Ennui

Back when Dave had a soul crushing job doing software testing, we used to email all day just to make it through the day. There's something about sitting in front of a computer all day, working on projects that have very little personal meaning to you that makes the ennui set in hard.

These days Dave is doing contract work for an employer who actually cares if he works or not. I've needed to develop alternative coping mechanisms.

The first is the music of Jonathan Coulton, who brought the wonderful song "Code Monkey" into my life. Code Monkey is a standout, but I also suggest the "Baby Got Back" remix, "Dance, Soterios Johnson, Dance", and the zombie song of the year, "Re Your Brains". You can listen to all of his songs on the web, and if you like them enough, you can buy his songs and albums.

And in case that music isn't geeky enough for you, my other ennui buster has been "The Picard Song" by DarkMateria. My favorite part is the part where he says "There are four lights". That's one of the many ongoing Star Trek jokes in our household. The song has also made me want to use "Engage" in all kinds of inappropriate contexts.

Engage!

Back to School

Yesterday was my first day of my grad class for the fall semester. It looks like this semester is going to be "Participatory Action Research and Policy Change". I'm excited about the topic and I couldn't get into the intro policy course, so as usual I'm just diving in to the higher level course and making it up as I go along. Next task: getting the reader for the course. There is no orientation for non-degree students, so a whole bunch of my U of A experience has been figuring things out on my own.

The start of classes also means that I am phenomenally busy at work with all the beginning of semester stuff. So why am I blogging right now? Because I needed something to keep my head from exploding for a minute while I regather my chi.

Today is James' first day as a middle school English and public speaking teacher. I'm excited for him to have this new experience and think he will be a fantastic teacher. It also means there are now two teachers going by Mr. Kittredge out there. Scary!

And now for something completely different, a picture of me from college with two of my awesome 'shmen, Joe and Kumar.

Helvetica

Apparently there is a documentary coming out in 2007 about the typeface Helvetica. It's the first time (aside from my obvious desire to see Snakes on a Plane) in a while I've been excited about a film enough that I might want to go out of my way to see it.

Much like my idea to read books about single word subjects (Cod, Salt, Coal), the idea of Helvetica intrigues me. Most people think "how could you possibly make a feature length film about a typeface"? I think "Boy, I can't wait to hear all the minutiae of Helvetica". I'm obsessive about details. It is never enough for me to learn about something on a surface level. I want to bore down until I understand the very atoms that make up whatever I am trying to understand. I want to stretch myself to the very edge of my intellect until I can't understand it any better. And then I want to ask more questions.

Small talk about the weather

Yeah, it's true, I'm posting about the weather. This is our weather forecast for the next few days. Doesn't that just throw all your usual perceptions about living in the desert out the window? Yeah, I thought so. This is the part of the summer that is genuinely unpleasant, just like the East Coast summer. It's hot, it's humid, everything sticks to you, and it sucks. The difference is now I have central air conditioning. And an umbrella, thankfully.

Zach Braff

I have an unreasonable hatred of Zach Braff in general and Garden State in particular. I like the soundtrack (more on this later), but the script is just SO BAD I don't have words to describe it. James says I hate the movie because I had some petty complaint about the portrayal of psychiatric medications in it, and he's at least partially right, but Natalie Portman and her cute little helmet? Come on people!

Anyway, in checking links on my blog, I discovered that Zach Braff has a new website. How nice for him. And apparently a new movie. But the truly disturbing discovery was this: Zach Braff, who I consider to be the paradigm for lameness, and I listen to the same music. Seriously, The Last Kiss soundtrack looks like my work playlist (although I have officially washed my hands of Coldplay unless I need a quick auditory benzo to bring me out of a panic attack) and he has a "listening to" plug in on the side and we seriously are listening TO THE SAME SONG. Sia, Breathe Me. I realize me listening to that song might be lame, but the fact that Zach Braff's image staff who put up what are probably fake playlists chose that song too makes me sad.

I've been ranting about innane things an above average amount. I'm in one of those moods where I want to just punch someone - anyone - in the face. I mean, if I really had to choose, I might punch Don Zimmer, just because it would be funny, but I'd probably settle for an innocent small child in a pinch. I need a kickboxing class or smething.

When Wikis are actually Wiki

I had never actually sat down and thought about why wikis are called wikis, so I consulted Wikipedia on the matter. I love the idea of the WikiWikiWeb. Any of you faithful readers (hah, readers) who are familiar with the wiki wiki machine know why. Apparently wiki wiki means "hurry quick" in Hawaiian, at least according to Wikipedia.

