Student Council

Politics. I hate politics because I learned first hand in fifth grade just how bound any one person's hands are. I knew going into it that even if I was president of the newly indoctrinated Hillside student council, I could not do things like "mandate that homework is optional". Some things are just not within your power.

Then there's things that are within your power, but you need agreement from your fellow council members. And then there's a tiny sliver of trivial stuff that you can get done on your own.

That's why it's hard for me to hear criticism about any political office, why it is hard for me to get jazzed up about a politician who claims to make a change. It's just hard. There's too many moving parts, life is too short. I'm amazed anything ever gets done in government actually.

Don't get me wrong, I think the system works quite well despite it's inability to change. I think it is fairly reflective of people as individuals and our own stubbornness - and that's what government is all about: representation. All I really want from a politician is someone who will do his best to represent the concerns of the people in his district, that's it.

The Failure of Awesome

Josh sent me this link to a touch interface for desktops. It's pretty awesome (and pretty vapor-ware), but it'll meet the same demise of all input device innovation: lack of software.

Apple got it. Multi-touch hardware, and a whole lot of software that leverages that functionality. But if I hook up a multi-touch input  pad to a Windows box, what benefit do I get? Not much, maybe none.

It is very much a chicken and egg problem. Developers don't want to write (or don't get paid to write) software that is for a minuscule slice of the market. They write for the masses. So that means you have to get everyone to buy a multi-touch input device. But consumers aren't [that] dumb. They want to buy stuff that adds value, and if there's no software, they're going to spend their dollar elsewhere.

Apple had a compelling story with the iPhone. It wasn't just, "Hey look! Use your fingerS!!!!" It has a big ass screen with a great viewing angle. It had the best web browsing experience of any phone on the market. It went out of it's way to make your life easier, and oh by the way, "...we do that with multi-touch". It's the same reason we got mice in the first place - input is just a thing, not the thing.

Fencing

The Purdue Open was this weekend. It is always an interesting beast to me. The Fall one is almost always better attended than the Spring, but the Spring one is always better organized.

This year, looking at pictures that the other fencers took of the event, it made me miss fencing. I don't know that I've missed it before now. I thought about getting back into it, wondering where I might find a good fencing home around here. Really it was about the people.

I could spot Big Joe Landin in his black socks from a mile away. I knew the twist of Sam Noonan counter attacking. I knew the call of Josh Williams. It is more fair to say I missed the people, and that fencing was the vehicle we all car pooled in.

Beep beep.

Name Tags

[caption id="attachment_1800" align="alignleft" width="470" caption="Hello my name is Inigo Montoya"][/caption]I don't understand why people insist on doing a piss-poor job of using name tags. "I'll just write my first AND last name, "Baczakeo Demyanakowskiwitz, on this three inch space... oh,and cursive sounds nice."

WTF? Really? You may as well have drawn a big black line on the tag and called it good.

Or there's always the guy who uses  a very thin, blue ink, ball point pen, the one that should have been thrown out a year ago, but he still likes to chew on this one. Jackass, I've seen darker lemon juice.

So here's the rules: Use a sharpie. Print your first name only. If your name is much more than seven characters, just use a nick name and stick it in quotes. "Anna" is way better than "Annastaslinkakola"... it'll be alright if a stranger calls you Anna for the night, it is way better than the crap the rest of us will try to make up because we can't read your ill prepared name tag.

Matt was looking for a blog

So I wrote one while "droppin' a log".

Cheers.

Color and Shoes

Walking home tonight I saw a girl, as one often does on the street, and she was mostly ordinary, unremarkable, with one exception. She had on a bright orange scarf. The color seemed to say to me "I'm having fun, life is awesome." It was just a scarf, on just another girl, but together, they were extraordinary.

I had been thinking about going back to my mis-matched Chuck's for a few weeks now. Partially motivated by my desire to re-find my own roots. Partially motivated by my upcoming high school reunion. Partially motivated to have a shield again, something I could deflect a stranger's dislike unto. And today, partially motivated by the need to have color, the need to look fascinating in a very simple way - a way that says "life is awesome".

Zappos will be sending me two pairs in short order, a navy blue and a light blue pair. I figure it'll be a good start, and something bold enough to achieve my goal, but subtle enough I can wear them at the office.

