Back from England

Turns out the union jack is a combination of the crosses of the saints of England, Ireland, and Scotland. If you look at it and cross your eyes you will see a pony. His name is Charles.

So, Christmas is over, thank God, and it was well spent in England with family and friends. There were side trips to London, but mostly we stayed around the family homestead.

A good deal of beer, brandy, wine, and especially sherry was drunk by all. If America has a fascination with food, England would like to slur some ill-chosen jibes about it at us before falling under the table.

The big news is that J-- and P-- are engaged! Congrats to both of you. I'm only putting this on my blog because I happen to know that the people who read it either don't know J-- and P-- or know already. If you don't fall into either camp, keep it under your hat for chrissake! Welcome to the family P--, you poor sod.

Now, on to New Years! I don't believe I'll be doing anything for new years. The party I was counting on fell through and I don't feel like dragging my ass to Boston where Eric has kindly offered to try and introduce me to desperate gals looking for someone to kiss at the stroke of midnight. With great thanks to Eric, I'm going to stay in Reston unless something truly awesome comes up locally.

In retrospect this year has been a fucker, and the sooner we can put it to bed the better actually. I moved to Reston for a new job and while the job's still pretty engaging I know it's not what I want to do with the remainder of my years. Reston can suck it, not least because I still don't really know anyone here and I'm not about to meet them at the local Porsche owners group. I will be going to Champps later tonight to watch the UFC fight with folks from my dojo though so I shouldn't complain.

K--- and I broke up, although I'm beginning to think in retrospect that I was dumped. I believe in self-help one calls that a "growth experience" but I'm not so cheerily inclined and I'll call it a bit of a poke in the eye and move on. Not bitter, just single in Reston without much to look forward too vis-a-vis moving on. Also, not nearly as maudlin as the rest of this paragraph would seem to indicate.

My resolutions for the coming year are, in their entirety:

1. clean the living room (9 months without ever actually finishing unpacking borders on the ridiculous)
2. create a website for mom to display and sell her art on - it's coming mom, I promise
3. create a website for my damn self for things like resumes and so forth.
4. start either kickboxing or jiu-jitsu again so I don't look like a girthy sausage any longer - not helpful in the singles market
5. invest money cleverly, or at least understand how

I'll come up with others, but New Year's isn't the only time for self-improvement so I'm not bothered about having an incomplete list.

Happy new year's all!

2008 cars are up

The car ranking and review website I work for, US News, has been working hard to get reviews and rankings of the 2008 models up.

I'm glad to say we're most of the way there. It's been a crazy time at work and everyone deserves a solid congratulations. The remaining car reviews are either in process or the cars aren't out.

Lovely photo

I went to brunch with sister J--- today (happy birthday T-- and J--). Afterwards the lot of us went over to Adams Morgan where they were having the Adams Morgan street fair festival. Just as J--'s friend D-- and I were talking about how to know when and how much you should pay for art, I saw a photograph I really like.

I asked the guy how much it was and haggled him down a little - thanks Dad for teaching me how. Now I'm the proud owner of this great photo.

By Val Proudkii

What I really liked about his work was how he manages to use peoples' gazes to draw you into the picture and tell stories. I know that may sound unusually pointy-headed even for me, but take a look at the rest of the pictures on the site. One of my favorites is this one with a cat and a baby looking with different interest at a fish.

Oh, by the way, the way you decide whether or not to buy art is by figuring out how much you like it. Avoid seeing it as an investment. If it'll bring you $100 of enjoyment when you look at it over the course of your ownership, pay $100 or less. I thought this one would be a lot more than I paid for it, so I feel like I got a deal.

My kung fu is . . . inadvertently dangerous.

I punched a guy in the nose today. Very gently, thank God. That'll teach him to whack me in the thumb with a stick though. Actually, there's no excuse for popping a training partner in the schnoz, so if you believe in a god (only non-vengeful ones need apply thanks), say a little word of benediction towards John. I think I frightened him a little because it was all camaraderie and funtimes before I grazed his nose, but a little stiffer afterwards. Can't blame him really.

I finally got to check out the local dojo today. I started with the Kali class. Kali, not the Hindu goddess of death, but a Filipino martial art segued later into a Krav Maga class. Krav Maga is what the Israelis teach their special forces and focuses a lot, apparently, on me gasping for breath. However, I know all about getting out of a headlock now. Go ahead, put me in a headlock, I dare you.

I could totally take these guys . . . at like, statistics. Maybe.

I'm definitely going back for the kali. I'm less sure about the Krav Maga.

cats and management

by this guy

I heard a lovely management adage about cats the other day. We're trying to think about how we structure for the long term at work and some of our ideas have been better than others. An abiding concern is that people shouldn't have more than one manager.

As a result of the conversation, I heard a fantastic maxim that I'll probably never forget. Someone at Havard Business School apparently felt so strongly that one employee should have only one manager that he or she decided to coin a phrase foul and audacious enough to stick with anyone who heard it.

