On Wednesday evening, Ratha and I felt like a break, so we ordered movie tickets online and drove down to Loews. From the description of the movie I had expected a romantic comedy. What I saw might have fallen into that category in an extremely loose sense, but I didn't anticipate just how much head-twisting there would be. It was so strange to see Jim Carrey play his character that I wasn't sure it was him until Ratha commented on the same thing.
Ratha told me afterwards that a friend had defended Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind's depiction of romance as “realistic”, as compared to Love Actually. I thought this was strange, because I had noticed a substantial similarity between the two: the intentional depiction of awkwardness. I suppose the awkwardness in Love Actually was more surface-level and less serious, though. But Ratha told me that she viewed the whole analysis in kind of an ironic light, because one of her past relationships had been sort of similar to that depicted in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and it hadn't worked out (and not just in the sense that they eventually broke up—the entire situation was sort of turbulent).
Friday Ratha and I headed over to Silky's to meet up with Mav and Steph. I got a light beer (Michelob Ultra, I think) and on the first sip remarked that it tasted like water. By the time I was half-way through it, though, I was definitely feeling the effects somewhat.
We spent most of the time talking about hair. Mav had some magazines, but the one full of hairstyles was also all girls. We talked about hair regimen and maintenance, about beards, and also about the makeover project as a whole. I was impressed that Mav was able to maintain such a high level of coherence when he had been drinking.
At the end, Mav gave me some instructions for what to bring to the makeover and so on. I'm still a little nervous about it, I think because if I end up deciding that any of the “improvements” don't really suit me, I'll feel implicit pressure to keep them up anyway. I guess I shouldn't worry about it, since it probably wouldn't be any worse than the pressure I would encounter to change my appearance anyway.
After about an hour, Ratha and I scooted. We had intended to go to a grocery store I hadn't tried yet (I can't remember which one at the moment), but it was getting late and their cafe was already closed, so instead we drove down to the Waterfront and went to Eat 'n Park for dinner. I seem to recall that we had a very interesting discussion over dinner, but not what it was. (This is why I should journal more often.)
After that we went to Target just before they closed. We bought a couple of torchières. They were very cheap, and they show it by having inoperative switches (the only way we can turn them on and off is by plugging or unplugging them), but they add a lot of light to the office. I also got an extremely cute desk lamp, and I think we bought a few more things. After that, we went over to Giant Eagle for groceries. (Hours: 06:00 to 0:00. Why is nothing in Pittsburgh 24/7? Even the Price Chopper in Catskill would let you shop in the wee hours of the morning if you really wanted to.)
On Saturday, we finally started to get into a groove on PC Torque to some extent. The problem has been that PC Torque as it is right now is a huge, messy code base, and I don't seem to have the ability to work very effectively under these conditions. I keep having to ask Ratha questions, but this distracts her from her own full-time job, so I try not to, but then I often end up searching for tens of minutes to figure the simplest things out. The key seems to be figuring out how to modularize things and split them off into parts I can deal with.
Anyway, at about 2 in the morning, I was staring at code, but it wasn't making any sense and I was getting nowhere. I stood up and walked over to Ratha, touched her, and collapsed on the floor. I was out cold—Ratha says she made a lot of noise after that and it didn't wake me up. Ratha was pissed at me for not working harder. I was pissed at myself, too, not so much for collapsing on the floor (in my experience, when my body needs to sleep, it just needs to sleep, and even attempting to continue to function is useless) but for not keeping things moving faster earlier in the week.
We didn't stay upset for too long, though. Keeping a solution-oriented mindset and remembering what we have in common helps. Also, orgasms seem to have a substantial positive effect on one's mood.
Sunday evening, after a day of fixing and re-architecting PC Torque, I was hungry and Ratha wanted to get out of the house, so we walked down to Kiva Han. I got a baked tofu sandwich and a coffee-based, cherry-flavored drink, and Ratha had pasta and a latte.
Our discussion ranged over a variety of topics, but the focus was the nature of Reality. As near as I could tell, Ratha was following the standard empiricist line that truth had something to do with verifiability, which I tried to dispute whenever it came up, telling her that when we dealt with fact rather than truth, we were leaving the realm of philosophy and entering that of science. At one point, Ratha got a little frustrated and asked me “then what is philosophy good for?” I said “it's fun”.
