy Arena in Bristol this afternoon.  The rink was poorly attended having less than a half dozen other skaters but with the caveat that the skate shop only had figure skates available for rent.  I put on my size 13 foot shivs and ventured out to the ice.  Things were going well at first until Kacey and Kelly and Randy and I paired off.  The ladies continued at the same speed and chatted while Randy and I lubricated our skates with testosterone and started speeding up.   I was going along well until I heard a grating noise and found myself face first on the ice.  I learned two things in this moment:

1) If I don’t bring down my foot correctly, the toe pick catches the ice and I fall.
2) Falling face forward is almost fun compared to the pain of ass planting.

Randy did something similar during his next lap and for the next hour we took turns face planting and yelling “fucking toe pick”.  My favorite such exchange was me falling while trying to emulate the skating style of someone and Randy then falling when laughing at me.

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I had a few friends over for dinner and I made mention of my annoyance that Lewis Carroll was portrayed as a drug addict:

Me: He was a chemist, you can find the Dodgson reaction as part of Organic Chemistry canon.
Mike: Actually, Terry, he was a mathematician.
Me: Then how did he come up with the Dodgson reaction?
Mike: He didn’t, he came up with the Dodgson  method of vote counting.
Me: Damn, I thought I knew Carroll Dodgson.
Mike: His name was Charles.
Randy: *sensing my weakness* I heard he had a hook for a hand.

From here, we came up with a goodly corpus of non-facts about Charles Dodgson, among them:

  • Lewis Carroll started life as the woman Carol Lewis, but upon turning 18 became a man.
  • Alternatively, Carol Lewis was a boy who became a man in the figurative sense upon turning 18.
  • He had a hook for a hand.
  • The Dodgson method is something you only want to do on someone you’re very close with.
  • He was a noted philatelist.
  • He killed the last dodo by hand.

I felt like a bit of an idiot by the end of the evening reminding me that my good friends make me feel great, my great friends make me feel terrible.

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New Boss: Terry, I hear you have some talent with computers.  We’re looking for someone to do hardcore web stuff for us.
Me: Ok, what kind of things?
New Boss: Setting up and running a web server, maybe some scripting.
Me: Normally I charge $60 an hour for that kind of stuff. *visibly crosses fingers*
New Boss: Can’t pay you that.
Me: Normally I charge $45 an hour for that kind of stuff.
New Boss: Closer.
Me: Normally I charge $30 an hour for that kind of stuff but get to come in when I want and get to work from home sometimes.
New Boss: Great.  I look forward to working with you.

 

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I’ve been meaning to pick up consulting work as a way to cover some expense shortcomings and tonight I was invited to talk to the head of the Princeton Chapter of the American Society for Quality to talk about “web stuff”.  He was a nice person but overwhelmed by the demands of his organization and didn’t want to have to learn any new IT and asked if I could update their web site so he wouldn’t have to.  I asked him what they used and he said it was done on the back of some obscure architecture with a custom attachment set-up.  I grimmaced at having to learn something from scratch but agreed to look at it.

Turns out their “obscure architecture” is WordPress, “custom attachment set-up” refers to the three plugins they run, and best of all they even use the same template that I do.  I like that the ASQ Princeton Chapter and SuburbanAdventure have the same banner image one in five times.