Cat v. Printer

OK, this is silly, but it still makes me laugh every time I see it! (A friend who’s deployed sent me a trimmed version.) I’m sure my own cats would approve.

Moody week

I’ve had a rough week, this week… Work has seemed unusually burdensome, I’ve been having some trouble sleeping and, to top it off, my two favorite contestants got booted off ANTM and Survivor, respectively! (Though I was going a little sour on James over these past few weeks.)

I think that the nadir of my week was when I sat through an hour-long meeting yesterday about the software documentation that I had spent several weeks working on and spent a day getting all the signatures from all the right people in order to finalize it.

Well, after signing it, the decision-makers decided to read it, then decided it wasn’t the document they wanted, and proceeded to have a long meeting to redefine the project entirely. (There are a couple more variables involved, but that’s the long and short of it.) It works out wonderfully for the programmer, since he only has to adapt something that’s already existing, but for me (who doesn’t actually have anything to do with the software at all, either with the development or with the use of it — analysts in my office have this job because we’re extra bodies and no one else wants to write the documentation), it means that I have to scrap the entire thing and start over from the beginning. I am not a fan of wasted effort nor of redoing things — especially not when it’s because no one bothered to figure out what they wanted in the first place. But I don’t want to dwell on this because if I do, I go back to the angry place, and I’m glad to be done with all that!

Actually, today I landed a job that was right up my alley… it was something that I’d actually already started exploring out of my own curiosity on my own time (to distract me from the red-haze-over-my-vision fury that would overcome me any time I considered the documentation I have to eventually rewrite in entirety). It had to do with a cost-benefit analysis of sending our people out on repeated extra duties that are being increasingly thrust on our directorate. I got to spend all day in Excel, mucking around with man-hours and pay rates and overlap dates and things like that… which probably sounds horrible to someone who doesn’t like messing around trying to find answers to problems. I got to wrap up my analysis of the problem with a set of recommendations that really were just glorified common sense (though I’ve noticed that in large organizations often common sense gets left when people come in the door). Really, this project just made my day–I wish I got more of them like that, because it’s actually something I feel qualified to work on and come up with a reasonable solution to! (And when I finish it, I know that I can argue it down to the ground, invoking obscure mathematical turns of phrase that would intimidate even the most irritating of bureaucratic automatons…)

So, by the grace of my nerdy short-turnaround project, my mood was greatly restored by the end of the day and I am actually just shy of feeling happy this evening, which is quite a feat when compared with the frustration/rage/despair I was wallowing in for the past couple days. Yes, I was being a drama queen; no need to worry about me. It was just an unhappy conjunction of gloomy overcast winter days, natural mood swings, and a bad week at work. And tomorrow is Friday! So life is good…

Ebooks? Really?

Today, I don’t remember what got me here (probably following a link about an interesting book), but I noticed all the hype on Amazon about their new Kindle ebook reader device. I’ve got to say, I was impressed… and somewhat tempted, though the way that the screen refreshes on the eInk screen leaves me a little… concerned. It flashes dark, then updates. According to one wiki matrix, the refresh time takes a considerable portion of a second. Which is actually a good time, since it’s still a developing technology, but I’m not sure if that’s acceptable for me. I like paper books, and have never seriously considered getting an ebook reader, though I did meet someone in Baghdad who waxed evangelical about the merits of the technology. I’ll have to say, knowing that this new display isn’t backlit and is thus easier on the eyes, it might well be a tipping point… but $400 for version 1.0 is a little hard to swallow. I tend to be an early adopter (at least compared to most of the people I know), but I usually wait until the price goes down and they’ve resolved the first round of bugs.

However, if I do end up going overseas again in the near future, I may well decide to buy this device. I like that it connects through Amazon–you’re virtually guaranteed a good selection of books through a vendor of that caliber, and even if I prefer paper books, I discovered through the hard process of shipping trunks of books back home that acquisition of even lightweight paperbacks is not a particularly good idea, when it involves transatlantic journeys. One reader device, a couple batteries, and a USB cord might be well worth it. Yeah, I might be paying for books that will be inaccessible in a few years, but when you’re overseas the real point is having the books available in the moment. Think of it like watching movies in the theater–not exactly the most money-conscious expenditure, but worth it for the access and convenience. (Even if you can pick up pirated copies the week after a movie comes out–in the States!–for next to nothing from the street vendors in some overseas locations… I always did wonder how they managed it.)

