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[theinevitable]

I've probably said this recently, but any time I am feeling stressed at school I remember dealing with those people at work.

Since coming to grad school I have sometimes thought "geez the whole human race stinks" but never "I wish the planet would burn up in a nuclear apocalypse at this moment."

[theinevitable]

Unfortunately urban planners work with the public pretty intensely. Hmm.

[pmcd9]

Two things.

In that first story, the pizza delivery robbery, could you really consider them as customers? I'm not sure that relationship had actually been established.

Secondly, I kinda have a little sympathy for the lady who couldn't get butter for her rice. What kind of bullshit restaurant doesn't have butter? And in the absence of butter, wanting to add back the beans seems reasonable to me. I wouldn't have acted like an ass about it, but I can understand her frustration.

[theinevitable]

I watched a really interesting video yesterday that was using woodworking with hand tools as a metaphor to explain a programming issue. Or rather, he was using it to make the point that the tools you use matter, because they change the way you look at the problem. He also had some interesting examples of how woodworkers in the pre machine age figured out how to make things come out correctly. Very cool stuff. He had a good line about some particular machine that is used for (something) with large boards, but can only handle boards up to a certain size. And how once you have learned to use this machine, when you have a project that requires even bigger boards your inclination is to try to find a bigger machine, while the guy using hand tools will look into methods to solve the problem with the tools he has.

Also the line "until you look at an ant colony under a microscope, you never realize how often ants burst into flames."

Signed up for classes for next semester, the final frontier. 3 out of 4 classes have the word "economics" in the title, although probably none of them would be recognizable as such to a-cap. I broke my streak, it's the first semester since freshman year of college that I will have to be at a class before 11am.

[AugustWest]

Nice work!

And those kinds of weekends are why I refer to work as my resting place.

I hear you.  Boy do I hear you!

[AugustWest]

Problem solving and how resources shape thought? That's all kinds of interesting stuff.

I thought I was pretty good at this stuff, but the last couple of years have really given me the masters course. I would have struggled to trim the noses on the rafters, but somewhere along the line I figured out that if you get the first one right you can use it as a template for the rest. Which leads to stuff like this:



I took a trim piece and cut in the shape needed to nestle the rafter nose on the top plate while matching the roof angle and then used it to cut all the rafters identically. Bip Bang Boom Done.

(I also cut the template piece right, estimating the roof angle by eye, the first time. That's where practice comes in.)

A lot of times you need to sit down and walk through all your options, sometimes you need the right tool, sometimes you need the right process and sometimes you need to dick around with both.

After learning how to learn, learning how to problem solve is a prime reason Hu-Mans aren't still wriggling in the mud like base beasts.

(thanks EggMan)

This describes my home repair/improvement/construction experience so well.

[theinevitable]

I was just organizing my bedroom a bit, and noticed that all of the sticky notes on my desk with tricky programming concepts on them are things that I now find really obvious and easy. Getting better at things is very satisfying. But I need to write new ones for the new stuff, of course.

[AugustWest]

Jeepers fuck*ng crappy crap. I think I lost too much weight to survive the winter.

What the hell is this cold shit? It's like i lost a super power.

Don't say that!  I'm on a roll here and I want to keep losing. 

[theinevitable]

In my Community Development class we were talking about how homeowners who were underwater on their mortgages after 2008 always felt like it was their own personal failure, and I thought that sounded really sad, that people would blame themselves for something like that. Then later in the day I said something about working at a grocery store after college, and someone pointed out that I graduated at the pit of the worst job market in decades.

(Sticking around for 4 years was definitely a personal thing, but I think I'm better off for it. Maybe 3 years would have been enough.)


My laptop is slowly crapping out on me, and I looked at the numbers and figure out that if I get the cheapest MacBook it will have the same specs as my current laptop, but only 1/4 the hard drive space. Is that progress? (Yes, because its battery doesn't die after 2 hours and it weighs like 1/3 as much.)

Alternative is to get this beautiful sucker and run some variant of linux on it. I can't go back to windows.

[AugustWest]

but only 1/4 the hard drive space.

I thought everything was on the cloud now anyway.

[theinevitable]

Spent all day at a comedy festival in NYC. Some funny stuff. But what I can't get out of my head is this incredible Italian sub I had for lunch. Capicola and prosciutto, perfectly crispy roll, mozz and sweet peppers and arugula. Holy shit. Probably the best sandwich I've ever eaten.

Also I saw a cute girl chug half a bottle of Heinz ketchup. So that was... somethin.

[wombat]

What a cruel thing to do to a snake.

[theinevitable]

Damn, my boss pulled some straight-up Office Space style stuff today, and I cannot tell if I am being a wimpy pushover with a red stapler, or a smart guy who knows not to push the issue when it's clear that his work was not satisfactory.

I have some sniffy feelings about this but I am going to process a little more. Trying to determine how to play this so that it is very clear that my intention is "you seemed unhappy with my work, since you reassigned several of my responsibilities to other people. Do you have any specific feedback about what I was doing wrong?"

"I tried to get feedback from you for months and you never gave it so I assumed I must be doing OK" should be apparent without being said out loud, I think.

(this is the lady who mere weeks ago was making affectionate faces and telling me to go for a PhD, so I don't know what the fuck.)

[wombat]

Speaking from experience, there are bosses that are so clueless that they don't understand that taking a task away from you sends the message that you were doing a bad job.

[theinevitable]

I have heard from several people that she does this-- you think everything's fine and one day you find out she thinks your work is shit. But I'm going to go see her tomorrow and see what's up.

I have considered that maybe in her mind what is going on is different from how it came across to me. We will see.