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Comparing Wikipedia articles normal people would read, with a geeky counterpart. Notice the length and the breadth of exposition. Some of my favorite examples:
Game day arrives. And so do we to a nearby public school diamond. Our spirits are high. The secretaries bring drinks, peanuts, crackerjacks, and fill the bleachers with cheers. We warm up. We have partners, attorneys, clerks, accountants. The other team arrives, boisterous and slightly younger.
5:30pm. Our team takes the field. I take the mound. I stop and think, Hm, this mound is a bit farther than it was in practice. I pause. The batter takes practice swings. I look behind me; my team looks back at me. I turn to the bleachers; they cheer my name. I pause again. Nothing happens unless I start. ohmigod ohmigod ohmigod, i am literally, geographically, thematically the center of this game. all eyes are on me, a giant burning ball of attention on my back. what the fuck am i doing on this field i have never played on a baseball field in my life i have no business playing any team sport let alone this one.
I gulp and let a pitch fly. Wild pitch. Another pitch: way overhead. Another one: bounces on the ground. Another, overhead. Way outside. High. Outside. Beans the batter. Actually. beans. the. batter. holy fuck this is still the first batter.
I try to dispel the tension. “Heh heh I think I could use a beer, ” I call out. Chuckles abound. yes yes a beer joke. everyone likes those. “Must be my nerves. Heh heh.”
One pitch finally goes over the plate. Hit. Batter takes a base and a new batter approaches. More wild pitches. The crowd quiets. They must realize that, holy shit, this isn’t a joke, this fucker cannot pitch underhand over 10 feet. Partner Coach realizes something must be done.
“Kathy!”
He calls out a secretary in the bleachers.
“Feel like pitching?”
“Sure!” she chirps back, grabs a mitt, and replaces me on the mound.
“Hey, don’t worry, [crab], you can still bat later.”
And there I am, at 5:40 pm, sitting alone on the bench.
During practice, I followed the plan and made obvious my ignorance of baseball (”okay where do I stand. okay which base is second”). This must have led Partner Coach to find a Position Of Least Harm for me:
“Do you want to give pitching a try?”
“No.”
“Get up there.”
“Yessir.”
Five underhand slow pitches later and I was pitcher. Later, batting practice revealed my hitting style akin to Ichiro. I left practice feeling good, feeling useful, feeling confident.
Sunshower = grab the camera.
The firm’s softball league is about to kick off and I have been conscripted to play. The problem is: I know shit about baseball, have never played (not even Little League), and am not sure the last time I threw a ball overhand. I reached out to K, who survived his own firm outing last year.
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Video: Mr. T vouches for Hitachi storage virtualization. “Intelligence in the network is for suckas.” Okay, but nothing beats getting perpendicular.
At Dickerson & Dodds:
For the sake of my own aesthetic, ALFINJ is now “Dickerson & Dodds”, or D&D. It just rolls off the tongue better.
Interesting new site, i’minlikewithyou, combines game design, social networking, matchmaking, and economics. They had me at “game design”.
I just corrected Wordpress’s setting for my timezone offset, again, because of Daylight Savings Time. This comprised of me manually editting a “-5″ into a “-4″ in a text field and clicking save. Are you kidding me? How hard is it to ask for a timezone locale and then calculate everything with tzdata auto-goddamn-mattically. I thought we invited robots for this very type of manual labor.
I may or may not have just joined some Anonymous Web 2.0 Matchmaking Service. I got an exclusive invite and when you receive an exclusive invite (through means which may or may not include spamming random people on another anonymous web2.0 social networking site), you have to go ahead and register the shortest username you can get. That’s just a law of nature.
So far so good, it’s plinking and making all sorts of weird noises even as I type this. And boxes are fading in and out. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that my Firefox memory footprint just became Bigfoot. All the input boxes are the size of Rhode Island, if Rhode Island were 75 pixels tall and 300 pixels wide. I can drag every visual UI element around, even though I feel guilty doing so.
Apparently I need to upload photos of myself that “make [me] look totally hot.” That’s a quote straight from their help pages. Unfortunately, all I have are photos of cockroaches, my stuffed gorilla, and food. Any Selfish Readers harboring “totally hot” photos of me? Send ‘em in.
Video: The daily routine of a Chinese woman without arms. Performs tasks with feet that most bimanous Americans cannot perform at all: uses chopsticks, cooks with a wok, writes chinese characters, eats fully-shelled crab. Also, this is the first youtube link my parents ever sent me. I mark these days in my Calendar of Mainstream Technology Milestones.
Questions My Father Asked During Dinner While Watching Television, Which I Had Difficulty Answering, Maybe Indicative of Our Yawning Generational Gap:
At ASUC, one of our web-based applications-in-progress needed a personal calendaring component, so I asked one of the student interns to research third-party open source code that we could plop in. Their suggestions? Google Calendar and Mozilla Sunbird, given in a powerpoint presentation, with Pro and Con columns and all, plus “demos”.
I was speechless. What part of “source code module” was vague? Also, I have to explain the difference between a desktop application and a web-based application to a computer science student? Maybe it’s my poor leadership skills, I don’t know. I’m doing something wrong.
Also, we’re using php/mysql which they thankfully know, but they are telling me that they are more comfortable in a Windows dev environment. um, windows as a development environment for PHP? It’s like doing an Etch-a-Sketch on the subway. I think I am just going to ask them, “But you guys know linux/unix, right?”, stare intently at them, and then fire the ones that go b-b-but-but.
So far the split summer between Anonymous Start Up Company (ASUC) and Anonymous Law Firm In New Jersey (ALFINJ) Dickenson & Dodds is going well.
The time it took from my position at ASUC to go from “Summer Intern Advising Us On Cyberlaw and Privacy Concerns” to “Summer Intern Re-making Our Website” was about 3 hours into my first day.
The time it took to go from “Summer Intern Re-making Our Website” to “Summer Intern Creating and Administrating Our Development Environment From Scratch” was 4 days.
Over at ALFINJ Dickenson & Dodds, the time it took to go from a venerable “Summer Associate” to a “Aw, Isn’t The New Kid a Cootie Patootie? (As Per Secretaries 1 thru 3)” was an impressive 2 weeks. I believe the 3 days facial growth cycle was the key to holding out for so long.