All Dressed Up With Nowhere To Go

     I’m going to take a break from the insane task of merging duplicates in my genealogy (I’m down to ~25 pairs left to investigate!  Then it’s on to my cousin-ish’s file which has ~225…) and briefly talk about my experience with speed dating.

     What’s that?  Shaun and dating?  I thought that just didn’t happen!  Well ha ha, but I do have something of a social life.  Now to be honest, I didn’t leave my home that night with the intent of speed dating.  For those of you unfamiliar with the term, it’s a recent trend wherein a group of singles get together and pair off for no more than five minutes where they try to get to know each other.  Obviously this activity has an equal numbers of guys and girls and is usually orchestrated by a third-party so that the individuals don’t know everyone already.  When time is up, you move on to the next person and begin again.  Often each individual will “rate” their speed date with each person, either at the end of the date or the very end of the activity, and list things they enjoyed, whether they felt a connection with the person, and whether or not they would be interested in going on an actual date with them.

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     I’d like to thank you all for coming out here.  I have an announcement to make.  To be honest, I feel kinda stupid doing this.  In retrospect, I should have just gone ahead with my plan without the announcement, but I already sent out the e-mail telling everyone to come to my blog for more information on this and I don’t think they’ll want to read about my flowers (pretty as they are).  So here goes.  I, Shaun Carlson, am giving up the Internet in my home and the use of my computer.

     Jerks.  What was that for?  Because I know a lot of you are laughing at me right now.  “What?  Shaun?  The guy who has grown up with computers and who has hardly gone a day without using them or the Internet is giving them up?  What a joke!”

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     Just a quick item before we begin.  I’ve been listening to the soundtrack to “The Phantom of the Opera” intermittently while writing this, so if my writing at some point suddenly becomes lyrical or melodramatic (more so than usual), you’ll know why.

     Whether or not my garden was a success depends entirely on how you choose to look at it.  In terms of actual production, it was a flop, and a fantastic one at that.  I planted about twenty different types of plants.  Five grew: the corn, two pea types, sunflowers, and the zinnia.  From these five, production was probably around a tenth of capacity.  If that.  So I’m looking at around two and a half per cent yield.  That’s not enough to break even (and it certainly doesn’t take much to break even on just the price of the seeds vs. the price of the produce).

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     This is actually a response that I had to another blog and its subsequent discussion.  It was going to just be a comment, but as usual, it became something that would be better off left as its own entry with a reference to the original work.  Make sure you read it first (it’s not that long) and also the blog it references (also not very long.  Seriously, what is my problem?) so that what follows makes sense.

     Ugh.  I am so not reading what I think I am reading.  No, I agree that fiction is not inherently “wrong” or “evil”.  However, the problem with fiction is just that.  It’s fiction.  It’s a complete other world, universe, belief system, etc. that does not exist but in the minds of the participants.  If taken too far, this becomes a means of escapism for people, a way to leave and ignore the world as it is in favor of this more pleasing alternative.

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     I just finished watching “The Village” and is my mind blown.  It’s something I couldn’t start to process until a few minutes after the movie was over.

     The first thing I want to say is that I am deeply impressed by how well the loose ends were tied up.  One of my pet peeves in movies would be when there are gaping plot-holes or inconsistencies with the story or just bad physics.  I know that these are for entertainment purposes, but I think it is better to sacrifice a really intense moment, line, or idea to keep something at least reasonably believable.  But this is me and I seem to annoy most everyone when I mention some of these things.  In all fairness, I can be overly nit-picky and can work on that.

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     Just a quick note to let the world know my roommates have arrived.  I no longer have the house to myself, but the new guys seem pretty cool.  They’re a little crazy, but then again, most people are compared to me (this is not to say that I’m “normal”, mind you).

     I’m actually looking forward to the year as I think I’ll get along with them well.  They’re quite friendly, if a little loud as is sometimes common with college males (hence my comment about my normalcy).  A couple of them drink O’Douls, which is a non-alcoholic beer.  That made me do a double-take when I first saw that in the fridge!  I thought the only reason people drank malted barley/hopps was because of the alcohol.  Blech!  Anyway, they’ve opened up to me surprisingly and I’m hoping we’ll have fun.  They brough in a big 29in TV, so video games are almost certainly back in the picture.  Just what I needed…

     On a side note, I’m coming along on my little project.  I’ve decided on a range of temperature devices, all coming from Dallas Semiconductor and I’m learning about wireless emitters.  It looks like I’m going to have to learn assembly.  REAL assembly, not this LC-3 stuff I learned in my EcEn-124 class (though they are similar).  Oh joy…

     Last night while I was trying to fall asleep again, I fell asleep from 6:30pm to 9:30pm and then tried to go back to sleep around 11pm (I was dead tired yesterday), I had an idea for an invention.  I need a few components and I am not certain where to find them, so I thought I might ask for any suggestions for places and/or request my readers keep an eye open and let me know should they come across any of the things on my list.

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     I admit it, my sense of humor is very random.  I often find things funny just for the sheer absurdity of them.  For example, I was walking into the Creamery on 9th a couple days ago and sitting on the flower bed was: a single shoe.  That’s it!  There was no mate anywhere in sight.  It would seem that someone managed to somehow lose a single shoe and then someone else fount it and put it in a prominent position on the elevated flower beds out front so it would be noticed.  So completely unexpected and out of place was it that I actually burst out laughing right there.  I did feel a little silly about laughing over a shoe, but it’s these simply odd and bizarre moments of life that I love and find humor in.  I truly believe there is humor everywhere if you are only willing to look for it.

     So with my love of these inanities, it shouldn’t be hard to see why I love humorists like Dave Barry.  They take what would ordinarily be a very dull and ordinary event and show a zany side to it.  Either they analyze it in ways that are completely absurd or they point out the already ridiculous assumptions we all make that allow us to take what is really an outrageous situation and accept it like it were nothing.  They have a gift in forcing us to make new, albeit absurd, associations with common, everyday events.  They teach us how to look at life from a different perspective.

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(AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is likely to be edited for length within the next day or two) 

mythbust
v. mythbusted, mythbusting, mythbusts
v. intr.

1. The act of debunking myths and false rumors that get passed around as truth or as common knowledge.

     OK, I have a question that I would like you all to answer, in all seriousness. It sounds a bit arrogant and pretentious of me, but I honestly believe(d) that everyone has(had) this capability. Can you tell when someone is telling you something that’s not true? This incorporates when someone is outright lying, but I also mean when someone is telling you something that is not true even though they may believe it is true themselves. Like an urban legend or one of the many incorrect “common-knowledges”.

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     This started out as a comment, but became too long and thus would seem impolite to post as one.  It is in response to Hilton’s discussion on the 30-1 ratio gap between the productivity of “awesome” programmers (to use his usual term) to sucky ones.  The general idea I have gotten is that those in the programming field seem to think that they are unique and inherently different from every other field, some how, and that this statistic proves it.  To me, I see this kind of disparity in every field, but it’s not always easily measureable and so it doesn’t always show up in the statistics that get published.  So the following is my response.

     I still hold to my position that this vast difference between the “greats” and the “sucks” is not unique to the field of programming.  Part of it is due to programming being a very young field.  A lot of it is still being explored and is still unknown.  I’m going to propose that many of these “30″ programmers oftentimes seem incapable of teaching the “1″ programmers what they know.  Sometimes this is because their ego gets in the way, other times because it’s still a bit intangible.

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