tag cloud
I love the term "Tag Cloud."
Here is a link to the tag cloud for this blog. I created it as a test.
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I love the term "Tag Cloud."
Here is a link to the tag cloud for this blog. I created it as a test.
The hotel has this funny thing where - if the ipconfig error message is anything to be believed - only one person can be bequeathed the wireless IP address at a time. Or, it only has a few to dish out and when they're gone they're gone. Either way, I remain in the bar with the yellow dot plodding along when all of a sudden I'm in.
Do I have to be down two Manhattans before I get IP?
If this happened more often, it would explain a lot of my posts.
Complain, complain. Vacation is over tomorrow.
Vacation is incredible. I think our kids are getting sick of us. They are hanging out in the hotel with the babysitter right now, after a nice swim in the pool. Later they will find something to eat or order room service. Spoiled? Maybe, but we worked hard to rent out our house and 2 nights in the most expensive Portland hotel we could find ($169) is definitely in the cards.
I headed the wrong way on Hawthorne to look for an internet cafe and ended up at Splinter, which is perfect. Great music, chairs, cappucino, power outlets, I am so happy. I am not thinking about my job at all.
But I do have to tell you something about that. One is that being unemployed is not a vacation. Especially when you only got 2 weeks anyway, and spent the whole time interviewing. I remember some tips I gave to people on their first day of work in this weblog, and I need to add to that: schedule a vacation for yourself right away. Myself I am now in vacation debt but I do not care. I am so fried from finishing the old job, then finishing the old job on no day care, then interviewing on no day care, and then starting a new job. So that's one important tip.
Another thing is coming up emotionally. I forgot what I was reading, but it had something to do with "seeing your name in lights." Oh yeah, it was lyrics from an old Soul Coughing album. I was struck by how I had come to the Internet in buses, just like everyone else, in order to see my name in lights. It was purely an act of ego, of manipulating external circumstance, of manufacturing achievement, of filling the void. The first time my name was on a door was 2000, and it did not scare me. I felt entitled to it. Now, my name is on another door, and I see it like a Marquis.
Playing Tonight: Elizabeth Grigg, Program Manager. Tickets on sale now for _5,000 a year plus benefits!
As in, no pressure.
In this spirit of making something ridikkulus that used to scare you, this is me with the marquis. The name on the door means a relaxed individual who takes care of herself and puts things in perspective may or may not be sitting there. That's what the name on the door means.
I followed Jay's advice to order the gobstopper of drinks, the triple venti chai egg nog latte. I will tell you what it tastes like. It tastes like chocolate chip cookie dough, minus the chips, plus the pumpkin pie spice, and melted in a saucepan. Venti. That's 20 ounces. Arrgh.
Over Thanksgiving I watched a lot of TV. Mostly of the "why is that guy catching all those gators" type of variety. Then there was the woman whose biggest fashion gaffe was cleavage. I say it was attitude, but that's just me. Anyway, a commercial for JC Penney came on announcing they were opening stores at 5am the next day. That's in the morning, in case you were wondering.
I took it dead serious. As if the commercial had challenged me to a duel. As if it had insulted my mother and dated my sister. As if it was a double dare.
Now, I was particularly ripe for this type of challenge because I was sleeping in a new house, in an odd bedroom, where the heat may or may not have worked. It was a refrigerator. Yes, a fridge is a very odd choice for a bedroom but hey, how many times have I said I love air conditioning? This was payback. I was up, up up UP at 5am that morning already, and expected to be again. So conquering the masses at a third rate department store sounded like a thrill.
Of course, last night I changed my routine a little bit and did not go to bed with wet hair. That accounts for having slept in until 7. But there I was at 7, with a 5 year old, picking stuff out like crazy. Past the fake YSL bags and the fake Uggs. Past the 150-packs of eyeshadow, up the escalator to the boys section. Jammies and undies. A big stack of stuff, a flotilla even. Racks too close together, bumping into everyone, knocking things over, leaving trash and valuables in our wake.
You know when you look for the back of the line, and you miss the fact that it turns the corner, and then you notice the corner and go "ohhh" and then stand behind those people too? Well, this I did about 6 times. Long line. We used my sacrificial outerwear as the basis for holding the new items, like a little raft. We arranged the new things on top like survivors of a flood. Every time the line moved, we kicked it along the linoleum. One lady ahead of us was buying a thousand floor pillows this way. Another lady ahead of us had a diabetic attack. We waited a half an hour. I had the 5 year old in a headlock and under threat of putting back his toy-shirt (parents know what I mean) if he didn't stop body-slamming practically everything and everyone while waiting in line. I think he thought JC Penney was some sort of play gym, not a clothing store. We certainly have never taken him there, and he will not go back willingly I am sure.
