The Answering Machine

As we get older it becomes increasingly more important to retain our inner childishness. There is an innocence, an ability to be open to joy, and a knack for seeing the good side in people which accompanies a sense of childishness. It is a quality found most often in children, who don't know any better, and those elderly who have learned enough to appreciate it.

The trick, however, is to maintain this as one of many aspects of ones personality. Childish behavior is a bit like food coloring -- The tiniest bit will permeate into other areas of your personality. The tiniest bit can greatly alter your appearance to the outside world.

So, keeping your heart young without having others see you as a complete buffoon becomes a rather complex endeavor. In truth, maintaining this balance is something that I have, rather recently, failed at completely.

Let me tell you the story of the doctor, the answering machine, and the screaming dinosaur. I'd make it an Aesopian fable, but the only morale would be: "don't do things that Ed does", which is something any regular reader of this blog knows anyway.

I have a dinosaur puppet. It is small, green, and you put your hand up its nether regions to make its arms move. In fact, I would imagine placing your arms up anything's nether regions would induce wild arm waving. More unique to this puppet is a small button on its left toe which, when pressed, causes the dinosaur to emit a great dinosaur-like roar.




ROAR! ROAR!



A few weekends ago, for my birthday, I was given a new "modular" phone system. You know, a base station and some satellite phones for use in areas of your house where a phone jack is missing. So, out with the old, in with the new, we needed to take down our old, faithful answering machine base station and put this new, fancy answering machine in its place.

This required, of course, a new answering machine message. I recorded one, it was a bit dull. It didn't really introduce the drama, the intrigue, the general giddy quest for the unknown that people experience when they call our house. In short, we needed something better to coax a message out of our future callers.

Enter... the dinosaur. The roaring, flesh-rending dinosaur puppet so terrifyingly pictured above. A few laughs later and the following message was on our machine:

Hi! You've almost reached Ed and Linda! Please leave your *ROAR* *ROAR* What was that? *ROAR* *ROAR* Oh God! Oh No! He.. *ROAR* *ROAR* Help! Somebody save my! Augh! Augh! *ROAR* *ROAR* It has my leg! *ROAR* Help! *ROAR* *ROAR*
< beep >




Hilarity ensued. What the hell, it was a weekend, we would record a new message later on. Besides, most people who would call us know we are crazy anyway. No harm done.

Amazing, isn't it, how one can forget to re-record such a message. Linda called me at work today with two pieces of information:

1. My doctor's office called this afternoon and left a message giving me the time of my follow-up appointment.
2. We need to change the answering machine message.

Oh dear.



*ROAR* *ROAR*

-Ed

Proof!

In case any of you were wondering I do, indeed, possess a heart. I know this because I got to see and hear it pumping away on Thursday when I got my heart ultrasound. I don't know whether I have a healthy heart just yet, we'll have to wait until next week to hear back from the doctor. At least, I hope it is next week -- good news travels slowly.

What makes this whole scenario interesting (besides the fact that I am in the center of it) is the absolute absurdity which surrounds it (again, because I am in the center of it).

Yesterday I had an appointment at 2:30pm to have my heart looked at. Yesterday at 1pm, 35 miles away from my doctor, I had a simple meeting. Well, I shouldn't say simple -- simple is one of those words that has a highly subjective application. So let me first define simple... lately simple means "there is a huge, ungodly obstacle to the project which will take X hours to solve, and we can plan a course of action in 30 minutes".

So, the 1pm meeting was supposed to be simple, but it was not simple. It turned into something a bit more complex. Let me define complex: complex means "there is a huge, ungodly obstacle to the project which will take 2X hours to solve, and we can plan a course of action in 60 minutes".

So here I was, running from the meeting at 2pm for my 2:30pm doctor appointment, 35 miles away. And I'm out of gas. And it was drizzling. In medical terminology, this is called a stress test. Through some miracle of physics, time management, lack of vehicular safety, and welltimes stoplights, I arrived a mere 10 minutes late for my appointment. Whew. First obstacle done with.

So the cardiac person lays me down and starts running a probe all over my chest. My heart is beating a little faster from the sprint through the parking lot and sprint up 3 flights of stairs. but we are able to have a good, if completely bizaare conversation. The background music is my heart, playing for all its worth.


