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For X-Mas my parents gave me some upgrades for my computer. I had selected these items, of course. There was, however, something I didn't take into consideration. Something I'd never have thought to check. Something, in fact, that I didn't realize until after I had spent roughly an hour swapping equipment in and out of my computer case.
The new motherboard only supports up to two IDE devices.
I guess for most people this might not be a problem. However, counting my hard drives and my optical drives I have four IDE devices. I've never seen a motherboard that only had one IDE port, so I never would have thought to check. I haven't really figured out how to connect the primary hard drive and one of my optical drives at the same time, since they're so far apart in the case. So, while everything technically works, I can't install drivers for, say, the onboard sound and network hardware. I was actually pretty impressed that Windows booted at all, considering I replaced the motherboard and processor.
Looks like I'll be going to Best Buy tomorrow to buy a SATA hard drive.
Posted at: 16:50
[path: /teiac] permanent link
I finally got my grades this morning. I would estimate that I have checked for them roughly fifty times over the past week. I remember my first few years of college, before KU managed to get any kind of web-based applications running, I had to wait for grades to come by mail. Of course, in those days I didn't really want to know what my grades were, and my only real concern was intercepting them before my parents checked the mail.
I got an A in my biology class and a B in my chemistry and calculus classes. I'm sort of disappointed with the B in chemistry, but I'm really proud of the A in bio and the B in calculus. I was pretty worried that I'd end up with a C in calc given my lackluster performance on the final. I guess everyone must have performed pretty poorly on the final. The midterm was curved by 25%, I wish I knew how much they curved the final.
I am frustrated with the chemistry grade, especially because I skipped roughly 1/4 of the lectures and I know I could have done better. But really, I skipped those lectures because I was up all night doing homework...and something has to give at some point. This was pretty much the first semester of my academic career for which I had to apply myself in any real fashion. I sort of had to bootstrap good study habits, since I've never really needed them before.
Could I have done better? Probably. But for now I'm just looking forward to applying everything I've accomplished so far to future semesters.
Mom's response to my grades: "Are those grades good enough to get into medical school?" Thanks for the support.
Posted at: 08:35
[path: /school] permanent link
In two hours I'll be done with classes for this semester. Of course, I'll still be insanely busy studying for finals this weekend, but I am definitely feeling some premature catharsis.
Posted at: 11:07
[path: /school] permanent link
It took me about three hours of tearing my hair out about this e-mail situation before I actually took a look at the headers for one of my severely delayed e-mail messages. It turns out that google is the culprit, mail is getting from sunflower to dreamhost just fine and then when it hits google it sits undelivered for 12-18 hours. It looks like their servers are choking when they try to authenticate where the e-mail is actually coming from, which makes sense really.
This sucks, because I need to have reliable access to my e-mail from a large number of computers throughout the day. The gmail interface is really nice, but if they're going to hold my e-mail indefinitely I guess I'll need to find something else. In the interest of totally overreacting to this situation, I think I'm going to try using Pine for a while.
Posted at: 23:22
[path: /teiac] permanent link
What follows is a discussion of my totally out-of-control e-mail situation. It will almost certainly not be up to the caliber of my normal posts, which have been described as riveting.
So my e-mail situation is totally out-of-control. I currently have about six e-mail addresses that I use, all of which are forwarded to my gmail account because gmail has the best web interface of them all. I don't really know why I maintain so many different e-mail accounts, but since I have them all forwarded to the same place it hasn't been much of a chore to keep up with them for some time.
The most heavily used of my e-mail accounts is my @sunflower.com address. This is because the sunflower mail server supports plussed mailing. This means that you can append "+anything" between the account name and the @ symbol, and it still gets delivered properly. For example, if my e-mail account were [account]@sunflower.com, you could send a message to [account]+whatever@sunflower.com and it would still be delivered. This can be useful because you can tag the e-mail address you provide when you register for websites with a unique marker to help you filter out any spam that you receive as a result. Basically, it prevents you from having to set up dummy e-mail accounts.
Well, a further complication is that I no longer live in Lawrence, so I don't have active Sunflower cable service. Until very recently, my e-mail address was tied to my old roommate's account, since he still worked at Sunflower at the time. When he quit, however, the account passed to his new roommate's name. The result of this is that I lost administrative access to my e-mail account when that happened because I don't know what the cable account password changed to.
And that brings us to the true dilemma: I stopped receiving most of the e-mail that was sent to my Sunflower account. I sort of sat on this for a few days because I was hoping that it would just work itself out. I really didn't want to call Sunflower for support, because my name's not on the account.
However, I noticed tonight that e-mail sent to my @sunflower.com address wasn't being forwarded to my gmail account, but to a third address that is itself forwarded to my gmail account. So I've realized it's actually the third address that's causing the grief, but I have no way to change where the sunflower account gets forwarded to. In my attempts to figure out what's causing the issues with the problem account I accidentally deleted it, and now all of my mail is just bouncing. How am I supposed to know when I get myspace messages without my mail notifications?!?
