Dreaded 20-year reunion

I went to my High School 20th reunion last Saturday.
It was surreal.
I should have studied my Yearbook.
I don't remember anyone or anything from High School. Have I been in a coma?

Seriously, the common passtime was covering your nametag and quizzing others about your name. I pretty much failed most of the time, since none of my school friends went. I talked about the whole thing at my sister's house the next day. About 1/3 of the graduating class showed up, and it wasn't necessarily all the "cool kids". Then she pointed out the pattern: it's the Cheerleader squad and their extended circle of friends.

Ah. That explained it.

Much of the affair was a smattering of awkward conversations, and furative glances around looking for an excuse to move on to the next conversation (or at least away from the current one). It was a little surprising what people remember me by (and conversely, what I remembered from them) given the context of the next couple of decades since we'd all been last forcibly colocated.

They'd thought I'd be a writer, since I wrote a lot of Sci-Fi and comedy. Computer programmer and future college professor was a bit of a shock. But, when I was in public school, we didn't have computer classes, and the only computer was the Radio Shack TRS-80 in the glass-walled Math Lab, which was the pinnacle of nerddom. You may as well don a Star Trek Enterprise (TM) blue shirt and clip-on Vulcan (TM) ears if you were going to sit in there.

(We had a computer at home, too, only ours was faster and had more memory. My dad wrote a really crude word processing program. The downside was that all my school papers came out on 5 inch wide thermal paper strips, which I had to rewrite or retype to turn in. Hardly a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card from being a nerd, but at least I wrote funny stories on it.)

I remembered one former classmate as having his car battery stolen out his car (on more than a couple of occasions) while in college. Another for the wild parties he'd thrown, including an episode involving Bacardi and crashing a small houseboat into an island in Lake George. On the way out, I finally ran into the guy whose tooth I'd accidentally knocked out during flag football in 8th grade Gym class--one of a frightening number of head blows I've experienced throughout my teens. (After hiking the ball, I'd stood up, somehow hitting his front tooth with my head.) I still have the scar, he's still got the front cap.

But it was interesting, seeing what people did after graduation. No doctors or lawyers in the group, but a large number had gone to Business schools, worked in finance, and moved to Boston. There were a smattering of others, married with spouses, or divorced and taking another shot at former high school sweethearts or the ones that got away.

It was an hour drive back to Albany, with a glass of wine over a Saturday Night Live repeat before going to bed, my voice still hoarse and ears still buzzing from all the noise. It didn't clear up until after Sunday lunch.

Well, 10 more years until the next one.

At the concert

Us, SPAC, lawn seats, Sheryl Crow concert. "If it makes you happy..."

-------------------------------------------------------
This message was sent from a T-Mobile wireless phone.

Social Calendar-ing? Social Scheduling?

Wow, it just dawned on me that there's a new category of Web2.0 / Social Software: the Social Calendar. The idea is this: sharable calendars, as starting with Microsoft Exchange / Outlook (ok, that's hardly the first one, but the most famous one), and more recently with Yahoo and Google, allow users to share their calendars. Services like eVite allow invitations to be sent, and (I think) integrated with Yahoo! Calendar.

There are a number of other web-based calendars out there. Really, it's nothing special. I've written one or two back in the day. But the new ones have sharing features, and there are more papers being published on the topic. Does this constitute a new category of Social Software? Why not, I say. Why not call it "Social Scheduling", since it fits the pattern of "Social Bookmarking". Now if we can figure out how to nail down store hours and bus schedules, so much the better.

And, Google Calendar apparently does an XML feed. Will have to check that one out too.

It all just seems a little trivial, but look what happened with Blogs...

Comp Exam Hangover

It's been almost a week since I turned in the Comp Exam. I still have a bunch of things to do, I just can't quite get into gear. But, we're going to the Sheryl Crow concert tomorrow night at SPAC, and on Saturday, I have my 20-year high school reunion. (I'm beyond thinking about how old that makes me feel.)

I have papers and proposals to do. But, I'm a little beat. Maybe I'll take a shot at it in the morning. I can barely focus on the letters 'XML', much less draw up a new syllabus for an XML course right now.

I'm a little down about Pluto losing its planet status. That sucks. It has a couple more moons, for a total of three. Doesn't that count? I think the story about how Pluto was discovered was pretty cool. I wrote a paper on it once, maybe in the 5th or 6th grade. It doens't matter to me that it never turned out to be the mysterious 'Planet X' that disturbed the orbits of the Outer Planets.

