Prelude to Massive Disloyalty: Employers I believe I'd like to work for

This was in my Draft folder...from 2008. Let's review:

EveryBlock - no longer exists, got swallowed up by another company.

Amazon - well known to be a phenomenally shitty workplace.

Metaweb - acquired by Google 2010

SAS - I don't really think about them much anymore

Lego - nice and all but I'm not obsessed with Lego. You gotta be obsessed with that shit to get a job there.

Things are suboptimal in the career arena right now. I'd rather not indulge in livejournal-esque expansion on that topic now. Instead, in a true power-of-positive thinking inspirational move, here are some places I think would actually be great places to work. Maybe I'm naive or deluded. Maybe I'm over-reaching. Regardless, here we go....

EveryBlock

A Chicago-based startup that makes raw, often unstructured data meaningful via mapping. Find out where all the crimes are going down. Find out which restaurants have good inspection scores. Cool things about EveryBlock:

Chicago
Python
Django (plus the guy that created Django)
Lots and lots of data manipulation, scraping, processing, munging, mangling, and so on

Amazon

Google gets all the 'changing the world' press, but Amazon put EC2, S3, and SimpleDB out there before Google App Engine came along. At a recent data warehousing conference, a big-shot in the industry sang the praises of the incredible Oracle DBAs that work at Amazon. They'd have to be incredible. It'd be a place where I could tolerate being the (relatively) dumb new guy in exchange for the incredible learning opportunities. Or so the theory goes.

The SAS Institue

Because of my math background, my whole life (it seems) people have told me: 'You know what you should do? You should work for the SAS Institute.' Actually it makes sense for other reasons as well. SAS always shows up in the 'best employers to work for' articles in the business magazines. It's located in North Carolina, and I love North Carolina - even more now that Jesse Helms left the building.

Metaweb (the creators of Freebase)

Wikipedia is cool, but Metaweb takes the idea a step further, giving the data more structure and creating the cool MQL (Metaweb Query Language). Here's an idea that's in the rich early stages - the possibilities are endless. That and the tweet from the MetaWeb dude saying 'look for me at the conference, I'll be in purple hair and a Freebase t-shirt'. It'd be great to have co-workers like that.

Lego

It's Lego! It's located in the alleged happiest place on Earth (although this article cooled my jets on that idea in a big way).

You Can't Force STEM pt I

I was at Bloomington's Makevention Maker Convention (hence the name, think Maker Faire but in a more independent way) last weekend and I spent some time talking to Joey who collects old calculators, and modifies them or makes and programs new ones, usually using the MSP430 microcontroller from TI. He's a member of Bloominglabs so I've followed his work for some time, but it was only recently I got a chance to look at it in greater depth after it was featured on Hackaday, and then in some of the presentation materials he put together for his display.

As a person who's worked in the IT world for some years I have some sense of what constitutes a difficult problem and good code to solve such a problem, and I'm very impressed with what he's done. He doesn't study computer science though, he studies Eastern European languages and cultures. I asked him the obvious question: have you considered doing this professionally?

The answer is he has given it consideration, but doing it for work is not appealing at all. He has no interest in working on projects with narrow constraints and very little about them that he finds interesting. In high school he had done some programming projects for school helping out outside of the regular class day, and even just 2 hour stretches of being in an office by himself coding were unpleasant.

It's great to find these things out before saddling yourself with crazy student debt. Before you know it you're there in your cube having a panic attack while looking at a photo of your kid, which makes it even worse. David Foster Wallace memorably described this scenario in his posthumously published novel about IRS employees struggling with boredom, The Pale King.

There is a whole lot of talk about the importance of STEM education for kids (sometimes they add in art, and it's STEAM. But not Alyssa Milano's early 80s TEEN STEAM). Suggestions include teaching kids to code or setting up makerspaces where kids can learn 3D printing and such.

I recently heard of a project where kids are required to wear 'business casual' and work in a simulation of a software development project coordinated by some well-meaning but ham-fisted 'the children are our corporate future' types. Business casual? Really? Everybody knows programmers, especially the really good ones, get to have crazy hair and tattoos, and wear flip-flops to work if they want to. We want to put kids on the treadmill to death before they've even had fun college experiences? We want Dilbert to be relevant to another generation?

Additionally, it's bad enough hearing adults talk about 'full stack web developers' or 'rock stars that are crushing it' or regurgitating some mangled Agile Argot they've patched together from blog posts and talking to other people fumbling their way thru 'Scrum Mastery' during the work day. Coming home to get the same noise from the kids would be pretty soul-deflating, so no thanks.

This is one area where Minecraft has the advantage. It appears to be a shared generational experience on the order of Woodstock, from what I can tell, only with billions of people instead of a couple hundred thousand tripping in a muddy field. Minecraft was made with, from what I can tell, exactly zero interest in promoting STEM education, or any kind of education, for young people. Most parents are probably ambivalent at best about letting kids on there, although at this point parents who don't let their kids play Minecraft may as well be keeping them in a bunker with a year's worth of canned goods as far as isolating them from their peers goes.

SSIS: 'to find this programmatically needs some circus'

In 2005 Microsoft introduced SSIS, which is a nice friendly GUI interface for defining dataflows between systems. It replaced DTS, which was also a GUI interface, albeit quite a limited one that was a pain to get to do simple things (secure copy instead of FTP? GTFO.)

Like a lot of friendly GUI things, it's nice for the first 20 minutes you use it until the cracks start to show. Still, when dealing with moving data between multiple servers, it's fast to develop something and it performs well. HOWEVER.

Something I have hated about it from day one is this: when a row errors out, you can redirect it. You will be provided with a cryptic error code (you can Google it, no worries), a brief description, and a 'Column ID'. Not the name, the ID.

Here's the fun part. That ID is buried deep in the GUI. click-click-click. If you are a programmer type who likes to be able to get your info quick-like via a search of a quick command line command, well, go fuck yourself.

The ID USED to be searchable if you switched from the pretty picture of your flow to the underlying XML. XML is never fun to look at, but if you can get vital info from it, it's like how a dog can get away with eating its own shit because it has a nice personality.

So now it's 2014. If my calculations are correct, 2005 was 9 years ago. Today, though, it still only shows the numeric ID, and YOU CAN'T GET IT IN THE XML.

Even Google is little help. Sure, you can do it, but you have to go through a ludicrous number of hoops to get a goddamn descriptive piece of text a human might like to read. As this guy puts it, 'to find this programmatically needs some circus'.

http://www.codeproject.com/Questions/440653/how-to-Get-ErrorColumn-Name-in-SSIS

Thanks, Microsoft. There's just no reason for this.

'We're going to have congressional hearings about this project' - the Healthcare.gov problems trigger bad memories of a fucked up time

Lately the problems of the Healthcare.gov site have been in the news. It is pretty much a disaster. A very large software project apparently was rushed out the door without adequate testing, and it didn't work as well as hoped. Also, Autumn followed Summer this year and at night the sun went down with commendable reliability. At any rate, the uproar about it and the tense hearings remind me of my first job out of school, where one of my co-workers, a grizzled (although, in retrospect, probably in his mid-30s at the oldest) veteran assured me our doomed Bad News Bears debacle of a software project would most likely end with Congressional Hearings.

Most people's first jobs out of school don't come with the threat of ending up testifying before Congress if you screw up. In this case, I had somehow miraculously landed a job despite having majored in the least (at the time) marketable major possible, pure math. This was the 90s, so jobs were in abundance. Democrats said this was because of Clinton. Republicans credited a magical lag effect from Reagan. This magical lag effect was not cited in the case of George W. Bush. Anyhow, it was also true that this was a government job with the Navy that paid peanuts. The pay was so bad, in fact, that my Dad got pretty mad at me for accepting the job. But I was by this time pretty much under Bloomington's spell, and didn't want to leave, so I accepted the crappy job with a defense contractor (I didn't get the government employee benefits) and gave it a go.

