Well, That's It Then... The day started with a John Cleese moment. In maybe my favorite bit of A Fish Called Wanda, John Cleese is lying on the courtroom floor. He's just admitted to having an affair with a witness in open court, his client attacked him and his wife gave him a smack upside his head. His career is over, his wife is gonna divorce him and his client will probably kill him. Hence, the only logical move is to abandon his current life, steal the diamonds his client has stashed away and fly to South America with Jamie Lee Curtis.
For me it wasn't quite so dramatic, but it was a definite moment where I will be able to look back and separate my life into discernible before and after chunks. In short, this morning I found out that the Google office will now be catering dinner as well as lunch. True, this might seem like a trivial extension of their already extensive/insidious perks, but this is going to be life changing for me. After my first couple months at the office, I settled into a reasonable sort of groove where I'd stay late once or twice a week. True, I was coming in on the weekends, but I didn't see the wrong side of midnight too often and I managed to get home before 6pm now and again. Those days are over, however.
The simple fact of the matter is that I'm way too cheap and lazy to possibly resist the allure of two free meals a day, particularly when they're better meals than I'd end up finding on my own. Some people, when they're in grad school, are keen for the free meal because they're getting paid jack and a free meal is $5 they can spend on something else like rent or heat. For me, though, the budgetary aspect was nice but the notion of getting something for free appealed to a deeper, more fundamental Legacy of the Dust Bowl mentality. If it was volitional, you could call it being thrifty, but this is more of an oblongata sort of ur-cheapness that was bred into me. Walking away from a free meal would be like leaving the house without my pancreas; it's just not an option. Hence, I got home tonight at 9:30 and that's pretty much gonna be the case for the foreseeable. I'm not complaining really (for the most part), it's just the way that things are gonna be.
Current Mood:resigned Current Music:Epic - Faith No More
Either/Or... Work has been insane lately, even by my standards. However, in lieu of talking about things that I can't talk about, I give you this video from the bowels of YouTube.
Like much of their content, it's either the worst or the best thing ever. The only danger in watching the video is that, like me, you might get the original version stuck in your head. So, be careful out there....
The close-set features in a broad, clean-shaven face; the high hairline still desperately clinging to the idea that it can be parted on one side; the constipated looking scowl and off-kilter glasses. In the alternate history of my life where I kept the subscriptions to National Review and American Spectator I had back in high school and went to Purdue instead of MIT, this is a picture of me. An uptight Republican proto-fascist apparatchik, complete with the impending trip to Club Fed for obstruction of justice and lying to Congress while my former bosses make their transitions into lucrative post-resignation lobbying posts and stints at Heritage and the AEI.
There, but for the grace of getting the fuck outta the sticks, go I...
Current Mood:disturbed Current Music:Mr. Brownstone - Guns N' Roses
Nostalgia... Reading Bill Simmons' running diary today really made me yearn for those halcyon days during grad school when we'd take the first day of the NCAA tournament off as a religious observance. We'd start off the day at Kincaid's, semi-sports bar up in Lincoln Park. It was the de facto KU bar in Chicago (many KU grads having the distinct urge to get the hell outta Kansas after graduation, but not quite enough gumption to go to NYC). It wasn't the full-on sports bar environment, but they'd have all four games playing at once, so you could get the full tournament experience. Plus, they had better than average bar food, which is a non-trivial issue when you're gonna be spending the next 6 hours in the same place.
After the first two sets of games, we'd decamp to Joe's a couple blocks away. Joe's was the real deal: four big screens arrayed at the front of the massive main room and a dozen smaller TVs filling in nooks and crannies around the rest of the place. It was also an Indiana bar, so whenever the Hoosiers would come on, you'd get the Indiana fight song and clips from the movie played over the sound system. Mainly, though, we needed to go to Joe's because after the aforementioned 6 hours of drinking, eating and watching TV at Kincaid's, increasing the level of stimulation was the only way to make it through the evening slate of games. Not that there weren't exciting moments from the games themselves; our time at Joe's witnessed the historic upset of a loaded Iowa State team by Hampton (nailed by Eugene's psychic coin flipping technique) and tighter than they should have been first round KU games against Holy Cross.