After restoring the e-mail address at my domain, I don't know what to do next. Mail that is supposedly forwarded from my domain isn't arriving at my gmail account, but I do see mail arriving at my domain. Is it getting forwarded at all? I've tried adding postmaster and abuse addresses because I read that some domains refuse e-mail if you don't have them? It's never come up before, but I'm pretty much willing to try anything to duct tape my precarious situation back together so I can get some sleep.
Posted at: 22:02
[path: /teiac] permanent link
I finally got a new cell phone. Hooray for current technology! In lieu of studying, I've spent the last four hours making custom ringtones and generally figuring out how everything works. Boo...
Posted at: 22:17
[path: /yt] permanent link
The PBS website now has a fairly extensive hatemail page full of letters regarding the documentary I discussed in my last post. A common theme in the letters seems to be that the documentary was not "balanced" enough and had a "Darwinist" bias. I was actually really happy with this aspect of the documentary. I feel that they presented Intelligent Design to the extent of its substance. The fact that there is way more to talk about regarding the scientific point of view really should not be that surprising.
What I found most galling about the cdesign proponentsists was the "oh gosh" attitude they took as they described how they were just trying to point out that there is another "scientific" explanation for the origin of species. No, what you were trying to do was gain a foothold, some precedence for the presence of ID in public schools so that you could unleash a salvo of attacks across the nation. You're no more interested in the balance of science and ID in the classroom than, say, PZ Myers.
I will say that I was sort of disappointed with the tone of the presentation of the plaintiff's case. It certainly smacked of rhetorical trickery. But then, that's the problem with debating ID; your opponents will continually set back the goalposts and feel as though they only need to give you pause for a moment to unravel a century of research and publication.
This excerpt from the judge's opinion of the case sums things up rather nicely:
"To be sure, Darwin's theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions. The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the Intelligent Design Policy."
Posted at: 09:14
[path: /school] permanent link
This week PBS aired a NOVA episode about the trial in Dover, Pennsylvania regarding the teaching of Intelligent Design in a public school, by way of the book Of Pandas and People. I think that anyone who has a passing interest in science literacy or education would find it fairly interesting. It also gives a pretty good overview of the salient points regarding the science vs "cdesign" debate and serves as a good introduction to the intellectual dishonesty of the Discovery Institute.
You can watch the program on the PBS website.
Posted at: 09:31
[path: /school] permanent link
Apparently I'm not cut out for this
On my biology test this morning I mis-identified the anti-parallel ends of a DNA strand. Looks like I should be looking into something a bit more my speed, like Communication Studies...
Posted at: 07:30
[path: /school] permanent link
Look at me still talking when there's science to do...
I had a pretty strange realization on Halloween this year. I asked my mom whether there were many trick or treaters, and she said there hadn't been many for several years. I remember when I was younger there would be an unending flood until fairly late at night, so this was surprising. She pointed out that all of the children from our neighborhood have grown up and moved away. In a sense, our neighborhood has "out-grown" Halloween, which is really sad.
My grandparents lived in Leawood, and I always thought it was strange that there wasn't anyone for miles around that was under like 60 years old. I guess now I know how that happens. It's kind of strange, though, that when we moved here everyone had kids around the same age. I guess it must be that we moved shortly after development ended, so it was still a young neighborhood.
So, nothing really came out of me talking to my TA about my worthless lab group. She said she wanted to wait and see how things would play out this week. This tells me that nothing is going to happen, because there's only two more labs left. I guess I'll just have to deal with it.
Also, I just recently realized that Emacs has a spellcheck mode, which is completely awesome. I write these posts server-side with Emacs, and now I won't have to spend so much time being crazy about whether I'm spelling things correctly.
Posted at: 18:46
[path: /yt] permanent link
Curse you, somaFM, for getting me excited about xmas inappropriately early.
Posted at: 07:39
[path: /yt] permanent link
I had to spend so much time working on my lab report that I didn't have time to launder my clothes. So in addition to hearing my wrath, they will also get to smell my wrath.
I'm actually pretty keyed up for conflict tomorrow, which is kind of sad. Still, no one has given my such a golden opportunity to be a vengeful asshole since Chris Pumpelly.
Posted at: 21:04
[path: /school] permanent link
As an addendum to my last post, I thought I'd include the e-mail exchange I had with one of my group mates this evening.
We normally e-mail around our individual sections by Sunday night. I had not done this because after reading the quality of the work so far, I sort of quailed in the face of all the work I'd have to do. So while I was editing their crap tonight, I got the following e-mail.
hey,
so i still need your section of the lab report!! get it to me as soon as possibe(sic)! thanks
Ashley
And my response:
Ashley,
Yeah, I'm working on it. I am also editing the rest of the report because it is completely unacceptable. I am really very upset right now because I feel as though I've had to completely re-write at least one section in addition to writing my own each week so far, which is why I've put this off so long.