Things were pretty messed up right out of the gate. The idea behind the project was to develop software for a 'minehunting sonar system' for the Navy, so at least there'd be no nuclear disasters if we screwed up. The defense department had long used Ada as their standard programming language, but here they were going to give C++ a go. So they hired somebody who just finished a Master's in Pure Math and had taken one Object Oriented programming course and paid him $20K a year, and mission accomplished as far as having a C++ guru on board. They put a guy in his early 30s who was a software developer who mainly just wanted to be liked in charge of his first ever project. The cast of characters included other science grad school sad-sack contractors like myself, aforementioned grizzled veteran, whose face would turn a cartoony shade of red when he railed against whatever he was railing at that day, a kind of cool hippie-ish dude who was the classic mad hacker and listened to Christian Metal bands, and a whole bunch of other government lifers.

For whatever reason, the 18 months I was there, we were somehow able to get by with only producing some really uninspiring design diagrams using 'Rational Rose', a couple hundred lines of C++ code, and some Perl scripts. We attended a couple of review meetings with Navy higher ups which mostly consisted of us battling with our arch-enemies, a base in Panama City that was duking it out with us for the project. The meetings would end with the Navy officials disgusted enough with both groups that neither one got to go home with the prize. So nobody got fired. Hooray!

Meanwhile the spectre of Raytheon, the contractor who had developed the original version of the software, loomed in the background. They were the scary, well-oiled private government contractor that today is still a champion of getting a hold of as much taxpayers' money as possible for their shareholders. They seemed a little less scary when you talked to the old timers I worked with, and they told you what an utter abortion Raytheon's early versions of the software were. Horrible as in if the software was still running a minute after it started, you knew it was going to be a great day. It sounded even more horrible to me in my naive 25-year-old youth, when I had no idea how widespread failure and dysfunction was in the software world.

At one point Raytheon called several of us who were working as contractors in for interviews. This made for an OK free trip to Rhode Island, which I can take or leave, and I purposely blew the interview by first pretending I didn't know the difference between a VAX (operating system) machine and a FAX machine, and then picking up an inertial unit somebody was clearly testing and moving and rotating it around. The place seemed like a miserable engine of soul destruction and everybody who wasn't grumpy was kind of robotic. By the end of the day I was ready to go Charles Bukowski if this was all the professional world had to offer. Anyhow, whatever info Raytheon was after, they didn't get it from me, but I suppose if they were trying to determine if the contractors currently working on the project were pretty fully mentally disengaged, they got their answer.

Oh yeah, also the HR glad-handing fake smile in a suit from Raytheon I spoke to at the end of the day said 'Ah yes. The 'Clemson Tide'' when he saw I had gone to Clemson. I want a name when I lose. Call me Pastor Blues.

Eventually I escaped the project for a job testing software for a less dysfunctional German medical device company (although there was drama and tension in abundance there too, I would find). Years later I heard from a former co-worker who'd kept in touch that the project was still going and they were still using our code (presumably with my comments like '/* update all this crap */' edited out). Nobody had to testify before Congress. But the project was a miserable episode in my life I was happy to leave behind, and I have all kinds of empathy and sympathy for the poor folks dealing with the Healthcare.gov site now.

Free as in Beer: My Recent MOOC experience

I last sat in a conventional classroom in December of 1994. I was taking a Topology Final as a Ph.D. student (Mathematics, if you don't recognize 'Topology') at IU. I had already decided to quit the program and go find a job outside of the academic world, so why I was there is anybody's guess. I think I worried that an especially crappy grade would haunt me for the rest of my life.

So, for nearly 20 years, I've been educated either through my own initiative or via training courses for work. I've attended the occasional workshop, like a recent one at Bloominglabs about using a lathe and a mill. I've been completely outside of the conventional college class and tests world. Eventually I stopped having bad dreams about being late for a Final Exam, not knowing exactly where it was being held, and not having studied or even attended classes. These were replaced by anxiety dreams about showing up for a race late once I started running in races.

2 months ago I decided to try out a MOOC, specifically, 'Intro to Data Science' on Coursera, taught by professor Bill Howe of the University of Washington. As somebody with a (very distant) math past who works with databases all day, learning about technologies I don't get to use during the workday like MapReduce, Hadoop, and the machine learning toolkit for Python, scikit-learn was appealing. It was also a chance to venture into a classroom setting without paying big money like some friends who've decided to go for MBAs (personally, I have zero interest in pursuing an MBA, but I did admire their dedication and devotion to keeping up with the challenge).

Even though the class was free, and I was one of 70,000 people who signed up, the idea of not doing well for whatever reason did provoke some anxiety. For one assignment, students submitted code which was then run by the auto-grader, nicknamed 'Darth Grader' by students on the forum. It suffered under the load, and there was often a long wait before getting results like 'you didn't calculate a value for @JonasBrothers' (because I removed punctuation including the very meaningful '@' symbol from Twitter data). One night I had a new anxiety dream for the MOOC era, where I refreshed my browser to find my scores had all been accidentally converted to zero by the autograder.

One Sunday I realized in the middle of the day that a quiz about MapReduce was due that afternoon. This stress was compounded by the fact that the service we were supposed to use, JSMapReduce, was suffering under the load much as Darth Grader had a few weeks previously. The discussion forums were life savers, and some suggested just running the job on your own machine using a Python library that simulated MapReduce (I say simulated because everything was being run in one process, pretty much missing the whole point of MapReduce, which is to split a load over a crudload of servers).

In general I found the forums to be the most worthwhile and surprisingly beneficial part of the experience. I am as skeptical as anyone of crowdsourcing, and you'd expect with 70,000 students signed up for a course, the forums would be chock full of noise and cluelessness. This was not really the case at all. People shared knowledge and experience (but, for the most part, followed the rules and did not share code). This helped a bunch with the optional AWS project (run a MapReduce job to crunch a TB of data). I found out that there's a $100 grant available to students, so I didn't have to pay for the services out of my own pocket (keeping the course truly free), and in a thread people compared notes about how many nodes they used and how to tweak settings when setting up your job. There were also helpful discussions about setting up and running Pig (a high level query language for Hadoop MapReduce jobs, sort of like SQL, but only sort of) on your own machine, so I was able to debug my pig scripts locally without having to pay for time on Amazon Elastic MapReduce (on AWS). (In the end, I racked up only $8 worth of charges against my $100 credit - we were warned it could cost up to $20).

Some critics say the forums are no match for the rapid fire face to face discussions you can have at a University. That is, if you're not as introverted as I was in my University days. I was lucky enough to have some accessible professors, although in retrospect what that offered was a mixed bag. When people get jazzed about the fact that you're hanging on their every word, they can veer off into weird political or racist directions. They can give you really horrible advice, like the advisor who told me not to take a graph theory class. I will probably expound on this in a future post.

I did enjoy the assignments, although several other students hated the open-ended requirements in some cases (for example: 'participate in a kaggle competition'). I thought the openness was kind of fitting, given the subject matter. Data Scientists have to figure out what the data is telling them without a set of hard fast consultant-friendly requirements.

The Kaggle assignment was fun and humbling. There is a tutorial-like competition on Kaggle (a website where Data Scientists and wannabe Data Scientists compete for money and glory solving problems in scientific or business domains) about 'Predict Based On These Variables If A Person Survived the Sinking Of The Titanic', which walks a person through examples with Excel, Python, and scikit-learn (also Python - it's a Machine Learning toolkit). Why I say it was humbling is that a kind of hokey and hackey Python example in the tutorial did a better job making predictions than the more impressive sounding 'Random Forest', unless you the competitor applied a whole lot of what's called 'Feature Engineering' to the problem to figure out how to deal with missing data and to identify how best to use the info provided. The assignment was due too soon - I would have liked to have dug into that more. As it was it was something of a 'here's a firehose of new tools, good luck!' experience. The Chief Data Scientist at Kaggle, Jeremy P. Howard, made an appearance in an 'Ask Me Anything' in the forums, and this thread was as valuable as any lecture.

The course ended a couple of weeks ago. I completed all the required assignments, but I still don't know if I got a certificate of completion yet. I'm not sure what I will do with such a certificate, but as I've never been a Mayor Of Starbucks on 4square I would like to have some sort of virtual recognition or mark of greatness. The ending did feel a bit like a fizzling out, really.