I think I should go to bed now. Maybe I'll feel sharper in the morning...

Rite of Passage

I turned in my General Comp exam on Friday, 4 pm. It was due at 4:30. I had actually finished it by 2pm, but had to wait for my car, drive downtown to make copies (they wanted triplicate), pick up my paycheck, go to the bank, and then drop off the exam. Normally, such an exam wouldn't be last on my list of errands, but there was time to spare and the paycheck would come in handy.

So, aftter turning it in, I waited around the parking lot for my friend Matt, who was running a little late. After all, it wouldn't be more than half an hour.
Over the next 20 minutes or so, I saw Jason park and run in. 4:10 pm.
Then Laura. 4:15 pm
Then Alex. 4:20 pm.
I think I saw one or two other people run in from a different door. Maybe 4:25 pm.
Finally I saw Matt's car tear through the campus and reach the sidewalk in a screeching halt, then him running inside. 4:28 pm.

Does everyone have to run when returning the exam?

But it was over, at last. I met everyone in the parking lot, chatting briefly. Not about answers, but basically about how much the exam sucked. After all, most of the questions bore a very faint resemblance to anything we covered in those proseminars. (I think I can at least say that much. The full discussion will have to wait until after August 25th, 4:30 pm, by department mandate.)

I wrote 41 pages in 80 hours. That pretty much fits in with my standard rule of thumb, that I need about 2 hours per page to research and write a halfway decent paper. Given my estimate that about 20 of those pages were halfway decent, I'd say it's about right. I'm not going to comment on the other 20 pages right now.

Safe to say, those 80 hours were a complete blur. I had to research and learn brand new (to me) theories in Cognitive Psychology and Sociology, and some of it was pretty interesting. Of course, I had no time to really explore any of that, but at least I walked out of the exam with a couple new research areas to think about.

But what's the point of all that, I ask myself? Half of the exam covered things we never did in any of the seminar classes. Is it just another test about how quickly we can learn and write about brand new material? I don't know. It seemed a bit more like a rite of passage, like the old Native American deal of entering adulthood by being made to hang by hooks planted in your skin or something equally disturbing. If anything, it seemed to reward irresponsible procrastinators who tend to wait until the end of the semester to churn out enormous volumes of work in a short period of time.

Like me.

Comp Exam, Day 4 - morning

Four down, 1 to go, 8 hours remaining.

With about an hour of sleep last night and another pot of coffee, I finally knocked off two more questions. Now that the kids are awake and practicing the recorder (yes, the musical instrument), I've retreated to a coffee shop to hammer away on the keyboard.

It feels like the last lap of a long distance race. But I'm on (my revised) schedule: finish the 4th qustion by 8 am. I need a break for a few minutes for my brain to shift gears. I might even not fail the exam.
[pause]
Ok, break over.

14 hours to go

I've completed 2 questions, and have half-completed the remaining 3 in the first 66 hours of the exam. I have 14 hourse left to finish the other 3.

The papers don't have to be brilliant, they just have to be B's to pass.

I wish I could take back some of the time spent crafting an A+ answer for the first question, which I spent about a day on. Dammit.

Now to finish. Sleep is largely out of the question now, aside from a catnap or two. That can wait until after 5 pm tomorrow.

Comp Exam, Day 3 - morning

Day three. Despite my eager anticipation during Day 1 and optimism during Day 2, I'm settling down, already behind schedule, with the exam period already halfway over.

I've finished one question, with the rest, well, slightly started.

So here's my readjusted schedule:
Day 1: 0 questions completed
Day 2: 1 question completed
Day 3: 3 questions to complete
Day 4: 1 question to complete

Progress is never linear. Now time to stop wasting time online, since the caffeine is starting to kick in. Still, I was warned repeatedly that I shouldn't expect to sleep at all (or maybe for an hour or two) during the exam. That may be true tonight, but I still think it would have been stupid to pull that for 4 straight days. I've probably slept for about 11 hours so far, out of the last 46. I know all about work performance under sleep deprevation.. I was a working computer programmer when both of my kids were born. Most of the sleep I had in those days was while standing on the subway...

Comp Exam, Day 2 - morning

Contrary to popular belief, it's possible to sleep at some point during the 80 hour exam. Then again, during the birth of our first child, we slept through labor.

Labor comes in two basic phases (I don't know the proper terminology, since I'm done having kids, and that's knowledge which no longer seems to apply.) There's plain old labor, with the contractions every n-number of minutes apart. This can go on for hours. Sometimes the mother can even sleep a little during this. We did.