I wonder whether you all are counting on the fact that I will do your work for you, or if you really think this is A-quality work? You could not have spent more than ten minutes on this.
Brian
I thought about signing it "Love, Brian" but I was afraid that would be overly churlish.
Posted at: 20:53
[path: /school] permanent link
For my chemistry lab, I am required to write absurdly long, formal reports about the experiments done each week. Until recently I would write these reports by myself, which took me approximately three hours to do. The past few weeks, however, I have been required to work on these reports with the rest of my group, and we turn in one report for the four of us. I would estimate that I am now spending approximately five hours on these reports, which are of comparable length, because I have to spend considerable time editing the garbage that my group mates churn out.
I haven't quite decided whether they are just lazy and have come to expect that I will totally rewrite their inadequate bullshit, or if they are just stupid and think that this is acceptable work. It is not acceptable work.
The problem is that we all get the same grade for the work. Without my intervention, I'm positive that we would be getting F's on these reports. Since I choose to intervene, we get A's.
We are supposed to write our initials next to the section that we contributed to the report. This situation has actually been the main source of my desire to use the word "churlish." As in, "I really want to challenge my worthless group mates by initialling everything that I actually wrote/revised, highlighting how little they contributed, but I don't want to seem overly churlish." Basically, I'm stuck with these jerks for three more labs, and I don't want things to be really hostile. At least, that had been my concern until this evening. I've decided that I really don't give a shit what they think about me, because I couldn't possibly think any less of them. I've e-mailed my TA about the situation, and I have before and after copies of the past few reports to back up my claims.
Lab tomorrow should be interesting.
Posted at: 20:36
[path: /school] permanent link
Thoughts from a Saturday Afternoon
I've been overusing the word "churlish" recently. I'm not really sure what brought me to this, but since my most common use of the word is "I thought about doing X in response to Y, but it just seemed overly churlish," maybe it's not that I'm overusing the word but that I've been feeling overly churlish recently.
As I was leaving the lab on Thursday night, I heard music in the elevator shaft and when the elevator doors opened I saw a six person band in the elevator practicing church music. I just stood there for a moment, mouth a-gape, and one of them was like "Well, come on in, man!" I faced the wall of the elevator for the entirety of the ride down and beat a hasty retreat afterward. It was pretty fucking surreal.
Since I spend so much time driving between Lawrence and Olathe, I've been listening to a lot of audiobooks to pass the time. I recently finished the Takeshi Kovacs Trilogy by Richard Morgan. I enjoyed that it was sort of a post-cyberpunk/detective/war/revenge story mash-up. I did not enjoy the numerous, frighteningly graphic sex scenes. Most sci-fi writers are pervs, but Morgan really pushed the envelope. I think that it was especially disturbing because of the male narrator's dedication to emoting the text. I would estimate that the most frequently repeated line in the series was "I was hard almost instantly." Sheesh.
We've been without home phone service for nearly three months now. We were going to port our number to Comcast, but after reading some really negative shit about Comcast phone service on the consumerist we decided to cancel. A week after the cancelled installation appointment our phone line went dead, and has been ever since. Both Comcast and AT&T are totally impossible to deal with and are denying any responsibility or willingness to help.
When faced with a large amount of work, I tend to delay getting started in pretty retarded ways like organizing my mp3s, or driving around pointlessly for hours. I think that I may have hit a new low today as I spent several hours trying to teach myself to type in Dvorak.
Aaron is in town this weekend, and we're throwing Britt a birthday party tonight. Callie and Ryan should be there, which is exciting since I haven't seen either of them in years.
Posted at: 12:38
[path: /yt] permanent link
I'm basically in this place right now where if I don't focus really hard, I just lose myself in my work and I lose track of huge spans of time. I cannot believe that it is November.
Today I attended my first ever scientific "seminar." A visiting professor from North Carolina came to give a talk about Drosophila Sechellia (one of the species of fruit fly we use in the lab). I didn't really know what to expect, but the room was packed. There was a small number of faces I recognized from the other fly labs and a ton of faces I didn't recognize. He was discussing his research. Specifically, he is attempting to find a genetic basis for host selection and speciation for sechellia, as well as discussing a lot of background information about the species. It was really interesting, and I was pretty impressed that actually understood almost everything he said, despite my limited experience.
It was also interesting to see the dynamic of the seminar. In addition to people I recognized from other labs, there were a number of GTAs from my biology class. I am accustomed to seeing the GTAs looking harried, so seeing them in their element was kind of neat.
It is absolutely amazing what a difference having a rewarding, stimulating job has made in my life. Actually receiving positive feedback is pretty nice as well. I feel bad, but I've really started to lose the empathy I once had for my friends still stuck in call center and/or retail jobs. I guess I'm just too pampered or far removed, but I just don't even want to hear about the bullshit that goes on anymore. All I can really add to the conversation is "you need to find a new job," and that never seems to help much.