Since the course finished I've resumed tinkering on some Bloominglabs related things, like my open-ended Arduino based bike computer and playing with our new(ish) laser cutter some more. I find that since I started doing that stuff, a purely academic exercise like completing an assignment is not as rewarding, because ultimately these often feel like meals you clear away when you're done, and move on. On the other hand, w/out more structure, peer pressure, and etc, there is a tendency for my hacking projects to be very open-ended and not really result in some point of completion (I tend to be best at 'completing things' if there's an upcoming opportunity to show the thing off). It's a trade off.

Ultimately I give Coursera a passing grade because I'm going back for more. I'm taking 'Maps And the Geospatial Revolution', starting July 17. Join me if you want to make some cool maps.

Some handy references:

http://www.katyjordan.com/MOOCproject.html
http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/retention-and-intention-massive-open-online-courses-depth-0
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/opinion/sunday/grading-the-mooc-university.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

Keeping Louisville Retro: Louisville Arcade Expo 2013

Two posts ago I wrote about Ground Kontrol Arcade in Portland, a real 80s-era arcade. Today I'm writing about the Louisville Arcade Expo, which is a gathering for people who love video games from the late 70's to the consoles of the 90s. I am not necessarily meaning to turn this into a classic video games blog, but let's just see where things go.

The Louisville Arcade Expo has been happening since at least 2011. Last year it was on my radar, but I didn't get it together to go, and I felt much regret after missing it. We recently set up a MAME cabinet at Bloominglabs, so I've been on a classic video games kick lately and this year was not going to miss it. I rounded up a couple other people to make the trip from Bloomington to Louisville to check it out. The day was a magical event that exceeded all expectations, with only a couple of negatives that we'll talk about later.

It was held in the Ramada Plaza, well outside of downtown Louisville in a sort of non-descript industrial zone. Of course, we were planning to spend the day in a retro 80s-90s bubble, so the setting didn't matter too much. There was a lot of floor space featuring 100s of pinball games and 100s of classic arcade games (I may be exaggerating a bit here. My point is, the space was huge.) There were also competitions with the action projected on the wall, an '80s Living Room', a vendor area, a food area for people wanting a $7 rum and coke or $3 hot dog, and finally my favorite spot, the classic computers and consoles room.

This room was laid out in chronological order, starting with the classic Atari 2600 (yes, there were games before then, but here we started with the 2600). That was my first home video game, one I spent many, many hours playing. I've since revisited the games in emulated form, both on PCs and in the form of a cheap 'Jaxx Pacific' joystick I have featuring some old games, but this was the first time in 25+ years that I picked up the cartridges and popped them in, which is a different feeling. I played Space Invaders, Choplifter, and Missile Command, opting to steer clear of the horrible, terrible 2600 port of Pac Man (although I saw quite a few people playing this over the course of the day. It was as horrible as I remembered!) One minor problem was that one of the joysticks was sticky, so I swapped it out for the other one, and then marveled that people would subject their old video games and arcade cabinets to a weekend of wear and tear (thank you, people who did).

The Atari 2600 and some cartridges

Other games and computers present included the Atari 800, the TI-99, the ColecoVision, Nintendo's FamiCom, the really wonderful Vector graphics console the Vectrex, Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, Dreamcast, 90's DOS boxen running DOOM and the like, and quite a few things I'd never heard of and was seeing for the first time, like the Nintendo 'Virtual Boy'.

Virtual Boy, played by Real Boy

Virtual Boy was from the days when 'Virtual Reality' was a big thing, and people would wear VR helmets and gloves and get real headaches in simulated environments. Virtual Boy features goggles on a tripod that cover the wearer's entire field of vision, with 2 screens showing slightly different images in two colors, red and black. I played Mario Tennis on it, and the 3D effects were pretty cool, but honestly it wasn't something I could imagine myself spending hours playing.

The aforementioned Vectrex was a totally different story. Some of my favorite classic games (Tempest and Asteroids for example) use vector graphics displays, as opposed to the raster-scan approach that other games (and TVs) use. With Vector graphics, rather than drawing pictures line-by-line, the lines in the picture are drawn with the beam. The resulting look is very bright and sharp, 'jaggy' free, and emulators totally fail to convey via software what this kind of hardware looks like. Vector displays fell by the wayside, so you can't really go out and buy a new one, but fortunately people keep the old arcade cabinets and the Vectrex consoles running, and I may have to get one from eBay sometime soon.

Vector Pilot on the Vectrex. The colors are from a transparent overlay.

The games I had a chance to play at the Expo were Fortress of Narzoid and Vector Pilot. Vector Pilot was a vector graphics version of Time Pilot, actually written by Vectrex homebrew enthusiasts in the 2000s, and Fortress of Narzoid was an interesting game requiring the use of the walls to hit enemies with ricochet shots. The controls were really nice, and the gameplay was addictive. I think at the time they were poorly marketed and too expensive, so no matter how good they were, a kid would have a hard time selling getting one to his parents when the Atari 2600 was so much cheaper.

This captures the intensity of the display better.

It's dark. Arcades are dark.

As far as the cabinets went, I played some old favorites including Tempest, Asteroids, Satan's Hollow, and Pole Position (both stand up and the sit-inside versions, where I got the high score for a bit). I played a couple games I either missed or didn't play much the first time around, like 'Domino Man(?)' and Mousetrap. I didn't play any pinball at all, in part because there were always lines, and also because I remembered I don't really like pinball. The arcade games were almost always occupied, but people were good about taking turns and sharing and so forth (Louisville/Southern politeness? The Classic Video Game set being good people? Whatever it was, I liked it). It was the same story (mostly) in the antique computer/console room, although I did have to tell a kid to move along when a line started growing behind him at the Virtual Boy.

What would have been a fleeting moment of glory in the 80s, now captured for as long as blogspot exists.

The convention also featured tournaments, panels and speakers. I went to a presentation by a young filmmaker who had also made a 2600 cartridge, but I didn't stay for it all because I wanted to get back to playing. I didn't check out the tournaments, either. There was a somewhat small vendor section, with one guy selling old cartridges and video games, including some homebrew cartridges like 'Grizzly Man', based on the Werner Herzog documentary about a man who cares for, then is eaten by Grizzly Bears. I looked for a 'Bowser' (aka 'Browser') stuffed animal or toy for my daughter, but the toys were mostly Mario/Luigi/Yoshi. My friend Zach found a 'Slimer' stuffed toy for his daughter.

Not endorsed by 'Grizzly People'

Fellow Bloominglabber (B-Labber? Blabber? We haven't worked out the nomenclature) Zach spoke to the organizer (who was running around dressed as Luigi) about the possibility of Bloominglabs having a table next year where people can make or modify old controllers. So watch for that next year.

A guy who has been on my radar somewhat was there, but his chair was empty. Sonny Rae Tempest had his Atari 2600 game poem 'Nothing is 0k' on display. Honestly this one required a bit of deciphering, and my eyes weren't really up to making out the binary codes on the screen. I am a fan of his 'stuck in traffic' Atari poem Calm, Mute, Moving, but as the controller is a simulated cigarette, it probably didn't lend itself well to sharing it with hundreds of people and their germs.

Food-wise, things were not so great. 'Wick's Pizza' is attached to the hotel, so we all thought, hey, great, let's eat there. However, two of the people I came with waited there 20 minutes to be served before bailing out to go to Dairy Queen. Later, I went at around 2pm, thinking I was being clever and wouldn't have to wait because of a lunch rush, but a horde of bikers showed up right before me. They were benevolent Harley-Davidson bikers, who have a median age of my age + 15, but still, it was annoying to have to wait a long time for a passable stromboli. Our other friend tried to go there and arrived just as a fight was breaking out, with two guys in ties (at the opposite end of the dress code spectrum from our benevolent bikers) pushing each other saying threatening things, and he was told by the manager that he couldn't serve him as he had to deal with the situation. He ended up making due with a hot dog, because by that time the Dairy Queen's grill wasn't working.

I had one of the great $7 Rum and Cokes later in the day, and while it was pretty strong, it was still $7, and of course I had to tip the server. I'm not an animal.

