Random Traffic Through Nick's Brain

Thankful

Had to wake up at 05:45 to deal with some red tape. As mind-numbing as that was, there were many things to be thankful about.

• I wasn’t one of the bleary-eyed workers staffing the Dunkin’ Donuts counter.
• I wasn’t rummaging through the trash for cans and food.
• I was lucky enough to make an appointment online, allowing me to skip to the front of the line.
• The red tape, though tedious, is there for a reason. At the very least, I have a chance to run the gauntlet to obtain the prize. It could be worse. The gauntlet could be impossible, nonsensical, or corrupt. It could be even worse, there could be no prize.

Grok

I think I finally get what Heidi was thinking and feeling. Interesting.

Learning

Silver Lining

While waiting to pick people up before C2 the other day, around 19:00 in Central Square, saw a grey cloud over the police station. The sun was setting behind the cloud, giving it a bright white outline. A-ha! Now I understand the saying about clouds and silver linings. I’d never seen that effect before.

Definition

Someone told me this definition of Triple Play. I like it. Here is the C# version.

public void TriplePlay()
{
	System.Console.WriteLine("Hey! Hey! Hey!");

	try
	{
		Circulate(0.5, true); // CirculateToMeet:=true
		Trade();
		Circulate(0.5, true); // CirculateToMeet:=true

		Hinge();
	}
	catch
	{
		Transfer();
	}
	Extend();
}

Lessons From Learning, Or, “To Everything…”

Still learning C3A. It’s quite hard, but it does remind me of my favourite passage from the bible (coincidentally, my favourite Byrds song). Ecclesiastes 3:1-15ish is the full passage, but the synopsis is well known:

To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven.

Various people have been around while I’ve learned the levels up to and including C3A, and most have contributed it some way or other to my learning. Thank you to all who have helped, callers, friends, dancers, and others who defy categorization. Specifically, thank you to the following, each helping in their own season, time, or purpose…

• …my ‘asshole friends’, for not bugging me more about a hobby which, frankly, is major cannon fodder due to it’s lack of cool.
• …those who’ve helped by defining, discussing, drilling, and dancing, for offering support, constructive criticism, and food for thought, I’m very, very thankful.
• …dancers and callers who’ve been helpful, verbally, and through body-language, thank you for helping me get where I needed to be, both on the dance floor and off.
• …dancers and callers who’ve been eager, thank you for infusing me with your enthusiasm.
• …dancers and callers who’ve been patient, thank you for allowing me time to figure out where I needed to be.
• …dancers and callers who’ve been impatient, thank you for pushing me to work harder to be faster, better, and more precise.
• …dancers who’ve been snippy, angry, and hostile, thank you for making me work even harder, and learn to be as good as I can be in a square to avoid confrontation and tempers. Thank you also for teaching me to hold my temper and my tongue, and to let things go.
• …those who’ve expressed concern, thank you for giving me a balanced view of the situation, and helping me temper enthusiasm with reality and social awareness.
• …those who’ve been two-faced, thank you for reminding me that humans are complex creatures, and I need to deal with all facets of them.
• …those who’ve been obstructionists, thank you for helping me hone my problem solving skills once I determined that I was still intent on my course despite the concern.

That’s now 7 levels I can (barely) dance in less than two years. And after the 7th level, time to rest.

… Which Leads To

Life is complex, and it doesn’t go my way all the time. Heck, my way is prolly not be the way things should go anyway. What I need to focus on, and what I’ve lost track of over the past 10 to 15 years, is that I can calmly observe what goes on around me, and appreciate it for what it is… … it’s the life I’m currently living … it’s possibly the only life I will live. Things have happened the way they have happened. I can no longer shape the past. I can only shape the present and future, and barely at that. This is the only way that time will flow past me. I have to re-accept this and learn to smile more as I watch the panorama unfold.

Phenotype

Topher Grace is a moron.

Composition Realization

It was interesting to watch some people the other day coming to the realization that a Rally was a Little with something else tacked on the end.

Somehow made me feel better about the way I think about challenge square dancing.

eBay Sux

Yes… some of you may love it… but eBay Sucks.

I bought (‘won’ in eBay parlance) my first item on eBay 2 months ago. Cost: $50, plus $16 shipping. I followed their recommendation and used PayPal (which also sucks) to pay. Unfortunately I paid without reading the fine print.

The seller never shipped me my item. It’s now off to eBay for dispute resolution. The downside? They charge $25 for the process. Bigger downside? They’re only considering the $50 as the price. Despite the fact that I paid for the $16 shipping at the same time, it somehow won’t be part of my refund.

