Positively Glorious!

Recently, I discovered that despair has no color. Despair needs no color. It works its dark magic using only black and white. Like the white square of a newspaper column. And the black words printed there. Words that would lie so innocently by themselves, yet were strung together in such a way that they announce the death of a soul.

I’m in no way a dark person. I tried to be years ago, and wrote all kinds of wannabe Gothic poetry to try to prove to everyone how dark and mean and unhappy I was. Reading it now is almost comical. I’d write some menacing description of the classic, dark, stone mansion… draped with wonderful spring flowers and warm breezes of spring. The dark foreboding presence creeping upon you would be a harbinger of… a wonderful summer brunch of lightly fried salmon with lemon and capers.

Well, that’s a bit of a joke, but the threads of happiness were still there- and they were big threads. Every once in a while, however, I need to write about darkness. Real darkness.

No, seriously people, real, real, darkness. The kind that you probably don’t even want to read. It’s not often, but it happens.

I’m at that point now, so decided to make another category, and remove it from the main feed. That way, you needn’t see it unless you’re looking for it.

There’s no salmon, no spring flowers, and no warm breeze. The Pit of Despair is a dark, cold and very lonely place.¹

1. I’m so full of shit. Why would I name it after  a reference to “The Princess Bride?” Even when I try to be dark and depressing, I just really can’t pull it off. [↩]

For many people, writing is a therapy. I know that I’m one of those people and I always feel somewhat better when I find other people for whom that’s true as well. Reading the words of people like Morgan makes me feel more normal.

One thing I’ve learned about myself as time goes by…I write WAY more when I’m down and feeling crappy and bleh and stuff. When things are going right, I don’t ..well..write. I guess only one right/write can I handle at any moment. But I feel kinda remiss about not writing about the rightness, or increase of rightness at least, that’s going on for me. Especially when I’ve unloaded so much wrongness in this space!

We write more when we needs therapy than when we don’t. It’s a normal way to be.

Of course, it’s my brain telling me that it’s normal, so I’m not entirely sure that it can be trusted. Continue Reading »

What are you doing here? Can’t you read?

I mean, I wrote that it would take me longer to finish it! It was in the title!

Did you think I was being ironic or something? Did you think that was some kind of allegory?

Why would you click a link to read something that specifically tells you not to read it? Do you think you’re being lead on a wild goose chase or something!?

Go away, I’m working on it. It was a lot for me to digest. There’s nothing to see here!

Go away.

Go on. Go¹

1. *PST* Come ‘ere, I’ll let you in on a secret. The entire point of this post was merely to practice my writing to try and make it succinct (or is that “concise?”), make sure there are no stupid misspellings, make sure I used words like “irony” correctly and left out words that I don’t really understand, ensure that sound structure flows well and, most importantly, write what I know about in an easy to read fashion where devices like run-on sentences are only used when they would make an appropriately poignant point- all in an attempt to impress Melissa Lion and make her believe that I can write well. Don’t tell anyone, it’s a secret. [↩]

This is not a funny post. Seriously. If you’re looking for funny, I suggest you look elsewhere. This is a post about my job, which is only funny in a “No, it’s not Office Space, it’s my real life” sort of way.

The Awesomeness of Code

There was a time, back in my Undergrad Program when I decided that a program to teach 8th grade students robotics and programming would be fun. So I made a job by creating such a program, bringing it to a middle school, and implementing it.

It was fun.

There were other times like this. Like the time when I thought a web-accessible database of coastal erosion data in ASP.NET would be cool (realizing that I didn’t know ASP, so would have to learn it), or the time when I thought that developing a data manipulation program for a Forest Service hydrologist would be cool.

They were cool.

There was this other time when I saw that the Forest Service had all this climate data online, and no online mapping interface connected to it. I contacted them and suggested it, knowing it would be a challenge. Then, I graduated and went to OSU- and the office with that data was at OSU, so I worked on it. I also stumbled into my thesis while I was at OSU, which was primarily data modeling, numerical methods and, yes, not a small amount of programming.

