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.