Off-Goofery

I don't goof off anywhere near as much at this job as at my old job, but when I do get some down time, it is major, serious, heavy-duty down time. Right now, for instance, there is simply no work. I finished a couple of projects (one small, one larger) for our president earlier, and now she has left to attend a conference. The senior tech is also on vacation. I have spoken to the other techs and none of them have work to delegate to me (or, for the most part, work at all). I haven't been here long enough to have files that need organizing or a particularly messy desk. So I can goof off with a completely clear conscience.

The truth is, I hate seeking out new work, but I love it when I have work. If people would give me 10 long projects with no deadlines, I would be as happy as a clam, knowing I could come in for many, many days without running out. I much prefer showing up to work in the morning, rather than coming in between projects.

When I do have work, I have to work pretty solidly. They're billable hours, after all, and I'm not willing to have my company bill other companies for my time if I'm half-working, half-surfing the Internet. So I stay pretty focused and only take occasional short breaks. We bill down to the quarter hour. It's...rigorous.

So I am enjoying today's (hopefully) brief respite.

Durable Goods Moratorium

I am declaring a moratorium on purchases of durable goods, starting now and effective through August. This means no new clothes, furniture, kitchen supplies, toys, etc. - basically anything that is not consumed. (Obviously it would be much more radical to try to survive without groceries, paper products, cleaning supplies, etc. I'm not that radical.)

I think I have everything I need at this time, so I hope I can stick to this.

Taking Math Forever

For a while now, I have spoken of wanting to take math classes forever. I like how learning math makes me feel (the short version: initially frustrated, then brilliant as I figure something out). I should graduate in about a year, and then the question is, what next?

I could keep taking math at Metro for many more years - there's plenty of math I haven't gotten to. But it would be nice to have something to show for all that math. It would be nice if my resume could say something more than "BS in Geographic Software Engineering, and oh yeah, I also took 45 more hours of math after that."

While Sally was here, she helped me look for master's programs I might be able to do without quitting my job. And we discovered that Texas A&M has an MS program in Computational Math that is fully online. It was a great find, because math master's degrees are not that common as distance education programs. (You can find a lot of math education master's, but not so many other kinds of math.)

The program requires 36 hours of coursework, i.e., 12 classes. They give you 7 years to finish. I figure I can easily finish in 6, taking one class per semester, which ought to be doable. And if you have taken the GRE and graduated from college, you can enroll with "G6" status, which means you don't have to actually apply and get in. Once you've taken a couple of courses, you can then apply with (hopefully) great grades in the program already under your belt, and the classes will count towards the degree.

It'll be great to be working towards this degree. At worst, I'll get interrupted somehow and not finish it, in which case I'll still have been taking math as per my wishes; at best, I'll end up with a nice master's degree in math. Whee!

A Shameful Confession

I love Moby. (His music, I mean, not him personally. On a personal level I think he's kind of a flake.)

I feel guilty about this, believe me. The music is...well, a bit formulaic, to be honest. Want to make a Moby song? The most common formula goes like this:

1. Get a clip of a black person or choir singing 1-30 seconds of something.

2. Play the clip a few times with a simple rhythm behind it.

3. Play the clip a few more times with some more sounds behind it.

4. Add some soaring electronic chords.

5. Continue adding more and more sounds to the clip, but never letting go of the original simple rhythm.

There are other types of Moby songs, but these are the kind I like best. And I mean, I totally adore them. I just put a new Moby CD in my car today and I could not get past the first song because I had to play it over and over. Here, see for yourself:



Embarrassing. Oh yeah, here's another one I like. This isn't the original video, just someone's collage.

Time Estimation

Let's say you had 53 categories or data items. And you needed to make four different graphs of each item, and then put them in a binder by data item, with tabs. You would have 53 tabs, each of which would have four graphs behind it.

You've been working on the graphs for days. New and corrected information has shown up, requiring you to redo a lot of the work. And you just now got around to making the fourth graph. And everything needs to be finished today, by 4 pm.

Let's further assume that you had acquired more than 53 tab dividers, the kind that use labels you print with a computer and then stick on, and you gave them to the receptionist at 10:30 am, confirming that she had time to do them.

How much time would you estimate it would take to put the finished binder together? Would you allot a full hour for this activity?

Guess what I just spent the last hour doing (including waiting for the dividers to be finished, punching holes, and watching the engineer - who eventually left to catch a plane with his mostly-but-not-entirely-finished binder - pace)?

