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Saturday, November 28th, 2009
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7:58 am - things you didn’t know about drugs, part one
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This happened to Steph, but I had a minor role in it. Something she didn’t mention: She was really, really freaked out when she called me. At least part of that has to do with the fact that many of our favorite films feature a plotline similar to “a guy comes into possession of some drugs that don’t belong to him, and wacky hijinx ensue.” Even if that wasn’t so, I think it’s best to be wary of any situation that puts you in opposition to people who break the law for a living.
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| Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
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10:20 am - a tale of two shows
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I watch so little television that it effectively rounds down to zero. Here’s the only exception I can think of: I watched about half of the first season of “In Treatment” while I was living in east Nashville, but none of the patients in the second season were very sympathetic, so I stopped.
I did watch all of “The Sopranos.” I didn’t have cable during most of its run, so I bought the boxed sets at the end of every season. I was always in a big hurry to get them, so I paid full price, sometimes up to 80 bucks a box. It’s my favorite show of all time, and the only one I’ve watched in the last two decades, so it was worth the money. Steph and I went through the entire run of the series together. Took us about six months. I’ve seen every episode at least three times.
Worst moment of the whole show. Nancy Marchand, who played Tony’s mother, died between the second and third seasons. The people in charge made an ill-advised attempt to create one more scene between her and Tony, using a body double and footage from earlier episodes. It was incredibly hokey. It pulls me right out of the narrative every time I see it. They should have let her character die offscreen and been done with it.
Best moment of the whole show. At the end of the fifth season, Tony meets Johnny Sack at his house. They are standing outdoors, talking business. It’s winter, there is snow on the ground. Without a word, Tony runs out of the yard at full-speed. He drops his gun into a snow bank. Cut to a crapload of New Jersey police, descending on Johnny’s house. Tony gets away, Johnny doesn’t. I’m not sure why I like that scene so much. The normally composed Tony Soprano being reduced to acting like a criminal, perhaps?
And then there was The Ending. David Chase swears he was just doing his best to tell the end of the story, there was no attempt to cause drama or anything, but that’s not how it looks to me. I think it was out of character for the show and I didn’t like it.
I’ve heard various people say that this or that season was The Poor One, where it got boring or not very much happened or whatever. I never agreed with that. I thought every single episode was enjoyable.
That was all an intro to what I really intended to write about: “Mad Men”. I was intrigued due to the fact that about 60 percent of its writers, directors, and crew members were veterans of “The Sopranos.” There have been many mentions on the web, none of which dissuaded me from thinking it might be pretty good. The first season box set contains the same amount of material as a season of “The Sopranos” -- 13 episodes of about 48 minutes each -- yet costs only 20 bucks. I spend more than that on a single trip to a restaurant. I just finished watching the first season.
The parallels between the two shows are hard to miss. The protagonist is a powerful, charismatic, self-made man who is doing well in his chosen profession, but he’s not yet at the top. He’s married, he has kids. He has lots of secrets and many mistresses. The people he works with cause him considerable angst. He struggles mightily to vanquish his foes and keep rising through the ranks. His wife wants things from him that he’s not quite prepared to give. His past is retold in numerous flashbacks.
The thing I liked best about “The Sopranos” is that it never resorts to cheap clichés. There is no swelling music to tell us how to feel about things. There are a million little shortcuts that TV writers use that make that medium depressing and inane, none of which David Chase and friends ever stooped to.
Sadly, “Mad Men” only usually avoids those clichés. Most of the musical score is bland, uninspiring, and pushy, nearly indistinguishable from any other TV score. The show would be better off with no incidental music at all. The writers occasionally attempt to manufacture drama where there isn’t any. In one scene, Don Draper is staring into a drawer, and we’re not allowed to see the contents. The subtext is loud and clear: “Could he be looking at A GUN? Oh my GOD, would Don resort to using A GUN to settle a situation like this?” Bleh. One of Don’s mistresses is surrounded by a gaggle of lame, flat, beat-poet wannabes that Don wouldn’t waste five minutes with, if he were behaving in character. The flashbacks involving Don’s childhood are sentimental fluff, more often than not, populated with one-note two-dee characters.
There’s one area where “Mad Men” is clearly superior, in my opinion. David Chase has a thing for “classic rock.” Almost all of the featured songs in “The Sopranos” fit that mold. He chose the best that genre has to offer, but, well, that’s still not very good, is it. The best thing I can say about “classic rock” is that it’s moribund, almost by definition. Featured songs in “Mad Men” are usually jazz standards. Despite being decades older, the featured jazz tracks seem much more fresh to me.
All things considered, I guess I’m willing to give “Mad Men” the benefit of the doubt. This is the first time Matthew Weiner has had a show of his own. Maybe it turned out to be harder than he thought, and he had to cut corners here and there. And he wrote for “The Sopranos,” which has to count for something. As a matter of fact, it was his “Mad Men” pilot that convinced David Chase to hire him. I have ordered the second season DVD box, which also costs only 20 bucks.
UPDATE: I have now finished watching the second season. My qualms have almost entirely been laid to rest. Don stopped hanging around with the hippie girl, so all her beatnik friends disappeared with her. There have been no further childhood flashbacks. The musical score is still largely tinkly wistful nothings, but there is thankfully very little of it. They’ve started looking outside jazz for featured music, and they are exhibiting good taste.
When looking for motivations for why things happened in the first season, the answer I came up with far too often was “Well, it makes Don appear even more dark and mysterious and conflicted, doesn’t it.” The second season is more plot-driven, so there’s less time for Don to stare into his own navel.
My early reactions were often some variation of “Why can’t this show be more like ‘The Sopranos.’” Now I can think of an objection that’s the other way around. In “The Sopranos,” there is scarcely a single character that isn’t a sociopath. Even people who are ostensibly on the same side will sell each other out for lunch money, or less. Most of the “Mad Men” characters are actual, functional human beings. You can genuinely root for them to succeed, and not just ironically. Peggy (Elizabeth Moss) is my favorite of the bunch. She started at Sterling-Cooper as a secretary, got some part-time copywriter work, then became a full-time copywriter, then got her own office and her own secretary. I can feel good about her progress without feeling slimy about it.
So that’s it, this show has fully captivated me now. I’m trying hard to avoid buying the third season on iTunes, because I know I’ll also buy the DVDs when they come out. And I guess I’m back to paying full price.
UPDATE AGAIN: I couldn’t resist, I bought season three on iTunes. BEST SEASON EVER. It’s going to be a long wait until season four.
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| Thursday, October 29th, 2009
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1:06 pm - microsoft II: the brainoring
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So I did the Microsoft phone interview yesterday. Four and a half hours or so. They told me nothing ahead of time, so I didn’t know it was going to be four interviewers, one hour each. Actually it was closer to four and a half hours, because a couple of the interviewers enjoyed torturing me so much that they went over a bit. The internet connection I have where I’m staying barely works, so I went to Portland Brew in East Nashville. A perfect spot for this. They have a big well-lighted upstairs room that’s far away from the front door, not many customers, and strong wifi.
