One Monkey, Eight Years

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Brezsny
This week, Brezsny tells us Gemini:

"One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time," wrote French author Andre Gide. I'm guessing that 2009 was a time when you embarked on such a search, Gemini -- a half-blind, groping exploration that asked you to leave the past behind without knowing where the future lay. By now, though, I suspect you have sighted the shore of your new frontier. If you haven't yet, it'll happen soon.

Well, yeah. Sighted the shore, weighed anchor, headed up to the beach and set up camp. So what do I do now?

To Leos, my moon sign, he says:

What will it be, Leo? A time of rampaging ids and slamming doors and lost opportunities? Of strange smells and sweeping views of other people's hells? Or will this be the week you finally slip into the magic sanctuary and track down the secret formula? Will this be the breakthrough moment when you outmaneuver the "dragon" with that non-violent "weapon" you've been saving for when it was absolutely necessary? It really is up to you. Either scenario could unfold. You have to decide which one you prefer, and then set your intention.

Huh. "Strange smells and sweeping views of other people's hells" is pretty intriguing, while the dragon thing sounds kinda cliche. I wonder if that's how he meant it?

I remain unguided by Brezsny for the week. Fair enough. Maybe it was meant for somebody else.

Oh, hey -- an announcement
Reactions to my French Laundry post reminded me -- I haven't actually told people about this, though we're not being really "secretive." More like "cautious", or perhaps "lazy", though I'm being a bit "quote-happy" here.

The girl and I are about ten weeks into our attempt to have a second, and probably final, small child.

With luck, this small child will grow up into a larger child, then pre-teen, and so on, but it's too early to plan for that yet. As with last time, we're not planning to find out the gender, and will be quite satisfied so long as our child has roughly normal limb-, head- and digit-counts, et cetera.

Given the timing, Krissy's hoping for a Virgo. I got another Gemini, and fair's fair :-)

The French Laundry
The girl and I recently went to the French Laundry. You're envious, you know it. For details, read on. [Edit: no pictures yet, we have to download them off the camera]

( Yeah, that )

My wife rocks!
Here is a list of the top 50 restaurants in the world. If you scan down the list, the top one in the USA is in New York (Per Se, described as "an urban interpretation of the French Laundry"). The second from the USA that rates is in Chicago (Alinea).

The third from the USA, number 12 in the world, is the French Laundry, up in Napa Valley.

My wife called today for a reservation, which you normally get two months out (call within a half-hour of the reservation line opening, they're definitely full within an hour). We do not have a reservation for two months out -- that was full, it's almost noon.

We have a reservation for this Sunday.

And right now, she's calling around and figuring out babysitting. My wife rocks.

That's a fun pair of horoscopes. This week, Rob says to Gemini (my sun sign):

It's time for you to fly away -- to flee the safe pleasures that comfort you as well as the outmoded fixations that haunt you; to escape at least one of the galling compromises that twists your spirit as well as a familiar groove that numbs your intelligence. In my astrological opinion, Gemini, you need to get excited by stimuli that come from outside your known universe. You need fertile surprises that motivate you to resort to unpredictable solutions.

Well, okay. Not sure how to do that, but okay.

While to Leo, my moon sign, he says:

Usually I overflow with advice about how to access your soul's code. I love to help you express the unique blueprint that sets you apart from everyone else. Every now and then, though, it's a healing balm to take a sabbatical from exploring the intricacies of your core truths. This is one of those times. For the next ten days, I invite you to enjoy the privilege of being absolutely nobody. Revel in the pure emptiness of having no clue about your deep identity. If anyone asks you, "Who are you?", relish the bubbly freedom that comes from cheerfully saying, "I have no freaking idea!"

And now I have a way to do that. Tidy!

Second-person Shooter
Ever wonder what a first-person shooter would be like as a text game? No? That's probably for the best.

This is still awesome, for those of you so long in the tooth that you don't think "Zork" must be some Web 2.0 thing.