Later on, though, I got her to basically admit my point, because she agrees that it's possible for her to be a brain in a vat, meaning that there is such a thing as truth independent of the understanding thereof. I pointed out to her that a hard-line empiricist would actually say that she can't be a brain in a vat (at least certain variants of that scenario would be ruled out) because there would be no verification or falsification conditions for that state of affairs. Ratha then said that it seemed best to admit as few things as possible into the realm of Reality, and I agreed, but defended the admission of pure mathematics as a precondition on any possible existence. (Two plus two is four regardless of what words we use to identify or what concepts we use to grasp that truth.)
Monday we managed to stay in a decent work groove again. The situation is clearly imperfect: we're trying to refactor a large and complex code base at the same time as we prepare to deploy specific enhancements to it, and this is difficult to handle.
Ratha was wondering whether it would be irresponsible of her to go to the KGB meeting, or whether on the other hand it would be overly focused to stay at work. She did decide to go with me; I brought Robert and let her write an email to her boss so that she'd feel a bit less guilty on that front. The meeting mostly concerned bylaws. The very first change allowed Ratha and I to be voting members despite not being activities-fee-paying students; I paid our dues (since I only had a 20; Ratha then gave me her $10) and we were able to vote on the rest of the bylaw amendments. There was a rather long debate as to whether to prevent people other than activities-fee-paying students from being officers. I saw a few quasi-legitimate reasons for this, but none so strong as to overrule my conviction that if the membership didn't want such people as officers, they wouldn't vote for them (a very similar reason to my revulsion at the concept of term limits; they seem like a hack to make up for the in-principle inadequacies of a democratic or republican form of government). The rest of the membership was heavily in favor of this restriction, though, so it passed, and soon after that Ratha and I had to take off since our budgeted time had passed.
I was still glad to have gone, though, because I got a chance to meet gwillen, the mysterious LiveJournal user who had caused me to spider my friend's userinfo lists in search of an unknown person reading my journal. He seemed nice enough, and pointed out a mistake I made while searching for my password to no-ip.org to fix Laura's dynamic updater client.
After we got home, I was able to develop one small enhancement to PC Torque (the ability to view product weights in the part editor, so they can verify that all parts have weights before we deploy the new live shipping quotes) totally without Ratha's help, which I was happy about.
Ratha's work situation is kind of nasty at this point. She's contracting full-time for Happenings at the same time as she manages and assists me on PC Torque—which has been almost another full-time job itself of late. I've been trying to help her with Happenings when she hits a problem that requires sharp thinking rather than diving through large messy chunks of code, to make up for the amount of her time I've been taking for PC Torque.
It does seem that things can only get better, though. As the PC Torque code gets into better shape (and as I watch her improve it and aid in that process, and thereby acquire better knowledge of the site myself), I should be able to work more autonomously on PC Torque, and Ratha should be getting more latitude on Happenings after the critical features are done, though we'll see whether that actually pans out.
I don't know how realistic this is, but if we can get the PC Torque code into good enough shape that it can run other sites, and be easily enhanced with custom modifications as needed, we have permission to re-sell it. Contracting is pretty stressful, but it has the potential to produce a lot of money without a huge number of hours once a good business plan is in place.
Wiki page for this journal entry
After a couple of half-price dinners at La Fiesta, I think I'm comfortable generalizing: although I think Ratha was a lot more outgoing when she went to these things without me, now that I'm here, it seems like we both end up minimally participating but still enjoying ourselves. I wonder if we're being offensively reserved, though. I hope not. The crowd who goes to these things seems pretty accepting.
On the walk away from the restaurant, we were discussing how the LARPers had taken some role-playing principles and applied them to real life, by creating what were essentially “geek points” and paying volunteers that way. It was interesting to see people who were undeniably more geeky than I or Ratha. In a way, it made me question the idea that I am a geek in the first place.
It took longer than we had wanted it to, but Wednesday night, the first PC Torque enhancement was finally ready to roll out the door: real-time UPS shipping quotes so that international customers wouldn't have to keep calling PC Torque for quotes, and so that the prices customers paid for shipping would more accurately represent the costs to PC Torque (previously they were using hard-coded per-item shipping prices). The deployment took a couple of hours, during which the site was down, but this was in the wee hours of the morning, so hopefully no sales were lost (PC Torque seems to have in the general ballpark of 20 sales a day). The sites is now under source control (it wasn't previously), so future enhancements should be a lot easier and safer to deploy.