The interviewers wanted me to install Microsoft Windows Live Meeting, but fortunately for me there is a java applet that runs in Safari you can use instead. I was afraid that the java version might have some limitations compared to the native client, but if it does, I didn’t notice them. In fact, there was a guy who works at the recruiting firm who sat in on the interview who did install the native version, and his experience was horrific. He said it took him over five hours to get it to work and he couldn’t see most of the diagrams the Microsoft interviewers were drawing. All I had to do was point Safari at a particular URL and it worked fine.
My worst fear was that they’d haul out the famous Microsoft brain-teasers. The most notorious of the lot is “Why are manhole covers round?” I’m sure they’ve had to retire that one, everybody knows it. Here’s another one I just googled up: “How many cars are there in the U.S.A.?” Fortunately for me, there was none of that nonsense.
But programming problems! Oh yes, lots and lots of programming problems. The night before, I gave myself a little pep talk. Part of the reason I do badly at this type of interview is that I am a classic introvert. I don’t like having my guts dragged out for other people to gawk at. So I had to remind myself that it’s okay to look stupid. The whole point of this type of interview is to give you questions that you can’t solve or haven’t seen before, and see how you attack the problem. I’m less of an introvert than I was five years ago, so this is less of a problem for me now.
I did pretty badly with the first interviewer. The first exercise was okay. He drew a theoretical program window on the Live Meeting chalkboard, and asked me to write a class to operate it. I did okay on that one, but I used old-fashioned “raw” Objective-C to do so. Then he wanted to know if I could do the same thing with bindings. I had to admit that, no, I have no experience with bindings. They don’t work on the iPhone and that’s where I’ve been doing my Cocoa programming lately. Then he started in on his second problem. You’ve got a 24-bit image file, and you want to dither it down to a 256-color palette. Here’s a sample list of palette entries and a sample RGB pixel from the image. How do you match that pixel to the closest palette entry? I came up with a matching algorithm that wasn’t completely embarrassing, but it wouldn’t work. There were other permutations, like how can you sort the palette entries for fastest access when doing the color lookups. I did really badly at all of that.
First hour over. The interviewer says “I see that our time is up” and exits the live meeting thing. I figured that my supposed four-hour interview had gone so badly that they’d terminated it after only an hour. I started packing up my Macbook. The guy from the recruiter calls me and says: Hey, misunderstanding, you’ve still got three more interviewers.
I did better with the second guy. He spent a fair amount of time grilling me about my Mac programming experience. I have a lot, but B-level cube farms are not willing to consider most of it valid, because the large majority was things I did on my own time, rather than for an employer. Incredibly, they seem to think that if a big corporation didn’t pay you for it, it doesn’t count. That attitude is so wrong I don’t even know where to start. Good companies realize that stuff you do on your own time is a far more valuable indication of initiative. It says you care so much about a particular subject that you’re willing to devote your own time to doing it. To Microsoft’s credit, they were perfectly willing to accept my homebrew projects as valid.
Then the programming exercise. Input an integer, convert it to a Pascal string. I breathed a sigh of relief. It sounds pretty straightforward, I can do this. I start by typing this into the live meeting thing:
typedef char PascalString[255];
void IntegerToString(PascalString* string, int integer)
{
char* text = string[1];
text = itoa(integer);
}
and the interviewer says “Oh, and you can’t use itoa().” Sigh. This is why programming interviews are so tedious. They don’t want you to write actual code that might be useful today. They want you to write code similar to stuff we were doing back in the eighties, before most languages had good libraries. Now that I think about it, that applies to the RGB palette question as well. Who would write something like that today?
I wrote a loop that could pick off the individual digits of the integer, no problem, and stuff them into the Pascal string. The interviewer challenges me to notice what’s wrong with my solution. It dawns on me: the usual way of picking off individual digits from an integer results in getting the low-order digits first, which means that they are backwards in the string. Now the problem has devolved into the age-old “write a method to reverse a string in place” exercise. My second-worst nightmare. I struggled mightily, glancing longingly at the clock in the Mac’s menu bar, praying for the hour to be up. I got it mostly-working by the end.
The third guy was my most sympathetic. He remembered that he had been in on my first phone screen about a week ago, but I didn’t really remember him. Phone interviews force you into an unnatural state; for me that means my mind isn’t working as well as usual. He was more laid back than the rest of them, and a little world-weary. I liked him. His first two programming problems involved bit-twiddling and recursion. I’ve done plenty enough of those things to come up with serviceable answers.
His third programming problem was my only stroke of luck all day: “Write a method to detect a loop in a linked list.” I got this exact same problem in my interview with OpenWave, eight years ago. Also, I did a tiny amount of googling for programming-related interview questions last night, and this was the one and only question that had a simple enough answer I could remember. So I had the perfect algorithm already in mind, it was just a matter of futzing over the details. (Here’s the answer, in case you’re interested. Write a loop with two pointers that traverse the list. In every iteration, make one pointer move forward by one link, while the second one moves forward by two. If the two pointers ever become equivalent, then the linked list contains a loop.)
Then he posed some language-lawyer-type scenarios involving C++. Things where the answers involve knowing what is-a and has-a relationships are, what private inheritance is good for, stuff like that. C++ is vast. I'm familiar with maybe 20 percent of it. Fortunately for me, all his questions were within that 20 percent.
His final question was a scenario that involves connecting circuits to each other to sort a list of numbers. I guess this was technically a brain-teaser, but enough like programming that I didn't feel cheated. And finally, this guy was finished with me. He went over by about 15 minutes.
The last guy of the day asked me about my programming experience again. He allowed me to go on at length about how I implemented my card game, which I enjoyed. His sole programming question was, I think, the most relevant of them all. Here it is: reimplement the NSObject method valueForKey: from scratch. Here is the relevant documentation on Apple’s site. If you’re following along at home (hi Alex!), the description I had to work with starts with “Default Search Pattern for valueForKey:” and contains five very detailed and exhaustive rules. I struggled mightily with this, moreso than the other programming problems, because this one seemed pretty close to something I might actually have to do in real life, in this decade. I spent close to an hour on it and got maybe 15 percent of the problem solved. So this interviewer ended up going over the allotted hour as well.
Whew, what an experience. I had been pretty focused the whole time, so I didn’t notice until it was over that my back hurt. I think I had been holding myself in a tense posture for the entire time.
I tried to get out of this, but now I’m glad I didn’t. I certainly did better this time than on any other programming-related interview I’ve ever done, which I attribute to finally being willing to get dragged into the thick of it. I’m still ambivalent about Microsoft, and I have no idea if I’ve made it to the next level, or if I even want to. But it was a positive experience. I’ll be recounting this story for years.
update: feedback from Microsoft via the recruiter is that I “had some trouble with the problems.” I would have felt obligated to take this if they’d offered it, so I’m a bit relieved.
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| Thursday, October 15th, 2009
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7:46 pm - never smile at a crocodile
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A series of weird things happened to me over the last few days.