So–I’m not buying it right now, but I’m keeping it in mind, especially if traveling comes into my near future. (Which is possible but by no means a certainty.)

The Best Years

Over the weekend, I watched the movie The Best Years of Our Lives on TCM. (Here is their page on the movie, complete with trailer and clips.) I recall having watched this once before, and that I wasn’t thrilled by it then: it seemed to me that war heroes (at least WWII movie war heroes) should be returning home to parades and fanfare, not the difficult adjustment process that the three main characters went through in the course of this movie.

And yet, watching it this time through, with my recent deployment behind me, I was blown away with the reality of it. Everything about it was familiar: from the instant rapport with other service members of shared understanding of the experience you’d been through, to the pained strangeness of coming home to all that which is familiar and comfortable, to your slipping back into the place where you belong, albeit altered by your time at war. And granted, my experience was shorter and different in feel than any of these characters’ would have been, but it felt really familiar to me. Someone involved in the process of making the film had to have experienced this firsthand, because it really was mind-bogglingly familiar.

And what’s so weird to me is that I can see clearly that you can’t completely understand the movie unless you’ve experienced that. The commentators briefly mentioned how “war leaves scars that can never heal” or something to that extent, how war changes people, physically and mentally, forever… Which seems to me to be a rather odd message to extract from the film. From what I saw, it is more about the fact that, even though adjusting back after a charged and life-altering experience like war can be difficult, it’s just a matter of sticking it out and getting through that first bumpy transition.

The movie’s overall tone is overwhelmingly hopeful… The men and women in it are (with a couple exceptions) outstanding examples of the kind of person of character that I aspire to be. Particularly the women in it–what strong, noble, steadfast souls they represent! It’s a pity that (as I noticed in the course of watching it) the only woman in the film who really feels contemporary is the horrid and shallow nightclub-waitress wife of one of the characters (who eventually declares brazenly that she’s divorcing him, since he’s not making life “fun” enough for her). Speaks well of women of the past couple generations… Sigh.

But back on track: the movie is great and I’d recommend it to anyone who’s had a deployment and homecoming in the past.

Post-Thanksgiving

Today is the biggest shopping day of the year… and no doubt that’s the reason that I carefully planned out my week in order to stay inside my house all weekend! Yeah, I’m not especially fond of crowds. Instead, what I’ve done all day is read… and read non-fiction, at that!

Yesterday was a very quiet Thanksgiving. Spurred on by an episode of CSI: NY that featured a 3D jigsaw puzzle as one of its primary clues, I broke out one of my own neglected puzzles and spent most of the day completing it, happily, with the Independent Film Channel playing a very wide (weird?) variety of movies in the background… Chosen because they don’t have the insistent and already-annoying holiday-themed commercials coming at you every ten minutes or so.

Here is the puzzle in progress, along with my purple toenails, Eeyore pajamas, and Heroes DVD set… (can you find them?)

Of course, since I did the puzzle on the floor, I seem to have overstrained my quads because of all the kneeling… I’m surprisingly sore today. I could come to like these 500-piece puzzles, though… because this one had so much script in it, I didn’t even use the picture on the box and I still completed it within one evening! I guess to be more honest with myself I should try completing one of my bigger puzzles without lots of straight edges to the picture… but where’s the fun in that?

Sooo… only 4 more weeks of these annoying holiday-themed commercials?

Oh, and the finished product…

Diversion: Jane Austen test

So, according to one online test site, I’m most like this Jane Austen heroine… (I signed up to take a test, not trolling for guys…)

Sigh. I should have known. (But I would never go for Mr. Collins–in today’s world, that is!)