Some 12 hours after it all began, we'd stumble out of Joe's, exhausted and queasy from the inhuman volume of beer and cooking grease ingested during the ordeal (Simmons' sub-literate last entry today is an excellent barometer of how draining the whole thing can be). Being broke-ass grad students, doing that again for the Friday games wasn't a financially viable option, which was for the best, really. Just dragging my ass into the office the next day was a damned near heroic effort; heading back to the bar for another full round would have required a superhuman level of devotion.
Yes, those were the days...
Current Mood: amused Current Music:(My 1st) Big Break - Cut Chemist
The Brookhaven visit was generally a success. They liked my talk, the one-on-one interview stuff seemed to go well and as far as I know they aren't looking at anyone else. That's a little odd, but then again this is a job where I didn't actually apply for it before they asked me to come out, so the whole thing is a little weird. The only downside of the whole trip is that it coincided with NY's last big blizzard of the year, so I ended up stuck in the airport for an extra day and had to chip my car out from under a sheet of ice when I got back to Pittsburgh.
The UCLA trip was a little more up and down. The one-on-one stuff seemed to go pretty well, but my talk was kinda uneven. The person who introduced me mentioned the whole "got admitted, but then turned us down" thing right before turning the floor over to me, which was more than a little awkward. She meant for it to be sort of a "look at this successful person who very well could have been one of you grad students" thing, but that wasn't really the first interpretation that came to my mind. Then I managed to step into a verbal gaffe when I was a little careless about what exactly the WMAP results tell us about the curvature of the universe with one of the WMAP people in the audience. He called me on it immediately (as he should have), and I was thrown off my rhythm for the next 10 minutes or so. In their case, they're looking to hire someone who does extra-galactic stuff to complement their Galaxy-scale and smaller science. I think I managed to cross the threshold of competence, so it's basically gonna come down to what direction they want to take, science-wise.
So, where does this leave things? Well, in both the Brookhaven and UCLA cases, I'm gonna be waiting until the end of the month to hear back from them; if it's sooner than that, then it's probably because I didn't end up getting the job. I've gotta post-doc lined up at Fermilab (where I won't be getting a faculty offer, as it turns out), so I'm not completely buggered either way. I am a little surprised that I didn't end up getting on a shortlist at Davis, given that I had a number of very positive chats with faculty folks there at the COSMO meeting back in September and even got asked to apply to their computer science faculty spot by the guy running the search. Like I said, I don't quite understand what happened there and haven't quite worked up the wherewithal to send an email asking what was the deal.
In lieu of information on that front, I get to sweat out the next couple weeks to see where the hell I might end up being at this time next year. Fortunately, we're in kind of a time crunch in the day job for the rest of the month and I'll have basketball to fill up the remaining hours, so I don't think I'll have to look too far afield for distraction...
For the Record... I'll be back on later tonight for the post-Brookhaven wrap-up, but while it's foremost on my mind let me note that following up a coffee with a Red Bull and cuppa extra strong Earl Grey tea may have been a bad idea. I'm not dead certain, but there seems to be a possibility that my right eyeball will spontaneously pop itself out of its socket in the next 10 minutes.
If that happens, I'll be posting the Brookhaven thing tomorrow night...
Current Mood:wired Current Music:So Alive - Love and Rockets
A Sense of Accomplishment... It's been not quite 36 hours since I got back from Cornell. I didn't intend it to be the case when I agreed to give a colloquium there back in November, but the talk was basically an upstate dress rehearsal for my first job talk of the season coming up this Wednesday at Brookhaven.
When I started writing the talk 10 days ago, I had brief pretension of using the fact that I lost the source files for last year's talk as a jumping off point to re-write the introductory and concluding bits. Half an hour of thinking about how else I might approach things convinced me that, if I was gonna take that approach, I was about 2 weeks too late. In the end, this year's version is probably 60-70% identical to last year's model. The first dozen slides where I sort of set up the narrative that I want to follow for the rest of the talk are damned near identical to what I showed last year. It's still a pretty good story for setting up what I do, so you gotta go with what works.
The Cornell talk was a little awkward since I wasn't allowed to actually talk about the Google stuff, which basically kills my ending. It's all build, build, build and then a slide talking about how I can't talk about what I've been doing for the last 6 months. I encouraged people to boo when I got to that slide, but no one took me up on the offer. Luckily, I've gotta dispensation to talk about the project for job talks so long as I don't use the project title, so things should be a little less anti-climactic on Wednesday. Other than that, people seemed to respond pretty positively to the talk and I only went a little long on time, so I'm pleased on that front.