1. A recruiter called me with a Mac developer job in the Bay Area.
2. I said sure, what the heck, put me up for that.
3. I’m scheduled for a phone interview. Two hours before the call, the recruiter tells me that the employer is Microsoft.
4. I do not immediately tell him to forget it. Mainly because I sort of felt sorry for him. People from this company have been calling me for four years now, dozens of times, and this is the first phone interview. I just didn’t have the heart.
5. I stew for two hours. I imagine what Microsoft developers must be like. Do they have horns? Red skin? What sort of animals do they sacrifice?
6. Despite extreme trepidations, I go through with the interview.
7. It is in fact the most pleasant first contact I’ve ever had with any potential employer, ever. I was babbling like a giddy schoolgirl ten seconds after being asked the first question. The guys I was interviewing with really, really get it. We spent a significant amount of time discussing industry gossip, like the recent debacle at Danger, which was acquired by Microsoft a while back.
This might not seem so strange to you if you don’t know me well. You have likely never met anybody more virulently anti-Microsoft than I am. They have done more to retard innovation in my chosen field than any other company in history, in my opinion. One of the reasons I am a Mac user today is because I made the decision to live a Microsoft-free life, over ten years ago. And now I am seriously considering moving to the Bay Area to work for them.
The job would be slightly north of six figures. That’s not so much in the Bay Area. That’s like 70 grand in Nashville. I would get my own office with a door and a window. I would be allowed to use a Mac. I would program for other Macs. I would not have to sully myself with Windows.
Working for Microsoft’s MacBU is major-league stuff. There is nobody in the Mac programming field who doesn’t know about them. They make Word, PowerPoint, and Excel for Macs. I would guess most of my peers have at least a grudging amount of respect for the MacBU. Once you are in the big leagues, it’s a hell of a lot easier to jump to another major-league company.
Hundreds of famous high-profile companies that make software for Macs, and the one that contacts me out of the blue is Microsoft? The only company in the world I dislike enough to instigate a decade-long boycott against?
It’s cute, the way fate conspires to make me look stupid.
update 1: Made it past the phone interview. Not sure what happens next.
update 2: Told the recruiter I’m really not up for doing the all-day code-on-the-whiteboard interview that I would inevitably have to submit to. Perhaps I’d be willing to go through such an inhumane process for some other company, but definitely not for Microsoft. He says I still have to go through at least one more level of phone interview, to save face with the people who feed him leads. Okay, fine.
update 3: I’m told that the second phone interview will be four hours long. What have I gotten myself into.
update 4: Was supposed to have the four-hour interview on Tuesday, but they stood me up. I’m guessing incompetence on the part of the recruiter. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time I’ve gotten that vibe from them.
update 5: Interview rescheduled for Wednesday. I’m told that I will have to download and install some kind of teleconferencing software beforehand. Funny that they didn’t tell me that before the first scheduled interview. Later, there’s an email with details: the software they want me to use is Microsoft Windows Live Meeting! Remember, I am interviewing for a Mac job. The urge to tell all these idiots to go fuck themselves is nearly overpowering.
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| Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009
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12:22 am - my girls
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 | polly
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AUGH. Steph has gradually been on her way out for a while now, but until today, I got to keep Polly. This will be the first night I’ve been in this house in almost two years when both of them are gone.
When the dog is here, I tend to think of the bad stuff. Like the fact that she can’t go outside for a leak without me taking four trips downstairs, the middle two because she got her lead wrapped around something for the umpteenth time. Now that she’s not here ... if I go into the kitchen right now, it will definitely NOT be daddy-and-Polly-snacktime.
This gets more shockingly real all the time.
Still, this has been a good experience. I used to like dogs and cats equally. Now I know I’m a dog person. A cat is an elaborate house decoration, like a lamp. A dog is part of your life.
Steph is doing much better today than she was when she got here from Houston, and that’s true for Polly as well. The dog used to be a nervous wreck. She did okay with humans, but she was wary and defensive around other dogs.
One day in the first week Steph and Polly lived here, we left the dog in the back yard while we went out to to eat. Polly barked loudly and continuously the whole time we were gone. I was flummoxed enough by the situation to hire a dog trainer to come help us learn to live with her. I want to say that it was mostly a waste of money, but I guess it wasn’t, completely. The one good thing that the trainer did for us was to act as the dog’s advocate, helping us see things from her perspective. After that, I learned to tune into the dog’s needs for myself.
Polly has always had, erm, “boundary issues,” I guess. She feels that most other dogs try to crowd her space too quickly. In the early days, that meant I was pulling her out of fights about once a week. Then I saw a woman at the dog park pin her dog to the ground for a couple of minutes when he was misbehaving. I started doing that too.
Polly always acted too kool for skule when I did that. She was all like “whatevs, I’m just resting. I’d be lying here anyway, even if you weren’t holding me down. I’ll be up and playing soon.” But I only had to do it a few times, and she stopped fighting with other dogs. It’s probably been a year since I had to pin her down. She’s still wary of dogs who crowd her space, but it never leads to a fight. She has learned to use defensive body language to make them back off.
Other dogs would try to play with her back then, and she’d be all like “you’re creeping me out, go away.” For some reason, she warmed up to one particular dog, a weimaraner named Ushi. All other dogs were still icky, but Polly would wrestle with Ushi for however long me and the other dog’s owner were willing to stick around. It was surprising to me that Polly knew how to wrestle, but I guess it’s not difficult to figure out. It helped that Ushi was particularly good at wrestling. She used her front paws like a cat.
In a couple of months, any dog that was about Polly’s size was okay for her to play with. Also, puppies. Polly has made it clear that, if she could, she would steal somebody’s puppy for herself.
Big dogs continued to freak her out. Especially male big dogs. She crossed that final frontier about a month ago. One day at the dog park I looked up from my iPhone to see her wrestling with a great dane that was easily twice as tall as her, and maybe three times her weight. Polly had to jump up in the air to take a swat at him, otherwise she’d only be able to reach his legs.
So here she is playing with a gigantic dog for the first time ever, as far as I know. The situation quickly turned ugly. The other dog didn’t want to play so much as he wanted to smell her butt, and he wasn’t being cool about it. That should have freaked her right the hell out, but it didn’t. She was all like “hey buddy, this isn’t fun anymore. You need to step away from my nether regions.” The other dog was increasingly insistent, not willing to take “no” for an answer. Polly kept amping up the countermeasures, trying to fend him off, finally nipping at him a little bit. She never overreacted, and it didn’t turn into a fight.
Finally he got the message. This huge great dane stood there towering over her, big flat head with a menacing expression, giving her ’tude. His body language said “did you just nip at me? Because I’m pretty sure you just nipped at me.” Polly said “we’re not playing anymore, pal.”
Well! I guess that’s it then. Eighteen months of love and affection later, along with near-daily trips to the dog park, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a happier dog. She doesn’t have much more to learn. She’s still too aggressive when she’s on a leash, I guess we could work on that. And she’s still a bit wary of dogs she’s unfamiliar with, but I suspect that won’t ever go away. Remnants of her past, deeply ingrained. Reminds me of myself.