The saying is, "never have two people fucking the same cat, because the cat will get confused". Yeah, the cat part and the other obvious bit don't need to be included, but you'll never forget this most important bit of business wisdom will you?

Boring games

I thought you guys might get a kick out of this picture I found on somethingawful's photoshop phriday this week. This week's topic was boring games.

Have a gander at "Mean Time Between Failures", created by goon Aardmania.

Meantime, this is could be the seed of a great idea. Is there any way to turn testing into a game. It's worked for Google and their images after all.

Wired and late breaking news

I was just at Barnes and Noble killing time and I picked up a copy of Wired to browse through. I ended up getting it because it's nice to have something to read on the can or during the many hours I have nothing better to do.

When I was checking out, the guy at the counter made friendly conversation by asking if I was getting it to "stay on top of things".

My thoughts went like this:

• Huh?
• Stay on top of things? With Wired?
• Oh he's joking
• Wait, he's not joking.
• Oh, hang on, he's a norm.

The guy was friendly and I said, in a friendly way, oh, not really, because, you know, it's in print so it's already about a month out of date. He nodded and smiled and I wandered off feeling like an alien.

I remember when I was reading Wired to stay on top of stuff. That was about 6 years ago. RSS feeds and iGoogle have changed all that for me. Now I enjoy Wired precisely because it's a little more relaxed. They've done the research for me, digested it, put some thought into the analysis. It's like the week in review for tech stuff (only not TWiT, I know).

Funny that Wired has moved from being cutting-edge for me to post-news roundup in the span of just a few years. Is it like that for anyone else reading the blog? I know both of you, and I've got my guesses.

The National Press Club, indeed?

I too like books and owls!

Good news from the transom today. It appears I'll have the opportunity to speak at the National Press Club next month. Before you gasp yourself incredulously to death, I should clarify that I won't be speaking "before" the National Press Club, but "at" it. Less "lend me your ears", more lend us your National Press Clubhouse.

ForumOne Communications has expressed interest in having me speak at a seminar they're putting together to be housed at the NPC. I'd be speaking about using the Internet and community for extending the reach and missions of non-profit companies. I've done that with mixed success before this job. I'd still like to use the Internet to pursue some public good even at this for-profit job I currently hold, and to be honest, it's probably harder to get community off the ground at a for profit because people keep wanting to monetize the community.

So, good news all around for me, since this is just the kind of gig that parlays into a misunderstanding, that further translates to paid speaking gigs. Plus someone will no doubt be pressed into taking a picture of me on the podium where it proudly reads "National Press Club".

I'll soon be kind of a big deal. (that's sarcasm)

A video from Oregon

Hey, so it's been some time since I posted to the blog. Mostly that's because I've been skipping and prancing and eating bon-bons. Some of the time was spent at work, sure, but I've promised in an earlier post not to dwell on that nonsense.

So, catching up, here's a delightful snapshot of some halcyon days when I wasn't working through the weekend, but instead shamelessly showing my face in the light of day during the hours when the sun is normally out.

I was actually looking at this waterfall - the second tallest waterfall in the U.S. or something. You can hazard other guesses in the comments.

In Soviet Russia, waterfall pee on dog! ha ha . . . oh well

Perhaps it was the tallest waterfall to ever enter a free-trade arrangement with the USSR? The nastiest waterfall this side of the Mississippi? Either way, it was quite a tall goddamn waterfall.

More interestingly though, it was right there and you could go and stand in it. I had a housemate from New Zealand at one time who complained that there's no right of public access to water in the U.S.. Apparently, in NZ you can just run right up to the water and hop in, no matter where you are. The shore is public land and if the Man wants to stop you from drowning he can go screw himself! I think it's a shame that in the U.S. we (have to?) restrict access to lovely feats of nature like this one. In this case, of course, we haven't and I should shut up.

Also, this makes me sound like a filthy libertarian, and I think libertarians should be beaten savagely. Then if the cops don't come, everybody wins.

We've launched

There's still a metric tonne of work to do, but the site's open to the public. The url is http://usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/cars-trucks/.

Okay, back to work for me.

More on work hours?

Even I'm finding my constant posts about work and the hours to be tedious. I promise that this will be the last one barring major interesting events.

I was at work from 9:30 AM on Thursday to 8:30 PM or so on Friday. By my calculations that 35 hours. Evan, who was there with me the entire time, and I were synching up our two technologies that produce the numbers that run our business. He has it in Excel, and I built it in SAS, so we needed to make sure the numbers come out the same (good news, they do).

Anyway, this was the last push to find errors and discrepancies and it took a good deal longer than we hoped. Still, it was the kind of work that doesn't require a great deal of hard thinking but also isn't so dull it puts you to sleep. In other words, it was the best kind of work to do overnight.