The crowd was all-ages, and not everybody was as nerdy as myself. People did tend to gravitate toward the games of their youth, which was not surprising, but I did see some kids playing the ancient games and having fun. It certainly appeared to be a huge success. I will be coming back to this one, and I recommend it to anybody in the area with an interest in pinball or arcade games. It was great fun.

Mario Brothers celebrate a successful Arcade Expo

Harry Potter and the Outdated Piece Of Shit Technology With Management Support

We were having this discussion Friday, which is kind of sad. There is a politically favored technology in house that sucks ass, and we feel a great deal of motivation and satisfaction in demonstrating how our little team can blow it and the army of devs working with it out of the water using SQL Server and a bit of knowledge and expertise. For example, some doofus will spend 3 days trying to extract the answer to a question from this sorry Paleolithic system with its BASIC code, and then out of desperation they turn to us, and ta-da, answer in seconds.

However this is always followed by the profoundly demotivational realization that basically the political situation is here to stay. We more or less get told to go back into our boxes. It is kind of a shame and I wonder how many places there are around the world where this is how it goes. Generally my way of dealing with it is trying to keep building my own knowledge and expertise so as not to get left behind or complacent, and our little team keeps trying to do good things, maybe just to amuse each other at this point. But like I say, it's quite demoralizing sometimes.

Ground Kontrol Arcade, a Great Place for Video Games and a Bad Place for Comedy

Occasionally I get to travel for my job. I like that it's occasional, but on the other hand I would hate to never get a chance to travel. I've had jobs where I went nowhere both figuratively and literally. In this case, we're upgrading to SQL Server 2012 (from 2005), so some training was in order. Fortunately one of the cities where training was taking place was Portland, OR, a place I've wanted to visit ever since I learned that the Dream Of The 90s Is Alive In Portland via Portlandia, a show I have a strange relationship with. What I mean by that is though it is a comedy and funny and it's supposed to be making fun of Portland and its residents and what absurd liberal hippies they are, in my case it makes Portland look like a really great place to live, possibly like Bloomington, but bigger. Everything that's supposed to be one of Portland's foibles is actually endearing to me. Even the dumpster divers are kind of charming. So I had to check it out now that I had the chance.

I knew I had to see Powell's, the multi-level bookstore the size of a city block (plus a science and technology building across the street), and I did. I went there twice, even, and may post about it more later. A friend of mine, Bloominglabs' Jenett T., told me about a place called Ground Kontrol Arcade. It turns out Ground Kontrol is an 80s style arcade, full of 80s games, mostly classic 79-84 era games. There are mostly pinball games upstairs, but I'm not too into that.

For the most part I think the 80s really sucked: Cold War paranoia, that doddering old fool Reagan, really bad drum sounds and dated production, and I had really out-of-control acne. I did love the video games, though, so when I found out about this place, I had to go. I had some fool idea that I'd hang out for just 2 hours or so and have dinner after, like 2 hours would be enough at what would probably be my one and only chance to re-live the glory of Flynn's Arcade in the movie Tron.

I got there about 7, which was cool because that's when they switched to being 21 and over, and yes they serve beer and a couple goofily named arcade themed cocktails (e.g., Vodka Tronic). I had a local beer (Black Butte Porter) and made change. Having a pocket full of quarters when you are over 40 ordinarily would be a damned weighing down your pants in a lopsided way nuisance, but this night it felt great. I started out with Dig Dug and made the rounds, spending more time with Frogger, Tempest, and Asteroids than with the other games, and spending considerable time playing 1986's Rampage, the game where you play a monster destroying cities in the Chicagoland area. In 1986, I was starting college and video games had gone off the radar. I missed Rampage altogether, so it was new to me and I liked it a lot.

A couple observations:

• Burger Time, while whimsical, is so slow it's painful.
• For a game from 1979, Asteroids holds up. One thing I'd forgotten was how satisfying the rumble is when you turn on the thrust. In general, like other good games from the era, it makes the most of the technology available.
• I miss vector graphics (Tempest, Asteroids, Star Wars). The really sharp bright lines are missing in emulators like MAME. Sometimes emulation just doesn't cut it.
• These games were hazardous after all. I hurt my shoulder with some overzealous joystick work.

I should also mention the sink in the bathroom is outlined with a glowing line, like it's Tron's restroom.

My plan to stay for 2 hours went out the window pretty quickly. Screw it, I could (and did) pick up something at Burger King on the way home. Hours passed, then I heard an announcement from a woman who turned out to be an emcee for an open mic comedy thing they were doing. They don't have a stage, so she was standing in the middle of a few tables near the bar where people drink local beers and eat nachos and other video game arcade bar food. It seemed a very awkward setting for a stand-up performance.

I wasn't exactly there for comedy, and by the crowd's reaction neither was anybody else. Of course, it didn't help that the comic was doing jokes about elderly relatives dying (Too soon! Even if grandma is 90.). She was followed by a guy who did some 'I'm reading a journal entry' conceptual thing who went over about as well, who in turn was followed by a loud 'wacky' guy with a hipster mustache who at least tailored his material to the venue, starting off with a rant about 'Burger Time' which I was receptive to. Apparently they also hold 'Rock Band Karaoke' nights, which I imagine are a bit more fitting and go over well.

Eventually I did go home and eat cheap fast food. Just like the old days and all that. It was a very fun place, highly recommended to anybody wanting to indulge in a couple of hours of nostalgic quarter-wasting.

Oh yeah. The link. Ground Kontrol Classic Arcade.

ROX 20th Anniversary show and general 90s nostalgia

Last night I went to the ROX 20th Anniversary Show at The Comedy Attic (Bloomington's comedy club known nationally as one of Todd Glass' 3 favorite comedy clubs, alongside Helium in Philadelphia and some other place). This was a proper reunion show as J (who lives in Montana now), B (who lives in New Orleans now), and XY (married to B and thus also in New Orleans) were all there. It was not like one of those 80's era Beach Boys show where Brian Wilson was not performing with them.

J & B on the ROX was a big part of my introduction to Bloomington when I moved here in Fall of '94 (I missed seasons 1 and 2, so of course I will be ordering the DVD set of Season 1). On Tuesday nights, the thing to do was to tune in to local community cable access station CATS (BCAT at the time IIRC) for the latest episode of ROX, introduced with the ominous Carmina Burana theme. The last ROX-related event I attended was the Season 3 (I think) premiere party at The Bluebird in the Fall of '94 (Episode title: 'Movin' On Down').

Though there was an undercurrent of anarchy to the show, it was no comically inept Wayne's World operation. Over the course of the show Editor B developed some really great editing chops, the cast were interesting, smart and fun people, and the show got some deserved national attention. For those of us in Bloomington, it was hyper-local programming years before youTube let anybody put on a show.

It was very much a part of the 90s, capturing what for lack of a better term we'll call the 'Slacker' ethic of the time. J&B and friends opted out of chasing the corporate jobs and big money to stay in what is a really great town (I live here, so I'm biased, but I wanted to live here the whole time I was working in Indy due to the less abundant job market here) and pursue various creative projects (the show, bands, and so on). The thing is, the show holds up twenty years later. During last night's show I sat with a couple considerably younger than I (Dan aka @majtom2grndctrl and his wife Whitney) who discovered the show in the late 90's and early 00's, and are big fans. The clips were very funny and outside of the '92 election clip featuring 'Fuck Tha Police' as background music there weren't really a lot of period-specific references outside of peoples' hair.

The event started off with me reliving a less positive aspect of my 90s life, going to a show by myself (my wife was at home w/ my daughter but said 'you should go') and being kind of awkward and not talking to anybody. Fortunately by the end of the night I had run into and talked to the aforementioned Dan and Whitney as well as a lot of people I knew from the time and from my own hyper-local creative outlet of the time, community radio station WFHB (still going strong). I did a show there from 1am-3am Mon night with my sister. I doubt more than 10 people ever heard it, but we had fun with it.

The format was an introductory rhyme by B followed by a series of clips and commentary by J and B and Terry Hornsby aka T Black. The clips were very funny and there were a lot of laughs, so the Comedy Attic was a fitting venue.

