Story Archive - July 2005

Another Weekend (07/31/2005)

He does not need opium. He has the gift of reverie. - Anais Nin

I had another amazing weekend. As I was reflecting on it with a friend, she complimented the attitudinal changes I have taken over the recent past. I will paraphrase from some friends over the past couple months.

I am glad you are so happy! It is such a great thing to see! Six months ago the discussions were totally different! :)

You know what? Every time I hear or read or see anything about you, you sound happy and cheerful all the time. I don't think I've seen you this happy in a long while.

Not that you were ever drinking at home alone in the dark while weeping softly, but you have made such a positive change to so many aspects of your life recently that I find it really inspiring. My rutt has been lasting a much longer time.

All I ever hear now is how great your girl is or how great your job is or how great your roommate is or how great your friends are. It sounds like you're taking opium again.

Just wanted to say that indeed, you seem entirely happy, and I am SO GLAD for that...on top of which, [your girl] is WONDERFUL!

It can mean only one thing. Life is good.

No Body Likes It (07/28/2005)

Exercise is bunk. If you are healthy, you don't need it: if you are sick you should not take it. - Henry Ford

Does anyone actually enjoy working out? I'm pretty sure everyone who says they do is lying. For the past few weeks, I've been doing a pretty good job of heading to the gym for an hour. At least, I go on nights when I don't have a hot date, and that is a decent portion of nights for me.

After thirty minutes on the cardio and thirty minutes lifting weights I'm spent and tired. Three weeks later, should I be all energized and excited about going to the gym? I'm not. I still despise it and do it out hope that eventually it will make me happy and fulfilled or something.

I look at it this way. If I do this every day for a year, then that's around three-hundred and sixty-five hours of my time in the gym. I'm awake around sixteen hours a day. So that's twenty-two waking days a year, that I'm at the gym. Twenty-two! How about this, it's one-sixteenth of my waking time. Over the course of sixty years, thats about four years of waking time. All I'm saying is that I better have more than four extra years of quality life because of it, or it just wasn't worth it in the end.

Diary as Performance Art (07/24/2005)

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train. - Oscar Wilde

She walked me through her high school pictures, as well as some vacation pictures and college pictures this weekend. "You are always so open and forthcoming and telling of everything in your life, I just want to share back." It's not the stories. It's not the pictures. It's those glimpses of memory or emotion in the person recounting them where I see the tiny magic. Those slices of other's lives are little diamonds to be found and treasured.

There was a series on PBS a few years ago about centarians. The blurb was something like, "There are over seventy-thousand centarians living the North America who share one thing: they all have an amazing story to tell." It was a fascinating series, one of the best I have every seen, but it opened my eyes to something I think I already intrinsically knew. My life, your life and the life of everyone is special and unique. There are six and a half billion people alive today, and they all have an amazing story to tell. It's true. Life isn't easy, and every day every person experiences in a way that isn't mine and finds her own nuggets of wisdom or his own bits of brilliance.

My daily RSS list used to be ninty-five percent technical and news journals with a few of my friends feeds. Now it is ninety-five percent personal feeds of friends and strangers alike who inspire my life. What a world it is to empathize. What a place when you start to know, if only but random sampling, how everyone else sees things. The US politics seem so different through the eyes of the liberal in NY than the conservative in Indiana.

I find the feeds of the strangers some of my favorites. These are people who I never met and may never meet who have such influence on me. Whether it is the struggling writer in the midwest, the software engineer in Dehli or the housewife knitter in San Diego, I treasure their willingness to share.

Manifolds (07/23/2005)

Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them, they translate it into their own language, and forthwith it means something entirely different. - Goethe

I was out at dinner tonight and the subject of manifolds came up. Not the types in cars, but the abstract topological concept. The two PhD's at the table looked over to me, "hey, your degree is in math. Can you define a manifold?" No, no I couldn't. I never really learned about them.

