They don't do windows

Some VIPs from our company's headquarters are flying in on the corporate jet next week for a bunch of meetings and schmoozing. My boss just sent out an e-mail with their agenda, which I opened on my computer at home. A brief moment of amusement followed. When I double clicked the Word attachment, Word popped to the front. My to-do list from last weekend was still open on the screen.

So for a brief moment, I thought that the corporate honchos had scheduled activities like like "clean bathroom, "get new toilet seat," "get scrapbook supplies," and "directions for Grandpa." Alas, it turns out that they're just doing things like having Operational Discussions about Financial Impact. Too bad.

ding, dong, ratatatatatatatatatata

I was up very late last night. (Blogging, I admit, but also doing some school work and various other things.) My plan had been to sleep until 9:30, which would have still given me, if not a lot of sleep, at least enough to make it through the day. At 7:00 AM, the neighbor's kid persistently starts ringing my doorbell to tell me that the cat was fine when she checked in on her. A week and a half ago, while I was on vacation. Not sure I see the urgency in this, but anyhow.

So then I was awake for a while, checked my e-mail and did a few other things, and could already tell that I was dragging. So around 7:45 I figured that I'd go back to bed for another couple hours. No sooner had I gotten to sleep, the world champion jackhammer team arrives outside my bedroom window. And starts tearing up the part of the street that they hadn't already destroyed.

Maybe I'm an unwitting part of some sort of sleep deprivation experiment.

Luther -- The Man, The Myth, The Movie

Sorry I've been invisible lately. Lots of stress, for a variety of different reasons. Hopefully things will get better soon, but I have a feeling posting may be erratic for a while -- possibly until the end of the semester.

On a non-stressful topic, I saw Luther on Friday night, and was blown away by it. Not that it was necessarily the best movie ever made. But, like Titanic, it gives you a real impression of what people might have seen and heard at a particular point in history.

I think if you've been exposed to something all your life, you sometimes don't really get the point. Growing up Lutheran, I've known about the 95 theses and Luther's wrath over indulgences for as long as I can remember.

The phrase "Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise" is stuck in my head, but not because I really comprehended it. Instead, it was part of a church camp chant that we'd repeat every morning before announcements:

Gooood Mooorning, Mister Craig. And what a fine morning it is. Yes, yes, indeed. The sun is peeking through the clouds, and it looks like it's going to be a wonnnderfulll day. Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise, God help me, Amen. A might fortress is our God. His banner over me is love. Turn, Turn, Turn. Oh, rocka my soul, Baby! A Do Run Run Run, A Do Run Run.

(Or something along those lines -- it was like 20 years ago!)

The point is, that when something is drummed into you in such a relentless and silly way, it loses all meaning. So that's why I was blown away by the scene where Luther stands in front of representatives of the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor (who could easily have him burned at the stake) and refuses to recant his writings.

Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me.

This dude is thumbing his nose at the most powerful people in the world, in a time when due process wasn't even a glimmer on the horizon. Not something you realize when the phrase is a prelude to announcements about tonight's big game of capture the flag.

To be sure, the movie is probably a rose-colored look at the life of a complex person. Nothing is said, for example, of Luther's antisemitic writings -- which reflected his time but are incongruous with his otherwise progressive views.

Still, I found the movie to be inspiring. If nothing else, it made me want to revisit Germany. I think we breezed by some Luther-related sites during our whirlwind 3-week stay in high school, but I'd like to see more. So I was also inspired to dust off my German book and order a new set of flash cards.

Nothing new there, I guess. I think my restlessness in Nashville is reaching new heights lately. And that's saying something.�

At the Beach

A cold day in the rust belt

United Technologies, the parent company of the Carrier corporation, has announced that it is shutting down the company's manufacturing facilities in Syracuse. About 1,200 of the company's 2,800 employees in the city will be laid off. The refrigeration equipment manufactured locally will now be made in Singapore and Stone Mountain, Georgia.

