Story Archive - October 2008

This is Halloween (10/31/2008)

There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world. - Jean Baudrillard

I'm going to tell you a secret about me that everybody knows. I love halloween season for an enormous number of reasons. Sure the adorable children in their princess and superhero costumes are wonderful. The make me laugh and smile and I know they are having one of the best days of the year. Kids on Halloween?

Awesome. When I user to trick or treat as a child my father would accompany me with a glass of wine. Whenever his wine glass was empty, after the kids were done he would say, "pardon me, but I'm also trick or treating. If you happen to have an open bottle of wine..." As a child I found the immensely embarrassing. As an adult it is one of the most brilliant things I have ever seen!

My secret pleasure of the seasons is that women feel it is trendy to dress goth. Black nail polish goes into style and all the ladies, having spent the last three months clad in frilly sun dresses with french manicures, feel like it's the time of year to put on the black nail polish. When the dark polish goes on, the rest of fashion matches and so black dresses, light foundation, dark lipstick and mascara all come into style. I find it, to be honest, absolutely wonderful and blissful time of year.

My costume? As is tradition for me I have dressed as a friends and coworkers for halloween. Last year I went gothic hipster punk. This year, my work costume was Jordan Singh. I was asked a lot of questions by people about the process for tying the turbin. It's quite intricate and involved and I dare say, my respect for those who tie one every morning has gone up. Enjoy:

[website postWithDate:today] (10/29/2008)

Obviously the Internet is an incredibly valuable tool to find dubious scholarship on all sorts of subjects. - John Hodgman

As I've been growing more and more in my job, I've been moving further and further away from nitty gritty work. I'm not interested in going into hands-on development work sitting in a dark room with the glow of the monitor my only source of light. I've never been there and never need to go there. Still, I miss the blissful moments of flow when techno music was playing and I was sure, in my heart of hearts, that in just twenty more minutes I would be done. Twenty minutes quickly become hours, but it was pure and simple bliss. I knew the problem was entirely in my control. Now in life, and in work, it seems I more often deal with problems out of my control.

A few weeks back, I decided it was time for me to learn how to develop for the Mac. Specifically I wanted to write an iPhone application and it seems like learning how to do Mac development is the first place to start for that. I have a pretty good range of languages under my belt, so I popped open the "Hello World" source for the iPhone and just started at completely confused. I'm a smart person and I so I looked really hard at what was going on. Thought about it. Still, it hurt my brain. Weird. I use my degree in number theory every day, not so much to prove new an excited theorems, but to say to myself "you have a degree in number theory; if you are finding this hard it is really hard."

I bought a book on Apple programming and I've worked my way about half way through it and mostly I'm upset. I'm used to writing detailed algorithms to build programs not to drawing pretty pictures. I think the worst moment came when I built a database management application (something I could easily do in Bento or Access) without writing any code; mostly just by drawing lines. The program didn't worked and when it fails it is hard to debug. No line number or log messages. I quit! I want to do grunt work as long as I get line numbers.

What's the been the weirdest programming language you've dealt with? Intercal is not allowed.

Birthday Hours are Over (10/25/2008)

You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it. - Scott McNealy

My birthday season has officially closed out after last weekend, but I made a good run this year. As I have collected friends over the course of my life I just keep having larger and more spread out parties. The kids from Sacramento have a hard time making it to south bay. The San Francisco people claim that going south of the bridges is too far. It's just a mess. Being the gracious host that I am, I just keep throwing myself more and more parties. You're welcome people.

The problem is, I keep collecting more friends. This year introduced a new portion to the party that involved former coworkers. I had not done that party in years past. So does that mean in future years I'm forced to add that party? Perhaps. Making it so easy to keep up with everyone means that I do keep up with everyone, but reading someone's twitter stream or Facebook update takes me ten seconds a day. Trying to make sure every one of those people can make birthday and give me a toast. That's real work. That's hard work. To relax from all that hard work. I ate a cupcake and started dancing.

Do you hang on to your friends forever? Or do you let them go?

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All Your Charge Are Gone (10/14/2008)

Steve Jobs doesn't want good design. He wants great design, and my method will never give you that. That takes a rare leader, who can bring both the cohesion and commitment and style. And Steve has it. - Donald Norman

Ohhh Apple you have never upset me so much. I understand that as an Apple customer I am expected to accept the will of the great Steve, and bow my head to the decisions he makes for me. His decisions help to reduce my confusion in the market place. He teaches me how to think and how to love and for that, I know how to compute.

My recent upgrade to the iPhone 3G has been the first upsetting upgrades I have ever done with Apple. My god! Is this how Window users felt when they updated to Vista? As you see, when I went to bed the night after I bought my new phone, I went to set down my iPhone in the dock next to my bed to Pzizz myself to sleep. Then I hit my first problem; the new iPhone 3G doesn't fit into my old iPhone docks. Really Apple? Really? Okay, I can get that you wanted to change the iPhone aesthetics and to hell with the old docks.

I tossed the old dock aside (bang!) and plugged the cable directly into my new phone. "I'm sorry Jordan, your old charger doesn't work with your new phone." What? WHAT?!? Okay, I'll admit, this charger next to my bed is from my old iPod Mini. So maybe, I guess, there is some weird charger difference between the old iPod Mini charger and the new iPhone 3G. Still, I don't understand why my iPhone classic happily charged but the new one did not.