Just a Thought

I wonder if the crazy shit that went down in the Bible was just a sign of the times. "Oh my wife? She, uh, got turned into a pillar of salt, you know how that goes." is like the modern-day equivalent of "Sorry I didn't get that party invite, the internet must've eaten it."

Then again, maybe not.

Women and Danger

I missed out on doing some things because I was busy doing a lot of other things. Friday and Saturday I was scheduled to be a volunteer at a Ruby on Rails Outreach workshop. Ruby on Rails is the programming language I use at work to write web applications. This particular workshop was targeted at women and was being held at sfCUBE.

sfCUBE is something between community space and a start-up incubator. I was hoping I'd run into someone there who could give me a better run-down of the business, but just being in a place like that made me get off my duff and write an executive summary (cover letter to a business plan) for my library idea (if you want to read it, just ask and I'll share the Google Doc with you, I could use the feedback). So now I have an executive summary, something I could put in the hands of someone who would want to fund my endeavor. It makes my start-up idea much more dangerous than it was a month ago because now my ideas exist on paper.

Alas, no one was at sfCUBE for me to talk to, so that remains on hold for now. Friday night was install night, where w e got all the ladies' laptops set up for Saturday. Saturday I was a TA, helping people when the fell behind, explaining things that I felt like got glossed over during the breaks. It felt good to volunteer, and it felt good to use Rails to do it. So I've made good progress getting my volunteer life back on track.

Today I went to Crissy Field nearest the GG Bridge which was a new part of the park for me. I was there for a coworker's birthday party, so there were a lot of people I knew from work. I had to leave around 3:30 to make my way to rock climbing with Lara who brought her friend, Marie, to join us. After a few hours of climbing artificial rock, we headed out for tapas at Ramblas, which is a pretty tasty tapas place, and I always like tapas because you can try like half their menu at once.

Thus a busy weekend. I wrote the first part of a business plan, made a lot of progress in getting myself back to who I want to be, and spent all of it with people I enjoy.

Dump

Two weeks ago, I got to see Wicked with Miss Lara Owen. It was an awesome show to me because it was campy, and serious, and had flying monkeys, and most importantly I had great company to reflect and laugh with. Shows are meant to be shared and I was glad I didn't see it alone as I had initially planned. It reminded me of two things, the first was that I really enjoy the theater, and the second was when I went to see some community theater with the Dickersons. Those two always know the fun things to do.

Women have the hot pants for Eric the vampire in True Blood which give me no small amount of angst. Eric is the blond, good looking vampire who is a total scumbag. Do they go for Bill, the gentleman vampire who swore off drinking human blood? No. They swoon for the ass hole who has deals in deception and manipulation. Women are crazy, but more accurately, I should say that I'm jealous.

Speaking of TV, go watch Battlestar Galactica. I am not a cylon.

I feel a little rebirth in me. I broke out the brightest colored clothes I had and my propeller beanie and went to a euchre picnic on Sunday. With the foul-mouthed jokes and knowing people well enough that I didn't have to ask wht they did for a living or what they've been up to the last X months... it felt like high school, or rather, I felt like the me I was in high school. I may buy some mis-matched Chucks in the near future.

Step Two: Volunteer

This Friday and Saturday I'm going to teach people (women specifically) how to set up their laptops as a development environment and then how to write a simple web application.

It's what I do every day, and yet I'm nervous as hell that I'll somehow fail. That someone will ask a question that I don't know the answer to and suddenly it'll all come crashing down that I don't really know anything. It isn't true, but that's what I'm afraid of, that's what I'm most nervous about.

Tomorrow, I'm also skipping lunch to spend time with a coworker, Adam, patching Rails. Rails is the platform on which we develop our applications. Rails isn't something we make in house, this is a big deal that is used by developers world-wide. I've never worked on an open source project, let alone something of this magnitude. My participation is two-fold. First, I get to learn about contributing to an open source project. Second, this is something work is making a push for, the higher ups have a vested interest in seeing Rails become a respected platform, and Pivotal getting its name attached to it - but when they pitched free lunch and swag, and no one bit, I decided that while I may feel under-qualified to write code, I wasn't under qualified to set an example for those more able to follow.