I would be remiss, however, if I didn't note that the biggest feeling of success during the two day trip might well have been when I correctly completely the "Tougher" soduko in the in-flight magazine on my fourth and final attempt (flew through Philly on the way there and back). Not that the folks in Cornell weren't interesting and gracious hosts or anything, just that I was getting aggravated by that damned thing by the end of Friday...
Current Mood: tired Current Music:Killing Me Softly with His Song - The Fugees
I'm Cool Like That... I may be the most socially inept person I know. I gotta call earlier this evening from the fine folks at UCLA telling me that I've made their short list. This was fairly unexpected since their short list has been up on the rumor wiki for a couple weeks and I wasn't on it. It was also a little ironic since earlier in the day the Administration announced plans to kill the field of astronomy by building giant space mirrors or filling the upper atmosphere with reflective dust. On a more personal note, however, it was interesting because it was around this time 10 years ago when UCLA admitted me to grad school. I did the visit, met the people and then kicked them to the curb when I got a last minute offer from UChicago.
Now, a normal, sane person would figure that either they knew this bit of information and didn't need to be reminded of it or they had forgotten and didn't need to be reminded of it. Best foot forward, trying to impress the possible new colleague and all that. Not me. No, I managed to bring up the fact that I'd been there 10 years ago within the first 3 minutes. Not only that, but I got to hear the person on the other end of the line verbally make the connection that I'd spurned them a decade ago and gone on to greener pastures.
Lucky for me, I don't think I'll have to worry about doing that again...
Inspired by Alice's remarkable socks, I felt like I should put something up to let those who've still haven't given me up for dead know what's been going on here in the 'Burgh.
It's been an interesting time these last couple months. Not that a great deal has happened, really, but it's been an especially nasty job season. Unlike the last couple years of job season bitching, I've actually gotta end up with a new gig of some sort at the end of this one, so the dramatic tension was gonna be turned up a notch anyway. Beyond that, though, I've spent the last couple months kinda watching my astronomy career circling the drain and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that.
When I started the Google thing, I had this grand plan that I'd do the Google stuff during the day and do my science thing in the evenings. Most of my best work was done in at night anyway, so I figured this would be a decent way to break things down. What I didn't plan on, however, was that the folks who run Google are much smarter than I am and that they would choose to use some of that brain power to entice their workers to spend longer hours at the office than they might otherwise. Not coercion in any sense, just the natural byproduct of creating an extremely comfortable work environment and having plentiful (free!) snacks nearby. Very quickly, "evening" didn't end up starting until 9 or 10pm and then ending at 1am because I needed to get to the office at a reasonable hour (again, no pressure on this, just something that I came up with on my own). Combine that with the fact that I'm actually working during the day (rather than just websurfing and talking to grad students) and my science output has been next to nothing for the last couple months.
At the same time, while most of the stuff that I'm working on during the day is astronomy-related, it's far enough removed from the sort of thing I was working on science-wise that the actual content doesn't really matter (although, as a weird side-effect of this project, I have learned more hardcore astronomy stuff about astronometry and photometry than I ever did as a working scientist). Most of what I do on a day-to-day basis is really more along the lines of computer science. Basically, I've been living the life of a software engineer for the last several months and it seems like my astronomer identity is kinda slipping away. I still know a lot about astronomy, of course, but most of my time is spent wrangling code and trying to ingest a decade's worth of computer science as quickly as possible. The actual last decade of my life was spent trying to become a decent astrophysicist and now, when I should be focusing on things like job talks and finishing up some very promising projects, I don't seem to be spending much time thinking about it.
Like I said, it's a weird sort of thing. It probably says some rather unhealthy things about my relationship to my job that I feel like I've sort of lost track of my identity over the course of the last few months just by virtue of changing offices and work schedules. At the same time, I've managed to make a couple short lists (Fermilab and Brookhaven), so I guess I'll have to figure out exactly what that identity is gonna be over the course of the next couple weeks....