Chemistry test in an hour, and I should be studying.
Posted at: 17:13
[path: /yt] permanent link
I am in the process of importing some entries from older iterations of this blog into the...current...iteration? Basically, whenever I changed templates or CMS engines I would pretty much just delete everything in embarrassment. Reading through some of my older entries here, however, I've realized how much I value being able to look at these snapshots of myself. Y'know, like a journal. Unfortunately, I appear to have made it rather hard on myself, so it may be some time before I'm able to fully restore what was lost.
Anyway, those of you who read this via RSS (Hi, Jon!) may see all of these older entries appear as though they are new, which may lead to some wacky anachronisms. Heads up!
Posted at: 22:00
[path: /meta] permanent link
I have never experienced time dilation to such a degree as I have this summer. While I can sort of remember the specific events of the days and weeks of June and July, everything seems to have blended together into this instantaneous amalgam event that stretches out for years worth of memories. At any rate, this hellish summer is finally over. I managed an A in my calculus class. This is a testament to how excellent a teacher my GTA was this summer, because this class is technically more difficult than Math 115, which is the only class that I have ever failed. I really hope that my GTA for Math 122 is on par with Tim, because I hear that the class is a total mindfuck.
I quit Garmin at the end of July. I hope this can mark the end of my life in shitty, generic customer service positions, for good. Now I'm working as an undergraduate research assistant in a lab in Haworth. I'm assisting with a study of fruit flies, both in terms of behavior and molecular genetics. Some of my tasks are kind of tedious, and a bit gross, like making fly food and fly husbandry, but most of what I'm doing is amazingly interesting and engaging. I'm sure that I'll look back at this and marvel at how naive it sounds, but the fact that my job involves collecting, amplifying, and genotyping sections of DNA, really blows me away.
It's funny, when I interviewed for the job, my boss-to-be warned me several times that the job involved repetitive, tedious tasks. Each time, I just kind of smirked and replied, "I work in a call center." As I said, I hope that my days of allowing anonymous assholes to abuse my intelligence and good will are over. I mean, I understand that in any job there's bound to be some asshole who is going to try to bring me down...I guess what I mean to say is that I hope that I never have to work in a position where my job description involves allowing anonymous assholes to abuse me. Looking back, I can't understand why I kept putting myself in that position year after year, job after job. I guess that's one of the primary realizations that drove me back to school, I realized that the only thing for which I was qualified was letting people abuse me. In October, I had a vision of myself in 30 years, some middle management type for some horrible retail chain, doing the same shit I'd been doing for my whole life so far. I hope that the revulsion and determination that I found then will carry me through all of the very hard work that I'm going to have to put in to see this thing through.
So, I love my new job. This is the first time in my life that I'm able to tell people what I do and not feel embarrassed. That is really powerful.
Posted at: 18:43
[path: /yt] permanent link
This entry is also about computers
So, my parents now have a fully functioning Windows XP installation. Their printer, however, is another matter entirely.
I didn't really discuss this much yesterday, but one of the biggest pitfalls of maintaining my parents' computer is having to deal with my parents. I'm sure that this is not uncommon among people my age, but my parents approached regular use of a computer with a great deal of trepidation1. And while they've both become fairly competent with the use of their computer, they have done so by learning very specific patterns of clicks and button presses that produce the desired result, rather than learning the underlying mechanics. So whenever anything changes they get completely lost, and they get pissed. I understand this, I really do, but when I've spent considerable time trying to un-fuck whatever is fucked on their computer and they start coming at me with complaints that some extremely minor thing has been altered slightly, I can't help but lose my cool.
The printer has been a sore spot for quite some time. When we purchased the computer four years ago, we also got one of HP's All-In-One printers, which is a combination printer/scanner/copier. This thing is a piece of shit, and it hasn't worked reliably since the day we got it. I've tried to explain that swiss army devices such as this are almost always garbage and that we should just get a separate printer and scanner. They mention that the copier function would then be lacking, and when I try to explain that the "copier" is just scanning and then printing, they totally shut down. So when the printer kicked the bucket today, I had to trundle off to Best Buy and try to find the least offensive of the All-In-One devices available. Against my better judgement, I went with another HP. Honestly, this decision was based on the fact that of all of the display models, the HP in question was the only one that was actually able to scan and then print something. I admit this was probably an elaborate Best Buy ruse to trick me in to buying their overstocked device.
In order to install the new printer, I had to first remove the old printer. I drafted my mother for this task, since moving light objects seems to me a fairly inoffensive task. I was not prepared, however, for her reaction to what lurked behind her computer desk when we wheeled it out from the wall. Behind every desk I've ever seen that hosts a computer is a rat's nest of cabling. I know that some people zip tie cables together, but this becomes a total hassle when you need to replace things. My mother was apparently not prepared for this inherent cable jumble, because she lost it when she saw this and began lamenting the state of her house. This did not prove very helpful in the installation of the printer, so I had to banish her from the room so I could get the damn thing over with. As I was sitting among these cables trying to tease out the power and USB cords that needed liberating, I began to reflect on how often doing some favor for my parents has caused me to yell at them.