Then there's active labor, which is a whole different ballgame. This is the stage of heavy contractions, ultimately leading up to the passage of the baby through the birth canal. I guess if you think of it as passing something between the size of a softball and a bowling ball through a part of your body that was once considerably smaller, you might get the picture. Drugs or no drugs, it's just going to be painful for quite a while. But at the very end, you end up with a beautiful bouncing baby (don't try the bouncing part) which somehow makes the whole experience worthwhile.

Then there's the experience of passing gallstones, which my brother relayed to me once, during Thanksgiving many years ago. It's along the same idea as childbirth in terms of sensation and proportion, but the resultant seems a little less fulfilling.

I think the comp exam is supposed to be somewhere in the middle. So far it hasn't seemed too bad. At least I'm done with the research, and had a little sleep. Let's hope the remainder is a little less painful. But clearly, the active writing part now must kick in. And somehow there's no operation to deliver the information if I'm unable to get it out of me the natural way...

I'm too old for this stuff.

Comp Exam, Day 1

Got the General Comp exam this morning, and feel pretty good about it so far. Taking a short break 3 hours into it. I've written almost a whole page!

77 hours to go.

Calm before the storm

The weather has suddenly cooled off, by quite a bit. Ok, it's mid 70's for the next few days, no rain, nice breeze, and sunny. Had I not run out of propane for the BBQ, life would be perfect.

Except that I start my General Comp exam in less than 4 days. By this time next Friday, I'll be exhausted, burnt out, unable to type or form complete sentences, or at least more so than usual. But at least the exam will be over.

I've reviewed some more material, made some more notes. But it's late, and my soda can is making really strange noises. It's Sierra Mist Free, or diet lemon-lime flavored soda. I have absolutely no idea what the hell it's made of, but at least water is one of the ingredients, even if the only identifiable one. Possibly the only scarier beverage in the house is Caffeine Free Diet Pepsi.

But, I've about run out of things to do to prepare for the exam. I've at least looked through all the material from the courses. I am at least vaguely aware of what we did in class, I'm pretty aware of what questions I'm *not* going to try in the exam. Pretty much everything else is busy work that'll save me an hour or two, tops, out of the 80 hours we seem to have now. But maybe it's just the denial talking.

Sleep? Fret? Meditate? Bike? Do Yoga? Why haven't we even made a verb out of Yoga yet? Crap, maybe it's time to quit for the evening and relax. After I look over the past exams again, that is.

Something Else

Taking a study break at 6:30 am. With a week left before my Comprehensive Exam, it's time to get down to business. It means early morning, evenings, lunch breaks spent rereading old articles and reading through new articles, since they like to think we're on top of current trends, not just the 10-year-old papers we read for class. I've (briefly) reviewed the class materials, looked over old exams, and am starting an annotated bibliography on probable questions. No point spending the time writing too much specifically for questions I haven't seen yet-- there is still plenty to do without wasting time on the illusion of preparation.

I'll be ready. I may not pass, but I'm as ready as I'm going to be by next week.

After a summer of work, some study, ongoing Departmental BS, and endless fretting about the damn exam, I find myself somewhat relieved that the waiting is almost over. I'm amazed at just the level of BS that goes along with Graduate Assistantships. You'd think they were paying top dollar, as opposed to a small fraction of what I used to make before going back to school. Damn, nothing creates more headaches than dealing with shallow pockets.

Kids are up, time to make breakfast.

Sunday afternoon BBQ

Today, not only was the weather unusually non-raining, but outright sunny and pleasant. It seemed like a kind of freak weather event, like the time that it rained only in the front half of my yard. Another family we've known since Grad school came over, and their kids (roughly the same ages as ours) played in the little kiddie pool in the backyard.

Now that everyone's gone home and I'm cycling the dishwasher and washing machine to clean up, and am debating whether to wipe up or hose off the kid table and chairs. Hosing off is not as labor-saving as it may sound.

And the next question is whether to see the free Kids play in Washington Park or not. Either way, there won't be any studying done for a few more hours...

Early Saturday morning fun and games

I found myself wide awake at 5 am, shortly after my almost-4-year-old's trip to the bathroom, and decided to give up on sleep a little before 6. Made coffee, loaded the dishwasher, and read an article. Then I noticed, for the first time (really) the pre-installed games on the laptop, including Internet Backgammon.