What a scam. Had I paid by credit card, the credit card company would have nixed the charges no questions asked. Now, I’m out $41. From the way this has been handled from the outset, I think the nickle-and-dime scams are baked into their business model.

I like days like this when I wake up before the rest of the household is awake. Though I’m frequently awake after the rest of the household has gone to sleep, it doesn’t feel the same. There’s something nice and relaxing about being up in the morning.

Not My Modus Operendi

I seem to have fallen in with a group where, due to specific individuals, it’s difficult / frowned upon to:

• Offer suggestions.
• Offer constructive criticism.
• Express unhappiness at / with others.
• Express displeasure at / with others (unless, of course, one does so because others have done one of the frowned-upon things).

In fact, I’m pretty sure that this post, expressing that it’s difficult to express any of these, would be greeted with displeasure were it seen. So much so that I thought long and hard about not posting this.

Thankfully, I get paid for what I do.

Somewhere

Yesterday, someone had the temerity to say that I wasn’t into introspective self-improvement. Wow. Maybe I’m not that good at it, but not into it? I’m probably too obsessive about it, especially in my professional life.

All Written Up & Nowhere To Go

I have the start of my platform speech for the next time I run for elected office of some sort.

Hear ye, hear ye, serfs of organization! Now that I have been elected, I plan to rule with an Iron Fist, crushing all that…

uhm… oops… sorry… that was my acceptance speech… ahem… uh… my platform speech… where was it… shuffle topmost sheet of paper to bottom of stack

ah… here it is… ahem…

Hello fellow commonality. Today, I humbly ask for your…

Summer

The following aren’t goals per se. Just things that I might want to consider doing. Many are prompted by the fact that my allergies seem to be at bay for the moment.

• Learn to play Go. I’d love to play with anyone who could help me learn and enjoy the game. All I know now are the basic rules that I looked up online as well as the fact that Gnu-Go beats me when it’s playing at its easiest setting.
• Finish learning to unicycle. I started to learn a while back. Now might be a good time to learn at least Skill Level 1.
• Bike a lot. I should probably set a goal of n km per week, but I’m not being that hard-assed on myself… yet. My current rule of thumb is to bike when I can within reason. Biking to work is out. Too far for my current level of fitness, plus, office has no showers. Most other commutes, especially those in Cambridge and Belmont, should be doable.
• Walk a lot. If we’re going to spend tonnes of money on a movie at Fenway or Boston Common, the least we can do is walk and enjoy our beautiful city.
• Play with balls more often. I need to juggle more. Though learning 5 balls would be good, I think I should face reality and realize that I need a lot of practice to get back to my old form.

  I also need to kick around the soccer ball with Dina and learn enough basic technique so as not to make a complete and utter fool of myself if and when we ever join a soccer league. On the other hand, complete xor utter fool would be fine.

  Need to find someone to throw the football with (or, Dina needs to learn to hit her target when kicking the football).

• Enjoy the summer. It’s nice out there. Why fret?

Thankful

Yesterday, during the day, I was watching some mindless TV, and then I realized that another thing I should be thankful for is being part of the dominant species of our planet. Being the top of the food chain has its benefits. As Dina pointed out, being a white male in North America ain’t too shabby either.

Then, we went to see Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which put me in my place and reminded me that we are, in fact, the third most intelligent species on the planet. How this correlates with dominance or the food chain, dunno… ask the dolphins… I’m not talking to the mice… they’re scurrying around our apartment and annoying us.

Aside: I liked the movie. I think my favourite part is watching someone’s vision of technology enabling and shaping cultures and individuals.

Communication

Lately, I posted a bit about learning. I thought I posted a tidbit on problem solving, as related to a Trump quote from The Apprentice on success, but I can’t find that blog entry for some reason. I think the quote was along the lines of:

What bothers me is that I hate ‘quitters.’ Good managers don’t quit. If you have to go over it; go under it; go around it; but you don’t quit.

I was thinking yesterday that a related topic is communication.

Communicating with someone is like teaching them something, having them understand something. Also, due to the fact that we’re all unique little human snowflakes, it means that each attempt to communicate with someone is shaped by both parties to the communication.

Communicating with a group becomes even more difficult. You need to find ways to reach as much of the group as possible with the additional constraint of not being able to do certain things that might reach some, as it would alienate others.