Later when we checked in to the hotel (Yessss!) the newspaper reported mass early openings at malls and stores everywhere. Someone got attacked in a Wal Mart over a dvd player. It was nuts. But no matter, I scored the jammies. May the fittest survive.
The declaration of independence talks about the right of each person to pursue happiness. It is the very core of the proposition that this new little country is now independent, self aware, and self representational. Many will point to this proposition as helping to form the nation's core psyche. It is almost as if every homesteader with a donkey knew these words by heart. From what we know about education in the early years of our country, this is unlikely, and speaks more to the founders' ability to anticipate and describe in advance the nature of the fledgling country's psyche. We don't believe there's NOT a northwest passage until the west is settled. We don't believe that industrialization has a downside until the hardship hits with true force.
External circumstances make us happy, no question about it, and it's not a very useful tenet because in case you haven't noticed, a) external circumstances do not happen to particularly be under your control, and b) even when they are, there is always something else out there to accomplish.
As we are all seeking this happiness together, instructed as we are by this declaratory document from the 18th century, most of us choose the same means. We aim straight for external circumstances to provide this happiness, and then get caught with all of the above. It gives us something in common, even between people who might have a letter W as their middle initial, and reasonable people such as you and me. It is easy to see how these W belly sneetches first attempt to control the uncontrollable, and are then in a progressive loop of accomplishment where one attempt begets another more rapidly than you can pat yourself on the back. I never thought I could find something in common with that guy, but hey, there's the underlying core of the nation's spirit for you. The happiness thing is very pervasive. Deafening.
I am reading, on a friend's recommendation, "The Power of Now" by Eckhart Tolle. He has lots to say on the failings of happiness, our national Kool Aid. I will try not to quote too much. One quote stands out.
"Happiness depends on conditions being perceived as positive; inner peace does not."
The great part about this is the recognition that you can learn from things being positively awful. You can, as the manual to "reading your myers-briggs results" says, encounter situations where "life circumstances do not positively reinforce this trait." In other words, external conditions may not provide an environment for success. For example, say you were an introvert, but were living in 1960s mainland China where everyone was open book and collective. In this case, you might have some trouble. Of course the least of your troubles is probably your myers briggs results, but that's another historical matter.
This brings us to the duality of success and failure. Success I always defined as something measurable. A book published. A calendar month with social events every weekend. Finally paying back your mom. A number on the scale. Other things that are less measurable might also be describable as success, but really they are something more. Having your child spontaneously hug you or introduce you to strangers proudly. A certain look in someone's eye. This is not success so much as connectedness, which is messy and wonderful like other things. Just to be clear, success is limited to the set of things you can measure going in a positive direction. Deriving ego from success is valuing the measurable above the intangible. It values the yardstick over the person. Valuing external success such that you derive your ego from it is - in a word - failure.
Traditional failure is when all yardsticks have a downward story to tell. No money, no car, etcetera. Insert blues or country song of your choice. Lots of people, when they refer to their failures (and grow to accept them) turn out to accept them as downward points on some sort of jaggedy but upwardly-mobile graph. They say, well, "I learned from that experience" with a perhaps implied or not so implied "so this got me where I am today." They certainly don't expect the graph to just keep pointing down. But what if it does. Did you still learn from the experience?
Tolle's postulation makes us admit that we can "fail" miserably without rebounding, as well as "succeed" brilliantly at a star-struck pace, and be puppets of our own definition of happiness. Through subscribing to this ideal, we are subservient to the illusion of heaven and hell on earth. The postulation makes us separate ourselves from these successes and failures, and concentrate instead on the learnings themselves for the sake of making the present more vital. It's an incredible thought, and frankly a more nurturing one to take with yourself and your resume. If you learned, then you learned, and are still open to learning. Open to failure or success right now. Either way is fine, as long as the learning keeps coming. That's the kind of character that can only come from true safety, from a person who identifies themselves as an individual who is safe on the inside. Peaceful even. I guess that's why they call it inner peace.
Anyway, through my Solutions work as well as this interesting book - a little like a conversation that I always wish would happen with a great group of thinkers but never quite seems to happen in MY house due to the incessant screeching probably - I realize that devoting this blog to happiness is an act of pure ego. Of course I will keep this dedication, because what else is a blog anyway but an act of ego. But I'm also here to say that the pursuit of happiness is the viral blanket, the polluted lake, and the hairy sausage of the internal psyche. Just because everyone's doing it, focusing on happiness, striving to make their life happy, achieving this and that and the next thing, obsessing over failures, doesn't mean it's healthy. And it doesn't mean it works.