I mentioned earlier that I do understand why they act like they do, I can see how unnerving it would be to have something change that you consider a fundamental aspect of the way you use said thing. Understanding, however, has not come close to staying my temper. I feel like I'm getting better, though. Yesterday when I needed help finding the backup CDs for the computer, mom claimed to have already given them to me. Since this was not the case, I calmly persisted in asking where, if anywhere, some CDs might be if I did not already have them in my possession. Rather than considering this, she proceeded to assign blame to me for not having them, and wiped her hands of the whole mess. And despite the huge bait laid2 before me, I was able to move on without comment. So, hooray for progress!3
----
1 While looking up the word "trepidation" to ensure I had the correct word, I found the following definition:
tremulous fear, alarm, or agitation; perturbation
I found this pretty funny.
2 I spent about five minutes reviewing the uses of "lie" and "lay" before I could remember the correct one to use here. I'm still not fully confidant I chose correctly. So much for the 35 I got on the English section of the ACT.
3 Regarding the use of footnotes, I've been reading House of Leaves. I apologize.
Posted at: 19:00
[path: /teiac] permanent link
I started using Debian exclusively a while ago. I've had kind of an on again, off again thing for linux over the past five years or so. I'd install it to dual-boot with Windows, and then I'd try to see how long I could go without booting into the Windows partition to see whether I could permanently make the switch. The thing that always brought me back to Windows was that I wanted to play video games, and they just don't really make video games for linux. While it is possible to emulate Windows for the purposes of gaming, it doesn't tend to work very well or reliably, unless the game in question is pretty old. At least that is my experience. So I'd invariably switch back to using Windows full time.
When I moved home in December, I decided that I wanted to quit playing World of Warcraft, permanently. I decided to merge my infatuation with linux with the desire to rid myself of the possibility of easily playing an MMORPG and installed Debian. And that brings us to today.
The point of all of this is that while I've been running Debian exclusively for about seven months, I didn't make this switch because I harbored any ill will towards Windows. I just wanted to try something different, really, and since thinking differently costs so much damn money, I went with the cheaper route.
So it has been interesting that while I've been using Debian, my parent's Windows PC has been nothing but trouble. Until recently I'd been using Windows PCs for the past 13 years or so, and in all that time I have never seen nor heard of a computer with such problems. They're all software problems, and they are all apparently inexplicable. I consider myself to be fairly competent technologically speaking, so it's pretty much only a matter of pride that has kept me from reformatting the hard drive and reinstalling Windows. It's gone on so long, though, that I finally gave in and started the process this morning around 9:00AM.
My mother asked how long I expected this to take, and I said not much more than an hour or so. Well, the time is currently 5:46PM, and I'm still not done. The lion's share of this huge waste of my day was installing Windows Updates, roughly 200 of them, over the course of about four hours. And rebooting every 15 minutes or so.
So while my exodus from the Windows world was rooted in no real animosity, I am now convinced that the work required to install Windows is far more than any inconvenience Debian could possible present me with.
Posted at: 18:00
[path: /teiac] permanent link
So school is in session, and my short love affair with public transit is, sadly, over. At first, taking the bus from Olathe to Lawrence was all right; in fact the novelty of it was kind of exciting. I also felt pretty good about the money I was saving. This ended on Friday when I drove to campus for the first time. There was a test on Friday, and I knew I wasn't going to want to hang around for a few hours on campus without homework to do, so I drove and paid to park. I suppose that since I hadn't yet provided myself with any basis for comparison, the bus seemed like a good option. Now that I've seen the other end of things, however, I have a hard time condemning myself to the restriction of movement and the huge loss of time that bus travel represents. If I drive, I can wake up 30 minutes later, still have time for breakfast, and I get home a full hour earlier. So now I'm trying to decide how much my time is worth; whether I can afford to spend two to three times as much weekly on my commute. Realistically, though, things are not looking good for all this bus nonsense.
---
Calculus has been an interesting experience. It has been about eight years since I've had to think about math any more complicated than arithmetic, so taking the engineering calculus was kind of a gamble. My other option was to take a pair of lower level calculus courses, which would add another year onto the time I have left. So I decided to bet on an ability of which I've never shown myself that capable, the ability to actually put my nose to the grindstone. I've been pretty pleased with the results so far; this class has at once made me feel smarter and stupider than I have in quite some time.
The calculus experiment was also a sort of precursor to returning to school full time. I started out by taking the class that arguably will be the hardest for me, to see whether I could actually become serious about graduating. As of now, I remain cautiously optimistic.