Thumpa Thumpa Thumpa
Ultrasound Man: So, what do you do?
Ed: Software. I'm so sorry I am late.
Thumpa Thumpa Thumpa
Ultrasound Man: Sofware? Really! Do you do client/server software?
Ed: I've done client/server software before.
Thumpa Thumpa Thumpa
Ultrasound Man: Do you have many friends?
Thumpa ... Thumpa
Ed: I have lots of friends. ??
Thumpa Thumpa Thumpa
Ultrasound Man: I mean, do you have lots of software friends?
Ed: Well, bird of a feather, you know? Did I mention I'm sorry I was late?
Thumpa Thumpa Thumpa
Ultrasound Man: Do your lots of software friends write client server software?
Ed: Am I going to live?
Thumpa Thumpa Thumpa
Ultrasound Man: My company needs lots of people to write client/server software for us. We are looking for software people to help us.
Ed: Oh, well, give me your business card and we'll talk about it.
Thumpa Thumpa Thumpa

So, wiping ultrasound gel off of my chest, he writes his home e-mail address down, gives me his business card, and I tell him I will send him an e-mail.

I didn't want to seem rude, but did want to casually steer the conversation back to my health so I asked if I would hear any results. He said not right away. The cardiologist will look at it, then call my doctor, who will call me. He did mention he thought it would be OK.

So, apparently, one can network in the strangest place. I will infer that I am in some level of health as he would not try and contract my programming services had he felt I only had minutes to live.

-Ed

Freedom Isn't Free

No, this isn't going to be a political propaganda blog. The only "shock and awe" you will find here is purely literary. 8)

Linda and I were out at dinner last night reflecting on what a truly horrific year 2005 has been, so far, for us. Now, granted, it has been a pretty terrific year for others, but they can get their own blogs. Here at the Red Tar Pit 2005 is officially a crappy year.

In short, we spend a good deal of time talking about grief, loss, and how we, collectively, deal with it. Whenever we talk on such morbidity I'm reminded of the 5 stages of grief, first proposed by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in her book "On Death and Dying." In it she talks about people facing their own mortality. We all know the standards: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and finally Acceptance.





Why has this been so popular? Because it is so common. Because it strikes a chord in those who have gone through serious loss and hardship, and because looking at the decomposition it appears to make complete and utter sense.

So were we really munching salad and talking about the stages of grief at a restaurant? Not really, the grief was a minor point. The major point was the much more philisophically fun question of whether we have free will and, if so, what exactly is free will?

My question being, if we have so many areas in our lives where our behavior is almost pre-defined can we really state we have free will? If we will always go through the 5 stages of grief, if we always have behavioural patterns, if our reactions to certain events are truly predictable, what on earth is free about that?

How many times have we said, have we known how someone will react to something? How many times have we used the phrase "I know him/her like the back of my hand"? I would hazard the guess that the entire successful science of psychology is based on the fact that we, collectively, obey behavioral patterns.


So let me fast-forward through the soup, salad, and entree portion of the discussion, throw out some dessert, and backfill in subsequent bloggings on the subject. I think free will does exist but requires such tremendous emotional energy (resolve, discipline, commitment) to actually execute that many, many people simply abandon free will for convenience. In that context, freedom is not free. It involves some work.

And by free will, I mean self-determination, self-improvement, goal attainment, attitude adjustment, or any other desire. But I explicitely exclude whim. My ability to wave my arms and make a noise is separate, to me, from an ability to manifest personal destiny.

Of course, my follow up question wonders if free will is nothing more than the ability to switch behavioral patterns. If the emotional energy involved in the transfer increases with the disparity between the source and target "ruts". That's clearly a reductionist view, but one which I'm not yet done exploring.

-Ed

Troublemaker?

I was going to start this blog with the simple observation that "I'm no spring chicken". However, I don't quite know the etymology of the phrase (though I could take a guess...) and, frankly, think there are better ways to relate my experience than through a comparison to poultry.

In college (yes they had college back in the 90's...) I studied computer science... scratch that... I studied software engineering. What's the difference? Come over one day when you have 3 years to kill and we'll chat about it. My college was small, classes were small, and I was a suck-up who made friends with all my teachers. Two of these teachers were rabid software engineers. They were program slicers (come over, 3 years, you know the drill) and they beat into me a sense of engineering over simple construction. One of the reasons I do so many other things well (or at least methodically) is through whatever small discipline they were able to transfer to me.