In the morning, we woke up to find that we had accidentally undone some changes Adam (the head of PC Torque) had made to the live site. Ratha and I were confused as to how this particular problem could have happened, but I can't say I was all that surprised that the deployment didn't go off totally without a hitch. We restored the newer pages in short order (we had made several redundant backups before actually deploying anything).
On Thursday, we looked at a couple more apartments, one in Shadyside and the other in Friendship. They were both vacant, and it would be a financial strain if nothing else for us to move before May 1, so we'll have to cross our fingers and see what happens, but they both seemed like much better values than any of the places we had previously looked at.
The first place is $1000 per month—at the upper limit of our price range, but the place is basically a house (although in actuality it is the upper two floors of a three-story building). It appears to be very clean and in good repair, pretty nicely styled, and has, in addition to two bedrooms and a potentially eat-in kitchen, three other rooms, which is actually one more than we had been looking for. We're sure we could figure out something to do with it, though.
The other place is about the size we had wanted and is only $800 per month (though heat is not included in this one like it is in the other one). I thought it was a shade less nice than the other place, but still decent, and very cheap for the space compared to the other places we'd seen. Pets are allowed in both places.
As we were finishing up looking at the second apartment, Ratha got a call from Laura (another PC Torque person who also happens to be Ratha's sister; the identifier “Laura” has become sadly overloaded in my micro-world) about some other weirdness that the deployment had caused. We headed home to fix these issues. None of them were huge, and I still felt pretty good about the deployment as a whole. I did my best to reassure Ratha, when she was beating herself up over having broken things, that a certain amount of brokenness was to be expected for a deployment of this size, and that as long as we fix the issues promptly (which we did) and especially since we have a process to decrease them in the future (source control), that it really isn't a big deal.
Friday morning Ratha burned her hand somewhat nastily on a piece of cinnamon sugar bagel topping that had just been toasted, and she had a headache, so she emailed Jason (her manager) and said that maybe she should take a sick day, and he responded that he thought that was okay. I sort of slacked off on PC Torque as well, although I started to look into USPS shipping quotes a little bit, and fixed a few last lingering issues with the deployment.
In the afternoon, we got lunch (had baked tofu, rice, a few other odds and ends, and smoothies) at and went grocery shopping at the co-op. We spent about what we have been on groceries, without getting as much as we have been, but we massively increased our spice collection (well, we didn't really have a spice collection before). Our spices now include:
(in jars),
(in bags).
These should last us practically forever. Plus, the jars look really nice, and the prices seemed pretty reasonable to me. We might need to get a spice rack.
After that we headed over to happy hour at Silky's. Ratha and I were the first ones there, so we sat down, she got a glass of water, and I ordered a rum and coke. We then waited for Mav to arrive, which he did, soon followed by Steph and an entourage of three others one of whom was named Minh but the others of whose names elude me at the moment.
Ratha and I both had our moments of participation in the discussion, which was a bit more wide-ranging than last time, although my hair was still one of the major topics of conversation. It's hard to know when one is participating the right amount in a group discussion. Monopolizing things is considered rude, and generally pretty hard to do, so I tend to become reclusive and say nothing unless specifically addressed. Group discussions seem like sort of a hack anyway. It seems to me like it's very difficult to have a good, balanced discussion with more than four people, and even four is difficult to pull off unless each individual knows each other individual pretty well (otherwise, it's too easy for someone to feel excluded and become reclusive).
After Happy Hour, Ratha and I saw a liquor store on the way to the car and semi-spontaneously decided to stop there. This was the liqueur excursion, as I already have a decent selection and quantity of base liquors. We ended up getting a few standbys (peach schnapps, raspberry schnapps, amaretto), one bottle whose expense was somewhat surprising but which seems like a good thing to have (Godiva Liqueur) and a bottle of Galliano, which answered a curiosity Ratha had had for years as to just what it was (she ended up not liking it, but I guess that's the way things work out sometimes) in addition to a couple of bottles of red wine. I paid; Ratha said that if she ended up drinking much, she would pay next time, but I'm kind of doubtful, since she seems to have the alcohol sensitivity of a ten-year-old. (At least she's learned how to enjoy the effect now, though.)