Your Score: Charlotte Lucas

50% romance, 31% sauciness, 56% etiquette, 88% intelligence

Intelligent and polite, you have a pragmatic streak that will not be denied. You are sensible and risk-averse. You never step on anyone’s toes, and your intelligence makes you excellent company. You think love is an awfully fickle emotion on which to base a lifetime’s happiness, and no one could ever accuse you of being fickle. Like Charlotte Lucas, you will get your happy ending…but it will be a merely comfortable sort of happiness. Maybe you should ask yourself if that’s really enough.

Ideal matches: Edward Ferrars, Edmund Bertram, Colonel Brandon

Guaranteed heartbreak: George Wickham, Henry Crawford

Not worthy of your affections: Mr. Collins, John Willoughby

Link: The Jane Austen heroine Test written by SarahKath on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

Storytelling

I’ve been thinking a lot about storytelling lately. Now this (the fact of my thinking about it) could be directly related to the fact that I’m taking a few days off work, and whenever I have a chance to do that, I immerse myself in stories… Books, TV shows, movies… the like. Anyway, this line of thought came when I was watching Cold Case from this past Sunday.

You see, early on they showed the basic setup of the cold case in question, abandoned body presumed a suicide; all about gender identity in the rather repressive environment of the early ’60s. Now, regardless of my thoughts about that particular theme (I think it’s been rather overplayed in the past few decades, no doubt due to the fact that the Boomer generation was in its formative years during that time and it impressed itself upon their collective imaginations… and them being the force that they are in our society, the rest of us get to hear a lot about it… but that’s the digression I was trying to avoid taking), they showed a clue early on that played out the rest of the episode for me rather predictably. Of course, it took the on-screen detectives more than half of the allotted hour to pick up the thread from that particular clue, as they rabbit-trailed along several story-worthy but inconsequential other lines of thought.

However, what occurred to me is that this has been happening to me rather often lately. I’ve got an affinity for the crime-solving shows, and watch almost all of them–and have done so, since they were first aired–and I guess you pick up a lot along the way. Unless they throw some complete red herring at you (which isn’t considered good mystery storytelling), it all plays out pretty similarly, especially within each show. This is probably not so much because I’m an efficient detective at this point, as that I’ve picked up enough to predict how the writers of each of these shows are likely to point to their eventual conclusions.

It’s a little like getting into a new class and floundering around for a while, grade-wise, until you figure out what it is that the professor wants from you–and write to him from then on. I always used to have to do this; I can remember a few particularly hard cases who were a little difficult to figure out, but I always got it. And once you write to their preconceptions, sounding as though you’re coming from an assumption base that corresponds with theirs, and as though you draw conclusions through the same process that they do, they think you’re brilliant. (Because anyone who thinks the way that they do must, necessarily, be brilliant.) I’m sure I would not be exempt from this phenomenon–if I were grading papers written from all sorts of angles, I’m sure I’d naturally gravitate to the ones that seemed familiar to me. But it is more of a game than, perhaps, real change that is occurring. (By they way, is this a common phenomenon? Other people who did well at school, did you end up writing for the audience who’d be grading it, intentionally?)

Anyway, the point being, we like stories (or papers, in school) that have some common cohesiveness and flow. This means that when an author–or scriptwriter–is particularly prolific, it gets more predictable over time to tell where they’re going to take a story. Within a genre, the bounds on where you’re “allowed” to take the story grow even tighter, which is why several of the genres I’ve read really do end up seeming like the same story told over and over, with a few cosmetic details altered. When someone breaks from the expected formula, it creates a sense of cognitive dissonance for the reader (viewer), a sense that the story went somehow “wrong”. (I used to hate, on principle, all unhappy endings, for instance, and refused to read books when they were heading in that direction. I still can’t finish books where the main character, through a combination of idiocy and recklessness, throws his or her life and success away pursuing some obviously destructive path of behavior like gambling or pyramid schemes, etc.)