The Limits of Science... Tomorrow promises to be an interesting day. We're having the grand opening of the local office, so the VP of Research is gonna be in town along with tours for local press and some elected officials. There was some word that Santorum might be among the dignitaries, but no one's said anything about it since that initial mention, so I think it'll end up being some of Western Pennsylvania's lesser lights. As for me, I'm kinda interested to meet the VP since he seems like a clever guy from all accounts, but I'll be playing second fiddle during our project demo, so there's an upper limit on the experience.
"A renowned black magic practitioner performed a voodoo ritual Thursday to jinx President George W. Bush and his entourage while he was on a brief visit to Indonesia.
Ki Gendeng Pamungkas slit the throat of a goat, a small snake and stabbed a black crow in the chest, stirred their blood with spice and broccoli before drank the "potion" and smeared some on his face.
I don't hate Americans, but I don't like Bush," said Pamungkas, who believed the ritual would succeed as, "the devil is with me today."
Y'know, I've been loathing the Bush Administration and its policies for going on 7 years all told (yes, I had a head start), but I never thought about voodoo as an option. Failure of imagination on my part, I suppose...
Karmic Blender I'm feeling very balanced at the moment. Not "balanced" the sense that I'm mentally at ease and in command of my day to day existence. No, more "balanced" in that this week has seen an equal share of very good and very bad events.
On the positive side of things, the election went almost as well as I'd hoped it might. I would have preferred a Lamont victory in Connecticut and the odious Marilyn Musgrave proved not quite odious enough for my hometown district, but I wasn't expecting the Democrats to take back the senate, so I'm very pleased with how things worked out. I also got the pleasure of voting against Rick Santorum in the most passive-agressive way possible. My local district has straight party line voting, so with a single touch of the screen I got the visceral (and possibly vicarious) thrill voting against Santorum and not quite voting for Casey and his anti-choice nonsense. Altogether, a very satisfying experience. Top that off with Santorum getting the taste smacked out his mouth by 20 points, and it's all good. Of course, I did see Bill Bennett talking about Santorum running for president in 08 and other crazy wingnuts floating the idea of nominating him for the Supreme Court, but I'll choose to laugh at those ideas until they become stark horrifying reality.
The other good part of the last week was Eugene's visit to work on our long-delayed modified gravity paper. We didn't get as much done on it as we might have (partly for reasons that will be apparent shortly), but we did hit on an idea that's potentially more interesting and probably more important. I also got to watch Eugene give a talk during the Friday lunch talks we have at Pitt. It wasn't quite as entertaining as the karaoke performance a month ago, but I did enjoy the talk thoroughly. Likewise, it was a big hit with the other people in the department, even if it was an even bet that they didn't really understand much of it (not a slight on them; we just don't get a lot of crazy theory people out this way like you do in a place like Chicago). If the powers that be around here are smart, they'll have him back out to give a faculty talk, but we'll see.
So, what was the karmic price for all of that buttery goodness? Well, Thursday morning I woke up to find that the hard disk on my laptop had apparently died. I tried to do some home-brewed recovery stuff on it, but to no avail. I took it in to the local Apple store and, as I was describing what I'd observed with the laptop to the guy at the Genius Bar, the increasingly ashen look on his face told me that the news wasn't gonna be good. Today, they got in the replacement drive (still under warranty), but they weren't able to mount the old drive. Now, I'm looking at sending the old disk to a data recovery service.
It's an interesting sort of dilemma. 95% of my code is backed up on another disk one place or another. All of the files for my papers (latex files, plot files, images), OTOH, were only on that disk. Likewise for all of my talks, the odd data file, job application stuff, music files, and so on. Basically, I'm looking at somewhere between two to three weeks worth of work to regenerate all of that stuff, at least. That's a fitting number because the price that I was quoted for a full recovery is about equal to my salary for that length of time (it's a sliding scale, based on how much they're able to recover and what sort of heroics they need to go through in order to do it; the best case scenario is gonna run something like $1500, but it could go as high as twice that). Throw in the fact that I'm not gonna have those 2-3 weeks any time in the next 9 months and basically I'm left with the conclusion that, if I'm gonna keep doing astronomy, I've gotta pony up the dough. Otherwise, I may as well just start reading computer science books and concentrate on becoming a full-time Google person. On the plus side, though, now I'll be able to put an exact price tag on what my astrophysics career is worth to me. That, and I think I'll remember to back up my data next time.