Honey in soft drink bottles -- sign #37 that you may be a terrorist
FRESNO, Calif. – The suspicious material found inside luggage that prompted the shutdown of a California airport Tuesday morning turned out to be five soft drink bottles filled with honey, authorities said.

A passenger's suitcase tested positive for TNT at Bakersfield's Meadows Field during a routine swabbing of the bag's exterior, Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood said. When TSA officials opened the bag, they found bottles filled with an amber liquid, he said.

"Why in this day and age would someone take a chance carrying honey in Gatorade bottles?" Youngblood asked. "That itself is an alarm. It's hard to understand."

Things are bad when a sheriff talks about how suspicious it is that somebody would put honey into an empty plastic bottle as a means of transporting it.

The guy in question was a gardener. It looks likely that the honey wasn't in a commercial bottle because he got it not from a commercial bottle, but from, like, actual bees.

Amazingly, it appears he's not going to be arrested or tasered anything for carrying honey, though there's a lot of loud decrying of various completely random things.

The above quote is from an article on this topic.

Update on Shanna
I figure I've driven most people off already by not posting anything interesting (Facebook is helping get rid of LJers, too). So I'll just post my baby filter stuff out in public.

The young'un continues to grow like a cute, curly-haired weed. She asks about people she saw on the Thanksgiving trip to Portland, so her memory's better than we usually give her credit for.

Her big favorite book lately is the "sajee book!", or Mythology book. We've got a big nice hardcover one for kids with lots of silly pockets and inserts and stuff to poke at. If we can keep her from destroying it at this age, I imagine she'll love it when she gets old enough to read the vaguely Lovecraftian/ghost-story plot with asides about Lord Byron.

She continues to love music, especially the "frog song!" -- Pollywog in a Bog by Barenaked Ladies, and the "monkey song!" -- Another Postcard, also by BNL. Honorable mentions go to "7 8 9" and "Drawing" by the same band, which are more rarely requested, and she occasionally even dignifies the singing I do for her in the evening with "nother song!", but that's less common yet.

Relatedly, her talking is much better -- she can rarely manage longer four-plus-word sentences, and she's starting to get some understanding of pronouns and verb tenses. Her manners are still, y'know, toddler-like.

She's getting taller, cleverer, stronger and all the usual stuff as well, so it's getting remarkably hard to keep her out of things. That's as it should be, and in her best interests, and quite frustrating.

I don't think we've got any tremendously new pictures online lately, but the old ones are still cute. You could go look at them again. I'll wait.

Computer Programmers, and Why They're All Guys (But Didn't Used To Be)
I hate posting links to PDFs. I really do.

Also, this draft is a bit rough, with a fair number of simple typos.

It's also extensively cited, well written, and on a topic we really, really need more examination of. If it helps, it starts with an article out of a 1967 issue of Cosmopolitan. Seriously.

If you care about computer programming, feminism and how women get pushed out of industries they're skilled at, read it now, please, as much as you can make time for.

Thanks.

For the record, I didn't write it. Some guy at UPenn did. I'm about halfway through reading it. It's long. Even if you only have time to read the first two or three pages, do.

A fun little teaching technique...
A fellow on why his favorite professor was a liar, purposefully and deviously.

Neat article.

Mmm... Dessert.
At turkeyfest,

vito_excalibur and her fellow Mister E brought excellent desserts, and I got to try them.

Mister E brought a fabulous flourless chocolate cake thing that could have been described as a marquise or ganache in a crust with coffee or any of several other ways -- apparently he made it by hybridizing recipes for a number of similar chocolate-and-cream-in-a-crust confections. It was good and intensely chocolate and thick and slightly overwhelming, as such things should be. Mmmmmm...

vito_excalibur brought something called Breton butter cake, or Kuign Amann. As best I could pick out, it's pronounced a bit like "queen yahMANN", but "queen" is slightly more like "koo-EEN".