Yes, I am really asking for it by voicing my own theory on what really happened between the lines for hp6. Many people have voiced valid theories, but all leave me somewhat empty. My trusty imagination has cooked up a theory that wraps everything up nicely, and has a certain truthful emotional ring to it.
Oh, and I know who RAB is, but the explanation won't fit in the margin ;)
Here goes. The theory operates on a single rule that you need to accept before continuing. Acceptance is mandatory and inevitable because, why, it's the magical world after all. It is absolutely necessary - even more necessary than realistic world creations - for worlds of magic to have an internally consistent set of rules. They actually have a higher bar for benefit of the doubt than realistic worlds. But then there is the final trump card, namely that the world IS magic, and so beyond this roll of the dice all events should continue consistently as expected. Only an internally consistent rule can be a part of hp's world. Enough said.
The single rule is. There exists a way for people to switch bodies - similar to polyjuice potion but much more deeply and permanently - that has the following properties. I will call this spell I am imagining "Switch-i-oh-sa" which rhymes of course with Leviosa. Switchiosa has the following properties:
* Two people can switch bodies permanently, but this does not affect their soul or memories. These unique qualities are portable.
* Unbreakable oaths can be fooled by Switchiosa. That is, if person A makes an unbreakable oath, and then performs Switchiosa with person B, then the body formerly known as person A's - with person B inside and calling all the shots - can follow through with the oath without the oath itself knowing. There are no consequences from this and all is just as if the regular person A followed through.
* The dark mark is something that occurs at the soul level, and therefore the blood is affected. I know this sounds strange but hear me out. If someone was a death eater, and they were to perform Switchiosa with someone - let's pick on Cormac McLaggen for example, he didn't have many lines - the death eater's soul would be inside Cormac's body. We have already covered that. However, there is a little technicality where Cormac's blood would be changed, as the seat of the soul is in the heart. This change would be immaterial in the case of regular people doing this Switchiosa. However, in the case of death eaters, the imprint of the dark mark penetrates as far as the soul and therefore detectably alters the new person (Cormac's) blood for the purposes of blood based death eater detection type spells.
Okay so you might not be completely bought into this Switchiosa concept, but seriously this is the flakyist part of the story, and many other things fall into place if you take these things as a given.
It has been known for some time that Snape has been guilty - not just technically guilty but also feeling pretty bad about it too - of spilling the beans about Harry being the subject of the prophecy. This led to V's offing of Harry's parents, and his subsequently long career as the protagonist of a series of novels which would have turned out just the same had he been replaced by a sock puppet. You could say that Snape had a lot of guilt to overcome about this. To his credit, he worked valiantly as a spy and continued to do so throughout most of hp6. But get this. After Snape makes the unbreakable vow to kill Dumbledore, he has no idea what to do. Dumbledore has been researching V all this time, finding out about the horcrux locations, and getting rather obsessed. Snape comes to Dumbledore and explains about the unbreakable vow. He is the very image of despair as he does this, because he does not want to add to his crimes. He was a double agent in order to do GOOD not evil, and now he has got himself caught in a terrible pinch. He feels like the world would be better had he never lived. He is suicidal. Dumbledore attempts to console him but at the same time a plot is brewing in his mind. All this horcrux talk has gotten Dumbledore in the portable-soul type of mood. He knows Snape plans to die via the terrible wrath of breaking the unbreakable vow (I assume the punishment is death for this) and wants to save Snape from this fate.
Snape and Dumbledore talk about what it is to have lived a full life. Snape says his would have been a full life had he taken out a bigger piece of V. That's when Dumbledore knows he has his man. He explains about the Switcherosa, and how the unbreakable vow can actually be fulfilled by Dumbledore instead killing Snape and taking a horcrux with it. Snape is excited, he gets to go out in glory, take a piece of V with him, and put Dumbledore in service of V as the person formerly known as Snape. Can you imagine what would happen if Dumbledore were a member of the death eaters secretly as Snape? Suddenly this seventh book becomes a lot easier to write.
Here is how it happens. Dumbledore has just acquired the horcrux ring, and trashed his hand. He does not care about his hand, because he know this body is getting Kedavra'd in a few months time. Dumbledore pumps all he can out of Harry, helping him prep for the 7th book, and also getting the confirmation of the horcrux plan from Slughorn. Then Harry and Dumbledore go on the quest. He says "come back in 5 minutes time."