I have a lot of ideas about dog ownership that I didn’t have two years ago. The main one is this: if you love your dog, everything else will work out. To that end, if you’re not willing to let a dog live in your house with you, then you shouldn’t have one. The dog will test your patience, often, but if you have her best interests at heart, she will reward your efforts, many times over.
That picture of Polly up there was taken in December 2007. She was so skinny then! She ate almost nothing in the first two months she was here. Steph and I thought she was picky about what type of dog food she’d eat. The truth was that she was so freaked out by her surroundings that she couldn’t eat, period. These days she will eat anything.
I thought it would be a good idea to wait until I’m no longer living alone before getting my own dog. They are a lot of work, if you’re doing it right. Seems better to split that work amongst two or more humans. But really, can I live the way I am now, with no other sentient beings in the house? No, I cannot.
Steph and I are talking about getting a little Polly-clone, and co-owning the two of them. I could take both dogs when she needs to go out of town or whatever, and vice versa. And we would each have our own respective dog, most of the time.
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| Monday, April 27th, 2009
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4:57 am - she’s leaving home
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After living here for a year and a half, Steph is moving out. Polly too. The two girls from Houston are moving into a different house, about a mile away.
Our relationship has always been complicated. Usually, when someone says “our relationship is complicated,” it’s code for “I am inhabiting an ugly dysfunctional mess that I’m too weak to walk away from.” You’d be forgiven for thinking that, and perhaps it’s even true, from your perspective. But I’ve never been more sure that I did the right thing than I am now.
Steph and I serve important roles in each other’s lives. That was especially true when I first met her. She was having a lot of trouble, sinking into a morass she couldn’t find her way out of. She told almost noone how bad things had gotten for her. It feels wrong writing even this much about Steph’s situation back then, but she has written about it herself, right here on LiveJournal, so I don’t think I’m too far out of line.
Today she is doing so much better. She has a job at Whole Foods that’s difficult but rewarding. She is much more prepared to cope with her life. I like to think I had a hand in that. She’s leaving under her own power, strong and healthy. I always knew it should end this way, as much as it breaks my heart. She is still the most important person in my life.
I am so sad about this. I know Steph is doing the right thing, but I got so attached to her. She is the one person in the world that I talk to about everything. She is why I more or less stopped using the internet as a social outlet. These days I tell her instead, and the need to express myself dissipates. No typing involved.
How do you deal with grief as an adult? Totally off the table: withering remarks, yelling, threats, attempts at wounding others, ultimatums, baiting, emo superlatives declaring your situation to be so much more deep and important than anyone else’s. What’s left? Crying? Seems inadequate.
I feel like I’m getting pretty close to the end of an era with LiveJournal, too. The fact that they banned our home IP address for close to a month seems portentious. I have at least one more entry to write, alluded to here, and then I’m free. Not looking forward to that one, though.
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| Tuesday, April 14th, 2009
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7:37 pm - it only takes a camera to change her mind
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Well! LiveJournal has had our home IP address banned for over a week. They’ve had several days to respond to Steph’s support request, but have not. I can’t imagine what either one of us did wrong, other than perhaps having too many RSS bookmarks pointed at LiveJournal blogs, thereby using up too much bandwidth. Seems like a long shot, though.
I haven’t been around LJ much for the past couple of years anyway. If they don’t lift the ban pretty soon, that’s it, I’m gone for good.
UPDATE: looks like our router was misbehaving? I guess? Because I fiddled with it, and we can access LiveJournal again. But geez, what sort of router glitch could remove our access to one and only one website? That’s a new one on me.
UPDATE2: LiveJournal first replied to Steph’s support request and told us we weren’t banned. Steph wrote back and explained clearly why it looked a lot like we were indeed banned, and got a second reply. This time they confirmed that “the IP address you specified was banned at the operations level due to this address hitting our servers at an exceptional rate a few weeks ago,” but that they were now willing to lift it. So me fiddling with the router must have been coincidental with them finally taking us out of their black hole list. So we really were banned.
This sucks pretty bad. Banning us is within their rights. But not telling us why, and giving us a bogus, late answer to our first request, and not answering my two support requests at all ... lousy.
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| Sunday, February 15th, 2009
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7:16 pm - he’s standing by to steal your luck
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 | Entré Computers logo, unchanged since 1985 |
The year was 1990, I think. I worked at Entré Computers in Wichita, Kansas. I was making about 20 grand a year. I thought that chain was long gone, but it looks like there is still at least one of them left. Our store in Wichita had a sign with that exact same blue-and-white logo that persists to the present day.
I got off work. I was sitting in the parking lot in my then-brand-new Toyota MR2, which I still own, listening to KMUW, as usual. There was an announcement that my favorite radio show of all time, After Midnight, had been cancelled. It wouldn’t be on that night, or any other night, ever again. The end of a show that had been running for 20 years.
I was stunned. Wichita was pretty boring. After Midnight had been one of only a few bright spots. It ran seven nights a week, midnight to six or seven AM. They played a staggering array of weirdo alternative music. It was the most important force in my life in shaping the kinds of things I still enjoy listening to today. My peer group at the time revolved around that radio show, the KMUW studio, and the sad sack bar next door, Kirby’s. I counted a few of the deejays as friends.
The previous night, a deejay had played something with a lot of obscenities. It wasn’t the first time. The program director wasn’t running a tight ship, and the higher-ups hadn’t done much to get the situation under control. Instead, they decided to cancel it, replaced with nothing but dead air.
It seemed like there was a chance that the show could get back on the station, if stricter controls were put in place. Alas, the only movement in the situation seemed to be people from our crowd hurling epithets at the station manager. They were making the situation worse, not better.
I have always been apathetic, but this was too horrible to ignore. I decided a feature article was in order.
I interviewed everybody I could think of. KMUW’s station manager, recently axed After Midnight deejays, the show’s program director, current daytime deejays, station interns, anybody with a stake. Much of the language was harsh. I’m fairly sure I caught the station manager in an outright lie or two. But I wasn’t out to make anybody look bad. Just the opposite, I wanted all involved to better understand everybody else’s position. So I edited out all the harsh and incorrect bits, and did my best to make everybody sound reasonable. I submitted it to The Note, our local entertainment rag, and it ran a couple of months after the show went off the air.
I am proud to say that I think I did some good. The best comment I remember was from somebody who approached me at Kirby’s: “I had never heard the station manager say that before.” It wasn't enough. The show never returned to the air. KMUW eventually replaced it with prerecorded segments from NPR.
The editor at The Note liked my article. He asked me to meet him at their editorial offices in Lawrence. The gist of his message was this: “What else have you got?” I couldn’t think of anything, so he suggested a topic: marijuana tax stamps, a concept which had recently been passed into law.
(Here’s some excerpts from that web page, in case it goes away: “The fact that dealing marijuana and controlled substances is illegal does not exempt it from taxation. Therefore drug dealers are required by law to purchase drug tax stamps. [...] Payment of the drug tax will purchase the drug tax stamps. Attach the stamp to the marijuana and/or controlled substance immediately after receiving the substance. [...] Purchasing drug tax stamps does not make possession of drugs legal.”)