I haven't played backgammon since elementary school, so it took me a really bad game to figure out the rules. The program helps a lot by analyzing the board for you and telling you where you can legally move a given piece. Two games in, I feel like I remember the game now.

Other points of interest: my opponent was listed as "Beginner: Arabic", but I could communicate by picking phrases to send out of a drop-down menu, which I assume are translated to/from every language they support. I don't know if there's a way to sent personalized messages, contact info, or whatnot. It's a "controlled vocabulary" I guess, limited to the context of the interaction. I would assume that the advantage is that you can't say something obnoxious to other players.

Thinking about internet games as a kind of distributed or collaborative work project, I start to wonder of having the predetermined pick list of messages is such a bad thing. Email and IM are absolutely notorious for the inability of sender and receiver to understand the full context of messages. Words alone hardly convey adequate meaning, since we don't take the time to write with adequate precision. Comments meant as a joke can be interpreted as insulting by others without the nonverbal cues and feedback that's part of communication.

So I guess that's really the point of those cutesy "emoticons" like :), to standardize messages and supply some emotional content, within limits. Maybe picklist email would make more sense at work, to limit the kind of communications between people. Not like my emails really say anything different.. the range is quite limited.

The emails I get largely revolve around meeting someone at a place and time, what's due and when, who's absent and why, web links for something, or even blocks of computer code. Most of these are things which I either choose to enter into my calendar: paper, Palm Datebook, Yahoo! Calendar, Outlook calendar, or notoriously inaccurate brain calendar. Maybe an email of calendar-type information isn't the best way to go.

Then there's the place aspect-- where to go. Do I need to fiddle between addresses and maps? But I think I've written about this before. Isn't there a way to just package that info in some useful way? Then there's the activity aspect-- what to do. This is harder, but not by much. After all, how many *different* kinds of things do we really do that we'd need to communicate with the outside world? Not all that many, and where you are pretty much limits what you're going to do there.

What I have in mind looks a lot like a big blob of XML with a layered stylesheet that outputs, yes, text just like you get in an email. So it's just like before, only better...

Dad's school.

Dad's school.

-------------------------------------------------------
This message was sent from a T-Mobile wireless phone.

Need a kickstart

Every bit of recorded music I have access to sucks. I don't know what else to say about it. Yahoo Music, iTunes shared from other people in the office, and whatever I burned into a CD via Windows Media Player, are all just really tired. I need something new.

I'll take donations of MP3's, so long as they're any good. Doesn't matter what, but the minimum requirements: the MP3's must be enjoyable to listen to, soothing, energizing, mood-lifting, mind-altering, or even funny, but most of all, they may not suck. Podcasts, podsafe music, podunsafe music, music, recordings of the New Jersey Turnpike during rush hour, jokes, voiceovers of the guy selling batteries in the tunnel under Bryant Park are all fair game.

I'm at a standstill on my development project for the summer internship, a program to aid in converting server-generated sites into static HTML, including complex XML mappings between file lists and navigation controls for a SCORM project.
There are a couple of bugs that I absolutely can't trace out. The continuous drone of the underpowered A/C unit behind me is supplying just the right amount of white noise to further dull the senses.

Time to print out stuff and go outside to see if that helps. Even jotting this note isn't helping this time.

Heat Wave

We're in a heat wave here in the Northeast. It's 10:30 am and I've already drank about 3 pints (1.5l) of water. The A/C here is just marginal on cool days. I'd really, really like some coffee right now, but they're saying on the news to avoid caffeine and alcohol. But, it could be worse-- Those subway stations are probably 120 degrees or more today, if it's 100 in Albany.

Last night, I walked home from work, by way of the library, showered, fed the kids, put them to bed, and promptly fell asleep. I woke up about 11 hours later, the longest I've slept (without being sick) since 1999, I think. Damn, I was going to study last night, too. Maybe the extra sleep will make me more productive tonight...

I'm just wondering if we're going to see another blackout, like the one I experienced in Manhattan 3 summers ago. Had to walk from 120th Street & Broadway down to the ferry dock around 34th St, then back up to the Lincoln Tunnel to hitchhike through. But it wasn't so hot as this. Even then, on the bright side, while Manhattan lost power for 3 days, my home in Jersey City only lost it for about 20 minutes. I was joking with my co-worker Adam, who lived in neighboring Hoboken, that we should do some hard bargaining with the sushi shops in the City on the way home...

Time to refill my water bottles again.