And So It Begins... This evening, I'm reminded of the immortal words of Kelsey Grammer in "Down Periscope" when he said, "My fish are in the water" (i.e. his torpedos are already streaking their way towards Norfolk in a simulated sub battle; it's amazing that this movie never caught fire with the viewing public). With the exception of the MIT application (where the email bounced) and the two North Carolina applications where for some reason they want four recommendations instead of the standard three, all of my job apps for this cycle have been either put into the mail or emailed away. It ended up being 7 post-docs and 18 faculty spots in total. 25 chances not to have to slink off to UW with my current boss or decide to chuck it all and just work at Google for good. Now there's nothing to do but wait it out. Fortunately, I've got 6 months of work to do in the next three, so I won't be able to spend anywhere near as much time obsessing about it this year.
In more entertaining news, I heartily recommend the video linked here. You may have thought that George Michael's "Freedom '90" was about a gay dude who wanted to get out of the closet and his record contract. Turns out that he was actually foreseeing elections 16 years later in another country. Either way, the folks who put the video together need to get hired ASAP; their video is a damn sight better than any of the crap political ads I've been subjected to as Santorum swirls around the bowl one last time before disappearing from view for awhile.
Current Mood: tired Current Music:DJ Shadow - Influx
Geek Cred... I went to MIT. I played Dungeons & Dragons. In my twenties. I know roughly 5 times as many programming languages as I do human languages. I've debated who would win in a fight between Spiderman and Wolverine. I can recite large portions of Monty Python dialog on demand. I'm astronomer and my day job is working for possibly the geekiest company in existence. Short of people who play Magic: The Gathering, attend Star Trek conventions or have furry sex, I'm willing to put my geek credentials up against anyone.
That said, I've never said anything as delusional or detached from actual reality as this quote from Pennsylvania's junior senator:
“As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else,” Santorum said, describing the tool the evil Lord Sauron used in search of the magical ring that would consolidate his power over Middle-earth.
“It's being drawn to Iraq and it's not being drawn to the U.S.,” Santorum continued. “You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don't want the Eye to come back here to the United States.”
It goes without saying that Santorum and his wife home-school their kids.
Remarkably, this little bit of fugue state blathering only narrowly edged out another Santorum quote as the craziest fucking thing I've read today:
According to a Harrisburg Patriot-News editorial, Santorum said the North Korea dictator “doesn't want to die; he wants to watch NBA basketball” as a reason why Iran is the bigger nuclear threat.
If only being batshit insane could be harnessed into a clean alternative to fossil fuels. Santorum alone could power a small midwestern city.
Current Mood: amused Current Music:Scratch - Herbie Hancock Featuring MixMaster Mike, GrandMixer DXT, Rob Swift, Qbert, Babu, Faust & S
Sometimes, It Pays to Call Home... I've been vaguely aware of the road trip that Oprah took this summer and has been showing in bits on her show recently. "Vaguely aware" in that I've seen promos for it and I saw something online about her pumping her own gas for the first time in 20-odd years during the trip. In one of those delightful coincidences that pop up from time to time, apparently, Oprah and her entourage stopped for the night in my hometown along the way and, well, things didn't go so great:
After their inspiring visit with a family of Hurricane Katrina survivors in Trinidad, Colorado, Oprah and Gayle stopped for the night at what they thought was just another typical motel on their way to the Colorado-Kansas border. What they found there was an eye-opening surprise.
Oprah says her room was so moldy that she had trouble breathing. Gayle says she could see the indentation in the sheets left by the person who was sleeping in her bed the night before. "This is what I learned on this road trip and this is good information," Oprah says. "Always go to the center of the bed, because most people sleep on one end or another. The center of the bed is the least slept-in and has fewer cooties."
Oprah was ready to abandon the motel entirely. "I would rather sleep on the ground with the rabbits and the coyotes than be in a grungy, moldy, stinky motel," she said. Against her wishes the Big Adventure team stayed the night.
In the morning, Oprah heard details much more shocking than a motel room's dubious cleanliness. On the previous day after the team checked in, Roosevelt, her makeup artist, had witnessed someone at a nearby bar refer to Oprah using shockingly racist and sexist terms. And Chris, Oprah's trainer, found two .22-caliber shotgun shells outside his room.
By morning, it was time to leave in a hurry.
