emptying my brain onto the internet since 1998…
Dragon*Con 2005 is over. Four days in downtown Atlanta with Science Fiction nerds, Fantasy dorks, costuming goons, and the TV and movie stars and authors that go with it.
I’m tired now, and I think I will sleep. Tomorrow, or perhaps another day later this week I’ll write more about my trip.
Its just a simple fact of working in the Information Technology field. New guys suck. One, they introduce change into what may be a well oiled machine of work. Two, they never know enough of the specifics to be much help for a while, and the slow you down asking silly questions. And three, they get a better computer.
See, technology moves pretty fast. What was a standard computer last year is this year’s slow model. And this is really what bugs tech guys more than anything. A new guy comes in, and he gets a better PC that the guy who’s been here a while.
Me, I’ve never been the new guy. I’m always the replacement guy. I’m much worse off than even the old guys because I’m replacing someone who has quit or been fired, and I get his junky busted equipment. So, not only do I not get the new guy benefits of a spanking new PC, but when the company does decide to spend some cash and buy new stuff for old guys, I’m not high enough on the totem pole to get one.
Bah!
It’s not actually my spider, he just lives outside my front door. Normally, I’d kill a spider living around my front door. I’d go out and spray him with insect spray until he stopped running or twitching. But I decided this time it would be different. However, I still didn’t want him building webs for me to walk through when I’m coming or going from my apartment.
So I trained him. With judicious use of knocking down web strands, I have trained this spider to build only on my neighbor’s side of the front stoop. This spider started out pretty small, but the stoop has lights on it that we, the apartment dwellers, can’t turn off, so it attracts its fair share of flying bugs. So he eats well. He’s pretty big now, I’d say his body is the size of a nickel, and with the legs he’s easily a half-dollar. And the webs he makes are pretty interesting. One night he managed to spin a perfect octogonal web, eight main lines with smaller and smaller octogons at regular intervals. Then one night he made an intricate web with two central points, which might have been an accident, or maybe he was supposed to have a guest. It’s become a nightly ritual for me to walk the dog and check out the web he’s spinning before going to bed. And he only spins his web at night… one, because only at night are the lights on that attract the bugs; and two, because my neighbor keeps tearing down the web.
Unfortunately for my neighbor, he can’t train the spider like I have. That’s because when he gets up in the morning and walks through the web, the spider isn’t in it anymore. The spider gets his food at night, then hauls it up to the top of the stoop and webs himself into a corner with his catch for sleeping and feeding. In the morning the web is empty. Now, you might be wondering why I would train a spider to build a web that my neighbor walks through just about every day…
Well, I hate my neighbor. I live in a pretty ghetto neighborhood. Guys sit on their front step and drink forties, and hang out in packs or gangs and make horrendously rude comments toward any woman who dares walk by trying to be “player of the year” or something… But my next door neighbor doesn’t do that. He’s from South Africa. His whole family is. Now, I don’t have anything against South Africans per say… but in this case is means that there are two families with a total of about 9 people living in a 2 bedroom apartment. Most of my animosity toward these people comes from their attitudes. The kids like to use car parking spots to park their bikes. They like my dog and they want to pet him, but only if he sits still, faces away from them, and they pet him lightly on the back of the head from behind. Any attempt on the dog’s part to sniff or move toward the kids earns a response of screams and running, sometimes crying. Usually this is when the dad comes out and says we shouldn’t scare the kids. Umm… what? Anyway, when we moved in, we used to walk the dog out front to do his business. But we stopped doing that, and he does his business out back. Oh, at night before bed, I’ll let him pee out front, but for any number 2, he goes out back into the weeds and trees. However, for some reason, all the other shitheads in our neighborhood like to just let their dogs run without a leash… so they come over to our area to poop, following the smell. Even though its been over 18 months since our dog has pooped out front, other dogs still come there to do their business. And my neighbor, he yells at me for it… “All thees sheeting. I come outside to sit and its smelling sheet.” “Your dog is sheeting under my front window.” and so on… but its not my dog, I explain that, but he just waves me off and gives me nasty looks. And he complains about our dog barking and making noise, which is pretty rare… and when I try to mention his kids thumping up and down the stairs at all hours of the day and night, he waves me off again.