Gas Tax Holiday

John McCain and Hilary Clinton recently both came up with plans to suspend federal taxes on gasoline over the summer. This is a stupid plan for reasons I'm sure are familiar to all of my readers. But what's refreshing about it is to see a public discussion of an economic issue that is actually simple enough that people can think it through. Understanding comes in stages that seem to go roughly like this:

• It won't save people a lot of money, and it's bad because the government will lose revenue.
• It encourages oil consumption, which is the opposite of what we need to do long-term.
• Wait - it won't actually lower the price of gas anyway. It just means the oil companies will get more profits and the government will keep less. (Some might view this as a feature rather than a bug, but few Democrats would.)

Of course, many people get to the point of realizing merely that the oil companies will raise the price to compensate. If they can charge $3.50 (or whatever) now, including the tax, there's no reason they wouldn't continue to charge that in the future. Oh, those greedy oil companies - is there no level to which they won't stoop?

As far as I know, the oil companies (at least in America) are not a cartel. They do not actually control the price of gasoline. It's a free market, which means that the price is (more or less) a function of supply and demand.

Please note that I'm not saying they wouldn't control the price if they could. I'm not saying the oil companies are virtuous and trying to get us a fair deal. They want to make as much money as possible, just like we want to save it. But they no more control the price of oil than realtors control the price of houses, or than Kroger controls the price of oranges.

Ahem. I really didn't mean to lecture on points familiar to everyone. So, let me return to my earlier point - it is great to see some public debate on a simple economic issue. And this one is apparently so simple that Clinton's campaign couldn't come up with a single economist to support the gas tax holiday. People thinking their way through economic issues, even though it has mixed results, is a good thing.

Billable Hours

At my new job (which I started last Thursday), I have to do billable hours - we're a consulting firm. So I have a record every day of how many hours I've worked on various projects, and how many hours I did other things (generally recorded as "G&A"). This is how I've done so far:

Thursday (1st day at work):
Billable - 5 1/2
G&A - 2 1/2

Friday:
Training - 5
Billable - 2 3/4
G&A - 1/4

Monday:
Training - 1
Billable - 4 1/4
G&A - 2 3/4 [I ran out of stuff to do]

Tuesday:
Training - 2 1/4
Billable - 5 1/2
G&A - 1/4

So far today (as of lunchtime):
Billable - 3

So that's all going rather well, I'd say.

Lovey Dovey

Sally is coming to visit me for Memorial Day weekend, three weeks from now, which is very exciting. She'll finally get to meet Ed, who I started dating just shortly after her last visit here. We drove practically right by his old apartment last time, but it didn't seem right to introduce them. Both of them have (rightfully) given me crap for this ever since.

Meanwhile, sometime around Sally's visit is our one-year anniversary. It's hard to believe that it's been nearly a year since we started this goofy experiment. The time has been well spent.

Overall, the relationship is just great. Sometimes when Ed is stressed, or I'm just weird, things get worse between us, a bit, and I start to wonder what the hell I'm doing here, but then we get some time together, talk, have sex, cry, or whatever, and things are fantastic again. I'm crazy in love with him and it seems to be mutual.

So, yeah, life is good.

Spring Cleaning

In an utterly out-of-character move, I took advantage of having five days off and have gone through everything in my entire bedroom (including the closet). I got rid of a lot of things including

• just enough books that I could shelve all of the remaining books
• all of my clothes that don't fit or are stained
• giant amounts of papers that I don't need or want
• a kite I never fly
• five of my seven pairs of snow gloves/mittens
• a scarf I would never wear
• shoes I don't like
• sheets that are not the same size as my bed
• one of the six pillows I own
• a tiny cooler and a giant thermos
• about six backpacks and other similar types of bags
• my Miami J collars from when I had my surgery
• connectors and cables for tech equipment I no longer own
  

I also finished going through all the papers I have from childhood. When I bought my beautiful file cabinet a couple of years ago, Mosch and I went through almost all of my papers and filed them away or discarded them. But I left one medium-sized box of papers from childhood because I just ran out of steam, and figured I could get around to them later.

I like to keep almost everything like that. I love to look at elementary school reports cards, the paper on solar energy that I wrote in 3rd grade, my high school journals, and all kinds of stuff like that. And now they are all filed properly in my filing cabinet.

The nice thing about a serious filing cabinet is that, once you have one, and until it is full, there is no cost to adding more things to it. It takes up the same amount of space whether it is half-empty or mostly full. So it was really wonderful to get all of the papers in there.

We also, while filing all papers, emptied out my "to be filed" file folder and either filed or discarded everything in it.

I had a lot of help from Mosch and some from Ed, but I worked really hard, and I'm super pleased that I've thinned out my possessions somewhat, and organized and cleaned the rest. The room and closet got an excellent vacuuming too, so everything is just super nice.