A couple things about this break. One is that, Dumbledore has always said to Harry that when he leaves, he leaves the castle with special protection. This special protection is Snape. Dumbledore and Snape have slowly moved toward this Switcherosa thing by sharing powers, some kind of mini-test. It could be that actually, Dumbledore sends Snape out on more of these errands than not. So this is one loose end filled by the Switcherosa theory. The other is that this 5 minute break would give Snape and Dumbledore time for this one last switch. Because the person who goes to the cave with Harry is Snape.
There are little subtleties as D-Snape (That's Snape inside Dumbledore's body) takes Harry to the cave. Little braggings you would not see D do on his own. What makes the most sense is that the cave would only be opened on the blood of a Death Eater. D-Snape gains entrance easily.
At the center of the lake, D-Snape quite appropriately goes nuts when he consumes the liquid. This is because the LIQUID IS THE HORCRUX and not the silly locket, which Harry never actually sees D-Snape retrieve. While drinking, D-Snape starts saying he is sorry, which he is of course for the crime of being a death eater in the first place. The funny thing is D-Snape gulps down this drink even though it causes him pain, but if my theory holds then this explains this contrary way of being. At the end of the bowl of stuff he says "Kill Me" which D-Snape wants done very badly. This is Snape's big martyr moment, now that he has injested the horcrux, but the moment will have to wait. Snape has to carry on in order to free S-Dumbledore from the unbreakable vow. D-Snape has to die at S-Dumbledore's hands.
D-Snape recovers quite quickly, although is a little weak cruising back to Hogwarts after drinking the horcrux. He does have the wits about him to undo several spells at top speed while riding in on his broom. He has so much to look forward to - release from his guilt, achievement of a victory, and release from life itself. He is excited, and he wants Harry as a witness.
In the headmaster's office, the only reason D-Snape freezes Harry is to keep him there to witness this event, to set him up for a series of actions that will happen in the 7th book. It is the last scene of Harry's training. You might think of it as conditioning, or brainwashing, because all that Harry is shown may not be true. It is quite a manipulation for Dumbledore to decide he would rather Harry think he is dead, to need to avenge not just his parents' lives, and Longbottom's etc, but Dumbledore's as well. But Dumbledore must know he needs a strong character on the outside if he is to go underground, and by 7 books with everyone manipulating him into this, Harry might just pull it off.
D-Snape begs S-Dumbledore for death when he sees him. Begs. And while Harry sees Snape killing Dumbledore, what is really happening is Dumbledore is claiming his new body, killing his old wounded one, and Snape's tortured soul, and one seventh of Voldemort. It is a careful and rewarding chess move.
The note we see in the locket - granted I don't know who RAB is, and I think it may be a functional title rather than a name - is perfectly consistent with my theory if Snape wrote it. He faces death knowing that V will be that much weaker. And if you remember that Harry never sees D-Snape take the locket out of the birdbath basin thing in the middle of the lake, it makes sense that Snape could have written this note ahead of time.
Plus, remember how adept S-Dumbledore (That's Dumbledore in Snape's body) was at blocking Harry's unforgivable curses he was throwing at him? He cared about Harry to the extent that he would not let Harry finish the curses. He was also skilled enough to save his own skin while pulling this off. He turned the death eaters off the chase while leaving. This type of finesse is pure Dumbledore. While not beyond skill level for Snape, I just think it is out of character.
I know this will sound nuts, but the Regulus Black theory just doesn't have the romance of mine. It also makes the 7th book HARDER to write, as the author would have to resolve the guilt or innocence of Snape, bring Dumbledore back to life, wipe out 4 horcrux thingies and close off several love interests if not for many things throughout the previous 6 books. It seems a safer bet to me.
I will be taking my computer with me on the road, but likely all posts will be offline. I have turned off all comments temporarily. Have a great Thanksgiving, everyone.
This year, this Thanksgiving, our family has more to be thankful for than ever before. Yet our route to appreciating it is unconventional, and sometimes falls flat with me. The riskiest aspect of the holiday, in terms of poisoning the gratitude that is the true and lawful mental state, is compulsion.
Many disappointments about the holidays - even Valentine's - can be traced to the expectations being too high in the first place. My way of setting and fulfilling the too-high expectations that I set looks very compulsive from the outside. No, not stuffing from a bag, we must use Macrina. Yes, we must have room in the car for the swim toys. The house must be impossibly free of dust, and a fleet of laborours must be hired to make this possible. High expectations, resulting in a compulsive mental state.
