work

Another day, another dollar

I missed my regular train this morning — or, rather, the train I normally get when I oversleep a little and miss the earlier regular train. There’s a 7:37, and then an 8:15, out of my station and I can get a good half-hour nap in if I catch the later of the two. It means I have to work until 5 instead of 4:30, and I much prefer getting the earlier train in the evening if I can do so. It’s less crowded, for one thing, and it gets me home a good forty-five minutes earlier than the next train. (Because it’s less crowded, has fewer stops, and requires less waiting around in Penn Station.) But it’s tough making that argument with my body when I haven’t had enough sleep, and at least twice this week my brain has lost it.

This morning I couldn’t find my hat — it was underneath some papers on my chair — and so I missed the 8:15 by a couple of minutes. I live less than five minutes from the train station, and I could see the train pulling into it as I raced that one block, but I just didn’t make it. I had to stop running when my iPod went flying out of my coat pocket anyway — its edges are a little chipped, though it seems otherwise okay — so I just accepted that I’d have to catch the 8:30 train instead. I just stood on the platform and listened to Studio 360 — the time travel show I’m sorry I missed when it taped live here in New York — and waited. And I’ve got to tell you, I’m really glad I didn’t give up looking for that hat. I’m glad I found it before the next train — not until 9:23 — but it was really too cold today to be without it.

Anyway, I think I’ve spent all this time talking about my train schedules and brief morning mishaps simply because the day was otherwise uneventful. I worked through lunch to make up some of the time the missed train cost me, and I read what I think is a really good chapter on a book we’re developing for counseling older adults. I worked a little more on that short story, and right now I’m watching the third episode of that Monty Python documentary.

According to my desk calendar (one of three I received this Christmas), today is Haxey Hood Day, which I’m amused to discover is still a very living tradition. That’s really neither here nor there, but it’s a whole lot more exciting than my day was.

Saturday leftovers

  • Michael Schaub on being an English major:

    I remember being an English major at a Big 12 school in the mid-’90s. This was an agriculture- and engineering-heavy school where liberal arts departments were isolated in a building that permanently smelled like paint thinner. Whenever I’d tell people I was an English major, they’d look incredulous and say “What are you going to do with that? Teach?” Like in the same tone you’d say, “What are you going to do with that? Trade blowjobs for meth?” Good times!

    I was an English major at a pretty agriculture- and engineering-heavy school myself, so I know the feeling. Even my undergraduate advisor told me, “You know, you really can’t get a job with this degree.” (My advisor within the English department was a lot more encouraging, but I met with him all of once, the day I declared, and he left Penn State around the time I graduated. So take from that what you will.)

  • Are you now, or have you ever been, a Lovecraftian horror? [via]
  • Will we be telling our grandchildren (or even our children) about this thing we used to call “fish”? [via]

    While the climate crisis gathers front-page attention on a regular basis, people–even those who profess great environmental consciousness–continue to eat fish as if it were a sustainable practice. But eating a tuna roll at a sushi restaurant should be considered no more environmentally benign than driving a Hummer or harpooning a manatee. In the past 50 years, we have reduced the populations of large commercial fish, such as bluefin tuna, cod, and other favorites, by a staggering 90 percent. One study, published in the prestigious journal Science, forecast that, by 2048, all commercial fish stocks will have “collapsed,” meaning that they will be generating 10 percent or less of their peak catches. Whether or not that particular year, or even decade, is correct, one thing is clear: Fish are in dire peril, and, if they are, then so are we.

  • Sorry I missed this around Halloween (and by dint of not living in Chicago), but I think a zombie-preparedness fitness class is a terrific idea!
  • Has xkcd been watching the Penn State Monty Python Society’s Mall Climb?
  • Ken Jennings takes the logic of Pixar’s Cars maybe a little too far.
  • Speaking of Pixar, this Pixar opening parody is pretty great. [via]
  • Imagine if the producers of FlashForward had gone with Robert J. Sawyer’s original concept and made the Large Hadron Collider responsible for everything that happens? Imagine how laughable the show might seem then. [via]
  • I’ve never been remotely tempted to buy a bootleg DVD, despite an abundance of them on the streets of Manhattan. Still, their cover art can be pretty delightfully bizarre. [via]
  • NBC sued over font usage. Really.
  • Well, Coldplay does kind of put me to sleep anyway… [via]
  • According to a recent survey:

    Almost half of British consumers have lied to their friends about seeing a classic film to avoid the embarrassment of admitting ignorance of great movies.

    I’m reminded — as it seems I often am, often enough that I should probably get around to reading the book — of the literary parlor game described here, where everybody one-ups each other with all the books they haven’t read. (The “winner is an American professor who, in a rousing display of one-downmanship, finally announces that he’s never read Hamlet.”)