So I trained a spider to build webs in front of his door…
Yeah you… look, I realize you’ve probably had a really tough day, perhaps even a really tough life, but one of the things that makes a revolving door work so well is that the work of pushing it around is shared by all the people moving through it. If you are going to get in, you have to do your share. My day hasn’t exactly been a big bowl of happy either, but you don’t see me just strolling through the doors with my arms folded making some other schmuck do all the work. If it hadn’t been for my desire to actually get to lunch, I would have stopped right there and kept you trapped until you shouldered your share… jackass.
“You can’t handle the truth!”
-Col. Nathan R. Jessep, A Few Good Men
It’s sad, but it’s true… there are a great many people who simply can’t handle the truth. And I mean simple truth, not ‘being brutally honest’ (which is more often a disguise for being honest, brutally). I had the misfortune of having a coworker ask about her own performance… Okay, let me back up.
I’m working on a program. And as I finish parts of it, I turn it over for requirements testing. The people who are testing it are also the people who gave me the requirements. More often than not, when they test, they complain about things the program doesn’t do, all of which are things they didn’t tell me it needed to do. As a result, I’m constantly rewriting my programs to include things after the fact. We have marathon email back-and-forths where we argue over the value of certain items. Their most common defense of a stupid business practice is “We’ve always done it that way.” And my most common attack is “We are writing a new program, so let’s take this opportunity to change the way its done and make it better.” And its not like its an alien idea… these are things they think SHOULD change, but they want the new program to work exactly like the old program and THEN change it. More work for everyone.
Anyway… so it comes that we are on the phone, and after we solve the latest fire she asks me how she’s been doing on the requirements and testing. I ask if she really wants to know and she says, “I want the truth.” I give her the truth, as kindly as I can. I don’t accuse her of giving me bad requirements, I instead explain that when working on requiements it would work better if she worked with the existing system for a couple or three weeks and documented every task she performed and later reviewed that log for missed steps or details to avoid the situation we have where daily tasks weren’t in the requirements. I explain that her testing should be testing of the requirements as written and not of desired features, and that things not in the requirements are enhancements for the next version, and if its discovered that essential requirements were missed they shouldn’t be reported as bugs, but should be brought up as requirements revisions. I explain that her testing is testing of my programming of the requirements as written, and when we move to phase two of testing, the user testing, her users will point out the missing details and at that point new requirements or revisions will need to be made. And lastly I say, that all this is for her sanity and mine, because if she’s constantly checking for items that weren’t in the requirements, then she’s going to be very unhappy; while on my end, if I spend every day rewriting my work for items that I wasn’t told about instead of working on remaining items or other projects, I get very unhappy.
In my opinion, I laid things out very clearly and kindly. I never yelled or accused, I just simply pointed out issues with the process she was using and how everyone would be happier if she did things differently. Well… except the users, but they’ll never be happy until we invent the “Do My Job” button so they spend their days like George Jetson or Homer Simpson, pushing one button when its needed.
So later that day I got pulled aside by my boss and told that I should never yell at anyone about how they do their job because its not within my authority as a contract programmer. I tried to defend myself, but he didn’t want to hear it. He only wanted to hear that I would never do it again (despite not having done it in the first place).
That’s my story… people, especially at work, can’t handle the truth… Now I will present you with a bastardized quote of my own:
“Work like you only need money. Love like you’ll never be happy. Dance like everyone’s got score cards. Sing only when nobody’s listening. And lie like your job depends on it.”
I don’t really mean that… but seriously, when someone asks for the truth, try to be sure they really want to hear it. And never ask for the truth unless you can’t handle it. And by “handle” I don’t mean “make them pay for telling it to you”.
John Hughes returns to high school with this tale of super powered children attending a school to train them to be heroes… or for the less usefully powered kids, hero support, a.k.a. sidekicks. Okay, its not really John Hughs, but its got enough teen high school troubles that it could pass for one of his movies…
I really had fun watching this movie. After seeing a number of comic book and superhero films take things in a more grown-up and serious manner, it was nice to see a film take it from an almost slapstick comedy family point of view.