Unfortunately I am still too immersed in optimization of time, space, and money, to make this holiday compulsion-free. What I am doing instead, this year, is staying aware of gratitude as the Z-axis dynamic, the subtext, the backdrop. Forces of gratitude against forces of compulsion, occasionally coming together in moments of co-opetition. Adver-tainment. Accepting that I can't turn into an easygoing hippie overnight, maybe I can get something from my compulsive state the feed the gratitude somehow.
Either way, our car is definitely too small. ;)
This post, maybe, will be a little cross section of the tissue that is Microsoft, the subset of that tissue that surrounds me and encloses me still. Take a slice, put it on a petri dish, and send it to the lab, this is what you get.
The outermost layer is the noise surrounding the concept of disruption, and the move to services as causing that disruption. I characterize it as noise because I remember when the first disruption hit. Me and my small company were pitching video game concepts to slightly amused and overworked soon-to-be-millionaires with no signatory power. It was a waste of everyone's time, but we were 23 and had great ideas. The amusement was something to cherish, anyway. The take-home for why there were no next steps taken for our proposal, is we did not have a web element. There was no internet connectivity built into our game concept. It was not, as they said, "Internet enabled." A friend translated for us. If we even so much as had a BBS that would share high scores across users, we would still be considered. Of course that would be a tangental idea, not central to the core gaming concept we had, and only done for the purposes of toting the company line of the next revolution or whatever. We had a solid game concept as a shrink wrap, and connectivity should have been a detail. Call me stubborn, but we were right. A product has a solid core of usefulness, and whenever there are long memos or supposed revolutions, everyone gets on the defensive and tries to save face and seem cool by integrating these new concepts by any means necessary. Actually, the shallower the implementation the better, because it saves time in QA.
In watching the blur caused by movement in this outermost layer, I am torn between tracking it obsessively - so as to land the game contract (metaphorically) that I could have landed 12 years ago - and ignoring it completely. In reading the memos, I am struck by how big a ship Microsoft is to turn, and the rudder must be completely cranked (no pun intended). People talk about Microsoft being a bunch of small businesses, and maybe that's true, but in reading these movements I am impressed with the challenges they have from being so big. I hope product groups aren't sitting around, assigning disruption as a concept to the taskload of certain weary program managers, so they can check off a few tolerable bullets to conform to the new mantra.
Historically Microsoft has a good track record of being there second, and winning. This particular challenge will address that trend. My prediction is the thinking will have to go beyond the memo, and around the memo, at the foot soldier level in order to be pulled off. Take the craziest idea kicking around the company right now. Now fast forward to 1 year from now when the idea is successful. We might be able to say, wow, that was successful because they read the memo and based their plan around that. But my guess is the success would have happened anyway, and the concept of disruption is an interpretation. Similarly, take the blandest idea kicking around the company right now. Fast forward to 1 year from now where the bland product has the attention component, or the monetization component, or the community component, and is still bland. (Mind you, bland can be a billion dollar business). My guess is the blandness would have happened anyway, and the concept of disruption neither helped nor harmed the innate purpose of the product. Tangental.
What I'm saying is I don't want to see a slew of products where disruption is tacked on, like internet connectivity would have been for our game. Innovation is done - and is currently done, don't get me wrong - through a culture of embracing dynamic change, and a memo is neither here nor there excplicitly because it is top down. Of course, I'm not looking at the internal blog.
Let's go in another level. Beneath the outside noise of the disruption concept is a set of emotional experiences unique to me. I will explain the title of this post. Microsoft is losing its grip on ME. Not "losing its grip" as in going nuts. That would be an untrackable metric. Microsoft has been in my life since 1991, and like Harry and Tom's experience at Hogwarts, I never found a place that I imagined I would feel more at home. It's possible that my obsessive attraction to the company, and my ideal that "If only I really really worked there" held true, came from a place more of compulsion, of wanting my ducks in order and life in a row, than from any emotional depth. After all, you can't have emotional depth about a company, can you? You can't really be in love with a company, can you?
At my new company we are easygoing. We laugh at things that seem impossible. They probably are. We don't make a big deal about it and hold a review drilling down into every aspect of our effort's alignment with a top-down directive. We just carry on. Microsoft is like the weather, always there, always up to something, but for the first time in a long time I have the opportunity to marginalize the company's role in my own life. Intellectual and emotional. In my hallway there is a Microsoft poster displayed with the developer himself on it, smiling. He is still smiling now he is at our company. Another person sometimes e-mails announcements of certain webcasts happening, always flagged low priority. That's about it. The reasons for me being compulsively attracted to Microsoft are fading, losing their grip. I wonder how much damage this compulsion has done to my health and happiness over the past however-many years.
