Coworker after hours: Terry, your knees look slimmer.
Me: Thank you, I think.
Coworker after hours: But the biggest chance seems to be *waves at back* here. Yes, your shoulders look less fat.
I’ll take what I can get.
Author: Terry
Scooped
Someone debuted a tool very similar to one I was working on except with the added bonuses of having an awesome publicity stunt, better name recognition, some novel features, and a company that someone has heard of backing it. People I’ve told responded as if I lost a child to measles or whooping cough and I thank them for their courtesy but, much like someone kicking over your sand castle or someone coming up with a similar song hook, it at least tells me that I was on the right track (or they shared my wrong one).
Briefly, I had something neat to work on that was mine. I do again but it isn’t mine in the same way as this one will require more collaboration and involves a lot of me tugging on people’s pant legs and saying “what’s a good algorithm I can use to find the K-th nearest neighbor within an arbitrary point cloud in 4-space?”
A Hypothetical Game
A friend from out of town wanted to meet me at Maggiano’s near the King of Prussia mall for dinner and after meeting we tried to figure out how to get service at the restaurant. The entrance had no door person nor was there a host station. The restaurant lacked a directional sign and a lot of people were milling around waiting to be served and I was completely ignored by the bakery person as I wasn’t properly queued. We went up stairs, and then down again, and then onto the main floor. Finally, I asked the take out person: If I wanted to give your restaurant money after sitting at a table and eating food, where would I stand to be seated?
This struck me as a question that I shouldn’t be required to ask much like a properly designed door should tell you that it’s a push or pull affair. The wait was 30 minutes so we walked to another restaurant where the host station was perfectly recognizable and after a few minutes of standing there without recognition I stopped a server.
Me: Sir, I’m in a very insecure state and need to know that this is where I should stand if I wanted to get a table.
Waiter: Yes, this is the place.
Me: Really? *fist pump*
Waiter: The hostess is here but… distracted. I will seat you.
This made me think she was either chasing butterflies or being nailed in the coat closet, either way, he seated us and my personal need for recognition went away around the time my Caesar salad came out.
Cut-Paste Calamity
Scene: Me, sitting in front of work computer, staring blankly, listening to a beep.
Boss:Â Uh, Terry.
Me: Yes?
Boss: What are you up to?
Me: Mourning.
Boss: Mourning?
Me: Yes. Hear that beeping?
Boss: Yes.
Me: That’s the sound of the UPS for my computer failing. The first time, it went off, it was before a save point in the 20 page work order I was doing. I rebooted the computer once power returned to find the auto-save copy nearly empty as it had occurred either during a cut/paste or while I was pulling pieces together from other documents, erasing my progress. The second time occurred just now and I figure the most productive thing I could do is stare blankly at the screen until my urge to kill subsides.
Boss: Sounds good, I’ll check in with you later.
I love having an understanding boss.
Proof of Progress
Tara: Terry, have you lost weight?
Me: Yes, I have. How could you tell.
Tara: I could see it in your…. *holds her hand near her neck* chins.
I’ll take that as a compliment.
Domains of Scouting
17 months ago, I participated in Woodbadge course NE-V-134, an underwhelming training experience that, given the option, I would choose to not repeat and whose subsequent iterations I actively dissuade most Scouters from joining. The final part of Woodbadge is to compose and complete a ticket consisting of a vision pertaining to your position in Scouting and five goals centered around it. One has 18 months to complete the ticket and I’m in no hurry even if it means non-completion as I feel otherwise comfortable with the hours days I’ve spent doing Scouting stuff since the course. At this point, completing the ticket would be largely to get people off my back about it as ticket completion is pursued by some staff members with a zeal that would impress most millenarian churches. This weekend, 12 people asked me about my ticket but most in the tone that suggested that it was the Scouting equivalent of “how are the kids”. A few, who a friend suggested I call the beaderati, chose a more aggressive stance of “why isn’t your ticket done” and “when are you going to complete your ticket”, both of which are beyond what I consider appropriate for Scouting and at minimum have built in assumptions that are foolish.
To address these concerns, I bought ifinishedmyticketstopaskingaboutit.com that I’ll probably get up and running next weekend should I have time to generate the content to populate it. I’ll make up some business-sized cards on reasonable stock and hand them to those who ask a bit more doggedly than I consider proper.
Hiding Evidence of Housemates
A high school friend who’s helping me learn some aspects of programming was over today:
Him: Terry, where’s your bathroom?
Me: It’s the first door on the left.
Him: Ok.
*realizing there’s a stack of my housemate’s adult magazines on top of the toilet tank*
Me: BUT I HAVE TO SUDDENLY GO MORE.
*darts past him, covers magazine stack with hand towel*
Me: Yes, the bathroom is still there, but do not use the hand towel on the top of the toilet.
Him: Why?
Me: …It’s for my cat.
Smooth, Terry.
Aging Gracefully
My brother has made a coordinated effort to maintain contact with our maternal grandmother who lives outside of Atlantic City, NJ. After 50 years she still has a strong brogue and never got her citizenship which puts her at odds with some diminutive Sicilian in her apartment complex that keeps threatening to submit her to ICE, apparently not realizing that there is a large space between citizen and illegal alien and his miss of this is rendered even more farcical by the fact that he himself is not native born.
Regardless, Ryan has done admirably in keeping her up to date in the goings of our lives and even does a passable impression of a late octogenarian Irish expat when relating stories and once I found particularly moving. When my parents were getting married, she questioned the wisdom of my Catholic mother marrying a generic Protestant as she still describes such non-specific members of the Jesus Brigade the cause of the The Troubles that had occurred from her birth to the time of her emigration. This dislike had apparently worn away over the decades as my brother mentioned that he was now a Methodist to which she simply responded with an emphatic and genuine “Good for you”. There’s also the non-trivial likelihood that she’s not familiar with Methodism, but I’ll take my chances.
Triumph Over To Do Items
It’s been on my to do list for months and was the first item I added to GoogleTasks when that feature debuted. It was on my hipster PDA for the period where I used it and it has always been on my Moleskine. After months and possibly years of noting and forgetting, today I rolled up my sleeves and did it: I finally applied WD-40 to the bearings on my ceiling fan so it no longer squeaks while I sleep.
Limitations of my Radio
My car radio doesn’t always connect properly and no way of holding my phone would lean the contacts correctly for the device to properly make contact, but this appeared to work:
By hanging the phone from a sunglasses hanger the connect seemed to stick except that Joe now had a iPendulum assailing his head and the phone sometimes disconnected forcefully. Â Maybe it’s time to submit an RMA.