Once again, I went around and interviewed everybody I could think of with a stake. A bunch of NORML members. A strip club owner who was putting up his own money in an attempt to get the law repealed.
The final article was serviceable, but not nearly as good as my After Midnight piece. I couldn’t care less about tax stamps or marijuana. But in the long run, it might have been even more educational for me, because I discovered that I could still do a pretty good job of it. I thought many of the people I interviewed were ridiculous blowhards, but it didn’t prevent me from being outwardly empathetic to their cause. I got them to talk at length, and dutifully recorded it all.
That should have been my career path. I could have written freebie stories like the first two for awhile, and it would have eventually led to paid gigs. I know it. It would be so much simpler today, with easy access to laptops, digital cameras, and digital voice recorders. I could have been a one-man internet-enabled reporting machine, the Po Bronson of lost causes. Sadly, I never wrote another story for The Note or any other publication.
Why did I stop? I’m going to say that the biggest reason was that I had no role models. All the adults I knew had boring jobs that they barely tolerated, if that. It had not yet occurred to me that I was driven enough to bootstrap myself into any career that I wanted.
Instead, I stuck with computers. It’s not a bad way to make a living. I enjoy programming, and I enjoy building things. Getting something big to work right for the first time is incredible. But it’s far too insular and inward-looking. I’m fairly introverted, but not that introverted.
At this point, I have to stick it out. I have been doing this for decades, it’s where I can make the most money. And it’s finally starting to pay off. Right now I have more contract work than I could reasonably finish in six months. The world has a hunger for iPhone apps, and I can provide them. The idea that I might escape the prototypical dreaded office job is coming ever closer to reality. I might be able to live and work wherever I want.
Back in 2003, when it looked like I was going to get my share of the family fortune, I planned to use it to bootstrap myself into feature writing. A decade late is better than never. Then my (former) sister cheated me out of it. The stunning depth of that betrayal knocked me on my ass for a couple of years. I was in no mood to experiment anymore.
That’s a tale that will have to wait for my next blog entry. I’ve been sitting on that story for long enough.
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| Friday, January 30th, 2009
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9:47 am - don’t choose the wrong song
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I think this is the coldest winter we’ve had in the seven years I’ve been in Nashville. My walks with the dog, once a daily occurrence, are now down to once a week or so, whenever the weather cooperates. I can’t handle being outside for very long unless it’s at least 45 degrees and sunny. One of the nicest coffee shops in town opened a few months ago, less than half a mile from our house, but I can’t ever go there, because it’s too cold to walk and Steph usually has my car. I’m ready for April.
I am working for the startup again. I gave up most of my equity, but now I’m getting paid. This time around I can afford to overlook a lot of the stuff that bugged me before, because hey, money. I still get a ridiculous amount of leeway in the way I go about implementing stuff, and I still get to work from home. They are not yet giving me enough to cover all my bills, but I’ll take this over a big-company job any day. The money situation will theoretically improve in a few months, if the CEO is successful in wooing VCs and/or angel investors.
Standard corporate IT jobs are not designed for people who are actually good at what they do. Even though the money was great, I’d just as soon never go back to the type of job I had before this, if I can avoid it. Knock wood.
I wrote in an email recently: “I have this fantasy of giving up everything I own except my MacBook, my clothes, and my car. I would feel so pure if I could do that.” True fax.
I haven’t felt like I belonged anywhere since last century. The house I was renting in Miami felt like it was really my home. Since then, it’s been rare for me to even finish unpacking, no matter where I’ve been.
My life for the last decade or so has been a pattern of getting something pretty cool, then rejecting it because it’s not quite good enough yet, then striving for the next big thing. I still have many miles to go before I reach my final form.
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| Wednesday, January 7th, 2009
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11:23 am - and now, an anecdote
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It was June 1993. I had just started working at Newer Technology in Wichita. My first job at a Mac-oriented company, but I was not a Mac guy at the time. I was hired to do DSP assembly programming for the Windows half of a Mac/Windows product they were working on.
Newer made various bits of Mac add-on hardware, but their bread-and-butter product was RAM modules. RAM was hideously expensive back then. Nobody could afford as much of it as they wanted.
I’m told that much of the dinosaur CGI in Jurassic Park was done with Macs. A production company working for Spielberg was facing a RAM crunch. So Newer loaned them about $50k worth of RAM modules for their Macs, to make their rendering projects go faster. I’m pretty sure Newer didn’t make any money for this, it was just a favor. In return, the higher-ups at Newer were vaguely promised a mention in the credits of Jurassic Park. They couldn’t get a straight answer as to whether this would happen or not.
Based on the optimistic assumption that Newer would get the credit mention, the company paid for every employee to go see Jurassic Park one night, early in its run. We sat together in a big block of about 50 people. I had just begun a dalliance with a girl named Roni. I think that movie was the first time we went out together.
All of us sat in the dark and oohed and ahhed at the dinosaurs, just like the rest of the country was doing at the time. The credits started and most of the audience left. The Newer employee block all stayed in our seats, waiting to see if we’d get the credit mention. Seconds before the film stopped rolling, we did indeed see the name of our company go by. Yay!
I haven’t thought about this story in years. I was reminded of it when I saw Jurassic Park on cable TV last night. It was breathtaking at the time of its release, but like all effects-heavy movies, it looks dated today. I watched to the end of the credits, and yep, “Newer Technology” is still mentioned there.
Newer capitalized on this for months in their advertising. “If you like dinosaurs, you totally need to buy our stuff” blah blah blah. The project I was working on was a miserable failure, never even released. I was laid off several months later. Newer went out of business in the year 2000. There’s still a company called that today, but it’s actually some other company that bought the name and possibly some of the IP and/or inventory of the original company. It was another eight years before I became a Mac guy myself.
I still wonder what happened to Roni every now and then. I have completely lost touch with her. She was pretty radically different than anybody else I ever dated.
UPDATE: it seems we weren’t the only ones in the Mac camp with a vested interest in this movie. Jim Reekes tells a story about Mac sounds he created, and how one of them was featured in Jurassic Park.
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| Monday, December 8th, 2008
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3:58 am - i heard you on the wireless back in ’52
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Steph got a NetFlix account recently, which is how I ended up watching The Devil and Daniel Johnston. Very well done, but I think it would be difficult to screw up. Johnston and his family have been documenting his life since the day he was born. All the principals are still alive and willing to talk. There is an embarrassingly large amount of source material to draw from. And there’s no need to embellish or exaggerate: Johnston’s life is already so weird as to be nearly unbelievable.
Johnston lives in a different world than the rest of us. They overlap in some ways: both have love and trees and Captain America, but his world is nonetheless a very distinct place. His music is not so good, technically, but that’s not what makes him great. Johnston’s skill is showing us what it’s like, over in his world. He is painfully honest and unselfconscious to a degree that few people can match.
You might not be able to appreciate Johnston, yourself. He’s not for everybody. But I’d be willing to bet that he’s part of an ecosystem that includes you, whether you know it or not.