Starting in my junior year of college I was tutoring adults through their masters degree programs. I've probably been a "helper" to 10's of graduate courses in "my day". The money was always good, especially if the person really, really, needed an "A" in the class. 8) The problem was, it left a pretty bad taste in my mouth for MS degrees.

Fast forward some depressing number of years and here I am, sitting in a master's degree program, remembering what it was like to be a junior in college. I am at once bored silly and terrified that the discipline has changed while I wasn't looking. That's right... bored and terrified are not mutually exclusive.

At work I am part of a group which, as its charter, defines the software processes to be followed for all software in the entire space department. It requires a real passion for software process. It also requires a real knowledge of software engineering. One of my graduate classes is called "The fundamentals of software engineering". It's like taking a class on breathing -- you know how to do it but always wonder if you can do it better.

And this is where I often get myself in trouble. I need to make the class interesting to me, because it is a 3 hour class and if there is something that is truly new I don't want to miss it because I was daydreaming. Usually, this means being mischevious... starting out with some simple humor and then working my way up to "devil's advocacy" and outright sophistry. Defending silly statements and fringe views just to hear, and refirm, the arguments against them.

The problem is, in making the class entertaining for myself, I risk coming across as arrogant, derailing, or simply psychotic (flipping viewpoints too frequently).

I suppose if the worst thing I can say about the classes I am taking now is that I struggle to make thems fun without being too much of a nuisance, that really isn't too much to complain about. It's funny how the thing I thought would be a real stressor in my life turned out to be one of the more calming and affirming things in it.

-Ed

ps. Some of this could have to do with the individual instructors. A good friend of mine is taking one of the classes I am taking, but in a different section at a different location. He complains about the number of homework assignments, how they take 6 hours to complete, and how the material goes by so quickly in class no one understands it. I showed him my homework assignment and the first question was "What color is an orange". I think he wanted to weep.

Let's hope I'm abnormal

I had a physical yesterday and the EKG machine stated either I have a natural abnormal EKG or,at some point in my life I've had a heart-attack.

Let's hope I'm abnormal. We'll find out Thursday...

I've just hadno emotional energy withwhich toblog lately. Plus, at homemy spacebar is gradually gettingworseand worse. My freetime at work is spent studying for class.

Graduate school has beenablast sofar. Maybe my next blog will beaboutthat.

-Ed

Life Uncommon

As children we are taught the benefit of sharing. I am convinced that such early education has an economical optimization in mind: if you have three kids that love to share, then you just need to buy one toy. For the sake of argument, let's forget that such logic never, ever works.

Over time, you learn to share non-tangible things: thoughts and feelings. Almost all communication is a sharing of some sort. Our ability to share what is in our minds and hearts is one of the things which make us human. The ability to take ourselves out of our own context and into anothers is what makes us graceful. The ability to make others want to leave their contexts and enter our own is what makes us leaders. The courage to share the events of our lives with others makes them be closer to us.

I share quite a bit. In fact, I'm sure many people dub me the king of "too much information". I don't care. It is my way -- if you are near my life you are part of my life. No one ever scratched their head and said "gee, I wonder what Ed thinks about XYZ." When I share good news it is because I want to celebrate with those around me. When I share bad news, it is because I seek the support of those around me.

An old African proverb states "It takes a village to raise a child". But not just any village, I would suppose. I assume one would require a village of communicating, sharing, close-knit people. People who are not afraid to share bad news as well as good news.

So, three weeks ago, when Linda told me she was pregnant we danced in the kitchen. We called some family. We called some friends. We waited a week or two more and then started telling those around us. We simply could not wait. The concept of not sharing good news with people we care is just alien to us. Not being able to communicate that joy ate at us as we tried to be disciplined enough to only tell people as we saw them in person.

And yesterday, Monday, as Linda and I were rushing to the hospital with pains we sat in the OB's office wondering what was happening. After blood work and examinations and ultrasounds we were finally given the news we had so desperately not wanted to hear: our pregnancy was not viable. We had an empty "yoke-sac". No heartbeat. No arm buds. No leg buds. The biological equivalent of a plastic easter-egg canister.

Tomorrow, Linda will undergo a short procedure and, just like that, we will be back to "baby-making square one".