Wiki page for this journal entry
Summary of the actual makeover process:
Mav's wrap-up LiveJournal entry
Pictures Ratha took with my camera
Reactions:
First of all, I want to give a huge thank-you to everyone who contributed money or support to this effort, and especially to Mav, without whom it would not have been possible. My wardrobe and my understanding of the effect of various factors on appearance have both been greatly enhanced, and these are both real gains, not transient or flimsy ones. I almost feel the need to apologize to these people, because while my next few paragraphs will be honest, they will also be kind of harsh, and those people really don't deserve to possibly be offended; I harbor not the slightest doubt that they acted in what they believed to be my best interests. I was touched by Ratha's mother's comment:
All I can say is that Kenn has to be the very best sport in all of human history. Tell him I think he looks great EITHER way!!
I reserve no such kindness, however, for those who never associated with me in any capacity before the makeover, but who seem to have come out of the woodwork to comment in Mav's journal on the magnitude of the improvement. It is towards them that this criticism is mostly directed.
So. As I said to Ratha, when I look into the mirror now, I may think “hey, look at that cute guy” (I suppose I have assimilated our current cultural assessment of what a “cute guy” is, to the extent that I can recognize my current appearance as manifesting that archetype), but I don't think “hey, that's me”. Of course, it's natural to feel that way after a semi-drastic change in one's appearance, and that reaction has already started to fade. That's not my point, though.
There is a crucial fact about my personality that I failed to communicate to Mav before or during the makeover process (or at all until writing this journal entry, I guess). Perhaps I give him too little credit in believing that he would have been incapable of achieving this as an additional constraint had it been presented to him, but truth be told, I failed to communicate it to Mav largely because of my ingrained belief that I am simply not capable of expressing it through the medium of my appearance at this point in time, if at all. I am sorry if this comes off as offensively arrogant, but I must admit there is a strain of potentially offensive arrogance in my personality: I not only see myself as a unique person, but as a uniquely important person.
As I told Ratha when we were talking about the makeover, for a long time I have had a vague idea in my mind that once I was so rich that money was nothing to worry about (if that ever happened), I might wear tailored suits and be dressed to the nines most if not all of the time. This concept I had—of extreme formality—was an inchoate attempt to express the sense of power that I feel, but have so far failed to implement it because it would have been too expensive and too much trouble.
Now, if you look carefully at my pre-makeover look, you might see that it was actually calculated to achieve that same goal, although in a sufficiently half-assed way that it failed to actually achieve it. I never thought of my beard as a “chia” or a mess; I had a concept of a full beard which I envisioned myself as having. Likewise with my hair, I envisioned full, long hair, not the wispy split ends which it seems are the best I am actually capable of achieving. Wearing all black is a sign of power, even if it does make me look too thin. And so on.
The new style is a definite improvement upon the old, because at least it actually achieves some goal, whereas the old was so half-assed that I might have honestly been better off just forgetting the whole thing and not worrying about my appearance at all (although my old appearance did generally make me feel powerful and confident, even if I didn't project that to the rest of the world; actually, I wonder if this might have anything to do with my tendency to unintentionally and unknowingly offend people over the last few years). But the goals achieved by the new style aren't really mine. The new style comes across as friendly and casual, but I'm not really a friendly person in that sense and I actually place a pretty high value on formality. The new style seems almost offensively laid-back to me. It makes me think “I'm more important than this”.
Now, I do still intend to give the new style a serious try, and that means at least several months of following it. And Ratha has told me she pretty strongly prefers my beard much more under control than it was, and the full beard idea seems to have been something I'm just not biologically capable of achieving anyway, so that part stays. But, there are still a couple more things about the makeover that disturb me.
First, the concept of being “in style”. Mav mentioned to me that muted tie-dye is in style right now, but that I should make the most of it since it would only stay that way for six months to a year, most likely. This seemed bizarre to me. If the clothes look good now, they'll look just the same in two or three years, assuming they haven't seen heavy use and gotten beat-up. I acknowledge the existence of the cultural institution of fashion, but I fail to see why I should pay it any mind whatsoever.