Anyway, in the course of wasting some time today, I came across the Extreme Programming Wiki. Now this wiki is a serious wiki. It has been edited by a million people, everyone keeps making up their own terms and articles and pages and adding to the "concept" or whatever. And you know what? It's a really bad idea. With the exception of a partially well written page on Test Driven Development, there is practically no useful information on it. Just a bunch of opinions and stuff people just made up. I mean, if ever there were a medium I would shine in, it would be something where you can just make everything up as you go along. My life is pretty wiki-like. But that doesn't mean I would want the general public to think that everything I make up is actual fact. Just like I wouldn't want anyone to think the way I use the word ninja (as an adjective, as in "my ninja writing abilities") is "actual English", despite it having caught on a bit in Monson back in the day.

So I'm going to state this for the record: if you just make something up, it is not a fact. If something is your opinion, it is also not a fact. I get quite persnickety about facts, so just don't confuse what is a fact, people. It will make me much happier.

¡Vamos a México!

Dave came to visit me this past weekend, which rocked. We went to Mexico, it was hot as hell, we ate lots of meat and I discovered the new love of my life, Mexican popsicles, or paletas. I got made fun of for my Spanish, got a little drunk, made a friend, and ate bacon wrapped hot dogs. Thank god Dave pointed out to me that the most obvious way of getting rid of my "friend" was to say "adios amigo". It was like he taught me a new Spanish word. It had never even occurred to me. Hermosillo is a pretty and clean city, with not a ton to do, but it was fun anyway. Dave and I both experienced the hottest weather we've ever been in - 109 with 40% humidity that weather.com said felt like 135. How Dave didn't die of dehydration I don't know, because I drank about 4 times as much water as he did.

Oh, I also forgot within three seconds of entering Mexico that I wasn't supposed to drink the water, and got an agua fresca made with Mexican water. Other things that rocked about Mexico: our hotel was $20, there was a store devoted solely to selling backpacks, we didn't get stung by scorpions, Dave coined the phrase "contemporary ruins" to describe crumbling modern buildings, tacos, how nice people were to us, watching a movie in Russian subtitled in Spanish on the bus TWICE, buying two spanish language cookbooks, the bus driver who was joking with us about marijuana as we went through US customs, and the fact that people kept bringing us bowls of key limes with EVERYTHING we ate.

Overall, the Spanish speaking went better than expected, everyone understood me, and we got everything we needed taken care of. The only thing I couldn't quite handle was getting a straight answer on what to do with our tourist permits, but as it turns out, it seems no one actually cares about the tourist permits. The trip did make me realize just how limited my Spanish language skills are though, and I really want to make an effort to get better.

There's a paleteria down on South 6th Ave. here in Tucson, and they make some rocking popsicles. I'm going to see if I can buy the supplies (plastic bags that are used as molds and sticks) from them to try some at home. They're $1.50 each from the paleteria, so being able to make passable ones at home would be awesome.

Nightmare on error-handling street

I woke up this morning trying to somehow work out in my sleep how I had handled an error on the website involving a person's courses if they don't have an entry in our people section. How weird is it to wake up with an SQL query in your head? Pretty weird. Even weirder, the fact that relief washed over me when I remembered "WHERE course.PID = Main.PID".

As it turns out, I had handled the error semi-correctly by my sheer incompetence, and will be spending today rewriting a whole bunch of website code to actually handle errors gracefully.

Just to make things entertaining, my work computer appears to have some sort of failure going on. It keeps throwing memory-related errors, but each individual stick of memory tests good. It only throws errors with both sticks in a dual channel configuration, but even with both sticks in single channel, the actual problem (programs quitting because memory couldn't be read) continues even if memtest can't pick up an error. ARGH!

Keep it like a secret

I read an article in yesterday's New York Times about how Americans are increasingly socially isolated and have fewer people who they can talk to about the most important things in their lives. More than the "Bowling Alone" phenomenon - or the weakening of community ties - written about by Robert D. Putnam, this new research asked people who they could talk to about things like serious health issues or who should take care of their children if they die. The study, conducted by sociologists at Duke and here at University of Arizona, found that on average adults had two close confidantes.

Reading this made me feel exceptionally blessed with a strong social circle, even if that circle is scattered all over the country. I have four or five people who I literally talk to about anything, and even my social group beyond that consists mainly of friends who I am extremely close to and could turn to in times of trouble.

