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My experience with my new employer has been delightfully void of ridiculous Office Space-esque farce so when I asked “does anyone have a three-hole punch?” the non-responses took me aback. My boss furrowed his brow and said “well, we have to have them”. We checked the two copy rooms, the supply closet, the mail room, and a few admin assistants’ desks but found nothing. What did we find? 22 two-hole punches.

Two hole punches aren’t entirely alien to me as my previous employer used them for some processes but my current firm uses them for none. My boss and I looked at each other, shrugged, and laughed. At least he found the imbalanced funny as well.

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While my father travels, I’m taking care of the animals which includes a dog, a cat, and a cockatiel. This isn’t time-intensive so much as it’s time restrictive. The cat and cockatiel can safely poop in the house but Max tends to leave… surprises after about 12 hours. Things I’ve missed because of this:

*Barcamp Afterparty
*Drexel Boardgame Night
*UPenn Material Science Night in the Pub
*Philly Start-Up Conference

On the flip-side, I can have people over on a week night and not worry about inundating them with smoke and Jeopardy.  I think it’s a nice break every once in a while.

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Actuaries are everywhere.  Unlock the fishmonger or the literary criticism instructor there are no obvious tells that someone’s an actuary except for maybe them having the warmth of lead shot.  Today, we had visitors from our UK group in and I was simply not prepared for the combination of actuarial terminology like “aggregate small loss protection policies” and Cockney rhyme slang.

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One of the benefits of baking is that it enjoys economies of scale. I can prepare a cookie in about 20 minutes using a toaster oven and a small bowl but 72 in an hour. I can produce about 160 in two if I can get two sets of sheet pans going. Today I made peanut butter cookies and made the 160 cookie double batch. Every time I do this the contents of the stand mixer nearly spill out and I need to integrate the flour with the care of a surgeon. I have no kitchen container that will hold this many cookies short of my 5 gallon igloo cooler and put about 120 in a Rubbermaid tub for work. Some were barely done, some were a bit toasted and not until after I finished did I realize that this was probably caused by the batter warming up as the kitchen heated up.

At work, I put out the tub, and over the course of the day people stopped by to thank me which is relatively rare. About half these people also said something like “you brought in a lot of cookies” and then looked at me accusingly. I guess my coworkers now view my baked goods as a standing challenge.

By the end of the day, about 20 cookies remained and the 30 people on my floor had consumed about 100 of them. That’s not even four per person and frankly I’m not impressed.

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I slept well.

I food shopped.

I ran nine miles.

I showered.

I had my evening plans cancel on me.

I leaf blowed the driveway.

I showered.

Of the above, the penultimate is by far the best. After my evening plans canceled, I decided I wanted to do some home maintenance so I called my brother to borrow a leaf blower. Someone else had it.

Me: Do you have a leaf blower I can borrow?
Dave: Yes, but I’m not home. When do you need it?
Me: Wanted to take advantage of the weather.
Dave: You do have that giant one in the red shed.
Me: Is it something I could operate?
Dave: Yeah, I think so, probably.

And with that vote of confidence, I went to the red shed, pulled out the 8 HP Briggs and Stratton, added gas, and set the “Power” slider from turtle to jack rabbit and I was in business. 8 HP is a lot of power in a leaf blower. How powerful? It was able to blow away a medium sized chainsaw that was under some leaves. It literally blew the grass off the ground in some places. I have never had more fun not knowing quite how to operate something. Leaves would blow away, hit a stone wall, fly up in a plume of air and land on me. I had bits of stone and wood in my hair by the time I was done and had to shower again.

That was fun.

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Yesterday’s party was fun and I looked forward to going to Barcamp proper.  It was held at UPenn, the nicest school that I never went to, and I was in my ersatz attempt at casual with my lone pair of jeans and a button-down shirt.  The venue opened at 8am with food and session arrangement.  Again, we were nerds, we had won.  We made purchasing decisions that would move millions of dollars in aggregate to the chosen vendors.  The food was free.

Bagels and Bacon

 

 

The schedule for the event was somewhat ad hoc.  If you had a session you wanted to run, you’d post it on a card and place an initial time slot.  If people liked that session idea, they would literally put a star on it.  If there were a bunch of popular sessions held at the same time, the organizers would re-arrange.  If all the sessions in a given horizontal were all technical, the organizers would re-arrange.

Da Board

This process of rearrangement went from 8am to 10am and at around 10:15 the event kicked off.

Opening Comments

This was the final board for the event.

Final Board Position

 

 

 

The first session I attended was on surviving Grad school.  Get a masters or appending “PhD” to my name is something I’ve considered doing for while.  The advice seemed useful if narrow.  I’m skeptical of any session presenter that only has data about their experience and only in a particular field.  The second session was held by Kevin Hale who held an interesting hypothesis that design is constrained by the words we use.  He tries to teach his designers words from different languages pertinent to design so they won’t be constrained by their words.

The image below is how he describes the output of allowing engineers to choose color palettes.