Along with the laughs there was (on my part) some nostalgia for the period. Bloomington in the 90s was a fun place to be, much more fun than the consulting company I went to in suburban Philadelphia in '96 and left after a few months. I'm not sure why I went with that at all, it really couldn't have been more sterile and different than the fun, creative and tight-knit community of Bloomington - I chalk it up to the minimal job opportunities at the time, an ongoing not insignificant issue of living in Bloomington, although in the Bloomington 'if what you want isn't here make it happen yourself' spirit, there have been interesting startups sprouting up in recent years. I wasn't good at living on a Ramen budget and was not as resistant to parental and societal pressures to make some money after getting 2 degrees as J&B and friend were. Anyhow after returning to Bloomington I got together with my wife who was considerably more socially a part of what was going on, and we had a lot of fun and being young (in our 20s) didn't hurt. So though things are good now and you can't go back in time and the usual cliches, it was fun to remember the period and of course to catch up with some people from the time.

'Passion' revisited: Do what you like, not what you love.

Some time ago I wrote about overuse and abuse of the word 'passionate'. For a while on the show 'The Crocodile Hunter', Steve Irwin (RIP) would say 'I am passionate about sharks', and I bought that, but when somebody says they are passionate about about the day job, I get the sense there's sort of a fake smile of desperation thing going on. It reminds me of when David Brent in the U.K. office gives that presentation complete with beat box musical accompaniment, trying hard to present himself as something other than a schlub caught in a pretty ordinary and unfulfilling job.

It's also kind of abusive to young people. There are all kinds of hideously irresponsible platitudes thrown about like 'do what you love, and the money will come', when the world and especially the Internet is full of people doing what they love without the money coming. Yes, it's bad to force kids into limited choices like 'you can be a doctor, a lawyer, or a loser', but a little bit of sense and reality is in order, at least as kids get older. If a 4 year old kid wants to be a wizard or a basketball player or have the power to transmogrify into animals when she grows up, then go for it, kid. I wanted to be a World War I fighter pilot, and the war had been over for over 50 years when I was born. I get horribly ill flying in small planes, so it's all for the best in the end.

By this time the reader has concluded I am a miserable negative fuck, and is making a mental note to try to determine my true identity for an HR blacklist, but the reader has it all wrong. While I have in true internet over-sharing fashion stated that I am pretty uninspired by IT, on the flip side it is actually a job where I do get to use my brain sometimes and solve problems, and I do get to learn new things. Things have to get done, and I can do them, and whooptee-doo, it's Miller Time. After going through a period of wanting to get the hell out and looking around at alternative options, I have decided it's quite OK. But I'm not 'passionate' about it, and I think it would be irresponsible and even unethical to bounce around from career day to career day acting like a phony trying to convince kids that working in IT is like a rap video every day with the girls and the cars and the champagne and the hot tubs.

I recently ran across an article that discussed this topic: 'Do What You Love' Is Bad Advice. One thing that was really noteworthy about this article is that not only is it worthwhile to read the comments, the comments are perhaps more interesting than the article itself. There are quite a few artists and creative types agreeing that the 'do what you love and the money will come' thing is the worst kind of bullshit and led them astray. Some are even getting degrees in accounting, which I think is going too far to the other extreme - it makes me think of the final minutes in 'Requiem For a Dream' when Jennifer Connelly is doing that 'ass to ass' thing, Jared Leto has just lost an arm, and Marlon Wayans is in a jail cell screaming. It doesn't have to be that bad, which is kind of the point. Getting on a track where you can pay the bills but don't hate life is not such a bad thing, especially if the job in question is not life-consuming and frees you up to spend time doing stuff you actually do love to do.

I'm the guy who

When I used to run religiously, which if you read my blog you know I used to do, anytime I met a new person in my neighborhood, they'd recognize me and say 'you're the guy who's always running'. I could have been insulted by being reduced from the complex human being with thoughts and feelings and stuff to a guy running the 1.8 mile loop around our neighborhood non-stop like a character in an arcade console's 'attract mode' sequence, but I was OK with it. I kind of liked it. At the time I was always worried I wasn't running enough, but here were people who thought I didn't do anything but run. It really encouraged self-delusions of adequacy.

Most of us, if we're lucky to make enough of an impression on a person that they remember us, are remembered for one or two things we do. Sometimes this is great; often it isn't. Most people chafe at being 'pigeonholed', but it's really just something that happens, and you can't blame people for trying to deal with their own struggles with information overload by remembering you as 'the girl with the grating laugh' or 'the guy at work I discuss 'Mad Men' with'.

I've been hit with a couple different categorizations recently, some I'm happy about, others not so much. One I like is being perceived as 'The Arduino Guy' or 'The Hackerspace Guy' or 'The Robotics Guy'. I like being sent links on Twitter to projects like a t-shirt that tells you if you've got new email in your inbox, or getting questions about what's a good way to teach kids programming. Sure, I do/am other stuff, but if that's the main thing people remember me for, that's cool.

To other people, I'm 'the guy who makes the dumb jokes on Twitter'. I'm OK with that, too.

At work it's a bit of a mixed bag. For years I was 'testing guy', then 'programming guy', then more specifically 'web development guy', but a couple of years back things took an ugly turn and I became 'the Business Objects guy'. That was a dreary nightmare I've only recently woken up from. It was a position supporting entirely too many people, using my years of education to repetitively answer questions about very basic Internet Explorer usage. So on the one hand, it was degrading. On the other hand, since these trivialities ate into time and focus on developing, the end result was rather predictably not up to the kind of quality I'd want to be 'the guy who' was associated with. Horror, despair, and soul corrosion filled days and sleepless nights. I started telling people I was a highway construction flagman. I hated being associated in any way with any of it. I felt like a guy in a movie who was an immigrant from the Ukraine (where he was a mechanical engineer) who was now a Subway Sandwich Artist (which is a perfectly fine job for people without advanced degrees in engineering).

Recently things have taken a turn for the better with a transition into SQL guy a.k.a. data guy. Not everything I do with SQL server is some kind of rocket-science mental challenge, but it's extremely refreshing not to spend the better part of the day trying to help a spoiled white guy with a sense of entitlement figure out where his MSN 'butterfly' went off to. Writing SQL and digging into the internals of what SQL Server's about is interesting and even enjoyable (I even did this on my own time back when I was in the Role Of Which I Will Speak No More). I do care about and take data quality and integrity seriously and have no problem telling people who want to pull up the sewage truck and pump crap data into my database to hold up a minute. People in 'the SQL community' are pretty interesting and even kind of endearingly odd, in contrast to the bloodless consultant/sales types I'd encountered in Business Objects days, who'd cast dreaded spells of Eye-Glazing and Will-to-Live-Sapping on unsuspecting victims.

I am a husband and a father, and these are the two most important roles in my life. In these cases though, things are different, because my daughter doesn't just see me as 'the guy who reads to me at night' or just 'the guy who drops me off at school'. I'm a more complete, full individual in her eyes, as needless to say she is in my eyes. Similarly with my wife, I don't think I am merely the guy who takes out the trash or the guy who keeps forgetting things. I'm fortunate to not be 2-D in everybody's eyes, but I can honestly say that for the most part I'm OK with being known for a small part of what I am or what I do. Past experience has warned me though to be careful as sometimes it's better not to be known or remembered at all than to be known as 'the guy who' does something I want no part of.

No dark sarcasm in the classroom.

It was only a matter of time before we managed to make the jump from glorifying stupidity to villifying education and the people responsible to provide and give the children the educations. 'Is our children learning?', the President Bush asked, and it turn out when he ask that it was meant in the same way the question 'Are you drinking my milk from the fridge?' or 'Are you beating your wife?' might be meant.

Later we saw evelation to celebrity status of the likes of Paris Hilton, Snooky, and the Situations and Paul E.D. Nooki even speaks at colleges now. Unfortunately she do not educate the studence at the universtietes about abstainence, or better yet, counterception, because as Bristle Palin shows, abstininse makes you pregnant.