This is a huge deal. Carrier is one of the most visible industries in the city -- SU's domed stadium has been known as the Carrier Dome since it was built about 25 years ago.

I don't know what to say...

It appears that California has actually elected Arnold Schwartzenegger Governor. I don't know what this means for Western Civilization As We Know It, but it can't be good.

Keep meaning to...

I keep meaning to blog, and then not quite getting around to it. Same old school/work stuff. Plus I've been trying to do much needed fall cleaning on my house. And I've been sucked into eHarmony, an online dating service that's more time-intensive than the real thing. (More on that one of these days.)

In other news...

What I did this weekend:

• Went to an Italian restaurant with friends and got to listen to a lounge guitarist with really cheesy synthesized background tracks. Then a chunky guy wearing an apron and an "Italian Stallion" t-shirt came out and started crooning. I was endlessly amused.

• Actually read my school reading assignments (on time, for a change.) Listened to an hour long interview with this biotech bigwig. And chatted online with my project team. All sorts of academic fun.

• An assload of laundry. And actually put most of it away when I was done.

• IMed with my friend in Boston about the Yankees, Red Sox, etc.

• e-mailed a professor at said friend's college to try to get in on a trip to India in January. For credit, to study offshore outsourcing of IT. Assuming they'll let me enroll and my school will let me transfer the credit. A lot of ifs, but traveling to India would sure beat another boring online elective.

• Watched The Other Sister with Juliette Lewis and Giovanni Ribisi. This is going to brand me as a total sentimental sap, but I absolutely loved this movie. It is a (debatably realistic) portrayal of a mentally-disabled couple, focusing on the woman's struggle for independence from her domineering Mom. I probably wouldn't have given this a second look in the theater, but I'm glad I happened to stumble into it on cable.

That's about all the excitement. On Wednesday night, I'm flying out to North Carolina for a four-day beach minibreak with my parents and one of my brothers. My parents are nuts, which is why they think that October is ideal beach season. I laughed at them the first year, but every time I've gone it's been warm enough to swim, at least most days. And there are absolutely no crowds. So maybe they've got the right idea.

OK, enough of this. Gotta go finish a group paper that I stupidly volunteered to edit. Gak.

Geek humor

From a RedHat FAQ on software RAIDs:

Q: Why is there no question 13?
A: If you are concerned about RAID, High Availability, and UPS, then its probably a good idea to be superstitious as well. It can't hurt, can it?

(For those of you scratching your heads, a RAID is where a server uses multiple disks with multiple copies of the same data to help guard against data disasters.)

Oh, oobee doo, I wanna be like you...

This is a bit tragic in that two people were hurt, but also a bit funny. A gorilla named Little Joe just made his second successful jailbreak from a Boston zoo. This time he actually escaped zoo grounds and was seen sitting at a bus stop. Evidently trying to catch the express bus out of town. After a high (well, medium) speed chase, he was eventually hit with four tranquilizer darts and recaptured.

Personally, I think the zoo should recognize his effort and just let him go!

Syracuse Pictures!

Haven't had time to write down what I did or even caption the photos, but you can see some pictures from Syracuse and Rochester right here. Will try to write more at some point, but no promises...

Lies, damn lies, and double entendre?

Seen in an upgrade solicitation for SPSS, a computer program used for statistical analysis:

Q. Does the new graphics system improve graph/chart appearance?

A. Get ready to impress your customers and colleagues because you won't be restricted by your variable length any longer....

Hmm. I've always heard that it's not the length of your variable, it's the motion of your probability distribution.

Cocktails, conversation, and other scary C words

I can generally hold my own in a variety of social situations. I have no problem sitting down to dinner and making conversation with people I've never seen before. But there's something about walking into a room filled with strangers holding beverages that gives me the willies. I periodically find myself in these sorts of situations (usually -- but not always -- business related). I usually make an effort, but often end up milling around uncomfortably, talking briefly to a few people, and then taking the first polite opportunity to escape.