Artists tend to be a little more “out there” than the rest of us. They’re willing to make do with fewer connections, and take more risks, and more drugs, and then report what life is like when you live like that. It’s not much fun being a bundle of raw exposed nerves, but it can be instructive to consume the work of artists who are. They live on an emotional frontier, so we don’t have to.
If you’re already more “out there” than most people, who do you turn to for inspiration? People like Daniel Johnston will do nicely. He is more “out there” than almost anybody, by virtue of being mentally ill. It’s no surprise that Kurt Cobain was a big fan of his.
I admire Johnston’s work, but I can’t listen to it very often. It’s tiring. The more I get on his wavelength, the more it hurts.
Johnston is an anomaly that is good for the world, on the whole. His illness is an anomaly that’s not so good for him personally, though. Who in their right minds would trade places with him? Certainly not me. The degree to which he has self-sabotaged his “career” is heartbreaking. Nobody ever gets very mad at him, because they’re willing to account for the fact that he’s mentally ill, but that doesn’t make his story any easier to watch.
So, hi livejournal, how are you. I quit working on the startup. I came to feel that my cofounders’ eyes were bigger than their stomachs, so to speak. Now I’m working on some different ideas that I hope will prevent me from having to take a “real” job again. There is a subculture of the tech world filled with people who get to call their own shots, for the most part. I’m trying to reverse-engineer the formula, to see if I can get my foot in the door and join them.
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| Thursday, November 6th, 2008
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12:38 am - look on my works, ye mighty, and despair
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I never believed he could get elected.
The situation in this country was pretty bad four years ago, too. Everybody I knew supported Kerry. Everybody I read on the internet supported Kerry. And yet, “they” sent Bush back for another four years. With the sadly predictable outcome.
Last time, Kerry was the usual rich white guy that always gets elected. So are they going to allow a black guy who nobody has ever heard of to get elected? Doesn’t seem likely.
Steph and I went to a nearby community center, right next to the dog park where I take Polly every day, and voted for the black guy. It was the first time in Steph’s life that she was old enough to vote for president. A couple of hours later, Obama and his wife and his two cute daughters are standing in Chicago, preparing to move into the White House, along with the new puppy.
So, apparently, it’s safe to pay attention to politics again? Holy cow.
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| Monday, September 22nd, 2008
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9:12 am - are you there, god? it’s me, johnnyfavorite
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I’ve read hundreds of stories of people in startups. One common theme is that you’ll feel a lot of different emotions. My experience so far: “different emotions” my ass. More like: another day, another planet.
Almost everything I’ve attempted on this job is something I’ve never done before. Technologies I’ve had to learn that are entirely new to me: Flash/Actionscript, Javascript, MySQL, Amazon S3, Amazon EC2. And unix system administration, which I’m mostly unfamiliar with. Every now and then I get to write a little C++, but I’m already an expert at that, so it flies by. Then I’m once again stuck picking my way gingerly through foreign technology documentation.
Actionscript is a distinct programming language, in case you didn’t know, used to author Flash applets. It’s like a cross between Java, C++, and Javascript. I was already pretty good at two out of three of those, fortunately for me. The Actionscript compiler has a very different view of the world than your standard C++ compiler, though. That took some getting used to. This one should have been hairy, but wasn’t, too much. The biggest problem was that Adobe is a big fat liar-head. They want you to believe that Flash is free and open, to drive adoption, when it very much is not.
I’ve always had some sort of mental block about SQL-oriented databases. I guess because the database admins at most of the jobs I’ve had have been jerks. They tend to treat the database as their own personal fiefdom, and you must supplicate yourself before them, if you want access to this richest of resources. Bleargh. But MySQL turned out to be pretty easy as well, once I stopped flinching and realized I could do whatever I want with it. Relational database concepts haven’t changed much in 30 years, it’s just the details of the implementations you have to figure out.
I could tell stories like this about all the other stuff I’ve learned, but it’s going to start sounding the same. It’s this story, over and over again: This particular technology wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be, once I realized that I can do whatever I want with it, and there isn’t some stupid person I have to placate before I can bend it to my will.
My attitude sucks.
I’m just now realizing that most of the “work” I’ve been doing on this job is battling constraints that don’t exist anymore. Decades spent in standard workplaces have conditioned me to think about all the roadblocks stupid people are going to put in my way, which I have to carefully step around, so as not to offend their stupid widdle egos. Then I can finally tear into my usual full-speed implementation mode. So much of my mental energy has been frittered away, fighting political battles.
Also, I’m mercurial. One week I can get as much done as it would take the average IT guy five weeks to do. The next week, I can’t motivate myself to do anything but putter around on the web and watch movies. This hurts my self-esteem, and makes me feel lazy, which makes it that much more difficult to get back to work. Then one day I wake up and I’m curious and motivated, and I have another burst of creativity and productivity that most people couldn’t duplicate in their wildest dreams.
Then I pretend that my slacker days are behind me. I’m certainly never again going to putter around doing nothing for a week. Not me. No sir!
Some days this feels like an obvious Big Win. There is no doubt this will work. I’m about to become the CTO of my own small company. From now on, if anybody around here is going to need his butt kissed, it’s going to be ME. If this particular idea doesn’t pan out, then another, similar one will. Other days I’m just cautiously optimistic: okay, I’ll work on this for awhile, I’ve got some time before my savings run out, all the while keeping an eye on the job listing sites. Other days, this feels like two or three months of hard work down a rathole. Oh well, at least I learned some new stuff, right?
My head hurts.
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| Thursday, August 7th, 2008
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9:26 am - harmonic parallel
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God help me, I am doing a startup. Since the middle of July, I have been working without pay on a project that may or may not bloom into a full-blown company. A like-minded individual emailed me out of the blue, told me what he was working on, and I agreed to join forces with him, right then and there.
To the extent that I have ever been successful at any job, it has been because I have A) been tasked with a green-field, start-from-scratch implementation of something I have little or no experience with, B) I was given wide latitude on how to go about the task, what hours I work, and what technologies I use, and C) the company was very young, and had few rules restricting me from getting things done. Invariably, there wouldn’t be enough employees to do everything, so I would go far outside my job description, picking up the slack. In the several fewer-than-ten-employees companies I’ve worked for, I have always been the default computer system administrator, because nobody else wanted to do it.
I don’t know why it never occurred to me before, but what I have just described is the exact characteristics of a startup founder.
In the past, I have foolishly allowed other people to reap the rewards of my work. In the several companies where I’ve been a key employee, I added far more value than I took home in salary. Now it’s my turn. My hard work is going to enrich me for a change.
Actually, it’s not so much about the money. It’s more about the freedom. I am capable of doing an incredible amount of work in a short period of time, but if and only if the people in charge get out of my way and let me do it. This time around, even if I wanted to be oppressed, I would be out of luck. My two cofounders are far too busy working on their parts of the project to micromanage me. They don’t know or care how I’m going about building my part, they are only interested in the results.
I like getting things done. It makes me feel competent and useful.
This is causing me to experience an inner contentment I haven’t felt in years.