I guess there are multiple ways to approach the problem, though, it’s interesting to look inwards and see that my brain approaches this as a simple exercise in problem solving. Do what it takes to communicate, try multiple approaches, try different approaches, try novel approaches.

Communicating with people at work is an interesting problem. The people are intelligent, and capable. This both helps and hinders. If I want people to use the system I’ve coded up, I have to do what I can to convince them. They’re blinded by their experience and preferences as to how to write software. On the other hand, they’re logical, and can be swayed by walk-throughs, code reviews, demonstrations, and by working examples. I have to do a lot of different things, some easy, some hard, some quick, some tedious, to sway them. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I don’t.

Since I tend to like certain forms of group activities (square dancing, group vacations, gaming nights, friends hanging out, etc.) and I’m not willing to wait for things to come together organically, or be organized at the last minute (yes Daniel, I’m impatient, a trait that is sometimes beneficial, sometimes baneful, and always me). Though people want to participate, they don’t always reply in ways that make things easy on the organizer. Sometimes they have other plans that are up in the air. Sometimes they are forgetful. Many times, they just do not respond well to the primary communication medium.

Email is good in that it can be responded to at the receiver’s leisure. It is also stored somewhere that the recipient can easily refer back to in the future. It has the downside that it can easily be ignored, deferred, or forgotten. IM is good that it is more geared towards immediate feedback, but it’s easily ignored also, and in many cases doesn’t have a persistence mechanism. Phone calls are even more immediate, are harder to be ignored once you actually have the person on the line, and have a backup persistence mechanism (voicemail). Personal reminders are good in that you are essentially cornering a person, and it’s hard for them to ignore you. On the other hand, many people don’t like being cornered like that.

I need to remember that different methods work at different times for different people. If one method isn’t working, simply switch to another, though, I have to be careful not to overload people. If people aren’t being reached by the methods I’m using, I need to find a way that does reach them. I have to be receptive to suggestions on how to communicate better, be they explicit, suggested, hinted at, or gleaned from observation. On the other hand, I need to realize my limitations, and realize that I can’t reach everyone. I need to work on not being frustrated when communication isn’t flowing. In some ways, that’s a normal state. Getting frustrated at either myself, or, worse yet, the person I’m attempting to communicate with is generally counter-productive.

One of the things that made me consciously realize that different methods are required to communicate is a memory from about 15 years ago. A friend of mine worked at an arcade at the train station on my way home from work. I’d frequently hang out there to unwind after a hard day. There was a homeless man who would frequently walk around the train station, mumbling, talking, or yelling to himself (or at something only he could see, we never asked him which it was). Mumbling or talking was OK, but the yelling tended to scare the people around him. The attendants at the station tried talking to him, asking him to stop, telling him to stop, escorting him from the building. It didn’t help, he’d just come back and keep yelling. One of the attendants finally stumbled upon the bright idea to fight fire with fire. When the man would yell, the attendant would yell back. Pretty much anything, in any language (I seem to recall English, French, and Greek being used), as long as it was at high volume. The homeless man would yell “OK! OK!” and go back to quietly mumbling to himself. The man’s yelling would go from occurring about a dozen times a day to once every few days.

When writing things like this, it occurs to me that I only get out a small fraction of what I want to say. Part of it is because I’m not that good a writer. Part of is because I don’t have as much time as I’d like to write (or, because I’m impatient, same thing in the end). I suspect that part of it is because I’m not spiraling deeper into the topic because the paper (or screen) doesn’t provide any 3rd party feedback. My brain reacting to my own written thoughts helps, but not as much as another person does.

Personality Quirk

A general, mild warning to people. A good friend / someone I think I communicate well with triggered this quirk yesterday. I realized she didn’t mean to, so I clamped down on said quirk. But I realized that I should warn people in advance…

Anyway… If I think you’re taking shots at Dina (that aren’t meant in jest / fun, like a lot of the things our asshole-friends and asshole-selves are), I may get protective. You’ve been warned.

If you’re not actually taking a shot, my apologies. If you are, you get what you deserve.

Of course, constructive criticism is welcome. While I work on not getting mad, I’d appreciate it if people try and use a teaspoon of sugar to help the constructive criticism go down when it comes to this topic.

Tidbits

Someone emailed me the other day and would like to use our sand castle picture for stamps for their wedding invitations. Cool.

Dina danced C1 at the barn on Friday. I think she did well. She was lost sometimes, wrong sometimes, and relied on her recovery skills at times. On the other hand, she stood her ground and corrected other dancers, including me. All in all, a very good showing on her part in my opinion.