This came out much more strongly when we were talking about black trenchcoats. Mav told me to avoid them, because everyone else is wearing them, so I wouldn't stand out. He tried to couch this in terms that created less pressure when it was clear I was resistant, but it was obvious that this was what he was trying to say. Now, to me, a black trenchcoat is a fucking awesome piece of attire. Always has been, always will be. I never had one in high school, although I vaguely wanted one, and I made a very conscious decision to switch to them rather than winter coats after entering college (and, indeed, intentionally made it a bit of a joke that I wear a black trenchcoat late into the spring and start wearing it again early in the fall—at DMV I wore it indoors even during the summer, since the air conditioning kept the place so frigid). To tell me that I shouldn't wear a piece of clothing that I like so much because “everyone else is doing it” strikes me as ludicrously focused on the opinions of others rather than on how the damn thing actually looks.
So, that's one thing—considering any factor that can't actually be observed in a mirror when selecting an appearance usually strikes me as both unnatural and unappealing. I say “usually” because my other objection falls into that category; it concerns the responses on Mav's journal.
I should qualify this first by saying that the better I know you, the less this applies to you. In particular, Laura, I couldn't possibly take offense to anything you'd say; Shawn, I'm willing to give you a by, because it's hard to imagine your intending anything but simple praise; and of course Ratha could get away with almost anything if she chose to (though a large part of the reason she has that permission is that she's succeeded in convincing me that she wouldn't choose to unless it was really important to her :-).
People I don't know or barely know: what you said hurt. Because I created my previous look, whereas Mav created my new look (albeit with input from me), talking about how much of an improvement the new look is, or criticizing the old look, comes off as a direct attack on me. And at the same time, it comes off as extremely trite—like you don't feel the need to actually know anything about me as a person, but are perfectly comfortable commenting on me as a chunk of meat. I know I submitted voluntarily to this process, and thus I don't really have a right to complain, but, well, I'm hurt. And frankly, my knee-jerk reaction is to give you all a giant middle finger and go back to looking however the fuck I want to.
Now, I'm not going to do that. That would be an immature reaction, and it wouldn't be the way to learn the most that I can out of this experience. But, come on, the makeover will help me pick up chicks? Why would I care? I already have the best one on Earth, and the rest of y'all can play that game amongst each other.
I guess my attitude towards the new look at this point is to see it as inherently temporary. It's worth trying out—and that means really trying out—for the experience with fashion, to see how it makes people treat me, and just to try something new. But I can't see myself dressing like this—or like an older version of this—10 years from now. It would just be too … undignified.
Once again, thank you to everyone who assisted with the makeover process, and I apologize if this journal entry offends anyone who didn't deserve to be offended. Feel free to flame me if you think I've unfairly maligned you. I'm pretty fire-resistant by this point.
Wiki page for this journal entry
After the makeover, to celebrate, Ratha and I went to Soba. The waiter told us that they were almost out of foie gras; ironically, this made us order it, when we probably never would have otherwise. It was interesting, though I don't see what the fuss is about.
I wore black pants, a black shirt, and my plaid blue-green jacket. Mav had told me this was probably an appropriate style of dress for this kind of occasion. Ratha had planned to wear a black dress, but she hadn't brought it from Florida, so she wore a skirt instead.
I had some sake towards the beginning. I see some truth to the saying that alcohol loosens tongues, as I talked and talked and talked, although I don't think I really said much I wouldn't have anyway. We discussed a bunch of stuff that we had sort of been postponing, but I can't remember what it was any more.
It's probably a sign of a problem if it becomes a recurring complaint in my journal that I can't remember the stuff I'm supposed to be writing about. I've been referring back to Ratha's logs of how she spends her time a lot in order to figure out what to put here. While it's good that she has those logs, it seems wrong that I should need to rely on them. But I have a strong aversion to keeping the same kind of logs myself.
You know, I put Sunday in my list of headers of things to write about, but I didn't take any notes on it, and quite honestly, I can't remember a thing about it other than that it was the day after the makeover (and thus, the makeover adjustment process was still very much in effect) and that I think it was enjoyable.
The KGB meeting on Monday included nominations. I was not eligible to be nominated for anything due to the passage of a bylaws amendment barring those who are not activities-fee-paying students from office (just after the passage of a different amendment which granted such people the right to be voting members). Of course, I've been more or less absent from KGB for about a year now, and wouldn't really want to be an officer. The nominations process was hectic as usual, but it seemed a bit less so than the previous two had been. We'll see how the annual meeting goes, I guess.
