The Evil Eyebrow

Category: Personal

  • Perceived Energy

    Here’s a graph of my work day. This isn’t based on extended data, merely my perception of things.
    Graph of my Energy on a workday

    You’ll notice that energy and caffeine follow each other closely. I’m not sure that’s causal. I’d have to experiment to find out. It might be a function of time, rather than mg of stimulant in my bloodstream.

    You’ll also notice that I am a three-meal-a-day person. This is not good. Why? Because when you’re doing a lot of exercise (triathlon training, marathon training) you’re supposed to eat four to five smaller meals per day. For one thing, that keeps you from having horrible wrenching hunger pangs at 11:00. For another, it’s just better for you. I need to do better with that.

    This graph shows what I should probably be shooting for. I realize that the “energy” item isn’t something that’s in my control. If I were going to represent an item that I had a conscious effect on, “focus” might be better, but I’ll stick with this for now.

    Ideal Workday Energy Graph

    I tend to do my most productive work in the mornings. I try to leave annoying administrative junk for the afternoons when my creativity level is lower. I also make a supreme effort to be “on” for the lunch period so I can write blog posts such as this one and podcasts for Talking Traffic.

    Because I always need new projects, I may start tracking this data (in a perceived 0-5 scale) on a daily basis, just to see what the range is. After a while I’d have standard deviations and everything! Assuming my daily habits are normally distributed, of course. Stay tuned.

  • Excellent Birthday

    I can state with near certainty that this was one of the best Birthday’s of my whole life. Saturday was just about perfect, from waking up with out anything needing to happen, to drinking a pot of coffee, to playing Guitar Hero III (present # 1) to the party in the evening. ‘Twas awesome. I love it!

  • New Phone

    New Phone
    Jenn and I upgraded our phones today. We have Dashes, now. I chose this specifically so I wouldn’t have to fight the technology in order to sync up my Outlook tasks. So far, things seem to be a success.

    Of course, T-Mobile pulled a lovely bait and switch on us. We showed up at the store to get the phones and the dude said, “You know there’s an $18 upgrade fee per phone, right?” I said (approximately) “Fuck no, you dirty donkey testicle!” ( I phrased it a bit more politely)

    I fought with the T-Mobile dude on the phone for about 10 minutes and got him to refund half of the fee. I chalked that up as a win given I didn’t feel like spending hours on the phone arguing over $18. Why do companies treat their repeat customers this way? Doesn’t exactly build brand loyalty.

  • Learning Computer Stuff -and- Birthday

    For my birthday, I decided I needed to learn more about Mozilla Thunderbird. Specifically, I decided to remove an email account before transferring over all the email inside it. Whoops. Thus leading to “how to recover a removed Thunderbird account” google search. Thankfully, it’s easy.

    I’m moving all of my email accounts (bruhsam, junk account, and TalkingTraffic) from POP to IMAP so I may access my email wherever I am. I’ve got plenty of server space, so it’s not a problem to leave it there. I’ll also be able to access my encrypted email from my work computer (the quantity of which will keep going up as I convince my friends and family to start using it) which I wouldn’t be able to do through the webmail interface. Thankfully, Thunderbird and Enigmail (along with GNU Privacy Guard) have a lovely solution to that issue.

    As a relative newcomer to the encryption store, I’ve run into some issues when trying to get it up and running. The “how to” web pages are mostly geared to a higher level of computer user than I tend to be and definitely a person more used to command-line interface. I’ve been a Windows user since Windows came into existence (I only ever dicked around with Unix in college) so I can hardly be called a wiz with the CLI. I seem to have gotten things running, though. It sounds like I need to write a dumbed-down “how to” page if I’m going to try and convince others to sign on. Frankly, the people who advocate encryption from the tops of their computer-expertise-towers seem to be underestimating how steep the initial learning curve is, especially for someone (unlike me) who’s not willing to sit for a few hours and figure it out.

    But not today. Today’s my birthday. “Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me…” I’ve already received an e-card from my mom (Very amusing, mother :), a card from my Aunt (Thanks Aunt Janet! Note coming!), a singing card from my mom-in-law (also very amusing, other mom), and flowers from my wifey-poo. Looks to be a good day.