As recent as a couple-three years ago, people pretend they respect teachers and it a high calling. We say pretend because teachers were not exactly paid a lot, and lets say it's 2007, if you say your a teacher to somebody working in finance, you are lower in thurr eyes than the guy they hired to maw the grass or clean the toylet, but worse to them because they have to acknowledge you existince and they no you see thru their bullshit ennyway.

But yeh, they would say 'wow you are responsible for teaching the children who are the future. We society owe you so much.' This time 'we owe you so much' said ecsactly the way your brother-in-law with a gambling debt would say 'I owe you buddy', you know, incincere because forget about it getting paid.

Fortunitey for these poeple, at least the ones what didn't get turned out on the streets in the big CRASH in 2008, Scot Miler and his thuglodite buddies like New Jerse Governer Chistopher Christophee, Mitch Danial, and Rand Pole concoct a scheme to blame EVERYTHING on the TEACHERS. Teachers they are too high paid! Let's pay them less money! They are killing us with this! We can't pay the rent on these library! Here are a bunch of things to say like: Unions they are like monocles, they have no place in the modern world now! Love it or go to Russia!

They say this in public but when they get together and hangout and have monocle parties like the ladies of the decade before the 80s had tupperwear parties! They are going to be the Monopoly guy, all of them, but the free market has told us their are betters.

Some say its ok u don have to pay so much for educashion. Scot Adam who create the dum cartoon picthures about the nerd in the newspaper and who don't want women to vote nomore wrote artical in the Walls Treat Journell about how collidge is a fraud, too. Scot Adam, he is a genius, so he say look at what genius Scott Adamms is, he take advantage of people cause they are dum, so if you go to collidge and are taken for a sukker by brainiacs like Addums who is your betters, maybe you learn something. Know your place.

Some say the school no need. Cost too much money. Money can buy gas for truck. Money can by boat for boss. Boat boss use to sale far, far away from dum angry peepl that got scrood out of an education and so they got no jobs and can't keep the computers and shit running. Where do electricity come from? No one know. We had to save money, dammit! We don't need know education. lol jbf 80085

Puppy Tweets UNLEASHED!

I'm a hacker type, and recently I've become interested in circuit bending, so I like to make a trip to the Goodwill or other thrift stores from time to time to see if I can find some musical or noisemaking toys that can be 'bent'. Saturday I went with my daughter, and she strongly disapproved of a Barbie guitar I was looking at, so I was out of luck as far as musical toys went.

As is sometimes the case at the Goodwill, we stumbled on something we didn't know existed, marked down to a price that practically demanded we buy it. Specifically, there were about 5 boxes of a product from Mattel (makers of Barbie) called 'PuppyTweets'. They were going for $4.99 (MSRP $29.95)!

I speculated as to why such an amazing product would be on sale for such a low price at the Goodwill. 'Maybe it makes your computer blow up.' I speculated. 'If you're worried about that, you should try it on your work computer instead of your home computer,' my daughter suggested.

PuppyTweets turns your dog into a Twitterbot that doesn't give away iPads or send people to dangerous mystery URLs. In the box we found a pendant that attaches to the dog's collar, containing some sort of motion sensor (to measure your dog's activity) and a microphone (to count barks). The pendant sends signals back to the PuppyTweets receiver, which plugs into a USB port and has an antenna, so I saw some wireless hacking potential there.

We tried PuppyTweets out on our dog @AdaDog, and the results were pretty much what you'd expect from a product that made the trip from retail shelves to Goodwill shelves in a matter of months. Periodically, Ada would send a Tweet that might or might not have anything to do with what she was doing. It was unclear whether the pendant or the receiver had anything to do with anything.

Not being able to leave well enough alone, I dug around a bit in the folders for the code to see what was up. Particularly interesting was the file sessionlog.txt, which appeared to actually be reporting activity and barks back to the receiver:

Sun Mar 13 14:04:15 2011 barkAccum=0 actAccum=0.3

Sun Mar 13 14:06:15 2011 numBarks=0 numActivity=0 lossOfSignal=0 outOfRangeTime=0

Sun Mar 13 14:06:15 2011 barkAccum=0 actAccum=0.26666666666667

Sun Mar 13 14:08:15 2011 numBarks=1 numActivity=3 lossOfSignal=0 outOfRangeTime=0

Sun Mar 13 14:08:15 2011 barkAccum=0.016666666666667 actAccum=0.58333333333333

Sun Mar 13 14:10:15 2011 numBarks=0 numActivity=0 lossOfSignal=0 outOfRangeTime=0

Sun Mar 13 14:10:15 2011 barkAccum=0 actAccum=0.55

Sun Mar 13 14:12:15 2011 numBarks=0 numActivity=0 lossOfSignal=0 outOfRangeTime=0

So presumably if you wanted to, you could check this log and get updates every 2 minutes, and perhaps use this in a DogTwitterBot of your own. Possibly the bot could send Tweets only when the dog barked or moved since the last update. Then people could make fun of you on hack-a-day, for yet another Tweeting thing project, although they might go easy on you since you didn't use an Arduino.

You could also use this to summon the police if your dog is barking a lot.

There are also several text files containing the tweets. The names (activity.txt, bark.txt, sleep.txt) suggest there's some correlation between the data logged by PuppyTweets and your dog's online commentary, but the fact that the Tweets are sent out at seemingly random intervals and don't often seem to have anything to do with what the dog is up to seems to have convinced most Amazon reviewers that PuppyTweets is sort of random and that the pendant is just for show (including the battery).

It is hard to believe that Twitter (who recently angered developers by introducing restrictions on how their API can be used - specifically, telling developers to stop developing client apps because Twitter wants to control the user experience) would lend their name (and logo) to a product of questionable value.

It also makes me sad to think about the story behind the story. Having worked on a couple of big software development projects, I can imagine poor sleep-deprived engineers designing and testing and tweaking the hardware late into the night. I can imagine conference rooms full of corporate management douchebags giving each other PowerPoint Presentations. I imagine the design team meticulously sweating the details of the packaging, copywriters carefully crafting the 539 different tweets PuppyTweets would send out, testing many of them out on Twitter itself. I imagine the software development team and their all-day Googling sessions and their all-night debugging sessions. I see Mattel mathematicians working out the perfect mapping between dog activity and dog tweets. Personally, I have to say the Mattel mathematicians were the weak link here.

I can hardly claim to feel ripped off or wronged for $4.99, and I did get a blog post out of the deal. For now, I am going to have to resume my duties as the actual person behind @AdaDog's twitter account.

Mystery Solutions To Famous Problems By Important Mathematicians

I just finished reading 'Uncle Petros & Goldbach's Conjecture: A Novel of Mathematical Obsession', written by Apostolos Doxiadis, part of the team that brought us the wonderful graphic novel 'Logicomix: An Epic Search For Truth'.

While Logicomix focuses on the great mathematician Bertrand Russell, his work, and his association with other great mathematicians of the early 20th Century, 'Uncle Petros' is about a more obscure mathematician, and explores his path from early promise to obscurity.

The narrator is fascinated by his somewhat reclusive but kind uncle, labelled rather cruelly by his businessman father and his other uncle as 'one of life's failures'. He learns that his uncle was a promising young mathematician who became so obsessed with proving Goldbach's Conjecture (still unproved as of this writing!) that his career went off the rails.

This 'most favored nephew' develops his own interest in mathematics, and tells his uncle of his plans to become a mathematician. His uncle tells him that very few people can become mathematicians, and that he doubts his nephew has what it takes. His nephew persists, so Petros challenges him to solve this problem over the summer:

Prove that every even number greater than 2 is the sum of 2 primes.

Our narrator struggles with the problem all summer long, but fails. He then finds out what some readers will already have recognized - Uncle Petros asked him to prove Goldbach's Conjecture.

At this point we wouldn't blame him for never wanting to have anything to do with his uncle again, but his interest in mathematics and in his uncle's story persists.