After the meeting, Ed let me into the KGB office so I could fix Ragnar. I wasn't quite sure why he had gone incommunicado, but as it turned out, he had had a kernel panic after about 280 days of uptime. This mildly displeases me, but I suppose nothing can last forever. I'm just worried that he might be developing hardware issues. I suppose that it comes at an acceptable time, if so, since I've been meaning to do a major hardware upgrade on him for some time now.
I had planned to meet Laura after the meeting, but she was at Ikea and wasn't going to be back any earlier than her game began. I would have just gone home, but it was raining outside and I didn't feel like walking through it, so I IMed with Ratha for a while from the UC, which was kind of strangely reminiscent of our earlier dealings (although in a weird way, since I never knew Ratha while I was a student at CMU). We decided to go out for pizza, so Ratha met me in the UC Circle and we headed to Mineo's. We got a pizza with artichoke hearts, spinach and green olives, and grape sodas. They were good.
I had sent a copy of the lease for the places Ratha and I had seen to my father, since he is a lawyer and I wanted to give him a chance to look it over. He commented exhaustively, both on the sections that had seemed strange to me and on several other clauses. Tuesday Ratha and I met Connie (the woman with whom Ratha had first been in contact) and Linda (the actual landlord for the place) to go over and sign the lease.
I took a pretty hard-edge approach—perhaps a little too hard-edge on one point, as I was hesitant to allow the landlord to be reimbursed for “any other out-of-pocket expense” should we abandon the lease until Ratha pointed out that should the amount actually become something to be worried about, it would be larger than whatever cap we would have set had we set one, and thus worth actually taking to court if it looked controversial. Still, it felt good to be talking with the people who actually had the authority to change clauses in the lease as long as they agreed, and most of the lease was pretty understandable and reasonable as was (thank God for plain language acts). I was glad to have a chance to exercise some assertiveness in a medium where I would be taken seriously and still not come off as antagonistic.
On Thursday, Ratha and I were pondering what to do about lunch. It seemed like the places nearby were kind of expensive, so I suggested that we head over to CMU, pointing out that the food trucks were pretty cheap, and that although the walk there was an additional cost, it was such a nice day out that it seemed like it might be a worthwhile one.
So we did that, and got food at the Moonlight. I got a large, not because I had any intention of finishing it but because the food there was such a bargain and I wanted to have leftovers. We sat on my coat in the grass, ate, and talked.
The Moonlight was different in many ways, but still identifiably the same place as it had been when I ate at it so often while a student at CMU. The phrase “omnia mutantur, nihil interit” ran through my head, although I did not say it.
For the past couple of weeks, I had been sort of vaguely working on PC Torque (and actually managed to put real-time UPS shipping quotes in place for them, albeit with a lot of help from Ratha), but I had been proceeding very slowly due to a possibly irrational fear of breaking the site (irrational because now that the site is under source control, any bad changes can be undone). On Thursday, seemingly by force of will, I decided that it was now okay to break the site, and proceeded to do so.
I'm still a little nervous that I will not be able to get the site back into a state where I really feel comfortable with deploying it, and I know that this development cycle may be a bit longer than I'd like it to be (just as the last one was), but at least we'll have a slightly nicer site at the end of it, I'll be a bit more comfortable with the code, and I'm sure I will be able to fix the things that I break, just as I did last time. It also took a tremendous amount of pressure off of me to discover when I discovered that the latest set of (seemingly pretty severe) problems that the PC Torque site had encountered were due to a broken Internet Explorer patch. Ratha has been having some problems with Outlook and newline formatting on thisishappening, and Adam had a hell of a time setting up his new Exchange server to correctly serve external IMAP clients. So, it seems that at the moment, all computer problems are Microsoft's Fault.
On Friday, Ratha had a headache and was having difficulty focusing. I had made myself a coffee and Irish cream, and I offered one to her as well, then called her chicken and dared her when she seemed hesitant.
It made her headache go away, and she seemed to relax and work pretty effectively. This mirrored the results of my last experiment with drinking before working—after one drink I was more relaxed, not noticeably less able to think clearly (at least relative to the reasonably simple tasks with which I was dealing) and not very distractable. Ratha was quite surprised by the results.