The next morning I got up, stretched, and went into the bathroom. There I dropped my new phone into my JBL speaker and the new phone happily slipped into the universal dock connector and FLOSS weekly started chirping out the speaker. Only, the phone told me "suck it. I will not charge on your less-than-one-year-old speaker." Really Apple? Really? So the annoyance and anger was pretty small on Monday when I went into the office and dropped it into my "Designed by Apple in California" iPod HiFi only to see the same, "suck it" message appear.

Ohh Apple, if you hadn't released shiny new notebooks for me today, I might never have forgiven you.

Half My Life Ago (10/12/2008)

If you're detecting an air of incredible privilege, small-P privilege, and not only enjoying, but not even thinking for a second that there was anything self-indulgent or wrong about spending your parents' money then your detection is correct. That is exactly what that period of my life was. - John Hodgman

Today I clicked over another year on my life odometer and that always makes me look back. Where was I before? Where was I half my life ago when I was young and innocent and full of hopes and dreams?

Half a life ago, I was getting close to the end of my sophomore year of high school. Every year of high school was a transitional year and only later in life did I learn that it was this way for most people. When I left junior high school for high school I made the transition from a standard public school into a private all-boys Catholic school. I choose the change into private school for a lot of reasons, but the one I tell people most often is the importance of being my own person. My brother was just one class ahead of me through all of a grade school and through junior high school and so to every teacher I was his younger brother. For example at the start of eighth grade students were given a letter from the outgoing eighth-graders; "oh how cute I am" thought the teacher as she gave me the one written by my older brother. High school was a good chance to break way from that mold and have authority figures define me as me, and not as the younger brother of a student they had the previous year. There were two top-tier public high schools in the area (my brother was at the close one) and one top-tier private school. So I went through the application; I got in; I went there, for better or for worse.

When I started in high school I knew absolutely no one. I'll say it again; I did not know a single person in the school and that is a terribly tricky situation to put in someone who is as painfully shy as I am. My first week I used social muscles that were rarely flexed and reached out to make a couple of friends, not because we shared interests, but because we shared class before lunch. Those first two days were the only time in my life I have said, "I need to meet someone; I will now become friends with that person." By sophomore year, those friendships were stretched thin. You can only take a friendship so far if there isn't a shared area of interests or a shared academic philosophy or a shared something. After two years, those friendships from freshmen year, made with people who also lacked friends at the start of high school, were dying off. We hadn't broken the final ties, but atrophy was running high. Towards the end of sophomore year I was lonely at school.

Still, once school was out and I went home I had two other groups of friends. The first was my blooming group of online friends I had met on the internet (well, on local dial-up BBS, since the internet didn't exist at the time outside university and military walls). This group was amazing and new and blossoming and unlocking a world I would not have found otherwise. There were people my age; there were people ten and twenty years older; there were people younger. It held a collection of people who were just so amazingly diverse and wonderful I couldn't help but fall in love with this group. I never met them. I didn't want to have my parent's driving me meet them, so I participated virtually and sometimes, with a rare few, over the actual telephone. There was something wonderful about having a lot of people in their twenties and thirties that would talk to me as a peer.

My other group was a group of two. It was just me and my secret girlfriend. Except I didn't call her my girlfriend at the time (commitment issues and all). She was secret and you don't tell people about your secret girlfriend; if you don't tell others about her than what's the point of calling her a girlfriend anyway? It was young. It was fun. It was childish. My half-birthday would be April 12th, and that would be just five days before the first time she and I stopped seeing each other for an extended time, but five days before that happened, we were happy. Things can change fast.

What about academics? Weren't you in the middle of high school and stressed about all the hard classes you were taking? I rarely think about them. I worked reasonably for school, never pushing hard and never slacking off. That earned me excellent grades (though not top-of-class) and my parents were proud of me for it. So why care? What I learned in school never stuck me to be as important as what I learned outside it.

Dont Sweat the Small Stuff (10/06/2008)

With the changing economy, no one has lifetime employment. But community colleges provide lifetime employability. - Barack Obama

Here is the Silicon Valley, Wall Street just feels so far away. I guess, really, that it says a pretty powerful thing about my faith in America. Every morning I wake up and I go to the same job and do the same thing. I still put my money into my IRA and 401(k); I still spend my money on the same simple toys and gadgets that have always made me happy. Last weekend I bought myself a new iPhone 3G for my birthday. It seems like if the American financial system is truly into a downward spiral to oblivion, I should be more worried about things. I'm not worried.

I've been watching my network in my financial software going on the steep downward trajectory over the past few weeks. I was going to take a screenshot, but it's just too ridiculous. I know it should concern me, but I've got a faith in the system. I'm playing the game of life according to the rules, not aggressive, but with good pace and strategy and I expect to cross the finish line just fine.

The Hoodie Quest (10/01/2008)

If you want to succeed, double your failure rates. - Dr. Leonard Mlodinow

Back in May I came to the realization that I didn't have comfortable hoodies to wear around. I just had the two given to me by a former girlfriend from her company and that just seemed awkward. "Ohh, you work for Google?" "Sorry no, but I dated someone who did." Under the wrong hoodie-wearing circumstances that could be awkward so I went on a long quest of hoodie acquisition. That quest is at an end.

I got a total of three new hoodies over the past couple months. Two of them are geek related with writing and the last is just stripy and plain. Which is still, in my opinion, awesome. Which do you like best?