Gradually we learn about Petros' early career: a very useful technique he developed as a Ph.D. student which he dismisses as 'Calculation of the grocery bill variety', his work with the great G.H. Hardy and Ramanujan, and his long and ultimately futile struggle to solve the Conjecture. His isolation and his fear of revealing any of his early results lest his competitors use it to beat him to the proof causes him to miss some great opportunities to publish, and gradually his career disintegrates.

Petros is a fascinating character, flawed but with a wisdom and a sort of contentment with his lot in life, spending his days with gardening and chess. His nephew develops an obsession of his own, trying to get at the true reason Petros ultimately gave up, and to understand the course of Petros' life and career.

In my favorite quote from the book, Petros explains his preference for obscurity over minor but forgettable successes:

'I, Petros Papachristos, never having published anything of value, will go down in mathematical history - or rather will not go down in mathematical history - as having achieved nothing. This suits me fine, you know. I have no regrets. Mediocrity would never have satisfied me. To an ersatz, footnote kind of immortality, I prefer my flowers, my orchard, my chessboard, the conversation I'm having with you today. Total obscurity!'

While I don't agree with that sort of 'all or nothing' thinking, being more of an incremental and a 'set attainable goals' guy like the narrator's father, it is rather romantic in its way and I can respect his attitude. I do very much agree that obscurity is underrated (or at least that's what I tell myself here in this comment-free blog).

Being in the over 40 phase of my life, I find myself reviewing my own past successes and failures, identifying along the way regrets and things I could have done differently, trying to come to an acceptance of the things that didn't go as well as hoped. There's no sense in wallowing in failures or regrets, but I'd also say it's essential to be (sometimes painfully) honest in your assessment of your past and yourself, and that's a lot of what this book is about. There's also a kindness and empathy in the book, the book has, for lack of a better word, 'heart'.

I'd strongly recommend the book (and Logicomix) even to the non-mathematicians. Mathematicians are interesting characters, and while many struggled with mental illness, there was so much more to them as people.

As for my own mathematical pursuits (which fizzled out early) I can say with complete honesty that I have no regrets. In retrospect I can see the value of realizing it wasn't 'in me' to be a great mathematician and changing course, as painful as it was at the time. And for a while, I truly loved math, and it was all I wanted to do, and it was almost all I did. I can understand the appeal and I know there is a joy in being obsessed.

Facebook's Fakeness Makes Us Feel Worse, Comedians' Honesty Makes Us Feel Better

'I see the people happy, so can it happen for me? 'Cos when I have no energy, there's nothing that can move me'

-Kate Bush, 'Sat in Your Lap'

Recently a group of Stanford scientists led by Alex Jordan published an article in the 'Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin' about a tendency people have to overestimate other people's happiness, which usually ends up leading to increased dejection and unhappiness. A good write up can be found on Slate, and there has been considerable discussion since in the blogosphere, Twitt-o-sphere, really all the spheres.

The fact that the research was inspired by one of the less-fulfilling aspects of Facebook triggered much of the discussion:

Jordan got the idea for the inquiry after observing his friends' reactions to Facebook: He noticed that they seemed to feel particularly crummy about themselves after logging onto the site and scrolling through others' attractive photos, accomplished bios, and chipper status updates. "They were convinced that everyone else was leading a perfect life," he told me.

I have noticed that I tend to have a feeling of emptiness and disappointment after nearly every interaction I have with Facebook, but hadn't thought thought about the underlying reasons for that so much. It does make sense, although I also hate Facebook for other reasons, including the fact that it's 'walled off' from the otherwise more open web, and the occasional feeling of being pressured to 'friend' people I am not really friends with (mainly co-workers or distant relatives I'm not particularly cozy with), which then leads to a pressure to to be fake about how happy you are and how great everything is, which in turn brings everybody down, as science has now proved, because you forget everybody else is frantically trying to fake being happy, too.

This ties in to a broader tendency I've noticed for people to focus on the positive to an absurd and unrealistic degree, almost to the point of seeing any kind of negativity as pathological, and seeing 'negative people' as pariahs to be avoided at all costs. Not to be too negative, but I think this emphasis on 'positivity' is destroying the world. Some examples:

• Being optimistic that invading a country and establishing a new U.S.-friendly regime and society there will be a 'cakewalk'
• Thinking home prices will go up forever
• Not being a gloomy Gus and worrying about energy dependency
• Believing you are great at multitasking, including texting and driving at the same time
• Thinking you don't have to pay taxes because you are Wesley Snipes

The list could go on and on.

It is possible the over-optimism is a reaction to the over-pessimism of the 90s. I'm looking at you, Billy Corgan. Billy was only one of the many songwriters in the 90s who'd say some variation on the following in interviews:

People ask why my lyrics are so depressing and negative. When I'm happy, I want to celebrate that I'm happy and have fun, I don't want to write about it.

Kurt Cobain was the patron saint of 90s mope-rock. He became a superstar singing about how crappy life is, and then shot himself in the head with a shotgun.

There are some promising signs that a more balanced view of reality is on the rise in popular culture. A good example is Louis CK's show 'Louie'. Louis is a very talented comedian, and the show is very funny, but at the same time Louis does not in any way shy away from talking about some of the unhappy realities of life after 40, including the gradual decline in health and realization that your best days may be behind you. He deals with really nasty people - a heckler, a kid threatening to beat him up, Nick DiPaolo - but on the other hand he really loves his daughters and finds great fulfillment in his role as their father, and he has the respect of his peers and confidence in his capabilities as a comedian.

Marc Maron's very popular WTF podcast includes Marc's honest observations about his life and life in general, including some things that are real downers like career disappointments and divorce. I've also learned from listening to his show that almost all of my favorite comedians are on medication.

It's strange that comedians (except Kyle 'Be positive at all costs' Cease) are the ones bringing us back to our senses, but somebody needed to do it, and best that it's people who can also make us laugh help us deal with it all.

As for Facebook, I can't quit it (yet), but I take some comfort in the fact that I'm not alone in finding it to be not only a time-suck but a soul-suck, too.

I Will Never Eat These Things Again

Today I took my daughter to Target to go grocery shopping while my wife is in London and then Dublin for a week. We went because while we can manage on our own, we decided to get some pre-packaged, easy-to-fix foods (frozen pizza, frozen other things) to get us through the week. You are probably thinking, wow, what a bad Dad, and actually it gets worse. My 7yo daughter decided she wanted to try a microwave meal involving a hot dog (and frozen bun) which had to be prepared in 3 microwaving stages, and yes, I let her try it (she thought it was alright, but didn't eat all of it). If I posted this kind of thing in a parenting web forum, I'd bring down a rain of criticism and misery, which is only one reason why I avoid those places.

We also purchased, and will eat: oatmeal. So back down.

While I was there I saw a package of ramen noodles on sale. It worked out to about 12 cents a pack, and this got me thinking about foods I used to eat which I will never eat again, unless something goes horribly wrong in my life.

Spaghetti-Os

I ate these and other Chef Boy-R-Dee canned pasta food products as a kid, and as somebody who just fed his daughter that freeze dried hot-dog bun thing, I'm not in any position to point fingers. I liked those canned meat-product-balls well enough. The Spaghetti-Os thing got out of control in grad school, and I have nobody but myself to blame. On a more-or-less daily basis, I'd take a can of spaghetti-os and a couple pieces of bread (occasionally a peanut butter and jelly sandwich) to the office, and eat that while I graded papers or sweated over problem sets. It was kind of unfortunate that in my early 20s, when my mind and body should have been at their peak fitness and power, I chose to undermine myself in that way. I believe this stopped immediately after I got my M.S. degree. Graduating meant an end to a lot of ruts, including eating these.

Hot Pockets

Jim Gaffigan does a famous bit about Hot Pockets, so it's really impossible to squeeze any more humor value out of them at this point. This post is not about making jokes, though, it's a confession of past sins, so I shall move forward. This habit started when I worked at AT&T and fell in with a group of obsessive runners there. This coincided with a peak in my own obsession with running. Now, years later, I can say it: I didn't really give a shit about what I was doing there outside of the really intense lunch-time runs that I still fondly remember, even the ones in sub-zero temperatures or the speed workouts that took every last bit of energy out of me.