It's been a good long while since I pulled an all-nighter, and I'm sort of surprised I was able to pull it off. Good news if I'm ever a father and need to stay up nights. I did lose about an hour during a fugue state after I went home for lunch on Friday and wasn't able to get any rest because an investor called. I put my head down for about 20 minutes and then got a call from Evan reminding me about a meeting. I rushed to the meeting and kind of woke up there. I don't have clear recollections of what I did during that hour, but afterwards I was pretty well awake for the rest of the day.

Now we just have to make sure this doesn't translate to bragging rights at work. I really don't want to work somewhere that rewards you for staying up all night and day. I'd prefer to work at a place where work is done well and smart and people are expected to have interesting extramural lives. We're getting there.

Back from Portland, Angry at work hours

Hey, the funtimes in Portland shambled drunkenly to a close, and now I'm back in dear old Reston working a hell of a lot.

Portland was awesome. I'm not sure why I came back.

I was in a lovely relaxed mood when I left Portland on the redeye. By the time I'd landed, driven 4 hours to Reston, had an equivalent of 12 cups of coffee, and stayed up till wicked late AM coding more goddamn SAS, I'd managed to leave both the jet lag and the sensation of calm all behind me.

Now I breathe in a continuous high-pitched whistle and my heart's BPM approaches rave music. When I get a chance, I'll upload some cool pics and videos I took while I was in Oregon and perhaps recall the sense of calm I enjoyed while snapping them. Until then, you should try to find that video of a concerned snowman asking candidates Democratic about the goddamn environment. P.S. large parts of England and the US are flooded, so thanks for being so on the ball about Kyoto George!

later y'all. Big shout out to Matt, who I chatted with yesterday about how much grad school drags at the end. Can I get a hell yeah from other grad school survivors?

Get a 1st life!

This week I'm out in Portland, OR, a place I'm seriously considering a move to now that I've seen it. Today I'm wearing my "Get a first life" T-shirt.

It's a parody of Linden Labs' whole SecondLife business/movement, and I got one because I'm both a geek and a skeptic. I also think they're funny.

Anyway, because the wedding I'm attending is today, I got a haircut this morning. I ended up explaining what the shirt meant because none of the people working at Aveda had heard of SecondLife. I also got a compliment from one of the other friends of the bride and groom on the shirt, but ended up explaining all about second life and WoW to other people sitting about.

Finally, as I'm sitting in Peet's coffee doing a totally crap job of catching up on work, a guy approached me and told me he liked the shirt. Turns out he works for Linden Labs and is on vacation out here.

It's a funny little world full of web memes these days.

I've also managed to identify and swap winks with a few folks wearing Threadless t-shirts. Turns out the t-shirt is the preferred medium of communication in the world of the web geeks.

I'm free?

I just started my week of vacation and I'm already back to work. I actually need to submit requirements for a project I'm part of before I decouple myself from the exciting world of working all the damn time.

I'm feeling both elated that I'm getting some time to myself (as well as time to see K--- - who I quite like to see), and chagrined that I'm leaving work in the middle of a big push. I feel like I'm letting my end down, which I sort of hate.

On the plus side, I'm going to spend some of the time away working on defining a long term community plan for my company's website. I'm very excited about this because I like to think I'm actually pretty smart about community - at least figuring out what people will want and use. Now I have to get smart about what elements of community we can use to pay my salary.

Speaking of interesting community stuff, D-- (to whom, shouts out while he's laid up in bed ) sent me this story from USA Today about more crowdsourcing from NASA. NASA was involved in the Mars Clickworker project as well, so they've clearly got some smart folks thinking about this crowdsourcing stuff. I just love the idea of getting people to participate in the principle of "many hands make light work" when they have no social capital to gain from it.

I've got to think how to use this impulse for the benefit of the site. Google's doing the same sort of thing with the label game they host to help with image cataloging.

So, thanks D--. Feel better! Now I've got to get to work so I can finish packing and get up early to drive to NYC

God Bless America!

As you already know, I'm British by birth. I spent a few years in the English school system, so I've been made aware of an alternative history to that doled out in American K-12 classrooms. I don't know that it's any closer to the truth, but it provides a counterpoint to the notion that maybe the US of A was set, jewel-like into the golden filigree of the Western Hemisphere by the sweat of brave explorers, doughty freedom fighters, Jesus, Washington, Lincoln, and Santa Clause.

I heard something more like, a bunch of godawful puritans got tossed out of England for being such a fucking bore all the time, landed on Plymouth rock, died, tried again later, finally got it right, swapped the natives smallpox for land, set up a nation that despite being free for all men, kept slavery around for a hundred years or so longer than any other country, and then defended it against the English using wits, cunning, and bravery, or at least such as could be purchased from mercenaries or tricked out of the Indians, who outnumbered Americans something like 4-to-1 in the US army of the time.

Here I am thinking fondly of the founding fathers, and hoping one will come along and unchain me from my desk.

Either way, I think the constitution is pretty damn cool and I like fireworks.