At the very core is a memory of me walking to elemenary school with my soon to be ex best friend, initials JS. We talked about everything together, every idea. We colored pieces of paper and placed them under heat lamps to see how they would change. We dug in the dirt. We staged halloween haunted houses where little kids put their fingers in bowls of olives that we said were eyeballs. Many days walking to school we talked about how every idea was connected together. Take an orange. An orange comes from Florida. It is also something you have for Lunch. Then, Florida is a place with a Beach. So you have an Orange now connected to the Beach. We thought this was a cool concept and would talk about this connectivity all the way to school. I dumped him for the brutal ways of girls when the army men thing got too much. I think now he's a fancy scientist or something. But without getting too Al Gore about it, this was a formative intellectual time for me. Neural pathways were created during those walks that are fixed even now, about how information has a right to know where it comes from, and who it is related to. Information has rights! Second, there is the concept of linking, and that is a many to many relationship and unbounded. Elementary school. So when I say disruption can't come from a memo and needs to come from a childlike position where we are open to dynamic innovation, you know what I am talking about.
So, with this slice of tissue on the petri dish, I am proud to be driving a small nimble boat at the moment. I am proud to keep customers as my focus, and connect data in more adept ways, and to have the option to ignore the so-called revolutions. We're just going to do good work, eh? Work that we were meant to do since the times those early neural networks were forming. What a delight.
Watching it - a little late - I guess the movie came and went already. Some very passionate fans. I'm on the second episode, the first one (the pilot) did not live up to expectation, but pilots are always awful. Now I'm enjoying it a lot. I especially enjoy the swearing - all in Chinese? It's not distracting at all. The soundtrack is American outback and so are the outfits.
Here is a comprehensive blog entry by another fan.
OMG I just realized the doctor is Lord Voldemort. Also the #2 gal is nemesis gal from Alias, can't remember the org ATM.
When starting any job, there is usually a bunch of forms to fill out. I have been putting one of them off for too long. The way I understand it, I need a list of things I have ever invented. The definition of invention is rather broad. Also, the list includes anything you might have invented (created) for another company, or in a work for hire arrangement. This is a long list. It's tough, because the implication of signing a blank form is that anything you have ever done - even before starting your current position - is property of the new company.
I'm hoping to dig my way out of this one by using broad generalizations (is there any other kind?). Otherwise, I will spend months and months archiving and indexing my entire life. I set an arbitrary start point of getting out of college, and was only able to complete the list via the grossest of generalizations. The mind reels at the lack of oxygen up here, but hey sometimes you get the best perspective from orbit.
CREATIONS OWNED BY OTHER COMPANIES
1992: Chakan the Forever Man - Code Implementation for Sega Genesis
1992: Sylvester and Tweety - Level Design for Sega Genesis
1994: MindMaze Encarta 1995 and beyond - Text, interface, and storyline
1995: MSN Onstage - Several musical works and adaptations
1996: MSN Onstage - Specification for audio for a Star Trek Site
1997: RealNetworks - RealMail
1998: RealNetworks - RealPlayer
1999: RealNetworks - RealJukebox 1.0
2000: RealNetworks - RealJukebox 2.0
2001: RealNetworks - RealOne
2003: ePeriodicals - Methodology and Tools for conducting research into Magazine Reading
2004: WMDG - mechanism to manage roles within Shareppoint (Code)
2005: HED - mechanism to track developer compliance to standards (Code) as well as initial editions of said standards (Doc).
CREATIONS UNDER MY OWNERSHIP
1993: Design for a Physical Music Interface Game for Sega Genesis
1996 - 2001: Numerous Pop Songs, a subset available on CD on Amazon
2001: Untitled Novel #1 - unfinished - on the topic of Self Help
2002: A goal targeting mechanism, specification for a software product
2002: A design for an SMS based fiction entertainment system
2004 - 2005: Several business plans, including media insurance and calendaring.
2003 - 2005: All original materials and writings documented in the weblog at this location.
It's raining so hard I think nothing else must be left of the world than our little house at the top of the hill. I bought my dh some gore-tex on e-bay just now. It's just a shame during the week to hand him my bus pass when he's standing there in some little sketch of a coat. We bought a new doormat because the old one drowned. It's powerful stuff, rain.