I’m not going to say much about the movie itself, because I might get carried away and ruin it for you… but its definately worth the money to go see it. It’s one I’ll have to own on DVD when they release it. Good stuff.
In many people, procrastination is a bad thing. When you see them putting something off time and time again, its quite likely that they will never get to it… they are actually putting it off in hopes that the situation will change and it won’t need to be done anymore.
I’m a good procrastinator. Good in that nothing I ever put off is forgotten, and eventually I will finish it and be done. And if the item has a deadline, I may wait until the absolutely last possible minute and drive my coworkers and bosses into a fits, but I’m not late.
A while back I said I was going to import the old website posts into this new format. That was… over two months ago. But I didn’t forget, and now all my Random Thoughts, Reviews and my old .plan archive are part of this weblog.
Enjoy.
It might just be that I’m growing cynical, or perhaps its just an understanding of the nature of people, but I’ve come to a point where I tend to examine the things that people say with a microscope, trying to find the flaws in their words.
For example, let’s take Joran van der Sloot, one of the suspects, and the only one still in custody, for the disappearance and possible murder of Natalee Holloway in Aruba. His mother has been saying, and its been repeated in the press, that her son states that “he left her on the beach because she wanted to stay.” Now, the optimist that lives inside every person wants to believe that Natalee felt that Aruba was great, better than Alabama, and that she wanted to enjoy it as much as possible before leaving, and that Joran, not wanting to be a nuisance, left her to enjoy the sounds of the ocean alone and headed home. A nice story, and would be wonderful if it turns out to be true. But the pessimist in me looks at that statement and says, “Its still true, technically, even if he killed her.” Say that Joran really wanted to have sex with Natalee, and that he didn’t want to do it on the beach, but wanted her to go back to his place, she didn’t want to, he tried to force her, she fought back, he killed her and dumped her body somewhere on the beach, either in this lake they are now draining, or leaving it to drift out to see where it sank or was eaten by animals, his statement is still true. He left her on the beach because she wanted to stay.
Part of me wants to think that this is some gift of keen insight when I dissect a person’s words like this, like if I applied myself I could be a good investigator for the police or some government agency. Another part of me, however, thinks this is just my willingness to accept evil in anyone, that every person is capable of horrifying acts. One thing is sure though, all of me is chilled that I could be right. I don’t want to be right, not for things like this…
One thing I do that has remained a constant practice in my life has been to avoid situations where I am guaranteed my expectations have exceeded reality. Mostly this comes in with movies and books. Should I happen to not see a movie just as it comes out, or read a book within a couple months of release, and that thing takes off with reports of it being “The best ever!” there is a narrow window of opportunity to see or read it before I’m forced to put it off until the hype blows over. The reason for this is simple… people talk it up so much that it can’t possibly stand up to it.
Harry Potter is one of those things. People were telling me for years that they were simply the best books ever written, utterly fantastic, it would blow me away. So, I didn’t read them. There was so much build up, that I knew it couldn’t possibly be as good as the hype. And it wasn’t. I finally started reading the Harry Potter books a couple months ago. I’ve been reading one of them, then another book or two, then the next Potter book, and so on. I’m almost finished with ‘Goblet of Fire’ now, that’s why I’m writing. The first book… ehh… it was good, no doubt, and for young readers its an excellent book for interesting non-readers. Its short, its light, full of fluff and fun, and to any person over the age of about 18 or so, completely and utterly transparent. The plot, while not bad, was predictable. Yeah, I’d seen the movies, but that didn’t matter, even the things left out of the movie I saw coming. It was not a complicated book. That’s both a good thing and a bad thing, as I said… good for young readers or new readers, bad for anyone who has heard all the hype.
The second book was better. Still a bit predictable, and more fluff than substance, but it was a fun read that I enjoyed. However, still far from being ‘the best ever’.
The third book, moreso… the story growing up as the boy does, becoming more complicated and involved, relationships becoming less simplistic, and overall a much better book.
As I move through the fourth book, I can see it continuing to grow. The story is more complex, more textured, the characters breathe on the page and display more traits like those you find in our own world, and its beginning to lose its predictability.
I look forward to the fifth book. And the sixth, the seventh, and more, if she decides to continue on.