I still feel like I own too many things, but at least in my bedroom, I don't own anything I don't actively want to own. When we did the closet, we took every single thing out first, just to make sure that (a) it was just as easy to throw things out as to keep them, and (b) the stuff would get reorganized. Obviously I couldn't do that with the whole bedroom, but still - almost everything was gone through.

As much as I love getting rid of things I no longer need, and seeing the useful things go to thrift stores where other people who actually want them can get them, I'm usually way too lazy to clean and organize. But since this was my last week at my old job, and I had to work hard all week to get caught up, I was in the habit of working, and since I spent the last day at my job cleaning out my old office, I was even in the habit of organizing and cleaning.

I'm very pleased with myself tonight :-)

Irritates Me

A while back, this office building moved to become more environmentally conscious. One of the changes was that they took away our trash cans. We still have trash cans in the common areas, but the ones at our desks are unlined and are for commingled recyclables: paper, cans, plastic bottles, glass, or whatever. But you are not supposed to put garbage in there, i.e., used paper plates, discarded kleenex, food waste, etc. (The fact that they are unlined is a good reminder of this.)

It's inconvenient because you tend to get little trash piling up around your desk. I keep a paper cup on my desk in which to put things like small candy wrappers and used tea bags, but sometimes other things pile up in an annoying way. But overall I think it is a good plan and it has greatly reduced the amount of waste our building produces.

But recently, two different people have admitted to me that they just put their trash in there anyway. That pisses me off because, you know, it just means someone at the processing facility has to go through and take out your own personal garbage and route it to garbage. I'm sure I sometimes throw away something that isn't really recyclable because I'm just mistaken about it, but I try to do it right.

And just this morning, another coworker picked some dead leaves off a plant in my office and then threw them in my trash. "You can't-!" I started, but it was too late. So I pulled them out. She didn't understand why they couldn't go in there since they are biodegradable.

"But they're not recyclable," I said. "You can't put them in here."

"Oh. I always put them in mine," she said, shrugging.

Argh.

A New Job!

You should hear the title in that Bob Barker (or whoever) voice they use on the Price is Right to tell what's in the showcase. A ne-e-e-ew car!

Anyway, now that it's official: I have a new job. Rather than working for an exploration & production company, like now, I'll be working for an (oil & gas) engineering consulting firm. The new place is a 5-minute drive from my house, rather than my current 25-minute drive downtown. It's a small company and the people seem very friendly.

I'm super excited. I almost had a heart attack when I had to tell my boss of 10 years that I'm resigning, but I lived.

So...yay!

Old-Timey

OK, I fucking love this contest to create vintage ads for modern products. I'm a total sucker for this kind of thing.

Yelling at Coworkers

It's pretty rare that I let myself get really angry with a coworker, but today I did.

A guy I'll call Bert is one of my best pals in the office. He's cool and nerdy and has similar political views to mine, so we talk politics pretty often. He also argues politics with a Bush Republican I'll call Rufus. I never talk to Rufus about politics, though. I don't actually care to argue politics with coworkers, at all. (I don't mind discussing views on a specific issue if it can be done really calmly and respectfully, but I'm not going to seek out someone specifically to argue with them.)

So Bert came into my office a few minutes ago to tell me that he told Rufus that people who voted for Bush must have done so for one of three reasons. I can't remember the three that he listed but they were something like ignorance, greed, or pure evil.

I just sort of said, "Oh, god," and covered my face with my hands.

Then another coworker, Kristin, came in, and I happen to know she's a Republican, and Bert started to repeat this to her, and I said, "All right, if you guys are going to argue politics, don't do it in my office."

Kristin wasn't into continuing the argument, but Bert was determined to at least make his few points. Ultimately I got very serious and yelled at him (not that loudly, but definitely yelling) to get out. In fact I walked up to where he was standing, forcing him to leave. I was actually pretty angry.

"You can talk to her somewhere else," I said.

"But she's not leaving," he said.

"I'm sure she'll leave sometime and you can find her then," I said.

Kristin and I laughed about it afterwards. Our boss overheard it and thought it was funny. But I do feel bad, and hope Bert is not too pissed off at me, because, after all, he's one of my favorite people here, even if he does enjoy arguing for the sake of arguing.

My Name

HowManyOfMe.com

There are 27 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

I think this figure was arrived at statistically rather than being an actual count. But until I tried a coworker with a really unusual last name, I couldn't find anyone among my friends with a more unusual name combination.