Travel updates. The house rented for over Thanksgiving, and we have 2 nights at a hotel and are bumming the rest of the time in Oregon. We bought plane tickets and made reservations for disney world, to see other family over there too, but that won't be until February. We will likely spend xmas at home.
Health updates. That was an interesting experiment. Next time you think you have a problem with something (I am taught to call it an "external solution"), try this out. Schedule a date and time to use the external solution you think you have a problem with. Then follow your own instructions, no matter how you feel. It's strange, to drink in a "wow I really deserve a drink" kind of way, even though I did not feel as though I deserved or needed a drink. Indeed, I had to load up on caffeine too in order to stay awake through the self-prescribed 3 glasses of wine. The result was I was vaguely symptomatic, not enough to prove my theory about the pain being triggered by drinking, but good enough for rock and roll. I fell asleep on the bone scan table thingy the next day. They gave me heated blankets and a pillow, what did they expect? So we'll see. The scheduled external solution thing was the most interesting part of the whole experiment. I found myself slightly whiny about it. "Why do I have to drink this stuff?" Whiny and rebellious, like not being hungry on thanksgiving, when it's time to be hungry and everything's all set.
I hope everyone is having a great time at MindCamp, and I'm hoping to be there vicariously. I will continue the rest of the day re-creating my own personal day spa amidst screeching children and torrential rain. Productive, no?
The goal for this week was to face a chronic health issue head-on. By drinking myself senseless! OK I can still type, so I must not be done yet. I have a theory that at the magic 3 glasses of wine, my trusty immune system* goes amok for vulnerable areas and that includes extremeties like my right big toe which has been the occasional bane of my exisistence every 2 months or so. I don't need any more banes.
Tonight my job is to test out my theory, to give it a good try and get "symptomatic" which means I want to have the little big guy keeping me up tonight with its usuall throbbing song and dance. No, not that little big guy. Although that's an idea. At 6:45 tomorrow morning I go in to "Nucular Medicine" as the nurse put it and also "Radiology" which sounds very very serious for that time of day, and get shot up with glowy stuff. I want to be symptomatic at the point they are running the scan, because if they come back and say they didn't find anything I don't want to have to do this again.
I have no idea what is the glowy nucular stuff they are shooting me with. It takes 4 hours to work, then I go in again for the bone scan and we see what glows. My hope is I will be in agonizing pain and the scan will show lots of fireworks.
I have planned my whole week around this experiment, so no pressure, but little mister toe man you had better perform for me tonight.
One more glass should do it. I downloaded lots of firefly to watch. Let's see what puts me to sleep first.
Cheers, and stay tuned for next week's goal, the "story of my entire life and all the inventions I cannot attribute to my current employer that I had any part in, listed concisely on one page for easy reference."Or the subsequent postponement of certain paychecks in lieu of this list.
* If you want to know why I suspect my immune system it's because I had an immune system attack of the singular kind - so you can't call it multiple sclerosis because there was only one - back in 1999. Still my hands are not as strong as they should be, a little more tingly than warranted etc. But it could have been worse. My dad has had similar immune system attacks, once he had an optical inflammation that was impossible to diagnose and very scary. So yeah, I think anything can happen. I'm just looking for any trend here at all. The wine thing is just something I noticed last week, at half-price wine night at "purple" which set mister big toe off on a week-long rampage. Health issues. If it's debilitating, I should prioritize it and get it solved. We will see.
P.S. I am drinking a lovely wine from grocery outlet. It is a bulgarian wine, a 2001 "reserve" merlot, regularly 17.99 and available for I think 7.99. I have never been disappointed with grocery outlet wine. Sometimes I go to qfc, have the wine "steward" help me, and come away with dish detergent. Go figure. If I bring wine to your house, check out the wine and the price tag because I will probably be proud of both!
P.P.S. Buying tickets to disney world tomorrow, due to getting a renter for Thanksgiving week. Hurrah! Reading the letter "B" group today, it looks like I have company.
Last night, after collecting mucho grande cande, we put the kids to bed and I put the apron on. I finished the final assembly of several entrees needed for 2 families that just had babies - no, nobody you know - I'm signed up to make and deliver meals to a couple new moms through a moms group. For those of you without kids, a moms group is one of those squishy things that makes you shudder with horror at how glad you are you don't have to join one of THOSE yet, and then of course when you need a network there it is, that same group, suddenly perfect.
