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I found out that I share the train with Yet Another Coworker and we talked about the a recent weight loss competition held at work.

Me: I heard you won.
Him: Yeah, I looked at the participant pool and built a stochastic model guessing how much each could lose taking their travel schedules and past performance into consideration. I figured I had a 90% chance of winning so it wasn’t a life improvement thing so much as easy money.
Me: Wow, hey we just missed our train.
Him: Not quite, follow me. *jumps onto about to leave train going to next station*
Me: This isn’t the right line.
Him: But it stops at Market East station next too. The trains are variable enough that we probably have a 50% chance of our train losing 10-15 seconds vs. this one allowing us to pick up the train we missed.

I work with people that are smart, people that are wise, people that are clever, and people that are cunning. I’m glad for that spread.

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On Friday, I had picked up a washer/dryer set from an appliance warehouse in Freehold, NJ. No one was there to help and I was glad I could move the set myself. This had led me to think of the large Terry of yesteryear as iron and my current incarnation as aluminum. I’m now lighter, stronger, better able to dissipate heat, but brittle.

Today was the first chance I had to try the set and I am pleased with its performance. My favorite feature is either the fact that for the first time in a month I can get fresh underwear without leaving my house or the little whistle noise it makes when the cycle’s done.

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My theoretical future manager at work is out on leave so my hopper is filled, largely, with random tasks that fall off of other people’s plates. I didn’t have much to do except for training and when a coworker popped by saying “are you busy?” I said “no”. “Good, I need you to come up with a proof of this transformation we’re using because the source data is wonky. Someone vaguely remembered an equation from an actuarial paper published in the 80s or maybe early 90s in one of these two journals. Find it, verify the proof, and tell us if we’re doing it correctly”.

I had gone from copy and pasting worker compensation growth rates from Excel to Access to verifying math with symbols I hadn’t even seen before. I wonder if this is the source of many of my coworkers claiming that there’s “never a dull moment” at my workplace.

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Tomorrow night is my 10th High School Reunion and I will be out of town for it. This morning I had five four people, most of whom I’d seen once or twice in the intervening decade, over for brunch and we caught up.

A decade is a tidy time over which to review the question of “what have you been up to?” It’s a span of time longer than the entirety of US involvement in WWII, longer than it took for the Beatles to do all their collective works, and long enough for a child to go from birth to 4th grade, yet an answer of “not much” seem entirely plausible. On the other end of the spectrum is the answer of “keeping busy” which can lump everything from parenthood to completing a PhD thesis into the same gray lump. We shared stories, gave a run-down of our respective life CVs which sounds redundant, and I kept the dessert trays moving.

The morning was wonderful but the french toast was over done. I hope next time the bread comes out more custardy.

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Thanksgiving passed without incident. So much so that I had some line left in my drama rope and decided to install Windows 8 on my main desktop. Even that went smoothly. Hm….

My uncle came up from Delaware and appetizers and cheeses came out at around 3pm. The turkey was done by 6pm and everything else was done and out for the dinner proper at 7pm. I am currently eating low carb and couldn’t have any of the desserts I had made, but my uncle had brought a cheesecake and a can of whipped cream. Whipped cream, while tasting sweet, has almost no sugar in it. The whipped cream didn’t survive the night.

Everyone left after a main course of three meats at around 10pm and on the way out my uncle looked at me and said “I just realized, you did everything tonight. Thank you, Terry?” This moment of “I’m Ron Burgundy?” was more touching than strange. At no point prior had my uncle reason to really thank me. He was the uncle that gave the great Christmas presents, he was the uncle that hosted the best game night parties, he was the uncle that had the pool. Now I was the nephew hosting Thanksgiving.

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Kelly Booz is pregnant and tonight brought over her ultrasound pictures. I have seen ultrasound pictures before but never have they had such immediacy. Kelly asked me to make a copy of the odd-sized output and I did. Randy swore they were higher quality, somehow, than the original print and we both shrugged.

Photocopies, this is what I offer to you, little future person. In 10 years, if they are still available. I hope to buy you your first chemistry set as well.

Godspeed, Kelly and Randy.

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Fudge in an exercise in seeing how small you can get sugar crystals. You do this by interfering with crystallization by mixing multiple sugar types, letting the fudge get as close to solidifying without touching it and inducing crystal formation, and finally by beating the hell out of the fudge after it’s cooled.

The fudge I wanted to make is a maple walnut fudge because
1) it tastes like Vermont
2) sugar is a cheaper input per pound than chocolate

I generally prepare double batches as baked goods scale and I like to feed people. Normally, this saves time, normally. The recipe called for the syrup to be brought to 240 degrees and at 230 degrees the mixture boiled over. I transferred the mix to another pan after cleaning up a lot of burned sugar I began heating it again. At 230 degrees the mixture boiled over and I thought “why did that happen? I heated it slowly” not remembering that heating rate in no way changes boiling point.

Good job, Terry.

I poured the mixture into a very high stock pot and boiled it directly to 240 degrees. Good thing I went to school for chemistry.

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I came into work, sat down, booted my computer and started my day to find that I had no network access at work. I asked around to see if anyone else was affected, tried to another work station to no success, and finally called technical support. They said they’d be a while so I had to bide time until a technician came around. I informed my coworkers of my plight and each offered to give me work to do.

The first had nothing because I couldn’t get on the web.
The second had nothing because I couldn’t access the network drives.
The third had nothing because she needed to email me something.
The fourth had nothing in general. I mentioned that no one else had been successful and he took this as a personal challenge. 10 minutes later he came back, he was frazzled, his shirt was untucked a little, and he seemed spent.

“Ok, Terry, please update these HTML files with a new batch of images you can make from screen caps of the Excel file on this this thumb drive.”

The drive was 512mb. It was old. I plugged it in and it failed to open. Later I got internet access back, googled the drive and found out the software the thumb drive used worked with nothing beyond Windows 2000. Next time there’s a network outage I think I’ll just take the extra paper kicking around and make a paper mache seat cover.

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I couldn’t sleep by midnight and decided now would be an appropriate time to rebuild my team’s TF2 servers, while on my treadmill. I had created a new master copy that the updated servers would be based on and now I just had to overwrite a few thousand files and re-apply the tweaks that made each server unique. This took another four hours and another eight miles. Once the servers were updated, the peripheral services had to be updated and this took another two hours and four more miles.

I took a nap, met someone for breakfast in Philly and walked around the Pennsylvania Convention Center. After that, I dropped off my car to be serviced, walked to the AMC Neshaminy to buy tickets, and then walked to Red Robin to meet some friends for lunch before seeing Skyfall. It was 2pm and I had put 30,000 steps on my pedometer.

Between my current commute largely consisting of driving to a train station and heavy walking days like this, there are streaks of days where I walk more than I drive. I smiled at this until I got the bill to get Wanda serviced. Maybe I should drive more.

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Me: Hi, my name is Terry Robinson.
Secretary: Hi, Terry, what can I do for you?
Me: I’m here to declare my intention to win the Holiday party.
Secretary: What do you mean?
Me: It’s a potluck, no?
Secretary: Yes, but it’s not a competition.
Me: That’s what losers say.

Side Note:

No one at work says “good night” when they leave for the day. I was annoyed by this at first until I realized that leaving people have no easy way of knowing who’s still in. I suppose one could just yell “good night” into a seemingly empty office but I can see how someone would be opposed to this.