  • Writing

    Write write write. Writing about writing? I write in order to become better at writing? Ascribo ergo sum?

    I’ve spent a great deal of time in the last few years writing. Usually it’s miniscule blog postings or rambling opinion pieces. I’ve been writing approximately 1,500 word essays on traffic engineering (see Talking Traffic) at two-week intervals for the past year. Occasionally I am forced (damn job!) to write reports and memos and emails and letters at work. These, of course, receive the lion’s share of my editing energy. It seems that I am able to write at least a lot, even if it is not literature.

    After last year’s NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month: November) I had given it a thought that I might participate. After all, one of the thrusts of NaNoWriMo is to write, but not to edit. You can write a great deal if you don’t go back to fix all the bits that are wrong as you go.

    But why wait ’til November? I turn 35 this weekend and it’s one of my New Year’s Resolutions to write at least one (crappy) short story this year. Why not make it a crappy novel instead? There’s also no real reason to do it during November because that happens to be when Thanksgiving is; an inconvenient holiday for project completion.

    No, I’m thinking that the middle of September to the middle of October is an appropriate 30 days for this potential project. It’s after Dragon*Con, so I won’t be distracted there. It’s at the middle-end of my marathon preparation, but that shouldn’t interfere any more than normal. I think that’s a good time to sit down and write something crappy and derivative. Alien elves defeat global warming after the fall of the United States or something like that. With nanotechnology and dragons, too.

  • Super Mario Galaxies

    Due to my wiinjury, I’ve played a lot of Super Mario Galaxy in the past week. But before I get into that, some background.

    I haven’t owned a console game since the Atari 2600. I played various console games such as the Nintendo 64 when I was in high school, but since HS graduation it’s been PC games almost exclusively. That means I missed almost every incarnation of Zelda, Mario and Halo which were primarily intended for the console market.

    Which means that I was entirely shocked by the psychedelic craziness or drug-trippiness of Super Mario Galaxy.

    Some of the crazy shit that goes on during that game makes me think that either A) the developer was high or B) the developer thought I woudld be high or C) it was designed by the Japanese.

    I think it’s a cool game, though, and the way that the second controller can be used by another person to assist the primary player is way awesome. Courtney has been a good star-catcher and I had fun freezing the big death-rocks for Jenn while she was playing.

    However, I’ve been playing too much because, tetris-like, I’m seeing it everywhere. I may have to swear it off for the weekend. Besides, the back is getting better which means I have stuff to do.

  • Wiinjury

    Yes, yes. I definitely did some damage. This is the nicest back muscle pull I’ve had since the last one, in 2006.

    Alas, it’s rest and recuperate time. I’m just beginning my marathon training for the Nike Women’s Marathon in San Francisco so that’s not too bad, but it looks like I’ll be doing my next triathlon without much ramp-up. Oh well, I’ll not be beating my PR at the Peachtree City Sprint Triathlon. That’s ok.

    In better news, John Scalzi will be attending Dragon*Con! That’s pretty sweet.

  • I Have Wiinjured Myself

    Friday night strength class + Friday night Wii Bowling + Saturday Morning Wii Bowling = “ouch ouch ouch ouch Oh my back…”

  • I Used to Do This

    Excerpt from an XKCD Comic on Literary Deconstructionism

    When I was a lad of 27 or so, my wife (then fiancé) was a Ph.D. student. We would occasionally go to department parties where I was the S.O. and would wander around chatting with students and faculty. I would see lots of people including those who had no idea that I had no idea about what they did. However, I was also the editor of my wife’s papers and articles. This gave me a detailed knowledge of her jargon plus a layman’s command of some of her field’s esoterica. Thusly, I could take a visiting grad student, or newly minted Ph.D. student, and bullshit the hell out of them. Some never did figure out that I was just stringing words together, pulling things out of my butt.

    This caught me flack from Jenn.

    At least I don’t do it anymore. For one thing, there’s a huge difference between a graduate student’s S.O. screwing around with other grad students and a professor’s husband doing it. For another, I don’t know enough to successfully bullshit a professor. Alas.

  • Five Years

    Jenn and I were married on the coast of Maine five years ago today. It’s been a good five years! Happy Anniversary sweetie!

    Bill and Jenn