It doesn’t matter so much whether this particular startup is successful or not. But it is vitally important to me that I am in control of my own destiny.
I really hope I’m not forced back into a “regular” job again. It would feel like a straitjacket, after this.
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| Friday, August 1st, 2008
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4:06 pm - levels of strength
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1. I am a little tiny baby.
2. I can walk by myself.
3. I am strong enough to enforce my boundaries, keeping the bad influences out.
4. I am strong enough to leave my parent’s house under my own power, and to support myself without too much of their help.
5. I am strong enough to take on the problems of others.
6. I am strong enough to wed and have children of my own, or sustain some other type of family unit.
7. I am strong enough to take down the boundaries I erected in my youth, and let anyone trample me who wishes to.
I wrote that in February 2002, when I was a little bit crazy. I am putting it here now because it feels like I’ve finally made an entire loop around the track, and I’m reaching that point again. Hopefully with a little more perspective this time.
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| Friday, June 6th, 2008
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10:20 pm - you are what you pretend to be
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I haven’t seen “Raiders of the Lost Ark” in, oh, let’s say 15 years or so. If I saw it today, I doubt I’d like it. It’s your typical big dumb adventure movie, the polar opposite of things I like these days. Yet I was super-stoked to see Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation, which played at the Belcourt Theatre last night. I would have gone with Steph, but she’s in Houston right now, so I invited a guy I used to work with. The film did not disappoint.
In case you’ve never heard of it, here’s the story. Eric Zala, Chris Strompolos, and Jayson Lamb were three kids living in Mississippi who decided to create a shot-for-shot remake of “Raiders.” It was 1982 and they were all around 12 years old. They originally thought it could be completed in a single summer. In reality, it took them seven years’ worth of summers. They finished in 1989, when they were in their late teens. There was one public showing of the film for friends and family, in the auditorium of a Coca-Cola plant. Then the three original collaborators went their separate ways, at least partially due to bad blood from old arguments, and the film was largely forgotten.
Eric occasionally showed the film to friends. Unbeknownst to him, his college roommate made a copy. That copy was copied several more times, and eventually made its way into the hands of filmmaker Eli Roth. Roth was at Dreamworks doing a pitch and passed along a copy, which was seen by Steven Spielberg, who directed the original “Raiders.” The film was shown in 2003 at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, and brought down the house. The three kids who made the film all received nice letters from Spielberg himself, and eventually met him in person. Since then, the film has taken on a life of its own. Inspired by this turn of events, Eric and Chris have quit their day jobs to start making movies again.
This is not an easy film to watch. It was shot on crude Betamax and VHS home video recorders. The sound is terrible. More often than not, I could not understand what the child actors were saying. But it doesn’t matter, because I wasn’t following it as you would a typical movie. I was seeing it as a technical tour de force, writ as large as humanly possible, given that the filmmakers and actors were all just kids. This is the most big-hearted labor of love I’ve ever seen in my life. It put a lump in my throat more times than I'd care to admit.
As the film progressed, I remembered the original “Raiders” well enough to know what was about to happen. I knew that, for example, there’s going to be a gunfight that ends with a bar burning down, an extended sequence on a ship, another sequence on a submarine, a scene where Indy gets dragged behind a truck, and so on. How on earth are they going to pull off all these things? They’re kids, they have no real budget to speak of. Yet they managed to produce very credible versions of all those things. Every new development had me gasping for breath. The scene where Indy commandeers a Nazi truck carrying the Ark of the Covenant is just amazing. It was over in 100 minutes and the pretty-close-to-full audience at the Belcourt gave the film a standing ovation. I can’t remember the last time I saw anything so inspiring.
After the film, the director, Eric Zala, appeared onstage to answer questions. The caliber of those questions led me to believe that I’m not the only guy in the world who’s read everything available on the web about this thing. Eric seems to really enjoy the adulation, and he told a lot of good stories.
Based on what Eric told us, I’m pretty sure you’re never going to see this film without one of the three principal filmmakers in attendance. They are in a legal gray area. Their film is a blatant ripoff of a copyrighted work. Spielberg has given them tacit approval, but he can’t just come out and embrace their film all the way. It would be interpreted as a license to steal everything he’s ever done. I’m sure his lawyers would never allow it.
Not wanting to push their luck, the kids from Mississippi are very careful about how and when their film is presented. They don’t provide screeners to critics. They allow it be shown only at non-profit organizations and festivals. They never profit personally from these showings. They never allow a copy of the film to travel anywhere without one of them going with it. They are trying very hard to keep their film off the internet.
I’m not the only guy who’s completely smitten by this big wet sloppy kiss of a movie, as evidenced by the fact that you can spend hours reading about it on the web, if you’re so inclined. I certainly have! But if you’ve only got the patience to read one article about it, I’d suggest this profile that appeared in Vanity Fair in 2004. It contains frank and thorough coverage of the juicy conflicts that occurred between Eric and Chris over the years, which I haven’t seen covered in detail anywhere else.
I’ve read that they’re working on a DVD release, but obviously there are big legal hurdles to clear. Since Spielberg himself likes the film, I’d say it will happen eventually. Until then, if this film comes to a theatre near you, you’d be wise to go see it.
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| Friday, April 18th, 2008
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9:57 pm - sirens
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I am surprised as anybody that one of my favorite things in life these days is going to the dog park. I take Polly there almost every day, unless the weather is bad or my schedule doesn’t allow it. Shelby dog park is exactly a mile away from our house. We have to walk most of the time, because Steph is usually at work when we go, and she drives my car.
Polly LOVES going to the dog park. I work at home most days, so she has the power to bug me endlessly about it. Starting at about noon, she gets The Look. She’ll lay down near my desk, and watch me expectantly. Sometimes she makes a sad little growl/whine in her throat. Whenever I get up from my desk, Polly is right there on top of me, her body language saying “ARE WE GOING? WE’RE GOING? CAN WE GO NOW?” I feel bad for her. What else has she got to do around here but look forward to going to the dog park? A lot of days I go earlier than planned, just so Polly will quit nagging me. When I head downstairs to get her leash, she knows that YES YES THIS IS IT WE’RE GOING WE’RE REALLY GOING YAY!!! and we’re in danger of Polly tripping me, such is her excitement. It’s so easy to please a dog.
It’s more work than you’d think. Polly is a good-natured dog, very friendly. She introduces herself to just about every dog and human she comes in contact with. But if some other dog gets too aggressive with her, her attitude can turn ugly in a big hurry. She’s never bitten anybody, or been bitten herself, but there have been many times when I thought such a thing was seconds away. Sometimes she lets me know she’s had enough by running up to me, and I’ll dutifully put myself between her and the other dog. Sometimes she’s not that sensible, and I have to drag her out of a dogpile.
I can tell as clear as day when Polly is getting unhappy. Her movements become clipped and choppy. She puts her tail between her legs. She stands at a weird angle with respect to the other dog, not looking him in the eye because that’s aggressive, but looking like she wants to. That’s my cue to intervene.