But, before all that, came the difficult task of informing family, then friends, of the bad news. And such is the double-edged sword of living an open life: laugh and the world laughs with you, cry and you cry alone. Now, that's a little draconian because I'm not crying right now and when I was, I was certainly not crying alone.

But, especially in our relative young ages, we simply don't have an experiential repetouire of tragedies to draw upon. A friends wants to talk playstation/football/parties/comedy clubs/computers, etc... and we all have experience in that. We can hold our own. What, your computer died? I have experience with that. I can talk to you about it.

Toss in some life tragedies and the experience gap is pronounced: You lost your pregnancy? Usually you get a silence first, then an "I'm sorry" then... another I'm sorry. Where do you go from there? I've gotten some incredibly touching responses and some incredibly un-touching responses, and I would relate all of them back to the experiential depth of the responder.

Touching responses have been some of the outpourings from family and friends. The flowers, the frequent phone calls, the shared tears, the offered hopes, the relating of similar occurences. Thank you, and God bless you.

The normal responses have been more of the "ouch", "damn", and general "I'm so sorry" responses which show a recognition of emotional pain, but just a lack of know-how in alleviating it.

A rather unexpected and, less touching, response that you get sometimes is "well, that's why you aren't supposed to tell people you are pregnant in the 1st trimester".

I think I understand the support being offered in that "advice": Don't count your chickens until they are hatched. But behind it is a more sinister interpretation of life:

-only share to others that which makes you look good and strong.
-don't share your hopes, lest you look foolish if they are dashed.
-what happened is shaming and should be hidden.

I'm sorry, but those are the philosophies of the emotionally weak -- philosophies in which one sinks or swims by the perception of others.

So, while it is very hurtful to have to go through, and share, such pain with so many family and friends it would be more hurtful still to have kept the last three weeks of joy, promise, hope, terror and dispair to myself. To have removed from those around me the insight into my life that I publish every day.

Some people get it and others cannot. But it's the way I live my life, and it is certainly a life uncommon.

When Linda and I started trying to have a baby in June we did not know how long it would take us to conceive, but we told people anyway. We laughed because it coincided with our cruise. Our family and friends dubbed it the 2005 "scruise". Did we know at the time it would only take us 2.5 months to conceive? No! Did we care? No! Would we have cared if it took us 12 months? 16 months? No! It was an important milestone in our lives, and one we wanted to share with those we felt close to.

What is the possible benefit of holding our hopes and our fears like poker cards -- close to our chest so that no others can see?

-Ed

Workbench

One of my favorite magazines is the "Family Handyman". Being relatively new to home improvement, and owning a home which needs lots of improvement, the articles and style of the magazine is a terrific fit for where I am right now. In the three years of dedicated reading, I have seen very little content repetition.

I am now making my garage an acceptable workshop where we can not only park cars but also produce the furniture that I want to build for the house. Step 1 of this process was building a good "no-bounce" workbench.

Back in September of 2004 there was a terrific article on just such a workbench, which I had dog-eared for just this occaision:



But, being me, I swore I could do a little better. Notice all that wasted space between the two boards labelled "B"? Also, the workbench, as shown, was only 5' long and, clearly, I needed 6'. 8) After a little sweat and about $70, I had created the following:





Please pardon the messy views of my garage -- it remains a work in progress. Is this the greatest workbench ever? Probably not. But it is very sturdy and flat enough for the projects I am using. And, frankly, at $70 it is close enough to workbenches that cost 25x as much. Really. Go look at the Ulmia Workbench:



It is a nicer workbench, it comes with a vice attached. It is not worth, to me, the $1799.00 they are asking for it when I can build something as good (for me) for the price of shipping!

My Workshop

Is progressing nicely. I just build a kickin' cool workbench for $70. I can't wait to post pictures of the original magazine article which described the bench, the bench I built with all the improvements I added 8), and a $700 workbench from a catalog that looks the exact same.

-Ed

A Mystery

My webhosting for www.mreparties.com has gone away, and I've lost all of its online content. No worries, as I've got archived backups of most everything. Unfortunately, though, that was where I was hosting my pictures for this blog. So no pictures until I figure this out.

-Ed

That Nightmare

You know the one.. you come to a class final only to realize that you haven't attended a single class that semester! Most of us have had the dream but today... today... I lived it.