It was, all of it, challenging.

And finally, there was a time when I worked for the Water Quality division at DEQ, and they wanted to redesign and redevelop their heat & mass transport modeling application- and they wanted to do it in Python. “Oh joy, this will be awesome,” I thought.

It was, in a word, awesome. Continue Reading »

I’ve been trying to figure out a way to write about my now-not-so-recent experience as a guest on Strange Love Live, but have been consistently failing to come up with something that does justice to it. I wanted to write something really funny, and mention panties at least 17 times, but I just couldn’t write about it at all.

I’m still not entirely sure why I couldn’t write. I mean, I think we’ll all agree that I generally don’t have trouble filling space with words. This, however, time I am.

Part of the problem is that it’s more of an experience than that. It’s not limited to my appearance on The Couch of Cami Kaos. The experience is something much bigger than that. It’s a world of events happening around me while I play ping pong.

In the past couple days, I’ve begun thinking that maybe the reason for my trouble is that I’m just really not the person to write about this. Right now, Dr. Normal is thinking about the audio settings for tonight’s show, the second focusing on Sex as a healthy and fun topic. Cami’s rounding up her friends for laughter, a wild after hours, and scheming on how to make her husband blush. They’re prepping the studio and changing everything from the last performance- and that performance was about the Idaho tech community.

The point is that while I’m sitting and trying to think about what’s happening, I’m already a distant memory, because they are on the move. It’s as if I’ve accidentally stumbled into a big room to dodge the rain, and happened to get caught in a picture standing next to someone famous.

I’m Forrest Gump.

There’s something very big happening here, and I’m witlessly stumbling onto its fringes. Continue Reading »

Some Math Fun¹ :

• Ignite 1: 250 tickets in 3 months. Assuming 90 days even, we have 10,368 seconds/ticket
• Ignite 2: 400 tickets in 2 days. 432 seconds/ticket
• Ignite 3: 450 tickets in 22 hours.  176 seconds/ticket
• Ignite 4: 550 tickets in 3.5 hours. 22.9 seconds/ticket
• Ignite 5: 560 tickets in 5.5 minutes. 0.59 seconds/ticket

Go on, graph it. It approximates an exponential curve. The equation

seconds = 86153 e^{(-2.2488(ignite))}

where “ignite” is the number of the event (i.e. IgnitePortland 6) and “seconds” is the number of seconds per ticket, the error value² is 0.9626.

What the hell does this mean? Well, assuming everything is the same next time, and things like server lag and response time don’t matter (which, they really, really do, unless Legion of Tech is using a serious cloud platform), it means that we can pretty closely estimate how long it’ll take to sell out Ignite Portland 6.

Go, on, it’s pretty funny. Plug it in. Put a 6 in there and see what you get. Naw, don’t. I’ll tell you. 0.12 seconds. Each ticket sells in a tenth of a second, meaning Ignite Portland 6 sells out of 560 tickets in 1.1 minute.

My prediction? It won’t happen. Legion of Tech just got hammered. They were shocked. I imagine that things will change for next time.

Still, it’s a pretty wild thought. Talk about popular! 1.1 minutes to sell out? I don’t think The Beatles ever did that!

1. With apologies to actual math lovers that I comically ignore assumptions and significant digits [↩]
2. As in “r squared,” yeah, I think it sucks as a metric too [↩]

Oh my god. If I had any kind of ego, It’d be stroked right now. Tickets for Ignite Portland 5 went in 5 minutes 29 seconds!

Josh Bancroft writes:

Update: WOW! That was INTENSE. All of the tickets, about 560 of them, were GONE in 5 minutes. Amazing. BUT! Don’t panic if you didn’t get a ticket. You can still sign up and get on the waitlist, and when people don’t confirm their tickets within 24 hours, or cancel/give up their tickets, they’ll go to the people on the waitlist, first come, first served. You guys are amazing!

Now, we all have egos, right? And our egos generally want to frame the universe such that we are squarely positioned at the center of it, right? And our egos are usually wrong, right?

