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I brought in a fruit-topped angel food cake and for the third week in a row noticed the same theme: The baked good would go largely untouched until lunch and then be devoured in a frenzy. This is in stark contrast to my previous workplace where the item would be consumed at a more-or-less constant rate over the day with a slight bump around lunch. This curve was irrespective of the item brought. For instance, I once brought in meatballs which were entirely eaten before 10:30am.

I wonder what causes this difference. The “now” orientation of engineers? The future discounting abilities of actuaries? Differences in professional courtesy? Just the quirks of the constituent people?

I’m not sure.

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New York Comic Con had a lot of people running around with cameras which I’ll bread down into a few levels:

-Guys with cell phone cameras taking pictures of hot chicks
-Everyone else with cell phone cameras taking pictures of the well-costumed
-Guys with point and shoot cameras taking pictures of hot chicks
-Everyone else with point and shoots taking pictures of damn near everything
-People with cross-over cameras
-People with DSLRs who use flash on everything
-People with DSLRs with off-camera flashes
-Photographers that cordoned off an area to use as a studio
-Businesses that brought their own studios

I stove to be the antepenultimate item on that list but still have a ways to go regarding flash. Even on that rung, there were a lot of other people and we all probably got about the same picture of any given person. So how to make it different?

Here are a few pictures that I thought were unique:

Slender Man Dance Party

Stuck Ones

Wrong Angle
So, I think my style’s going to be “characters out of character”.

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New York Comic Con is the largest of the East Coast nerd gatherings. The convention consumes most of the Javitz center spanning some four blocks. Every continuity in printing comic-dim goes at least somewhat represented and the list of B and C-list celebrities present breaks 100. I don’t read comics nor have I really ever but I like being familiar with them. My relationship with myth is similar in that I enjoy learning about Norse Myth without having read the Prosa Edda. This makes interacting with some fans hard as I can give you the outline of Crisis on Infinite Earths but have no idea how Hawkman was specifically effected.

I’m here for costumes. The excitement and enthusiasm that comes from someone in replica garb is somewhat contagious. It’s also a way of practicing portrait photography under less than ideal conditions. My pictures of the day are below.

[flickr album=72157632155172281 num=30 size=Thumbnail]

I attended one panel today. Compare this to Dragon*con where I averaged six a day. The panels here, in general, were less interesting to me and didn’t seem to have coherent tracks. If I wanted to spend the day talking to Marvel nerds in sessions, I don’t think I could. The lone panel was a short-story reading by Chuck Piloniak <tk his name>. Chuck is known for his graphic short stories and it’s not uncommon for people to faint or throw up during one of his readings. With this in mind, I didn’t feel bad when I felt queasy midway through hearing about terrible sexual misadventures. The reading began and ended with Chuck throwing plastic limbs into the audience. I’m not sure why but this seemed appropriate.

Comic Con had none of the party atmosphere of Dragon*con and this was reinforced by the venue promptly closing at 9pm.

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Me: So, I’ve worked for here for two weeks now and I feel like I have a handle on who you are.
Coworker: That’s good, right?
Me: It’s a false sense. I have no idea who any of you are. I barely know one guy here just because we went to school together.
Coworker: I’ve worked with him for a while and he hasn’t even Facebook friended me.
Me: I guess he doesn’t want you to see the keg stand pictures.
Coworker: Really? I knew he was hiding something. Are you being serious?
Me: No not in the least. The most interesting part of his Facebook profile is a picture of him with various fake beards.
Coworker: I can see why you wouldn’t want that to get out.

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I went to Men’s Warehouse during lunch with the intent of getting new pants. Over the course of lunch, I learned:

  • All flat front pants are now skinny pants
  • Cuffs are not available on cotton pants
  • All slacks there either run $60 or $150 with little in between
  • All store associates there have their wastes about three inches below their nipples
  • “I’m in a hurry” means “I’m going to disappear for long lengths of time somehow in a store the size of a shoe box”

Note to Self: Find new pants place

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We had a department get together today and there seem to be some slight indications as the hierarchy of people’s backgrounds based on an unlikely source.

Person vs. Writing Tablet
Me – Legal pad
Second Newest guy – steno pad
3rd Newest guy – small notepad
ACAS – personal stationary pad
FCAS – sticky notes
PhD – Nothing

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This morning I participated in my first department meeting which seemed harmless enough. Once done, and for the rest of the day except for a short trip out to get crepes, I scrubbed data. A submission from a third party included contracts for whom the important data were spread cross multiple documents and no one had a canonical list of contract names. The names and terms of those contracts would change such that in some places a client’s name were abbreviated and in others not. I came up with a function that pulled things together for analysis but this required repeated VLOOKUPs making it so that running it on the whole range would be something whose completion would be witnessed by my grandchildren.

I asked a coworker and he said this was somewhat standard. I now understand why some of my coworkers drink.

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The banana muffins were well received and I received three inquiries regarding whether it was me or my wife that had made them.

There is a large gap between the programming abilities of my coworkers between those who are Excel, VBA, or r ninjas and those that kind of plod their way through. I’m somewhere between the two and was very glad that, instead of defining a custom function in Excel, I was able to come up with a way of calculating weighted averages in cases where the weights weren’t always present. At my previous employer, I would have yelled “ACTION DINOSAUR WITH HAT” or “hot cha!” but I was new here and didn’t want to look odd.

The following happened over IM:
Me: Does anyone in the office every yell “woooh”?
Coworker: No, but do you want to be that person?
Me: Can I?
Coworker: Proceed.
*I yell “woooh”*
Coworker: Nicely done.

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Today was a task day where I had 12 things to do where I’d be happy if I finished six and wound up finishing four which is more than the three I had set as the “minimum to finish before sleep”. Life’s sometimes about managing expectations.

I baked nut-less banana nut muffins and edited enough photos that I’d only be slightly over a month behind. My dry-cleaning went undeposited, the floor was unvacuumed, and, to my probably future disgust, the kitty litter went unchanged. When the last happens, my free-thinking cat shits outside the box in a show of septic defiance.

While running on my treadmill I realized that I had completely missed the Webelos Weekend. I had no intention on running or providing program, but four the past four years that event had been my first weekend in October and now it had been covered in a pile of tasks including such quests as arranging a washing machine repair and buying new pants. Someone else spent a weekend showing children the joys of science and while I was glad it happened, I was saddened that it was not me.

We choose.

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Kyle Anderson and I caught a nice brunch at a greasy spoon diner in Trevose and caught up. He will be working as a teacher at Mercer County Community College for the next year before starting his PhD program and we both enjoy music and particle physics. He’s a contemporary of mine and I feel we’re within a standard deviation of one another in terms of having a life plan. I respect him and I think he me and if I had to guess we both enjoy that company as we feel out our respective futures.

Late that evening, Suzie and I visited Mike and Kacey at Kacey’s aunt’s and besides booze and chat there wasn’t much to do. I brought up playing Jungle Speed and found a target nearby that had it in limited stock that was still open. We drove there, they had none, and I called the next closest Target to see if they had it. They did and were the only store in the state with any in stock. 30 minutes of 202 and I-95 later we were at the Christiana Mall and I found myself face-to-face with the last six copies of Jungle Speed in the state of Delaware. They were on discount for $9.99 and Delaware is sales tax free so I did the reasonable thing and purchased all of them.