There are obvious mitigating factors that make this easier. For example, attending the affair with one or more other people helps. (I think married folks have this easy -- they have a built in conversation partner, and someone who can tag-team with them in case of awkward gaps in conversations.)

Attending an event where you've had enough previous contact with the people to know a few names, faces, and hometowns also helps out. The more people you already know -- even slightly -- the easier it is to meet more folks.

But these factors don't help in situations where you are attending an event alone and know virtually no one. Conference organizers could help somewhat by taking this sort of thing into account -- for example, providing nametags that are very descriptive, or even providing a list of attendees and their backgrounds as part of the conference packet. Sometimes they do, but often you are cast adrift with no lifeboat.

From years of experience with this sort of thing, I have decided that I am simply lousy at this sort of spontaneously-generated "cocktail conversation." You'd think they would teach this sort of thing in school. Maybe they do, and I just skipped class that day. In any case, I think it's a skill I need to develop. Anyone know where I can find an online class?

Back to my old haunts

I'm visiting my alma mater this weekend. I'm here for the 100th anniversary of The Daily Orange. (You can read about some wacky DO traditions -- including the drinking of beer from a shoe -- right here.)

I'm also fighting off a nasty head cold. Gak.

How many schoolteachers does it take to build a nuke?

The National Priorities Project database allows you to find out what tradeoffs are being made to support various government programs. For example, next year Tennessee taxpayers will pay $259.7 million to support the nation's nuclear weapons program. This same money could fund more than 6,000 elementary school teachers. You can use the tool to run your own comparisons for your home state.

Destroying the air in order to save it

Quoth the New York Times:

Last month, in one of the most far-reaching environmental decisions of his tenure, Mr. Bush eliminated [environmental] rules, allowing thousands of power plants, refineries and factories to make extensive upgrades that increase pollutants without having to install new antipollution devices. The president said other regulations, as well as the passage of his bill known as the Clear Skies initiative, would keep the air clean.

[...]

[T]he trip to the Detroit plant, intended as a broad defense of the Bush administration's clean air policy, quickly reignited the fierce debate between government officials and environmental groups. While Mr. Bush was greeting workers, environmentalists said the relaxation of clean air rules known as the new source review would allow this plant to increase emissions by more than 30,000 tons a year, a 56 percent increase over current levels.

The groups also noted that the government's own analysis of the effect of the Clear Skies bill found that the Monroe plant would not decrease its emissions of soot-forming sulfur dioxide.

Grumble... Who really needs clean air anyway?

Non-Commercial

I avoid some products like the plague because their advertising annoys me. I'm starting a list:

• Anything from Arbys -- Aside from their mystery meat "roast beef" sandwiches, that talking oven mit is just annoying.
• Michelina's frozen dinners -- The Macarena went out with the last century. Let it go, people.
• Feminine hygiene products -- Well, OK, boycotting these isn't really causing me any great hardship. But with all the great market research out there, you'd think they could target these things better. Most men I know would be quite happy if they never had to think about the words "yeast infection."
• Anything advertised on the folded over half page that comes on top of the Sunday comics. How are you supposed to get your "Get Fuzzy" fix with that annoying paper flap tacked onto the section? I make it a point to rip it off without reading it. Take that, corporate America!
• Wal-Mart -- I confess to not really being 100% faithful to this boycott. But the company still bugs me. They have a penchant for image campaigns where they promote themselves as a down-home Mom and apple pie retailer. Of course, this after they killed off all the real Mom and apple pie retailers with their giant suburban mega-warehouses. (I did a paper on this for my marketing class -- and I had to admit that their strategy was brilliant, in a Dr. Evil sort of way.)

This list may be updated as events warrant.

The Washington Post Magazine sent Gene Weingarten to France to pen "A mature and balanced examination of the French, with an eye toward defusing international tensions and dispelling regrettable stereotypes." He describes his mission:

We are now facing a time of chill, with repercussions both silly ("freedom fries") and substantial (tourism and commerce in both directions have taken a hit). There is a great deal of hand-wringing about it on both sides of the Atlantic. No one seems quite certain how to deal with it -- least of all the French, who thought it a swell idea to enlist Woody Allen to tell us, as a specialist in ethics, how we are being unfair to France.

