I found this neat java application the other day. Wordle creates word clouds like the one below:
It's been a tough couple of weeks for me, leading up to this week. Things are changing pretty fast at NewCo which is no less inscrutable than it has been in the past. Most of the changes are minor like moving cubicles or some talk of new projects etc, but there are more concerning ones. For example there was a recent email about tightening our belts. Mainly it involved not traveling unless entirely necessary, and of course doing so in "economy or economy premium" where possible. I'm surprised that anyone was allowed to travel at a higher level than that initially considering the company was created with an inbuilt cost consciousness. Two days later we got an email that there was a problem with the payroll system that would lead to our pay getting in on time but our pay stubs being delayed. I'm glad that they let us know, but it is worrying on the heels of the "cheapness initiative" as I like to call it.
Outside of NewCo, there's the issue of the impending end of our old business unit. There's a feeling like a mixture of last day of high school and the funeral of a close friend haunting the halls. Every day, it seems, there is a luncheon to say goodbye to someone, who's moving on to a new job or something. It's been toughest with Becklesworth (who is still around) and Fat'n'Happy and his little family to whom I've grown quite attached. I had dinner with them on Monday and when I was dropped off at the train station had to fight against a surprising wave of emotion. Curse this all too human heart that beats in my breast!
Still got some more time with Becklesworth, who underscored his overall value to the team by organizing a brewery tour at the Anchor Steam brewery. It was a nice way to spend the afternoon, plus the company was good (Dr Germ, The Married Guy [hey, you said they called you that!], Flanders and one other for whom I have no current nickname) so it all worked out. For such a small operation it was amazing to see how much they could make and distribute! I looked for Oompa Loompa's but couldn't really find any - must be part of the development plan though.
Best quote of the last 4 days: "All those women dressed up in line to see the Sex and The City movie, I realized they're not just dressed up, they're dressed up like the characters in the movie! It's like Star Wars for girls, which character are you?"
Today was so warm that it sublimated memories of New York, 1985 and losing my brother in Central Park.
Let me back up a step. I stepped out of the building for lunch today with my colleague Fat'n'Happy, bent on getting a slice or two of pizza. As we walked through the doors of our building, I found my eyes closing and a small smile spreading on my face. The air was warm and silky as bathwater and frankly I'd been waiting for this for the last seven months or so. Thinking this I was suddenly aware of a scent that was distantly familiar to me, which I eventually identified as the smell of New York in the summertime. Not the urine drenched muggy stench of midtown, but the lightly stifling scent of the parks and the less traveled streets. Essentially the warmth of the lunchtime air had sublimated the solid stuff of my memories, releasing the sweet scent of my childhood summers and bringing up a specific memory tied to that smell.
(Wayne? Garth? Tootle-oo-to, Tootle-oo-to, Tootle-oo-to, Tootle-oo-to …)
I just found this blog entry while puttering about avoiding my job. It's a remarkable post, not because it's particularly well written but because of the sentiments expressed in it. It certainly captures a period in my life fairly well; the obsession with comics and the awkwardness around girls may be common but as anyone who went through it will tell you, it always feels like you're the only one.
Moreso, I had a similar experience with female penpals. Flying Lufthansa from Khartoum to Boston almost 20 years ago I was given their kid's in-flight magazine. On the back cover was a list of the newest kids in the Lufthansa pen pals club. The small selection of kids seemed to be from all over the world and I suddenly wanted to be among them - not necessarily to write to any of them, but to be one of the names on the back of the magazine that some other kid would see and think was exotic and exciting. So I sent in my name and surprisingly they must have posted it since I started getting letters. More surprisingly the letters were all from girls.
They were from diverse backgrounds but all more enamored with getting a pen pal, I think than keeping one. There was one German girl who wrote enthusiastically and hoped we'd be in touch "forever" - but neglected to write down her address anywhere. There was the Nigerian girl who stopped writing after the second letter. In those and every other case the glamour wore off fairly soon. Perhaps it was me but I am convinced that it was the nature of the whole thing. Kicking off the correspondance was exciting and sort of romantic, putting you in touch with strangers on the other side of the world. After all, I had also been lured in by this idea - but after those first two letters what is there? Mostly banal accounts of the daily grind: school, sports, family; and those don't keep up the interest. In some ways it's a shorthand for most relationships, with their passionate beginnings descending into dull familiarity.
The interesting thing is that even these abortive attempts and pen pal-ing were a great boost to my adolescent confidence. It seemed that even as I schlepped along unnoticed in my daily life, there was some version of me that was cool, and attractive to people. On paper, anyway.