---
I went to see Megan and Sara at their roller derby bout on Saturday. I will admit that I really did not want to be there, but Megan and Sara started in on this almost a year ago, and it's important to them, and I'm a huge sap with no ability to control my own (extremely limited) free time, etc. Really, though, I was planning on making some bullshit excuse but Alex called and said that he was going to be stranded in KC for two hours because Megan had to get to the arena earlier than they would let him in, so I caved. Alex and I got to the arena pretty early, so we had a lot of waiting to do. I commented that this is probably how fathers feel, dragged to whatever ridiculous performance hobbies their kids are into. Alex agreed.
Once the bout actually started, however, I discovered that roller derby is actually pretty fun to watch. It doesn't hurt that it was effectively a number of pretty hot women throwing each other around for my amusement, but the "sport" of roller derby is also pretty damn exciting. It took a while for me to pick up the rules and scoring, but once I understood the basics, I appreciated the game.
---
PS: I am still ripping CDs, and I still haven't gotten my X-Box 360 back from Microsoft.Posted at: 11:34
[path: /yt] permanent link
X-Box 360 - May 20, 2006 - June 3, 2007
WE HARDLY KNEW YE
Posted at: 09:05
[path: /teiac] permanent link
Night Shift, Fruition, and Public Transit
I started my new schedule at work this week, 3:00PM to 11:30PM. I've really enjoyed it so far. I take calls for the first four hours, then dinner, then I answer e-mail for four hours. I wish that I could just answer e-mail all day long because even though people tend to be bitchier through the veil of semi-anonymity e-mail provides, at least I don't have to talk to them. It's also nice because I can listen to my MP3 player for the last four hours. My music collection is feeling kind of stale, though, so I've begun again the arduous process of ripping my huge CD collection. I hate ripping CDs, it takes such a long time that while I'm waiting I keep re-ordering the "must have" CDs for the evening. I guess if I do five or so a day I'll be done in a couple months. I've actually purchased songs on itunes before to avoid having to find and rip that CD.
I find it pretty amusing that there is such a stark difference between the people that work the day and night shifts. The people who work during the day are, for the most part, pretty straight-laced and tend to be a bit older. As soon as 7:00PM rolls around and all of gentle folk go home, the freaks come out of the woodwork to occupy their desks. During the day shift conversations usually tend to focus on weekend plans, sports, children, tv shows, etc. As an example of typical nighttime conversation, here's something I heard last night in reference to the author of an e-mail: "This is the kind of guy that wants you to stick your tongue up his asshole until he coughs."
It wasn't until I moved to the night shift that I realized how uncomfortable I've felt at work the whole time I've been there. It's not that there's anything wrong with my day shift coworkers, it's just that I never felt I had much in common with them. They tend to be true adults, instead of my permanent man-child state, they have kids and real estate and I always kind of felt like I had to watch what I say around them. I haven't quite mastered the "polite society" conversation filter, so when I start to get comfortable around people I can say some "impolite" things. A poor example of this, my mother and I were at Applebee's the other day and talking about people getting married who shouldn't be married, differences in values, etc, and I made the comment "I could never marry someone who was religous." She was surprised and asked if I was serious, to which I responded "I could never marry someone who believed in a god or gods." The previously loud and talkative couple sitting next to us stopped talking and stared at me continusously throughout the remainder of their meal. Oops!
So while it was very nice for a time to have a shift that allowed me some sunlight on my commute home from work, I have to say that I feel much more comfortable with the night shift.
Also, my new supervisors took me out and treated me to dinner last night and we bonded. It was very nice.
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In October I came to the realization that I was very unhappy with the direction that my life had taken thus far, and that in order to break out of the rut I'd worn for myself I would need to make some significant changes. To that end, I moved to my parents house, found a higher-paying job, began saving money for tuition, and made various health-conscious changes. Most of these were geared toward finishing school, having dropped out of college twice already for lack of direction and purpose I spent a long time trying to honestly suss out some core passion that I could latch on to and somehow turn into a career. I'm fairly certain that I've got a firm direction now and after almost eight months of planning and saving, school starts again on Tuesday.
I've started to wonder how I'm going to be able to suppress my old behaviors that have always led to difficulty and disillusion and caused me to falter and fail. I feel confident now that I'm on track, that I can change for the better and finally grow up. But I wonder whether this passion will fade again in two weeks, a month, a year, when I am tired and questioning the drive that takes me to class every morning. Living at home should help this, I doubt that my parents will let skipping class pass without comment. But knowing that I had trouble waking up to drive five minutes to class, let alone walking from Stephenson or the house on Indiana, how much more difficult will it be to wake up for a forty minute commute to Lawrence?