As I do when I am stumped by a question, I look it up afterwards. I have decided that manifolds are complex beyond my current capacity. As I was reading about them in my topology yellow book (anyone with a math degree knows the yellow books) I read the simple explanation "a manifold without boundary is a non-empty topological space in which every point has an open neighborhood homeomorphic to an open subset of Euclidean n-space." I don't know what that means at this point in my life, but I do remember a time during my senior year of university when that phrase would have made perfect sense to me. I remember working with neighborhoods and and homeomorphic varieties and Euclidean space. I just don't remember what those things are any more. They don't have a habit of coming up in my normal day and so they have fallen by the sideline.

One of my most memorable moments in math came when doing some calculations in abstract algebra. I was playing around with some sort of bijective mapping between fields that was one-to-one and onto and noticed the zeros mapped to each other. I quickly generalized to realize that in maps with the certain characteristics the zeros always mapped to each other between fields. It was a fairly amazing feeling that I had proven some arbitrary and important thing without actually trying to. I remember pulling open my abstract algebra book and validating that what I had proven was in fact a truth. It was. I vividly recall thinking, "this has got to be the same feeling the first mathematician to prove this felt, only so much more intensely." I store that feeling in a little box in my dresser and take it out from time to time when I need inspiration.

Parties (07/19/2005)

California is a fine place to live - if you happen to be an orange. - Fred Allen

We had a giant party at work to celebrate the launch of a new customer. I had spent the better part of 2005 working on getting this project live, so I was happy to cut my vacation a bit short at the lake to come back for the party.

The theme was orange. So we tossed orange water balloons. I tried to casually sit out, but it was my day, so they made me do the balloon toss. No one wanted to be my partner. Do you really want to do a water balloon toss with someone who has a severe depth perception handicap? No. Luckily, there was one person at the event who was willing to do the toss with me.

Balloon Partner Balloon Catch

We did bobbing for oranges. I tried to sit out again to avoid getting horrible cooties from my coworkers but was forced into it. Slamming your head into a tank of very cold water on a bright sunny day is tough work. I think oranges are much harder to get a bite on than apples. In fifteen seconds I only go one orange, but that was one more than a lot of people.

Go for the Orange Toss the Orange Celebrate the Victory

Okay, so I'm a sucker for cute babies. It was blazing hot outside and they were doing their best to stay cool. Will drank beer and Avery jumped into the water cooler.

Will Avery

Vacation Coma (07/18/2005)

Laughter is an instant vacation. - Milton Berle

So ends my self-titled "vacation spending spree." I had a ton of micro-vacations scheduled through the end of June and start of August and now it is all behind me. The latest little bit in Clearlake I was completely away from work without checking voicemail or e-mail. The weekend was fantastic as well, spending a ton of time with my friends and my girl. I visited Muir Woods for the first time and it was gorgeous except for the paved paths and large number of people.

Monday rolls around and I'm in a bit of a vacation coma. The 6am meeting Monday morning didn't help. The 7am Tuesday morning isn't going to help either. There are a lot more new issues than I was expecting as things had been fairly quiet over the past month. My inspiration is lacking. Still, I am good boy and trudged through until all the e-mail and voicemail was checked and all my tasks were complete.

I have a mental list of a bunch of things I wanted to get done outside of work that have been on hold because it requires me to be local for a while and with all the trips to LA, Sacramento and Clearlake I knew they were a bad idea. Now I'm back. Now I'm ready! READY! But I'm not motivated. The vacation coma appears to apply to personal life as well. Worse yet, I don't feel guilty about slacking off on my personal affairs. Lord knows when I'll get them done.

Not Again... (07/11/2005)

A tricky guy is selling snake in alcohol. It cures all sickness and all injury. - Cobra versus Mongoose (Shonen Knife)

I'm not sure I have memory of one of our annual Clearlake vacations that does not result in at least one trip to the emergency room.

Some of the kids took out the sailboat and they were perhaps a bit less experienced sailors than they should have been. We're watching from the porch enjoying the show as the boat is getting closer and closer to the rocky shores and we're sure that there is some sense of terror slowly growing on the vessel. We see a failed attempt to tack. Then another failed attempt to tack. My father finally chuckles and jumps into one of the wave runners to man the rescue operation.