    For the record, of the “top ten classic films people most lie about seeing,” I’ve seen all but one of them. Can you guess which one I haven’t seen? [via]

  • I often find it a little ridiculous what parts of the internet they do and don’t block in my office: blogger.com, but not www.blogger.com; twitpic.com, but not Twitter itself. We have a YouTube channel, for instance — I’d link to it, but there’s nothing there right now — except I can’t visit it at work, even when I’m working with our UK team to upload video to it. Glad I’m not the only person who thinks these policies are a little outdated:

    As I’ve said a whole bunch of times, the “competition” for those of us in traditional media industries—book publishing, broadcasting, newspapers and magazines—is no longer other book publishers, broadcasters, or newspapers and magazines. Instead, our “competition” is now the plain fact that, even if you stipulate that 99.9% of the for-free internet is worthless nonsense, the remaining 0.1% is large enough to absorb anyone’s attention full-time for the rest of their life. For anyone with an internet connection, running out of interesting things to read is completely a thing of the past.

  • This is probably the subtlest Rickrolling I’ve ever seen. [via]
  • And finally, Birds on the Wires [via:

    Birds on the Wires from Jarbas Agnelli on Vimeo.

Thursday

So, saw this today…

Not much else to say except that. Our company had an employee recognition luncheon this afternoon, and for a change of pace held the event aboard a New York harbor cruise. It was nice. We left the office at 11:30, disembarked around noon, and had a really nice lunch and a chance to go up on deck and take some photos. I didn’t win any of the recognition awards, unfortunately, but we each got $10 Amazon gift cards and had the rest of the afternoon after 3 (when we returned to shore) off.

All in all, a very pleasant way to spend a Fri–what? It was only Thursday? Oh. Well, you can’t win ’em all. It was a very nice day, nonetheless.

Thursday various

  • Roger Ebert on trivia:

    The fatal flaw in the concept of trivia is that it mistakes information for knowledge. There is no end to information. Some say the entire universe is made from it, when you get right down to the bottom, under the turtles. There is, alas, quite a shortage of knowledge. I think I will recite this paragraph the next time I’m asked a trivia question.

  • In all the talk about whether or not Google should be allowed to scan massive numbers of books and make them available in electronic form — a matter that’s still not yet resolved, due to pending litigation — there’s one question I haven’t seen raised a lot: can Google even do this well? There’s some evidence here to suggest not. Certainly, even if Google Book Search goes ahead, it may need some significant work. [via]
  • Mad Max fan builds replica Interceptor, moves to Outback. I’d make a Thunderdome joke, but I think we’re all trying to get beyond Thunderdome.
  • Police baffled as dozens of “suicidal” cows throw themselves off cliff in the Alps. Warning, there are some images (not terribly graphic or close-up, but potentially distressing) of the dead cows. [via]
  • And finally, given that I’m taking tomorrow off, I find it pretty easy to sing the praises of the four-day workweek. I wonder if I could broach the idea of my telecommuting one day a week. Most everything I do is via e-mail, and working on manuscripts that are delivered via e-mail, and there are even some things — most recently checking if a video was on our YouTube channel, which ironically is blocked at the office — that I can only do at home. I don’t have any serious expectations that it could happen, but it’s an interesting thought. [via]

Thursday various

  • My sister is getting married in a couple of months — a little less than, actually — and I don’t think she’s taking her fiancé Brian’s last name. Apparently, however, 50% of Americans think she should be legally required to do so. I’m curious as to what these people think the legal repercussions for not taking your husband’s name should be. Thirty years hard labor? My future wife needn’t worry. I ask only a dowry of ten cows and three oxen from her village patriarch. Anyway, as I noted yesterday, my last name is frequently misspelled and -pronounced. [via]
  • N. K. Jemisin on describing characters of color:

    Because so much of fantasy takes place in settings that in no way resemble the real world, featuring species that in no way resemble human, fantasy writers often have trouble dealing with regular people. This is something that, I think, isn’t as much of a problem for mainstream writers, because they can simply describe the world around them and come up with a reasonably accurate representation of humanity. They can also fall back on the plethora of real-world terms used to describe human beings, racially and otherwise. But using these terms makes no sense if you’re dealing with a world that doesn’t share our political/cultural context. You can’t call someone “African American” if your world has no Africa, no America, and has never gone through a colonial phase in which people of disparate cultures were forcibly brought together, thus necessitating the term in the first place.

  • Got $8,000? Why not buy your own Personal Satellite Kit? [via]

  • On the other hand, if you have eight million dollars, maybe you want to bid on your very own rare T-Rex skeleton. (Maybe you could get an Ankylosaurus skeleton and make them fight.)

  • And finally, if you’re going to complain about your job on Facebook, at the very least make sure your boss isn’t one of your friends. [via]