There are days where I’m just not fit for polite company. Sorry. These are the days when the only people I want to hang out with are the ones I’d be willing to strangle, or give a large piece of my mind.

Meta-Cognition

So… this is a subject that fascinates me on many levels. I like learning. I like learning about learning. Apparently, I also like learning about learning about learning. The chain stops here. I’ve thought about learning ^ 4 only as a mental exercise to see how meta I could go, as opposed to for love of the subject itself. I also like teaching others, and thinking about self-improvement when it comes to teaching.

I’m decent at certain things, and would like to teach those things to others. Sometimes I can, sometimes I can’t. I haven’t figured out the full pattern yet. It doesn’t always seem correlated to how good I am at it, nor how long I’ve been doing it.

Some things I just grok, or at least, think I grok, but can’t express. Digression: Maybe I don’t grok the word grok… maybe grok implies being able to communicate it to those willing, ready, and able to hear it.

Anyway… back to the rambling topic at hand. It also fascinates me because, well, learning how I learn will hopefully make me learn better… (where better can be faster, more in depth, so as to be a better teacher, or just plain more fun). And… as y’all may have guessed by now… I’m a bit stupid about wanting to do certain things better.

Some people learn by front loading. Others get overloaded that way. Some need a solid foundation, a long break to let the foundation settle, and then can learn at an astounding pace. Some prefer a steady pace.

I’m one of three callers / teachers for Dina’s C1 class. There are 6 learners. It is interesting sometimes to take a step back and watch myself learn, and watch the dancers learn.

Watching (at least) 6 different people learning, some slowly, some quickly, at a set / desired pace, and figuring out how I can improve my teaching to fit in with both the constraints as well as the individual learning styles and difficulties is simultaneously fascinating, difficult, and frustrating.

On a personal note, some time ago, I realized that I don’t like learning certain things certain ways, even though those ways may be more efficient.

I could learn something in 10 hours if I did it on my own, but 20 hours if I did it in a group setting. However, the solo mode is notably less fun, so there’s a good chance that I’ll abandon it. So, I’ll take the less efficient (time-wise, and possibly group dynamics wise, as I’m definitely an introvert (in that dealing with people, no matter how much I like / love them saps my energy)) route to learning in order to get it done.

There are other things where going the solo route is definitely the way to go for me, as I feel constrained by the group. Unfortunately this means that I won’t have as deep an understanding of things, and it may take me longer to come up to speed. It’s sometimes worth the aggravation (both to me personally, and to others who have to suffer through my ineptitude while I come up an extended learning curve) to do things this way.

OK… many more thought are still swirling around in my little brain, but… they’re not yet dense enough to be put on paper… more on the topic in a few days, months, or years… who knows…

Going through books to sell, found the following note:

Nick Varracali

 

Bridge, chess (NO FRENCH).

Find me! (IN #503)

 

Shahid.

Brings back memories of old friends in London who I’ve lost touch with. I don’t remember what the “No French” part means. Interesting, because just the other week, I noted that it’s been 10 years since I left for London on what I thought would be a 4 month work-term in London.

When using other people’s computers of late, I’ve noticed a lot of ads for classmates.com. I find this a bit odd, since I don’t really feel the urge to look up old classmates, either from high school or university (though, now that I’m blogging about it, I feel that I should just to see what the draw is (hmmm… they want you to register, nevermind)). I’ve kept in touch with the few people I felt like keeping in touch with, and don’t really care about looking into the rest… guess I had an odd… or… at least… geeky… school experience.

…which dovetails nicely into the next topic…

A bunch of old high school friends have been in touch lately. Caroline, an ex-girlfriend mentioned that an mutual friend, Katt (now going by Kate), (theoretically an ex-girlfriend also, but we only dated for 14 days…) is getting married, and that maybe I’d want to take the pictures for the wedding. Interesting offer, if it weren’t for the fact that the bride-to-be and I parted on less than friendly terms (a dispute over scheduling of me accompanying Katt playing Memories on the trombone, of all things). Taking pictures for a wedding is both flattering and scary. I don’t think I’m reliably that good. On a personal note, not sure I want to go back and see all the people I knew in high school.

Two, Noémi sent an email to Chris and I remembering dancing spices. Chris was a very good friend in high school, and I have lots of good memories doing things with him. We parted on bad terms for a variety of reasons, some of which I’m still not sure I understand today. He’ll be in town in July… that should be an interesting meeting.