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I love public transportation. That statement is probably pretty ridiculous to those who depend on public transportation on a regular basis, but I've lived in the suburban Midwest my whole life. I never even took the bus to school, so my exposure to public transit is fairly recent. My first trip on a subway was in Toronto in October when I was visiting Justin and Amy. It was probably more the excitement of being in a new city with good friends, but the rush of running to catch the train, jumping off amid the throng of others trying to enter and exit so we could catch our transfer bus, all of it was very exciting. So when I heard about the K-10 Connector bus running from the Edwards campus to the Lawrence campus, I got pretty excited. Having done the math, it looks like it should save me a ton of money, a round-trip on the bus is $3.00 whereas I would spend roughly $8.00 a day on gas, not to mention the cost and frustration of parking. I will have to wake up awfully early to make it to the bus on time, and I'll be stuck in Lawrence for an hour and half after my class gets out. Hopefully that I'll be able to use that time to force myself to study and do homework.
On Tuesday I decided to get up early and take the bus for a test run. Shawn met me at the bus stop in Lawrence and we ate breakfast and ran around for a while until the time the bus was leaving. I can see that taking the bus will give me a whole new perspective on regular travel, with very strict deadlines I'll need to be pretty obsessive about the time. Despite these minor negatives that I'm sure will seem very major in a few weeks, I'm still pretty enamored with public transit.
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I cannot recommend strongly enough that you go read this right now. It really made my day.
Posted at: 10:34
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I think that my two favorite features of Myspace are the ability to see the status of messages that you send, and the button that appears below bulletins that allows you to remove the sender from your friends list. Regarding the status message: this really appeals to my deep well of schadenfreude. It's like impatiently waiting by the phone for someone to call you back, 2.0, people sweating bullets while mashing F5. That bitch has time to read my message, but not enough time to write back?! I wonder if the guy who wrote the Myspace code, Tom or whoever, intended to make people insane or if it's just a happy side effect. I do wish that other forms of communication had the same level of transparency, like a voicemail system that informs repeat callers that, in fact, their messages are being deleted unplayed. Delicious!
Regarding the remove friend button: I wonder whether this feature was available at the conception of the bulletin system, or if it was introduced upon request. It's funny that the coder/s realize how fucking obnoxious receiving bulletins is that they give you a way to sever all ties with chronic bulletineers, but they don't just remove the broadcasts altogether. I suppose they expect that you should police your own "friends."
And that pretty much sums up all that I like about Myspace. Everything else: the non-scrolling background images; embedded audio; horrible polychromatic fonts against clashing background colors; stupid, meaningless, and often misattributed quotations. The Internet Prime, circa 1996. The worst offense, to my mind, is how fucking scene it all is. I guess I appreciate the opportunity afforded to independent musicians, but Myspace is unquestionably the face of hipster posturing in this young century.
Speaking of "scene," I've become pretty sick of the way that I've been acting recently. I'd like to begin with an apology to my friends on the off chance they care enough to read this: I'm sorry for the judgmental prick that I've become. Now this is where you pause to think "You've been an insufferable prick ever since we met." Well, fuck you. It wasn't always this way. I remember a time when this fresh-faced lad, a newly minted high school graduate, approached each day with a smile and a sense of adventure.
I don't want to place the blame for this situation on anyone else's shoulders, but I remember vividly the events that started my descent into ignominy. Stop me if you've heard this before: I met a girl, totally unlike anyone I'd met before. She was my antithesis, while I totally conformed to what one might expect from a white suburbanite in the late nineties, she completely eschewed the mainstream in a way that was totally outside my experience. I fell for her hard. And events progressed more or less straight from the script of any coming-of-age romantic comedy. The degree by which I was in awe of her was matched by how totally she intimidated me, and it wasn't until after she moved to New York that I attempted to express my feelings to her. I began to emulate her attitudes, her taste in music, even her chosen path through college, in what I expect was subconsciously an attempt to become more impressive. What I'm saying is that she deeply influenced the person I became. She had a great breadth of knowledge and experience, and she was a bright and charming person. I have attempted to gain a measure of that breadth, but I feel that it has caused me to affect a world-weariness that I find unpleasant.
I guess that the point of all of this is I feel like I have become a caricature, and I need to find some way to change. I've been making a concerted effort to be less of a dick, but I still catch myself making faces or shitty comments almost on impulse. Anyway, enough of that for now.
Posted at: 01:30
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After deleting all of my previous entries from the bad, old, wordpress days I had resolved to not write anything about my job. While some people would have me believe my work stories were my most entertaining, I found the practice a bit worrying for several reasons. The first is entirely caused by my inflated sense of self-worth: I worry that I will write something that is unintenionally scandalous that will get noticed and bring shame and embarassment down first upon the nice people who give me money and then invariably upon myself.
The second can be explained by my vanity: going to the trouble of writing something and then not shamelessly self-promoting it? You clearly don't know me very well. So what I ran into at my last job was that I would write something obliquely about a co-worker or a call that I found frustrating, and then I'd pass the link around to my friends at work. Pretty much every story that I have to tell is borne from my desire to share how ridiculous people can be. The problem was that I didn't really know how wide my audience was among my co-workers so when something appropriately mockable occured I was unsure whether I could sling arrows securely protected by a veil of passive-aggressiveness.
