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I’ve been working odd hours for the last few weeks on a project that required little contact with other people.  My normal arrival time was somewhere around 4 PM and 2 AM and most of my coworkers haven’t said anything.  Today, on my way out around 11 AM I ran into the person who runs our cafeteria:

Her: Where have you been?  We’ve missed you.
Me: I’ve been working odd hours and my meal needs haven’t really synced with when the cafeteria was open.
Her: That doesn’t mean you can’t stop in and say hi.

The only person who noticed my absence from the normal work day was the head chef.  I’m not quite sure what this means.

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Me: So, do you plan on seeing the New Planet of the Apes movie?
Joe: You mean Return to the Planet of the Apes?
Carl: Isn’t it Rise of the Planet of the Apes?
Me: Which was the one with DJ Marky Mark?
Joe: I think it was Return of the Rise of the Revenge of the Planet of the Apes.
Carl: Wasn’t it Back to the Return of the Rise of the Revenge of the Planet of the Apes Part II?
Me: No, I remember, it was the Return of the Rise of the Revenge of the Aftermath of the Planet of the Apes Part II Reloaded: Ariel’s Big Adventure.
Joe: Yeah, I think that’s the one.

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One of roles I assume at work is that of inhabitant of a sort of technological Potemkin Village.  While my primary employer does have neat stuff like 3D scanning equipment, an SLA set-up, and some pimp multidimensional visualization software, these are rarely used and never in conjunction, but for tours we pull all these technologies together to give the illusion of living in the near future.  My job also never requires me to use these technologies except to impress people during tours where I sit behind a glass wall and act as if I can’t see the gawkers wearing oversized lab coats as they are dragged around the building to see our “Operation of Tomorrow”.

During today’s tour, a group came by and, having been notified in advance, I was spinning around and arbitarily modifying a CAD drawing of some piece of production equipment by adding a racing stripe, wings, or some other bullshit when I heard a tour participant lean over to the tour leader and say “can he hear us?”  The reply was “yes, but their work requires focus so don’t be too loud.”  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the tour participant lean very close to the glass separating my office from the hallway, squint at the wizardry of my screen and then she waved at me.  I didn’t move in response and she said “He is focused”.  The tour guide indicated that the group would return to this area after visiting elsewhere and I prepared a gift for their next visit: A sign that I posted in the window that said “Please do not tap glass”.

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I’ve run out of reasonably usable space in my office to post pictures so I’ve started putting them on the wall outside my work area.  One of them is probably my new favorite building shot:
Reflections Explained

No one said anything but I received a heck of compliment when someone opened the door to my area and ran into someone who’d be staring at it for a minute.  A picture so good it hurts.

</ego boost>

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Reason #18 of why I don’t like flying is that it’s roughly a coinflip as to whether or not I’ll come down SARS or some other infectious disease from the legion microbe factories called children.  This time the coin came up “Temporary Icy Grip of Death” instead of “Just Fine” and I came down with a wicked case of I don’t know what.  The first notable symptom was chills, which I first countered by wearing one then two lab coats.  I popped the collars so it looked like I was making a fashion statement.  Being surrounded by engineers and scientists, no one noticed.

The next notable symptom is by far the weirdest I’ve encountered.  All music sounded 30% slower.  My first response was to check that it wasn’t a device issue but both songs on the radio and over Youtube sounded slower.  Voice and ambient noises seemed unaffected.

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A mass-mailer to reset passwords usually means a new head of IT or an executive’s info had been divulged because their password was “monkey” or “abc123” so we now needed passwords with a capital letter, a lowercase letter, and at least one digit.  In addition to this, the answer to security questions had to have a minimum length regardless of their actual length; even though my first pet was “Max”, I need to answer “maxthedog”.  I set the custom questions to:

Who is number 1?  “iamnumbertwoyouarenumbersix”
When is a raven like a writing desk? “idontknowthatswhyitisariddle”
Who is phone? “phoneisring”

After all this I had to set my password, so I entered my current one out of habit and waited for it to be rejected as a previously used password yet it wasn’t.  So after all this, the focus on security, the quest to increase entropy, and the need to have a clean start we’re allowed to use old passwords.  Spectacular.