He goes out and pulls the craft around and most of the way back to the dock and then leaves them to come back the final distance on their own. He ties up his boat and he's taking more time than usual. He wanders up and it's at this point we start to notice the huge wash of blood across the side of his body.

I come running up to him and he calmly says, "Jordan, get the keys, we need to make THE trip again." We know the way to the hospital by heart. I think they may have a wing named after us at this point. We're off to get another punch in our frequent injury card. I think just one more and we get a free surgery. He's managed to get his finger caught up in the tow rigging and amputate about a quarter inch from the tip of his left ring finger. It probably won't affect his life much, except to make touch typing a lot harder.

Three Things (07/08/2005)

Know thyself? If I knew myself I would run away. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I am complete sucker for these things, but I refuse to blast them out in e-Mail. This one is stolen from Nancy, who met me once, but probably doesn't realize I stalk her.

Three names you go by:

  1. J-Jiggy
  2. Schmoo
  3. Cookie Boy

Three screen names you have had:

I'm not going to put active screen names, since you could stalk me. Instead I will do old BBS handles.

  1. Chaos
  2. Anomie (it's Latin for chaos because I am clever like that.)
  3. Viper (When I started the BBS'ing my best friend and I were Viper and Venom)

Three physical things you like about yourself:

  1. Eyes
  2. Anorexia (I like being skinny)
  3. Crooked Smile (I been told the nerve damage makes me cute)

Three physical things you don't like about yourself:

  1. Height (Ohh, to be 5'9" again)
  2. Blindness (Ohh, to have depth perception)
  3. Hair (Too coarse, too wavy)

Three parts of your heritage:

  1. Scottish
  2. Danish
  3. English

Three things that scare you:

  1. Strangers
  2. Spiders
  3. Guns

Three of your everyday essentials:

  1. Coffee
  2. e-Mail
  3. Smiles

Three things you are wearing right now:

  1. Paperclip Rings
  2. Kairos Cross (live the fourth)
  3. Glasses

Three of your favorite bands or musical artists:

  1. The Murmurs
  2. They Might be Giants
  3. Guns N' Roses

Three of your favorite songs:

  1. The Murmurs - White Rabbit
  2. TMBG - Birdhouse in Your Soul
  3. GnR - Patience

Three things you want in a relationship:

  1. Love
  2. Smiles
  3. Laughter

Two truths and a lie (in no particular order):

  1. I have shot a person.
  2. I have read the bible cover-to-cover.
  3. I have driven 140 MPH.

Three physical things about the preferred sex that appeal to you:

  1. Cute smile
  2. Shorter than me (it goes towards cuteness)
  3. Emotive eyes

Three of your favorite hobbies:

  1. IRL Chatting (haha... ohh, those acronyms kill me)
  2. Water Skiing
  3. Geo-caching

Three things you want to do really badly right now:

  1. Go see my girl.
  2. Go back to sleep.
  3. Win the lottery, quit my job and become an artist.

Three careers you're considering/you've considered:

  1. High school Math Teacher
  2. College Computer Science Professor
  3. Content writer

Three places you want to go on vacation:

  1. Antarctica
  2. Japan
  3. New Zealand

Three kid's names you like:

  1. Summer / Autumn / Winter (girl)
  2. Dallas (boy)
  3. Willow (girl)

Three things you want to do before you die:

  1. Go to Antarctica
  2. Have grandchildren
  3. Spend a decade in retirement

Three ways that you are stereotypically a boy:

  1. I own a PS2
  2. I read a lot of Sci-Fi/Fantasy
  3. I am good at math

Three ways that you are stereotypically a chick:

  1. I love Broadway musicals
  2. I cry at movies
  3. I love babies

Three former celeb crushes:

These don't have to be former do they?

  1. Britney Speares (before she got skanky)
  2. Hilary Duff (until she gets skanky)
  3. Kevin Sorbo

Three people that I would like to see take this quiz now:

  1. You
  2. Gumdrop
  3. Annie