Next Semester

Today, the course schedule for next fall was released. It's always exciting for me, picking out the next semester's classes.

There are three classes I still need to take:

Principles of Programming Languages
Linear Algebra
Probability & Statistics OR Abstract Algebra

I should note that I eventually intend to take both Prob & Stats and Abstract Algebra, so it's not really that important which one I take now. But in any case, here is when the classes are available this fall (TR = Tuesday/Thursday, MW = Monday/Wednesday):

Principles of Programming Languages
TR 1:00-300

Prob & Stats
TR 11:00-1:00
MW 7:00-9:00 (PM)

Linear Algebra
TR 1:00-3:00
MW 5:00-7:00 (PM)

Abstract Algebra
TR 7:00-8:15 (PM)

I try really hard to avoid taking classes during the day. I also try, though much less hard, to get Tuesday/Thursday classes rather than Monday/Wednesday ones.

It's pretty clear that the obvious choice of two classes from this list is Linear Algebra and Prob & Stats on Monday and Wednesday nights. That puts them in a solid block from 5-9, which is similar to the schedule I started this semester with (though I have Tuesday/Thursdays instead).

My fear is that the same professor will be teaching linear algebra again. I really don't want to take it from him. It's still "TBA" right now. But if he teaches it at night two semesters in a row, then there's no reason to think he won't do it next Spring too, so there's kind of no point in skipping it for that reason.

This is a lot of hours. It's possible I could instead take Prob & Stats and Abstract Algebra. I'd have class four nights a week, and having a single class at 7PM two days a week is not that great, but I could use the time before class to do homework. And it would be 7 rather than 8 credit hours.

But linear algebra, unlike either of the other two maths, is non-negotiable, so leaving it for Spring of '09 would mean I'd have to take it at that point. As things stand now, the only class I'll actually have to take next Spring is Principles of Programming Languages.

I guess we'll see next semester if I can really get through those two courses. At least the first half or so of linear should be easy the second time through.

A Painful But Correct Decision

I made a decision Saturday night. I am dropping linear algebra.

I'm getting an A in the class. The material is, with a reasonable amount of work, comprehensible to me. I'm getting the homework done. I can probably continue this way and get an A.

But I'll flunk sweprac. (This is "Software Engineering Practices," my senior experience course. It's a big group project.)

Linear algebra is simply consuming all of my available time. It doesn't help that I have a terrible professor. (It helps that Ed loves it, and helps me with it a lot. But this doesn't save me time, really - it just gives me a better understanding of the material. And something fun to do.) It really doesn't help that linear algebra homework is so much more straightforward than working on my sweprac project, and so much more deadline-driven, that at any given moment I am bound to choose it.

But sweprac is important. It's my senior experience course. It's only taught in the Spring. I really, truly do not want to have to re-take it. I also don't want to let down my professor - who is happy for me to finally have the positive group experience I've never had. And I really do have a fantastic team for the class. I owe them my effort, and it's also a great opportunity to really do something.

The idea of re-taking linear algebra another time sounds perfectly fun and delightful, so it's not a loss in that way. Maybe I'll even get a good professor next time.

So...goodbye, linear algebra. And hello, scary sweprac project!

Too Many Things

There are too many things in my life right now. Work. School. Ed.

My current resolution is to turn screens (computer and TV, though the latter isn't much of a problem for me) off at 10 PM. Ed's under strict instructions not to talk to me via IM after that time. And, if I'm at my house, I've asked him to kick me out by 9:30. (It's a 10-minute drive back to my place.)

I have eight (8) sections of homework due next Thursday. I got a week behind, and next Thursday is the test, so it would be good to be caught up, though probably not all eight of those sections will be on the test. But our professor hasn't said which ones will, and I don't intend to go back to class again until the test itself, so I had better just finish all of them.

I've done one section, so basically, if I complete one per day from here on out, I'll be fine. But there's really no such thing as completing one section per day. While I can't exactly sit down and do several sections in a row, I also can't usually complete a whole section on the first pass. So I need to do some unspecified amount of work that averages, by Thursday, to a section a day.

This is the most boring blog post ever.

Anyway, aside from this trauma, things are all right. At some point I will need to do some work for sweprac if I'm to pass that. The week after next is Spring Break. I might survive.

Blows My Mind

Do you know what blows my mind?

This:



From Astronomy Picture of the Day, this is a Hubble telescope image of the Sombrero Galaxy.

OK, so, it's not all that fabulous, but think about this. In our sky you can see lots of stars in our galaxy. Our galaxy is huge. And then, also in our sky, you can see whole other galaxies. They are so far away that they are, like, the same apparent size as stars.