Related to the first point is also the fact that I seem to recall seeing a sub-heading in the employee handbook that advised against blogging. I must consider that warning means that we shouldn't publish anything about the company because it could be misconstrued as being the ruling opinion of the company at large, which is certainly not how I am trying to present myself.
There we have three very compelling reasons to completely steer clear of posting anything to the internet that is even remotely connected to my place of employment. This is problematic, however, because living at home and saving money to finish my degree hardly make for scintillating conversation. I just can't seem to get very passionate about decrying the people I encounter in the infrequent errands and dinner dates that fill the time between work and sleep. These people are rarely ridiculous at all, they're just shopping or lazilly performing their own simple, unfulfilling jobs.
So, in the interest of living a shame-free, drama-free, and continually employed life, I am not going to write anything specific about my job. Further, I will not pass this along to anyone at work. I also ask that once I finally add the ability to leave comments that any commenters who know me personally please respect this and not identify the company that pays my bills.
With all of that said, I was talking to Justin last night and he reminded me of a story that I told him a few months ago that I thought was worthy of a few paragraphs of melodramatic buildup.
I was speaking with an older gentlemen who had just recently purchased one of our products. As is common for the neophyte, he wanted to cut his teeth on something he knew: setting the device to his home. I held his hand through this process for about twenty minutes or so and I was getting ready to end the call. He said that he just needed one more thing, one last bit of help to satisfy him. He wanted to change the name of this label he created to "home." So I show him how to bring up the keyboard and change the name of the label, when he floors me with the following exchange:
And that was good enough for me!Him: Oh! I misspelled it! It says "Iome."
Me: That's okay, just use the left arrow button to get back to the first character so we can change it.
Him: *muttering incoherently to himself for about a full minute* Oh! Okay, I got it. *begins to read the alphabet to me as he is cycling down through the letters* I, J, K, L, M...okay, I got it!
Me: *shaken, struggling between wanting to set this right and wanting to not talk to this man ever again* I'm sorry, I'm pretty sure that was an "N." *internally: GOD DAMMIT WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME*
Him: What? No, it says "Home," just like I wanted!
Posted at: 21:32
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In the interest of jumpstarting my return to academia early, I decided to take an online course from a local community college. Amy gave me the idea, she mentioned that a friend of hers had taken several classes online that transferred back to KU for full credit. So I spent some time looking through the list of transferrable classes and found that I could take a class that would cover my Western Civ II requirement. At least, that's what I thought I found. I would later discover that they added to the transfer list a notice indicating that one must take both the class in which I was enrolled, as well as another class, offered only in person, in order to fulfill the Western Civ II requirement. Now, most people would be reasonably upset at this turn of events. I feel that in order to fully communicate the sorrow and rage that I feel, I must describe how utterly ridiculous this class had been.
When I was in seventh grade, I had a class called World History. This class was a far more competent survey of history than the community college class I just endured. We were given weekly reading assignments, and a list of quetsions to answer. What made this unique was the apparent insecurity of the instructor. Each assignment had at least one question intended to make us apply what we'd learned (read: nothing) to our contemporary lives. The questions were also frequently worded to double as a reminder of the absolute importance of the study of history and historians. For example:
Our examination of the slave trade can show how vital the study of history is to our contemporary selves in that historians show us how not to repeat the crimes of our past. Write a few sentences providing evidence to support this claim
Ug. In addition to this, he would make exhaustive use of abbreviations such as "HL" (historical literacy) that would require trolling through everything he had previously written to find a definition.
The worst by far, however, were the assignments that required that we write a few sentences from the point of view of whatever culture we read about that week, making sure to identify who we were in the process. So...roleplaying? For college credit? That was the plan anyway.
Needless to say, I dropped the class the moment I found out it wasn't going to count for anything. I had a hard enough time forcing myself to do the homework when I thought there was a point. Here's hoping that my return to actual college work will be a bit more stimulating.
Posted at: 08:45
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Hello, you may remember me from such infrequent entries as my comments on the decapitation of K-State fans, or my description of my trip to Toronto.
A lot has happened since last we spoke. I spurned independence by moving back in with my parents in order to more effectively save money for tuition. I feel like I've regressed about a decade, and for some reason need constant validation for every decision I make. Not really sure how that happened, but it's pretty disconcerting.
I'm enrolled for the Summer, or should I say that I am currently enrolled for the Summer. Every aspect of getting readmitted has been an incredible hassle. I've had to call the Registrar's office about five times since December and argue with minimum-waged freshmen that answer the phones.
Spent the weekend painting my room. I spent around five hours taping the unpaintables and doing all the fine detail work. I left to get some dinner, and when I got back 20 minutes later I found the room totally painted. Turns out the roller work is a bit less intense.
I'm playing with a new CMS that is a lot more lightweight than wordpress. I got tired of it taking a minute to two for my pretty minimalist wordpress installation to render. Things are kind of basic as of the time of writing, but I should be able to spice things up a bit
Posted at: 18:21
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