But another key point, I think, is that all of us tend to think of ourselves as the protagonists in a story. Which story varies from person to person, and plenty of people would choose the dark and misunderstood rebel while plenty of others the shining paladin who battles for good (to name a couple rather obvious archetypes). In some sense, I think, figuring out exactly what character a person sees himself or herself as being, in what type of story, gives you a very good handle on who that person is, what decisions they’re likely to make, and why they’re doing it all. I think this is why we place such importance on the idea of “narratives” in philosophical circles…

Anyway, I’ve noticed that when you change up the culture, the storytelling changes. The central myths aren’t familiar, and characters react in seemingly unpredictable, even “wrong” ways. I’ve recently watched a series of Asian films, both from the Far East and some Bollywood type pictures. Personally, I’ve enjoyed the unfamiliar in them. Some of the storytelling is far too over the top, at times, and then at other times a character will seemingly fly off the handle for no reason at all. I like the puzzle-solving aspect that goes into this–what was the provoking action? Why was it such a big deal? Why was something else that (in Western circles) should have been a big deal completely dismissed and unnoticed?

It seems to me that if we were to pay more attention to the storytelling that goes on in other cultures and other societies–maybe even within other subcultures existing under our own cultural umbrella–we might have a better handle on what makes those weird people act–and think–the way that they do. If you know what a person from that country considers an act of heroism versus one of cowardice, and play that against our own notions of the same, you can see very clearly where our value set diverges. Really, if you could get a full understanding of the set of cultural myths–stories–that shape people in a specific culture, you’d be very close to understanding them altogether. But that takes time, and effort, and research. (And a lot of reading.)

Anyway, I’m not sure where I’m going with this… it’s just thoughts that I’ve been having as I immerse myself in stories. I think this may play into my language and culture learning strategies, if/when I get the chance to follow that particular ambition.

Virtual conferences

Well, on Friday I telecommuted for the first time, attending a conference on federal presence in Virtual Worlds. I attended from home, in “person” as an avatar in Second Life, where in a conference room there we watched a live video feed from the actual conference in real life, in Washington DC. To make things more convoluted, there were moderators present in the DC conference who were also online, relaying questions from the Second Life audience, and at several points presenters actually displayed, live, the Second Life forum (where all the avatars waved and said hi, assuming we knew how to control them at that point), so we were watching a video feed of the virtual room in which we were virtually meeting. Yeah, it’s hard to describe it in words. The recursion of this all is a little crazy.

But regardless… here’s a picture of me attending the conference (with a nifty free coffee mug donated by one of the advertisers there).

I was still in process of tweaking my avatar–I suspect that may be an ongoing process, because I’m still not completely content with her, even though she’s gone through several metamorphoses already.

While I was there (the conference was in the NOAA’s Second Life area), after the conference was over, I chatted with a couple people but spent most of my time exploring Meteora, which is the NOAA’s virtual presence. They had some fun stuff, including a tsunami demonstration, a real-time weather map displayed in 3-D (your avatar can walk across it to inspect it more closely), and a weather balloon ride.

There were some technical glitches–the feed lost audio several times, and required reloading, and there was a limit on how many people could coexist in the Second Life conference hall at once, so you had to attempt to get there multiple times before it would work, but it was a really great way to attend a conference without having to charge work the money to travel there. And having to do it at home (as all the DoD types had to) was a nice plus.

So after that, I had some info about who was online and what there was out there. I still haven’t quite figured out how you actually find a lot of the sites you know are out there… I assume that you do a standard Internet search to get the SL links from the company’s webpages, and then you can “teleport” there in Second Life. I did, however, manage to find NASA’s site, and looked around it for a little while, until it got too popular and my avatar kept being approached by people–young men, I’m assuming–who wanted to know things like “How old r u?” and stuff like that. (People–telling me my avatar’s hot is kind of beside the point! Avatars are generally good-looking–that’s how it works!) I think that I’m probably going to have to set aside my vanity and develop an “invisible” entity for when I want to be left alone. How annoying.

All irritations aside, however, I was intrigued by the whole Second Life thing and I’m pretty sure that there’s potential there we’re only just barely seeing the edges of at the moment. What an interesting time we live in!

Oh, and for vanity’s sake, here’s a later version of my avatar, after I’d done some tweaking.

Nature or nurture in Kid Nation?