Engineer Color Choice

 

 

The next session was on the nature of expertise with Dr. David Timony.
Timony on Expertise
His major contention was that expertise is vastly oversimplifed in terms of the number of hours required to get it.  He thinks a key aspect is drive to be willing to put in that kind of time and generating that kind of interest is hard.  He told a wonderful story of norming.

So you’re a parent of a small child who one day points at a plane.  You think the kid likes planes so you buy them plane toys, plane wallpaper and other plane crap.  Their first word is plane and you have a birthday at an airport because you think this kid is crazy for planes.  What does the kid thing?  “Wow, my parents really like planes, otherwise why would they be surrounding me with all this plane stuff?”

He also didn’t like dealing with the interruption of hands and people calling out so he handed out whiteboards that people could write questions on.  I really really liked this methodology.

Contrasting Technologies
I walked around a bit during lunch and tried to figure out where my partner for the day was. UPenn has a gorgeous campus and I replayed in my head what would have turned out differently if my college finances had zigged instead of zagged. I wouldn’t have been ready and the process would have crushed me moreso than steeled me. Temple had been good to me. Maybe grad school.

After lunch, Chris Bartlett gave a presentation on serendipity in organizations.  He’s an organizer in Philadelphia and struck me as someone who is everyone’s friend.
Chris Bartlett on Serendipity

The session I attended after was terrible and I walked out.  Chris and I met up in one of the areas where people were charging devices.  He asked me what I did, I told him and we talked about statistics for a bit and the areas where I feel people lack important understanding.  We talked about community organization and I posed to him the following:

I work with the Boy Scouts because at the end of the day, my goal is to jam science into children.  I can do that for 200 kids in a weekend but feel uncomfortable having to do a religious ceremony and knowing that none of these kids can have their sisters attend.  Is there a better organization for me to accomplish that goal without that cost?

He thought for a second, and replied:

Terry, I was a Boy Scout and it was something I loved.  It pains me to know that I can’t volunteer for them.  But for now, no, I don’t know anyone where you could better accomplish your goal.  Maybe you should build something.

Today was wonderful and there was a twinge of regret that I had no one in my normal of circle of friends to share it with.  Next year I’ll ask more people and maybe run a session of my own.  I have a few arrows in my quiver from Scouting that I think I could flip.

 

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Barcamp Philly is an unconference somewhat modeled on Friends of O’Reilly (FOO Camp).  Tonight was the preparty sponsored by Zivtech and held in the Philadelphia building which has its obligatory front area art piece.

Vintage Televisions

Most everyone there was a nerd with a profound level of obviousness whether it come from non-standard haircuts, shirts as references to pop culture phenomenon, or men intimidated by women with even a passing level of attractiveness.  I spoke with people and took pictures noting the free venue, the free booze, the free hats, the free shirts, the free glasses, the free notepads, the free food, and the free access to an otherwise locked down building.  Why?  Because we had won.

I want to tell every child with an inclination towards STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) the following:

“You are smart and driven but no one cares about that right now.  You may be alone, you may be angry, you may be underappreciated but if you can safely make it to 25 in one piece you will have won.  You’ll have an expertise, you’ll have some sort of grudging respect, and you’ll probably have a good paycheck because people will be afraid of you.  You know things that they don’t and that scares them.  They will give you what you want to stay safe. ”

This party was a victory celebration of those people.  Once I realized that I very much began to enjoy myself.

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I love my father, but he and I make poor housemates. We each have spots of the house that we consider sacred and whose violation we consider sacrilege. I consider it subhuman to not have the toilet paper on the roller, he considers it a throwback to not always have a clean kitchen towel at the sink.  This week and next, he’s on vacation with my mother, his ex-wife, and the person he’s dating which all happen to be the same person.

Tonight I returned to a house empty of other people but containing a dog that a very happy to see me, a cat that saw me, and a cockatiel that was somewhat adversarial.  This house would be mine for the next 10 days and I celebrated by not changing a thing.

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I finished processing and uploading my pictures from Dragon*con and set about notifying people the people in those photos. At the event, if someone in costume liked their picture, I’d get their email address and contact them when it was posted. Normally, there was a 1-to-1 relationship between a given costume and a wearer except for Thor. I photographed four Thors, all of which wanted their pictures. I wasn’t sure which was which but a bit of Googling helped me identifying two of them. What to do with the remaining two?

There I found myself with the strangest email salutation I’ve ever written: “Dear Thors,”.

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David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas was a magnus opus of language, structure, and storytelling albeit without much of a plot. The movie was a bit more scattered but hammered on the theme of connections in ways the book did not. Instead of there being one character that was iterating across time with a single thread connecting each to the next, the movie had many more parallels and appropriately six people that were implied to be versions hopping across time. The future plot lines dropped much of their invented language and, while this makes sense for a movie, I missed it.

The plot element of the 1830s notary’s good need rippling forward in time also isn’t much presented in the book.

Did I like it? Yes. Three hours is a bit on the long side but that breaks down to a little over a TV episode per each of the six time periods. I’m curious what the film would have looked like if it had followed the novel’s structure of ABCDEFEDCBA directly.