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like am'rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapp'd power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
Andrew Marvell "To His Coy Mistress"
Doing my part to bring culture to the masses...
It all started with my cousin's phone call last weekend. She was worked up about a visit to Bayside. Bayside is a mostly white neighborhood in Queens, NY, famous for its Sopranos-like residents and for race issues. It's no Bensonhurst but then again, does it have to be? At any rate, the car she was in was blocking the street and when honked at they moved it. In response she and her girlfriend were met with the finger, and then, at the window of their car, a belligerent middle aged gent who (of all the words he could have possibly used to express his displeasure) chose to use the word "nigger". "Just like a nigger," he apparently said to them, repeatedly.
My cousin was, understandably, in shock. After all, this is not 1955 and she was not in Mississippi, and yet here she was hearing the sort of language that one had thought confined to movies about the "bad old days". I tried to calm her down on the phone (this is days after the event mind you), and remind her that she did the right thing by not starting a ruckus right there in the street. That would have been playing into his hands and in a neighborhood like that could have caused her far more pain than just to her dignity. Still I was appalled by the whole thing and I shared her impotent rage. How could such a thing be said in this day and age?
Flash forward to today, at the morning meeting, where one our mid-level managers (Keifer) was referring to something that hadn't happend in a long time as not having happened in "a coon's age". I'm not sure if he realized that the expression has nothing to do with raccoons or any other cuddly woodland creatures. I felt a cold knot in my stomach that was mirrored by the silence in the room. Even our Ditka-like floor supervisor shot me a glance of "are you going to flip out?" My leg twitched and I calmly stood up and walked out of the room, and took the corporate way out - a strongly worded email. Does that make me a coward or a fool? It certainly made me an angry oaf that I snapped at my lunch partners and stomped off to eat by myself.
It all started with my cousin's phone call last weekend. She was worked up about a visit to Bayside. Bayside is a mostly white neighborhood in Queens, NY, famous for its Sopranos-like residents and for race issues. It's no Bensonhurst but then again, does it have to be? At any rate, the car she was in was blocking the street and when honked at they moved it. In response she and her girlfriend were met with the finger, and then, at the window of their car, a belligerent middle aged gent who (of all the words he could have possibly used to express his displeasure) chose to use the word "nigger". "Just like a nigger," he apparently said to them, repeatedly.
My cousin was, understandably, in shock. After all, this is not 1955 and she was not in Mississippi, and yet here she was hearing the sort of language that one had thought confined to movies about the "bad old days". I tried to calm her down on the phone (this is days after the event mind you), and remind her that she did the right thing by not starting a ruckus right there in the street. That would have been playing into his hands and in a neighborhood like that could have caused her far more pain than just to her dignity. Still I was appalled by the whole thing and I shared her impotent rage. How could such a thing be said in this day and age?
Flash forward to today, at the morning meeting, where one our mid-level managers (Keifer) was referring to something that hadn't happend in a long time as not having happened in "a coon's age". I'm not sure if he realized that the expression has nothing to do with raccoons or any other cuddly woodland creatures. I felt a cold knot in my stomach that was mirrored by the silence in the room. Even our Ditka-like floor supervisor shot me a glance of "are you going to flip out?" My leg twitched and I calmly stood up and walked out of the room, and took the corporate way out - a strongly worded email. Does that make me a coward or a fool? It certainly made me an angry oaf that I snapped at my lunch partners and stomped off to eat by myself.
I had no idea this word existed, or what it meant. Frankly it sounds made up, doesn't it? I ran across the abbreviation BOUS in one of our parameter sets when I first started working at the Blue Beast. It seems that it is a holdover from the days of [begin dork-speak segment] screw-actuated stages, which were not always perfectly matched, leading to a different overlay offset depending on what direction you were scanning[end dork-speak segment]. Hence, as the plough furrows. I learned all this from my colleague who owns that particular part of the process.
The problem of course is that the word sounds completely fake, in the same way that budonkadonk does. That's compounded with my colleague's dead pan delivery to almost anything. Just listen to yourself saying the word: boo-strof-a-donic.
"Did you hear that new Black Eyed Peas song? It's boustrophedonic yo!"
"Twenty dollars for that? That's boustrophedonic!"
"I'm sorry, sir, your wound, it's gone boustrophedonic, we'll have to amputate."
It's amazing that a word like this really exists, and it's a pity we can't put it to more use.