I know that some people will have a beer with lunch, but I've always thought of that as sort of a plebian thing to do (i.e., something for those whose jobs don't involve much thought), or certainly something for those with pretty high alcohol tolerance. Maybe that attitude was wrong, though. Maybe drinking in the middle of a work day once in a while can be a good thing.
In the evening, Ratha and I went to Happy Hour with Mav, Steph and friends. It had not previously occurred to me that this might be an ongoing thing—I guess I had assumed that we were only going to it to meet with Mav about the makeover. Nevertheless, I enjoyed myself, getting into an extensive political debate with some guy whose name I can no longer recall. As Ratha later pointed out, he ended up contradicting himself, but I'm not totally sure my positions were self-consistent, either. Still, a good time was had by all, and I received several compliments about my new look (which I was unsure how to react to; this unsureness continues even now).
On Saturday, at about 11:00, Ratha and I drove down to the convention center to become members of the NRA.
The requirement to become members in order to attend the convention (which was, in fact, the NRA's annual meeting) seemed almost like a technicality, as they offered memberships with no benefits for $10, but Ratha and I both ended up joining as full members (at a discounted convention rate of $25 per person). So, we're both members of the NRA now. That's kind of neat.
We walked around and looked at a number of different guns. Ratha attracted a lot of attention from men who seemed eager to explain how guns worked to her, whereas I was basically ignored. I was glad to attend, but I felt a little embarrassed that even though it had been my idea, I knew so little about guns myself that I couldn't really show Ratha the ropes.
By far the most impressive presentation, however, was by Glock. A salesman there demonstrated to Ratha not only how to fire the gun but also how to take it apart and what safeties there were. It seemed like a remarkably simple and trusthworthy device. There were no retailers selling Glocks at the convention, apparently, but another salesperson at the booth gave us the addresses of several retailers in the area, including one which is also a firing range. This will bear further investigation. I am inclined to a positive attitude towards Glock products at this point.
After the convention, Ratha and I headed over to the strip district (which, I realized, I had never actually been to before) and to Kaya for lunch. Ratha seems to be pretty into the Big Burrito group of restaurants, and the two that I've been to so far have been quite nice, if a tiny bit pricy. The food was good, though, and the service was tolerable if a bit mixed-up (our waiter was new to the job).
As we were eating, one of those guys who carries roses and guilt-trips guys into buying one for the girls they're trying to impress came up to our table. I think ordinarily I would tell such people to buzz off, but I was feeling generous, so I bought Ratha a rose. It's sitting in a Pom Wonderful bottle on her desk now.
In the evening, Laura unexpectedly called and asked if I wanted to go to a party. I didn't really feel like I was going to accomplish much work that evening anyway, so this sounded like a good idea to me. I asked Ratha if she wanted to go, but she said she was swamped and really needed to work. So I met Ed, Rachael and Laura in back of the Fairfax and they drove us over.
It was very good to catch up with Ed somewhat, which I did early on in the evening. I wonder if I'm actually developing a party vibe, though. Ed commented that he thought the makeover would result in a lasting change in my personality, and attempted to describe what some attributes of that change might be—he thought that social situations would become much more natural to me and that I wouldn't have such a problem with group discussions. He partly retracted this later in the evening when I said that one difference between him and me seemed to be that I don't really value most people all that much. It seems to me that there are too many people, even somewhat decent people, to really bother with most of them—it seems like I need to have pretty tight filters only admitting the really exceptional people in order to keep from being overwhelmed.
Once again, I received compliments about the makeover and was unsure how to deal with them. The party overall, discounting my discussion with Ed, was mildly unpleasant at the beginning, before I started drinking. After I'd been drinking a bit, I was interacting with people maybe 30% of the time and awkwardly between interactions the rest of the time, but that seemed almost okay somehow.
At almost 2, Ratha arrived at the party (unexpectedly to me). I had been sort of okay with spending a few hours apart from her, but at the same time I had missed her, and so I was glad to see her.
We left half an hour or 45 minutes after Ratha got there (basically giving her a chance to catch up with people there). When we got home, it was time to get to sleep.
Wiki page for this journal entry
I apologize if this journal entry is disjointed. I'm going to try something.
On Tuesday evening we went to half price dinner. Only one other person showed up—not even Katie and John Eric were there. We talked about software engineering. I think it was a good discussion.