What I really love about the 4th of July though, is that it represents the first day off I'm getting in a long stinking time. God bless paid holiday!

I fell off my bike for America!

It vexes me!

Because I'm a dolt.

Have you ever known for a full couple of seconds that you're about to eat it, and hard, but there's nothing you can really do about it?

I have. I was just cycling home, thinking giddy thoughts about the upcoming 4th of July when I peeled a leg off the bike so I could stand on one pedal and glide to a graceful halt, stepping spryly down to the sidewalk as I reached walking speed.

That would have been wicked acceptable.

Instead, I started gliding on one pedal, looked down, realized I had a scant moment before catching a curb with the selfsame pedal I was balanced on, sighed, and took off over the handlebars like an utter asshat.

Yeah, I'm pretty awesome. My mother told me so.

Speaking of dear old Mom - in case you're reading this, I was wearing two helmets and a kevlar vest when this happened, as I make a conscientious point of doing every time I ride anywhere.

Busy

Given that blogging is the lazy man's approach to keeping in touch with friends, and given that I haven't had a chance to even blog recently, I feel I should explain myself a touch.

I'm still at work now. It's about 24 o'clock, and I'm staring down the barrel of another couple hours of coding.

I'm actually only on google this minute because I was feeling lonely and hoped my inbox would be hiding some contact from the outside world.

Anyway, love to you all. I promise to write more - emails even - in a week or so.

Yay, D--'s in town

As a surprise to me, although knowing me (and I do) he probably told me many times, D-- is in town. I'm going to see someone from outside of work!

I was just saying to a colleague of mine, "I haven't seen anyone but you fuckers for the last week". Now I will see someone who I know and like, and who isn't bothering me because something's broken.

Awesome!

SAS makes me crazy

SAS is the big dog of statistical programs. It suffers your interaction through an almost nonsensical coding language, and it makes my brain hurt.

I'm a fair coder. I can code sloppy object oriented code and I'm comfortable with arrays, functions, objects, the whole bit. I've learned on my own, but I'm not a monkey.

SAS drives me up a freaking wall. As far as I remember (and I'm not going to back this up with research because, well frankly, I'm a blogger) some guy, perhaps Samuel Alphonse Sassafras, started building SAS on his abacus a million years ago - before object-oriented-code became popular, and no one has seen fit to go back and, you know, make it easy to use since.

It's so bad that, despite being a language designed specifically for manipulating and analyzing data, they eventually imported a much better language for data manipulation rather than doing it right themselves (big shout out to all the Proc SQL heads in the crowd!).

Anyway, I spent all of last night doing dull, impossible crap like trying to read in date values and split rows of data into multiple rows.

I'm glad to have SAS around for when I get to doing logistic regressions, but it's driving me up a bleeding wall right now!

Brunch, mongrel meal of the gods!

Here is P--'s dad, S--, ably demonstrating just what brunch is all about. Play on playah!

J--(my sister) and P-- (her man) had me over for brunch today with some of P--'s family. I love brunch. One of the things I took to in NYC was the brunching. It's a long, langorous, indulgent meal that allows you to sleep in and waste most of the day over carbs, mimosas, and coffee. The only improvement we might make to this institution would force us to rename it "brunchcuzzi", but the logistics of that evolution remain totally befuddling.

Anyway, popped in the Garmin which finally redeemed itself after much hassle from previous posts. In fact, it endeared itself to me a bit by surprising me with a homey detail. I entered J-- and P---'s address as a "favorite location" and named it "J---". It would have been "J-- and P--'s", but you pretty much have to type with one finger on a non-qwerty interface, so sorry P--. As I rolled up on their place the Garmin announced in fine voice that I was about to arrive at "J--", which I think is hilarious. Not only did it add a little personality to the arrival, but it pronounced J--'s name correctly, no mean feat in my experience of computer-aided-speech whatsits.

See, it's a terrible haircut I got in the last post

So, brunch was lovely. Getting coffee was a whole ordeal since J-- doesn't have a coffee-maker and the very helpful lady at Starbucks was overwhelmed and undertrained in the fine art of filling a box with coffee. We ended up with an overflowing mylar bag full of scalding caffeine, surrounded by a disintegrating coffee-sodden cardboard box. But, through judicious application of milk and Splenda, the day was saved and brunch came through victorious in the end.

Since it's both Father's day and my stepdad's birthday, we called home and wished him a very happy awesomeday. I can be seen at the right agreeing with him that wearing a bike helmet is terrifically important all the time even though I spent the better part of my youth tumbling off various Schwinns and lived to tell of it. Ask me about the time I wet-banana-ed over the hood of a towncar one July if I haven't already bored you with that story.

Ah the weekend

The weekend, which Loverboy assures me we're all working for, is my time. It's my time to run errands that got away from me during the week, my time to get a haircut (not a very good one it turns out), my time to fruitlessly track down thrift shops where I can give away old clothes, and my time to well, spend a few hours at work.