That would be the lovely Cow Palace Inn, located at the north end of Lamar; if you click on the link above, you can see a picture of Oprah in the parking lot. It's unclear whether the bar mentioned above was the one in the hotel or the slightly seedier "Opal's Pub" across the highway. Based on the comments, it's an even bet either way. There were also apparently comments during the show about how the hotel smelled kinda like cow shit (it's less than 3 miles from a giant feedyard, so whaddya gonna do?). The phrase ".22 caliber shotgun shells" is amusing, though (for reference, there's a shooting range less than half a mile away where the main access is through the hotel parking lot and the hotel hosts an annual hunting convention, so shotgun shells and cartridge casings are pretty much gonna be around).
Talking to my mom tonight, the locals are up in arms over the damage that the visit might have done to the town's economic prospects (although, given that the same hotel had an outbreak of Legionnaire's Disease back when I was in high school, I'm not so sure that they've gotta leg to stand on). A letter's being drafted asking her to come back and see the more moderately attractive parts of the town (the downtown area and the wind farm south of town). They're also planning to invite Mayor Daley to town for some reason. I can't imagine either of these things actually happening (Oprah effecting the local economy or wanting to actually come back to Lamar), but I guess it's one of those things where the city fathers (or "city mother" in this case, I suppose, since the mayor's a woman), kinda have to stick up for their own and write the letter.
As for me, my only problem is that I haven't been able to track down any video of the segment. Seeing Oprah wander through the Cow Palace lobby and looking at shells on the ground would keep me laughing for hours...
Back from Tahoe... It was nip and tuck, but I managed to get out of Pittsburgh last Sunday, just hours before I would have spent a full month in town without any sort of trip. This time, it was back to California again, although just barely. Specifically, it was Lake Tahoe for the COSMO 06 conference. Given that I'm being paid solely by Google these days, it's not entirely clear how the trip advanced the project that I'm not supposed to talk about. However, the fact that I'm working there seemed to come up in just about every conversation I had during the course of the week, so that probably has me covered. It was tough not talking about what the hell it is that I'm doing, but hopefully, that restriction will be lifted relatively soon.
That aside, the conference itself was reasonably good. After a heady half-decade where every conference seemed to have at least one significant new measurement or result, cosmology is in sort of a funk right now. The hangover after a really good ride, if you will. There were some interesting theory talks and a couple technical talks that were novel approaches, but the ISW talk that I gave was the closest thing I saw to any new result (and that's really just taking data that already existed and combining it properly). Still, there was a good crowd, a number of good conversations and free drinks every night, so one can hardly complain.
There were some job-related things that happened during the week which were promising, but I can't quite bear to bore you all with that stuff so early in the season (enjoy it for now, 'cause by January the shit's gonna run deep). That aside, the highlight of the entire week might have been Thursday night's excursion. Tahoe's right on the California-Nevada border, so of course there are a handful of seedy little casinos just on the other side. Lots of slots, a few blackjack tables and the saddest, loneliest limit hold'em table ever. I spent about two hours at said table playing against the local talent; there was one pretty good player and a bunch of people who were willing to call with just about anything. In particular, there was a one older lady (rail thin, way too much make-up, giant hair and very thin cigarettes) who would fuckin' bivouac on any small pair in her hand like no one I've ever seen. You couldn't make her fold her pair of fours with an ace kicker no matter what. Fortunately for her, there was another guy at the table who spent $400 in about 90 minutes (which is almost mathematically impossible at 3-6 limit hold'em) coming in second in every single hand, so she did Ok.
After getting my fill of the mopes at the table, I went back across the street to the casino where all of the other astro people had remained. Four of them were dominating a blackjack table, including Hennessy, who started with $20 and was up over a couple hundred when I returned. It'd never occurred to me before, but if anyone in the department was psychologically designed to rock a blackjack table, it's Hennessy. Drinking, bullshitting with the dealers, occasionally making an ill-advised decision that turns out to be fine anyway, more drinking; a match made in heaven, really. While that was impressive, it didn't hold a candle to what was going on in the next room.