Of course, it’s better when I don’t have to. Polly’s best friend at the dog park is a Weimaraner named Ushi. Those two would wrestle for hours, if I could stand around that long. Ushi acts like a big cat, coming after Polly with her front paws, using them like they were hands. Polly runs faster, but Ushi is more limber. I’ve gotten to be friends with Ushi’s owner, Jess. I feel like I know that girl pretty well now.
There are a couple of other dogs Polly will almost always wrestle with, if we see them. Polly really likes puppies for some reason. She’s always very sweet and gentle with young dogs that are smaller than her. Polly feels threatened by dogs bigger than her, she tends to avoid them.
I don’t know what we’ll do when the weather gets cold again. Polly acts like she’s going to die on days when we don’t get to go. I hope next winter will be mild, like the ones we usually get around here.
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| Friday, February 29th, 2008
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1:54 am - vapor trail
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About ten days ago, Steph and I went to a nearby pizza place we hadn’t been to yet. We’re trying to eat at every neighborhood restaurant at least once. Three or four hours later, I was violently sick. Took me 14 hours or so, but I finally vomited up every last bit of that pizza, and then some. I’ve never been that sick in reaction to food in my entire life. I didn’t feel like eating anything for another 24 hours after that, and I may never eat pizza again.
It was certainly no fun at the time, but on the whole, it was an interesting experience. I was SO sick that I felt like I wasn’t part of the world anymore, more like I was observing it from an oblique angle.
When I think about who I was in my twenties, I come up with:
GOOD POINTS:
* much better listener than anybody that age had a right to be
* healthy intellectual curiousity
* near-infinite attention span
* able to master anything I set my mind to
BAD POINTS:
* quick to anger
* unable to negotiate the world
* crippled by lack of positive role models
* often incapacitated by emo fits over absolutely nothing at all
* small negative things often overreacted to
When I think about who I am now, I come up with:
GOOD POINTS:
* still a good listener, but most people my age are, duh
* very long attention span, not often put to use
* finally able to keep my poor social skills from affecting others much
* able to negotiate the world, for the most part
* near-constant inner peace I never thought I’d achieve
BAD POINTS:
* intellectual curiousity more or less dried up
* small negative things often overreacted to
* inability to care about a bunch of details I should care about
* still not doing a whole lot with my potential, dammit
There’s a big tangle of cables in the living room surrounding the cable modem and my wireless router. It’s been like that since I moved in. I just can’t make myself care enough to make it pretty. And I still haven’t bothered to set up the stereo. My 25-year-old self would be horrified.
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| Friday, November 9th, 2007
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1:00 pm - about those snap.com popups
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Perhaps you’ve noticed those incredibly annoying pop-ups that recently showed up on LiveJournal, when you hover your mouse pointer over a link that points to an external website. They are the handiwork of snap.com. Apparently, Brad doesn’t like them either.
The pop-up windows themselves have controls you can use to turn them off. Alas, that doesn’t really work for me. That method installs a cookie, which is lost when you shut down and restart your browser. That's just snap.com being devious. They could install a cookie that would never time out, if they wanted to.
I’ve seen wildly conflicting reports about how to get rid of these things permanently. None of the solutions I read worked for me. Well, one solution is to switch to FireFox. It appears you can use its AdBlock feature to filter out the annoying little buggers forever. But I really don’t want to switch browsers. I’m sort of emotionally attached to Safari.
Being a technical-type guy, I went with the operating-system-level solution: modifying the hosts file. In case you don’t know, that’s a text file that resides on your local computer which helps guide DNS requests. In this case, it can be used to force lookups for snap.com’s evil domains to fail, so you won’t have to look at their crap. If you are on Windows, the hosts file is probably located at C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\hosts. on Macs and Linux/Unix computers, the file is at /etc/hosts.
These are the lines I added to the hosts file on my Mac:
127.0.0.1 spa.snap.com
127.0.0.1 shots.snap.com
127.0.0.1 snap.com
127.0.0.1 i.ixnp.com
If you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, and you don’t have access to a local computer expert who does, you’re probably better off not trying this. But I can tell you that this worked for me. If snap.com changes the domains that they serve their ugly pop-ups from, then the list of hosts above would have to change, but the principal is basically sound.
Oh, and here’s another change you should make, which is a lot easier. Go to this page: http://www.livejournal.com/manage/settings/ and turn off the check box that says “Graphic Previews.” That will disable the nasty little buggers on your own personal LiveJournal. If everybody on LJ did that, the problem would be solved.
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| Saturday, October 27th, 2007
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12:55 pm - find a city, find myself a city to live in
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I talked my employer into letting me telecommute, most of the time. I’ve been going into the office on Mondays and Tuesdays, then working at home the rest of the week.
I don’t know about you, but my job involves a whole lot of stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with work. Getting up early in the morning, so I can get in the shower and get into the office before morning traffic gets really bad. Worrying about even worse traffic I’m going to run into on the way home, no matter when I choose to leave. Dealing with people I don’t like very much but can’t get away from. I like my immediate superiors just fine, but I can’t say that about everybody in every department. I end up cleaning up other people’s messes in the break room, because they’re all slobs and I can’t stand looking at it.
The worst part, for me, is the huge crush of people. When I started at this company, we had about 15 employees. Now we’re up near 60 or 70. No matter where I go, there’s lots and lots and LOTS of them, clogging up the space in my head. I feel like I’m being constantly abraded. (Yes, I am an introvert, thanks for asking.) My job requires an inhuman amount of concentration, which is getting harder and harder for me to accomplish in the office.
When working at home, I often don’t get into the shower until ten or eleven, when it makes for a good break to clear my head. I can connect to the office network through the VPN, which is 95 percent as good as if I were physically there. I can crank up iTunes loud enough to rattle the windows, or I can work in complete silence. The people I have to interact with can still get in touch with me, via instant message or email or cellphone, which puts them at enough of a distance that they don’t drive me crazy.
This has opened up so much space in my head, I can’t believe it. Despite the fact that I’m probably working more hours than I used to, not less. I’ve got a real phobia about staying in the office later than about 6:00pm, so I always leave by then, no matter if I’m in the middle of something or not. If 6:00pm rolls around and I’m at home, I’m already in a warm fuzzy state of mind, so I’ll probably go ahead and work for another hour or two until I get to a good stopping place. I’m lots more productive and happier besides.
I pushed for this because the situation in the office had become intolerable to me, to the point where I was about to quit. Now that I see how much better I feel, it seems like I should have been trying for this a long time ago. It’s better enough that I just turned down a job in the Bay Area in California, writing software for the Mac. Okay, there were some potential problems with that company, but still.
Let’s see, what else has happened. Steph and I went to San Francisco for a week, so she could see what California is like. I’m trying to get situated in East Nashville, and act like I really live here.
Today I made my second trip to this little organic grocery near my house called The Turnip Truck. Everyone I’ve encountered at that place seems so happy to be working there. The guy at the register was almost too happy, like maybe he’d just started the job. I asked him, and he said he’d been working there for two and a half years! Imagine still being thrilled with a job, even after working there for two and a half years. I can barely fathom such a thing.
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