It occurred to me, as I watched my recorded version of “Kid Nation” from last night, that even this over-lauded new society of kids is rapidly reverting to retrogressive norms. They’re set for a new round of elections for leaders, and it looks like the oldest (strongest, most powerful) kids will be winning all he spots on the town council. Interestingly enough, it looks, too, like the council may well be all boys, once this second set of elections comes through.

When the adults (producers) set it up from the beginning, there was a nice well-rounded town council–two girls, two boys, some diversity represented with an ethnic minority and a mix of ages between them. None were on the top end of age range (about 14), and one was only 10, which is near the bottom of the age range they’re representing.

However, as soon as the decisions were placed in the kids’ hands, things started changing. The first round of elections saw them with a 3-1 male-female ratio on their council. The last girl wasn’t challenged that time through. They’re going to have another round of elections next episode, though, and the challengers are uniformly the older boys. I’m wondering if they’re going to end up with a boys’ club council, fully on their own and (almost certainly) against the wishes of the producers and other adults involved in the show.

I find this fascinating, that the natural tendency is for the stronger males in the group to gravitate to the leadership roles. And watching the children conduct themselves, the girls aren’t able to make themselves heard and obeyed in a way that the older boys are. The older girls do better, but seem disinclined to take on the role of leadership (perhaps because they’re perceptive enough to see that then they’ll be a target of perpetual backtalk, whining, and back-stabbing–all of which seems to take the boys by surprise).

How much of this kind of behavior is natural, in the sense of being human nature, do you think, and how much is socialization? I know that the standard PC line is that it’s all “nurture” rather than “nature”, but these kids were obviously raised (with one or two exceptions) to value diversity and to be inoffensive and appropriate in every socially-acceptable way. Unless you can mount a convincing argument for unconscious socialization (which I have very strong doubts about), it’s looking a lot like “nature” is causing most of this situation.

On being busy

I’m feeling a little less than brilliant this evening… there’s just something about an intensive two days of writing mind-numbing software documentation that will kill one’s creativity anytime! Well, especially when you add to that the fact that I’m not a software developer and I don’t even have much particular expertise with the software in question… Oh, the joy.

This has already been a busy week, and I’m only two days into it! I had someone coming or going at every turn over the long weekend, which was fun, though I never really got my alone time to recuperate. And then three major deadlines for projects at work this week. Oh, and incidentally my birthday yesterday. I was actually rather pleased with myself this year–always before this, I’ve let slip that my birthday is upcoming, so that people feel guilted into at least wishing me a happy birthday. I keep intending to keep it on the down-low, and then I forget and say something about it. However, this year I managed to bite my tongue, and I was glad to see that it was possible. I’ve got plans to hang out with my local friends (all two of them) this weekend in celebration…

Actually, what’s funny was that the only indicator that it was my birthday was that my mailboxes were full. Both physical and email mailboxes, that is. I had a whopping 22 personal emails in the account that I keep separate from my Internet business! (Of course today I had none, so perhaps that’s the flip side of the phenomenon?)

I get to try out telecommuting for the first time ever on Friday, which I’m excited about. There’s a conference being held about government presence in virtual worlds, and there’s an option to attend (for free) virtually. The catch? The virtual conference is being held on Second Life, which our helpful office Internet filters block in toto. (Not that I blame them–I suspect it would be difficult to get much real business done if you allowed workers to spend their time wandering around virtual worlds…) I’m excited about this because, more and more, I’m attracted to the idea of a job where telecommuting is the normal standard. Then you could be measured not by the amount of time you spend tethered to your desk, but by what you produce. (Which is how I measure myself anyway, and why I get frustrated with nonsensical busywork.) I have high hopes that by the time I leave the military, I’ll be able to find myself a good way to telecommute and a good place to live where I can do it. Then again, there is a distinct possibility that without the (annoying) interference of a commuter schedule, I’d cave in to my own inertia and never get anything done. So perhaps the traditional workplace is something I need.

It’s funny–as I consider my current slack-wittedness, I realize that as boring as the writing itself may have been, I’ve enjoyed spending an intensive week working on something. I miss working hard at things… it reminds me that I’m capable of producing a lot more than I am asked to on a regular basis. That’s a good thing to remember.