Hot Pockets fit in because I didn't have time to have a proper lunch, and I did have to get work done so I could hang on to the job and keep running. Again, at a time where I was pursuing peak fitness and health, I was undermining myself by eating this garbage. Inevitably I got sick of the taste of them, and when I changed jobs, again, it was a good time to ditch an unhealthy rut I'd gotten myself into. I can't really say enough good things about the mental and physical health benefits of switching jobs (unless you switch to a very shitty job, that is).

Salad

This one is also lunch-time-workout related. Our workplace has a fitness center, which is a nice benefit. There's also a cafeteria, which is competent as far as being a corporate cafeteria goes, but after a workout the only thing they have that I feel like eating is salad. The salad bar is kind of unpredictable, and some days there are only 2 or 3 things I'd want to put on the salad besides lettuce. I've gotten pretty tired of salad, to the point where salad has become a combination of two Mitch Hedberg jokes to me:

Rice is great if you're really hungry and want to eat two thousand of something.

and

You can't be like pancakes. You're all happy at first, but then by the end, you're sick of 'em.

I said at the beginning of this post that I will never eat these things again unless something goes horribly wrong, but I would like to think between myself and my wife, we'd be clever enough to find better things to eat even under serious budget constraints. As I saw today after our shopping trip, this kind of food, while convenient, is not necessarily cheap. It's probably safe to say whatever happens, life will be a journey from one kind of food I get sick of to another.

What foods are you never going to eat again? Don't answer in the comments, just say them at your screen like you are talking to your favorite TV pundit. I couldn't stand it if I asked people to comment and nobody did.

This year, I'll try to be more superficial

There's no point in running it into the ground anymore - my goals for 2010 have been covered and revisited. Overall, I did OK, but it was not the year things really happened for me. In the interest of looking forward, even though that way lies oblivion (it lies the other direction, too, only then I didn't know any better), here's what we'll be going for in 2011, which we've already been in for a week:

Simplify:

• Cut down Google Reader Usage as much as possible
• Same with Facebook. Maybe just never use it again. I never feel good after spending time there. Usually I feel more alone and isolated than I did when I started.
• Same with 99% of the Internet
• Get books I’m not currently reading and stow them away somewhere, so they don’t mock me and stress me out.
• Use fewer variations of the same thing at work (e.g., one version control system is enough).
• Organize the bills/etc. better
• throw away things I don’t need
• Don’t work on 50 projects at the same time, mainly at home, I mean. I ought to finish something occasionally

Learn:

• R
• Audio-related electronics (amplifiers, DACs, effects, circuit-bending, noise making).

Stay the course:

• Spend lots of time with daughter and molding her impressionable young mind and such
• Spend time with my lovely wife also
• Continue to weigh 185 +/- 5lbs
• Continue to not have any major health problems
• Run
• Ride the bike
• Walk the dog, remember to take the time to tell her she is in fact a good dog
• Maintain wall of detachment between self and people/places/things that won't be named at this time

Also, as per the title:

Be more superficial.

What does this mean? As a ‘back end’ guy (ha), I focus on behind-the-scenes stuff nobody notices (data, monitoring, number crunching, etc). I need to do more bullshit front-end things, dress up the web stuff a bit beyond really stark raw info stuff. I had this realization recently that I spend an awful lot of time doing stuff nobody really sees.

I don't really care about that at work (they pay me, so the sting of being ignored is not so great - in fact, they need to have a big sign printed that the HR department hangs up everywhere reading 'Being Ignored Is Its Own Reward', because that's a true story at that place), but it would be nice to get the occasional notice/recognition elsewhere.

On another superficial note, I really ought to do a better job keeping up with movies and music. It's one thing never to have anything to say when people talk about sports, but I look at peoples' 'My 50 Favorite Movies of the 4th Quarter of 2010' lists, and I feel like I'm totally out touch. Who knows how many comic references I'm missing? I may eventually find nothing funny but wordplay and slapstick. The prospect is horrifying.

Wish me luck, or don't, and have the best 2011 possible.

'Something to offer besides waiting to die' or 'why do I live in Bloomington?'

Yesterday on Twitter, @drewmckinney, aka the guy who wrote that cool DrivingBuddy iPhone app, wrote:

Why be a tech professional in Bton instead of SF? "Bloomington is 58% cheaper than San Fran, housing is 81% cheaper"

He linked to bestplaces.net, a handy site where you can find out for example if you are making $50,000 a year in Bloomington IN, how much would you need to make in San Francisco to get by at the same level in terms of housing and so forth? The answer to this question is: $117,735.

These numbers always have to be taken with a grain of salt, and ex-NYC resident @lmcalpin called bullshit on them:

my apt in bklyn wasn't much more $$ than apts downtown here

anyway i've heard people say before that cost of living makes working here attractive compared to either coast

and i think its a bullshit argument and wishful thinking

Fair enough. At this point we turn to blog posts and articles on whether the fact that it's cheap to live in the Midwest is a draw for businesses and talent. The first one was brought to our attention via @benfulton, and was written by Morton Marcus, a retired economics professor whose column appears in Bloomington's Herald-Times sometimes. I like Marcus' work as he seems to me to be non-partisan, in sharp contrast to the regurgitated Cato Institute dreck people from the Indiana Policy Institute serve up in the H-T Op-Ed.

Marcus' article in the Indiana Economic Digest, 'If the brain drain remains open, what's left?' has this to say about the 'It's cheaper to live in the midwest, come work here!' argument:

Housing is cheaper in Indiana because fewer people want to live here and the value of the goods and services we make is lower than in the Golden State. Lower valued outputs lead to lower wages which lead to lower housing prices.

and:

It’s easy to say the problem is a failure of business investment. We could not admit that the failure is a stodgy environment, communities with hardened intellectual arteries, and businesses that feel at home in such places.

Yes, the issue could be the brain morbidity of business and civic management rather than a need for more business tax incentives.

This discussion reminded me of a blog post by Max Beatty summing up September's 'The Combine' Conference in Bloomington. This was a conference in the tradition of SXSW and other tech gatherings organized by tech professionals in Bloomington, including the people from Humanetrix and SproutBox. Max's post is mostly positive, but this excerpt stung, I have to admit:

Then came the first discussion panel titled “More Than Corn.” The panel of Midwest executives did not deliver. I thought they would be up there boasting about how great it is to be part of tech companies in the Midwest and the opportunities that lie ahead. Instead, they never offered any valid arguments beyond the cost of living being lower and being a great place to raise a family. Working for less and settling down is something very few of my friends under 30 are interested in. By the end of it, I was reaffirmed with my decision to leave Indiana. Indiana’s brain drain won’t stop until there’s something to stick around for besides growing old.

I first read this a few months ago, shortly after the conference, and my initial reaction was to be like Ice-T in the middle of a Twitter beef and invite the author to eat a hot bowl of something. I showed restraint, which is good.

After thinking about this again as a result of the Twitter exchange, I believe there were probably two problems there. First, perhaps having the panel was ineffective for this guy because the panel was showing and not telling, in the parlance of writing classes and lyrics by Canadian Rock Gods Rush. The fact that people in Bloomington put together The Combine, SproutBox, Ignite! Bloomington, and (here comes the plug) Bloominglabs shows cool tech things can and do happen in Bloomington. Having a panel where people talk about things like houses being cheaper is more talk, less rock.

I have been thinking about it some more, and the reasons I like and live in Bloomington have very little to do with the cost of living. We had a house on a lake in Martinsville, IN that cost less than our current place, but I was happy to trade that for living in Bloomington. As I think about it some more, I love Bloomington because it's different from the surrounding area. A lot of people refer to it as an 'oasis', and though I don't use that cliche a lot, I have to admit my reasons for sticking around and loving the place have a lot more to do with Bloomington than the Midwest. Morton Marcus nailed it when he referred to 'communities with hardened intellectual arteries'.

So in the end, I think @lmcalpin and the man Morton Marcus are right. The cost-of-living difference, while really nice, is not enough in itself to draw people here. Further, I don't feel compelled to defend 'the Midwest', and I think cities are more important than states (and definitely regions) when one's deciding where to live.

'Cities' by The Talking Heads