Now that the books are out of the way… lets talk about the fans. I’m reading the UK versions of the books. One, because those are the ones my fiancee owns. And two, because reading the book with the authentic English (or Brittish) vernacular just appeals to me more than having them all sound like a bunch of Americans despite the fact that they are in England. As such, the books I read have covers that most of the people I pass on the street have never seen. Constantly, I am berated by people yelling at me or even grabbing me or my book forcibly, demanding to know how I got ahold of the as of yet unreleased sixth book. Once I explain to them that its an old book, most of them just stomp away, not even apologizing for my sprained wrist or nearly tackling me. Few ask why the book is different, and to those that do, when I try to explain that its the original UK versions, their eyes glaze over like I’ve just tried to explain in depth quantum mechanical theory to them, and they stumble away, dumbfounded by the knowledge that Brittish English and American English aren’t the same, and that people actually write in languages other than American English. Only one person so far has actually carried on a conversation of intelligence and cared about the differences in the books (simple things like that people in the UK call a ‘flashlight’ a ‘torch’ and so on).
I’ve met numerous people who are going to go out Friday night and stay up at book release parties until 12:01am Saturday to buy their copy of the book. Because, obviously, the books bought at that time will be better than the ones the store will be selling all day the next day, at reasonable hours, like after the sun comes up, or even after a lazy brunch.
As it is, my fiancee, a huge Potter fan, but not an insane Potter fan, is actually going to wait until sometime the following week to read it. Her UK copy is being shipped overseas, and while most who order through Amazon will get their books on Saturday if they specified the next day shipping, next day from England means Monday or Tuesday.
Anyway, back to work, or something… Harry and Cedric have just… nah, not going to tell you. Read it yourself. I do recommend the Potter books… but I do not recommend becoming a Potter fanatic.
I’ve been a fan of George R.R. Martin for a long time, ever since I picked up the first of the Wild Cards books that he edited and managed. A couple years ago I picked up A Game of Thrones, the first of his ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ series, and was simply amazed.
Thanks in part to his success with the Ice and Fire books, they have reprinted some of his earlier novels. I’ve just read two of them, ‘Dying of the Light’ and ‘Fevre Dream’, and both of them are very good.
Dying of the Light takes place on a rogue planet, Worlorn. When this frozen planet was found to have a path near a grouping of stars that would thaw it out, the planets of the fringe decided to have a festival. They set up 14 cities, and for ten years, five approaching the stars and five moving away, they held this festival. Now, seven years past the festival, the planet is closing on being too far from the stars. The light is fading, and the world is growing cold. This is where Dirk comes to find Gwen, an old flame, who has sent him a message for help. Abandoned by most of the worlds after the festival, Worlorn is now the residence of a few hundred people who didn’t wish to leave, and Gwen and her team studying the interactions of the plants and animals brought to Worlorn that should have never met. Gwen has a new man in her life, two of them in fact, and they belong to a culture that is steeped in tradition. And its the traditions of those people, the Kavalars, that pushed them all down a dark path.
I have to say that I was wary of the book at first. I love sci-fi films, but sci-fi books have often left me cold. Some times this book was a bear to read, trying to keep in mind all the alien terms used throughout and trying to understand them all by their context. In the end though, I did enjoy it very much. It was a good read.
Fevre Dream was altogether different. If someone had slapped the book in my hands and said I would enjoy this book about Steamboats on the Mississippi, I’d have called them a liar. But George has put together quite an excellent novel. The story is of a river boat captain, Abner Marsh, who’s had a string of bad luck, resulting in all but one of his boats being destroyed. He’s approached by a strange man who offers to pay to build the best boat on the river, all Abner has to do is take him on as a partner and never question his bizarre habits. So begins the friendship of Abner and Joshua York, a man who sleeps by day, lives by night, and has a fondness for a wine of his own private stock… a vampire.
Martin’s take on vampires in this book is very interesting, and his characterization of Marsh and the rest of his crew is fantastic. And without ruining it, this book is home to one the most fascinating and yet slowest chase scenes I’ve ever read. I devoured this book much more quickly that I expected, and in the end I wanted to hear more, even though there was no more to tell. I highly recommend it to just about anyone.