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The mechanical keyboard I use on iMac has made typing a joy.  While not normally one to require constant feedback, each key press comes with the noise of the letter struck saying “bring it, fatty!”  Work is the other place where I do a lot of typing so the second mechanical keyboard I purchased went there.  When I brought it in, I told my coworkers, “this keyboard is loud.  If you find it annoying, please tell me and I’ll use something else”.  My coworkers would then look at me and go “how loud could it possibly be?” and soon learned.  I couldn’t use the keyboard when people were on conference calls but no one complained, until today:

Boss: Terry, do you have a second?
Me: Sure.
Boss: I’ve been, uh, approached, uh by some other people in your area.
Me: Yes?
Boss: And there’s a problem.  Your keyboard is too loud.
Me: But I told everyone to tell me if they had a problem with it.
Boss: I understand, but everyone knows how much you like your loud clicky keyboard and we didn’t want to hurt your feelings so I was elected to talk to you.
Me: Oh, ok.
Boss:  You can still use it when the office is empty or when it’s just me, I kind of like it.  Makes me feel like I’m a newsroom in the 80s.

So now I’m back to a membrane keyboard with its crappy response time, lack of tactile feedback, and painted-on key labels.  I don’t think my coworkers were annoyed, they were just jelly.

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Requester:  Terry, thanks for the prints you made that were twice as big.  How long should it take to get the rest of them?
Me: Well, the regular sized ones took 4 hours, so 16 for these.
Requester: You doubled the size, why not just twice the time?
Me: By doubling the length and width, it’s actually four times bigger.  So, it’ll take 40 minutes a page instead of 10.
Requester: But it’s only twice as big.
(This is what I was afraid of)
Me: When do you need these by?
Requester: Three days from now.
Me: How about I just give you a call when I have them done and I’ll work as fast as I can?
Requester: Now that’s what I wanted to hear.

And the silence after he hung up the phone was what I wanted to hear.

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Me: The marketing folks requested I print another set of posters for them but this time “twice as big”, does that mean 2x area or 2x each axis meaning four times bigger?
Boss:  Terry, you’re dealing with marketing people.  They’ve gotten where they are by ignoring fact and figures and going for what “feels” better.
Me: So you’re saying I need to say which “feels” twice as big?
Boss:  Yes, you could say that.  Which print has twice the presence to it?
Me: Presence?
Boss:  Yes.
Me: You agree that this is utter horseshit.
Boss: Yes.

I concluded to double the axes making it four times bigger, as that was twice the “twiceness” that the requester wanted.  I gave them 100% more twiceness than if I just made it twice the size.  That should make them happy.

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A coworker was taking apart his Roomba today at work and marveling at its complexity as he removed great tufts of dog hair from it.  “It’s not amazing, but it’s mediocre daily, which is better than me vacuuming well once a week” he said to another fellow skeptical of its effectiveness.  “Show me how it works” asked the second guy, so the Roomba was placed on the floor and started.

Coworker 2: I see that it navigates around, but how well does it pick up things?
Coworker 1: Let’s see.  *scatters hole punch detritus on the floor, starts Roomba*
Coworker 2: It doesn’t really pick it up.
Coworker 1: It works on the assumption that it’ll go over the same area multiple times, it’ll get it eventually.

So we waited a bit and none of the pieces appeared to be picked up.  A pen was made around the paper leavings with boxes and the Roomba was placed inside so it could go no where else and still the paper bits stayed.  Eventually, the demonstrator said “I guess paper is hard to pick up” and it was left at that.

Later, a member of housekeeping came by with a dustpan and brush and cleaned up the bits as part of his rounds.  Quieter, faster, and without much fanfare, a von Neumann machine did what was necessary to provide for itself.