It is just freakin' amazing the range of orders of magnitude present in our universe. It reminds me of this, of course (from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, which I remember seeing in the theater in New Orleans as a little kid, with my mom and her friend and her friend's kids):

New Layout

I hope you like it. I'm glad I figured out how to get recent comments to show up. I enjoy this feature on other blogs.

Brilliant Math Genius

The other day, I showed up at Ed's house, found the front door unlocked, raced up the stairs to his room, met him in the hall, and said, "Your girlfriend is a fucking brilliant math genius!"

Let's back it up.

I'm not a math genius. I am pretty good at math, and getting better all the time. I also think that almost anyone can learn and enjoy math, and that most people who think they are "bad at math" just haven't had good experiences with it and thus haven't stuck to it. (This applies double to my mom, who loves formal logic and puzzles and therefore is obviously math-inclined despite apparently never having enjoyed math itself.)

But math can really kick you around. Unlike history or literature, where you have progressively increased knowledge leading to mastery and insights, math can make you feel really stupid when you don't get it. (I might not understand the causes of the Great Depression, but this makes me feel, at worst, ignorant. When I do know some history, I am unaware of my lack of insight about it. You don't have to have the proper insights to understand what others have written.) The flip side of feeling like an idiot when you don't understand math, though, is feeling like a genius when you do.

Last week, I had a section on transition matrices and change of basis. (I promise I won't talk about this in detail.) I did all of the homework pretty quickly by stumbling (by some insight I couldn't recreate until recently) onto a method that worked, but when I triumphantly showed it to Ed, he didn't like my method (he's not a fan of the augmented matrix; he prefers an algebraic approach).

When we sat down to figure out the actual algebra, we found the section of the book rather inscrutable. (I have since seen the completely clear presentation in his linear algebra book, so I have a basis for comparison. No pun intended.) What we found by deduction from what I'd done in my homework didn't seem to make any sense, and Ed didn't feel it was consistent with the book's text. He hypothesised (hypothesied? hypothesized?) that someone different had written the questions from whoever wrote the text, and that the two didn't match. He also found that the questions and answers were not themselves consistent.

"But I did them all the same way," I protested, "based on what I read. And my answers match the ones in the back."

I said this over and over, but I couldn't show how it was true, because I had lost the understanding of what I'd done, somehow. I'd lost the knowledge of how it made sense.

I don't want to make it sound like I just rolled over, either. We worked on this hard for a long time, on two different days. We came to a conclusion about how most of the problems worked, but the conclusion was just stupid. It would sometimes require things to be multiplied backwards, in the direction that doesn't work for matrices. And it was just plain not sensible, even though it was workable in a lot of instances.

I was troubled. The night before my breakthrough, I felt that I thought about these problems all night while I slept. By morning, I had a new tack to try, and I hastened to the library to work it out.

By 90 or so minutes later, I was ready. I had figured out how to show that the book was consistent, correct, and sensible, and I was eager to demonstrate this to Ed. We had been stupid and missed a kind of obvious point. (For my fellow linear algebra students, I will state the central insight thusly: a transition matrix does not change a basis to another basis; it changes a vector stated in terms of one basis to the same vector in terms of a different basis.)

Hence my rushing up the stairs, declaration of myself as a genius, etc.

Ed was skeptical. We'd worked pretty hard and pretty clearly on this, after all.

"We're going to run this like a game," I said. "And games have rules, right?"

"Does this mean our relationship is a game?" he asked.

"Yes, but you knew that already."

"I guess you're right."

"OK," I said. "These are the rules. You can't go ahead of me, and you can't go sideways from me. You have to let me show you this. You can only interrupt me if you think I've done something wrong, or if you don't understand what I'm doing."

"No going forward, no going sideways. But I can go backwards? Got it."

We chatted a little more while he made some tea. He asked if I was going to be crushed if he didn't agree with me, once I had showed him my argument. I told him I'd only be crushed if I still thought I was right, but that I was confident we could come to an agreement either way. He was pretty sure I was going to turn out to be wrong.

I wasn't. In fact, once I gave him the central insight, the rest pretty much fell into place, though I went through my demo anyway. It was terrifically fun. Some of my algebra was wrong (for instance, in one place I divided each side of an equation by a vector, which is an undefined operation), but it led to the place we'd ended up the other day anyway, except that now that place didn't seem nonsensical. (The algebra worked in the other direction, just not in the way I'd derived it. What I provided was not in any way a proof, but I did show some relationship between our work the other day and the sensical way that the book was really working.)

Like I said. Brilliant math genius.