I started the weekend with an outing to the bank. Closed on Saturdays thank you very much, but since I only wanted to deposite the last paychecks from CR, I coped with just an ATM.

Here I am looking dead concerned about the environment

Then, it was off to the recycling center. In my new building there's only recycling for cardboard, and you have to cart it to the dumpster (tip for the UK audience) by the exit of the underground parking garage. However, since Al Gore has spoken to me via powerpoint, I want to recycle everything. I found a very nice little place nearby where I can recycle all the usual recyclables, and went there.

I even ran into some other people equally worried about our fair mother earth, and one lady who might have been totally mental, but I didn't hang around long enough to ask.

....Because I was setting off for Herndon. Herndon is quite nearby Reston, and it's been described to me as where the people who clean and chauffeur and valet-park for Restoners live. Sort of the Morlocks to our Eloi (because, *spoiler alert*, we Restonites are delicious!). I went there in the hopes of dropping off some clothes at the Salvation Army.

A very apologetic man there told me that the enormous SA thrift shop just couldn't take a bunch of clothes from me and I'd have to go to a very-out-of-the-way Salvation Army outpost (bunker?) if I wanted to get my hands on any Christian Charity. However, he did helpfully pass on some totally incorrect directions to another thrift shop where I could give away clothes.

Utter bunk! I later found it on the Internet and I'll go there when I get a chance.

Finally, I dashed in to work where I spent four hours not getting any work done. Ironic since Evan and I had planned to go in on Saturday precisely because we'd finally be able to focus just on what we needed to do.

I mucked about with SAS and then went for a haircut. A very mediocre haircut. Then, looking mildly coifed, I went and bought no-wrinkle, iron-free shirts. I'm skeptical, but I'll let you know.

Awesome storm

We had a fantastic hail storm in Reston today. It came on super quick and there was horizontal rain, lightning, thunder, and hazelnut-sized hail stones.

A lot of us went outside to have a look because it was so incredible. It was raining 3 hours later when I left.

One of my co-workers said he was glad he hadn't washed his car over the weekend. I told him how glad I was I hadn't thrown handfuls of pebbles at my car as I actually thought how glad I was to have the stupid car insured. Turns out my car is hail-proof, at least at the level of hazelnut-grade hail.

The lesson I learned is, always take your camera. A little video would have been better than my crap description.

The good news is that I'm in storm country again. One of the things I loved about Michigan was that when it stormed, it really opened up and stormed. New York has tame little storms that suck. Nothing scary about most NY storms. I like my terrifying weather events to be safe, but to make you wonder, like rollercoasters.

Okay, everybody back to work!

This one goes out to the commenters

Bowing to popular demand, I'll include a reference to monkeys somewhere in this post, perhaps even within this very sentence!

Actually, once I'm done with spending every stinking moment at work, I'm really anxious to get back to the national zoo and see the golden lion tamarins (not to be confused with tamarinds, which are also delicious, but more of a tropical fruit). As some of you know, the tamarins run wild at the zoo. That is, NOT IN CAGES!!!! That's right, if you can win their trust, they're totally within their rights to come home with you and do your dishes, wreck your curtains, ghostwrite your blog, whatever!

Alas, it'll be a while before I get to go do things again. I'm in charge of a team of . . . wait for it . . . wait for it . . . interns (sorry) who need to be riding-cropped into doing startuppy stuff. I actually do precious little cropping. I leave that to my direct subordinate. A shout out here to Evan Jones, who does a great job. I doubt he'll ever read this.

Anyway, enough about work.

I read today that Gallup now finds that a majority of Republicans don't believe in evolution. That is, they don't believe we evolved from monkeys. Now, I'll admit that evolution isn't easy to "prove". It's a theory concerning the process by which all the available data like fossil records, genetic records, variation within and among species, etc. came to be. Still, I thought we had this licked. What sensible tennets of education will we stop believing in next? I personally don't understand the quadratic formula very well. I've seen it "proved" before, but I didn't really follow it and I'm not going to let some "numbers" tell me what the square root of a quadratic equation is. Hell no!

Sadly enough, later in the same Gallup questionnaire, they asked respondents how true they thought the following idea might be:

"Evolution, that is, the idea that human beings developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life"

How "advanced" does this guy look, for instance?

It's sad because it shows that even the people asking the questions about evolution don't understand it. As the evolution geek in the crowd, I'll explain: Evolution doesn't create more or less "advanced" forms of life. Advanced is a word with a valuation attached. Bacteria actually outnumber and outmass humans, as do ants. They've also been around longer, so it's hard to see how we're more "advanced" than they are.

14 hour day

I had a lot to do today. Most of it got done.

Some will have to be tackled tomorrow.

What a crappy day.

Listen, you have to leave comments

I know there are two or three of you out there reading this blog, my only regular and reliable communication to the world outside Reston. I'm going to try and be better about emails and such, but for the time being, this is what I can manage to find time for.