One of the charms of the Tahoe casino experience was the fact that they didn't seem to require an ID of anyone at any particular time. No one at the doors checking, didn't see any of the bartenders asking for IDs, nothing. As such, the karaoke bar next to the gaming floor was full of people who (according to me, anyway) wouldn't have been able to successfully buy cigarettes at the local 7-11. I'm not complaining really, just making it clear that, as much as astronomers stick out in any bar-type situation, it wasn't tough to pick out the astro folks from the crowd (they'd be the folks with glasses not dressed like 16 year olds). Anyway, the non-gambling astro people had entered the nightly karaoke contest. I got there just in time to see a trio featuring Eugene (wearing his standard Eugene-gear), a grad student from UC Davis (who could pass for Lauren's younger sister) and Iggy Sawicki (who dresses like an English grad student because he was one) take the stage to warble their way through the Eagles' "Take It Easy". As anyone who's seen karaoke live or on American Idol knows, that particular song violates the several of the cardinal rules of the game; namely, it isn't an up-tempo number that will get the butts on the floor and shaking and (even more importantly) it has a chorus that requires you to actually find and sustain a note for more than 2 seconds. Given recent congressional follies, it would be insensitive to describe what happened on stage as a crime against humanity, but it wasn't good (although perhaps better than their first choice would have been: Blondie's "Heart of Glass"). Very, very funny for me, but, sadly, the judges didn't see it quite that way. In fact, they were one of exactly two acts who were kicked off the stage before finishing their song (bribed with drinks to get off the stage, to be precise). Hence, by any objective standard, they were worse performers than the lesbian in a mohawk in a wife-beater singing Motley Crue's "Girls, Girls, Girls". Of course, in the absence of any other information, that conclusion might be obvious.
Yes, it might well have been the best evening I've ever spent in a casino...
Current Mood: amused Current Music:Groove Armada - I See You Baby (Fatboy Slim Remix)
Outwitted.... Well, it's now three weeks into the Google experiment proper and I think I've turned out to be not very good at this whole corporate whore thing. The whole point of selling out is that you're supposed to be making a clean and clear transaction: you put in a certain fraction of the precious time that you exist on this planet and the company gives you back a defined amount of currency. Instead, I found myself at the office last night until 11:30 tying together some loose ends. It's exactly the sort of thing that I'd do for my own work, so it didn't occur to me that I was doing something that wasn't really part of the deal until after I got home. Basically, I'm having a helluva time keeping up the science half of my intended Google/science split. It's just too easy to get home after a day of banging away at the code and end up not quite getting around to working on that ISW measurement that should have been finalized a month ago. Of course, part of that lack of incentive is the fact that I haven't gotten home before 7pm more than twice in the last two weeks, which tends to make for a short evening. Basically, the Google folks do a damned good job at making it comfortable and tempting to stay in the office and keep working. Come to think of it, that may well be the crux of the whole thing: I've agreed to work at a company run by people smarter than I am and they've decided to use part of that intellect on the problem of inducing their employees into working longer, more productive hours than they would if left to their own volition. This may be a problem...
Temptation... I realize now that I can write off any late-in-life career change to become a secret agent. I've been exposed to a tiny, tiny fraction of the company's innards and I can't tell you how difficult it is not to talk about all the cool new stuff I've found out. This is particularly true given how being a scientist basically means regressing back to that perfect state where you can't wait to tell anyone who'll listen about the cool new thing you figured out. Most people grow out of this stage around age 6 and then science types spend their entire grad school lives figuring out how to get back there. Of course, the NDA I signed when I was out in California basically gives them the right to litigate my ass back to the Stone Age if I say anything, which does help to keep one's tongue. However, the likelihood that I'm gonna have one too many Red Bulls before dinner and it's all gonna come out in one burst remains high.
In between worrying that my natural inclinations are gonna land me on the wrong side of an intellectual copyright infringement lawsuit, I've been figuring out how to manage this two career thing. I'd had the idea that I could do a reasonably good job of this by compartmentalizing based on location: when I'm at the office, I work on the Google stuff and when I get home I do the science stuff. Between talking to grad students and just general laziness, I never really got much done science-wise at the office anyway, so this seemed like a reasonable way to go. Project-wise, this has been working fairly well; despite the fairly steep learning curve as I adjust to the idea that more than one person is gonna be looking at my code, we're making some good progress this week. Unfortunately, I've been finding that I don't really start to hit my stride in the evenings until about 10pm or so and that lasts until about 2 or 3 in the morning. That's not so good when there's something of an expectation that you'll be in the office a respectable length of time before lunch is served at 11:30. Fortunately, I've spent the last four years convincing Andy that I can be productive and not get in until noon, so I think this will eventually work itself out. Either that, or I'm gonna have to invent the early evening nap and learn to sleep four hours at a time.