The menu had to cover 2 families. One was kosher-style, the other was typical northwest democrat, no red meat and super healthy. The meal had to also feed kids and my own requirements were: make the food from the one-handed food group, and make the food infinitely re-heatable. My choices were:
vegetarian burritos: My signature classic. This time I screwed it up by switching brands of rice, but I don't think they'll notice. The other secret - other than the rice - is to saute some peppers and onions and add those. My burrito "philosophy" if you can buy a phrase of such preposterousness is, all the microwaveable stuff in the tortilla, and then put the crisp cold stuff on top. I don't believe in burritos with lettuce and tomatoes and sour cream and guac on the inside, because what if you want leftovers? It's awful to eat a burrito cold, and doubly awful to microwave lettuce. So that was one choice.
homemade salsa: I don't use any super hot peppers because they are too scary to work with. What if I have to pick up the baby, or yank out a contact lens? It's just too frightening. Instead, I use pasilla peppers and cut the heads off - like the tops of a pumpkin - off go the heads into the disposer. There is lots of waste, but I buy produce at the fruit stand where the whole bag costs 25 cents. I made one version of plain salsa and another with mango and avocado.
teriyaki noodles with chicken: This I have never made before, but since MY kids don't eat burritos I figured the new mom's big kids won't either. So this was some golden chinese noodles, like upscale top ramen really, tossed with some dark meat chicken without the bones or skin. I just added sauce from the bottle and mixed it around. The part on the spoon after I was done was yummy.
deviled eggs: I had fun ordering special vintage tupperware from ebay in order to carry these things around. I think I botched the eggs though. I did not use an electric mixer, so there may be some less than creamy bits in the yellow part. And when doing the paprika spank, it managed to miss the eggs completely, as if I was aiming for the tupperware parts in between! What are the chances of that really.
Anyway, I made all these things, and set out to deliver them tonight. I pulled up faithful yahoo maps and selected "printable version" to get to my two destinations. While waiting for the print job to complete, I noticed the following text on my printout, provided by yahoo as a disclaimer it seems to every map shown in printable view:
"When using any driving directions or map, it's a good idea to do a reality check and make sure the road still exists, watch out for construction, and follow all traffic safety precautions. This is only to be used as an aid in planning."
Here I will launch into an examination of the mysterious forces that must have been at work in order for such a disclaimer to be present.
* Legal department is bored and starts demanding a disclaimer for driving directions. They provide stuffy and impossible text.
* Some enterprising product manager spiffs it up, avoiding the descriptor of stuffy but somehow re-creating a coyote and road runner grade worst case scenario of possibilities.
- Spiffing up is achieved by the a) use of contractions, b) use of phrase "do a reality check." I don't seem to do that often enough in general, do I? Thanks yahoo for reminding me.
- Lawyer's original intent preserved by a) disclaiming not just the use of this map, but of ANY and ALL maps presumably from ALL sources in ALL media. Gosh, that's pretty comprehensive. Wait, I can think of a map that doesn't need a disclaimer. I can't write that small on my middle finger anyway. and b) the unnecessary coup de grace about how this map is an aid in planning. Rorf? As opposed to a score for my player piano? What if I scroll it around just so, and I hear plinkity plink sounds I like, what then, do I still have to do my reality check?
- Warner brothers scenarios achieved by a) making sure the road still exists. Hey, what good is an aid in planning for if it shows you non-existent roads? So the scenario they're imagining is, a person sees from this map that a road might exist, so the person decides to try it and then drives right off the end of the unfinished or washed out road. Okay, I see how that could happen, especially with the pretty colors of the map from my color printer. I mean, who needs to even look out the windshield? b) watch out for construction. So a person sees from this map that a road might be available, and then despite the fact that it is under construction insists on repeating the scene from case a above. c) follow all safety precautions. So the scenario they're imagining - still - is that someone will take this map, scan it into some kind of automatic car steering and braking mechanism, and have a nap in the back seat while the map does all the work - via a printout - with the player piano along for the ride just for fun. Where is Trimpin when you need him, he could build it I'm sure. Yes, with this device I am sure we would need a reminder to still obey stoplights and gestures from other drivers and such.
Needless to say, despite several turns of the U and the Y variety, me and mine are safe at home and hopefully making other families night a little easier. Which is a curious thing to do when desperate for support yourself: give to others. It seems to work, at least for one night.
P.S. Houses with dads who in this day and age of lawyers who are still willing to be SCARY are very very cool. Dads hiding in real coffins bandaged like mummies and going roar. Dads hiding out and then jumping up and yelling boo. Everybody is so nicey-nice usually on halloween, there needs to be some edge to the holiday or it's just going to turn into xmas, except more expensive of course.