The reason I know there are a handful of you out there is that you guys leave comments. If you're reading and not leaving comments, well . . . start.

Here's how:

To leave a comment and brighten my day, click on the link that says something to the effect of "0 comments" at the bottom of the post.

Then, you'll see a screen wherein you can put all manner of delightful words. The sublime and silly are accepted with equal joy.

If you're logged in as a googler, your comment will be posted under your name. Otherwise, choose a handle or post as anonymous.

So, what's on your minds?

Garmin update

The garmin returned to life once I plugged it in to my computer via the usb. It still can't find a satellite though, so it's graduated from "night-light" to "frustrating little map of a stretch of 495 where it died last night".

Improvement!

I'll take it back to Best Buy in the hopes that I got a singularly deffective unit. I've taken a lot of things back to Best Buy recently, hmmm.

I'm also going to unload my car and thereby undo the effects of the last month of unpacking, but that's another story.

I expect that, since I slept til 11:30 thanks to being up half the night driving, there will be breakfast. Kevin, you didn't take all your food out of the cabinets, so I'm eating your cereal.

My garmin is now a night-light

I'm so mad!

Fewer than 12 hours ago, I loved my new garmin nuvi. I'm new to D.C. and I don't have a great grasp of geography, so having a tiny box to tell me where to go is fantastic. It's like being in a relationship but without all that inconvenient sex. Plus, I can learn my way around without the usual adventures where you end up driving around West Baltimore with the doors locked, for instance.

Then, at 2:30 AM or so, on my drive back from NYC (where the Garmin gamely took me this morning) it stopped doing anything at all. I'd been getting goofy messages from it earlier. Like it told me that it was running low on battery and would be shutting down now, thanks very much - despite being all plugged into the cigarette lighter and whatnot. Still, I pulled over and unplugged it, plugged it back in again, and we chalked it up to miscommunication.

Then, just as I get to the tricky part of the trip home; the part near my new place; the part of the trip that is neither entrenched in long-term memory, nor a variation on "stay on I-95", the little bastard up and dies. It showed nothing on the screen and was basically a night-light as shown above.

I muddled my way out after getting off the highway to look for a gas-station, finding instead a spot that looked like a cross between a state park and a CIA emplacement. I tried to reboot the Garmin, by, you know turning it off and on again, but that didn't take because it wouldn't turn off! I've left it on the floor now in the hopes that it's battery will in fact die during what little's left of the night.

I'm home now, no thanks to the Garmin. I'm pissed off to have spent an extra half-hour dragging my sorry ass around the greater D.C. area when I should have been sleeping. I've learned two things: First, I should have 2-D maps in the car just in case. Second, GPS systems need to have better redundancy. Maybe not a lot of them are being used at 2:00 AM when it's hard to find someone to give you real directions, but the point is that sometimes they are. If your product does something potentially very important and its failure can strand a user, then it shouldn't fail.

Marmite - Now for . . . baking? Surely not!

Attribution: bunchofpants

This post will amuse only my English reader(s?) and those otherwise familiar with marmite (or marmoset as my friend Mike Elkins likes to call it).

I was in the grocery store today looking for sugar-free brownie mix (with no bloody luck, I'll add). Predictably, I was in the "Baking Needs" section of the supermarket. Less predictably, somewhat troublingly actually, I ran into Marmite there. It brought me up short, I'll tell you.

For those of you who don't know, Marmite is yeast extract British people spread on their children's bread to acclimate the wee darlings to a lifetime of eating horrible British food. It tastes rather like slightly bitter salt and you should probably never ever eat it unless you were raised on it. I love it!

I was excited to see some Marmite in my local grocery, since it's not always available and for God's sake, I live in the South now. I was horrified to see it in the "Baking" section though, because it goes about as well with cake as Marie Antoinette.

I worked out the odd logic when I noticed it was surrounded by Fleischmann's yeast, so I told a somewhat uninterested shop manager that he might have a miscategorization on his hands, a miscategorization that could lead to a violent revolution involving beheadings if anyone tried using Marmite as yeast for . . . well for anything.

As an interesting side note, Marmite and mashed banana on toast is lovely. Shut up, yes it is!

Also, take a look at Marmite's own site. This ad is pretty right on the money, although the amount she puts on her toast could probably kill a grown horse.

P.S. - while I was looking for an image of a marmoset, I found this adorable site. Look at it!

Seriously man, I'm working a lot

I'm not complaining, but I've already put in 12 and a half hours this week, 16 and a half if you count Sunday as the start of the week.

I'm not asking for pity or awe, so you know, don't gimme none. I'd like to make some observations though:

• When you spend a long time at work you start remembering the morning like it was yesterday. I had to think twice before walking home today because normally I bike but today I walked (thanks to that stinking fire alarm). However, I couldn't remember whether the fire alarm took place yesterday or today.
• You stop knowing what day it is. I'm familiar with this event from the other side. During the summer vacations I'd sometimes lose track of what day it was because, well, who cared.
  