Right. (right? they’re wrong, right?)

Even so, mine still wants to believe that the crazy response to Ignite Portland 5 was purely because there are hundreds of women who want to throw panties at me.¹ I know, “shut up, ego.” Sadly, I have to admit that the great and always useful saying “It’s not about me” applies here. Because, well, like usual, it’s not about me.

It’s about the amazing PDX community, it’s about The Legion of Tech, it’s about the energy of Ignite. If anything, it’s about everyone else!

But, I guess it’s a wee bit about me, though, right? Because I’m presenting. Of course, there are 17 talks, so it’s only 1/17^th about me. There are a bunch of 15 second videos, this time, so that cuts it down a bit more.

And, there are 560 tickets, and a bunch of people that can wait in line (The Bagdad holds, what? 750?). Plus all the people who host and organize it, and all the sponsors. There are volunteers…

Wow. Okay, so we’re down around 1/1000^th about me. Wow, that’s tiny. I don’t know how the ego is goin– wait one.. there’s a call from The Ego…

Yeah… yeah… uh huh… panties, right… yeah… okay… Yeah, will do.

Great, that settles it. The Ego is cool. We’ll take what we can get. Ego has a good point: If I have the chance to have even one pair of panties thrown at me by even one woman while I am alone, on a stage, with a microphone in my hand, then having Ignite be only 1/1000^th about me is, well, just fine.

Because for one shining moment of my life, I may see a piece of fabric glitter in the lights as it flies through the air, and I’m going to believe that being a geek is just as cool as being Elvis.

Yeah, baby. The Mettadore has left the building.

1. Okay, if you haven’t read this post, listened to  our craziness during last week’s Strange Love Live, and hung around on Twitter incessantly, you may have missed that reference. [↩]

I wanted to have a post about my experience on Strange Love Live ready for Monday, but it’s difficult to do justice to that show, so it’s taking more time than I thought. Funny story about cigarette breaks:

When I was in the military, I wasn’t smoking seriously. I’d have a cigarette about once or twice per week, maxing out at about one or two cigarettes per day at one point. I used to buy packs for my friends and then bum them so I didn’t have stale cigs (they loved it because they came out ahead).

Anyway, the smokers on the submarine I was stationed on would go “topside” every hour or two to have a smoke. I decided that it wasn’t fair, so I went up and just chit-chatted with them. I actually got in trouble. “What are you doing?” “Taking a smoke break.” “You don’t smoke, stop wasting time and get back to work.”

So, I’d bum a cigarette from my friend (who was more than happy to oblige) and light up. Not good. I was just trying to “get away with something,” trying to “shirk responsibility,” etc.

Later, I was sitting in front of the XO with a reprimand. Awesome guy. He told me that I was right- it’s a stupid way to run things, but that’s the way it is. The conversation is lost, now, but basically consisted of  “Look around you, do you honestly think we just made all of this up last week and are just playing games? Yeah, a lot of it is stupid, but it’s a framework necessary to make the system work. Some of us recognize that it’s stupid, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s necessary. And let me tell you something, if you do nothing but make fun of it without appreciating it’s necessity, you’re going to have a long hard road on this boat. If you openly push your superior’s buttons just for fun, they’re going to push yours too, and we’ve got a lot more power to push.”

Then he ripped up the reprimand and said that he doesn’t condone smoking, and doesn’t want me to start, but if I’m standing topside, I’d “better have a  goddamn cigarette in my hand.”

I spent two years taking breaks with unlit cigarettes in my hand and no-one ever said another word to me. Turns out that the XO made it ship policy to stop bugging (paraphrase) “anyone holding a cigarette and taking a break for so long as a cigarette normally takes to be consumed.”

Most of The Navy was crap. But my XO was a great guy.

While I was never an avid smoker of tobacco, I’ve often thought that those who take cigarette breaks are blessed with some quality quiet time – several times a day. What if I stepped out and sat on a park bench for 15 minutes, about four times a day? Would I be healthier?

via Seeking Meditation Time | Positively Glorious!.