I've been wanting to post for a long time about PostSecret, a "community art project" where people write and illustrate in some way a secret on a postcard. What strikes me is that this is the very phenomenon the researchers were investigating. People send their deepest darkest secrets here. Often these secrets are secrets of despair - suicidality, sexual or physical abuse, or paralyzing fear. Sometimes they're the opposite - a desire to live life more fully, or deep love for someone estranged. Usually when I read PostSecret, what strikes me is that most of the secrets there don't need to be secrets. These are things that many people go through, that many people think, that many people survive. They are things that no one wants to talk about, but it is the act of talking about them that will free you.

I'll admit that I'm not perfect in this regard. I have plenty of things I'm afraid to talk about sometimes, and things that I don't express as often as I would like. But I feel like as time passes, I aspire to keep fewer secrets. I want the people I love to know how much I love them. I want them to be able to share their deepest, darkest secrets with me. And I want to be able to do the same with them. A secret only has as much power as you give it. Once it's out in the open, I've found it isn't nearly as dark and scary as you thought it would be.

Idea day!

So yesterday I had what I've decided to call an "idea day". It's a day where my creative juices are flowing, and I have a far above average number of crazy ideas, 99.97% will never go anywhere beyond the idea stage.

It seems there are a few factors that go into having an idea day. Based on yesterday's experiences, I've attempted to distill it down into the most basic components:

1. Low stress levels
2. Well rested
3. Inspirational reading material
4. A feeling of excitement about the future

I wish I could say these things came together for me on a regular basis, but it's a semi-rare occurance these days. I wonder if I had idea days more often if they would be as fast and furious as they are now. Am I actually generating the ideas right then or just releasing the ideas that have been building up in my head?

One of my ideas from idea day was an effective way of capturing the ideas. Even though I know most of them will never come to fruition, I want to know what they are. I have a mini-voice recorder I use for this sometimes, although I hate having to hear my recorded voice when I play them back. Being a nerd, there's going to be a database involved. Boo yeah!

Another idea that came out of idea day is a webmaster group at the University to provide the kind of collegial support I was longing for yesterday. It looks like this one is actually going to happen - I have a meeting next week to get the process started.

Industry Conferences and the Daily Grind

So when I'm not making mojitos and playing World of Warcraft, I am a web developer for University of Arizona. My boss considers "keeping abreast of industry developments" to be one of my primary duties, so I read lots of industry news, including a decent number of blogs. (I keep meaning to post a blogroll, but I'm sooooo lazy.)

This past weekend was BloggerCon, and the folks over at Monkey Bites were in attendence. Yet another industry conference in I have no chance of going to, because I don't actually work in the industry. (Actually, BloggerCon is actually more of an un-industry un-conference, but the point of this post is conferences.)

Most of the time, I don't mind the differences between the education sector and the private sector. I've learned to swallow the crappy pay, the fact that I'm a single webmaster with a single site rather than part of a team, and the total lack of anything resembling a "development budget". But conferences, especially the big ones like SXSW and Web 2.0, remind me of the divide between people who work "in the industry" and me. They have money for conferences and training, we don't. In industry, there is a constant push for innovation and excellence, in education many times the goal is just getting by.

I am a passionate web designer and developer. I'm opinionated about user interface design, web standards, and accessibility. When I first started working on websites for a living, I soaked up information about how to do the best job possible like a sponge. I could literally tell you every supported and non-supported CSS property in all the major browsers at the time. Now my days are mostly spent doing updates and day-to-day maintenence. I feel like my enthusiasm for web technologies has waned, and I'm burnt out and jaded.

So I guess this is really a post about the daily grind. Conferences are a break from the daily grind. I suppose vacations and the more flexible schedule that I get from working in education are too. Mostly I miss the opportunity to talk to other people who are passionate about the things that I am passionate about - to hear their ideas and bounce my ideas off of them. Surely there must be some way for me to get that here at the University. In the meantime, I'll live vicariously through conference blogging.

The Perfect Mojito

So a while ago, Dave and I were talking about how fast mint grows, and what one does with all that mint. I said "Mojitos! They're so 2001!". But apparently mojitos are still trendy, because they're featured on Bacardi commercials right now.

My first mojito recipe came from a May 2002 issue of Cooking Light, and is the one I've been using. Ten mint leaves, 2 tsp sugar, 2 oz. light rum, 2 tbsp. fresh lime juice, and 6 oz. club soda. All in all, I'm happy with this version of the mojito. Dave's is slightly sweeter and has less lime juice, and he's happy with his too. We've both working on the mint squishing so that we don't break up the leaves too much.