• Work sucks most when you spend the first 8 hours of your day trying to clear your docket so you can get some work done in the latter 4.
• Work can be a gang of fun if you have 12 hours to dedicate to really working hard on an interesting project.
• It's important to make lists. I had the nagging feeling that I was running around in circles accomplishing nothing until I looked at yesterday's List Of Crap To Do and was able to cross off about 6 important tasks.

Have a good night all.

Fire alarm(s)

I'm at work earlier than I'd like to be. (I may be lazy, but I was also here for 4 hours yesterday on Sunday).

It's probably not a bad idea and I sort of wish I'd planned to be here at 7:30 on my own. However, what really impelled me out from between the covers this morning was a fire alarm. It's the second I've enjoyed since moving here 3 weeks ago.

The first one took me by surprise. It reminded me of work at CU. It's building-wide, the klaxons are loud as hell, doors close automatically, and I think lights flash. I scampered out my door, looked for neighbors doing the same, and followed them to safety. It turned out that some doofus backed into a sprinkler head in the parking basement and set off the alarm.

The one today I know less about except that it happened (thankfully) after I got out of the shower and was just thinking, "gosh, I'm up early, maybe I'll lie here for a moment and listen to NPR". Now I'm at work instead.

I talked with some neighbors standing like refugees in the rain outside and they tell me it happens rather a lot. When I worked at CU, we had a lot of fire drills. Many of them were popcorn related (don't ask), but many were also the indirect results of lab tests. We all grumbled about them, but you know, it seemed justifiable.

Now I'm in a residential building that seems to be matching pace with a business that occasionally test things by burning them.

On the plus side, Starbucks wasn't packed to the gills.

So, good morning! And remember, only you can prevent forest fires.

Working on the weekend

busy as a . . . well, very busy

Well, Memorial Day isn't really the weekend, but I did work. Lots of things about working for a startup are great, but the hours are stern.

Among the good things are . . .

• You get to do a bit of everything - I'm working on methodology, statistics, and web development
• It's never boring
• You get to say you've worked for a startup
• It's small, so ideas only need so much vetting

But I worked today. And I'll probably be working through next weekend.

I'm a FONZ!

One of the things that appealed to me about moving to D.C. right off the bat was the zoo. Some of you may not know that I was raised in a zoo, the London Zoo. Actually, my mom worked there when I was young, so I spent a lot of time around the zoo, both with the regular tourists and behind the scenes.

D.C. has a pretty nice National Zoo (Of which I've recently become a Friend - hence FONZ). K, J, P and I all went yesterday.

We met by Lemur Island, which has a small island, but no lemurs to speak of. I want my free admission back!

K and I had already scoped out the sea lion - or perhaps seal - area. I can never remember what's supposed to distinguish one from the other. Either one's adorable-looking though so I took a picture.

Little known fact about sea lions: they're avid Technorati.com users.

I think I cheated by sneaking over to a hole they use for feeding these guys. I probably tricked him into coming over and posing by looking suspiciously like a Guy With Fish.

If you're reading this, I'm sorry man.




Time for a Zoo quiz
See if you can work out which one of these right-facing animals went for margaritas after the zoo (answer at bottom of page):

Señor Nibbles - A loaf of rodenty goodness


Myself, a smug zoogoer with a nose for
margaritas.


John Q Lookout, seen here turning a brave eye toward the future with unflinching
dedication to searching out the dangers that threaten our noble country.
A presidential meerkat if ever I saw one!


We also saw this tiger burning brightly . . . .

And got admissions from some members of our group who, while still quite young, thought that lions and tigers were the male and female members of the same species. I think that's not such an unusual misapprehension.

Ex GF redacted for her privacy's sake

Here we see a primate uncharacteristically unimpressed with K.

I'm pretty sure that both apes in this picture are females. One I'm dead certain on. The other I had to judge by size and demeanor. Out of shot in this picture, the gorilla is watching Oprah.

When we wandered into the great ape house, we got a show of two gorillas wrestling. It reminded me of an older and younger brother insofar as one clearly wanted to be left the hell alone and the other wanted to show off how strong he was. All went well until the larger one tried to put the smaller into a sleeper hold. Then the younger one got properly pissed off and started chasing his agressor around. Fun was had by all, not least the audience.

Speaking of the audience, there were a lot of people at the zoo, it being Memorial Day weekend. Some were well behaved and intellectually curious. Others were mouth-breathing peasants who smacked their hands on the glass, startling the elephant shrews, and demanding a show.

Contrary to its name, this animal hardly nagged at all

Poor elephant shrew.

I'm fairly certain these slack-jawed yokels weren't Friends Of the National Zoo. More like grudgingly acknowledged acquaintences of the zoo, but not anyone it really likes - you know, just people it'd be rude to ignore since their mums know each other and so on.