Hell Is Other People... Karma is a bitch. Or, in my case, a two year old child. Let me back up. When I was told that I'd be getting a laptop from the folks at GWHQ, I figured it would be something that I'd be able to fit into my bag and take back to the local office without any problem. Turns out that, at Google, when they give you a laptop, they also throw in all manner of goodies: $50 laptop bag, cable lock, slick iGo power supply, and retractable ethernet/telephone cable. That was all great, but when combined with the coding books I picked up (and the extra copies that my boss had me snag for him as well) I had a luggage issue. I ended up stuffing my old laptop bag into my suitcase and lugging around the new one with both laptops, $400 worth of textbooks and all of my normal bag stuff. Bottom line: it's never a good thing when the way that you get around the baggage weight limit is by bringing it with in carry on.
So, with bags in hand and wrenching my shoulder out of alignment, I made my way to my redeye flight back to Pittsburgh. I was in coach, but when I checked my seat assignment, I felt Ok because there was an empty middle seat in my row, so at least I'd be able to stretch out. Turns out that the other seat in my row was being filled with a woman who was traveling with her 6 week old infant and 2 year old toddler, Ethan. I thought that I'd experienced the worst of air travel with my experience with Hunter and his two dumb-ass parents who'd bought only two seats and counted on being able to seat their spawn between them. That experience put me off flying ATA for three years. Ethan, though, took it to another level.
Imagine, if you will, the worst noise you've ever heard made by a two year old: that ear-splitting, spine-shivering wail that doesn't even seem to be possible from a human. Now, imagine that noise. In a confined space. Right next to you. Occasionally with accompaniment from the infant. For four hours. And did I mention that he was also kicking me? It was the first time that I've ever had other people on the plane thank me for putting up with the ordeal and not losing my shit. The only thing that kept me from blowing up was the realization that, as unpleasant as it was for me, the mother was having an even worse flight than I was. True, it was her boundless stupidity that led her to fly with two ridiculously young children and United's negligence that let her do it with only one ticket, but yelling at her probably wasn't gonna change that. My idea for Adult Airlines (the airline with a lower age limit of 18) has never seemed more like a winner than right now.
Drink the Koolaid? I'm Swimming In It... The nan at the cafeteria is a little too stiff and crunchy. It's the end of Day 2 here at MTV and right now that's the biggest complaint I've got (and that may well be driven by the fact that I might not really know what nan is supposed to be like). True, I didn't feel quite this way at this time last night, but today was a pretty remarkable turnaround. I don't want to get into the details of it, but basically the first day was something of a perfect storm of miscommunications and people being out of touch for one reason or another. Not really anyone's fault (other than perhaps me, for pushing to get out here this week rather than next), but it did make for a sort of scattered day. Fortunately, I was adopted by some HR people and they were able to get me more or less sorted out. As of now, I've got my employee badge, most of my accounts are active and my schedule is pretty much blocked out for the rest of the week. Tomorrow morning I'm set to get my official laptop. I even managed to snag a couple programming books that I've been meaning to pick up ("snagged" as in got them from the giant locker of books following one of the training sessions along with all of the other larval engineers).
Every once in a while, I get the one of those feelings like I'm the poor cousin come to visit the rich relatives in the big city and can't quite believe what I'm seeing (You need stuff to do your job and they just give it to you? Right then? Madness.). This new paradigm will take some getting used to, I suppose, but I'm willing to learn.
Missed Opportunity... Via Cosmic Variance and the BBC, we learn that noted legal scholar Florentino Floro has lost his appeal and is now officially removed from the Filipino bench. I note this partially because it's fun to laugh at the idea of a judge consulting three mystic dwarves to help him perform psychic healings during downtime in the courtroom. It's also amusing that the BBC felt that they needed to add the word "imaginary" to the phrase "mystic dwarves", just to make things clear. However, I think the real victim in this case might the intelligent design folks. An en banc hearing with Floro, Armand, Luis and Angel could have given them the legal victory that they've been denied so far here in the States.
Current Mood: amused Current Music:The Police - Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic
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