You know, like, Baklava? Or other phyllo dough desserts? Imagine the buttery, layery feel of that, but in a dessert that is instead soft and more like a bread or cake. It's also caramelized all around the outside, but I'm a butter guy more than a sugar guy. The caramel was good, but the OHMYGOD BUTTER was what it was all about for me :-)

I'm told the previous attempt was even better, and to make sure there's enough salt to help balance out all the buttery sugary goodness. Makes sense.

So, y'know, if any of you get a chance to try a Kuign Amann, do it. I'm just sayin'.

Or if you get a chance to have dessert with them, do that too :-) The conversation was also fabulous. But it's harder for me to make you drool about it on LJ afterward, which shows the hopeless inadequacy of my writing skills.

I could never be a professional creative writer or a painter. I could get really, really good and I'd never be able to sit back and say "I'm way better than 98% of everybody in the world." I would instead say things like "you know, if you get way up close to that, it TOTALLY doesn't look like actual rabbit fur."

That New Job
I was hoping to have some code I wrote in use by actual people by the end of my first week. Didn't happen. I do now, though.

Yay!

*sigh*

Maine.

*sigh*

At least it was a close loss for civil rights, and not much more than half the people who showed up wanted to oppress a minority?

Nope. Doesn't help, really.

That's not even as comforting as "they meant well, in a horrible, intolerant, patronizing way."

Now *that* is a thought-provoking horoscope...
This week Brezsny tells the Gemini:

Nature's rhythm is cyclical. Everything alive waxes and wanes. If you're smart, you honor that flow by periodically letting parts of your world wither or go to sleep. If you're not so smart, you set yourself up for needless pain by indulging in the delusion that you can enjoy uninterrupted growth. According to my reading of the astrological omens, Gemini, this is your time to explore the creative possibilities of ebbing and slackening. Ask yourself the following question, which I've borrowed from the Jungian author Clarissa Pinkola Estes: "What must I allow to die today in order to generate more life tomorrow?"

Relatedly, he says to Leo, my moon sign:

It might be tempting to turn your home into a womb-like sanctuary and explore the mysteries of doing absolutely nothing while clad in your pajamas. And frankly, this might be a good idea. After the risks you've taken to reach out to the other side, after the bridges you've built in the midst of the storms, after the skirmishes you've fought in the Gossip Wars, you have every right to retreat and get your homebody persona humming at a higher vibration. So I say: Be meticulously leisurely as you celebrate the deep pleasures of self-care.

These things, taken together, suggest that maybe it's time to slow down on the whole six technical tasks a week task that I set myself back in April, and am suddenly having trouble continuing at full bore with the new job.

It's like my desperate scramble to ferociously learn new and interesting things is harder now that I'm doing that at my job too...

Alternately, maybe some of that but less than six. Six a week felt unreasonable when I made the goal, and probably was. But I did it anyway, so I'm glad I picked something unreasonable :-)

So yeah. It's probably time for me to back off on that kind of self-development for a bit, and treat work as being a lot of my allowance for it. Because realistically, it will be.

But that only answers some of the question. I'm sure that's not the only thing in that category, even if it definitely qualifies.

Sensible, harsh, nuanced - a comment
There was a comment on an online article which was substantially better than the article itself that I felt like passing along. Like the commenter, I think it sounds a bit more elitist (against other elitists, amusingly) than it is. Read to the end before you decide he's just stuck up.

( Cut for length... )

Day 2 at job: done
I've now been at the new job for two days. I'm definitely still getting stuff sorted out - accounts, other computer-y and developer-y stuff, garbage can for my cubicle.

But I've made one code change and half of another so far, so it appears that I can make good on my brag -- that I'm likely to have stuff I did actually get used by the end of my first week.

Oh, hey...

msde reminded me that I didn't actually post about this.

The offer from the new employer was definitely acceptable, and I accepted it. My last day with the previous employer was Monday (the day before yesterday), and my first one with the new one will be this coming Monday.

I'm looking forward to it.