As usual, it falls to a journalist to make things right. This has happened before.

Back in 1834, during the Jackson administration, the French-American rift was trivial, really -- largely a matter of bookkeeping: We sought reparations for damage done to American shipping during the Napoleonic wars, and France was stiffing us. The whole matter was easily resolvable, but President Jackson was given to gruff, obliquely threatening pronouncements -- "bring 'em on" kind of stuff -- and before you knew it, France had recalled its Washington ambassador, and invited ours to leave Paris. There was muffled talk of war.

At that precise moment, a young French writer named Alexis de Tocqueville published a book about the national character of America, gleaned from a nine-month visit here. Democracy in America proved an instant balm to global tensions, not because it was entirely complimentary -- it wasn't -- but because it was entirely honest. It confronted openly the differences between Americans and the French, and found much for the French to like and admire. War reparations were paid and cultural exchanges began again between the two countries, with young Tocqueville himself in the middle of it -- an ambassador without portfolio.

Tocqueville had nine months, but he probably dillydallied. You know the French.

I figured six days should do it.

Go read the rest right here.

Fairy Floss

According to today's Tennessean, cotton candy originated in Nashville about 106 years ago when candy makers William Morrison and John C. Wharton designed a machine that allowed them to produce "Fairy Floss" by using centrifugal force to force hot sugar through tiny holes. The confection made it big in 1904, when the pair 68,655 wooden boxes of the stuff at 25 cents each.

Miss Crumm Wed Nearby

I should be sleeping, but I'm still up going through the box of old papers. When my grandparents had their 50th wedding anniversary in 1992, I helped put together a display for the occasion. I just came across some papers left over from that project.

One was a partial copy of a letter apparently written by one of my grandmother's relatives in which she catalogged some of the wedding gifts and gave a description of the wedding day. Here's a snippet:

I'll try to tell you all about the wedding now. Whew!! what a job. Well, here goes and your mother can supply the gaps and details.

It started about five:thirty A.M. with me waking up and almost shreiking with joy because I peeked out of the window and found out it was going to be a perfectly beautiful day. We all got up later and had breakfast on the installment plan and then tried to get Lucile to pack her things from her bureau and dressing table. She started in the middle and went both ways, so up to now we haven't any of us been able to find anything! In the middle of it I happened to think that she didn't have anything to sit on besides her Davenport and one big chair, so I went up to the store room and got out two of the four solid walnut shairs that belonged to my grandmother and which a good friend had kept for me all these years until about four months ago. One was O.K, two were hopeless as far as any amateur cabinet work was concerned, but the fourth only needed a brace. So Papa put one on and I washed them and then waxed them. Then your mother and I upholstered them in a blue linen ex-skirt, and PRESTO-! they matched her livingroom suite! Then we got down the cedar gatelegged table Papa made and she is borrowing it for her dinette until she gets one.

We had just gotten that settled and Lucile off to the beauty parlour when Roscoe arrived so we packed everything into his car and Dolores and your Dad helped him over to the apartment and got the things into it.

The next thing lovely that happened was Harry calling up unexpectedly from the airport and maybe THAT didnt set us wild with joy!! We weren't expecting him until quarter of seven and were worried about the timing, as it takes 45 minutes or longer to get here from there, and the wedding was a seventhirty. While your Ma and Pa went to the airport with Papa, Dolores and I had already decorated the church in the afternoon, and I must say it looked beautiful. Roscoe had gotten a whole carload of laurel and pear blossoms, we had lilac, bridal wreath and forsythia, and Papa actually got two dozen gladiolas.

