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.