These “blogger beware” articles have become pretty standard fare of late. What the article says is entirely true. People should be careful what they share (compromising pictures? Cell phone numbers? Are they insane?) and what they say about their workplace.
It’s a rough and unfair world out there. Be careful.
I just got my copy of “What Really Happened To The Class of ’93”. This is a book about my high school class, with specific stories about where particular people went and what they did. Some founded businesses, others got sex change operations.
I talked to the author briefly, while he was researching it, but that was the end of my participation. I’m apparently too stunningly boring (plus, I wasn’t close to any of his principle stories) to make for good reading. I’m okay with that. The big transition in my life in the last decade was the realization that I’m actually living my life seeking increased happiness rather than just increased knowledge. Turns out that wisdom, calm, and love are more important than knowledge in the pursuit of happiness. For me at least. Your milage may vary.
So anyway, I looked at the book, hefted it in my hand, and formed this opinion:
You don’t represent me. Never did. I’m not with these people. I passed through for four years, took what I could, and had a pretty good time while I was there. One friendship from that time has lasted for me, the rest have vaporized … lost in the mists of time. Besides which, I’m an almost totally different person now than I was in high school. The things that drive me, comprise me, are so inverted from then that it’s almost pointless to make the comparison. High school choir? Chess club? Junior year, the big decision of “quantitative” vs. “qualitative” geoscience? Prom? Class officers? That guy who killed himself at college? Bah. Humbug. Away with you.
I suspect that many people feel this way about high school. I still plan to read the book. It appears to be written in a fast paced, journalistic style. I’m mostly curious to see where people ended up. Maybe I could touch base with one or two of them. Rich Vuduc, Brenda McEldowney, Karen Taggart. Though in all likelihood these will be the standard, long distance contacts. A few emails. “Hi, how are you, what’s new, wow, a whole decade, you’re married? any kids?” and then the drifting into silence again as the passing urge to communicate fades or is pushed into the background by the realities of living each day.
Given a choice between staying in touch with old friends and weeding the garden, I seem to choose the garden, nine times out of ten. That’s part of the reason for this livejournal thing. It’s a little message board, a tiny book that I leave at the head of the trail. I may be out when you happen by … but you can look through the book and see where I’ve gone. If you feel like it, you can leave a note telling me that you were here.
On the train for my morning commute. God, I’m really glad that I don’t have to chase the train every morning. Really, even putting on pants every day is something of an imposition. Someday, this blissful period of my life will come to an end, and I may have to <shudder> wear a tie and get in at 7:30 to keep the minions in line … but for the moment life is pretty good.
As I was getting on the train, I overheard that most horrifying of all sounds for the morning commuter (okay, loud tubercular coughing is also pretty bad) the sing song of a parent who has lost their mind. “oh-KAY little TIM-mi. It’s Tahm to get up Up UP on the biiiiiiiig choo choo! Do you Seeeeeee the biiiiiiig Choo choo Tim-mi?” and so on. It’s hard to describe my desperation as I tried to decide whether they would take their insipid monolog (the kid is totally silent, it’s the parents who sound like prating idiots) forward or backwards on the train. DAMN! They followed. Now, one last choice, upper or lower seats: DAMN! Followed again. I snagged that most precious of commodities, the single seat (no chance of an uncomfortable encounter with SETS (Someone Else’s Thigh Sweat). The monolog is sitting two rows in front of me.
The pathetic part is that from time to time the parents will make eye contact top of the kid, and in voices just as loud and penetrating as their singsong, curse and swear in harsh Boston style.
Oh yeah, and the train is stopped so the bomb dogs can walk through. Woot. Nice Dog-GIE! Did you Seah tha Dog-GIE Tihm-MI? Nahs dog-GI!
It’s hot today. My plants were wilting. I put out the sprinkler, and I’ve been moving it around all day to soak the entirety of the grounds. Most recently, I put it directly in front of my office window. Shortly after I came back in, I noticed activity. The house finches (little brown common birds) are happily playing in the puddles and jumping through the jets of water. For some reason, this makes me happy.
A friend of mine wants to write a program to play online poker. It would interact directly with the web interface (as a macro program on the desktop), and would thus be identical to a real human on the server side.
I’m a little concerned about this.
Creating synthetic online poker players only hastens the day when we have to deal with the simple fact that things are not as simple as we would like to believe. Someday, computer programs will be able to emulate all of the visible facets of being human. At that point it will be a matter of faith as to whether or not they *are* sentient like us.
Cheating at online poker is only the first step. Soon you’ll have mechanized cigar smoking, exotic dancer ogling lushes. Automated alcoholics. Automata panhandlers. Synthetic domestic abusers.
What space then for humanity?
Made the Mountain Brew this afternoon. This, for those who haven’t been paying attention, is a batch of beer where a crud-load of the fermentable sugars come from 2.5 gallons of Mountain Dew. That’s 24 cans, or approximately half the fluid volume of the batch. Supposedly, the yeasts don’t eat the caffeine either, resulting in a poor man’s “red bull vodka” or whatever the kids are drinking these days to combine uppers and downers. It was a simple batch, and it didn’t even try to boil over. Nice beer. Sit. Stay. It’s fermenting now. I decided to hold off on the other batch because the kitchen was just too damn hot.
Ran too far. Now I ache. All y’all psycho supermarathon runners can go talk amongst yourselves for a while. Eight miles is far for me.
Here’s the map: no idea if this like will work for you. If the link does work, click on the “satellite” button on the upper right of the map.
I had to walk the last mile, because like a dumb-ass I planned my run to conclude right at high noon.
Here’s a link to a story about some students of something called “mechatronics” (<grouchy old man>Seems like RO-botics to me, at least that’s what we called it back in the day…</grouchy old man>) who have made a robot to play a guitar.
Soon, all those ovrepaid, union slaves to the assembly line of pop will be out of work as automation replaces them and the industry moves to Mexico.
Spent the day doing phase two of that for which yesterday was phase one. We parallelized. We tuned. We tweaked, and we timed. We found stupid bugs up and down the chain, and we removed them. We automated. We timed again. 0.26 seconds per compound/CPU, for those who are keeping track.
At five, the boss came in and said “It’s beer time.” Then he made us shut our laptops and come with him to this place where they serve beer and play music. There were many people there. Most of them work at Evil Pharma, but they seemed like nice people anyway. Evil pharma employs about 40,000 people worldwide, and these were just a few of them. I met a robotics person (who manages the robots that toss vats of steaming goo around) and two oncology / genetics people who (I assume) steal people’s souls for a living and then sell them back in fractions. They were vague about what they really do. We talked about how much we used to party back in college, and what a pain it is to be a grown up.
Then the boss said “We need to hire you. Is that possible?” I said “no,” and explained that I’m ruined for future employment by the whole “work from home, kick ass all day” lifestyle. He persisted. Then I explained about the noncompete clause I had signed. He persisted beyond flattery to the point where I said “what is this? don’t feed the ego, man!”
To that, he said “Chris, you just did in two days what we failed to do in two months. I’m serious. Can you at least come back next week and do more? You’re expensive but worth it.”
So that’s my new slogan / motto / bumper sticker: “Expensive but worth it.”
Oh yeah, and my brain is totally fried. I feel like two months worth of smart got sucked out of me in about two days. I think I’m going to go watch some movie with explosions in it now.