So I looked online to see if there was a general consensus on mojito making. There isn't. Lots of the recipes I found were much sweeter, some used less lime, some used a sugar syrup instead of granulated sugar. Some recipes have lots less club soda, and it seems that adding more soda has been part of the "Americanization" of the drink. And then to make it more confusing, someone who claimed he knew what he was doing said that you should actually start with lime slices and muddle them in the glass with the mint and sugar to release lime essential oils, and forget about lime juice entirely. Someone else said it's actually better with dark rum instead of light.

Now it pays to bear in mind that neither Dave nor I have ever had a mojito made for us at any bar, or in Cuba, or anywhere else. We're going on our innate gringo mojito instinct, which probably is about as strong in us as say, The Force.

So tonight the mojito experiments begin. I don't know what'll be going down at Dave's house, but I have grand plans to refine my mojito into the perfect (for me) drink.

Just Stuff

I've been trying to write a new post for a while now, but they always seem to get stalled part way through. I'm not sure why.

Things her have been pretty medium for a while now. James is out of school, I decided not to take a class this summer, I went to DC for Sarah's graduation, Gracie came to visit, and I'm trying to figure out what I want to do with my summer. I think I'm going to to to a yoga class tonight. Also, it's a bazillion degrees in Tucson. I mean, 101.

Milestones

This blog has devolved a little too much into a "what dorky computer thing I did today" chronicle, so this post will be devoted to non-geeky things.

Yesterday I had my last Principles of Epidemiology class, so all I have left this semester is a take home exam. Overall I'd say the class was a good learning experience, both in teaching me about epi and teaching me about what I want out of a graduate program. I'm still totally conflicted about grad school and if I actually want to do an MPH or enter the public health field at all, but at least now I have somewhat of an idea of what I'm in for.

James graduates next Saturday with his Masters in Theater Studies. He's going to have a graduate degree! This degree was the whole point of our move to Tucson, and I'm really proud of his accomplishment and the great work he's done here. If anyone is looking for an expert on Albee, the American Dream, or any number of other esoteric theater topics, I've got the perfect candidate for you.

In other graduation news, Sarah is getting her BA in International Affairs from George Washington University in a few weeks. I officially feel old now that my little sister is graduating from college. I mean didn't I just start college about 5 minutes ago?

Finally, Jackie and Mason got married April 15th. Their wedding was absolutely beautiful - overlooking the ocean in San Diego. Later that night they had a Pirates vs. Ninjas party, which was fantastically fun. And I got to see all my peeps, which was awesome. We also went to the San Diego zoo, went out for some of the best Indian food I've had in a while, and swung by Chino to visit James' grandparents on the way home. I've attached a picture of me, Gracie and James at the party and a picture of Jackie and Mason looking all marital.

Morning Roundup

From the Interwebs this morning:

Actually cool - Yahoo Farechase. Now you don't have to search multiple discount airline sites. Yahoo Farchase does it for you. And has all kinds of other useless bells and whistles. I personally like that their "choose a departure time" feature actually works, so I can make sure my flights don't leave before 7 am.

And a hillarious parody of Web 2.0 featuring my all time favorite Internets innovation, the blink tag. Web 2.1 sever side blink tag

And in case you haven't read the hype on Web 2.0, here's a brief introduction. I think it's mostly a load of crap for those of us who still have traditional websites to run instead of chasing venture capital, but I'm willing to beg, borrow or steal any idea that might make my life easier or my site better. Thanks giant XML!

It's official

I'm obsessed with World of Warcraft. Like all I'm thinking about right now is going home to start some auctions and level up my tailoring. The only thing stopping me from doing it right now is that running WoW via Remote Desktop tanks the connection and generally messes everything up.

Three months or so into playing, I have a lvl 24 mage and a lvl 28 druid. But then I decided I hate my druid and don't enjoy playing the character. So I've started a new mage to be my main. Her name is Pamplemousse and she's way cute. I'll post a screen shot when I get a chance.

Just some stuff

It's 71 in Tucson right now, and only expected to hit 81 today. That's downright chilly for late April here. I'm going to do something after work to take advantage of the nice weather. Like, you know, play computer games.

I found this Wikipedia entry on "leetspeak". It's maybe the funniest thing I've ever read. Note the totally egregious misuse of the word sociological.