Dell: Nope
I don't think we'll be buying from Dell again. I'm glad they produce a Linux-based laptop -- most companies won't, at all, full stop. It's a Microsoft licensing thing that's pretty certainly illegal, but happens with every large hardware vendor anyway. However, things have just hit the "yeah, no" point.

I bought the laptop, and the wireless card promptly failed. That's not great, but is probably excusable. I had to call and get forwarded a few times to get to somebody who would do support (including "yeah, the hardware failed" support), because Dell doesn't directly do that for Linux. That semi-excusable-ish, though *very* inconvenient since those phone numbers don't come with the machine and can't be found easily from the Dell web site.

The tech support guy was very competent, and had me do several things that should probably have voided my warranty to make sure the hardware genuinely didn't work. It was a pain in the ass to do with Shanna around (think of tiny little screws, opening up a laptop and a toddler, all in the same few square yards of space), but it was respectfully and competently done, and I can see why they do it. He didn't make me reinstall the OS and all updates a second time after I'd already done it once, which is, sadly, above average for tech support. And hey, now I know how to re-seat the wireless card in that laptop.

I thought he was calling at weird hours and annoying Krissy and Shanna repeatedly after the laptop had been shipped back to them, including asking questions like "when will the laptop be shipped back" (i.e. questions that Dell tech support should know better than Krissy, and really shouldn't be asking her rudely and randomly). Somebody with an Indian accent identifying themselves as Dell tech support was doing so, and it saddened me that the competent guy I had talked to was also a rude pain in the ass -- except, as it turned out, he wasn't.

Instead, Dell has guys claiming to be technical support calling and asking if the computer is a little slow or if it has any other minor complaints, probably to sell you an upgrade, possibly to just sell you the solution of removing all the shovelware they put on the computer before shipping it to you (I always reinstall any computer, from anybody, before using it).

Of course, whatever solution they're selling doesn't run on Linux. So after repeatedly, rudely, pushily calling many times (the most recent at 9pm), he found out the computer Dell sold me doesn't run Windows -- and it never has, they shipped it with Linux -- and he's stopped calling.

It's hard to overstate just how crappy a customer experience that is. Repeatedly waking up my toddler to sell me useless stuff that Dell already knows won't run on my machine is... special.

At the very least, guys: having your sales personnel identify themselves as such rather than claiming to be tech support, and have a separate list for Linux purchases so you're not trying to sell them Windows crapware. There's plenty of room in the market for Linux crapware if the Windows kind is working well for you.

This is all weird for me. My last Dell purchase, about three years ago, had fabulous customer support. The only serious problem I had was a spurious claim on their web site that my machine would support the intel VMX instructions. And given what a pain in the ass it is to figure that out, I'm okay with the fact that Dell was confused -- it took me several hours of sustained digging to figure out why my processor didn't have them.

Then again, my last machine cost noticeably more. Maybe I just need to not buy cheap stuff from Dell.

Last day at work...
I'm still waiting to see if they're going to do an exit interview. I'd kinda like to go home now, but maybe they'll get it in gear? My manager's checking.

I've cleared out my browser stuff -- bookmarks, cookies, saved passwords and whatnot. FireFox makes it reasonably easy, which is nice.

I already took home everything that was mine. Looking around, I'm reminded of just how much crap was in here when I got here. Most of it hasn't moved an inch in that 2.5 years. The guy who had the cube before I did works here again, but he apparently didn't want it even after coming back. I guess the next guy will feel similarly about me.

I was kinda tempted to snag a technical specification that they had printed out here. Nobody here is ever likely to use it, and it's commonly available, so I wouldn't be stealing intellectual property by taking it. And then I thought, "hey, do I really need more random crap in the house?" The JPEG and PNG specs don't really cut it as stuff to leave laying around. I won't use them much, big impressive binder or no.

[Edit: the figured it out, and I got my exit interview and last check not long after 3pm. So not bad. There was just a scramble at the end -- apparently my email slipped through a crack somewhere and people needed prompting to get started.]