The benefits of being a polite and curious FONZ though, is that volunteers take time out of their busy days to show you stuff you wouldn't expect to see normally.

For instance, we went to the hall of invertebrates for the 3:00 giant octopus feeding! Awesome! The first volunteer we ran into was narrating the feeding. He was quite nice even if he did answer a question about how big the octopuses get by citing Wikipedia.

Since I was standing right next to him, I took the opportunity to ask him about cuttlefish.

I only just learned how amazing these little bastards are. Mostly they look like slightly dopey squid. However, if you tease them with food, watch them for hours, or get pulled into their world by a Discovery Channel documentary, you'll soon find that they're astonishing. They change color better than any other animal, and in fact, they can change not just the color but the texture of their skin to blend into almost any surrounding. Check the kids, one may be a cuttlefish! Crazier than that though, they sometimes use their color-changing abilities to flash and dazzle their prey.

Anyway, he pointed me towards a cuttlefish in a tank nearby and I went over to try and encourage it to do something amazing. Cuttlefish, like octopi, have eyesight that's as good as ours. That means you don't have to whack their tanks to get their attention. I just waved my finger about and it started to track it.

Then a new volunteer came over and we began geeking out about cuttlefish. I'd seen the aforementioned documentary, so I talked the talk. At this point I was angling to get him to feed one for us. We did our little dance. He was excited to talk to zoo-goers who actually gave a damn about the animals. I asked, nonchalantly about the next feeding. One thing led to another and he popped behind a curtain only to show up with a piece of shrimp to feed to the cuttlefish.

My only regret is that I was so engrossed by the whole process, from meeting the very friendly volunteer, to seeing the cuttlefish grab the shrimp with its feeding tentacle, that I forgot to take pictures or shoot video. My bad.

So, the zoo was fun. I encourage D.C. ers to become FONZs. Jess and Phil did, and they're both wicked smart, so you probably should too.

I'll be going back in July to see the free ranging Golden Lion Tamarins.

*Answer to Quiz about margaritas: "Señor Nibbles. The Mexican name should have given it away. His full name is Juan Nibbles, of the Oaxaca Nibbles. He got surly though and tried to cut Phil. We had to pick his drunk ass up and carry him home. Hope your head's okay Juan!"

Widescreen monitor = the future

I'm not a Luddite, but I'm also not gaga over technology for technology's sake. Still, I want my jetpack once the future arrives.

Anyway, I just got a 22" widescreen monitor, and this is one of those cases when the future has arrived. It's a Samsung something or other (226BW if the frame can be trusted). It cost just north of $300, and I love it. I've said for a few years that the cable-modem bill is my favorite one to pay. Cable Internet feels like the future in the same way that this monitor does and that the Segway just doesn't.

So, there you go. I'm not recommending this model, although I'm real happy with it. I'm just saying, if you can spare the scratch - go get a fancy big-ass monitor.

Basis for comparison

Hey, I reread my post about Reston, and I think I may have been too harsh on Reston's complete lack of harshness.

I should probably qualify what I said about my new neighborhood by displaying some pictures from my old one:

A car

Out my window one day (actually, while I was interviewing for my current job).

A rabbit

This is Easter in Washington Heights. It's as David-Lynch-esque/Donnie Darko
as my old neighborhood ever got. Usually if my old stomping grounds wanted to
be scary, someone would shoot someone else or stab a baby or something. Come to think of it, this rabbit's probably packing. He's definitely holding.

My skinhead bartender

James, from the local bar in my hood.
Not actually a skinhead. You just don't see
quirky people where I live now so much.

What the hell am I doing?

I've received a few emails from friends and family asking me what the hell I'm up to.

Fair question.

Here you go:

and . . .


I've also been working a fair amount and trying to figure out my way around Reston.

Moving to Reston

Hey y'all, I moved to Reston about two weeks ago. I've just recently found the time (and unpacked the necessary hardware) to start blogging.

Reston is creepy. I was having a hard time deciding if the town has the smartest, dryest sense of humor I've ever come across, or has no sense of humor at all. I'm now leaning towards the latter.

To set things up, the part of Reston I'm in has been described by me, my friends, family, or coworkers in the following ways:

It's like . . .

• . . . an outdoor airport
• . . . a mall
• . . . Mainstreet USA at Disney
  
• . . . Stepford

I can't argue too much. It's very white aspirational upper-middle class. AOL is nearby and I've never seen so many Porsches. My new Honda Fit, quite frankly, doesn't.

Here are some pictures that explain my confusion about the sense of humor:

this one just kills me. "SoMa" is supposed to be South of Market St., like SoHo is South
of Houston in NYC and London. Now Reston's a really tame place, so the fact that
soma is also the name of the pacifying drug from Brave New World would be
hilarious if someone thought of it. OH GOD I hope it was intentional.

and . . .


A BMW with a latte on the front? OH COME ON! There's probably an
izod shirt in the glove compartment.