Friday morning we got up early to pick up William at the airport. I drove because Ratha had been up even later than I had the previous night trying to make a kernel to make a build disk to set up her new dev server for thisishappening, which is sitting on her desk. It's a Dell PowerEdge 2600. Anyway, after picking William up I drove us back to Pittsburgh and we went to Pamela's for breakfast.
Saturday evening Ratha and I went to the firing range after going to Mallorca (a Spanish restaurant) with William. The food at Mallorca was quite good, and despite the fact that there wasn't a single vegetarian entrée on the menu, the waitstaff was amazingly accomodating. (I paid for breakfast on Thursday. I also paid for most of lunch on Saturday. There must have been a meal in between that Ratha paid for). I had a lot of sangria, and actually might have been drunk. It was an interesting experience, although my memory of it is quite vague—as most of my memories seem to be.
Anyway, at the firing range I found out that Ratha has much better aim than I do—I'm basically incompetent with a gun. I would have thought of this as just being a beginner if I had been alone or if Ratha's ability had been similar to mine, but the fact that she was so much better than me really brought home the impression on my part that I was fundamentally incompetent. I went into a massive depressive cycle (interrupted once we got home to watch Office Space, but resumed shortly thereafter). I still don't know how I will deal with this. There is a training class starting this Saturday at the range, which costs $500, most of the cost of which can be applied to the cost of membership in the range. Ratha seemed pretty gung ho about it, but I think I turned her off to the idea by being so massively depressed. She's repeatedly told me that I should take it and she would take the first class later, when I was taking the second, but I'm not sure I can stomach this. It seems like it would just mean that I was pathetic and she was accomodating how pathetic I am. We talked some about ability, on the drive home and later, and I realized that I don't really believe ability is developed so much as uncovered. It seems that I've always been good at certain things and sucked at others, it's just that I realized I was good at some things in which I previously had no confidence. Thus, it seems likely that I will never develop the ability to aim a weapon with an acceptable degree of accuracy (most of my shots literally missed the target at a distance of 20 feet), and like it would be an affectation and a silly waste of resources to even try to develop my skills.
On Wednesday evening we went to a concert. They played Black Angels and Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony. The first was inaccessabily in that “modern music” kinda way, but surprisingly good given how inaccessible it was. The second had parts that were good, but although I tried very hard to continuously pay attention to it, I found it surprisingly difficult to do so. Afterwards, Ratha and I started to talk about music, but basically concluded that talking about music was meaningless and talked instead about abstract æsthetics.
Today (Monday the 26th) I worked on PC Torque (got USPS shipping quotes to work, though 1: the API doesn't support insurance, so it may not be useful anyway, and 2: I was working on a branch of the code which is deep in the middle of refactoring, so I can't actually deploy the change for a while) and helped Ratha with a server migration for thisishappening. I felt pretty good about getting stuff done, actually, although I had to miss KGB to help with the server migration and despite what I perceive as the productivity of today, Ratha still seems to feel pretty behind.
Well, I have no idea if I missed anything, but my train of thought seems to have run out.
Wiki page for this journal entry
On Monday, I skipped KGB to help Ratha with a server migration for thisishappening (her main project).
On Tuesday, I was surprisingly productive after Ratha's and my morning discussion about acceptable levels of work. Somehow I got it into my head that there was no reason I couldn't finish the changes I was working on that night, so that's what I did. In the evening, we went to half price food at India Garden. After that, we deployed a conversion of PC Torque to in-process credit card requests (in preparation for a multiple credit card payment feature) and I added in USPS shipping quotes, because they were pretty easy and I wanted another thing to put on the invoice I would send them. Ratha was dead tired during the deployment, which was obvious to me, but I was still glad to have her there, because I always feel a little nervous when dealing with something like a production site on which people's livelihood directly depends.
On Wednesday, we discussed attention and focus. At some point in this discussion, I looked over at Robert's screen. “Operating system not found”, it said. Head crash—my first in years. Managed to recover all of my data onto a spare laptop hard drive of the same size I had lying around, but it took all day to do that (although I also found and fixed one PC Torque bug). I felt a little bad for spending an entire day on this, but I don't seem to be able to focus on much else when one of my computers is broken.
Wiki page for this journal entry
Kenn Hamm
For copyright and other information, click here.
Last modified: Mon Aug 4 19:38:29 2008