Graduate school classes started on September 7th. That's a Wednesday. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday classes ran last week, with Monday and Tuesday classes joining in this week. Does this mean that the Monday and Tuesday classes go one week less because they start later? No. Monday and Tuesday classes must meet the week of Thanksgiving, whereas Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday classes do not.

Still with me? Good.

I have a Monday class and a Tuesday class. At least... I thought I had a Monday class. Some classes can be taken at my work (JHU/APL). There is a building next to minewith classrooms in it and if you are sufficiently swift you can register to take classes there, having not so much a commute as a brisk walk to school. I registered to take classes at APL, and those classes were on Monday and Tuesday.

Still with me? Good.

The classes taught at APL fill up very quickly because every working schmuck in the program, like me, wants to take the classes where tey work. By the time my paperwork cleared, the classesI wanted to take at APL had filled. I needed to take them at a different campus, about 10 miles up the road. Both classes were at the same times, and appeared to be on the same days, just at different locations.

Still with me? Good!

I get a registration slip in the mail. It lists my class names, times, and days they meet. Next to one is a T which, I presume, stands for Tuesday. Next to another is an M which, I presume, stands for Monday. All seems right with the world.

Today I ready for my first day of class. I leave work at 4pm, get tothe place by 4:15pm, ready for my 4:30pm class. I go to the "front desk" of the satellite campus and ask the receptionist in which room my class meets. She takes my class number, looks on her list, and informs me "I'm sorry, sir. We don't have that class here".

Still with me? Because this is where the ol' nightmare begins.

I hand her my dot-matrix-printed, carbon-transferred copy of my registration receipt, showing my class names, times, dates, and locations. After a ltitle research we discover that my Monday class is not a Monday class. It is a Thursday class. How did we finally noodle this out? The M on the registration sheet was not an M at all. It was an H. In academia, an H apparently means Thursday. On a carbon-transferred dot-matrix printed receipt, I gotta tell you, an H looks alot like an M, especially when you were expecting an M in the first place.

No problem! Thursday is a fefw days away. I'm not late. I'm early!

No. Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday classes started last week. I missed my first graduate class. 1 out of 13. A 3 hour course, gone. Holy crud, cue Psycho music.

Then a moment of salvation, a cosmic coincidence that pulls my butt out of the fire: The class through some freak accident, is being taught by... a coworker of mine who sits directly across the hall from me. We were both on the same flight software team.

Yes. I randomly go to graduate school, pick a class, lose my first seating choice, get assigned a different location and happen to get a teacher who is on the same flight software team as myself. The class? A generic core class: the fundamentals of computer architectures. Holy wow, batman.

So I drive back to APL, stop by his office, and relate the above. We have a good laugh, he tells me what I missed. He further tells me he made a scheduling mistake so the homework that was due on the 2nd class won't be due until the 3rd class, so I have no homework. He also happens to have copies of all of his handouts and presentations. He tells me he will see me on Thursday.

Why haven't I blogged lately? Trust me, this is the least of the bizarre that hasbeen going on.

-Ed

Sorry

I've been away more and more often now. Times they are a changin'. New items a plenty very shortly.

Square 1

It's official.

I am now a graduate student at JHU taking two courses this semester. My first classes? This coming Monday and Tuesday. I've even got my new student ID card.

One of this many things that has changed since I was in college is the enormous price of textbooks. The book for one of my classes is $130! And this is no weighty tome. It's a standard sized hard-back book with, perhaps, 600 pages or so.

For $130, I want way more tree damage than that...

-Ed

My Car Generates Gasoline

My car has a digital readout that tells you how many miles are left until you are out of gas. Presumably, this calculation is based on how many gallons of gasoline the computer *thinks* is still in your gas tank and what your current "miles-per-gallon" average is.

I got in the car this morning to go to work and the readout stated that I had 121 miles until empty, which places me at about 1/3 full (I get around 330 miles on a tank of gas). As the premium stuff inches towards $4 a gallon, I've been trying to drive in a manner which saves gas: fewer throttles and speedups, less passing, not accelerating out of turns, and staying away from high RPMs in low gears.

Apparently, this technique works. 36 miles later when I pulled into my parking lot at work, my car read that I now had 124 miles until empty!

My car generates its own gasoline!

-Ed