Alas, the copy of the letter I have ends there, so we'll have to rely on the newspaper for a description. I found a copy of an article (and bridal photograph) that ran in the Washington Evening Star on May 21, 1942. It reads, in part:

Miss Crumm Wed Nearby

Amid decorations of spring flowers and palms the marriage of Miss Lucile Marianne Crumm of Mount Ranier to Mr. Roscoe Daniel D--* of College Park took place last evening in the Mount Rainier Methodist Church, where the Rev. Clarkson R. Banes officiated at 7:30 o'clock.

[...]

The daughter of Mrs. Mildred E. Crumm, the bride was escorted to the altar by her grandfather, Mr. Christian Eckert, and given by him in marriage. She wore a gown of white satin made on princess lines with long sleeves, a sweetheart neckline and a full skirt ending in a train. Her veil was fingertip length and edged with lace and was held by a pearl trimmed net coronet. A necklace of pearls, the gift of the bridegroom, was her only ornament, and she carried a shower bouquet of white roses and lillies of the valley.

[...]

Out-of-town guests attending the wedding included Mr. and Mrs. George Eckert of Chicago and Mr. and Mrs. B.A. Kilby of Laurel, Md.

[...]

Mr. and Mrs. D-- will be at home after May 1 at the Prince George Garden apartments in Hyattsville.

* name omitted to prevent voyeuristic googling of this site.

I am fascinated by this sort of thing. Here are the lives of my forbears laid out from the grand to the mundane. My grandmother, who has never let me live down my frantic last-minute packing binge at the end of my senior year of college, is revealed as a young bride frantically throwing things in boxes.

I would not be born for another 33 years, yet I feel like I know these people.

The car

I was going through a box of papers, and came across this piece I wrote for a magazine class in college. The funny thing is that I'm still good friends with Brian, and he's perhaps even more eccentric now.

As we sit in my living room, my friend Brian keeps glancing anxiously out the window toward the parking lot where he parks his car. He is checking for tow trucks -- he is convinced that the parking company is out to get him.

He is obsessed by this.

Of course, his concerns are not totally unjustified. He just mailed a late payment, and the last time the company was convinced he owed money, his car was towed. But when you get right down to hi, there's something a little odd about Brian's relationship with his car.

"I think parking lot attendants are automatons," he tells me. "They're an unwitting part of the system." The "system," in Brian's world, includes parking attendants, the police, tow truck drivers, meter maids, and anyone else who tells him where he can park his car. (Or for that matter, how he can drive it -- he says he doesn't "believe in 'no right turn on red' signs.")

This is no idle pursuit. Brian spends an almost frightening amount of time coming up with ways to foil tow truck operators.

"If you park your car," he says, "leave the wheels turned in such a way that if the two truck pulls it out, the car will turn and smash into something!" And woe betide the poor schlub who does succeed in towing his car. There is a scrape on one of the doors left when his mother ran into a snow bank. "If my vehicle is ever towed," he says, "I'll have something to hold up against the towing company for damaging the car!"

I wonder if perhaps this kind of fanaticism runs in the family. Brian says that his uncle removes the starter from his engine whenever he parks it. And although he boasts that this technique once foiled a thief, you have to admit that there's something a little, uh, weird about taking a wrench to the engine every time you pull into a parking lot.

On top of everything else, Brian's car has a name. Baby. "I think of my car as feminine," he says. And by anyone's estimation, "Baby" leads a pretty sheltered life. Her oil gets changed religiously every 3000 miles, and her fluids are checked on a biweekly basis. She gets a wax job every time she heads for Syracuse. And Brian refuses to move the car, turn on the defroster, the radio, or any other accessory until the car has been running for at least 45 seconds. ("It puts strain on the engine.") And if Brian has to avoid hitting something or someone, Brian says he tries not to slam on the brakes. ("It would cause them to wear.")

Despite all this rationalization, you have to wonder if there is something else to this whole car obsession. For most people, a car is simply a device that gets them from point A to point B. Brian's car seems to fall into the category of loved one.

"Have you ever considered," I ask him, "that you might be using your car as a surrogate for a woman?"

"Shut up," he says. "I'll tell you when I have a girlfriend."