My doctor's office called me this morning at 7:40 to cancel an appointment. In what world is 7:40 a reasonable time to call me? The world where I leave for work at 8? Irrelevant I say! I wasn't planning on getting up until 8:05, so I got back into bed and slept until 9.

I'm an official freak about timezones. I used to not care, because no one who lives in the Eastern time zone needs to care. Everything is calibrated to the East Coast. But now I live in Mountain Standard Time. Always MST, because we don't observe daylight savings time. One of my top ten pet peeves is the misuse of "standard time" when one really means daylight time. Last week Blogger said they were going down at 4 pm PST. Which of course was a lie, because it's Daylight Time right now, and they went down at 4 pm PDT. So I wrote to them, being a timezone freak and all. And today their scheduled outage posting is for 4 pm PDT. I feel so vindicated.

Thoughts on Software

So yesterday I was signed in on a computer where I am not a local administrator, and I tried to use what I call the "calendar" in Windows that you can access by double clicking on the taskbar clock. I was confronted with the error message "You do not have sufficient privileges to change the system time." Huh? But I want to look at the calendar!

I thought it was kind of funny because it occurs to me that it really is the "control panel" to change the system time, and I doubt when they programmed it that anyone was thinking of it as "the calendar". But I use it that way all the time. So does one of my coworkers. I mean, if the developers were thinking of it this way, they would make it so you can still use the calendar features but not be able to commit any time changes.

This happens to me CONSTANTLY with software. In fact, now that I've realized there are "actual humans" programming these things, I often send in feature requests when I bump up against something in software that drives me crazy. For example, in Microsoft's FrontPage, you can't use their hyperlink tool from code view. Well, maybe I imagined that or am losing my mind, but I swear you used to not be able to, but I just did it a minute ago when I went to confirm it. Thunderbird doesn't have a "send this message at a certain future time" feature, and as far as I can tell, there's no extension that does it either. I can't find a single calendar app that does what I want it to do (easy to create events from email, multiple to-do lists, email reminders/confirmations, indexed search - I hope Google is listening since they have 3 of the 4 already). In fact, off the shelf products can be so infuriating sometimes, I totally understand the impulse to just come up with your own solution. But I'm not really up for writing a calendaring application, so I'll just sit here whining about it instead.

OMGWTFBBQ!

I'm so pissed off at Thunderbird right now. Its "adaptive spam filter" has been catching my Orbitz deal detector emails. So a week and a half ago, my plane ticket to Sarah's graduation would have been $214 - had I actually gotten the email and booked my flight. This week I bought my ticket for $286. How exactly is it $72 more to book a ticket this week than last week? Sigh. I really shouldn't complain. I'm flying out of Tucson and using a bizarre configuration of airports into and out of DC and don't have to fly in or out of BWI. But still, what exactly prompted my spam filter to catch that of all emails? It hates me, that's why.

A while ago I was talking to Sarah and she told me her New Year's Resolution was to "stop attaching excessive meaning to inanimate objects". I thought that was the funniest thing I've ever heard, but I guess if I'm pissed off at my email software, it wouldn't be a bad resolution for me either. Except I don't believe in New Year's Resolutions - apparently I was so vehement about it when James and I were first dating that he's been afraid to make resolutions and tell me about it ever since for fear of me thinking he is "feeble minded" or something like that.

Windows on Intel Macs

Ooh, two consecutive Apple posts.

I spend a decent amount of time at work doing Macintosh desktop support. I have this duty based on the fact that in college, I was a Mac user. So even though I used to love my Mac, I currently have a lot of disdain for Macs and their users. Especially since as tech support, I rarely encounter a Mac that is working correctly, leading me to believe that Apple is selling a bunch of permanently broken computers.

But the other day I had a Mac user ask me for a text only HTML editor, and I got to wax rhapsodic about BBEdit, which is hands down the single best piece of software I have ever used. It's SO GOOD, I've been thinking about moving all my web development work over to my Mac. The only thing stopping me is that my Mac is kinda sucky in comparison to my Windows machine and the PITA factor of working on two different operating systems constantly can't be overlooked. Oh, and my boss would mock me mercilessly. And all my database stuff is stranded on Windows, at least for the time being.

But now that Apple has announced that their Intel Macs will be natively dual bootable into Mac OS X and Windows, I think it's fair to say I'll be seriously considering a Mac as my next non-work computer. I'm not even sure I'd boot it into Windows that often.